pandemic 2

WHY ARE WE TIRED ALL THE TIME?
days at home alone with his/her personal computer—they
are definitely not both a master and a slave in the same
sense.
A lot is being written about how the old Fordist
assembly line way of working is replaced by a new mode
of cooperative work that leaves much more space for individual
creativity. However, what is effectively going on is
not so much a replacement, but an outsourcing: work for
Microsoft and Apple may be organized in a more cooperative
fashion, but their final products are then put together
in China or Indonesia in a very Fordist way—assembly
line work is simply outsourced. So we get a new division
of work: self-employed and self-exploited workers
(described by Han) in the developed West, debilitating
assembly line work in the Third World, plus the growing
domain of human care workers in all its forms (caretakers,
waiters . . .) where exploitation also abounds. Only the
first group (self-employed, often precarious workers) fits
Han’s description.
Each of the three groups implies a specific mode of
being tired and overworked. The assembly line work is
simply debilitating in its repetitiveness—workers get desperately
tired of assembling again and again the same
iPhone behind a table in a Foxconn factory in a suburb of
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