Four Thousand Weeks on the effects of on-demand gig economy work and flex time:
All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics-the world of meetings, rallies, pro-tests, and get-out-the-vote operations are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected-alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised pro-paganda. "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals," wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It's in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him.
Most of the book is just “use your time well; productivity isn’t going to make you happy,” which is true but doesn’t need that many pages to explain it. This chapter on people becoming desynchronized from each other is a break from that. It talks about how the Russians during the 1930s tried splitting all people into five groups, giving each of the five groups a different day off so that 80% of the people were working at any given time. They hated it.