The secret life of the office:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S6RCKPY32Lg

The history of the office from a 90s perspective, cw: its from the 90s...

#office

I was familiar with "bullshit jobs" as a term and book, but only now reading it. This video fits very well.

#bullshitjobs #davidgraeber #books #economy

@wmd “What the F do you do at an office job?

Right, so a lot of people are confused about what an office actually is. Some people have this misconception that offices like function or like produce something. That's a common misunderstanding. They're actually religious building. There's this religion called professionalism and one of its core tenets is hierarchy. So an office is just a shrine to hierarchy. Here are things about like a mission or a vision or a goal. These are not real. The actual purpose of being in an office is to like demonstrate that, you know, this form of worship. So it's a polytheistic religion. It's a little complicated.

The gods in professionalism are companies, which are non-human deities that sometimes take human form as these things called C-levels. So that's basically like a high priest to this deity, right? So that's at the top is the C-level. It might be a CEO, CFO, whatever. And they don't really do anything. Their purpose is to just like physically be there. Like the temple is just a place for them to waft around.

So their immediate sort of servants are called managers. And these people, their job is to kind of observe the lower ranks and make sure that those people are doing their jobs. The thing is the managers don't know how to do any of those jobs. So they can't actually tell if anybody is doing their job. It's mostly a ceremonial role. And they do perform ceremonies. One of them is called the one-on-one. This is where the manager sits down with the worker and the worker kind of reads off a list of everything they weren't able to do because it was impossible. And then the manager will quote the Holy Scripture. It'll be something like, "I would love to see a more flexible mindset about what is possible." It doesn't have to make sense. It's traditional.

So below them are the specialized workers. And these people kind of have a job. Like there's a thing that definitely does or doesn't happen that is their responsibility. This might be like an IT person or like a researcher or like a UX designer. But because managers obviously don't know how to assess whether that work was done, really the function of workers is to bear witness to the space. So like you're supposed to be physically present for a certain amount of time. You have to wear like special regalia that is compliant within the tenets of professionalism. And then you usually have to assume this like meditative pose where you're behind a desk and staring at a screen. But it doesn't matter what you're doing. during that time you can just you can just play dwarf fortress and that's fine.

And then on the bottom of the hierarchy you have the office bitch this is sometimes called an office assistant or an intern this is the closest you'll get in an office to like a person who has an actual job they do with their hands in the mornings you'll like make sure that the coffee machines have paper and ink and make sure the coffee is made you'll spend most of your day like running around the building moving objects around like this binder goes over here and this chair goes over here sometimes you'll go out into the village and pick up people's like food or paperwork from all of periodically give offerings to the sea levels that are called email. There's no evidence that anything actually happens when you do this, it's just like an exercise of faith.

But it works, like money comes out, so.”

@wmd
100 years from now (of humans exist) this is how they see our current generations.

And they sigh, and call as dumb, whine our ancient spirits go "yup."

@wmd Things in the office.

(When I'm not in office, I do non-office things or I don't do office things, take your pick.)

@wmd

*applauds*