Month: November 2025

Many years ago, I had an older friend who’d been a government bookkeeper during WWII. One senior accountant on a raised platform faced the room, with thirty or forty workers down on the floor in row and column desks. Every so often, one of Tom’s co-workers would light a cigarette and lean back in his chair, seemingly pondering some difficult calculation but really just taking a five-minute eye-and-brain break from the endless stream of numbers flowing across the desk. When Tom did the same thing without the cigarette, the bossman would holler “Hawley! Get back to work!” So he did what any reasonable worker would do, and took up smoking.

Etymonline.com shows the phrase “rat race” scarcely in existence at all prior to the war, and rising to its peak of usage in 1969. That growth paralleled the rise of bureaucratic culture, in which Taylorism, standardization, and the division of labor emerged from the factory floor and entered the office. (The male office, anyway. Taylorism and close observation had already been the main structure of women’s corporate working lives, from the Lowell mills to telephone operators to steno and typing pools.)

When each workday feels like the last, when someone’s job is to provide standardized outputs at a steady pace, that person has no attentional autonomy. That doesn’t mean they’re not skilled; Barbara Ehrenreich spent a year doing housecleaning and diner waitressing and hotel housekeeping, and said at the end, “There is no such thing as unskilled labor.” The skills and judgments one develops, though, are only focused on the immediate task provided. The miner may exercise a lot of judgment about the most productive and safest way to attack a wall, but the wall and extraction of coal therefrom is the only thing to pay attention to.

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Years ago, when I was doing my dissertation in a rural high school, I started to see significant differences between students, but not only across the dimensions one would expect: intelligence, athletic ability, popularity and such. What I saw was four clusters of students that I framed my own X-Y quadrant diagram around.

High school is an attentional-deficit environment. Every fifty minutes, a new person insists on students’ full attention to yet another irrelevancy. They get yanked through six or seven attentional demands every day. The teacher John Taylor Gatto, in his 1991 acceptance speech for New York State Teacher of the Year (a speech he used to resign from the profession, saying “I can’t hurt children any more”), said that one of the hidden lessons of high school is that nothing really matters. We start and stop our engagement with any particular idea on someone else’s whim, rather than on our own progress or satisfaction with the work we’re doing. English-History-Religion-Algebra-Lunch-PE-Spanish, the screwing-on of knowledge-nuggets as we roll down the line. And in the end, we’re screwed.

It turns out that different groups of kids responded differently to the factory. Kids from middle-class families who were aimed at college and white-collar life did pretty well in school, but for different reasons. The ones who made themselves attentionally compliant, who did what they were told, were the “good kids.” I called them Believers—they endured the difficulties of the world in order to obtain the rewards sure to come. Others, though… they struggled against their bonds every day. They believed so strongly in the value of thinking that they hated being told what to think about, or when they should stop thinking about one thing and go on to another. They were the Theologians, who relied not on received wisdom but on self-determination. That girl in the back of Spanish II who’s secretly reading Cervantes… that’s a theologian.

Working-class kids who were moving toward blue-collar life right after high school also fell into the same two camps, but they looked different. The ones who were willing to comply—”whatever, dude“—were Agnostic to what was being presented, all of which was merely something to endure before lunch, before soccer, before graduation day. But the ones who pushed back had no aims to move toward, they just didn’t want to be herded. These were the “fuck you!” kids, the Infidels in detention or shifted off campus into the “continuation school” of post-expulsion and pre-emancipation.

High school, in principle, names its function as moving kids upward on that graph; giving them the tools they need to have a better shot in adult life. But what I saw, every day, was that the hidden function of high school is moving kids leftward, toward compliance. Compliance makes the machine run, whether you believe in the machine or not.

More soon.

I have a feeling this is going to be a string of posts.

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I’ve always cultivated the ability to hide out and do the thing I wanted to do, fully focused and without interruption. And I’m increasingly recognizing what a luxury that is, unavailable to most of us most of the time. I’d like to explore that luxury—to whom it’s offered, and to whom it isn’t. How carefully it’s built, and how easily it’s lost. How our best intentions lead us, individually and institutionally and culturally, away from that precious state.

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The idea of autonomy has to do with self-determination, An autonomous person gets to make, or at least strongly participate in, decisions about their own actions and beliefs and relationships. The opposite condition is submission or subordination, subsuming our own intentions to the intentions of others, Let’s look at that from two directions.

DIRECTION ONE. About thirty years ago, the British architect Frank Duffy wrote a book called The New Office, in which he put forth a taxonomy of work types, each of which requires different characteristics for a good workplace. (I admit that I’m a total sucker for a well-crafted X-Y quadrant diagram.)

I’m a writer and not an architect, so I’ll take exception to his four clever shorthand terms for each space, but the principle makes a lot of sense.

• If you’re told exactly what to do and left alone to do it, you’re a drone. Example workspace: cubicle.
• If you’re told exactly what to do and put in a group to do it, the work of the pack is more important than the individual member. Example workspace: high school classroom.
• If you decide what to do and are left alone to do it, you’re an artist in her garret. Example workspace: writer’s desk.
• If you decide what to do and are working with others to achieve it, you’re part of the inner circle. Example workspace: boardroom.

Hang onto that, while we go to…

DIRECTION TWO. The environmental psychologist Irv Altman developed a theory that the fundamental definition of privacy was the control of information: both information about oneself going out, and information from others coming in. So having your mail snooped around in is a loss of privacy, because you’ve lost control of information about yourself; but having loud neighbors is also a loss of privacy, because you hear their arguments and their video games and their TV shows without having asked for it.

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Put those two directions together and you can understand why your job sucks. You don’t get to control information. You don’t even get to decide what to think about! And it’s not just the world of endless interruptions, though that’s an enormous disrespect to our attentional autonomy. It’s more importantly that we’re constrained by the very nature of our businesses. Here are a few examples:

I worked for a business once that was part of a national consortium founded upon ten common principles. My very first research project there was truncated after a day. I’d asked my new colleagues which of the ten principles was most important to them specifically, and was told that the company’s position was that only one of the ten really mattered, and that the other nine were niceties that had no real bearing on our work.

I worked for a business once that did exactly the same four or five jobs for one county government after another. Same scope of work, same methods, same spreadsheets, same deliverables. There was no room there to ask interesting questions or to approach the problem sideways.

I worked for a business once that hadn’t the faintest idea what a meeting was for. The president called us all together once a month to give us the equivalent of a podcast; the provost did the same thing with a smaller group every week. Committees were established with no time frame and no demands for progress; we just got together and picked at the same scabs for a couple of hours every Thursday afternoon or Tuesday morning. I rarely felt like I got any work done, because I set it aside every twenty minutes to go to another meeting.

These were all low-autonomy environments that had hired us because we’d been successful in high-autonomy training. They recruited us because we’d done really good work on projects we devised and cared deeply about, and then told us that all of that individual motivation was no longer the currency of the land.

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So think of this post as the preamble. Over the next few days, I’d like to think about what attentional autonomy can tell us about social class, about craft, and about education. Maybe some other stuff, too.

When I worked at the Boston Architectural College¹, one of the fundamental rituals was the weekly Directors’ Meeting. Turns out that for a college of a thousand or so students, there were a lot of directors.

There were four directors representing the four disciplinary divisions: architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and design studies. Those were the four academic/professional fields in which one could get a degree, the warp threads that were fundamental to setting up the loom. But every weave also has its weft threads that cross the entirety of the fabric. At the BAC, they were Design, Design Media, Design History and Theory, Technology and Management, Liberal Studies, and Professional Practice. No matter which of the four degree strands you were engaged in, your path would cross each of the six topical areas.

(There were also directors of Admissions, Advising, the Learning Center, and Financial Aid. Without getting too far into the weeds, there were a few others as well, mostly historical artifacts and loyal long-term employees who’d grandfathered their security as the school had changed around them. True in every workplace ever.)

Let me oversimplify a little bit, but not much. The degree strands weren’t fully owned by the College. More fundamentally, they were owned by the professional accrediting bodies that granted the College the right to offer degrees with the respective words attached. The National Architectural Accreditation Board, the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board, and the Council for Interior Design Accreditation all visited the school every six or eight years and made sure the franchisees were adhering to corporate standards. (Design Studies had originally come about as an exit ramp for students in the three professional strands who weren’t going to make it professionally but who had invested time and money and deserved a college degree of some kind or another. It’s become something far beyond that now, but it isn’t part of a larger national cohort.)

It was really the lateral bands that defined what made the College distinct. They were one school planting its flag in the sand and saying no matter what discipline a student is part of, this is what every one of them will experience.

When I taught at Duke, Writing 20 (Introduction to Academic Writing) was the ONLY COURSE that was required of every single undergraduate student. For twenty years, it was a fundamental hallmark of what it meant to be a Duke student.

I find, now that I’ve left higher education behind, that I have very little interest in the disciplines. (I didn’t while I was inside, either. I was just curious, and had my own questions that I needed to satisfy.) With almost five thousand colleges in the US, it seems to me that it’s the horizontal curriculum that declares a college’s institutional mission. Complete this statement for yourself: no matter what you major in, at our college you will… That’s the sentence that makes your college worth choosing over any of the others. It ought to be fully distinguishable from all the rest. Write it carefully, and live it fully.

1. 2006-2103. I have no idea what they’re doing any more. ↩︎