“No means no?” Throw consent out the window! It’s time to exercise a dismissive heartlessness a computer algorithm could never possess.

Like ice cream from the sleepiest corner market in Burbank in the last days of spring or a charcuterie board served on the reclaimed slate of a segregation-era schoolhouse, there’s an ever-increasing demand for hand-crafted, artisan misery. I should want the Amish to churn my butter. I should want, as a selling point, my Carl’s Jr. cookie ice-cream shake “Hand-Scooped®” by a pregnant migrant worker and I should want a human to do basic polling of what could be easily handled by three clicks in Google Forms. We want authenticity, and you can’t have authenticity without a group of insular Swiss-German Anabaptists who disapprove of nonmarital sex making your dairy products any more than you can have simple queries in real estate handled by a comment field and a few lines of code.

It seemed not long ago as though we were on the verge of a breakthrough—maybe an end to labor as we knew it. In 1930 economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren that people would work no more than a few hours a week to sustain a comfortable lifestyle as automated technological processes would eliminate the need for most forms of work. In the early-to-mid 1990s, virtual realities and cyberspace were coming to fill the gaps in time produced by a horizoned liberation from labor. Consumer goods, particularly exotic and novel Japanese electronics, were not to distract us or provide salve for the misery of our capitalized existence, but as a theoretical preemptive leisurely apparatus giving us something to do.

This market-researched silicon Garden of Eden would not come to pass. In the Age of Trump, whose time fomented years before his election in 2016, came a renewed interest in a reverence for labor, domestic manufacturing, “bringing back jobs,” and local American craft. Nothing became more politically desirable than the return of the factory job, the assembly line, the coal plant, an all-day toil before heading home to enjoy several glasses of Tennessee whiskey authentically produced in 96% white Lynchburg—a detail many folks can take pride and comfort in.

In the past few years we’ve witnessed rehashed elements of labor under social democracy but without any tangible benefit to laborers beyond flag desecration and exploitation of veterans. Many supporters of Bernie Sanders were persuaded, post-primaries, by the social-democratic, labor-oriented rhetoric appropriated by Donald Trump and the alt-right. As with 1930s and onwards notions of social democracy and “full employment,” these populist ideations began as a center-leftist ideal to return to sincere, mutually-respectful interaction between customer and business.

The market had no trouble adjusting to these reactionary, retrofit sensibilities, repurposing anemic left-wing aesthetics to serve the needs of a resurgent corporate identity. Almost anywhere in America can one find a restaurant or shop offering “all-natural,” “GMO-free,” “clean food,” or “locally-sourced,” product, often served on or around “reclaimed” materials. Yet we couldn’t expect this to scale economically—the beauty and desire of the local was contradictory to mass-production and consumption needed to reignite the American economy. Or so was thought.

What started as twee reaction to corporate goofballery was seized as opportunity for renewed coercion by the corporate right. When the “small is beautiful” mantra reigns, perceptions of mass-production corporate product fall to new lows. This maneuver, though, is more than optics. A return to small, locally-sourced business for basic needs paired with automation for mass goods created a vacuum of control over the lives of customer-citizens; it became apparent the threats of mass automation, basic incomes, locally-sourced, artisan-craft local markets might have on controlling the masses; controlling desire.

So the marketing calculus was updated, the market turned on its head and artisanship returned to the pinnacle of desire. As intended by the hipster barista at the corner milk-and-cookies bar or the gastroartist serving pan-seared water, handcrafted, artisan misery is now the source of value and the mechanism by which desire is cultivated and served. Corporate marketing departments adapted quickly—there’s a reason why everyone who works in marketing looks exactly like the people serving you chicken and waffles next to the bike co-op downtown. There’s a reason why Chobani, official sponsor of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, is now a household name, though they’re quick to state:

We’ve come a long way from our humble roots, but we still operate like the small craft company we started out as.

Desire achieved through automation provides less value because it doesn’t involve hand-crafted, artisan misery. Not long ago we mocked the smug-yet-responsible Toyota Prius-driving consumer who boycotted products that exploited outsourced laborers in developing nations; today we embrace those same products so long as the exploitation goes down the backseat of a Tesla in Detroit or Toledo instead of Dhaka or Taipei. We no longer feel concern for, or social responsibility to, exploited workers in developing nations, but jealousy over their taking what is ours.

There’s almost something sexual—a Lacanian jouissance—a self-annihilation in the desire of artisan production and consumption. Like the renewed nationalists clamoring for a return to American manufacturing, real estate agents want to know their money buys our suffering and not merely an automated script working for free and producing a similarly-aggravating result for their shitty leads.

Stop. Please stop. I clicked only browsing. I clicked on not buying for several years. The website “PROMISED” that I wouldn’t be spammed if I put my phone number in. I should have gone with my gut. Please stop calling. Please stop texting…from multiple numbers. Every time I block one, I get a message from a new one. Even if I was interested in buying, I wouldn’t use this agency if my life depended on it.

If the above quote is the final statement produced by a lead to our firm, I can only imagine the shitshow an uncaring and dispassionate automated script would produce. What’s possible with automation must be such a terror we can’t even take a risk on it and the status-quo outcome is definitely the safer bet. On a personal level it’s enough for work to be meaningless and unfulfilling, yet I am the intermediary between idiocy and malice; leads who view the agents with skepticism (as they intuitively resent salespersons) telling them to provide their phone number as a password to a website for browsing homes but provide valid contact information anyway. Leads never see the homes but their number is then used for days of phone calls and text messages.

My managers, their managers, real estate agents, and our investors know the wrought suffering I endure for less than $30,000 a year. Without this suffering our service would be lacking and our product inferior. Put succinctly, we would not be worth paying, but paying us somehow beats the flat, one-time cost of automation. People and especially corporations and politicians are terrified of the potentiality of automation, yet human-to-human interaction is far more wrought. Without introduction, consider the two passages below.

Passage one:

POWERED BY PEOPLE: Our 100% U.S. based team is powered by humans who are trained to gather all the information you need using friendly and natural conversation.

Passage two:

[…] in the 21st century, intelligent machines waged war against their human creators. When humans blocked the machines’ access to solar energy, the machines retaliated by harvesting the humans’ bioelectric power.

Nevermind the first passage, from my company’s web page, sounds like the dystopian conflict-plot of The Matrix—which I lazily snagged from Wikipedia for passage two—there’s nothing “friendly” or “natural” or even human about disregarding the will and desire of people who reply a polite “no thanks” to our advances. Yes, the first passage is an extraction from our corporate website, but it could be taken from virtually any corporate advertising anywhere in the 21st century. On first read, without context, it doesn’t even seem particularly heinous or reactionary. Powered by humans. We’ve quickly normalized the preference for manual labor before technological automation and augmentation.

As for the second passage, from The Matrix, the movie itself is a spicy take on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and “Theory of Forms” so it’s not as though obscured nonsense fucking over the whole of humanity is something new. What sucks about recognizing The Matrix analogy or Plato’s fundamental allegory is that we never got to the point where our machines could wage war against us, a point that would be sort of an implicit positive risk to the reward of automation. We’ve been denied even a chance at that fresh hell; we were far too afraid to ever let things get to that point but for different reasons—that our machines might liberate us from our stultifying labor-boredom, which is to say liberate us from our bosses, and so the chance dystopia was avoided by cleverly throwing out the planned utopia. I’d say “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” but that idiomatic expression is more about warning to the dangers of being a hapless moron whereas the present circumstance of an “artisanal” ontology is far more deliberate, pernicious and coercive.

In tandem with a distinct preference for human labor is a repurposing of the ontology through development; that labor is a type of personal development—not merely building character—but harnessing one’s life force and cultivating it into something stronger. I recently applied to work for a corporate competitor whose application asked the following question:

“People Incubation” (their proper noun, not mine) is such a literal take from The Matrix I’m surprised this job posting wasn’t advertised with in-movie imagery of people incubation battery chambers:

I took a stand by deleting the application.

The company I work for prides itself on “the human element” of interaction between a prospective sale and the agent. I can assure you with the utmost sincerity I can possess as I write these words on a Monday morning that there is nothing of value in the human element of my interaction with leads. My work is utterly meaningless and devoid of any sort of joy. There’s an a priori assumption, a foregone conclusion, that one should desire “the human element” in every interface; that “Hand-Scooped®” foodservice by an oftentimes faceless but assuredly miserable underpaid laborer is no longer a concerning vector for foodborne illness but a desirable trait regardless of the seemingly-forgotten benefits of automated services and technological augmentation. To make a point obvious, we’re dealing with a paradox, a contradiction, an absurd irony in the fetishization of the natural and organic as producing an outcome more artificial, strange, and alien-inhuman than the automated processes we’re afraid of.

Which brings me back to the first passage, the one from our corporate website: engaging leads using friendly and natural conversation. It’s even worse we will engage a lead via text message at 2 a.m. if they’re browsing at 2 a.m., even though basic social intuition tells us that would be a typically inappropriate behavior given the time of day—you might expect an automated process to naively and inhumanely make such a decision, and you would hypothetically hate the automated process for being so uncivil and stupid.

Yet there are humans engaging in a sales pitch at 2 a.m., and that not only makes the practice seemingly permissible at a corporate boardroom level, but even desirable, friendly, natural. If I’m at a Walmart at 2 a.m. buying a $20 toilet seat there’s a good chance I’m not looking for an overly-peppy sales team to circle around me asking me how soon I’m looking to purchase or if I’ve been talking with any other sales associates recently. It’s all the more assured for people who, from the comfort of their home, are browsing half-million-dollar houses they cannot afford as a manifest daydream, a cultivated desire for a good they cannot possess.

As we’ve been conditioned to prefer “artisan, handcrafted” labor over pristine, non-exploitative automated production, leads have been conditioned to daydream-desire homes they cannot afford and never intend to purchase. Let people dream the dreams curated for them by HGTV and and Better Homes and Gardens and let laborers sleep instead of engaging in friendly and natural conversation at 2 a.m. just to evade the zombie of homelessness.