There are secrets that have no secret. Patricia Conde’s words about Masterchef can be cryptic, unsettling, and intriguing. It is morbid to see him say and refute them in successive paraphrases, but if the specific facts that inspire them are more or less obscure, there can be no denying that they are at the same time obvious.
We may never know what happened, although what happened is clear: Masterchef reproduces with such success the conditions of exploitation and slavery that prevail in so many companies that even the stars who live in TV fiction learn about it and know the codes of reality television You forget the scam and succumb like the most fragile intern to the most ruthless company.
Not a single ingredient is missing: humiliation, abuse, gaslighting, harassment… Everything is possible to offer the show of contemporary success, that fable in which the heroes are galley slaves of a slave ship and who endures the lashes with a smile, wins.
Masterchef explains why remote working doesn’t work. After the plague, many thought the offices’ days were numbered because they were inefficient and expensive, but Elon Musk and his apostles are in favor of preserving them because it’s very difficult to abuse and humiliate someone who is at home is. The battles over Zoom are less battles.
The success of the program is consistent with an individualistic, highly competitive world of work, with no unions and no notion of collaboration, solidarity or collective work. How can viewers not identify with a show that reflects so well the conditions in which millions of people work? Masterchef tells life today better than the Dickens novels told in 19th-century London, except that Dickens didn’t hire a child to call him Oliver Twist and relay Cain’s stories to the world at large.
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