Neijuan(en.wikipedia.org) |
Neijuan(en.wikipedia.org) |
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
The 996 working culture in this page is actually *996.ICU*. "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). [1]
Take a step further, do you want to overwork to death if you have other choices? One of the reasons behind 277k stars in 996.icu repo is that 996 working culture literally takes over every single corporations in China. With the downturn of China economy and the selective execution of Chinese labor law, in recent years, 996 becomes even harsher to labor force in China because there are more than overwork now, e.g. low salary and low human rights. When you say 'make the average consumer better off', you conveniently ignore the tears, sweets, and blood behind the facade of neijuan.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
Jeez, what an asshole.
The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici...
There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that literature.
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
内 "inside", 卷 "roll".
But if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.
Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.
I have been thinking of measuring it along these lines perhaps... https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability...
But they have a closed sourced software so I would have to find or create an open one in that case.
Happy to hear if you have any ideas on study design!
It's atomic, and one can't usually add value beyond a low threshold. If we're seeing more words–or tokens–used over time for a task which one cannot reasonably argue has gotten more complicated in that time, it would be direct evidence of involution. If you can relate that to competition for VC dollars or customers, that takes you over to Neijuan.