Fatigue Society

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Description

Trebor Scholz:

“Demands for qualifications are getting ever higher and anxiety, the fear of unemployment, and poverty have become central life themes for many young people today. They are moving down the one-way street from unpaid internship to underpaid creative work.

Such a start into work life then, leads to a lifelong “precarious career,” which also makes life planning impossible and old-age poverty a certainty. A 2010 study by the American software company Intuit found that 80% of large American corporations are planning to increase their use of flexible workers substantially in coming years.

We are living in what the German/South Korean author Byung-Chul Han called a Fatigue Society. This is no longer a disciplinary society, Han writes; instead, we are living in an achievement-oriented society that is allegedly free, determined by the call of “yes we can.” Initially, this creates a feeling of freedom, but soon that freedom is accompanied by anxiety, self-exploitation, and depression. Han writes that depression, exhaustion, attention deficits, and burnout are not caused by negativity but by an excess of positivity, which can bypass all immunological defenses. Too much positivity about 21st century work leads to anxiety, depression, and exhaustion.

Platform owners play a central role in this Fatigue Society. With their seductive interfaces, they make it hard not to participate.” (http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/think-outside-the-boss/)