A new word has entered the popular lexicon to describe feelings of burnout, ennui, and despair.
Instead of allowing our words to “deteriorate into a slush of vague intention,” aswrote, what if we named things with greater truth and precision? What if people called the brutal hours imposed by the tech industry “corporate feudalism” and the dangerous demands placed on delivery workers a form of exploitation? What if the students toiling away in front of their computers, depleted and tired, are not involuted but, rather, to borrow a phrase from the late David Graeber, victims of a profound...
Last December, a twenty-two-year-old employee surnamed Zhang at the e-commerce company Pinduoduo collapsed on the ground in the middle of the night, on her way home from work, andsix hours later, apparently from exhaustion and overwork. Two weeks later, another Pinduoduo employee leaped to his death, during a visit to his parents, reportedly after he was fired for criticizing the company’s work culture.
Involution came to the fore once again, as online commentators tried to make sense of the deaths of two young people through its lens. I compulsively read posts on WeChat with titles such as “A Pinduoduo employee has died, why did we descend into an era of involution?” and “Workplace involution under the Pinduoduo model.” In contrast to exploitation or suppression or even alienation, involution is presented as part of the natural order of things—like bad weather.
In many ways, China’s affliction of involution is no different from America’s cutthroat meritocracy. But China’s crisis is unique in the severity of its myopia and its methods of entrapment.
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