Production-process forms increasingly colonize private leisure time

Evidence

If we suppose with Marx that in bourgeois society labour power has become a commodity in which labour is consequently reified, then the expression ‘hobby’ amounts to a paradox: that human condition which sees itself as the opposite of reification, the oasis of unmediated life within a completely mediated total system, has itself been reified just like the rigid distinction between labour and free time. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 274 (#expands, via linked claim)

Between the reveille that opens it and the lights extinguished to mark its end, ‘time’ is written out upon the exterior surface of the day. The device of the timetable separates out the dimension of time to form a framework, in which the activities of studying, eating, and exercising are to be contained. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 259 (#expands, via linked claim)

Influencers are more than people we see and interact with on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Influencers are an integral category for the reproduction of the social relation that is capitalism. When an influencer labors to become interesting, relatable, or worthy of attention, the internet becomes a factory to produce the self as commodity. This book examines this articulation of capital and selfhood. It employs influencer culture as an entry point into a set of relations that far exceed social media. In attending to the videos and images of influencers, it draws out numerous obscured infrastructures of contemporary capital, infrastructures that relate to a deeply questionable reinvention of subjectivity and social existence. In these pages, we will sketch the emergence of an economic context in which “successful” individuals achieve wealth, fame, and luxury by imagining themselves and acting not as individuals but as if their existence is equivalent to that of a vertically integrated corporation, a context in which rights and abilities are denied human citizens and transferred to corporate entities—a historical moment we term the Corpocene. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107; Work and amusement have converged in structure while growing more strictly separated; The hobby concept shows free time is reified like labour itself — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 274 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The hobby concept shows free time is reified like labour itself #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 274
• Timetables impose abstract time onto bodily activity as an external frame #expands (0.78) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 259
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #exemplifies (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18