Work and amusement have converged in structure while growing more strictly separated

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Google, meanwhile, redefined corporate culture with its T-shirt-clad workforce, free meals, and whimsical campuses. “Google is not a conventional company,” founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote. “We do not intend to become one.” They chose Eric Schmidt as their first grown-up CEO because he was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man. Zuckerberg borrowed heavily from Google’s unofficial playbook for how to run Facebook, commissioning artist David Choe to spruce up its office walls with a graffiti-inspired mural. (The stock Choe took as payment later ballooned to $200 million.) This vision of work as fun was so compelling that dying companies hired Google executives to spearhead revivals. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 277 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern leisure organizes activity so rigidly that its schema outweighs its content; Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107; Mass culture occupies workers’ leisure with content stamped by the labor process they endure (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The hobby concept shows free time is reified like labour itself #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 274
• Production-process forms increasingly colonize private leisure time #corroborates (0.82)
• Tech companies exported their culture of work-as-fun to outside firms #exemplifies (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 277