Decades ago, Roland Barthes quipped that “one is a writer as Louis XIV was king, even on the toilet”. He was mocking the way literary types like to distinguish themselves from the mass of working people. Writers insist, Barthes believed, that their productive activities are not limited to any time and place, but flow constantly like an “involuntary secretion”.
Well, we are all writers now, at least in this sense. Stealing a few holiday hours to work on an article used to be my party trick. Now I find that, on Mondays and Fridays when many office buildings stand empty, my salaried comrades are sending emails from an Airbnb somewhere. Come the weekend, they might close their laptops, but they don’t stop checking their phones.
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