SCREW THE SYSTEM: Explorations of Spaces, Games and Politics Through Sexuality and Technology - Tapa blanda

"The mainstream corporate office environment is pure hell at this moment. Bosses pester and spy on their employees as a matter of course, whether by remotely reading their email or just barging into a cubicle with a question or a comment... And the age of cell phones, Blackberries, and iPhones is also an age in which private life has been crushed out once and for all. If you boss has your cell phone number, you are never off work.

"The nameless lead character in FIGHT CLUB also starts out as an office drone. It's worth noting that his pseudo-revolutionary movement seems populated by men on the lower end of the employment spectrum... but he himself is a relatively successful middle-class insurance investigator at the beginning of the film...

"The threat of a workplace massacre becomes at once fodder for comedy, and a moment in which we're expected to cheer for the narrator as he threatens his boss...

"J.G. Ballard's SUPER-CANNES: this novel, released one year after the Fight Club movie and four years after the book, deals with superficially similar themes: men releasing the stress of business through violence, but from the other side of the mirror...

"Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever been more potent..."

"You remember that Fight Club's author wants you to buy his book, and the movie's director wanted you to buy a ticket, and then maybe later the deluxe DVD boxed set. As the late stand-up comedian Bill Hicks said, "He's going after that ANTI-marketing dollar. That's a big market..."

"In the real world, workplace shooters are much more likely to come from working-class or at best middle-class backgrounds... An early, paradigmatic example is that of Richard Farley... he stalked a female coworker, Laura Black, for four years beginning in 1984...Farley was terminated in May 1986. On February 2, 1988, Black obtained a restraining order against him...On February 16, Farley, by then unemployed... showed up at ESL with two shotguns, a rifle, four pistols and a knife, along with over 1000 rounds of ammunition. He killed seven employees and wounded four, including Black, before surrendering to police. He's currently on death row in California...

"America has workplace shooting sprees because corporate America creates the psychosexual sphere that breeds these types of situations, but it's also because America has the guns..."

"Companies treat their workers like slaves and criminals rolled into one, spying on them, and never letting them forget that they can be fired at any time. Everyone knows someone who's out of a job; most people know someone who's been out of a job for a year or more...

"If workers had spaces of true privacy, they would be happier, and ultimately more productive. And maybe nobody would get shot. But it seems that this is just one more way in which Americans are going to have to accept a few bodies as the cost of doing business."