If the World Ended on a Tuesday

Black Mirror's 15 Million Merrits

When Google Calendar went offline this past Tuesday, CNN wrote, “it took with it a sense of time and stability in offices and households across the country (and parts of Europe, South America, Asia and Africa).”

Many took to Twitter to engage in something of a collective, if subconscious, meditation on the nature of the work day. Despite a satirical undertone, the way in which people reacted to a disruption of the work day speaks volumes. Though not as significant as the pause in motion post-9/11 (so severe it warranted a “get back to shopping” plea from Bush Jr.), the calendar’s disappearance did cause a disruption in the flow of everyday life under capitalism, as millions of workers worldwide faced an unexpected (and very much welcomed) hitch in the wage labor process.

The following is my own little meditation on the momentary hitch as expressed through various quotes and Twitter posts.

----

“Work has come to so dominate our existence that we have trouble imagining a life not subordinated to it. The utopia of the double life that Jameson depicts offers both a diagnosis of and a remedy for our addiction to work, our reverence for its values, and our inability to imagine a life outside it.”
- Kathi Weeks, Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and the Political Imagination 
 

@MelanieCrissey - Google Calendar is down and I don't know where I am or where 
I'm supposed to be. 
 

“After centuries of domestication, the modern human being can not even imagine a life without labour. As a social imperative, labour not only dominates the sphere of the economy in the narrow sense, but also pervades social existence as a whole, creeping into everyday life and deep under the skin of everybody.”
- Kathi Weeks

 
@mvolpe - Google Calendar is down, so I will be wandering around the office aimlessly and eating snacks until it is back up to tell me where to go and what to do.

 
“First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

 
@futureshift - Google Calendar is down so you might as well leave work and have a few margaritas.

 
“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home”
- Marx


@awsnewbies - Well. If Google Calendar is down, it means I can go home, right? 
 

“His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.” - Marx



@sarah_edo - GOOGLE CAL IS DOWN NO PARENTS NO RULES.

 

@darth - remember if google calendar is down u are free. u are free. i do not make the rules.

 

@thmsbrns - google calendar is down, time no longer exists, you're free. 
 

“Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

“[Fredric] Jameson also affirms the critical function of utopian thinking and the efficacies of the form itself. Here too he insists that the fundamental function of utopias is to revive a sense of the future, which requires taking aim at the forces that prevent us from venturing out from the comfortingly familiar confines of the present.”
- Weeks


@saltnburnem - TOTAL ANARCHYYYYY


“An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.”
- Marx


@collision - Google Calendar is down. I've been relegated to wandering the hallways, asking passers-by if they'd like to meet.


“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”
- Fisher

 
@ascnedantlogic - NO MASTERS NO CHAINS


We can write newspaper articles about how much freer we are without work. We can tweet about it incessantly and make one-off comments to our co-workers. All of this is permissible to get it so long as we keep showing up to work.

All is permitted so long as our discontent remains a (sometimes witty, sometimes funny) expression of catharsis - so long as we scream into the empty space of the internet; self-destruct internally; eat ourselves from the inside. It’s said that in China the internet police only pay you a visit when you start to organize other people; you are free to voice your pain, so long as you don’t attract a crowd.

Discontent becomes a joke. Rage becomes a commodity. We live in a hellscape where everything - love, sex, dreams, desires, passions, meaning, purpose, reason - can and will be converted into a montary value and sold on the market.

“Fuck off, capitalism, I have nothing left,” moans the collective. “Tears...Give me your tears. I’ll make soda out of them.”

We are Bingham “Bing” Madsen pouring out his heart on stage, glass shard pressed to throat while the judges listen, pause, then applaud. Our deepest pain can be monetized, rendered a spectacle for the captivity of other workers. Do we all sell out in the end?

----


Alas, the world did not end on a Tuesday.


The calendar was restored by midday, prompting a particularly scolding headline: “Google Calendar is back, so get to work.”


The dream was over, paradise lost.


“Sweet, sweet freedom,” wrote CNN, “dissolves into responsibilities as looming deadlines and appointments surge back into our lives, all at once.” Order was restored, “But not before leaving mayhem and infuriated, liberated and eventually disappointed users in its wake.”


One must wonder, how can the truth be so openly spoken? How can CNN, one of the primary mouthpieces of bourgeois ideology, get away with calling the absence of work “sweet freedom”? What compels a worker to consciously return herself to a state of unfreedom right after Tweeting her newfound (if surprising) liberation?

This, surely, is the immense power of capitalist ideology: we know work sucks, but we keep coming back, day after day. Ideology, explains Slavoj Žižek, cannot be understood as something like a pair of glasses that distorts reality. Rather than being “imposed on us,” ideology is “our spontaneous relationship to our social world.” The great paradox, continues Žižek, is that we enjoy our ideology. Because it is painful to “step outside” of our ideology, we must be forced to be free.