“Feeling so like robotic”

Lily Philips’s tears as a symbol of commodified work?

In Igor Stravinsky's ballet Rites of Spring, amidst the vitality and creativity of the season of rebirth, a virgin is ritualistically sacrificed. Stravisky shared that he created the ballet after he “dreamed a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin dances herself to death.” In Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Canadian historian Modris Eksteins, who quotes Stravinsky’s dream, analyses what made the ballet scandalous to many members of its audience and critics when it opened in Paris in 1913: “[The virgin] submitted to a fate that transcended her. The theme was basic and at the same time brutal. If there was any hope, it was in the energy and fertility of life, not in morality. To an audience decked out in its civilized finery, the message was jarring. The music was equally jarring. It lacked ornamentation, moral intimation, and even, for the most part, melody.” The subject of the ballet thus “brought the very notion of civilization into question,” and “the music underlined this challenge” (Kindle locations 1069-1077). For Ekstein, Rites of Spring and the ways in which it challenged sexual, aesthetic and moral norms foreshadowed the fissure in the culture that soon afterward became evident in the destructiveness of World War One—during which many previously held ideals such as honor and duty died in the trenches.

About 110 years after the outbreak of World War One, in October 2024, British OnlyFans performer Lily Philips had sex with 100 men in one day. Josh Pieters filmed a documentary in which he interviews Philips before and after this extreme undertaking, and clips from his documentary went viral, generating fierce commentary and debate. While in the days leading to her undertaking Philips expressed excitement about what she depicted as her own fantasy and desire (not just the desire to make money), at the end of the documentary she breaks down in tears and expresses pain at “feeling so like robotic.” She reports having had to disassociate in order to go through with her task and feeling “so bad” that while she promised each men 5 minutes of her time, she often was able to offer only 2-3 minutes. She also says that she can remember only 5-6, perhaps 10, men out of the 100 she had sex with. However, despite what seems like trauma and remorse, Philips soon after went on to announce her next goal: to sleep with 1000 men over 24 hours in early 2025, despite the apparent arithmetical impossibility of this task. Once again, Philips is describing her undertaking as something that she loves and enjoys rather than as something that she is forcing herself into.

For good reasons, the debate about Lily Philips has focused on questions of sexual exploitation and morality. Is Philips more sinned against by the men who purchase her services or more sinning by making herself millions through this extremely unhealthy commodification of herself and by feigning passion to lure men into putting themselves in the position of abusers? In the context of this debate, many crucial points have been made about the sanctity of sex, about the body as a temple, about health, about abuse, and about whether our society has standards of right and wrong any more.

While these questions about the sex industry should remain the focus of the discussion, I also feel that Lily Philips’s unhealthy undertaking brings us into contact more broadly with the ghosts of commodified work—past, present and future.

In The Sacrifice, Adele Wiseman describes the life of a Jewish family who fled to Canada after a pogrom in the Ukraine in the early twentieth century. Their only son, Isaac, works in a garment factory in an unidentified Canadian city, but ultimately rebels against the conditions there, and especially against the abuse of Rusen, a highly skilled craftsman who could have thrived under more humane work conditions:

“Would he end up like old Rusen, then, who sat across from him, glued to the machine, his hands trembling when the foreman shouted for more speed and he tried to hurry? He imagined himself an old man, bent over the machine, afraid to steal a moment to pause and crack a joke, resented by the other workers because he sometimes worked through his lunch hour and they thought he was trying to get ahead of them, picked on by the foreman because he was too slow. The foreman had it in for Rusen in particular because, though the boss was always yammering at him for more production, he wouldn’t let him fire the old man. Every time he brought a prospective buyer to the factory the boss pointed out that this was no ordinary sweat shop that worked on the principle of mass production at the price of good workmanship. Here, for example, was Rusen, one of the best old-style craftsmen left in the city, at one of his machines—and not just turning out samples to fool buyers; turning out the actual goods. In his shop it was quality first, speed second” (96).

Isaac eventually speaks out against the hypocritical abuse of Rusen, appearing like a Moses who strikes a slave driver:

“Finally Moscovitch stationed himself behind old Rusen. The old man’s hands trembled as he guided the material into the machine. He did not stop working when the foreman spoke to him, but his furrowed, anxious face began to sweat. Leave him alone, thought Isaac. Leave him alone. For a moment he saw himself in Rusen’s place, his back misshapen by the years of bending over the machine; slow – even now he was sometimes tired – unable to feed the machine quickly enough to fill the bellies of his family, and not even a master craftsman to be kept on by a whim of the boss. The foreman continued to stand over the old man. ‘All right, all right,’ Isaac said out loud. ‘Leave him alone.’ The neighboring machines paused suddenly. Isaac felt his body begin to shake as though with a chill. His heart thudded irregularly. He stopped his machine. ‘Leave him alone,’ he repeated, noticing, to his amazement, that he was almost shouting. When he left the shop he was without a job. His heart still beat too quickly, so that he had to pause, leaning for a few moments against the wall of the building. But the fresh air smelled good. Only now he realized how he had hated the shop” (99-100).

While The Sacrifice describes the reality in garment factories, it also articulates the idea that there are “better” jobs:

“Someday, yes, someday people would see what a teacher Isaac would make. Then there would be no more shop. Then they would take him into the Hebrew school and then they would hear; then they would find him worth listening to” (127).

But are we coming under pressure to make almost all work, including in the knowledge fields, more commodified? Do the words “feeling so like robotic” threaten to affect also professions that we tend to assume would have higher levels of liberty?

Lily Philips’s business scheme is brutally, grotesquely rational. By subjecting herself to extreme commodification on OnlyFans, Philips has made herself into a millionaire. In a short period of time, she is making more than what many people make in a lifetime. But does Philips’s self-commodification also stand as a symbol of a broader cultural trend by which a great deal of work that is not nearly as well paid as Philip’s has been coming under a quantity-over-quality pressure? I am thinking, for example, about a person in the knowledge economy who has to take on more contracts than they can comfortably handle to make ends meet. Each contract in itself could be enjoyable—but the sheer amount and pressure of work creates suffering. I am thinking also about education and about how growing class sizes can make it hard to remember the names of all students or to spend more than a certain number of minutes providing feedback on each assignment. Or what about medical clinics that tell patients that they cannot discuss more than one medical problem in an appointment because this is not how the billing scheme works?

In today’s knowledge economy, there is a lot less shouting and overt abuse than in the sweat shops, factories and other places of employment depicted in Wiseman’s The Sacrifice or in Charles Dickens’s work. But the commodification of work and the creation of a new aristocracy of experts does create an ongoing risk of exploitation. Lily Philips’s tears resonated with me because despite the very unusual and extreme nature of her business, and despite the wealth that she accumulates though her business model, I felt that Philips gave expression to a kind of widespread cultural sadness that many of us carry in our hearts about being rushed and being forced to commodify work that should be allowed more space, time and depth.

In “Pedagogy and Pleasure,” a chapter in The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber tell professors, “Whatever else we do, we need first, as [Mary] O’Reilley memorably puts it, to stop abusing ourselves with overwork: ‘it doesn’t help students. . . learn, it ruins our health and causes us to have colourful breakdowns—but the most important reason is that it ultimately makes us hate students’” (50). One of the quotes that prefaces The Slow Professor is Hillary Rettig’s observation that “moment by moment, when we’re rushed, we’re simply not the people we’re capable of being.” But who can be included in that “we?” How many people can realistically seek the fulfillment of slow work without exploiting others and without implicitly claiming quasi-aristocratic status for themselves?

Responding to The Slow Professor, Physics contract professor Andrew Robinson provides a sobering and scathing reality check:

“I have never seen such a grotesque example of tenured faculty privilege. Imagine, Canadian academics, some of the best paid academics in the entire OECD, are deciding that they want to slow things down and take it a bit easier. Because they are overworked. Poor darlings. . . . As contract faculty I don’t have this luxury. My pay is so bad that I have to take as much work as possible, to maintain even a modest standard of living. I’m not part of the Canadian middle class, by any measure of income. Tenured faculty earn at least three times what I do. So my sympathy for them, as you might imagine, is extremely limited. . . . I can tell you exactly what being a ‘Slow Professor; will cost me. It will cost me 20% of my annual earnings, the princely sum of C$6750. As a sessional lecturer/contract instructor (Adjunct Professor in the US), I am an academic serf paid for piece-work. Each piece is a one semester long course. If I want a vacation and take quiet time to contemplate things, then I have to stop working for two months and so I don’t get paid”

https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/slow-professors-yeah-right-539a1b84dd24

Is “slowness” increasingly becoming an aristocratic privilege—with “the rest of us” coming under pressure to accept quality-over-quantity situations in order to make a living?

In Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, Victoria Sweet suggests that physicians can find ways to be “‘Slow’ in the midst of Fast:”

“[Slow medicine] is not a Way that excludes “Fast” or the Way of Fast. It does not reject seeing the body as a machine and being a good mechanic, who traces the source of his patient’s suffering to its origin, who might even take things apart, repair and replace. Nor does it reject the tools of the fantastic medical progress I have witnessed in my life as a physician. Rather, it is a Way that incorporates Slow and Fast, the Way of the Gardener and the Way of the Mechanic, that sees these two Ways as tools in its little black bag and uses the right tool for the job. It is a solid Way built on excellence—of method, of knowledge and experience, of hard work. But also on the personal, the individual, and the face-to-face” (268).

When Sweet and Berg and Seeber wrote their manifestos, it was before ChatGPT became a thing in 2022. Artificial intelligence adds a dimension to Philips’s ominous “feeling so like robotic.” In the context of education, ChatGPT presents the temptation to have AI do our work for us so that one can have more “quality time”—but at the expense of the slow pleasure of building up knowledge and intellectual skills through hard work. But what will happen in the gig knowledge economy when generative AI becomes the norm? Will knowledge workers come under pressure to produce work faster and for less money so that it will be practically impossible to make a living without using generative AI?

I remember my first moment of contact with ChatGPT. I was reading Peter Lindsay’s The Craft of University Teaching. Lindsay was quoting “Jim Holt’s description in the New York Review of Books of self-similarity, the defining characteristic of fractals [never-ending pattern].” The concept is explained with the example of a cauliflower:

“To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form – the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process – and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole” (p. 82).

From time immemorial, human beings have found it meaningful to challenge each other with questions and riddles. So I thought it would be cool to ask one of my WhatsApp groups, “what do you think it means to say that a cauliflower is self-similar?” In what seems to be almost instantly, I got a response that essentially reproduced the book that I read. This is when I first encountered ChatGPT. It was impressive, but it also seemed to take away the pleasures and rewards of turning inward, of asking oneself questions, of slowly thinking, of experiencing the tender vulnerability of saying, “I do not know.”

In the story “The Wampum Belt Tells Us” Basil H. Johnston’s imagines the first contact between Indigenous people and Europeans in what later became Canada, reflecting on the imminent decline of Indigenous ways of being:

“Over the years the White people will prosper while our people will grow even poorer. Though our people and our kin and other nations of our race will forsake our heritage and take up the ways of the White people, it won’t do them much good. It will not be until our grandchildren and their descendants return to their values and traditions and beliefs that they will regain the strength and the heart to master new challenges. . . Otherwise they will vanish as smoke vanishes into the sky” (p. 88).

As we are being colonized by AI, are we at risk of cultivating conditions in which working slowly with passion and with attention to quality will “vanish as smoke vanishes into the sky” and will no longer be possible as a way of making a living? If the commodification of one’s work becomes, for many people, a necessity of making ends meet, then Lily Philip’s sexual sin might become our own anti-virginal Rites of Spring. When Lily Philips cries, I feel sorry for her. I also wonder if Philips’s temptation to make millions by subjecting herself to a spectacle of exploitation might be a bizarre symbol for something even sadder—the fact that for many people who have to make ends meet, the commodification of work at the expense of quality is not even a choice.

Sources (quotes of books are from Kindle editions)

Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (University of Toronto Press, 2016)

Andrew Robinson’s response to The Slow Professor:

https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/slow-professors-yeah-right-539a1b84dd24

Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Vintage Canada edition 2012; copyright 1989)

Basil Johnston’s “The Wampum Belt Tells Us” in Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past (Anchor Canada, 2004)

Peter Lindsay’s The Craft of University Teaching (University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Victoria Sweet’s Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (Riverhead Books, 2017)

Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice (Penguin 2016; copyright 1956).

Josh Pieters’s documentary about Lily Philips:

I Slept With 100 Men in One Day | Documentary

Image—dancers from Rites of Spring:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RiteofSpringDancers.jpg