Knowledge Work is an Abstract, Bodiless Void

The modern knowledge worker now swims in a froth of the purely abstract. Like an astronaut cut from the space station, he floats, untethered, gaping at the shrinking earth below him. He’s lost his body.

He thinks he is made of only thought — and the deluge of requests that bubble up from the void in his inbox scatter what sense of self he has like marbles across the floor. He is bodiless, unprotected, fragile.

The knowledge worker has lost sight of the process. Efficiency reigns. He’s a slave to the product — even as he is scarcely its author.

He is besieged by a barrage of electronic missives — creating, as if in a slow-motion video game, an illusory — but somehow real — sense of stress. It’s the stress of an ambiguous email; the awkward, pixelated silences punctuating a Zoom call; or the dreary commute, the feeling of neither coming nor going.

He’s deluded into the belief that the stuff of thought is the only work of value. The body, or still vaster expanses of possibility, the Knowledge Worker must ignore.

His view is only: The Infosphere. That and the cacophonous arena where workers contend with one another in a furious dance of keyboards and screens.

The world of the abstract

When I sit to do “work” — engage in the rigorous and often frustrating exercise of the mind and its tapping fingers — I am analytic, caught in the sticky morass of pure thought. Most of the time, my desk job calls me to wield thoughts as if they were “me” in the ultimate sense. When I submit a piece of “work” via email, I receive a “good job” from the void as if the “job” were me and the “good” were its quality — even though no exchange was made except the abject moving about of information.

Dading! the email software intones, as if I struck a bell with a mallet, although no music exists.

The illusion bred by knowledge work is that the mind is wholly and totally satisfactory. From kindergarten through university, the future Knowledge Worker is told: Slough off this fleshly vessel. You are mindstuff now. You are words and numbers and abstraction.

The cubicle world once satirized by Dilbert and The Office has loosened up in its structure — just enough to appear now less absurd, as dress codes have relaxed and tech CEO’s grace the covers of magazines. The monotonous hum of the worker strangled by his own tie has given way to a certain allure of the avant-garde — a kind of romance of the new and the brashness of startup culture.

Many now work from the convenience of home. But remote work done from the comfort of one’s couch — and even absurd machines like the treadmill desk — does little to settle the problem. It’s still the mind at play in its numbered matrix.

Marx's astute critique of the factory labor system emphasized the worker's alienation from the fruits of his labor. But in the realm of knowledge work, this estrangement takes on a new dimension: Detachment from the body.

Knowledge Work is the work of ghosts. In the words of philosopher Matthew B. Crawford: “What is new is the wedding of futurism to what might be called ‘virtualism’: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.”

We once wielded tools to shape our world, and fire to nourish ourselves. Now we are left with but one weapon, a weapon that turns against us: The madness of the mind.

Dissolving of concepts and the beauty of emptiness

The modern knowledge worker’s gossamer dreams cling lightly to his mind. The unfinished novel tossed in the trash; the smeary, graphite art sketches hidden under the bed; the exotic getaways never taken, cocktails never quite imbibed, the mysterious girl at the bar never quite spoken to.

But still, he luxuriates in the paychecks, sitting comfortably in the backyard of so many summer eves, assured of his place in the world.

In those moments he’s more than thought, more than knowledge. More, even, than the muscled, sinewy ontology of his body.

When he searches deep within himself for the answer, all he finds is an emptiness, a void where his fears and self should be.

In those moments of existential clarity, he feels like he’s touching something raw and true about the nature of the self and consciousness.

Then back to the Zoom meeting: the video chat displays him — his head, anyway — in the corner. Who — or what — lives in that tiny digital mirror? On the other hand, what lives nearer than his nose, closer than close, wider and shallower — and somehow deeper — than the shimmering pond of vision itself?