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By Root 297 0

that if the abstracts produced by Information Access Company were no good, then “the market” would punish it; the company should have been beaten out by one with a higher regard for quality. The company has been bought and sold several times since I worked there, but appears to still be in business. Maybe things are better there now, and quality has improved. I honestly don’t know. In any case, the time scale on which the market administers its omniscient justice may be quite a bit longer than crucial episodes in the working life of a mortal human being. Being an early entrant into the market for electronically distributed abstracts, IAC enjoyed a temporary quasi-monopoly. I suppose it was fairly free to set standards as it pleased, and may have calibrated the production quota, and corresponding quality, to some threshold of “good enough,” beneath which the user walks away in disgust.8 Recurring purchases, after all, may continue even when the alignment of interests between producer and consumer is only partial, or even accompanied by a felt antagonism. Frequently we come to hate things that we nonetheless continue to depend on (like Windows). Further, a product made under conditions of harried intellectual carelessness, such as InfoTrac circa 1992, may generate its own demand by corrupting our standards in the same direction, and our initial harsh judgment of it will come to seem reactionary. The very existence of the product makes the lower standards suddenly seem respectable or inevitable.

In writing abstracts of academic journal articles, I thought I would learn a lot. Quite apart from the pay, the job seemed to promise an intrinsic good to me as a worker: satisfying my desire to know. This satisfaction is in perfect harmony with the good of the user of InfoTrac, who also desires to know, and the good of the author of an article, who wants to be understood. The standard internal to the job, properly conceived, was the very one that presumably animated both parties I served: intellectual excellence. But this good was nowhere accommodated by the metric to which I answered, which was purely quantitative. The metric was conceived by another party to the labor process, a middleman hovering about with a purpose of his own that had no inherent tie to the one shared by the principals. This purpose, of course, was that of realizing a profit from my labor.

As I have said elsewhere in this book, work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest. That’s why you get paid. But, again, if I had been serving the user of the database directly, his interest in high-quality abstracts would have aligned with my own interest in experiencing the pleasures of comprehension. It may or may not be the case that selling my labor directly to the user would have given him a high-quality product at an attractive price and have provided me a comfortable livelihood; one would have to calculate whether such a transaction makes sense or not. And let it not be forgotten that my work would need to be marketed and distributed, as IAC did, and its technical bugs worked out, and this would contribute to the cost. Let it further be conceded that I never would have undertaken to launch such a product as InfoTrac on my own, and that the entrepreneurs who did so took risks. I have no beef with them. They made something, then sold it to others (the media conglomerate Ziff) who seem to be in the business of owning things. What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to maximize a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, must drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus but which is a central and concrete concern for