The Work: Domestication, Education, Occupation / Danielle Billing
This episode features a conversation with Danielle Billing, teacher at the Idaho School of the Deaf and Blind. At first, we begin discussing our love for pets, and our revulsion regarding the breeding practices of dogs, the anthropomorphizing of animals, and then the conversation moves into our education system and teaching in our contemporary society. Eventually, we get to the crux of the conversation: What is work? How does it serve us to work in our modern economy? What is branding, and how does that fit into our contemporary work in the age of social media?
The opinions expressed in this episode in no way represent the views and positions of the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind.
In the shift from manual skills to the art of selling and servicing people, personal traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market. Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further sales. With anonymous insincerity, the successful person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.
Sincerity is detrimental to one's job, until the rules of salesmanship and business become a 'genuine' aspect of oneself. Tact is a series of little lies about one's feelings, until one is emptied of such feelings.
The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and alienation characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways and come to bite deeper into all areas on life.
People are required to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, as this ethic spreads, one learns that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself, and is estranged from it as well.
- C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951
Episode Notes:
We reference the article Starbucks is quietly changing the business as furious baristas slam the 'cult that pays $9 per hour'
