Workers accept precarity as natural because dismissal feels synchronous and arbitrary

Evidence

But if yuppies can find some satisfaction in sheer know-how, the staff and maintenance personnel of the postmodern may not be so easy to please. For them, then, a certain synchronic blackmail is available which is historically and socially unique only in the way it is locked into time perception and simultaneously repressed (as though it was the most natural thing in the world). It’s democratic too, and the entire upper level of management may have vanished without a trace the day before the plant itself shuts down. It is as though you were part of a computer game whose constellations are subject to change without notice and include you among their optional tokens: even good behavior may not be sufficient grounds nowadays for retaining a position or keeping a job. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 756

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s concern with periodizing postmodernism — this is the lived experience of late-capitalist labor that grounds the culture. — connects to: Workers internalize capitalist values and accept precarity as deserved — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 63
• SEED: The computer-game metaphor for employment precarity could anchor an essay on how gamified labor normalizes arbitrary dismissal.