How techno-optimism led to endless work, and the story of an obvious hoax
Imagine working 15 hours a week.
‘Never trust a free lunch’
A reporter-friend once told me that during a conversation about declining a lavish sit-down meal from a new source.
The discussion was about how journalists are ethically prohibited from accepting gifts like food, but expanded to focus on the kinds of perks that wannabe-hip companies use to mask insufficient benefits, or help employees forget that, increasingly, there’s no such thing as a work-life balance.
The point: Everything comes with a cost, whether it’s a steak dinner, an office with a ping-pong table or “unlimited” paid time off.
During a time of historical anxiety and stress (we are working from home because a virus has killed 2.5 million people, not because it’s a luxury) the average workday is about 48 minutes longer than in 2019, Harvard Business School determined.
But the current moment also highlights the utopian predictions that failed to come true.
In 1930, leading economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that his grandchildren would work just 15 hours a week, a notion driven by increased automation and a desire for more personal time. That didn’t come true for a variety of reasons — wages haven’t kept pace with costs of living, for one, and some 34% of Americans say work gives them purpose — but the idea contributed to the hope that some day, U.S. workers would have more free time.
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1964 came up with the slogan “Don’t commute — communicate!” based on the idea that telecommunications networks would make a huge amount of work possible by distance. Optimism accelerated in the ‘70s with the introduction of the personal computer and then the internet.
Bob Taylor, who developed an earlier version of the personal computer, in 1977 marketed the idea to Xerox based on the belief “that the machines would be transformational, eliminating much of what he called the ‘drudgery of office work’ and freeing office workers ‘to attend to higher-level functions so necessary to a human’s estimate of his own worth,’” as Wired reported.
Instead, we’ve filled our time with distractions and the kind of performative work meant to show off that we’re “working,” even if it means not getting anything done.
A story in The New Republic put it into stark terms.
In the average twenty-first–century white-collar workplace, employees perform their tasks from cubicles, in open-plan offices. They attend meetings (or prepare for meetings) 12 hours a week, according to some estimates. They receive approximately 121 work-related emails per day. These activities are at the heart of a working week that is 44 hours long. Each has been shown, in some cases by more than a century of scientific inquiry, to be distracting, inefficient, and stress-inducing. None are conducive to productivity, and yet each has become entrenched as a default.
Jetpacks and hover-cars sound great, but first parents need the time to take care of their kids without fear of losing their income.
‘America’s Greatest Hoax’
Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many people wanted to believe it.
In October 1869 workers found a 10-foot figure made of stone buried two feet underground on a farm in central New York.
Excitement spread from Stub Newell’s property in Cardiff, in Onondaga County, through the area and then all the way to Syracuse, 13 miles away. Within a week, 1,500 people had stood in line at the farm to view what appeared to be a petrified giant from the Bible, the remains of a member of a lost North American race, or some kind of Viking statue.
It had been four year since the Civil War, and much of the public had become preoccupied with the idea that ancient Egyptians, Romans and the Lost Tribes of Israel once roamed North America. Books about the subject had sold tens of thousands of copies, and the “Cardiff Giant” promised to be evidence that the story was true.
Some 600,000 people had visited the giant within weeks, setting up vendor stands on the roadside and paying a fee for a glimpse at the petrified figure.
The first president of Cornell University was there, too. He described the scene like this, "The roads were crowded with buggies, carriages, and even omnibuses from the city, and with lumber-wagons from the farms — all laden with passengers."
Long before Lyle Lanley sold Springfield a monorail, and before a former reality TV show host entered the White House, the Cardiff Giant was early proof of just how much people in the U.S. would want to buy-in.
Journalist Jack Hitt wrote briefly about the sensation for the New York Times in 2016.
Just as nowadays, there was an argument between rationalists and people of faith about the science of the Bible, in this case, whether the giants described in the Scriptures were real. (People forget that the reason God flooded the entire earth during the time of Noah is that angels and humans kept having lots of illicit sex and inadvertently created a race of deranged giants.)
At the time, “fossil” had become one of the buzzwords in the popular battle between Darwinian scientists and angry pastors. So a cigar maker named George Hull thought it would be entertaining to fabricate a fossil of one of Noah’s giants. He had a 10-foot man secretly sculpted, treated it to look old and then buried it in rural New York State, where he contrived to have it found. Instantly, massive crowds of astounded Christians started pouring into town, eager to see biblical proof in the petrified man with the 21-inch-long feet and the six-inch nose and all the other proportionate appendages. Hull made lots of money charging 50 cents a viewing. But as his wealth grew, he became nervous that the hoax would blow up. So he sold the Cardiff Giant to a consortium of businessmen, headed by a man named David Hannum.
After two sculptors revealed the ruse, the Cardiff Giant traveled the County Fair circuit for a time before it disappeared from public view.
“It is a statute, cut in gypsum, and intended to represent a human form of colossal size in a recumbent posture,” a state geologist told the New York Herald on Dec. 22, 1869. “As to the sources of its sources or origin, I cannot conjecture. It is worn and dissolved by water to a degree that indicates long inhumation, and it is covered by an alluvial deposit of three feet or more in depth. The sculpture is one of a high order and very different from those of Central America.”
The original figure is on display in a museum in Cooperstown, NY next to a sign describing it as “America’s Greatest Hoax.”
recommended reading
NASA Sent a Secret Message to Mars. Meet the People Who Decoded It: "Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it." [@kenchangnyt]
Mars Is a Hellhole: Investing in travel to the red planet is a waste of time and money when we need to be proactive solutions to slow global warming. [@shannonmstirone]
Thelonious Monk — So Plain Only the Deaf Can Hear: A wonderful examination of the most interesting person in jazz. "Unlike the jazzman who travels north with an instrument case and a dream, Monk was, almost by birth, an apartment dweller, a man utterly at home in the dense and sardonic temperament of Manhattan." [@carvellwallace]
Olympian McKayla Maroney Ensnared in Mystery ‘Cult’ the Church of the Master Angels: "Master" John Douglas, an elusive figure who is praised as a “prophetic minister, spiritual healer and extraordinary teacher," runs a shadowy organization that charges $10,000 for supposedly elite-level courses. McKayla Maroney, who was traumatized by the serial pedophile Larry Nassar and whose father died suddenly, is among the reported adherents. [@cheyenneisround]
one more thing
No More Normal is a semi-regular newsletter written by Jeff Stone. You can lend your support by subscribing, sharing with friends or suggesting ways to improve.