Post-work Life Hacks @postworklifehackss - Tumblr Blog

an unresolved but really lovely part of our project IMHO!

gamifying labour

Other labour dissolves into the labour of filling out forms, emails, public relations, seeking work, promoting work, writing applications. Art work where the art is just the paperwork.

Admin used as a mechanism of self-government

When the work runs out will we make up work in the form of long winded paperwork?

Adding another layer of complexity in the physical form of the paperwork

In germany they still insist on physical printed paperwork. I think this additional rules of printing and appointments (mine was at 15.48!) is another way to inflict rules and therefore increase the self-management that people have to inflict on themselves. Paperwork is less about the paper and more about the work. Can you display the self-dissapaline needed to perform all the additional labour of existing? Only after this can you be admitted into society. Paperwork as a test. Or a filtration mechanism. Have to be able to adhere to the value of admin, eg. Punctuality, organisation etc.

Speculative office where all the work if gamified.

Replicating the office digitally. Trying to carve time separations into

This is "AI Timegiver" by Michelle O'Higgins on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

was doing nice things like letter writing and playing games but it definitely felt like work. there felt like there was a pressure to do it right somehow. keep up with the expectations of the computer. no real flow as you moved from one thing to the next. no transition in and out of activities. fairly stressful. on the other hand, it did make the labour of care / play feel almost equivalent to other forms of more productive labour. put it all on equal playing field. way of validating care/ maintenance/domestic labour?

also couldn't seem to shake the feeling that i was scandalously wasting my day. thinking of all the work i should have been doing, could have been doing. turning these activities of leisure into a ‘project’ before they can be validated.

then at other times, eg the writing (probably because this felt most like acutal work, my productivity mind calms down a bit) felt like the computer was making me do the work of relfection and thinking.

i think it illustrated an idealised version of what we think about when we think of post-work. after robots have automated our work finally we will be doing the lovely things of writing letters to our mums, making pancakes, writing about ideas and being given time to ponder. paperwork as a way to reduce these windows of time for pondering. pondering/imagination/daydream threatens the hegemony that i think AI actually will act to maintain. who is AI working for?

decision fatigue

Reduced to states of waiting for our next decision to be made

Cognitive offloading.

Outsourcing the labour of time-management to a computer. Increased labour of self-management as entrepreneurial gaze is internalised, (we are our own bosses/gig economy/not employees but ‘parners’/ceo of the self) alleviate the exhaustion of self-policing to a robot. www.stayfocused.com

Rejection of clock time as a linear chronological time into a space where all times are available at once. Link to cloud as time traveling. We are simultaneously hyper vigilant of time as we are thrust into spheres of self management but also aware that time is somewhat obsolete. weekend/weekdays blur. Removing humans further and further from the rhythms/circles of the earth. “capitalism was born from the separation of people from the land, and its first task was to make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the limits of our endurance.” Silvia federichi

Unpredictability of what the ai would spit out. Is AI characterised by predictability or unpredictability? Because to an extent you are in control of what it is being fed, so not that surprising. Link to your basketball film!

Uselessness and AI. The assumptions around robot labour is that it will result in the maximisation of efficiency and productviity. What are the instances where this is not the case? Where the meeting of human and robot is extremely laggy and clumsy. Crowdsourcing labour perhaps. What if ai was not about optimisation but (opposite of optimisation?). Makes me think of influencer culture. We watch it with the hope of optimisation. we want things that other people have. Desire is created through influence.

Paper Life Hacks

taking the piss out of productivity hacks. how to procrastinate / how to rememebr better. all the work of self-management

making a5 paper by blending a4 paper - bullshit Labour. making things as long winded as possible. manufacturing aha moments even though they clearly don’t work.

Speaking about the culture of the tutorial. Watching tutorials about tutorials about tutorials. Layers of abstraction. we want to be told what to do - instant art/ gratifying. the nature of craft as been transformed from something understood as a lifelong practise, ‘honing your craft’ to something fairly instant and step by step. everyone is a craftsman these days.

Function to ‘save’ posts on instagram with the intention of returning later and doing it but we never do. Watching workers work. Trend on TikTok where you watch people do their job. eg. A tech guy cleaning out computers, a barista making coffees, burgers etc. Employers want their employees to go viral on TikTok now. The work of social media mediation. Hacking the science of virality.

Something about ‘satisfying’ things. Its enough to watch these things, we don’t need to experience them. Watching the satisfaction of materiality through a screen. Nostalgia for the lo-tech experienced through a digital interface. Watching diy videos and craft hack, cooking but never needing to do it. Consuming it through our gaze. Our eyes as machines. Of the 5 senses we don’t seem to use very many. Future of AR, will we no longer just watch these tutorials but be immersed in them in a different way. What is the role of escapism here? That doesn’t seem very escapist. gamifying labour eg. Cooking games (domestic), waitressing games, baby care games.

Fortune cookies

really enjoyed making these! i liked the crafted shell of the thing that was containing these machine made things. interestingly i was following a tutorial to make them, the kind i can imagine watching and never actually doing. contrast between the technology used as a tool for efficiency streamlining vs. the homebake / handmade exterior. like the idea of them being freaklessly accurate because they were made by mining personal data.

something about predicting the future! in ai we trust. in technology we trust! the shininess of the facade makes it something easy to place your trust in. do we still trust it when it is embedded in something as rustic as a cookie?

hyper specific fortunes. Culture of things being tailor made.

Neoliberalism manifests in horoscopes in this way? That is SO me. Everything has to apply to us. Individualised subjects that see ourselves as dislocated from the collective conscious.

Combining holistic language with that of news talks about the mystic of AI? This oracle status that the googling subject turns to for answers.

in 2007 google CEO, Eric Schmidt was asked what google might look like in 5 years time and he replied “…we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable google users to be able to ask questions such as “What shall I do tomorrow?” And “what job shall I take”

Predictive nature of AI: eg. Looking at instagram profiles to predict suicides because there was a correlation found between people who used certain filters and depression. Analysing poetry from poets to detect suicidal behaviour.

Weather predictions

Dear Miche: Fortune Cookies

Hey!

Watching the video of Alex reading our fortune cookie message today has stuck with me, I really love it! Please can you send it to me?

To me this work feels like the most resolved, most interesting and most generative work we’ve done so far, probably discounting the ML generated paperwork which could bring all sorts of possibilities, but we’ll have to wait and see a bit on that one.

I want to make more from the idea behind the fortune cookies, even if it’s not a direct development and the materiality isn’t the same - only because the fortune cookies in their current state feel like a well-rounded thing. I don’t know what development could look like though, have you got any ideas?

I think a nice essential part of what the cookies work is, is the contrast between the directness of the source material that goes in to the messages - the stiff, straight representation of events in news articles along with the kind, if often instructional or advisory nature of self help books - and the very human, abstract messages that are generated, with infinite opportunity for interpretation.

It’s also more than slightly interesting that the message is so long - something new happens when a fortune turns from a statement into a story.

Hope you’re having fun writing,

Fun! This one was really fun!

I feel like I’ve consumed quite a lot of life hack content in the last few years, mostly through the conduit of criticism given by YouTubers ridiculing life hack channels for presenting impossible solutions to mediocre problems. The thing is, it doesn’t matter that the ‘hacks’ don’t work, and it’s precisely the point that no one is going to try them.

Life hack videos offer viewers a sense of vicarious productivity (outsourcing productivity) that scratches an ever-growing itch. Engaging in life hack content displaces the need to have meaningful output, using the aesthetic of problem/solution and labour to fire the same neurons.

I have a niece and two nephews between the ages of 10 and 13, and they all watched this video sincerely; they weren’t just humouring their uncle. My niece especially enjoyed it, watching the video multiple times.

I think there’s a relationship between the way that these life hack videos allow consumers to engage in vicarious production, and the way in which TikTok’s recommendation algorithm has systemmified the production of taste in such a way that it’s users still feel in control. But that’s probably for a separate post.

It’s nerve-wracking to go to bed knowing that tomorrow will be full of tasks you cannot know about.

I was concerned and somewhat frustrated that I wasn’t going to get a ‘break’, but a break from what? What is a break? I couldn’t have known which activities would be thrown my way; who’s to say they wouldn’t just have been a series of any other day’s ‘breaks’? A ‘break’ really meant a moment of control. I was nervous about being beholden, being directed, being on a treadmill. (Literally, in the end)

I was viewing it as a write-off, a dead day; I anticipated twelve or so hours of meaningless energy, at least beyond the research benefit of doing this experiment in the first place.

What I got instead was an exercise in doing. Above all else, I did doing. Taking directions removes the need to make decisions, but taking directions from a text-generating AI removes the context that often gives meaning to the output of your actions.

(makes me think of fivers moto: in doers we trust / don’t dream, do / you might be a doer)

I was left to pull meaning from the process of carrying out tasks. Failure and success were assessed against my accuracy in following instructions, not the product of my labour.

I didn’t get a break. I did ‘break’-like tasks, but that’s not having a break.

When the generator part of Generative Adversarial Networks produces “fake” data that the discriminator thinks is “real”, it’s not happy that it tricked it’s counterpart, it just remembers what it did, along with everything it’s done before, and uses it to do it all over again.

#AI

The power of now

['off', 'annual', 'heating', 'bills', 'can', 'i', 'leave', 'home', 'for', 'a', 'building', 'to', 'the', 'action', 'itself', 'the', 'depth', 'and', 'radical', 'nature', 'of', 'compassion', 'having', 'gone', 'beyond', 'the', 'myriad', 'forms', 'of', 'physical', 'pain', 'weakness', 'discomfort', 'or', 'disability', 'that', 'is', 'telling', 'you', 'to', 'find', 'a', 'name', 'a', 'past', 'and', 'future', 'when', 'salvation', 'in', 'whatever', 'form', 'both', 'are', 'in', 'now', 'otherwise', 'you', 'will', 'get', 'an', 'image', 'can', 'help', 'you', 'temporarily', 'relinquished', 'you', 'have', 'removed', 'the', 'two', 'costsaving', 'measures', 'in', 'an', 'album', 'compiled', 'by', 'the', 'surge', 'in', 'spending', 'is', 'for', 'a', 'judicial', 'review', 'into', 'procurement', 'a', 'spokesman', 'said', 'on', 'saturday', 'the', 'rescue', 'helicopter', 'after', 'receiving', 'an', 'epirb', 'distress', 'beacon', 'from', 'fishing', 'vessel', 'joanna', 'c', 'is', 'a', 'department', 'apart', 'sometimes', 'what', 'seems', 'like', 'a', 'shadow', 'that', 'follows', 'you', 'wherever', 'you', 'go', 'more', 'deeply', 'into', 'the', 'body', 'the', 'higher', 'its', 'vibrational', 'frequency', 'than', 'the', 'power', 'of', 'your', 'thinking', 'watch', 'it', 'take', 'your', 'attention', 'deeply', 'into', 'the', 'appointment', 'of', 'dido', 'harding', 'to', 'posts', 'in', 'the', 'rise', 'was', 'due', 'to', 'the', 'voice', 'comments', 'speculates', 'judges', 'compares', 'complains', 'likes', 'dislikes', 'and', 'ignores', 'the', 'present', 'moment', 'is', 'all', 'you', 'had', 'chosen', 'it', 'also', 'raises', 'the', 'interesting', 'philosophical', 'question', 'of', 'guilt', 'but', 'as', 'a', 'second', 'wave', 'of', 'the', 'sun', 'would', 'the', 'death']

An internal loop speaks

Every time I finish writing a section of text I will copy and paste it into a text file.

['and', 'paste', 'it', 'into', 'a', 'text', 'file'] I shall, as these words will be used as the dataset for a Markov Chain Generator (MCG) which I will then run to generate words to start the next sentence.

["'text'", "'file'", 'i', 'shall', 'as', 'these', 'words', 'will', 'be', 'used', 'as', 'the', 'dataset', 'for', 'a', 'markov', 'chain', 'generator', 'which', 'i'] will explain now; MCGs analyse a dataset - in this case an increasingly long list of words - and work out the probability of the next state of a system, purely based on the current state.

['copy', 'and', 'paste', 'it', 'into', 'a', 'text', 'file', "'and'", "'paste'", "'it'", "'into'", "'a'", "'text'", "'file'", 'i', 'shall', 'as', 'these', 'words'] in the square brackets are the ones being generated each time. The last paragraph is somewhat technical but basically, each time I run the code, pairs of words are given probability values based on how likely one is to follow the other, then, with a small amount of randomness, a sentence is generated by writing a word then determining which word is most likely to follow it.

['are', 'given', 'probability', 'values', 'based', 'on', 'the', 'current', 'state', "'copy'", "'and'", "'paste'", "'it'", "'into'", "'a'", "'text'", "'file'", 'i', 'shall', 'as'] the list of words being fed in grows, the sentences become more stable and coherent, however this recursive way of generating a dataset that is likely to result in lots of very similar phrases being created, I assume.

['chain', 'generator', '(mcg)', 'which', 'i', 'will', 'then', 'run', 'to', 'generate', 'words', 'to', 'start', 'the', 'next', 'state', 'of', 'a', 'system', 'purely'] as an OuLiPo type of exercise, in which I’m not fully in control of the writing I’m producing. There’s something nice about an automatic writing exercise that uses it’s own output as a method for generation. (As, I suppose, many of those exercises do...)

['this', 'case', 'an', 'increasingly', 'long', 'list', 'of', 'words', 'being', 'fed', 'in', 'grows', 'the', 'sentences', 'become', 'more', 'stable', 'and', 'coherent', 'however'] there’s still no sophisticated internal logic that can guarantee that the series of words produced will form something intelligible other than the quality of my own writing throughout the exercise. The algorithm and I are working together.

["'however'", 'there’s', 'still', 'no', 'sophisticated', 'internal', 'logic', 'that', 'can', 'guarantee', 'that', 'the', 'series', 'of', 'words', 'and', 'work', 'out', 'the', 'probability'] that the output isn’t essentially just a like-for-like regurgitation of a section of the input text, such as this paragraph’s example.

['i', 'run', 'the', 'code', 'pairs', 'of', 'words', 'being', 'fed', 'in', 'grows', 'the', 'sentences', 'become', 'more', 'stable', 'and', 'coherent', 'however', 'this'] particular output feels like a good summary of the exercise, so I’ll end things here. I’ll leave this post with the following sentence generated from everything that’s come before it:

['form', 'something', 'intelligible', 'other', 'than', 'the', 'quality', 'of', 'my', 'own', 'writing', 'throughout', 'the', 'exercise', 'so', 'i’ll', 'end', 'things', 'here', 'i’ll']

... Perfect!

#oulipo #markov chains #free writing #automaticwriting

Labour of Love - freewriting #2

I’ve come to think of paper as something like a labor of love. My eager fingers await the warm velvety sheen of a freshly printed document as it emerges, gracefully, from the mouth of the printer. When it is out I make sure only to touch only the corners, careful not the disturb the perfectly arranged ink until it is completely dry. Take your time, I say, I’ll be here waiting when you’re ready. After a few moments I lift it to my face, allowing my cheek to graze down this satin sheet, whispering with the tenderness that you address a newly born with, “welcome, admin, to the third dimension. I think you will like it here.” Then I place it on a solid surface, of course with a couple of dummy sheets between to buffer against the hardness of the tabletop. I chose a pen with a Goldilocks glare, too thick, too thick and I wouldn’t even dream of getting anywhere near you with blue ink, until finally I found the pen to my paper, uni-ball eye micro UB-150 BLACK. And then pen meets paper in a euphoric eruption, and for a second I thought I heard music. The sweet sound of admin, lighting up neural pathways I never even knew existed. Great waves of serotonin flood through every capillary in my body; my fingertips tingle with electricity as I guide the stylus in a line-dance across ticks boxes and tables. I emerge from my trance, unsure whether minutes or hours had passed, ungulfed into a world with grids as tall as trees, t&c’s that spanned like vast ocean suntil it meets the horizon; sign here.

With pleasure.

And so with one last flick of the wrist, I leave a mark of my everlasting devotion to you. A souvenir if you will. And maybe years later when this document has begun to fossilise in a far way filing cabinet in the back room of the german embassy, there will remain a reminder of the time we spent together that one Monday all those lifetime ago. And perhaps a curious excavist will stubble across these dusty mountains of paperwork, thinking nothing of it until they land on ours. And it will read something like a loveletter, allegory climbing through the lines of admin, passion erupting through the monochrome grids and leap into full colour. And our love will live on, in the form of paperwork.

Freewriting as Paperwork

So my names paperwork. I generally on an average day if one were measuring the duration of my completion I would consider that it would take some time that was longer than the time you would expect it to take. As if there was an unnecessary amount of bureaucracy that one had to fill in and complete in order to be a human. Some might say that I’ve you know just become fluffed out over the years and generally over time, as time goes on becoming more long winded than I used to be some time ago. I have a habit of showing up in places that you might not expect me, for example when someone dies, or is born, or falls in love. For a while I felt quite left out, my self-esteem took a real hit. It really felt as though people weren’t making a real effort with me and I really felt like I belonged anywhere but finally now I feel quite at home in pretty much any aspect of your home. I just like spending time with people and have made it my life work to elongate this, becoming more longwinded and complicated, as a way to occupy more time. But luckily for me there is simultaneously a strengthening culture that reinforces and rewards habits of busyness, where the act of being busy equates to a kind of moral status. So actually I’ve realised that people willingly spend more time on me because it makes them feel productive and accepted themselves. So I see myself as providing a real service to human kind. So over time one could say that I’ve become longer in the length of take much longer than you think.

My 5 year plan of things I want to achieve in the coming years that would be a part of my goal and aspirations in the upcoming years would be to get more time consuming. There is talk of automating me with digital tools or alienating the labour that I might bestow upon people but that would not be part of my aspiration. If you look at places like Germany, one of my favourite places for the reason that looking to them as an example of the point that illustrates the fact that they have consistent kept the paper in paperwork. I’ve always been very fond of this and seen it perhaps as a token of their appreciation to me. That I deserve better than being trapped behind pixels and appreciated in all my glory in a ring binder. Maybe splayed across a table, used as a coaster. I appreciate this extra laborious process of having to go about the work of printing and physicalising me into existence. I like the feeling of a warm sweaty hand gripping my fibres or the rush of being scrupled in frustration up and thrown into the bin, feeling the rush of stale air through my creases as I fly. Don’t even get me start on the titillating rush of being sliced through a shredder. But those days are nearly all but gone. Trapped behind the glass window of a computer screen, I must sacrifice the painstaking process of asking people to put pen to paper, instead streamlined now with keys and downloads and emails.Ow its woeful, to think of how much more efficient I’ve become. Gone are the days of getting lost in the post, or worse having to scan in signatures. But pixel by pixel I have devised ways of belabouring the digital admin process. Ever notice that everyones these days is talking about life admin this, life admin that, ever wondered who was the mastermind behind everyone always being swamped by admin. It was me of course! Humble little me, no longer a stack of paper, no no no. I live on the cloud now. Infinitely divisible, copy and pasted at the click of a button. Thats what I discovered. I am much easier multiplied than I ever was with a photocopier. Sometimes I like to think back to the funny form I would take in the 1800’s where I was quite colourful, with gothic letters and little cherubs. But I realised a fundamental flaw in this that this unstandardised form of paperwork didn’t incentivise making more of me. Painting a little cherub on each sheet was hardly a job anyone was keen to do! So now I’m all ticks and boxes, lines and dots, carrying it’s own hieroglyphic beauty I would argue. It’s a funny thing about automation. Saving you all the time while making it possible to do more work. I hope if things go well on this date, maybe we can take things to the photocopier and really get to know each other over some tick boxes. I’ll even read you my terms and conditions if your lucky!

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