Against Productivity

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Title Against Productivity
Publication Type Miscellaneous
Pub Year 2014
Authors Norton, Q.
Keywords busyness, humanness, neo-Taylorism, productivity
Abstract

This Essay Took Four Years to Write

Notes humannessProductivity is a quality of perfect robots. Stories, adventures and all new things still have to come from messy humans. productivity, neo-Taylorism"This idea of productivity started in the 1980s, with the lionizing of the hardworking greedy. There's a critique of late capitalism to be had for sure, but what really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism's perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed."
URL https://medium.com/message/against-productivity-b19f56b67da6