Millennial slaves and societies' solution

Regarding new media "net slaves"

BUT AS BILL LESSARD FOUND OUT, NOBODY IN NEW media really wants to hear this story. Lessard did his time in new-media sweat labour. In 1995, he was hired as a content producer and bulletin-board manager at Pathfinder, Time-Warner's website. Like most producers, he found himself pulling twelve- to fifteen-hour days. "I wouldn't clean my apartment for a month," he recalls. "I'd have cartons of milk of various vintages, all fermenting. I was a mess." Like most digital shops, Pathfinder touted itself as a cultural hotspot, and the young staff governed themselves accordingly: hanging out, sleeping together and almost never leaving the office. "It was a dorm in there," Lessard says. He burned out and fled in 1996.

By then, all of Lessard's friends in new media were telling him horror stories about their jobs. So, he and a friend, Steven Baldwin, decided to compile a book on the subject. In an homage to Studs Terkels' famous book Working, it would relate tales of everyday digital work in the employees' own words: NetSlaves. They collected dozens of interviews, and given the boom in internet-related books, they figured they'd have no trouble attracting interest. No such luck. Publisher after publisher declined their proposal. "They'd say it wasn't upbeat enough and that nobody would want to read about this," Lessard says. "They wanted a book about how everyone was having these great opportunities." Eventually, even their agent lost hope and gave up. With nowhere else to go, they turned their project into--what else?--a website (www.disobey.com/netslaves).

Lessard's story is a testament to the power of the myth of "liberated" digital work. Yet it's surprising that today's young workers, so self-reflective, so otherwise fluent in irony, would buy into such a myth. This is not to suggest that new-media jobs are unmitigatingly horrible. All in all, they're considerably better paid and more challenging than the minimum-wage tedium that passes for most people's work in North America. But what's intriguing is that new-media employees are so desperate to believe that they are not, in fact, workers: that their work can be play, that they can control it and that their employers are bending over backward to please them. Instead of the other way around.

From Good Shit - content agregator

find the story http://krick.3feetunder.com/jobsucks.htm