“Living in what Walter Benjamin had predicted would be a “culture of distraction,” we now experience and enjoy hundreds of apparently mindless things that function to fill our time — not only mobile-phone games and internet tabs but also phenomena like social-media notifications and YouTube clips.”
“we urgently yearn to steal seconds of pleasure in the middle of the work day”
“These distractions, far from being as useless as they pretend to be, are productive and powerful tools that transform us into suitable workers.”
“They set into motion a strange guilt function that turns one into a good capitalist and ultimately makes more money for the company.”
“Through such useful and instructive “rational” amusements as parks, museums, and the promotion of team sports and social clubs designed to group people together in easily manageable clusters, those in power hoped to contain and control a restive population by organizing their enjoyment.”
“we are in a bizarre second wave of what the Victorians called “rational recreation.” That project emerged after 1832, when Britain was as close to political upheaval as it ever came — “within an ace of a revolution,” according to historian E.P. Thompson.”
“Today, rationality demands the opposite: mobile phone games and internet tabs encourage individual enjoyment and appear totally useless and uninstructive. Yet while the enjoyments themselves may be different, we are seeing another wave of controlled recreation today that attempts to organize us through our enjoyment, making us work harder for capitalism.”
“Distracting games and websites appear to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of our precious time. But precisely because these distractions are seen as completely wasteful and useless, they make the mundane work we perform for capitalists seem so much the more “productive” and “useful” by contrast.”
“They stimulate a feeling of guilt that sends us back to work eager to make reparations.”
“The idea is the game simply offers a much needed refreshing break, but I think there is more to it than this.”
“By seeming useless and wasteful these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but they also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends.”
“They renew our commitment to capitalist production rather than reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions might be.”
“This investment in cycles of distraction and compensatory productivity can preclude the sort of social interaction that can foster worker solidarity.”
“These acts of self-distraction are strangely positioned: They are neither allowed nor disallowed. Most employers will allow at least some level of procrastination, and some encourage it.”
“But this downtime must be structured as useless, indulgent, unhelpful, and even slightly sinful. These little moments of distraction, tiny misuses of our employer’s time, characterize the modern experience of work and supplement it, turning back to support and endorse the very process we think we are distracted from and resisting.”
“The usual line would be that a culture of distraction prevents us from concentrating on what is really important and doing truly worthwhile things. This often is nothing more than the age-old generational complaint that young people ought to do something better with their time, and worse, it endorses specific ideas of what “worthwhile” time expenditure consists of, just as Candy Crush does in the very act of distracting us.”
“A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production.”
“Distractions only serve to focus our faith in that myth.”
“What New York City’s masturbation booths show us is that these acts are not really transgressive at all. Rather, they are a licensed transgression that not only allows society to continue unharmed but actually reinforces our desire to pay back what we owe for our little acts of nonconformism.”