Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis: Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary

There is something immediate when we perform in the frame of a protocol. But our actions could prepare for a different order of living. They could transform an experience of radical privation, a passivity, into a conscious affirmation. Alienation in fordist labor was based on this hypnotic, repetitive experience of working, where one repeats without knowing why. Labor in a gamified world becomes a post-hypnotic experience; it shows a form of life in which alienation is familiar, cognized, and desired. Protocols capture this change in the imaginary of the social sphere. Through gamified management, uninterested, fordist repetition becomes fixation and an “increased motivation” to engage something. Today we do not deal with traditional automatism but a perverse evolution of it.

(excerpt from the discussion between Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis)