The workers at the Fuyao auto glass factory in Dayton, Ohio, may still only make $14 an hour, but they voted against joining a union, and elections have consequences. Things work out differently in America for different people. After the economy collapsed in 2008, for instance, President Obama did nothing for workers and homeowners, bailing out the banks and Wall Street instead. Now, post-presidency, he and Michelle have signed a multi-million-dollar deal with Netflix to produce content, which they can feel good about because the first documentary they released, American Factory, studies the plight of the workers Obama didn’t help. And it won an Oscar for its filmmakers, Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar, the crowning glory of their long career in filmmaking that stretches back to movies about feminism, socialism, and labor unrest in the 1970s and 1980s.

[...] We are supposed to feel pity for Cao, a man who is getting millions in tax subsidies from the state of Ohio. Then American Factory wrenches us again, like in Modern Times, with a supertitle at the end that informs us that by 2030, 375 million people around the world will have lost their jobs to automation, unions or not. Why this ideological muddle? Because this is cinema verité in the service of power, not people, made to win awards. A success story in the film, about an unemployed forklift operator named Jill who has to live in her sister’s basement until she gets a job at Fuyao and moves into a tiny apartment by herself, turns sour when she’s fired for bringing up safety violations. [...]

Parts of The Traitor take place in the United States. It’s always great to see European films with American-set scenes that weren’t shot here. Most of them were filmed in Germany, from what I could glean in the credits. Tommaso and his family go to a supermarket, shop in a mall, and eat in what is maybe supposed to be an Olive Garden. The supermarket stocks huge two-gallon containers of milk on the shelves in the regular, non-refrigerated aisles next to canned food; the New Hampshire mall looks more like The Grove in LA than anything in New England; and the Olive Garden features a grotty, beardless Santa wandering the dining room with a guitar, singing in Italian. (That last, of course, would be an improvement.) [...]

MEMOIR IS THE COYEST of literary loves. It comes on as more honest than fiction and more open than poetry, but at heart it’s as angled and cropped as a Grindr pic. Not flattering necessarily—the urge to confess is as likely predicated on a sense of sin as a need to boast, and castigation is the desired outcome as often as absolution—but always self-serving. It’s simultaneously a calculated, often brutal act of excision and a carefully staged magnification. On one hand the sculpture winnowed from stone; on the other a splinter of life invested with outsize significance, like the thorn in the fable about the elephant and the mouse. A thorn’s a tiny thing compared to an elephant, but when it’s in exactly the right (or wrong) spot it becomes your whole life, your whole universe even. “How small the cosmos,” Nabokov declares at the beginning of Speak, Memory, “how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!” A profoundly humanist sentiment, but only if your notion of the human discounts civilizations, the species, in favor of individuals. [...]

[...] Matt had been describing his approach to dating—a topic which he’d clearly given a great deal of thought, studying the criteria that the various four-letter billionaire tech moguls (Elon, Mark, Jeff, Bill) had used when selecting a “mate.”

“I don’t want to be with someone who has my skill set,” Matt began, “I want to be with someone who has strengths in another area, who can fill in my blind spots.” He went on to describe a woman he was seeing, who he was flying out first-class the day we left. He liked, for instance, that she was good at reading people, that she was perceptive and sensitive to things like art and literature, that she was knowledgeable about cooking and food culture, that she understood his world but was not exactly of it and so could objectively add something to his field of vision. I found this odd but charming: better than the engineers I knew in college who thought it was “dating down” to be with a humanities major. Unlike them, Matt spoke eloquently about how selecting a partner was among the most pivotal choices a person made in life.

[...] Matt began to tell me, with flat-line sincerity, about how he felt it was reasonable to assume that we were living in a simulation.

I had heard this idea before, always from men for whom life looked pretty great: wealthy men, white men, intelligent men, respected men. Here was yet another. What was it about the idea that this all might be a game, someone else’s game, that struck such a chord among those who were by all accounts winning?

Look: he wanted a wife. Don’t we all? Someone to think ahead about our needs; someone to make our homes and our lives orderly; someone to tend to our emotions when they’re raw and sore. Someone to track and manage the infinite details of living; someone to be responsible for our moods; someone to balance the books. We all want someone who knows us so intimately they can predict what we’ll want; someone who picks up our loose ends without complaint; someone who fills in our weaknesses with her strength; someone who does what it takes to help us succeed. Someone who attends to our desires eagerly, with a smile. Someone who means it.

But, you know, we’re progressive. We want a wife, but we want her to be happy. More than happy, we want her to be fulfilled. We want a true wife, a born wife, a wife who would feel imprisoned by any other role, so that to be our wife is in its own way a golden opportunity, a liberation. We want a wife who wears her responsibilities like a privilege.

And who could blame us! Regardless of gender expression or sexual orientation—everyone needs a wife. There isn’t enough time in the day to fulfill the demands placed on a modern human: to be available to work throughout all our waking hours; to show determination and ambition so that we are not made redundant; to service debts and taxes and run a cost-effective household; to source and consume healthful meals three times a day; to exercise our bodies the recommended amount; to maintain mental well-being amidst chaos; to care for dependents (aging parents, young children); to be present and attentive to those we interact with; to find, build, maintain, and perpetually assess the longevity of meaningful and fulfilling partnerships; to get eight hours of quality sleep. Literally: how does one do it?

For most of Western history, the answer was: the wife. Now what?

The end result is that we now all have at least three jobs, three modes of survival to tend to: our financial survival, the survival of our communities, and the survival of our family units. The state has long shirked its responsibilities in each sphere; now, the wide, slobbering maw of the tech industry waits, ready to commodify whatever it can.

How strange and predictable it is, then, that wages for housework have, at last, become widespread—but in the form of our subscription to digital services and gig economy labor. This work has become concretely valuable at the precise moment its value can be effectively captured by a small cadre of men sitting at the top of the tech industry.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It is no coincidence that the first artificial intelligence boom began around the same time as the sexual revolution; no coincidence that the history of women in computing has been roundly overwritten by the myth of male coding genius; no coincidence that the voice coming out of your smart device is almost always a woman’s. Stemming from a fundamental arrogance on the part of men—the idea that work historically performed by women is so straightforward, so mindless even, that it can be effectively programmed— the latter part of the twentieth century saw a rise in technologies aimed at making traditional women’s work faster, simpler, or redundant.

What concerns me as much as these developments is the broader picture of which they form only a part: a world in which the exact forms of labor women have fought to have recognized and remunerated—chief among them caretaking labor, tedious household labor, buoying-the-male-ego labor, service-with-a-smile labor—are being co-opted, monetized, and sold back to us as shiny, premium, cutting-edge tech, the intermediary step of individual households outsourcing such tasks to workers primarily from the Global South having been insufficiently profitable for the Silicon Valley brain trust. As automation rises, technology will increasingly undercut the wages of these workers; the human workers who depend on these precarious gigs are viewed by the tech industry and the broader economy as a temporary inefficiency.

This is the dark ethos of the twenty-first century: most of us are performing labor that can and will be at least partially automated. We work, and as we work, we audition for the right to continue working. There is no room at the negotiation table; any unpaid work will remain unpaid until, in due course, we will pay to have that work done for us by automation. And like that, the mainstays of human life become premium services we pay for. Like that, the value only flows up.