Sublime

In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salar

transforming the means of production … which at present serve above all to enslave and exploit labour, into mere instruments of labour freely and co-operatively performed”.

Even for the most creative workers, autonomy has turned out to be transitory and unsustainable, or it has been an effect of identification with employers’ interests.

the three primordial freedoms,

the seeming self-valorization hides high levels of unpaid labor and makes workers acceptant of constantly deferred rewards and total expendability since they can be immediately dismissed if they cease to be “fun,” “sometimes even before a job is finished.”32

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of wor