This document discusses how productivity and digital lifestyles are framed as fun activities. It notes that historically, fun was seen as a temporary release from domination that reinforced the status quo. However, now work is presented as play through concepts like lifehacking and productivity being fun. The document questions whether this instrumentalization of pleasure through framing work as fun truly allows enjoyment or further entrenches social control.

1. 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

2. Ceci nʼest pas un papier.

3. (I know thatʼs not French.)

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

10. Play = Fun
Work = Play
Work = Fun

12. Fun
A Very Brief History

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

15. [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.

16. The End of Fun?

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

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