Jem Calder

Julia has landed a fresh start—at a “pan-European” restaurant. “Imagine that,” says her mother. “I’m imagining.” Nick is flirting with sobriety and nobody else. Did you know adults his age are now more likely to live with their parents than with a romantic partner? Life should have started to take shape by now—but instead we’re trying on new versions of ourselves, swiping left and right, searching for a convincing answer to that question: “What do you do?” Jem Calder’s Reward System is a set of ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh fictions about work, relationships, and the strange loop of technology and the self. They are about a generation on the cusp: the story of two people enmeshed in Zooms and lockdowns, loneliness and love, devices and desires. Hyperaware but also deeply confused about who they are, Julia and Nick reveal the way we live now in a startling new light.

Reward System

Laura Dobie

Hard to say exactly which impulse draws you back to the smartphone again and again; impossible to distinguish which behaviours are expressions of which initiating drives. Curiosity, boredom, the will to be entertained. A child's fear of the dark.

This sums up the experience of time passing in the pandemic perfectly.

If I'd written about it, I might have written that the daily density of world-changing events - crossed with the comparative scarcity of the kinds of routine personal micro-experiences that'd formerly set the pace of our lives - had caused our collective perception of time to simultaneously contract and dilate: hours now felt like days, days felt like weeks; but somehow, months also felt like weeks, and weeks like long afternoons. The recent past seemed further behind us than it really was, while the future had been indefinitely postponed. We were stranded in an eternal present.

Perfectly sums up how we’ve all felt at work sometimes!

The weekend has begun. As he emerges from the stairwell into the first floor's main work area, he thinks about all the weekends destined to follow on from this one, then about the many long workweeks that will precede those. Every hour of his life he feeds unchangingly into a cosmic timesheet, and that time is billable back only to himself.

Cut to now. When was the last time you read a full short story without, at some point, taking an intermission to check your device; refresh your feeds? Consider your forefathers/-mothers: did they feel it necessary to check their mailboxes every fifteen minutes? What, exactly, is going on here?

The sub-two-hundred words of text Dwyer has to edit are intended to preface a presentation deck scheduled for internal sign-off and client delivery by close of play this afternoon. Realistically, there are at most thirty minutes of actual work here for Dwyer to complete, although the task will take him somewhere in excess of three hours to fulfil - or that, at least, is how long he'll log the task as having taken him to fulfil when, later, he updates his daily timesheet. Small projects like these depend upon a level of inefficiency to turn a profit: the bureaucratic business model of the creative industry is to strategically over-allocate professional resources; the opposite of labour-saving. The more billable time you can expend on a project, the more money the company can justifiably charge to its client. The best work ethic you can have around here is a bad one. Dwyer highlights and unhighlights a field of electronic text; makes some minor grammatical amnendments: flips a few sentences from passive to active voice; dumbs down some smart words, smartens up some dumb words.

The Danish has staled in the air-conditioned air. Eating it, Honey settles into a preferred fantasy of his last day here. He will bring in a Krispy Kreme premium non-ring dozen with personalised raspberry-glaze lettering that reads ‘FUCK YOU ALL’ across the individual doughnuts - twelve exact characters including spaces.

For the first time in human history, no person has to think their own thoughts if they don't want to. Technology has opened new slots in the world through which instant, substanceless, distractive relief is accessible to the consumer at any moment. Anyone you talk to is simultaneously half-present in a more entertaining, disembodied social space that exists in an onscreen tangent-reality.,

Nick nodded. “So, what's keeping you here?”

Good question. To which the obvious answer was: where else could she go? All her friends were here, even though she never saw them, and so was her job, even though she didn't like it. This was, supposedly, the city where opportunity ran thick and fun things happened. There was no real alternative, and that alone had to justify its crippling cost of living and almost-unbreathable air.

The male user considered the further flaws of the algorithm-based dating app. To experience eary-stage romance easily and frequently discounts its value. By joining the algorithm-based dating app in the first place, users are, from the get-go, demonstrating the perforce failure of their romantic lives; their personal defectiveness and unlovability. Owing to the replicable means of their production, app-contrived relationships take on a modular structure, a design that fosters interchangeability. Relationships initiated by the algorithm-based dating app have no solid grounding in reality -no surrounding context- and, as such, unfold with the drifting narrative coherence of dreams.

The anticipation of enjoyment is a feeling texturally similar to dread. Their date loomed over the female user's week like a deadline.

Walking to the agreed-upon venue, the female user worried that she might struggle to generate conversation in the evening ahead. She reiterated several times to herself her overall strategy for the date, which was to present to the male user an exaggeratedly carefree, pretty, lite-version of her real self; a person-shaped suite of attractive gestures and responses whose outline she could gradually, somewhere down the line, restock with elements of the personality she actually had.

My problem was, I couldn't force myself to do the things I wanted to do; couldn't make myself start writing any more than I could make myself stop drinking. Some self-sabotaging mechanism in my personality derailed my every attempt to make positive changes in my life. 

In order to start making those changes, I reasoned, I would have to undergo some kind of pre-change change; become the kind of person who could readily make such changes. But how was I even supposed to make that ini- tial, pre-change change? Let alone the many incremental micro-changes I would first have to make on the way to making a pre-pre-change change?

I think we have all felt like this at a party.

When he finished, I considered telling my own tangentially related anecdote, doubted its applicability, and, by the time I had deemed it worthy of retelling, realised its window of relevance to the current conversation had closed.

She rolled her eyes in a way he couldn't not-notice and selected the middle of the five selectable radio buttons. Funny how it was impossible to return to the state of never having selected any button after you'd selected one of them. You could select a different button and switch your answer, but could not go back to the lifetime of pure potential you'd spent never having submitted to the limited logic of selecting an option from the questionnaire's scale of multiple choices.

Brilliant writing that perfectly captures modern life and its challenges, preoccupations, and the ever-present smartphone.

Reward System

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