Productivity Is Fun:
Instrumentalized Pleasure and
Digital Lifestyles
Martin Roberts
The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on
Digital Labor
Eugene Lang College
The New School
New York
13 November 2009

Ceci nʼest pas un papier.

(I know thatʼs not French.)

DIGITAL LIFESTYLES
* Lifehacking
* Lifecasting
* Uncluttering
* Micronapping
* Productivity
* Fun

Play = Fun
Work = Play
Work = Fun

Fun
A Very Brief History

Ric Burns, Coney Island (PBS Home Video, 1991)

[For Adorno,] “fun” is not even pleasure but the
simulacrum of pleasure, a temporary release which
enables the enjoying subject to forget the forces of
domination and unfreedom to which he or she is
actually in thrall. [. . .] Moreover, for Adorno “fun” is
in many cases not even the specious satisfaction of
simuacra or an anticipation which provides a
sparkling facade for political coercion; it is the
coercion itself, a sadistic cultural mandate to enjoy.
Fun in this case is a kind of commodity as such, the
token of a pseudo-solidarity which is normative a
priori. [. . . ] “Fun” is here no more and no less than Erica Weitzman, “No Fun:
the agreement that one if “having fun,” a tautological Aporias of Pleasure in
Adornoʼs Aesthetic Theory,”
performance of pleasurability that only serves to The German Quarterly, 81.2
reinforce the status quo (186). (2008): 186.

The End of Fun?

Sex Pistols, Live at Winterland, San Francisco, 14 January 1978

May the Fun be with you.
Martin Roberts
robertsm@newschool.edu