Nick Srnicek

the shifting focus of standards and the endless nature of housework, unpaid reproductive labour tends to fill whatever temporal container it is placed within.134 There is always something more that can be done, and the ratcheting up of standards is a key mechanism through which this temporal vacuum is filled with, well, vacuuming.

And it has been suggested that given the lack of value attached to work done in the home, women often see the performance of long hours as a way to indicate their own (non-monetary) contributions to a family.

Middle-class notions of cleanliness, bourgeois images of elaborate meals, and capitalist pressures to ‘invest’ in one’s children and to put on conspicuous displays of busyness are all part and parcel of our class-based societies.

The family has shown itself to be isolating, exclusionary, labour intensive, time consuming, and deeply unfair – and yet it has retained an impressive grip upon the cultural imagination. How did the nuclear family become hegemonic, and how does the division of labour that it engendered continue to shape the ways in which so many of us live our lives?

Interrogating the spaces of reproductive labour may be one way of contributing to the construction of a new kind of explicitly feminist post-work common sense.

According to many of its theorists and advocates, the new socialist byt involved three crucial spatial components: communal laundries, communal childcare facilities, and communal kitchens.

deemed the insurmountable apex

As a means to outsource traditional household labour, digital platforms have been one of the most significant technological transformations in recent decades. They are not a reduction of work, of course, but rather a transfer of work from the household to the market

picture of the smart home future, imagine trying to fix a malfunctioning printer, forever. Households’ resident IT experts can expect plenty more to do as we enter an era of digital housework

Already in housework and childcare, men tend to do work that is more autonomous, less routine, and more engaging than that of their female partners.137 Much the same could be said of digital labour in the sphere of housework; those who lead on implementing smart home technologies often see it as a hobby – at least initially