Then And Now
Enterprises are no longer linked to a territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers, living together in a factory day after day, but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the same place everyday, but remain alone in their networked cubicles, where they answer to the requisites of ever-changing employers.
The capitalist (employer) hires a fragment of available time, a fractal, compatible with the protocols of interfunctionality, and recombinable with other fragments of time.Industrial workers experienced solidarity because they met each other everyday and were members of the same living community who share the same interests, while the internet worker is alone and unable to create solidarity because everybody is obliged to compete in the labor market and in the daily fight for a precarious salary. Loneliness and lack of human solidarity not only characterize the situation of the worker, but also of the entrepreneur.
….the story of the social condition of labor; the impossibility of friendship in the present condition of the virtual abstraction of sociality, and the impossibility of building solidarity in a society that turns life into an abstract container of competing fragments of time.
—Franco “Bifo” Berardi. excerpt, The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance
These photos were taken Saturday afternoon along Kraklauer Creek after an area-wide late night downpour. The water flow is swollen above its banks. Creekside vegetation is lush, seductive. Its not easy to notice the sharp rocks that are scarcely seen beneath 
the brown torrent.
Not unlike the changes that have occurred with our working lives in the last few years. The economy hums along for some. The well-to-do have never fared better. TV advertising is crowded with pitches for luxury car brands. 
Unemployment stands at 3.9%, quite low. Yet the worker, those who produce, make the value that is directed into the strong-box of those who finance the enterprise, endures flat wages, and rapidly rising health care costs. By all accounts stagnation of wages and precarious job security is 
here to stay.
One must drill down, look beneath the surface.
I thought of the lines in a T. S. Eliot poem, The Dry Salvages….
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
