Talk:Shadow work

Self-service gasoline as a shadow work
Using a photo of a women filling her own gas tank as an example of "shadow work" is pretty butt hurt, to frame the matter in strong vernacular language.

What's next? Filling up your own canteen at the water fountain?

In the case of drinking water, most people could probably manage to procure this resource entirely on their own initiative, if they had to.

Gasoline? Hundreds of thousands of people work across one of the most complex industries in human history to make it possible to obtain ten gallons of highly purified fuel containing 31,000 kcal per gallon for no more personal effort than standing there in a clean and sheltered space and squeezing a handle for two minutes.

Commandeering 300,000 kcal in two minutes with one hand! And we call this shadow work? Surely we can find a more appropriate photo that's only 1% as butt hurt. &mdash; MaxEnt 02:29, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Another shot at pumping gas
I completely forgot about my previous comment here concerning the gas pumping example, but I possess the book and it came up again and as I result I returned here with little recollection of my last pass.

This time my objection to gas pumping is along different lines.

Half the job of pumping gas is shutting off your car in the right place (look Ma! no valet service!), supplying payment credentials (best shared as little as possible, while avoiding the membership benefits spiffs as speedily as the keypad permits), selecting the gas grade, and deciding how much to pump.

As for the actual pumping, if you eff yourself you can find that little latch thing that holds the handle, then you can stand back and let the machine finish the job.

The only real shadow work I see here is in the avoiding of the membership benefits programs, that portion of the workflow where it asks you if you have an airmiles program, and forces you to say "no" for the 1000th time in succession.

Refusing their stupid advertising is coming out of your hide, over and over again. &mdash; MaxEnt 16:53, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Shadow or vernacular
After reading through Illich's book again, I notice that the text seemed to misunderstand the idea of shadow work, so I tried to correct it. Illich does a clear distinction between vernacular, or subsitance-oriented work and shadow work. Shadow work is a necessary complement to industrial production or distribution that "doesn't go all the way", but halt and let the consumer take over the last steps. The gas station example is maybe not so striking today, as we are so used to this kind of "taking over" a piece of professional service, a long time ago people helped with cleaning car windows even. The IKEA syndrom is a very typical example, and most of the little bigger stuff you buy these day, you have to assemble yourself to a degree. One may claim that the waiting on the phone for the automated answering robot to proclaim you choices is a kind of shadow work, lifted from an employed person to you. Onkel a (talk) 20:35, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Definition deviates from original coined by Illich, and feminist usage
The definition and examples here are somewhat petty and miss the big picture that Illich described - that shadow work is unpaid work that is essential to the survival of capitalist, industrial production, because such production would become too costly to be viable if these unpaid forms of work were to be formalized and paid. The quintessential forms of shadow work are child-rearing, cooking, and domestic chores. In a sense, capitalism has cherry picked certain domains of self subsistence that are amenable to industrial replacement, but in doing so, is entirely reliant on certain remaining forms of subsistence.

Also worth noting that poor people are often more reliant on subsistence because they cannot afford to pay to outsource their chores (eg housekeepers, food delivery, external childcare, etc), and insofar as they do, we may only see an acceleration of their destitution and financial precarity. PalimpsestCleaner (talk) 20:36, 9 November 2023 (UTC)