15. Heike Geissler

“You don’t want to use these new terms quite yet, but Norman makes it clear: You can call the tote a crate, but it won’t help you much because the tote’s called a tote.” -Heike Geissler (translated by Katy Derbyshire)

 I’m extremely unpopular on Twitter. This probably has more to do with my sporadic engagement with the service than it does any sort of defective tweeting skills on my part, but the fact remains that my posts rarely rate a like (except possibly from my wife) and almost never merit a retweet. But one time, at least by my modest standards, I had a surprise hit. Quoting the poet Tommy Pico from his book-length work Junk, I tweeted, “‘Content’ as it applies to creative effort and ‘Brand’/as it applies to identity are the most disgusting words in human/history.” The results were unheard of: 41 likes and 11 retweets.

I’m sure part of the reason for the (very relative) popularity of my tweet was the strong feelings people have for Pico and his work, but the response also pointed out just how deep an aversion many people have to the current vocabulary that shapes the way the world thinks about creative endeavors. Since most of the people who liked/retweeted my post were in the literary or artistic worlds, they were particularly sensitive to the ways in which creative work is dismissed and commodified by the demands of efficiency and profit. They understood how media companies take what was once an individualized artistic pursuit and turn it into a disposable flow of words (“content”), some of which may earn a few more clicks than some other flow of words and create a little extra revenue for its host.

By speaking out against this vocabulary, even if it was just by clicking the like button below my tweet, these people voiced a refusal to adhere to the ideas that the words “content” and “brand” represent. But people in all fields have a specific vocabulary as well, and while much of it is necessary to carry out the tasks required by the job, in some gigs, particularly low-level positions, words can serve as one more tool of control. In Heike Geissler’s nonfiction novel, Seasonal Associate, the main character (known simply as “you,” representing a version of the author) takes a job as a temporary worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany. As she’s learning the ropes, she’s given the run-down of the official vocabulary of the job. That crate-like thing she puts products into after she’s scanned them is known as a tote and the structural bed that the totes go onto is called a pallet. As her supervisor tells her, she had better get used to those terms because, in the world of the warehouse where she finds herself trapped for the season, that is simply what they’re called.

If Geissler’s worker were to ignore her instructions and continue to call the tote a crate, it would not seriously impede the flow of production. But there is still a power in this form of refusal. By insisting on her own vocabulary, even if only in her own head (and even if only for just a moment) she gives herself an opportunity to retain a small wedge of mental autonomy, to refuse a wholesale acceptance of the mindset that her world-bending employer wants her to adopt. Her boss Norman insists that the “tote’s called a tote and it’s called a tote everywhere”—Amazon’s dominance means it defines the terms by which the world operates—but it doesn’t have to be called a tote in any individual worker’s mind. No doubt Amazon, along with their big tech counterparts, would love to colonize our headspace too, using their algorithms as tools of mass depersonalization. As Seasonal Associate makes clear, that is why it’s so important, whether we’re working for the “everything store” or simply using their services, to maintain at all costs our private, weirdly personalized ways of thinking.