Who made this world? ‘work.txt’ at the theatre reviewed
Maya Little
A question I often find myself asking is ‘why am I working so much?’ I think this is a pretty familiar question to 20-something year olds, fumbling for career ladders that have been melted down into crumpled heaps, anxiously aware of each other’s side hustles and striving to become a poorly defined ‘enough’.
But this is the wrong question. Or at least, it’s a question that is easily answered: ‘because I do not know which work I should be doing.’ This leads to a better question: ‘what is the nature of the work that I am doing?’. Asking this helps us begin to answer the current beneath all these work-questions, ‘what is the work that I want to do?’.
These questions – tricky ones, that lodge themselves awkwardly into the shape of my life – started surfacing after watching online theatre piece work.txt.
work.txt is billed as ‘a play about work’. Soon after you begin work.txt, you realise that this is an intentionally thin veil over the fact that really, it is a play in which you work. Almost immediately you start to feel the prickling discomfort that comes from realising that you have been labouring without making a choice: the extra hours you slid into at work, the passion project you were supposed to be co-running which you now appear to be running, the conversation with your friend’s parents that your friend has unexpectedly left.
Here is what happens when you participate in work.txt. You sign up online, through a pay what you can mechanism (I paid an arbitrary £5). You receive an email titled ‘Welcome to the work(.txt) force’. When you join the linked Zoom meeting, there are some funky and mildly unsettling visuals and sound (the soundscape throughout is impressive, joining together the disjointed workplace you become part of). You are welcomed by chat function. There is no audio or video attached to chat function: it is there to tell you what to do. You have your audio and video on and chat function can tell you to read script that it sends you at any time, or to do some other piece of labour. One of your fellow participants has been chosen by chat function to explain this to you. They tell you not to worry (or rather, chat function tells them to tell you not to worry).
You are all sent a link to a grid of squares, and asked to click on any you wish, to build the city that you are working in. You can see as other people click other squares until the site times out. You go back to the Zoom call and are shown a 3D model of this 2D grid, the buildings taller where more people have clicked. People across the city wake up: participants are selected (through private chat) to read the script. They tell you that ‘someone exactly like me is waking up, having coffee’. Then it is time to pick your protagonist. The chat function tells you to message them your name if you want to take this role – many other roles are designated in this way throughout the play. Whoever messages first appears to be given the role.
The central plot, such as it is, revolves around the self-chosen protagonist. They are a worker, working remotely for a company that deals with social media for other companies. One day when they are on a Zoom call, they simply stop. They stop moving. They stop working. Behind them, a screensaver continues uninterrupted: it is only the worker who has frozen. This becomes an internet phenomenon, and the rest of the play documents the responses of the world, until a strange and complete surreal breakdown towards the end, where you end up jointly singing that one song from Titanic.
There are some parts of work.txt that I have struggled to remember, but I think all of these parts can be suitably covered with the following summary: you spend an hour anxiously watching the side of your screen to be sure you don’t miss a task sent to you by the chat function. You are so busy making sure you do your work on time that it makes it difficult to do anything else.
There’s a way of participating in this play that would leave you feeling like you had completely torn apart the concept of work. That you, with your fellow audience members-turned-performers, had laboured in ways that were fun, productive, new. That was not the way I experienced it. For me, it was a precise and detailed answer to the question ‘how are we made to work without conscious intention or realisation?’, delivered by making me do work without conscious intention and only a slowly dawning realisation.
Ann Boyer writes compellingly about the invisibility of work in the realm of modern literature: ‘How strange that we live in the epoch of hour selling, in a made world in which we do not acknowledge the makers… The structure of reality becomes, in our books, a hidden chamber unlocked only with the question, “but who made this world?” The books themselves hardly ever seem to ask it.’[1]
It is easy to pass through things these days without asking ‘but who made this world?’ and it is becoming easier. The clatter of the restaurant kitchen recedes behind the delivery driver on the doorstep; the hands that made the clothes we wear move through the air in a country we may never see. So disconnected becomes time spent from thing made that the ‘hour selling’ in which most of us participate feels increasingly abstract. We no longer make most of our personal world nor have relationships with those who do. So obscured is the thing made that it becomes harder and harder to tell when we are working, and what it is we are working at.
This is both a problem of technology and a problem of capitalism. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi points out that ‘work is tending to assume a uniform physical character: we sit down in front of a screen, move our fingers on the keyboard and type. But at the same time, work is a lot more diversified in the contents it elaborates’[2]. This isn’t to rage against technology, but to point out the struggle to cognitively differentiate types of work (and subsequently, work from non-work) when we remain physically the same. Despite this appearance of generality, workers ‘could never exchange jobs because each of them performs a specific, local task’[3].
The central plot point of work.txt acts to reveal this fact: the protagonist breaks from their act of labour by refusing to perform this ‘uniform physical character’. They instead sit in their chair unmoving and unresponsive, and it is quickly realised that to take over this labour is not as simple as assuming its physical character. The protagonist’s colleagues discuss the files, the distinct knowledge, that are essential to the protagonist’s job, and which they now cannot access.
Work and rest are distinct from one another and being able to make this this distinction is key to our autonomy. work.txt also depicts an impulsive societal resistance to this: the Zoom meeting in which the protagonist is non-responsive quickly becomes something people are tuning in to watch, and there are discussions around how this could be turned into a live art installation. The resting body is depicted as unnatural and striking, an object of fascination.
The indistinctness of work in modern society does not simply result in ‘working too much’ but in a deeper problem that creates the need to overwork. As our work becomes less visible, we feel that we are not working enough, must work harder. Simultaneously, the fruits of our labours become increasingly obscured, making it more difficult for us to recognise the value in our work.
This is what the late David Graeber outlines in an article for STRIKE!, writing that where technology was supposed to lessen our need to work, instead it ‘has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.’[4] The ancillary jobs that seem to spring up essentially to facilitate the act of more people doing more work are down to the fact that, as Graeber puts it, ‘The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.’
By the time I read Graeber’s article, I’d already had this made pretty clear to me by work.txt, a performance which was on a surface level, and I think on its deepest level too, against this. But the way it operated was almost a mimicry of the ruling class position: it was a play in which I had no time on my hands in which to really consider exercising my autonomy. I felt like my job as an audience member-participant was of replication, not of creation – not even ancillary but arbitrary. In participating you become extremely aware of yourself as a maker of the world you inhabit, but you are not quite sure what this is in service of.
There was a clear hierarchical structure to the performance: the chat function told us all what to do, and we did it. What was disturbing about the show was that the degree of agency I had been granted, though greater than what one is used to accepting as an audience member, made me all the more aware that I possessed no ability to be a ‘mortal danger’ to the structure in which I was participating – in other words – to change anything. I imagine there were others who did not feel this, who enjoyed work.txt as an explorative piece in which they had agency, in which they had chosen their work and felt its immediate visibility. I think this would also be a productive way to experience it.
For me, it was my sense of oppression that was productive; the imposition of the tasks I was putting myself through/being put through made me much more concerned about making visible the other places in my life where this was happening, and about questioning my sense of powerlessness. Practically, there was nothing stopping me from speaking out of turn in the show, or from refusing to take part. But I was struck searingly by the knowledge that I wouldn’t.
Graeber’s most perceptive question is ‘what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?’ Capitalism has made us value the wrong kinds of work. Work for financial gain has become the most visible and most societally valued kind of work. But we work in exchange for so many things, and we get so many things in exchange for much other than work. I wonder, sometimes, what would happen, if we framed the value of work in the terms of Ann Boyer’s question ‘but who made this world?’. If we collectively decided that we were exchanging our work for how much world we made by doing it?
I struggled for a long while over whether work.txt was a successful reconception of work. There is a deceptiveness to the whole set up that that made it hard for me endorse its vision. I felt like it was out to get me. But in the weeks since, trying to piece together my own conception of what work I wanted to do, what I felt to be ‘good’ work, I found that the act of reconception is itself a spur to further reconception, and my own dissatisfactions with what work.txt did and how it worked were necessary and intentional.
Besides which: it was a great piece of theatre. It was gripping, satisfying, discomforting, with an elusive glimmer of hope I couldn’t quite catch, but knew I would go on seeking.
[1] Boyer, Ann, “Find Something to Hide as Soon as Possible; an interview with Ann Boyer”, The End of the World Review, (Sep 15 2020), https://endoftheworld.substack.com/p/find-something-to-hide-as-soon-as
[2] Berardi, Franco, “What Does Congnitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression.”, Cultural Studies Review, vol 11, issue 2, (2005), pg. 1.
[3] Ibid, 2.
[4] Graeber, David, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant.”, STRIKE!, (August 2013), https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/.
