Work in communicative capitalism is addictive and expands to overflow any capacity.

Evidence

At the top of the tower, there is no liberation from work. There is just more work — the only difference is that you might now enjoy it (life is too exciting for sleep). For these CEOs, work is closer to an addiction than something they are forced to do. In a provisional formulation, we might want to posit a new way of construing class antagonism. There are now two classes: those addicted to work, and those forced to work. But this isn’t quite accurate. Whether we are working for our employers (who pay us) or for Mark Zuckerberg (who doesn’t), most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1703

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch 8’s kept claim that addicts choose addiction, framing CEOs as the addict class. The hydra image also recalls ch 92’s digital communication compulsion. — connects to: Work now colonizes all waking time because workers themselves are the commodity being sold. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1704
• STORYSTEM: The two-class formulation — the addicted vs the forced — could seed speculative fiction where workers literally breed inescapable task-fountains.