ABSTRACT
In the second episode of the Bravo reality series LOLwork, viewers are given a glimpse of the contradictions that characterize a twenty-first-century “creative economy” office space. A show that epitomizes Bravo’s broader uptake of con - tent featuring new forms of labor and branding imperatives, LOLwork follows the staff of Cheezburger, the company that makes “lolcats” and other cute animal media, securing more than 700,000 daily global viewers and more than 2 million page views per day.1 Based in Seattle, Cheezburger is a hip workplace: the office space is colorful and laidback, with a couch, a foosball table, a boss who uses a standing desk, and no cubicles of any kind. Indeed, the space itself is emblematic of a post-Fordist blurring of work and leisure, similar to the cool “new economy” environments described in a New York Times article about millennial workplaces with an “aggressively playful vibe” (Widdicombe). As Andrew Ross demonstrates in No-Collar, such “permissive” workplaces, “designed both physically and philosophically to chase off the blues,” emerged during the 1990s tech boom (10). Cheezburger’s staff is comprised primarily of young creatives who dress casually, love animals, and grew up steeped in Internet cul - ture. In this particular episode, “Career Day,” the staff are working on Saturday (“caturday”) in order to host junior high students, “the future customers of icanhazcheezburger,” interested in learning about how the business runs. When one of the students asks Content Director Paul, who is depicted throughout the show as a cynical curmudgeon, “Don’t you have a lot of fun?” Paul replies, “Sort of, but here’s what happens: when you work, doing things that you like, the thing that you like suddenly becomes the thing that you hate, and so you have to learn to love and hate something at the same time.” In a manner suggestive
of the ways in which neoliberal capitalism captures and instrumentalizes passion and desire, Paul underscores how work has destroyed his previous relationship to creativity. Throughout the series, Paul is the voice of anti-work critique, struggling with what Kathi Weeks describes as “work as a requirement, work as a system, work as a way of life” (3). Later in the same episode, he tells the camera, “I gave the kids a leg up today. They’re going to know that work is hell and they’re going to be ready for it.” In response, the show cuts to student McKenzie, who concludes, “I think working at a place like this would be a lot of fun, actually” (“Career Day”). McKenzie’s comment functions as a way to render Paul’s antiwork perspective baseless.
