Vintage Marxist scholarship often arrives at the image of feet marching, zombie-like, off to work. What moves these feet, the scholars ask. Where is the line between forced obedience and personal volition?

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The question is theoretically overtrodden, and there's no strict answer. But in concert with the gamification of everyday life via biometrics and big data, what we could find out is the precise number of steps the worker has taken, perhaps spiking their health care rate if our prescribed exercise target hasn't been met. The more information available to individuals, the more rigorously they are expected to police themselves.



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In the same token, we must self-regulate our use of technology as well... As my friend Zak writes, “Platforms and devices are like drugs and food, and we style our technological ethos as one plans a diet; the conflation of ethics and consumption is a hallmark of neoliberal thinking.”

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Prolific coder Michaël Trazzi offers his own “productivity hacks”in an article for the site Hackernoon. His tips include:

Step 1) Make a color-coded chart of how every fifteen minutes of your day is spent.

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He expresses an extreme sense of horror vacui when confronted with his flattened, logistical life:

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What kind of empathy can we locate for the "future self?" The Future Self's only plight being its outrage at the lollygagging indiscretions of a Past Self doesn't inspire much compassion, from my perspective...



Step 2)Put your phone on mute and airplane mode, turning it off, and putting it in a sock within a sock within a sock within a sock and leaving it in your kitchen.

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For someone as time-conscious as Michaël, we must assume there is signifigance to each step of the process- superstitiously muting the phone before turning it off, bulking it out to a soft tumescence with layers of sock, putting it in the kitchen, where it is out of place, all to designate his device as a thing of filth.



On the subject of layers, obfuscation, and D.I.Y., a tactic I've observed on the Deepweb marketplace Dream Market is the selling of huge bundles of pdf guides to illegal activities for between 5 and 10 USD (around ฿0.001022- ฿0.002044), in lieu of tangible illegal items like drugs or DVDs (hence sidestepping the shipping issue.)

mask

The same user has listed multiple bundles, with names like "**BEST FRAUD PACKAGE ON THE DARK WEB**" each with a similar-sounding yet (as far as I could tell) distinct list of several hundred documents on VPN’s, hacking, fake ID’s, credit card fraud and a few astrology guides as well as scans of ID’s and forged documents…

listie

I wonder who would have enough time to implement even a fraction of these hundreds if not thousands of scams. Would they set up a productivity schedule like Michaël and try a few different ones out each day?

Another question is what this group of documents is even worth... on one hand it seems like paying $5 for what could earn potential millions is an incredible investment. On the other hand, when I started searching some of the documents that were listed specifically, every single one of them came up online for free on document-hosting sites like coursehero.com. When it comes down to it, this package isn't worth the energy feeding the server it's surreptitiously hosted on.

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(From the free online scam documents I learned the old-fashioned "black-hat" Search Engine Optimization technique of adding a bunch of unrelated text and tags in a white font on a white background to promote your site in search results. >Hi Mom< Highlighting= invisible ink decoder.)

(Another tip was using public records to find out someone’s mother’s maiden name when prompted as a security question. )