Related: http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_ecstatic_capitalisms.html/
A 2001 long-form piece that examines the work culture of the dot-com community and gathers together many more related strands of how this is changing how we live. """ Allison Behr, the 29-year-old public-relations director who is showing me around, tells me that she works 11 hours a day, except during the weeks near the Christmas rush, when everyone at Sparks burns the midnight oil. In her world, this is no oddity—area legend has it that when a 24-year-old Netscape programmer told a survey company that he worked between 110 and 120 hours per week, the researcher objected that his computerized questionnaire wouldn't accept a number that big. """ """ Nineteenth-century utopian novels like Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Dean Howells's A Traveler from Altruia assumed that progress would inevitably lead to leisure, with time for hobbies, civic engagement, family, and neighborly sociability. """ """ Ecstatic capitalism has bored so deeply into the national psyche that it has even changed how Americans think of childhood. For just as every day Mom goes off to work—as did 59 percent of women with babies under one year old in 1998, vs. 31 percent in 1976—and Dad goes off to work, so baby . . . well, goes to work. While a generation ago, experts saw infancy as a time to develop healthy emotional attachments, contemporary parenting magazines and advice books are obsessed with "learning" or what Newsweek has called "building baby's brain," presumably for the demands of knowledge work. [...] After a lesson-packed infancy, the new-economy baby must begin school as early as possible. One New York City foreign-language program starts babies at six months—before they can talk—and public pressure is mounting for universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds. For today's five-year-old, a full day's work is mandatory """ ~ash On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 22:01, Sruthi Krishnan <srukr...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/singleton/ > > Fun piece. > > "The rapacious new corporate ethic was summarized by two phrases: > “churn ‘em and burn ‘em” (a term that described Microsoft’s habit of > hiring young programmers fresh out of school and working them 70 hours > a week until they dropped, and then firing them and hiring more)" > > Reminded me of the manager I encountered fresh out of college who > sincerely believed that staying at the workplace from 8 am to 10 pm is > a minimum requirement to build character. And as far as I know, IT > firms continue to live by this ethic. Are there any exceptions out > there? > > Sruthi >
