you know where you are with
up in the air (2009), affective labor, and the cost of dignity
a couple weeks ago, i applied for a full-time job. despite going at this for about a year, the humiliation of job hunting never really ends. it’s always nauseating to have to fill your resume with word salad that corresponds to your perception of the company’s needs, followed by sending it off into the ether, knowing full well you’ll probably never hear back. in these circumstances, even rejection is a kind of grace.
i like to think i’ve gotten detached enough that i can plough through and pretend it was all a bad imitation of something written by Kafka. but a couple weeks ago, i applied for a full-time job, and i still can’t get the taste out of my mouth. unlike other job applications, where the humiliation is in the banal bureaucratic requirement of shrinking your life down to fit a form, this application insisted that i use an AI chatbot to apply. meaning that my resume would be automatically filtered, without ever seeing human eyes. it’s one thing to know this, and another to see it happen. as if that wasn’t enough, this was followed by an ‘interview’ with the chatbot, which asked situational questions and provided 3 prompt answers for me to choose from (the ‘correct’ answer for each one being obvious, which i thought defeated the purpose).
on one hand, i get it. in this economy, every open position gets hundreds of applicants. companies don’t have infinite manpower, we’re all workers, maybe that’s understandable. what i cannot understand is why efficiency (or the guise of efficiency!) is a good enough reason to throw our last shreds of dignity out the window. as it is, there’s not much we can give each other. why, then, is this something we’re willing to cast away, when we already have so little?
i think this increasing alienation is best captured by the 2009 film, Up in the Air1. it’s premise is simple enough: a corporate consultant’s (Ryan, played by George Clooney) entire job is to jet across the US at a moment’s notice, having been loaned out to fire workers from other firms. his whole life is efficiency, ruthlessness, and routine. the motif of the movie, cast mostly through sleek montage, is that he feels his whole life can fit in one bag, brought with him from one place to the next without ever weighing him down. it’s the same weightlessness and atomisation that opens Radiohead’s Let Down, a deadpan vision which can only see the endless sequence of “Transport, motorways and tramlines / Starting and then stopping / Taking off and landing / the emptiest of feelings.” perhaps slightly overdone, his professional title labels him as a ‘transition specialist’.
in this way, he’s the ideal blank slate for this job, because he knows “How we feel doesn’t even compare [to the retrenched worker]”. professionalism in Ryan’s world has necessarily become synonymous with unfeeling, because disaffection is the only tolerable way to endure his repetitive work of confronting and recognising the humanity of the worker-person sitting opposite him. following this, the role he fulfills can be considered a kind of ‘affective labor’2, which - in the simplest terms - is a (professional) contact premised on emotion. in this case, he’s meant to wrangle the fear and anxiety of the retrenched worker into a desire to move forward, an effort which makes any self-reflection and sincerity on his part impossible.
of course, he knows this. at one point, he finally gets frustrated enough at his mentee (Natalie, played by Anna Kendrick) to snap: “We take people at their most fragile and set them adrift.” while Natalie feels guilt at a firing gone awry, it only serves as further ammunition for Ryan’s own belief to severe any and all connection before it can develop into something that might weigh him down, that he’ll have to carry for the rest of his life. another word for it might be responsibility.
as if this wasn’t bleak enough, the film’s central tension rests on the threat of computerisation, as Natalie’s first act proposal to the company involves moving all of its services remote to save on costs. to his credit, Ryan is firmly against this, and makes the argument to his boss that at the very least, “There’s a dignity to the way I do it.”
and maybe it’s tempting to laugh at the bare minimum that Ryan considers “dignity”, but dignity is exactly what’s at stake here. in a firing situation, it’s both himself and the worker who are being put through the debasing effect of its mechanisms. and although the jargon used in these scenarios might try to distract from the person being laid waste, the affect - the palpable human presence - of the room is the only thing holding up the notion of dignity. to frame moving this already delicate operation to the virtual realm as an inconsequential decision based on efficiency is then not only disgustingly ignorant to the “brutal” reality of what’s being done, but utterly devoid of recognising the need for dignity, i.e:
“...we should always treat people as ends in themselves rather than as a mere means to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate capitalism.” (Ian Fraser, p. 30 of ‘Affective Labor and Alienation in Up in the Air’)
which you’d think would be a simple, incredibly basic point to grasp, but alas.
the movie ends nebulously, with Ryan finally recognising his own alienation. he has no family of his own to go back to, so we’re spared a saccharine moral ending. instead, he’s left adrift, on an airplane (to a destination of his own choosing), knowing that the affective orientation demanded of him by his job has cost him his entire life.
which is to say: how did we get here? when did our lives become like this? doesn’t anything mean anything to anyone anymore, or are we content to sacrifice ourselves - and our dignity - in the name of efficiency, without ever considering quality?3 like firing someone over Skype or assessing someone’s ability to do a task through AI4, when did we decide that this was acceptable? and why is it shameful to demand more, to demand better? why is this what we have to settle for?
if difficulty is a good enough reason for us to turn away from one another, we might as well just give up now. what we owe each other is whatever lets us keep our dignity.
it’s not lost on me that a movie that came out just after the 2008 financial crisis would display this cynicism about jobs. we don’t have time to unpack all of it here, but Up in the Air presents a completely different mood to the straightforwardly optimistic office-films of the 2000s, like The Devil Wears Prada or Night at the Museum, both of which portray work as an all-encompassing element of life, that through this very characteristic, has the transformative ability to make its characters not just better workers, but better people.
for a more thorough analysis, see Ian Fraser’s article https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137370860_2 (available through scihub)
or: enshittification.
this also applies to: ‘i asked chatgpt to ______’ why did you do that. do you care about anything. use your human mind!
thank u for this..for articulating this so well but also just for this, for saying it
felt every word of this right down to “use your human mind”!! <3