One indication of that is simply the amount of time that the workers in “Microserfs” spend at work. While one of their colleagues is reported to be locked in his room at 2:30 a.m., trying to solve a problem with the code he is writing, the other Microserfs are heading to the supermarket, which is “completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people” (Coupland 1994). Elsewhere in the story, the protagonist wonders whether a co-worker—whose eyes are “all red and sore”—ever sleeps. But the penetration of work into leisure time is not just a quantitative matter: private life is overwhelmed by work life. As the protagonist of “Microserfs” grudgingly admits, “Microsoft is not conductive to relationships.” He tries, he acknowledges, to get other things going, “but then work takes over my life,” leaving him with “work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep” (Coupland 1994). This description is reminiscent of Marx’s lament about the alienating effects of (industrial) labor, where the worker “feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most also on his dwelling and in personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal” (Marx 1995, 99).
But for the most part, the blurring between on duty and off duty is seen as positive progress by the digerati and as a trend that allows the injection of creativity, joy, and personal expression into work, or the “erotization” of the workplace in Marcuse’s (1974) terms (see also Agger 2004). The blurring of work and leisure can be seen, for example, in the production of new workspaces that openly incorporate leisure ethics and culture. This is evident at a symbolic level: work no longer takes place in a factory but on a “campus” (Coupland 1994). Work is a place where “research and development,” “intellectual work,” “creative work,” and the “analysis of symbols”—to name just few of the neologisms associated with network work—substitute labor. Work in a campus is not so much about production as it is about creativity and contemplation.
This blurring is also evident on a spatial level. An illustration in a special issue of Wired, guest edited by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, shows the network workspace to be explicitly designed to blur the distinction between the rationalized, productionist, public, and disciplined world of work and the eroticized, irrational, consumerist, and private world of leisure.<sup>3</sup> This space combines elements of work (or social reproduction), such as computer stations and small cubicles, with elements of a more social and eroticized space (pertaining to social communication), like a coffeehouse and a living room; as the text accompanying the image explains, “the lobby looks like a living room, a cluster of workstations like a café” (Koolhaas 2003). The title of the article—“Where Do You Want to Work Today?”— implies a more lenient, flexible approach to work. It is not only that workers can decide where it is they are going to work: in front of a computer, at the coffee bar, or on the couch in the living room; more important, perhaps, is that work itself is reconstrued in terms of leisure, involving—in this case— personal, consumer-like choices (where do you want to work? the “cubicle,” the “café,” or the “living room”?—it’s your choice). At the same time, these sites of leisure are also reconstituted as spaces of work.
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