Restructuring economic and social relations around the temporal value of efficiency has the effect of making all relations instrumental to productive outputs. Everything and the activity of every being becomes a means to optimize productive potential. But would we ever really treat someone we really care for in an efficient manner? Would we express our love and affection and extend our warmth and attention by maximizing our output in the minimum amount of time, with the minimum expenditure of labor, energy, and personal capital? Can one experience true intimacy or joy efficiently? Is it possible to deeply empathize with another being in a highly efficient way? Turning relationships into efficient means to advance productive ends destroys the empathic spirit.
In the 1980s and 1990s psychologists and educators introduced the notion of “quality time” into family relations. The idea was for parents to set aside a few minutes in their otherwise over-burdened and busy days to get back “in touch” with their children. The forced efficiency of these structured intimate encounters often defeated the purpose of the exercise. Deep relationships require nurturing and suffer when yoked to the dictates of the clock.
The almost pathological obsession with efficiency in the modern era reflects an underlying fear of the death and the hope that time can be saved and one’s duration on Earth continually extended into the future. Anyone who has ever engaged a hyper-efficient personality can almost smell the fear. Getting close to such a person becomes nearly impossible.
– Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilisation, pg 166-167
Raiding the inarticulate since 2010
accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek
Mark Carrigan 