Capitalism is getting very much more dystopian very quickly
It’s a matter of time before companies start their own Pod-communities and ‘strongly encourage’ workers to live there and set up rules like no alcohol and no defamation of the company in the Pods.
As nightmarish as this is (and it is), this is only new for documented white people. From seasonal archiculture workers to construction workers to sweatshops, ‘sleep where you work and live your whole life controlled by your boss and coworkers pressured to spy on you’, has been very much a thing for a looooooooong time.
This is one of many things capitalism has always done to workers and now they’re going “hhmmmm.. if I can do this to some workers, why not all of them? if I present it as a hip new way of urban living people for the ‘freelancers’ that I exploit, I might even be able to do it without the armed guards that run my sweatshops and plantations.”
I don’t really get the issue with the “sex is banned” part tho
I don’t want to hyperfocus on that part because ‘live without privacy, convert your bed into a desk by day and just work work work’ is distopian enough as it is and I don’t really want to distract from a conversation about the new fuedalism to just talk about sex.
But can you not understand how that monotomous soulless life defined by work becomes even more soulless when you are not permitted to engage in (what is for most allosexuals) one of the most intimate moments of recreational joy and interpersonal connection? & how much it says about our lack of power when we live in places that control our sexual and reproductive lives?
well yeah, but it’s communal living. I mean you’re spot on with the rest but idk, a ban on sex when you share your living quarters with like two dozen other people? it doesn’t seem that deep tbh.
You know, I’ve spend time in socialist and anarchist self-organized communal living spaces where lots of people shared bedrooms because they liked it and all these spaces had a place for sex. They all acknowledged that that was a thing many humans loved and valued and so they organized to make that good thing possible. Some had a spare room with a lock on the inside that couples could use, others had dorms where sex was okay and dorms where it was not so people could choose where to sleep. It is not difficult to have communal living for those that like sharing bedrooms and also organize a place for sex.
This, however, is not communal living. This is crammed, dehumanized corporate living. This is squeezing as many people as possible into a space defined by work. The inhabitants own nothing in this space and have no control over their environment, they can’t even paint the walls let along organize the space to meet their needs. In such a space, sex is made impossible on purpose:
“We built the pods facing each other so the community polices itself”
The people that made this could have organized privacy and opportunities for sex. They deliberately did not do this, they dilerabetely designed the space for minimum privacy. The purposeful banning of sex from this space is just one part, but one very obvious part, of the way these spaces are not build for humans, they are build for employees whose whole identity should be limited to their productivity.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, mining communities and factory towns encouraged workers to join their ranks by offering company housing and company stores, where workers and their families wouldn’t have to worry about money, because their rent and whatever they wanted from the store would simply be deducted from their paychecks.
Didn’t take long for workers to realize they were spending over 100% of their paychecks, and would have to work the rest of their lives in soul-crushing poverty to pay the company back.
Company Towns were definitely bad– but even those allowed for their workers to have a pretense of a life.
This explicitly is saying that you cannot express a fundamental part of your humanity here. No, sex isn’t necessary for all people, but it is for some; it’s a complicated matter that’s not about morals and freedom of choice in it is absolutely crucial to full human expression. This is not only explicitly saying, “you may not have a family here”, it is also dehumanizing and infantilizing, and controlling to an alarming degree.
