010180000:

“Crucial to maintaining the culture of overwork and 24/ 7 temporality is the pervasive insecurity embedded in the belief that we are in unceasing competition with every other member of humanity. This feeling of unease is omnipresent, structuring our emotions and relationships outside of the workplace. Gilles Deleuze writes that “the corporation is a spirit, a gas,” meaning that people no longer experience coercive control as masses within the walls of physical enclosures (schools, factories, prisons), but that today we are controlled outside of and in between these enclosures, through the competitive logic of the corporation. In a postindustrial world, this gaseous form of control becomes ever more necessary as production becomes increasingly untethered to physical locations of containment and workforces become more diffuse and workers more flexible.”

— Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love & Other Lies About Success and Happiness

tenderculture:

“There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money. The cash of two grocery stores, and even of the shoe factory and the shoe store, was not sufficient to hide our origin. Lila herself, even if she had taken from the cash drawer more money than she had taken, even if she had taken millions, thirty, even fifty, couldn’t do it. I had understood this, and finally there was something that I knew better than she did, I had learned it not on those streets but outside the school, looking at the girl who came to meet Nino. She was superior to us, just as she was, unwittingly. And this was unendurable.”

— The Story of A New Name, Elena Ferrante