I’m dismayed when I see headlines popping up about how employees value working from home so highly, they would be prepared to take a pay cut.
The Latin phrase “cui bono” springs to mind – meaning “who benefits?” Clue: It’s not really the employee.
No, working from home should not mean a pay cut
Study reveals how COVID-19 can directly damage brain cells NewAtlas
No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected,’ wrote Aldous Huxley. ‘To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad.’
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Many people see few problems with the march of the digital machine through every aspect of our lives. Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen.
Many people are not paying attention.
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A few days after I lost my game of chess, a couple of friends came to visit us from England. We hadn’t seen them for nearly a decade, and they hadn’t travelled anywhere since the pandemic began, so they were blinking excitedly in the sunlight. They had taken the ferry across the Irish Sea, which had necessitated them performing a particular technological ritual, one which went beyond even the longstanding norm of scanning their digitally-enabled passports and sitting on a boat full of CCTV cameras.
This time they had to have their photo taken, and show their digital proof of vaccination. They also, for some reason they didn’t understand, had to recite a string of numbers into a recording device. If I were being paranoid – and these days I usually am – I would guess that this was part of the creation of an embryonic digital voice recognition system, which will be used in future to supplement the eyeball scans, passport chips and smartphone-enabled health certificates which are already forming the basis of our glorious future of freedom and plenty.
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Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.
I think: these are things designed to trap prey.
A recent survey of workers across 25 countries, including 1,000 in Australia, found Australian office workers are the most burnt out in the world, ahead of Italy, China, Canada, the US and the UK.
More than half of the Australian respondents said they suffered from burnout in the last 12 months, with 52% admitting they’ve taken time off due to mental health concerns during pandemic lockdowns.
Similar research from LinkedIn found 52% of office workers have taken time off during the pandemic to support their mental wellbeing.
One third of Australian workers say pandemic burnout caused them to resign, according to new research2. “A British bakery has been forced to pull its top-selling cookies from the market, after regulators informed the owner that the sprinkles are illegal. The U.S.-made sprinkles contain a coloring that’s legal for some uses — but not for sprinkling.” Link here.
4. Vaccines in rural Kentucky.
