— Work culture has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Before it was obvious that you’re working for “the man.” In today’s hustle culture, you work for yourself, first and foremost. Your employer’s success is your success. You don’t progress? You’re not seeing the opportunities. Still on a shit salary? You’re not working hard enough. Mandy Brown writes:
The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.
I noticed this in previous jobs. People, who primarily define their role as “entrepreneur of the self” and shoehorn their actions under the disguise of “the mission,” start working against other people or teams. They prioritise outcomes that prove advantageous to themselves. And management doesn’t figure it out because they play the same game. And we end up with two groups. One that gets ahead, and another that ships actual work but slowly burns out.