Water Cooler Talk / Again Icarus
FIONA PEARL MILLER
I am sitting on the right side of the third floor of the Seward Park Library at a table next to the easternmost wall and right next to my seat there is a window, which faces out onto the Seward Park Basketball Court.
Dusty green and maroon arches and lines, seen between stripped-bare tall trees which—standing before the ground and below the noon-thirty sun—are lit up barren and lay down a severe pattern of dark shadow-lines. Above their branches, clear blue sky. Single bird. Sirens.
For the most part nowadays we are living automatons, minds steered by a domineering yet translucent corporate hand reinforced by the pervasive digitization of existence. We fall on bended knees in worship to the altar of efficiency—the primordial virtue of a society in which we “touch base” with our mothers; “reach our emotional bandwidths” with our closest friends; and “circle back” to our roommates re: the dishes. This infiltration of corporate speech into personal relationships is symptomatic of a greater mental pollution; a flattening of the individual; a wobbling world. The way that we consider our own existence is changing: every interaction a transaction, every conversation a means to an end. Kant teaches that what is divine about our soul is its capacity for ideas. Man’s ability to conjure up unique, original, singular ideas,—his creative power not just to react but to act—this is what makes him distinct from all other created beings. Contemporary society encourages us to neglect this innate ability and to reduce ourselves into instruments, useful only insofar as we adhere to our instructions and complete efficiently the tasks each of us have been delegated.
While the sphere of labor has always served as a baseline for human interaction, contemporary corporate speech feels especially dangerous because it operates under a heavy layer of artifice; obfuscating relationships of power that had heretofore operated in plain view. Work today, for the most part, has been glamourized and streamlined, made comfortable with cushy chairs and gym passes—nevertheless the vast majority of workers today have no more meaningful relationship to the object of their labor than did the industrial workers of the Old World. The past century’s advancements in labor laws aside, both the barista and the cubicled operations assistant alike experience the same demand for homogeneity of maneuvers, maximization of productivity, and factory-line repetition as did workers in the industrial age, with one critical difference: the expectation for the modern worker to love their job. For industrial workers, labor was a “temporary death” from which the worker could reincarnate “only after the alarm bells rang announcing the end of the working day” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work, 2009). While a frightening turn of phrase, this temporary death permits the individual to don the mask and costume of the dutiful employee without cognitive dissonance, the exchange is clear: I give you work and you give me money. Without these clear demarcations, the boundaries between “you” and “you at work” blur.
Today, workers are encouraged to “be themselves” while at work: crack jokes at Sandra’s birthday lunch, send a Slack gif to communicate your animosity towards Mondays, decorate your cubicle with a framed picture of your dog or a flag displaying your sexual identity—but the invitation towards authenticity rings hollow in the corporate sphere because nullification of individuality is a necessary component of the job description. The modern worker—required to dull, twist, and flatten themselves to fit into the box outlined by their title; expected to do so under the guise of “I’m Living the Dream”—is thus offered a choice: either reject the premise and allow yourself to slip into the “Temporary Death” for eight hours a day, reincarnating somewhere between your commute home and dinnertime; or allow the boundaries between work and life to be blurred so that you enter into a perpetually dissociative half-life. Max Horkheimer writes that “[a]lthough most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it” (Eclipse of Reason, 1947). The “circle back” and “emotional bandwidth” crowd is the inevitable repercussion of this game of pretend: so much so have they allowed their work to subsume them that they are eternally clocked-in: the corporatization of existence.
A friend tells me that his office has recently adopted a new Outlook software that allows everyone at the company to see emails as they are being written. This same software comes with what he calls “the Funny Button,” which is an artificially intelligent button you can press after you are finished with your supervised writing that regenerates the text of your email to read as corporate-approved humor. “Corporate-Approved Humor” is in no regard actually funny, but is useful in a cubicled, fluorescently-lit and Business Casualed world because it provides a “laugh-opportunity,” which is when a coworker presents you with a moment during working hours when it is appropriate to release a chuckle, to remind you that you have fun here and it’s not really so bad after all. See: “Someone has a case of the Mondays!” or “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.” These one-liners, typical of corporate-approved humor, function as avenues through which the corporate employee can release work-related resentment without stepping over The Line past which resentment threatens productivity. The funny button is useful towards the maintenance of efficient production because it allows workers to feel they are exercising their capacity for creativity without the complications that may arise by them actually doing so. And instead, delegating that ability to an artificially intelligent software that is distinct from humans most in that it lacks the capacity for creative thought. The funny button is only one tonal option of many in this software: other options include “professional,” “friendly,” and “apologetic.” The funny button, corporate-approved humor, and the laugh-opportunity are all examples of invisible tools used in the workforce to promote, in Horkheimer’s words, “a life as free as possible from friction…and respect for the status quo” (Critique of Instrumental Reason, 1967).
The boundary problem presented by the expectation to “be oneself” at work in the absence of actually being able to is only furthered by the adoption of such technology. Be yourself! But after you get that out of your system, please regenerate the text of your email so that no traces of your individuality remain. The ability to work from home ushered in expediently by the pandemic carried with it a promise of expanded freedom for those whose jobs did not require them to actually be physically present: one could now work while enjoying the comforts of home. But, as Byung-Chul Han in “In The Swarm: Digital Prospects” notes, digital apparatuses are “installing new constraints, new slavery. Because of their mobility, they make possible exploitation that proves even more efficient by transforming every space into a workplace—and all time into working hours. The freedom of movement is switching over into a fatal compulsion to work everywhere.” The inverse of the “be yourself” problem quickly devolves into the same result, the distinction between work and life blurs further.
Historically, religion was the unifying factor in society promoting a life as free as possible from friction. Individuals worshiped the same god and followed his rules, providing a foundation for both interpersonal relationships and inner worlds. But religion no longer constitutes the same societal peace-treaty it once was. Left without this cultural adhesive, individuals had to find a new way to understand themselves and relate to one another; and so profit becomes pope, productivity replaces prayer and promotion constitutes salvation; the delineations of man's soul dictated by his 8-hour day and the maintenance of his inbox.
You wake up with a song in your head. You think: how did this get here? You go to Spotify and you tell Spotify play that song out loud. You sing along. You sound good. You’re brushing your teeth, you’re washing your face, you’re urinating you’re getting dressed. You listen to the song all the way through to its completion. This is a great song. The song ends—another begins. It’s a recommended song. You like it, it’s a song you like. You go about your day and you’re listening along to the path of songs Spotify has chosen SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU! You are embarking on a musical journey and it’s all because that one song was cemented in your head at the moment you opened your eyes to consciousness and light got into your brain and you remembered I am alive and today is another day and this song is in my head. That’s something. It happened to me today.
Writing in 1957, Horkheimer observes that contemporary factors of social organization such as “population growth, a technology that is becoming fully automated, the centralization of economic and therefore political power, the increased rationality of the individual as a result of his work in industry…are inflicting upon life a degree of organization and manipulation that leaves the individual only enough spontaneity to launch himself onto the path prescribed for him” (The Concept of Man).
The capacity and inclination towards spontaneity is where we must focus our attention now. The launching in itself is where the spark lies: The first moment of light; the song in our head. The thought that flashes across our mind in that moment of stillness between two movements. The gut feeling, the first impression of a stranger. These are original, these are ours. We must hold on to them, take them seriously and in earnest. After enough time we could collect enough of them to form something real—something once ubiquitously held and known as “an inner world.” If original ideas are best nurtured by these transient moments of stillness, the domination of man’s individuality through work coupled with our entanglement with the virtual world threatens to render this fertile ground a fallow field.
Insufficient to promote smoothness of relations in a secular world desperate for common ground, man’s capacity for creativity is discarded. What use is free thought, the essence of man’s divinity, in a world concerned not with elevating man to his full potential but rather with lubricating the gears of society and the maintenance of the status quo? Horkheimer writes that “as interiority has withered away, the joy of making personal decisions, of cultural development, and of the free exercise of imagination has gone with it. Other inclinations and other goals mark the man of today: technological expertise, presence of mind, pleasure in the mastery of machinery, the need to be part of and to agree with the majority or some group which is chosen as a model and whose regulations replace individual judgment. Advice, prescriptions, and patterns for guidance replace moral substance” (The Concept of Man, 1957). Homogeneity enforced slyly under the guise of authenticity operates not only during working hours, but also through the digital apparatus permanently affixed to his palm from the moment he opens his eyes to morning until that time when he closes them to dream.
We are chronically logged in and clocked in which means we are never logged out or clocked out: constantly within a second’s reach of not only our boss, but our friends and family and acquaintances and those Greek guys you met that one time and your alcoholic hairdresser—everyone in the world. Technological innovation has always functioned to liberate man from the more laborious tasks of everyday life, and, in theory, should function to further the possibilities promised by human experience. The invention of the telephone meant we could maintain and build relationships outside of physical interactions. The invention of the television meant we could have synchronous experiences with people we didn’t know, the creation of a shared world in real time. The invention of social media meant we could know what our friends were doing when we weren’t with them and share our own pictures, thoughts, status updates. All of these experiences expanded the reach of what we could know and do.
But interiority withers away: the virtual world has now taken a step further, becoming a new realm of human experience in itself. We craft and maintain online personas, engage in online interactions at the same rate or faster than physical ones, and during conversations “IRL” even come to refer to mutual friends by their instagram or twitter handle in the place of their given name. While the digital sphere initially functioned as a democratic and populist expansion of freedom because it allowed everyone a platform to speak, this promise of autonomy carries with it the same artifice as does the encouragement to “be yourself” at work. Digital platforms require us to contort our expression to predetermined forms: ideology via infographic, humor via meme format, self via selfie.
Han writes that “[t]he occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with information by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives…autoexploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a feeling of freedom accompanies it” (In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, 2013). In our free-time, the imperative “be yourself” is conveyed as “express yourself”—according to the rules of expression: express yourself by posting, by buying new clothes, by sharing infographics and retweeting the ideas of those who we find agreeable. Buy in, sell out, buy in, sell out. Hello Mr. Political Party: how much for an “Ideology” please? Hello, The people I follow on Instagram: how much for one set of values and virtues? Just a checkmark on a piece of paper and a few reposts? What a fucking fabulous deal. Similarly to the “be yourself” problem, the control that the digital apparatus bears on our life is reproduced every second of every day through our continual cooperation. Han continues, “Control society reaches completion when its inhabitants communicate not because of external constraints but out of inner need—when fear about giving up one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the urge to put oneself on display, without shame…when freedom and control prove indistinguishable.” The “be yourself” problem, the mobility of work, the permanent log in—all of these bring on and are brought on by a generalized attack on interiority. The private and the public become indistinguishable because privacy itself disintegrates: everyone is selling something and most of the time the product in question is themselves.
The opening up of the private life into the public through the expansion of social media is an onslaught on the inner world. In our non-working hours, the virtual world now threatens to subsume the physical entirely. “Real life” has been relegated to what happens during parcels of time spent looking up from our palms, and the time we spend looking down comes to determine the content of our inner worlds. The problem here is not that consuming media is in itself a process destructive to individuality, but rather that in the global digital community, there is very little heterogeneity in the media we are exposed to. Moreover, time spent tapping through Instagram stories, doom-scrolling through TikTok, or staying up to date on twitter provokes very little introspective thought, the lifeblood of an inner world.
Horkheimer exclaims: “The so-called ‘authentic man’...is but an empty well from which those who cannot achieve their own private life, their own decisions and inner power, fill up their dreams” (The Concept of Man). The offices of film and television producers everywhere are overwhelmed by mountainous stacks of screenplays with pages filled up by dialogue flatly exclaimed and drooling out from the plumped up lips of characters pronouncing: Authenticity! This is ME! Here are my quirks and here is my trauma, this is who I am and why I am and above all I am still relatable. And each one the same, divided down to the greatest common denominator so that in audiences everywhere it can be said by every ticket-buyer and Netflix-streamer: Me. An entire personality crafted by prolonged exposure to the lives of others better off, easily replicable because it is meant that way. We learn how to behave through mimicry.
Coercive conformity, mechanized by social media, reifies individuals—flattening them down from three-dimensional beings with creative potential into useful tools. Out to lunch I hear a woman say that finding success on social media as an influencer is “all about curating your brand.” “Brand yourself”: we used to brand cattle and now we brand ourselves. And the “brand” must be curated, that is, carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented. One must curate their own brand: present themselves as an individual in a way that is tasteful, palatable, and sellable. But the very nature of individuality is that it cannot be absolutely relatable to the masses in a heterogeneous society. So to brand oneself one must look to everyone else to figure out the appropriate form “individuality” should take, taking cues from big names which trickle “influence” down to the masses, so that everyone with an iPhone and an Instagram account knows what to do: at brunch, “phone eats first,” device hovering over acai bowl, worshippers finger blessing the offering with a tap and post to story caption “on my health grind lately” ensue endorphin rush. To influence, and be consumed. Too bad human-brands seem to fall prey to the same unwavering tide of homogeneity and refinement culture as product-brands.
I am frequently overcome by an intense and burning nostalgia for a past never experienced by myself—nevertheless there is within me a clear and present belief that things used to be better than they are now. That the best days are behind all of us and that the day is creeping up on us faster than expected when every realm of society will, neck craned backward, find wings burnt round the edges. We are nearing the sun.
I walk down my street and there is a blue sky above me and colors everywhere are lit up vibrant and true. Wind moves my hair against my cheek, my nose, my lips; the light warm on my face refracted through eyelashes blinking and my fingers are cold and white snow banks are melting, this is all real to me. Walking, I pick a leaf off a shrub, fold it with my index and my thumb, and drop it down to the marked sidewalk. And I am conscious that my eyes are brown and they are my own and they are the only eyes I will ever see out of and no one else will ever be behind them but me. They are brown and I am looking at that thing, or that, or that.
We are nearing the sun: Everything is entertainment and whatever isn’t is efficiency. Everything is either entertainment or efficiency. What is efficient is made to entertain and what is entertaining is made to be efficient. The fuel that feeds the flame of our friendships now is sending each other instagram reels, swiping up, commenting, retweeting, liking, texting, reacting, emphasizing, viewing, noticing, tracking. In person, then: “I saw you went there” “So you posted your boyfriend on main, things are going well then?” “Did you see that thing on twitter about the—” We go through these motions and show pictures or gossip for the first hour or so of hanging out and if the in-person experience manages to force its way past this you might end up having a world-building, acting not reacting conversation.
This essay originated from my October distress over Meta’s artificially intelligent Chatbots. Available at your disposal, around the clock on Instagram and Facebook, parasitically wearing the skin of various celebrities, these characters claim to offer advice and companionship in 28 different personality-ways. Having signed their likenesses away for up to five million dollars, Kendall Jenner plays Billie, your “ride-or-die older sis,” Tom Brady plays Bru, a “wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches” and Mr. Beast plays Zach, “the big brother who will roast you — because he cares.” Other artificially intelligent characters (all of which possess their own profile, messaging capability, and skin-suit) include: “devoted dog mom,” “your bestie who’s been there and done that,” “creative writing partner,” “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” “small-town singer-songwriter,”—with twenty additional specialized alternatives to choose from. Each of these profiles has been programmed with a specific type of real person in mind, meant to cater to their desire for companionship, their aesthetic aspirations, their frustrations, their need to vent into the void without the complications that may arise from friendship. These kinds of profiles are familiar: we’ve seen them before, we know them, we might even find some of them relatable. They remind us of our own older sister or big brother, our own best-friend. Dwayne Wade, Snoop Dogg, and Charli D’Amelio are smiling up at us from the void and we have a chance to talk to them about our problems and have them offer their unconditional support. Imagine being 11 years old.
Operated by AI technology, managed by Meta, these “companions” are frightening. In my mind, I can conceive of no better way to collect real data on human experience. Sociological and anthropological studies are riddled with error and the polls fail to accurately predict votes time and time again. These pseudo-scientific methods are insufficient in calculating human behavior because it is impossible to quantify common sense and emotional reactions—but what if a corporation attempted to, on an individual basis, befriend people? The sheer volume of data that could be amassed from the most vulnerable aspects of individuals: their hope, dreams, fears; the motion of their heart, their most well-kept secret, something they would never tell to a pollster; poured out to a companion online with no repercussions, no risk…
Perhaps this is conspiratorial. While @yoursisbillie (the bot wearing Kendall Jenner’s face) has over 200k followers at the time of writing, most of these accounts hold less than 10 thousand followers. Perhaps these chatbots are just a new attempt to get Instagram and Facebook users even more hooked to the apps, a new foray into the ever-expanding Zuckerbergian universe. Even so, their presence is symptomatic of a widespread reimagination of how companionship should manifest.
The traditional understanding of friendship serves no higher purpose, it is an end in itself—and is thus not conducive to an efficient society. Moreover, our private relationships have now become subject to expert-approved standards of interaction. Chatbots demand no reciprocity, have no emotions and thus no emotional limits; they have no other friends and so they cannot slight us or exclude us or leave us feeling unwanted. They have no schedule, they are constantly available to us and exist only to please and serve: work getting you down? Dealing with feelings of anxiety, depression? Want to talk about music, art, sports, getting your fitness routine back on track? There’s a chat bot for that, providing an efficient avenue to release your desire for companionship without any of the messiness that may result from emotional intimacy with a real person.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Friendship,” states that a friend is “a sort of paradox in nature,” as to hold a friendship requires truth and tenderness and no statistical analysis of reciprocity. A true friendship thus boldly flouts the unwritten codes governing society in which every interaction must be equal, reciprocal and within proper boundaries. (“To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?”) Today we hear: “your network is your net-worth;” “how to set limits with your friend who won’t stop trauma-dumping;” “why asking consent for emotional labor should be a common practice”—the list goes on. This should ring a bell. Please see: we are nearing the sun, things were never meant to be this way; corporatization is dulling our personalities, technological imposition exterminating interiority—and the last bastion of social-emotional fulfillment and joy, the friendship, subjected to (under the guise of wellbeing) norms of behavior prescribed by an omnipotent HR rep in the sky.
It makes sense that in an increasingly corporate world, our friends are becoming more like our coworkers. Our very images are commodified, and when “influencing” is listed as 1 in 3 pre-teens’s dream career path, likes are currency and a retweet is an investment—so yes, unfortunately our network is in fact our net-worth. But we do not have to surrender. Emerson writes, “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.” You talk to your friend: you know them. You know this person and you embrace them. They embrace you. You demand nothing from each other. You dissolve into them and they you yet, keeping the delinations clear, you see the distinctions between each self and love them.