Technology has strengthened this illusion. Without you, the whole place would fall apart! (It wouldn’t.) “How are things?” a colleague from another department asks in the workplace kitchen. Being endlessly on call produces misery but also signals consequence. Idleness was once the ultimate goal of the rich and powerful, but over time, even they would embrace workism. The overwhelm associated with contemporary white-collar work is legendary. These are tallied separately from notifications on the “Home” tab, which light up channels and DMs, and “Unreads,” a collection of every single post I have not yet seen but apparently ought to. The new Slack is not, in fact, “more focused.” It adds a dedicated “Activity” tab, which catalogs every user’s movement in your vicinity on the software, along with a numeral that counts them up: mentions, emoji reactions, replies, thread replies, app notices. But this change felt distinctive because it laid bare a difficult fact: Office work is now more like social media than like office work. (Later on, she messaged me separately to see if I would write about Slack’s terrible new format.)Īll change is bad when you don’t think you need it. “all my slacks are: I hate the new slack,” slacked Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. “I am reverting to sending physical memos on personal letterhead,” posted another. “folks I cannot handle this new version of slack and will be taking the rest of the month off,” one Atlantic staffer said. Slowly, over the days that followed, complaints about the new Slack started trickling into our chats. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. “Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier.
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