Opinion On the Loose: 5-Minute Rule

But alas, on the ground, StandardToilet feels brutally dehumanising, a warning almost, that there robots are lurking dangerously close, and they don’t waste any time in the loo at all. The fear of technology’s inexorable march finishing job opportunities will eventually leave people no choice but to agree, humiliatingly, to have their bodily functions monitored at work. Maybe next, somebody will design a super absorbent diaper, the kinds astronauts wear when they go on moonwalks, which will remove the need for an office loo itself. Products like these make one almost long for something akin to a Luddite revolt, and for the world to break out into anti-tech riots.

This brilliant and bizarre toilet invention, somehow, brings to mind the Pink Floyd chant We Don’t Need No Education. In the video of this deeply cynical track, the child protagonist suffers the rigours of a monotonous schooling system, where kids are punished for creativity. The song shows a choir of children walking rigidly in line — cogs in wheels— before turning into identical sausages. Like no free thinkers, visionaries or entrepreneurs can emerge out a system like this, analysing employee productivity down to a pee break, may be similarly counter productive. Anyone with office experience knows people spend time talking, listening, often about stuff related to work, and sometimes not. There are coffee breaks, samosa breaks, lunch breaks and smoking breaks because we’re not robots. Workplace chatter is part of the process. In fact, many forward thinking start-ups have rejected goal-oriented targets and have days set aside, where employees are encouraged only to think. All the research suggests, that’s when the big ideas come.

Of course, it’s not the people in management positions who need to worry that their bathroom breaks may be scrutinised down to seconds. It’s the low paid and precarious factory worker packing cardboard boxes for the likes of Amazon, or the household domestic, who will passively slide off StandardToilet in five minutes, because between automation and off shoring, there are not a whole lot of job options left. It is worth reflecting on if citizen dissent whether in Paris— where French activists just cut electricity to 1,00,000 homes to protest against the raising of the retirement age — or in Hong Kong or New Delhi, where students are rallying against the Citizen (Amendment) Act, is more than just political critiquing.

It’s also an irrational cry for help against a bleak future, of a struggling planet and a dystopic work culture, that makes the upcoming new decade feel particularly hard. StandardToilet seems like an appropriate emblem of this like-it-or-not realism, raising more depressing questions on the virtues of apparent progress. —hutkayfilms@gmail.com