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By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update...

• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Those are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. Sorry for the late reply which I hope you see. > Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work. You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all without telos, other than as ends in themselves. However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life. Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away from. > I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag you. > if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really. You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness of so much activity. I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle. I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.