Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - After Work

Episode Date: February 10, 2016

ToE instaserf Andrew Callaway gets invited to do a TED ALPHA Talk on the sharing economy.  Mary Gray (a real sharing economy expert) explains why we are anxious about the future of work and Ignacio Uriarte leaves his cubicle to make post-office art. image from the amazing Swedish TV show real humans

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called After Work. Have you seen the new Uber logo? No, I have not. Well, you should check it out. I want to get your thoughts on it. I have to give a speech about it next week at this conference. You're giving a speech about the new Uber logo? What? Have you not been looking at my Snapchats? I'm like a sharing economy expert now.

Really? And how did this happen? The podcast. A lot of people have been listening to InstaSurf. And they've been reaching out. You know, I've been getting emails and tweets and people have been commenting on my Instagram. I'm a big deal. People want me to help them understand what's really going on in the sharing economy.

Like who? Well, last week I was on live radio in Canada. You were on the CBC? No, no. This was more of a like shock jock kind of morning show. But, you know, he more of a shock jock kind of morning show. But, you know, he's a Canadian shock jock, so he definitely wanted to know my thoughts on regulation, workers' rights, and apploitation. That's my new catchphrase.

So you're big in Canada. Not just Canada. Last week I got flown out to Iceland. I really don't understand what's going on here, Andrew. Well, these Iceland bros made a delivery app, and they loved my apploitation vine. So the CEOs invited me to be a consultant. Helped them out with some team building exercises, you know? So I would yell at the CEO about how he needs to appreciate the workers in front of all the workers. So I got to express a lot of the aggressions that were already in the air, you know, purify it a little bit. Just make sure everybody felt like their voices were being heard,

even though it was really just my voice. But we did get a group chant going against the CEO. And in the end, he offers all the workers a discounted subscription for halabata. And what's halabata? That's like? That's like the Subway sandwiches of Iceland. This is so absurd. Yeah, I know. My agent says I shouldn't do any more of those unless they start paying me real money. Wait, you have an agent? Benjamin, I have like five publishers bidding on my book proposal.

Of course I have an agent. How the hell do you think I could do this on my own? What are you writing a book about? You know how you wish someone would do the Barbara Ehrenreich thing? Nickel and dimed for the sharing economy? Well, a literary agent got in touch with me and said that's pretty much what I did on the podcast. And she said I could make a lot of money writing a book about it. The proposal is getting a lot of interest.

I am really so confused here. I don't understand why you're getting a book contract for my podcast. Whoa, well, okay, obviously I'll mention Theory of Everything in the book. In fact, when the book comes out, we could even do a follow-up. You could interview me. This is ridiculous. You were the insta-serf. It was my show.

I'm the one who should be getting the goddamn book contract. I thought you would be happy for me. You happy you're cashing in on my work? No, I'm not cashing. This is not a cash-in. I'm building a career here. In fact, if this conference goes well, I am going to be able to quit making videos

and do this full-time. Do what full-time? Sharing economy expert-ing. Wait, what is this conference next week? Okay, so I'm not supposed to talk about this on account of the NDA, but I'm getting flown out to Hawaii. Why? So you know about TED Talks, right?

Wait, are you doing a TEDx? No, I'm not doing a TEDx. They don't have TEDx in Hawaii. TEDx is community centers and libraries. I'm doing TED Alpha. TED Alpha. Yeah, okay, I don't know why I'm telling you about this, but TED Alpha is like the big exclusive one.

Like, it's invite only, it's in Hawaii, no cameras, no online videos. They collect your phones and iPads at the door, and nothing leaves the room. That's where I'm going. Why? Because I am the motherfucking sharing economy expert, bro.

Yes, but it's my show. I'm the one who put together the three-part series on the sharing economy. I'm the one who spent 10 hours in the waiting room at the hospital while my son is being born trying to edit a 10-hour file of you driving around smoking up with your passengers in a Lyft so we can get the show out on time. Why am I not going to TED Alpha? Because I did the work. Maybe you forgot, but I delivered like 2,000 Chipotle burritos.

I can't even imagine you being capable of doing that. Have you ever even been inside a Chipotle? All right, Mr. Expert, fine. Let's hear it then. Why don't you just tell me about the future of work? Let's hear it. Let's hear the TED Alpha version. Okay, great.

But just make sure as I'm talking, you're picturing me up on the stage talking to the most important people in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Just, why don't you just go. Okay. Some say that Uber's new logo is just a standard issue rebrand. Why is this news?

Who cares? Well, I'm going to argue tonight that Uber's new logo isn't just a big deal, but it's actually the key to understanding the future not only of the sharing economy, but perhaps of all mankind. Many have noticed that the logo now looks more like an O than a U, and I would say that this is very much intentional. But it's not designed to look like the letter O, but the shape of a circle. Let's see, here's the thing. The circle is not yet complete. There's still a line there.

What does that mean? Well, simply put, this is not the final Uber logo. Uber has not completed its transformation yet. I mean, why do you think Travis Kalanick has been so closely involved in this rebrand? He's been spending months obsessing over this new logo. Do you think he's simply trying to be the next Steve Jobs? Or is it that he knows that this is the last logo that will be designed by a human before there are no workers at all. That's it? No, that's just where I get the applause.

Do you think I need more? It seems that everyone I talk to these days is anxious about the future of work. It's like we all know that those things we used to call jobs are on the way out, but no one's yet explained what comes next. I reached out to Mary Gray, a real sharing economy expert. She's a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. I asked her if she could explain what all this anxiety is really about. The stress of doing gig work comes from a combination of

really three things. One, not knowing where your next gig is going to come from. The second is not really being able to control what kind of work might be coming your way, that you literally have to see what comes in as an opportunity and decide on the spot, do you want to take on that opportunity or do you want to wait for the next one? That's a pretty dicey game to play if you don't know where your next paycheck is coming in. And the third is not knowing if there's a pretty dicey game to play if you don't know where your next paycheck is coming in. And the third is not knowing if there's a more stable opportunity that might be out there beyond taking on the gig work. You left out robots. No, I'm serious. Isn't it fair to say that as stressful as the sharing economy work already is, that it's only going to get worse once the platforms replace everyone with robots? So some of the players in the platform economy are creating more anxiety by suggesting that robots are on the rise. I think the challenge is that

that presents the fantasy of automation that we have never really seen actualized to the elimination of labor. The reality is that we've never gotten rid of the shit work, the mundane work that it takes to make our day-to-day lives function. We haven't just gotten rid of jobs. We've created all these temporary jobs that we literally do not account for. We don't have a head count for how many people in the United States do part-time gig work that builds the productivity and the full-time labor that drives that productivity. We have no accounting of that. Even though we might not know the exact number of people working part-time or behind screens, we do know that their number is growing.

And while most of the people who contact Mary Gray are like me, people who want to talk about how absolutely fucked the future of work seems, she sees it differently. Mary Gray believes that the future of work might be amazing. Well, that is if we as a society create an employment system that supports workers of the future rather than exploiting them. Could happen. We need to come up with today what we want our working world to look like. And the hard truth is that we can't avoid this question. The reality is that we've shifted both our reliance on part-time work and our desire,

our unquenchable thirst for 24-7 services to the point where we're organizing most jobs around a kind of flexibility that means we have to come up with a new way of defining what full employment means, not full time. Like, let's get employment to move away from being anchored to a time and location. That we have this problem that we've got to fix. And one solution to the future of work is to continue to pretend like there will be no people working in the future, that it's effectively going to be automation all the way down.

The other way we contend with it is we have to have an employment system that literally can value somebody who's working 40 hours a week or four hours a week. And I think the only way we're going to be able to do that, and I think the business incentive, not to mention the societal desire for what could positively come of on-demand economies is to come up with a bundle of safety nets that really allow all of the workers who might contribute to on-demand economies to be able to do an amount of work that fits their schedule

and that they can choose that schedule, that they can demand the payment that they want to be paid for the work that they're doing, and that they're going to have an opportunity to try out other kinds of tasks and other kinds of jobs that interest them to expand their experiences and their sets of skills. To do that means taking on providing a baseline of security that makes the riskiness that comes with letting go of a 9-to-5 job possible. We need to come up with today what we want our working world to look like. And one opportunity, one option, is to really see it as a mix of flexibility and security that genuinely puts the worker at the center of that equation. The artist Ignacio Duarte hasn't worked in an office in years,

but you could make the case that he is still on the clock. I do something that you might call office art. It's mainly in the medium of drawing, animation, paper installation, graphics in Excel and a couple of paper works and things on pin boards and PDFs. It might look quite minimalistic but it always has a strong relationship to work. I enjoy working with Excel a lot. I've done quite a few drawings that are based on formulas or also just even using the little formatting palette that Excel offers you.

I'd really like to use the tools that a regular office employee would use. Many of my work start from a minimum creative moment. Let's say when you are in a phone conversation and you start to scribble subconsciously. I often take these little moments and turn them into art pieces. Let's say with a scribble, I have a different series of works where I just scribble in a very methodical way. I often make spirals and one single line that covers a whole page. In one occasion, I recorded the sound of it, the sound of the making. And it's a triptych in black, blue, and red,

like the basic colors of the Big Universe, of this French pen manufacturer, Big. And it's called Big Monochromes. I got to see this piece, Big Monochromes, when it was on display at the Drawing Center in New York City. It's really an incredible work of art. When I put on the headphones, I could see, hear, and feel the boredom, repetition, frustration,

and loneliness of the office. One thing that I like to do that is a bit mean is to take these little creative moments and convert them into a very structured activity again. You could call it a meta-routine. So it becomes something very similar to work. What used to be or was initially something like an escape from work suddenly becomes a very work-like

activity. Ignacio never set out to be an artist, but he never set out to work full-time in a beige and gray cubicle either. So art school offered the possibility of something else. I always thought I have no artistic talent, which I actually don't in the traditional sense. I'm not capable of drawing a man or something. So that's why I never thought of becoming an artist. I never saw it as an option because of this lack of talent that I saw in myself. But I always was very interested in the passive way. I was checking out exhibitions all the time, was very much into art history.

Even though Ignacio was much older than his fellow art students, he felt like he had the advantage because he knew exactly what he wanted. He studied script writing and filmmaking. And after graduation, he moved to Berlin with his girlfriend to start living the creative life. But within weeks, he found himself once again working in an office cubicle. So it was absolute, absolute failure. I was in this full-time position, a terrible job in an American corporation. It was pure suffering. And I did that for two more years. And those years were the ones where I found this extreme motivation to find a way out. This is when Ignacio Duarte started making office art. When I started making art, it was sort of like a mirroring of the experience I had had the same day in

the office. The Sisyphus type of work, this doing to undo again, this, I mean, what is a work, what is a routine to start with? It's an activity that gets repeated periodically. So those are the ingredients of everybody's work life. You have a certain schedule to fulfill, etc. And those are the ingredients that are always present in my work. The idols I had were, for example, Kafka, you know. The fact that he always stayed in his job

and really makes you understand where he's at and really makes you identify with him, because we probably have all experienced this kind of suffering, you know. Well, a few days, of course, I did do art during office hours. After a few years of this, Ignacio got a residency, a paid residency, to work full-time on his office art. He immediately quit his job.

I was the happiest man on earth when I left my last job. That residency was just the beginning. Ignacio now has gallery shows, museum exhibitions, famous collectors seek him out. But, he says, there are many things that remain the same. What I'm living now is the fantasy I had back in the day to finding a creative talent that allows you to escape from work routine. Having said that, the reality I'm living now is starting to work at eight and staying till seven or whatever, you know, and working Monday to Friday, you know, because it just seemed normal to me.

I didn't want to be the cliché artist that breaks out of the office and just does something really crazy. I wanted to work from, I wanted to talk and work from my own petit bourgeois experience and from being locked up in this cage. It was like opening the doors of a cage

and deciding to stay inside and draw the bars of it. Even though Ignacio Iorte uses office tools to make office art, and even though he keeps the same studio hours as when he toiled away in his cubicle, his artworks present us with evidence that art and work are two different things. Art has this great advantage against work. In work, everything has to be functional.

Efficiency is quite important, and everything has to have a meaning, a direct meaning that you can translate either into money or material benefit, let's say. And art has this incredible advantage of not having to be productive at all. You can just do whatever you want to do. And that is a huge danger because I use the same tools to do something totally unproductive,

which puts maybe things even in question. And that, of course, is dangerous. If you show people that Excel is a means that you can use to make paintings, then this is quite a danger for bosses. I mean, they might forbid Facebook, but they definitely can't forbid Excel. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called After Work. This installment was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker,

and it featured Ignacio Duarte, Mary Gray, and Andrew Calloway. If you missed our InstaSurf series from last year, you can find it in the archive at toe.prx.org. Special thanks to Daniel Jones for helping me record Mary Gray. Check out the podcast he puts together, Radio Berkman. They just dropped a pretty great episode called Digital Alter Egos. Also, thanks to our sponsors this week. If you're interested in sponsoring this podcast, drop a line to the folks at

sponsor at radiotopia.fm. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best-loved podcasts. And as always, thanks to MailChimp, The Knight Foundation, and listeners like you for getting us started and keeping us going.