Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, ch. 7: Shovel Knight
“The Shovel Knight Kickstarter was now live, asking fans for $75,000 to make their dream game, although unlike Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity, this campaign didn’t start skyrocketing right away. Few people were even paying attention” (170)
“Velasco and crew had a specific vision for Shovel Knight as a brand, one that they wouldn’t want to trust with a big publisher that was looking for profit above all else. The only real option was crowdfunding, not just to earn money for their game, but to start building a base of loyal fans” (175)
‘They wanted Shovel Knight sweatshirts. Shovel Knight plushies. Shovel Knight magazines. ‘I wanted to make an eighties brand that created a character, where the name of the game was the name of the character,’ said Velasco’ (175)
“with two weeks left on the Kickstarter campaign, they reached their goal of $75,000” (179)
“At PAX, David D’Angelo talked to other developers who had successfully used Kickstarter and got two major pieces of advice. The first was to update their Kickstarter every single day, so backers could actively participate and spread the word about Shovel Knight rather than simply waiting around for the game. Right after PAX, Yacht Club started running daily Kickstarter updates with art contests, character reveals, and stretch goals” (179-180)
“The second piece of advice was that Yacht Club should send the Shovel Knight demo to popular YouTubers and Twitch streamers” (180)
“When the Kickstarter ended on April 13, 2013, Shovel Knight had raised $311,502, which was more than four times their campaign goal but wasn’t all that much money for a team of five people in Los Angeles. At the standard burn rate of $10,000 per person per month … it would last them six months—maybe longer if they all took less money” (180)
“They also had to learn how to start a business, which was a time-consuming process involving signing up for health insurance, sorting out taxes, and finding a copyright lawyer who could help them protect the Shovel Knight IP. Eventually they decided to designate Tuesday as ‘business day’ and spend the rest of the week making Shovel Knight” (181)
“the Yacht Club crew gave up on all semblance of work-life balance, knowing that if they didn’t crunch on Shovel Knight, they’d run out of money” (181)
Commentator’s Note: Compare to Flynn’s comments on crunch in the Dragon Age chapter. Crunch ‘works,’ but what does it work for? Who does it work for? What is the cost, and who is deciding whether that cost is spent?
“They followed a simple, yet radical rule: If anyone said no to something, they all had to stop doing it. Nothing would happen until the entire team agreed on a singular way to proceed. It was the democratization of video game design … chaotic multilateralism” (182)
Velasco: “People would ask me how things were going and I was like, ‘Everything is getting worse except for Shovel Knight. That’s getting better’” (185)
“On June 26, 2014, after nearly four months without salaries, Yacht Club Games released Shovel Knight” (186)
“In the first week, they’d sold 75,000 copies. By the first month, they were up to 180,000, exponentially higher than any game they’d developed at WayForward” (187)
“Two and a half years later, Yacht Club Games still had Kickstarter promises to keep” (188)
“After shipping the Plague Knight campaign in September 2015, they had two more boss campaigns to release: Specter Knight and King Knight” (189)
“There’s no way to know whether Yacht Club’s success would have been possible without a barrage of hundred-hour workweeks, but it was tremendous. By 2016, they’d sold well over a million copies of the game. They’d ported Shovel Knight to every gaming console possible, put out a physical version in retail stores (a rarity for indie developers), and even worked with Nintendo to build a collectible Amiibo toy based on their intrepid shovel wielder” (190)
“Remarkably, Shovel Knight was the first Amiibo from a third-party developer. All of Nintendo’s previous Amiibo toys had been based on the company’s own franchises. To make the toy happen, David D’Angelo told me he had simply bothered Nintendo representatives every month until they said yes” (190)
“these boss knight campaigns weren’t making them any money. They were investing cash—upward of $2 million, they estimated—into a bunch of campaigns that they were selling for a whopping zero dollars” (190)
“The optimistic view was that they were building a game and committing to updating it for the long haul, like Blizzard had done for Diablo III. ‘This is how you create a hit now: you make something and add to it,’ said D’Angelo. ‘And it’s not about the day-one sales, it’s about getting more and more people on board and invested in it’” (191)
“They talked a lot about emulating Nintendo. ‘I would love to have three tentpole brands that are huge,’ said Velasco. ‘And then just iterate on them.’ Shovel Knight would be their Mario, but that wasn’t enough. Velasco wanted them to make another franchise that was as iconic as The Legend of Zelda. And a third that was as beloved as Metroid” (191)
PsychOdyssey, eps. 19-21
Episode 19: I Want More of That
A wave of new hires changes the team dynamics at Double Fine and generates fresh ideas for Psychonauts 2. —Episode Description
“We put James far out of his depth in those levels, as a person who never really built levels before. I don’t think I appreciated how hard that was going to be. I mean, I think even people who have made tons of levels before and are veteran game designers, or level designers, or level artists… Like, Psychonauts brain levels are incredibly hard. And making the first one in that position, I think, was 100% not a fair mission to send him on” —Zak McClendon
“this was his first time designing these kind of levels. He was our junior level designer. And put into a weird position of doing a process we haven’t done before, project leader we haven’t had before, and really put on the spot, because some of the first levels we ever reviewed were his. And you have a lot of people in the room … I think he’s actually been pretty resilient for someone who was put under that kind of pressure” —Tim Schafer
“I feel like maybe we didn’t effectively postmortem the first failure. Because we have the same water thing that we had last time that really tripped us up. And I still don’t know what to do with it” —James Marion
“Yeah, there is a lot more women” —Emily Johnstone
“Psychonauts hired a lot of people. And so, there is a whole new generation of people that are new to the company. And they are so enthusiastic” —Schafer
“Emily in particular on that level, she’ll do a ton of explorations, and then, you know when you know. It just hits. Everybody was like: ‘Yep, that’s it!’” —Lisette Titre-Montgomery
“He [Jeremy Natividad] is so chill right now. He got out of that Helmut meeting, that one time we were, like: ‘This is what we are going to do. This is the structure.’ And everyone’s like: ‘Yeah, cool.’ And he was so amazed! He was like: ‘It went… well.’ ‘What’s going on?!’” —Johnstone
“Have you guys talked to Tazio yet? About him being the only VFX artist for a while” —Jeremy Natividad
“I wish that there was a little more decisions. Like, hard decisions … ‘I’ll make the decision! It’s a fucking door!’ You know, so there is a lot of that kind of nebulous stuff going around” —Gigi Ruggiero
“Being a new person at the studio, they also helped me understand the process that we go through. Which I understand is kind of unique per brain. Similar to how each brain is unique, because they each have unique needs. And I guess the ideas and talents that are on each brain team, each level team, shape that brain” —Joshua Herbert
Episode 20: Brainstormed Out
Asif is given the task of adapting his Amnesia Fortnight project into a full-fledged Psychonauts level. —Episode Description
“when it was suggested, like: ‘Let’s bring that in as a level and let Asif make it.’ I was like: ‘That makes so much sense.’ It’s a great setup for the ideas … We’ll do these interviews, or he’ll watch a team meeting, and he’ll be sitting in the back there, taking notes, and then I’ll get this email after the meeting saying: ‘Here is some ideas’” —Schafer
“I think it’s just a natural thing that happens. The more and more you get deep into covering something and learning more about it, and see how other people create stuff in that medium, makes you just want to do it more and more” —Asif Siddiky
“We are going to try and let everything happen, but we were talking about how Compton needed to be a smaller level” —Andy Alamano
“There is pressure to do this level a lot faster than the others … They want the level to be small, because there is a lot of large levels, and we can’t go crazytown because… people will die. People will die” —Johnstone
“The idea was that we would save a bunch of concept time by already having this idea and just plopping it straight into the game. But the problem is that there are all these other considerations that we have for things about the character that have already been decided. And then, there is also a power that’s kind of already figured out that we need to introduce in this level, and all of these things don’t necessarily fit in. They don’t slot in perfectly with The Gods Must Be Hungry” —Siddiky
“In the current state the powers are always evolving, and they get retooled and sometimes completely changed based on what the needs of a level are … In this case, in it’s current form, the power that we are supposed to be basing this level around, or at least introducing to Raz in this level, is completely antithetical to the gameplay of Gods Must Be Hungry. You need a specific outcome, and this just generates a bunch of random outcomes right now” —Siddiky
Episode 21 Much More Drastic Things
With time and money running out, Zak struggles to find the path forward. —Episode Description
“Alpha is where everything is represented in the game. Whatever is not in the game by Alpha theoretically is stuff that we are not going to do in Psychonauts 2. So, in some sense, it’s between now and December we have to finish the game” —Michael Tucker
“It’s a point in the game where you really realize if the ideas of the design team and the level teams are actually feasible” —Titre-Montgomery
“We kind of get punted the level and we get three weeks to make it, like, what it’s actually supposed to be. And that seems a little unfair, you know?” —Will Koehler
“I think the thing that should be realized though is that we are in this situation because their designs have taken so long to begin with … They’ve essentially had a year and a half to work on their particular levels. And we got five months to get it to Alpha” —Geoff Soulis
“Not much more to say about this than usual. I feel like, it’s always kind of right there [points to burndown chart], when we want to be right there. And I go: ‘Yeah, we should log our stuff.’ And we go: ‘Yeah, that’d be a good idea.’ And then, you know…” —Alamano
Commentator’s Note: Ah yes, the ur-plee of despair of all producers.
“There is only one week left. It’s five days. And this is one of five sprints to get to Alpha. We have to be hitting plus 80% of work complete on these things. Ideally, like, 90%, honestly. So, you know… 61% of the time elapsed, and only 33% of the work getting done… We will have to start simply getting rid of things at some point” —Alamano
“The final say thing is always a tricky business. Because at the end of the day I have final say. I’m the Project Lead. Everything I want to put my foot down and be a jerk about it, I can do it. And that’s just how it is. The more often I do that, and the more often I do it about small things, the worse everything gets” —McClendon
“Maligula’s level. Like, the final, climax of our game, that’s not in the game right now. So, we gotta make that whole thing. And none of the bosses exist” —Tucker
“I’m trying to make sure that I’m checking in with everyone, and seeing what’s causing their frustrations. At the end of the day, if people are angry, it’s because a process is broken. I think everyone is feeling the pressure to deliver on time” —Titre-Montgomery
“The rift between the designers and the artists that we had at the beginning of the project is starting to come back. And it’s not good for morale”—Kristen Russell
“I’m actively watching what’s going on with the bosses, and I’m getting extremely nervous” —Titre-Montgomery
“Everyone feels like they are sort of toiling away at something that they don’t have the opportunity to really make good. And I think that’s the core of a lot of the bummer going on right now” —McClendon
“I don’t know how much other people have talked about it before on the camera, or how candid … I think some of the new people who have come here have come from studios with different mentalities. And I think it is a very linear or clear delineation of roles on a project, and things happening in a certain order with certain disciplines being absolutely first. And any time it went out of order, there became conflict … I don’t think it’s really the Double Fine way. And certainly not a thing that most people here are used, and I think, additionally, a thing that a lot of people who have ended up here from other places came here to get away from” —Tucker
“At Gearbox things were certainly more smooth, because everybody knew their role. However, I left there for a reason. Programmers were tools for the designers … We sat on different floors, we got Jira tickets from design, we did that work. Sometimes it made no sense to us, because we had no idea what the hell we were making. That’s how they wanted it. And it works well for them. That’s how they do. It’s not where I wanted to be”—Amy Price
“What makes it really bad is I give feedback, and he gets defensive, and then he starts arguing against something I hadn’t said. And then he’ll go off on this really long argument about how I’m wrong” —Anna Becker
“These are the calls you have to make. It’s like: ‘Okay, we need a trailer.’ We all agree that this is important, we all agree it’s worth our time. So, we did it. But it does come at a cost. We lost at least four weeks of real time. Maybe more. Of actual work that could have been put into the game” —Alamano
“Big week last week. A lot of crazy stuff happened in the news. If some of you were watching, our friends at Starbreeze had an exciting, exciting… You never want actual news about you, or your publisher at all. But that was, uh… exciting. From what we know, someone got arrested at Starbreeze headquarters. A CFO-type person got arrested. We think for selling their stock too close to an event that changed their stock price? Which is not deemed proper, and so we think the person arrested is no one that we know. But no one knows where Bo [Andersson, CEO] is right now. So, that’s exciting!” —Schafer
“That focus on action paths is just so against everything that Psychonauts is. That’s not what Psychonauts is about. The reason people play Psychonauts is because it’s fundamentally and narratively grounded in an idea, and, like, a very specific and particular world that people really love. And I think that’s way better!” —Tazio Coolidge
“Velocity is a strange word. And our velocity up to this latest milestone has not been what I would hope it would be. So, we are going to assess: ‘All right, this is where we came up short.’ Because we’ve come up short on this milestone. I mean, if we were in a position where we had to submit this for payment, we would not get paid” —Alamano
“Now we are looking at the point of, like: ‘All right, if we add all this stuff that we didn’t get done on top of the stuff we knew we had to do, where does that put us?’ And it’s like: ‘Oh… okay. What are we going to do? How are we going to address this fact?’” —Alamano
“There is a big Eurogamer article about Starbreeze, which was very enlightening. The article is just about all the excesses and overspending of Starbreeze over the years, which even though we knew about some of it, it was still a really entertaining read” —Schafer
“As of right now, we are still being paid by Starbreeze, but who knows what it’s going to look like in two-three months. There is a possibility that they do fold and shutdown, and we have to find a new publishing partner” —Greg Rice
“I’m at a point right now where I’m second guessing a lot of my communication. Because I’ve done a lot of communication where it’s like: ‘Everyone hated that.’ And I’m like: ‘Oh, okay, I thought that was pretty good’” —McClendon
“[Of the Loboto level] A lot of people will ask: ‘What does this mean for our schedule?’ And there are some questions that only I can answer about the schedule. Because it gets into the how much money does the project have, you know? And so, I think, it seems weird to not be able to really answer that question fully. Because we currently don’t have the money for that extra time. And that’s really a weird position to be in” —Schafer
“There is finger pointing happening and stuff. And it actually surprised me, because of the amount of negativity and low morale around Alpha felt really like: ‘Oh, okay, I see, not every studio is perfect.’ Or: ‘No studio is safe from this experience’” —Herbert
“We are certainly getting to the point of the project in which, if we have stand-offs or people just not working well together, things are going to get tougher. And I don’t want it to go that way” —Kee Chi
“I think a lot of people are hoping that Tim steps in, saves the day” —Becker
“We run into the reality of game development that, like, shit is hard, you know. And I don’t think we’ve been well enough prepared for actually implementing the version of the game that we want to implement. And that’s also the thing. It’s because we start from the wrong end, right? And this was the exact conversation that Anna was having. And the reason that she left. You are making it much harder for yourself essentially, because you are fighting fundamentally what’s good about the type of games that the studio produces, right? You are fighting the nature of the studio and you are making it something completely different” —Coolidge
On screen text: 4:30, Friday. Time invites the team to an impromptu meeting. Tim informs the team that as of this afternoon Zak McClendon is no longer an employee of Double Fine Productions.
Media and Management, ch. 2
‘Just-in-Time Labor’: Time-Based Management in the Age of On-Demand Manufacturing
Author: Rutvica Andrijasevic
“Whoever can offer goods in the shortest time wins. —Arthur Chen, ASUS Czechia” (31)
“a new temporal order, established through algorithmic control and enforced by customers’ expectations of timely service delivery, is impelling workers to increase their labor productivity while, at the same time, worsening their working conditions” (32)
“Studies of time management have made a pivotal contribution to our understanding of how digital technology generates new temporalities that configure people’s perception of time and engender work arrangements that exclude the workforce from labor and social protection” (32)
“I deploy the term ‘just-in-time labor’ (JITL) in order to illustrate the interdependency between media and management for time-based management of labor” (32)
“The general trend in electronics manufacturing is time-based competition driven by a shortening of product life cycle and price erosion” (32-33)
“This in turn has resulted in the adoption of so-called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, pioneered in the auto industry and typified by flexible and lean production” (33)
“Time-based competition is organized, I suggest, via a diverse set of mediations such as labor intermediaries, dormitories, and social-media platforms (e.g., Viber and Facebook) that, while apparently not related, all join up in actualizing a very specific social order and relations of production” (33)
“A close analysis of how time is mediated, either via institutional, discursive, or social processes, exposes the ways in which the JITL model engenders novel forms of work practices that further the vulnerability and exploitation of workers” (33)
“sociologists and media scholars showed that platforms operationalize a very specific idea of time, that of ‘real-time,’ embedded in the economic and utilitarian philosophy of time” (33)
“I draw on feminist theories in order to indicate how time is always lived and how it operates as a form of social difference” (34)
“For feminist scholars, globally organized systems of production not only perpetuate structural inequalities at the level of time but also rely, for their very existence, on the exploitation and performance of non-economic difference” (34)
“JIT systems are apt for electronics manufacturing in that electronics supply chains, while globally dispersed, are characterized by a modular governance structure that is managed across long distances through “codification” (36)
“A key feature of the electronics industry is the vertical disintegration between product innovation and manufacturing. Lead firms—such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony—focus on product development and marketing, while contract manufacturing companies—such as Foxconn—specialize in the assembly of hardware” (36)
“In other words, firms expand internationally in order to compress space and time so as to be closer to their end-consumer markets and be able to meet, in the shortest time possible, the production needs of their clients” (37)
“Temporary workers fulfill industries’ need for an ‘on-demand’ workforce that can be ‘assembled’ on short notice when orders are high” (38)
“Conversely, when orders are low, workers can be ‘let go’ on equally short notice. Workers are themselves treated according to the logic of assembly familiar to us from JIT manufacture” (38)
“businesses like Uber and Handy should not be seen as tech companies but rather as platform labor intermediaries and as new players in the dynamic temporary staffing industry” (39)
“In a global production network, the management of objects (commodities), bodies (labor), and information cannot be separated” (39)
“Time-mediated management practices that aim at achieving the synchronization of information, labor, machinery, and materials, operationalize a very specific idea of time. This idea of time is best known as ‘real-time’” (39)
“cannot be measured according to the parameters of the linear, sequential clock time, as the speed of communication is no longer assessed by the time taken to cover geographical distance” (40)
“ICTs [information and communication technologies] time as instantaneous, simultaneous, and globally networked rather than durational, sequential, and globally zoned. The ICTs and digital media, by permitting a vast increase in speed and volume of data and money, function as ‘conduits’ (Purser 2002) or as mediums permitting an instantaneous mode of production, consumption, and finance” (40)
“Digital technologies globally interlink production, consumption, communication, and finance, thus underpinning the management of complex and technologically innovative production chains” (40)
“Protocols, conceived by Galloway (2001) in terms of controlling mechanisms for decentralized networks, have long played the role of interface and link, suggesting that the managerial thinking behind current digital platforms existed long before the technology of digital platforms as we know it” (40)
“Software systems encode managerial roles in that they diminish the need for physical control of processes and workers, as control is now embedded in the system itself via the code” (40)
“work design and work processes are programmed so that only certain options are available to the workers” (40)
“the role of the software code is key to the temporal integration of work and for governing globally dispersed labor” (40)
“In our societies where time is calculated in relation to money, reducing and/or eliminating time lags, as JIT manufacturing attempts to do, is seen as an indicator of progress” (41)
“Real-time is operationalized by management practices that attempt to reshape the labor process by compressing time and space, transposing internet time to the world of laboring bodies and assembly lines” (41)
“Transnational labor contracting, in particular, makes use of “time arbitrage” in order to extend the work time across borders to achieve a twenty-four-hour business cycle, hence exploiting ‘time discrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit’ (Nadeem 2009, 21)” (41)
“Twenty-four/seven society is characterized by what Winifred Poster (2007) has called ‘reversed temporalities of work.’ Round-the-clock office hours, as in the case of the U.S. companies that outsource a variety of functions to India (e.g., technical support, processing insurance claims, data entry), has meant that Indian workers in call centers need to work permanent night shifts or that software programmers stay late into the evening for conference calls with New York (Nadeem 2009)” (41)
“In order for workers in the United States and India to work effectively in the same time zone, the 24/7 global economy has brought about the collapse of the work–life boundary for the Indian workforce. Within this temporal order, certain populations are required to ‘recalibrate’ (Sharma 2017b, 133) their lives so as to fit with the temporal demands of capital’s labor arrangements” (42)
“digitalized networks that enable the expansion of tech corporations are not just communication networks but rather, by fusing information with money, they are the very foundation of contemporary financial systems” (42)
“real-time establishes and mediates a temporal order that bolsters vastly unequal power relations” (42)
“rooted within objective, quantitative, and rational narratives of time, and dependent on technological mediations themselves conditioned by managerial innovation and system design, real-time temporal order obscures management’s reliance on the differently classed and racialized bodies as well as on the gendered spatial division of productive, unproductive, and reproductive time” (43)
“By turning time into a disembodied, quantifiable commodity, the notion of real-time erases labor from both production process and consumption” (43-44)
“Control over time is achieved via an increase in speed that is constantly communicated via the digital, real-time technology. To increase efficiency, this mediation reduces unproductive time while also intensifying the labor process” (44)
“In JIT production, operations are broken down into micromovements to eliminate unproductive time and allow for internal movement of the workforce” (44)
“Thanks to the barcode system, computers make it possible to record the pace of production step by step and identify which workstation and which worker has caused a fault” (45)
“This is why, in production, Foxconn deploys young men and women, aged between twenty and thirty-five, who are able to learn tasks quickly and sustain the speed of production and the variation of tasks for longer” (45)
“Intensification of the labor process on the other hand is mediated by a specific manufacturing technique that emerged out of Toyotist manufacturing known as ‘Kaizen’” (45)
“More generally described as ‘continuous improvement,’ with workers modifying and improving the production process, the Kaizen system, as a Slovak worker explained, colonizes the entirety of working time as it requires workers not only to keep up with the flow but also to continually try to improve it” (45)
Quote: “In Foxconn there is this system they call Kaizen, that means that you have to do better and better each day. Kaizen system is everywhere in the factory” (45)
“in consumption-driven production where orders are cyclical, manufacturers perceive workers as unproductive labor. This view of the workforce, as Louis Hyman (2018) stressed, is best understood in terms of the managerial paradigm shift since the 1970s from considering a stable composition of employees as a resource to seeing them as a cost or waste that can and should be eliminated” (45)
“managers use time as the workplace currency to deliberately construct debt relations. When workers are unable to work because of deficiencies in supply-chain management or infrastructural problems, they still receive their wage. However, they then “owe” the hours paid but not yet worked to their employer. Over time, the workers’ time debt becomes so large that, in addition to working their normal hours, they are unable to work back the hours they owe to the employer” (46)
“What we can observe here is the logic of credit and advance consumption applied to labor time. In both cases, time-debt functions as a reserve of time that managers manipulate in order to temporarily bond workers to the firm so as to extract maximum value through the labor process and meet the fluctuating market demand” (46)
“By positioning themselves between firms and workers, agencies’ mediation role extends to include advertising, selection, and recruitment of workers in the country of departure; cross-border transportation, direct management of production (including control of workers inside the factory), and management of accommodation in the country of arrival; and finally the return of workers to their country of departure during periods of low production” (48)
“the classification of workers as services erases labor once again. In addition to the notion of the real-time expunging of labor from production and consumption, the classification of workers as services removes cross-border labor from protections that the law ordinarily bestows” (50)
“the ‘workforce-as-a-service’ model” (56)
“the legal framework dematerializes labor, rendering it mobile, flexible, and capable of being deployed just-in-time” (50)
“we see a return of the real-time model of mediation that effectively removes workers from their regulatory regimes in order to make them more mobile and available” (50)
“these limits to regulatory protection and collective representation result for posted workers in substantial labor violations, such as lack of employment security, payment below the host country’s minimum wage, above-maximum working times, bogus deductions for social insurance, and nonpayment of holiday pay and overtime” (50)
“Given fluctuating production requirements, the dormitories enabled the agencies and Foxconn to stand workers down for several days without risking a shortage of workers” (52)
“In addition to the pressed production period and intervals, I suggest that waiting is another key temporal dimension in the JIT manufacturing regime” (52)
“In contrast, during periods of high production, dormitories allowed the agencies to extend the workday” (52)
“With no children permitted, dormitories eliminate any disruption caused by schooling or parenting needs, turning all activity toward meeting the production needs of the firm” (53)
“Dormitories allow the firm to facilitate just-in-time, high-speed production by compressing the workplace and living space, lengthening or shortening the working day, and extending management’s control over labor outside the workplace” (53)
“Such control is enhanced through the use of information asymmetry. Based on existing retail patterns, Foxconn knows well in advance when the peak production periods are to take place, but agency workers are kept in the dark about the existing production dynamics” (53)
“Dormitories thus operate as media that temporarily capture and attach transient and mobile workers to the firm” (54)
“The struggle over working conditions is, I would suggest, increasingly a struggle over time” (54)
“Posted workers, like gig workers, have no direct employment relationship, experience dispersion of responsibility in terms of who might be ultimately responsible for their circumstances, and are located outside trade union representation” (56)
“Workers’ integration into a real-time global economy thus brings about what Aneesh (2009, 364) has called ‘a temporal unhinging of family life’” (58)
“Real-time operations are modeled on the lives of very specific subjects. These are ‘brogrammers,’ better known as Silicon Valley software developers who are typically young, white, and male and who cherish the myth of heroic individualism” (58)
“These are also subjects that are unencumbered by the responsibilities of care (Gregg 2018) and who perceive the concept of work–life balance or private time as antiquated (Wajcman 2019b)” (58)
“The widespread tendency in studies on platform workers to study temporalities apart from gender division of labor risks overlooking how temporal and spatial reconfigurations of labor, characteristic both of supply-chain and platform economy, are anchored once again in gendered power relations and naturalized notions of reproductive labor” (58)