Multitasking Man

1.

Occasionally on social media, I’ll see some finspirational content made by some dubious business-type. I really love it when they show their computer setup because most of the time, it consists of around 3-6 monitors, all delicately and neatly positioned on top of a thin minimalist desk. There’s nothing else on the desk, apart from maybe a CELSIUS® and a non-wired computer mouse. Sometimes it’s a wide-shot, allowing us to see that the not-often-seen space outside and surrounding the desk—their bare home—pales in comparison, pales in efficiency.

What is the efficient equivalent between the 6-monitor setup when compared to the bareness of their greyscale maid-made bed.

6 blankets or pillows won’t affect their profit pursuit—or the pursuit of a good night’s sleep—but I don’t think having 6 monitors affects it either. But it builds and constructs the image of efficiency, of a mind clear enough to peruse and dissect the information they need from multiple different visual stimuli at once. I don’t even think they have a setup like that just for the camera to strengthen their self-image, instead, I prescribe the behaviour as an ingrained belief in their thought that it really generally works. Even an acknowledgement and understanding that multitasking has its flaws is not enough to fully convince the self. When technology becomes more evolved and more advanced, there’s this feeling that this new app, this new tech, will finally allow me to become my most efficient self. My most capable multitasking self. Multitasking Man.

2.

Multitasking Man would probably be fine working with one lonely monitor, and maybe a second would be a net positive. But the very act of having two monitors in your workspace in any capacity produces this contrasting feeling for the person involved—a feeling that feels both efficient and fragmented. You’re shamefully wasteful and yet, still working. The way a coked-up turtle would go about their day. Stimulated, but still only capable of moving oh so fast. Operating at a snail-necked pace.

You feel that you’ve organized your digital space, in effect your mental space, and there is nothing stopping you from working now that you’ve mastered your computerized domain. Studying with both a Laptop and iPad, dual screening two separate chrome tabs on your laptop. Or even better, a split-screened library computer, a split-screen laptop, and an iPad. Accompanied by the shaking wiry arms of a person at such a stage of shameful desperation to finally work. The ultimate setup of someone who already seems to be in a pit of despair, engaging in a process more desperate than efficient. Begging, just begging, for that brain,—a brain swamped by leisurely entertainment, where being waterboarded by TikTok and YouTube is more common than not—so used to not working, unable not to do anything that isn’t play.

At the end of their rope, Multitasking Man is deeply driven to do work. But their brain—now of the ape resemblance—does not want to separate from their entertainment needs. Not wanting to go cold turkey. They wean off their entertainment by first continuing to watch YouTube, but shifting it from the object of focus to now place it in the background. Perhaps split-screening it.

The process starts as so:

1) Wasting hours solely consuming entertainment in any form, phone or computer 2) Slowly pouring in Google Doc tabs, trying to ease in the task at hand, but still consuming entertainment solely. Maybe now you’re beginning the split screen. It is now the struggle between your multitasking of entertainment and work—the limbo stage that is the hardest now to overcome.

This limbo stage is primarily where most people who seek to multitask with entertainment will stay. You need something disruptive to shake you out of the trance of entertainment. Whether it is the silently ticking loom of the non-stopping digital clock, the piling mountain of shame which has been building as you procrastinate, nicotine, or stimulants. But I think mostly, the main driver is shame. Mass and overconsumption of entertainment fill the viewer with shame if there is a different life they’re supposed to be living, if there is still work to be done. Either for themselves in an introspective way of self-critique, or for a task needing completion. Whose lack of completion would result in a form of punishment.

3.

And who doesn’t want to feel they’re capable of the peak form of efficient work? To feel the power of instrumentalizing your devices, the determination of the human spirit over technology. To truly be an agent of social determinism. To wrest away the power of technology to utilize yourself, not losing something in the process. But our pockets of agency do get picked, and in a much more insidious way than some predatory—but still human—Barcelona pickpocket.

It’s driven by the urge of consumption, the neoliberal belief that it can provide a certain edge, a positive benefit to the self. The next purchase will allow you to arrive at the level of happiness you desire. Viewing life as a series of purchasable steps that lead to the fulfillment of that desire.

This is made possible by the famous Lacanian object ‘a’ that mediates between the incompatible domains of desire and jouissance. In what precise sense is object a the object-cause of desire? Object ‘a’ is not what we desire, what we are after, but rather that which sets our desire in motion, the formal frame that confers consistency on our desire.

Desire is of course metonymical, it shifts from one object to another; through all its displacements, however, desire nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of fantastic features which, when encountered in a positive object, insures that we will come to desire this object.

Object ‘a’, as the cause of desire, is nothing but this formal frame of consistency. In a slightly different way, the same mechanism regulates the subject's falling in love: the automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent (libidinal) object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy place.

Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge (Zizek 1997)

You love the M1 Mac not for what it is but for what it provides for you. This is not necessarily a criticism of the self or of the object; the focus of this overconsumption is its purpose in attaining the personage you aim to adopt—and to an extent, it very well could be true. All these faux study apps sell the person you’ll be, pitching feelings and success, not necessarily the tools to bring you there. ChatGPT sells itself and tempts via this same appeal to desire. But of course, they violently affirm that they’re the tool for the procrastinated job at hand. It’s the heart of advertising, which has been overstated millions of times in such better depths than this student union blog post. Ingraining your work process into a habitual consumption pattern—stretched to the limit by the neoliberal policies exploiting customer habits (Chun 2016).

But it’s easy to allow yourself to be manipulated when desperation is the underlying drive. In fact, you’ll engage in it willingly. And the first most hypervisible stimuli which arrives, sees you as nothing more than an archery target. Gladly shooting the first penetrating arrow into your desperate heart. Your heart, which is shamefully accepting, craving any possible aiding shot.

4.

I don’t think I even know what works best. But I think there’s maybe some kind of beautiful yet tragic importance in feeling a lack of control over your productivity. A lack of control over your ability to be at your best. It makes the moments you are more meaningful, and it makes future reflections and reevaluations of your work more significant. Your backlog of work now feels more tied to a specific time and a place, analyzing that old context of production—now evaluated against your current context of consumption.

Multitasking can work, even if it definitely maybe slows down your ability to focus. But the role entertainment plays (and preys) in the process of work and productivity for generations who mass consume media that is significant. And some mediums are infinitely more distractible to multitask with. No one is reading a book for pleasure simultaneously when writing. You’re doubling down on two textual perceptions which aren’t necessarily compatible. But audio and visual media? Infinitely incorporable. Infinitely multitaskable, infinitely distractable.

Multitasking Man is the embodiment of someone with an infinite appetite for distractions (Postman, 1986). An almost deeply human characteristic. And this has not been multitasking work with work, but multitasking work with entertainment. The behavior the symptom of a deeply addicted individual, one who lacks agency unless certain stimuli are fried to satisfatory numbess. Groping for the right subjective level of unquenchable satiatation that puts you into the entertainment consumption trance, where only the extent of your agency is the determiner of whether you rise into productivity or continue swallowing water, sinking into stasis.

Gasping for air but only getting water. And from a distance, that gasping looks almost a little bit like the victim is laughing. But when you’re swallowing water, gasping or laughing seems about equally productive as solutions to a growingly insurmountable problem.