It's about Work (Cubed & The Circle...)

[alice malice]

I read The Circle....and now ... Cubed ?

Siva Vaidhyanathan points out the irony of legislators exhorting
universities to emulate the private sector at the very moment when
Silicon Valley corporations mimic colleges by giving employees
“unstructured work time, … an altruistic sense of mission, recreation
and physical activity integrated centrally into the ‘campus,’ and an
alarmingly relaxed dress code.”

The laptops in the window of every Starbucks are manufactured by
migrants given little time to sleep, let alone see their families.
Behind every American home office lies a Chinese company dormitory.

First World fiction, however, shows even less interest in factories
than in cubicles: the myth that work is becoming more flexible
universalizes the luck of a few knowledge workers in a few rich
countries, including the novelists and bloggers who propagate it. (To
be fair, The Circle does take as its backstory the heroine’s low-wage,
no-perks previous job in a genuine cubicle.) Worldwide, increasing
numbers of migrants leave their villages for urban slums or their
countries for ours.


http://www.publicbooks.org/multigenre/last-offices
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l