[Click play] Hiii, this is <first_name> calling from <Organization_I've_been_waiting_for_a_call_from> if you could call me back that would be great my number is <phone_number>. Thanks!!
Oh good I've been waiting a month for this call...
Huh, why didn't I hear this ring [checks call log] oh it was marked as spam... Great. [Unmark as spam]. Well I better call her back.
[Calls number, robot answers, its a corporate call center] OK so its not YOUR number... Got it. [Your call is important... Your position in queue is 9]
[30 minutes on hold]
Hi this is <not_who_I'm_looking_for>
Hi I'm looking for <first_name>
Oh OK did she say... Why?
No... She said just call her back
OK what is your information
[Gives information]
OK let me see of she is available
[Waits 10 minutes on hold]
Hi, sorry <first_name> is on lunch she'll call you back after lunch OK?
Uh, OK, yeah that's fine.
[Click]
I guess I can wait another... Hour? Who knows...
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.