R is for Robot

By: Joshua Glenn
June 4, 2012

A series of 26 posts featuring excerpts from Joshua Glenn’s The Idler’s Glossary (Biblioasis, 2008) and The Wage Slave’s Glossary (Biblioasis, 2011). Both books were coauthored by Mark Kingwell, who contributed entertaining philosophical-critical essays on the subjects of idling and wage slavery; and both were wittily illustrated and designed by the cartoonist Seth.

ROBOT

Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that “whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice… he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.” This sort of classic liberal critique is at the heart of Czech litterateur Karel Čapek’s 1921 play, R.U.R., which introduced the coinage robot (from the Czech word for corvée) to describe android workers of the future. But surely it’s also the point of L. Frank Baum’s 1913 musical play, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, the titular character of which sings: “Always work and never play / Don’t demand a cent of pay / What I’m bound to do I do / Isn’t that the nicest way?”

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ALSO: Alienation | Big Rock Candy Mountains | Corporation | Dawdle | Employee of the Month | Flazy | Greybearding | Hobo | Inemuri | Jack of All Trades | Knock Off Work | Lazy | Micawberish | Nobbing It | Onboarding | Pink Slip | Quitter | Robot | Stakhanovite | Time and Motion Study | Unemployment | Volupté | Wage Slavery | Xerox Subsidy | Yakuza | Zero Drag

Categories

Idleness, Read-outs