This Was A Triumph: Remote Work Dystopias from Portal to Pandemic

Lessons on remote revolution from the Aperture Science Enrichment Center

by Louis Evans

“This was a triumph. I’m making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS.”

– GLaDOS on the events of Portal

“I think we did a great job.”

– Donald Trump on the response to COVID-19

Isolation

You wake up alone. Your alarm clock’s going off, but otherwise there are no signs of human life and you don’t expect that to change. Nevertheless, it’s time to get to work—solving bizarre, abstract puzzles in a desolate landscape of constantly shifting mortal danger. 

Within the hour, you’ve formed an inappropriately emotional attachment to a friendly box.

The first thing you notice about the 2007 video game Portal is the isolation. You wake up in a minimalist space defined by vast sweeps of grey tile, white ceramic, and glare-free glass, a little bit like an Apple Store designed in hell¹. For the rest of the game², you will not encounter another living being. You yourself are human, with a ragged haircut and a “pajamas count as clothes in quarantine”-style tattered orange jumpsuit. But there are no other humans where you are. 

Since Pong, few video games have leaned this far into isolation. Even Pac-Man had the ghosts of all those dead astronauts to keep him company. 

This loneliness alone would make Portal seem relevant during our COVID-imposed quarantine, much the same way as all the old “bottle episodes” on TV shows have now suddenly taken on intense quarantine overtones. But there’s more to it than that. 

Loneliness alone would make Portal seem relevant during our COVID-imposed quarantine. But there’s more to it than that.

Alienation

Despite your total isolation, you’ve got plenty to do. A disembodied voice keeps pestering you with instructions—come here, go there, press that—which rapidly exceed your own innate capabilities. Fortunately, you soon get your hands on a miraculous device that lets you work remotely…

Capitalism has, since birth, been entangled with space. Not “space” as in “the final frontier”,³ but in the more prosaic sense of distance. The fundamental innovation of the merchant class was to arbitrage space, to move objects from where they are cheap to where they are expensive.⁴

But capitalism, as always, inevitably seeks to consume and destroy what it feeds upon. Space is no different. Faster ships, better roads, newer and more abstract methods of communication: century after century the twin engines of capitalism and state formation have ground down the fundamental essence of space, the once-inescapable reality that right here and over there were very different places indeed, even when separated by only a paltry handful of miles. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the railway, steamship, and telegraph, society had achieved “the defeat of distance.”⁵

If the modern era and its industrial infrastructure gave us the defeat of distance then surely the post-modern, post-industrial cyber-era has unleashed something further, not merely triumph but annihilation—less a “defeat of distance” than an abolition of space, brought to you by technologies that allow instantaneous communication and labor at a distance. Technologies such as Zoom or the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, for instance.⁶

This handy gizmo, universally known as the “portal gun”,⁷ represents the perfect fantasy of spooky labor at a distance, the reification of the digital abolition of space. Point and click here, and a blue orifice opens up on solid tile. Click there and its orange twin appears. The two are at once connected, allowing both people and things—labor and capital—to pass through.

Now, with distance disestablished, you can labor away to your heart’s content, only mildly inconvenienced by the ever-present threat of death, fulfilling the orders of a disembodied cognition and, coincidentally, earning your way to the cake in the break room GLaDOS keeps advertising!

Simulation

But not so fast. There’s something wrong in this dystopia.

I’m not talking about the Sentries, tripodal robots that gun you down while apologizing with android serenity, and who look and sound like nothing so much as Alexa with an assault rifle. While they’re obviously horrible they’re also clearly of-a-piece with the whole Aperture Science mood. 

No, I’m talking about the underside.⁸

A malfunctioning panel about halfway through the game first reveals to you that behind the smooth walls and high technology of the Aperture Science testing facility, there’s another world. A world of steam vents and ducts and churning machinery; a world with a handful of already-eaten disaster supplies; a world whose walls bear hand-scrawled warnings:

The cake is a lie.⁹

With distance disestablished, you can labor away to your heart’s content, only mildly inconvenienced by the ever-present threat of death.

As the game progresses, you get deeper and deeper peeks into this backworld, the world of grit below that keeps the world of shine above operating. Eventually, when GLaDOS shows her true colors and attempts to have you incinerated, you escape into the underside and traverse it to—spoiler alert—ultimately defeat her and escape.

And it’s this final conceit that cinches Portal’’s status as a COVID-19 game.

Because, after all… the descriptions above? The isolation, the loneliness, the alienation of remote pandemic work? All the cute little signifiers of the new abnormal, the sourdough starters, the Tiger King, the work shirt plus pajama pants? That’s the white collar apocalypse. Underneath it all, undergirding and making even this constrained life possible, is the world of labor. Front-line warehouse workers up to their necks in boxes; front-line nurses up to their necks in bodies. 

It’s not that the white collar lockdowns (though medically necessary) aren’t grueling. They certainly are. But, as always, the top-down production of culture misses the more fundamental reality of labor. Even in a digital wonderland, someone is still out there breaking their back. The cake is a lie. 

Revolution

This is the bit where a good leftist essay talks about the transformative power of revolutionary solidarity.

Sorry.

The truth is that Portal, despite its presciently incisive critique of the alienation of COVID capitalism, is ultimately a heroic narrative, not a revolutionary one. You, the player, are ever and always alone.¹⁰ And GLaDOS turns out to be not-so-disembodied after all¹¹; instead, she’s a classic corporeal video game final boss. 

No, any wisdom Portal has for us as we confront pandemic capitalism, malfunctioning security forces and megalomaniacal voices, is more cynical, more grounded. Portal tells us: don’t trust the powers that be. Don’t be fooled by the transfigurative powers of technology. Look to the underside, look to the substructure of labor. Remember. Adapt.

Survive.

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1. Which is, in fact, where the Apple Stores were designed.
2. It clocks in at a comfortable 3 hours and 15 minutes, 62% of a complete binge of Tiger King.
3. No lesser authorities than Gene Rodenberry and the Strugatsky brothers assure me that outer space belongs to the socialists.
4. At long last, a non-satiric footnote! See Deveraux, “Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”
5. This coinage is allegedly owed to a theorist with the satisfyingly chewy Germanic name of Ernst Wagemann, though I’ve only been able to find it attributed to him in Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Vol I, page 416.
6. The sequel reveals that this technology was developed at the behest of Cave Johnson, a megalomaniacal entrepreneur who was led into madness, penury, and eventually a choking, coughing death caused by his own indifferent safety precautions to the known airborne hazard of moon dust. The parallels to various real-world guillotine-worthy maniacs with more money and power than they deserve are left as an exercise to the reader.
7. To paraphrase Wilde, under capitalism, everything is about capitalism except capitalism. Capitalism is about war and death.
8. A Marxist might call it the “base” or “substructure”.
9. One of the most absurd correspondences between Portal and pandemic is this: Portal’s catchphrase is “the cake is a lie”; for a few lockdown summer days on Twitter, the lie was a cake.
10. Even in the sequel Portal 2, which introduces a range of additional characters as well as a two-player mode, there are no humans other than the player character. Portal passes the Bechdel Test (so long as you consider GLaDOS’s increasingly unhinged soliloquies to Chell as conversations) while still failing the Turing Test.
11.  Like a few other notable fictional hostile supercomputers, e.g. HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Skynet in Terminator 2, and unlike some other such AIs, e.g. AM in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” or Skynet in Terminator 3—but that’s another essay.