Call center rage is impotent because it lacks a legitimate human object

Evidence

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 132

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the impotent-anger dynamics of the earlier isolation-booth and urban-strangers material — anger with no legitimate object because there is no responsible agent. — connects to: Call center rage is directed at a fellow victim with no effect — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 132; Anger at obstructed reality deflects onto those who merely voice it — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 285
• CANDY: Framing call-center frustration as ‘as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself’ is a quotable line.

Related

• Call center rage is directed at a fellow victim with no effect (similarity 0.95)
• Call centers give consumers their most direct experience of capital’s centerlessness (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Call center rage is directed at a fellow victim with no effect #expands (0.92) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 132
• Anger at obstructed reality deflects onto those who merely voice it #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 285