REPENT! STAY HOME! SLACK OFF!!

The impact of quarantine on imagination, productivity, and the legibility of our labor

My previous piece on Covid-19 focused on how extended quarantine might impact members of the precarious labor pool previously used by the now-obviated gig economy. This piece will instead focus on white-collar workers & the shift to remote work.

While the shift to remote work (specifically work-from-home) in the wake of lock downs is liable to result in lower individual productivity (for instance, I have been working on this article for an entire month), I think it will inevitably produce reorganizations on multiple scales that, if properly embraced, will increase productivity on the whole. This increase will be the direct result of subversion, and while it will benefit businesses in various ways, it will also destabilize their control over us, because this increase in productivity will be inseparable from a higher order abstract creativity incompatible with micromanagement and surveillance.

Working from home differs from working in the office in two major ways. One is the absence of a shared physical environment specific to workers. The other is the barrier to managerial supervision.

A shared physical environment was once a near-necessity for quick response times. Today…