In capitalist society, work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.
—PAUL LAFARGUE
Work sucks, I know.
—BLINK-182
Most Americans despise their jobs, yet suffer from a species of brain worm that makes them believe work is inherently virtuous. America thinks of itself as a come-to-play-every-day, lunch-pail kind of nation, possessing intangible strengths like “coachability,” “instinct,” and “a century or so of a free labor supply” that have made us rich, powerful, and the envy of the world. The American Work Ethic sets us apart from flashy, hip-hop-style, vacation-taking European countries and other players with raw, natural ability, like China. We keep our heads down, never complain, and grind every day. That’s how global economic champions are made.
And, for some reason, we take for granted that for the majority of the precious handful of decades we’re alive, we’ll be making money for someone else, doing something we’d rather not do. Not only do we resign ourselves to this fate, we want nothing more than to make sure everyone else is roped into the assembly line as well. At the bottom of our stomachs we hate our bosses, but we dream of someday becoming them. Political theorists call this “fake consciousness,” and there is no faker friend than your boss, no faker crew than your workplace.
So why do we put up with it? The answer lies in a shared set of national beliefs about work and how it sets us free. The first key myth in this psychology is a timeless classic you’ll hear from warehouse managers, boomer dads, and Joe Biden: “Work builds character.” Here’s the latter at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, quoting his own dad:
Dad never failed to remind us that a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about—[applause]—it’s about your dignity. [Cheers, applause.] It’s about respect. It’s about your place in the community. It’s about being able to look your child in the eye and say, Honey, it’s going to be okay, and mean it, and know it’s true. [Cheers, applause.]
Usually when people invoke “character,” it means some combination of grit, patience, determination, ingenuity, focus, self-discipline, and empathy. And sure, these are all good things that make for self-confident and healthy individuals.
But now ask yourself: Does your job bring out these traits in you, your colleagues, or your boss? Or is it much more likely to bring out things like anxiety, impatience, petulance, authoritarianism, and a pent-up sense of homicidal rage? The contradiction is easy to unpack: the idea that work “builds character” makes sense only outside the context of wage labor, the reality of most people’s employment. Sexless Silicon Valley weirdos and horny reptilian politicians alike talk about work as a matter of innate human creativity, self-determination, and boundless possibility. In fact, most jobs chip away at those things until they’ve been completely annihilated. Jobs destroy character, day after miserable day. They drain all the time and energy you would otherwise have for fun, sex, hobbies, and anything other than staring blankly at a computer in the couple of hours you have to yourself after 7:00 p.m.
So when old people tell you that work builds character, what they really mean is that it trains you to slog through hopelessness and alcoholism and to redirect your unexpressed rage toward your family and your loved ones. It doesn’t build character, but it sure does build a tolerance to the antidepressants, mood stabilizers, five-hour energy diarrhea drinks, and “focus”-enhancing drugs coursing through your bloodstream.
Another uniquely American lie meant to cover all this up is the idea that “the rich work hardest of all.” The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (after brutally suppressing a grassroots “Occupy” movement) immediately pretended it never happened.
Sure, the average CEO or VP may work “longer hours” than you, maybe, but what are they actually doing with their time? By definition, the only things their job affords them the time to do are pace around their huge office, promote and attend conferences, glaze over during PowerPoint presentations created by other people, trade golf stories over three-martini lunches, and worry about their taxes. The factor of their income over that of a regular person is so astronomical that to be “equal” they would have to work hundreds of times harder and give 10,000 percent all the time. Also: since the 1980s, bosses don’t get paid only in terms of salary, they get stock options, too, which are taxed less than income. As a reward for being a good test taker—or, more likely, for being the child of a good test taker—bosses are compensated at a rate that would shame the Egyptian pharaohs, all in return for “blue-sky thinking” and “inno-vention” that mostly involves putting a marketable gloss on wage theft and parasitic rent-seeking. The average CEO gets paid three hundred times more than you do solely for being the type of creep who impresses imbeciles like David Brooks at Davos.
All right, so maybe they don’t toil as hard as their workers, but at least the big bosses do some good by hiring all those workers, right?
At one point during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called the parents of a fallen US Army officer, Humayun Khan, “so unfair to me, very unfair.” In response to this, George Stephanopoulos asked him if he’d ever sacrificed anything in his life comparable to what the Khans and their son had. He responded: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I created thousands and thousands of jobs.” Pressed to elaborate, he said, “I think those are sacrifices. I think when I can employ thousands and thousands of people, take care of their education, take care of so many things [sic].” This quote made headlines for a few hours before being overtaken in the news cycle when Trump claimed, “I fucked Bigfoot. Beautiful! Tremendous!” But it deserves to be remembered.
Of all the off-the-cuff imbecility that Trump spouted during his soggy march toward the White House, this nugget is one of the most revealing bits: How could anyone define the extraction of surplus labor from thousands of people—to fund the construction of Trump’s diamond-encrusted sexcopter—as an act of “sacrifice”? Because, somewhere along the way, a Chamber of Commerce messaging gremlin turned the base metal of capitalist exploitation into the shimmering gold of “job creation.” And, because we’ve torn organized labor to pieces and shipped the shreds to China to be reassembled and shipped back to us as Emperor’s New Groove Happy Meal toys, there’s no one in a position of power to call bullshit on it.
The ugly truth is that no employer hires anyone unless they can extract more value from them than they have to pay out in wages and benefits.
But what about the good ones? “Small businesses”? This fetish is widespread even on the Left. It’s nice to think that, far away from the Borg-like monopolies of Wal-Mart and Comcast, there exists a benign, plucky, authentic type of business, perhaps run by a cute old Italian couple who employ a bunch of young boys in aprons with slicked-back hair who carry big paper bags of groceries to your doorstep.
If this kind of shop even still exists, it’s likely that those slick-haired boys have no stake in the business, have shitty or zero benefits, and are probably huffing vitamins every hour to make it through the day. Little old Giuseppe works everybody till 8:00 p.m., doesn’t pay overtime, and has a tendency to pinch all the young women on the hip any chance he gets. Meanwhile, his wife day-drinks and occasionally slips the word eggplant into her unnecessary monologues about “urban types” hanging around the neighborhood.
Even more likely, this mythical old couple is actually a loud, crew cut–sporting Trump voter or anti-vaccine Wine Mom who gets away with abusing his or her employees even more than the corporate droids working for Target and McDonalds do. Small-business owners are, generally speaking, insane egomaniacs who believe enough in their “pizza restaurant with a night club atmosphere” to borrow $250,000 and lord it over a workforce of desperate people. And you know what? Even if the boss is a nice person (it can happen), they still deny their employees an equal share in the profits of the business and continue to prop up the completely arbitrary social order that lifts up people with access to a bank loan and makes everyone else dependent on their personal generosity.
The simple fact is, bosses aren’t your friends, they’re not your parents, and they’re not your benefactors. They want to turn your sweat and anxiety and mounting desperation into a second Jet Ski. Asking nicely has never gotten workers anywhere, but that’s what people tend to do when they think their boss hired them out of the goodness of his heart. Don’t fall for it. The next time you hear “job creator,” just imagine your boss sitting on his ass eating a foie gras burrito while you pull a fist-sized ball of pubic hair out of the break room sink.
Our modern world runs on pay-by-the-irregular-heartbeat courier apps, “consulting,” and financial instruments that will bankrupt pensions if a certain species of bird doesn’t go extinct. But it wasn’t always like this. To understand how mind-numbingly stupid your job is now, you must first understand the history of the labor economy.
ANCIENT TIMES
After humans stopped hunting and gathering for themselves and their immediate families, they started to realize complex needs beyond mere subsistence and rudimentary horniness. Homes needed to be built. Swords needed to be forged. Fucked-up condoms made out of animal bladders that people in the past liked, because they felt natural, needed to be sewn. These ancient occupations were usually centered around necessities, with a smaller portion of jobs devoted to the desires of the wealthy. If you were lucky, you could have been Julius Caesar’s foreskin cleaner, King Leonidas’s slave trainer, or Hammurabi’s coder.
THE MIDDLE AGES
After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were some career opportunities in literature and science in places like the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and East Asia. But LinkedIn was hundreds of years away, so people in northern Europe and the scattered remains of the western Roman Empire couldn’t relocate to take part in the challenging team-based solutions that made up the burgeoning industries of the East. Instead, they toiled away, creating new, stupid wolf gods for the tribes of the region to worship; bashing rocks into other rocks to create new, exciting shapes; and graffitiing vulgar complaints on abandoned Roman aqueducts in a precursor to the modern Internet comment section.
As civilized kingdoms consolidated their power in Europe, the Saxons, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Megagoths, and other assorted tribespeople started to take on even more specialized occupations. For some, that meant translating the Bible into new languages. For others, that meant heaving dead bodies directly into water reservoirs and blaming subsequent deaths on Jewish magic.
But for 99 percent of humanity, this meant being a landless peasant. Serfdom was a full-time job doing backbreaking agricultural labor for a local liege lord, who in turn offered you physical protection from such threats as Saracens, Vikings, and forest berries that turned you gay if you ate them. In fact, until the invention of capitalism, serfdom was the most efficient economic system. It meant full employment and short commutes, as peasants would be helpfully reminded through light dismemberment that they weren’t allowed to wander more than ten furlongs away from the hovel where they were born. They spent their entire lives toiling, then died having never found out their last names.
In our modern information economy, we might find this absurd—the idea of a job that requires you to be responsive to your boss’s whims at all hours of the week for little to no compensation, forced to adopt officially acceptable political and religious views under threat of termination, and made to live in tiny, dilapidated quarters with total strangers. Indeed, if you’re reading this book in your service job’s dark, gas-lit breakroom or for a media internship that expects you to blog about how problematic our show is, you’re probably wondering how feudal society could have been so backward. But remember that medieval rulers didn’t have the benefit of the scientific field of economics that we enjoy today and were thus forced to rely on the augury of court wizards, whose analyses of entrails led them to recommend that a lower tithe rate would spur job growth and ward off the birth of two-headed cattle.
In fourteenth-century England, however, one man rejected the wisdom of the wizards and decided to wander off the road to serfdom. This plucky lowborn, Wat Tyler, led a peasant revolt, spurred on by the words of radical priest John Ball: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” This insistence that it was against God and the notion of equality for the landed aristocracy to exploit the labor of those born into servitude was one of the earliest recorded organized harassment campaigns. The insurgents captured London and sacked several government palaces before the situation was resolved when Tyler and Ball were captured by Richard II’s men and mutilated to death, convincing the peasants to return home and agitate for incremental change by working within the system.
THE RENAISSANCE
Yes, streets were still paved with human shit, kings were still chosen based on who had the most first cousins for ancestors, and people still thought the devil tricked them into being horny, but the concept of work was starting to resemble its modern incarnation. It took a plague that nearly ended civilization and a series of pointless wars over who was more Catholic, but distinctly nontorturous jobs were beginning to spring up.
Take the day of a typical merchant:
6:00 A.M.: Drink a nice breakfast beverage made of ale, oats, mud, and eggs.
7:00 A.M.: Check up on your daughters to see which one will command the highest market price when she reaches the marrying age of eight.
9:00 A.M.: Trudge your way through the bog-like streets to your establishment, where your perfectly smooth workboy is toiling away at your inventory of leather condoms and selling spices from the Far East that are too spicy for white people, such as salt, and Big Marco Polo–brand pantaloons.
12:30 P.M.: A bird carrying a message from your mistress informs you that your bastard son has inherited your cleft chin.
12:45 P.M.: Outraged, you scream at your smooth workboy to nonspecifically “work harder,” ride your horse to the countryside, barge into your mistress’s inn, and examine your illegitimate son for facial similarities.
2:00 P.M.: Drink your brunch mead and then make your way back to town.
4:00 P.M.: Arrive back at your establishment and inform the workboy that you’re going to meet God.
5:30 P.M.: Trudge home, defeated, and find out three of your seventeen legitimate children have died.
Despite the honor with which such men conducted themselves, there was still a stratosphere of upper-middle-class professions above them. Unlike in today’s childproofed, safety-padded world, where it’s seen as “cool” to go to the doctor instead of dying of one of several diarrhea-related illnesses, the coolest thing you could be in the Middle Ages was a really tough guy. If you weren’t lucky enough to be born a lord, duke, or prince but were absolutely amazing at murdering serfs, you could still be a knight. Knights were the Special-Ops guys of this time, in that they loved gear and functioned as tools for moneyed carriers of syphilis. People thought that was insanely badass, for some reason. Whether it was those storied knights of England, the samurai of Nippon, or the Varangian Guards of Byzantium, every culture at this time had a venerated warrior class. Quite rightfully, no one in those days respected actors or scribes or anyone who could read, so the elite warriors were the real celebrities. But just like the democracy of YouTube now makes celebrity attainable for anyone who can perform cruel and bizarre pranks, the earth was about to open up for the 5 percent of people who didst whatever it tooketh.
As the major nations began expanding their colonial properties, trade between states and continents grew immeasurably. It wasn’t a rising tide that lifted all boats, but it was a chance to get ahead for people who would do absolutely anything to anybody for a quick buck. If a seafaring sociopath could avoid dying of a funny disease like syphilis or a severe vitamin deficiency, being murdered by his crew, or drowning while attempting to make love to a mermaid, he had the opportunity to return to his homeland for his high school reunion and brag that he’d enslaved thousands, killed millions more through disease, and earned his weight in gold. If one had a genetic susceptibility to diarrhea, there was always the fallback position of intermediary for goods plundered from faraway lands.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belonged to slave brokers and codpiece merchants, they were about to get some company. Technological advances in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that were supposed to ease the workload of the poor ended up ramping up their exploitation by making every hour of labor even more ruthlessly efficient. The average peasant may have been illiterate and convinced that his erections controlled the tides, but he knew enough to understand that toiling away in a Dark Satanic Mill sucked ass, so he avoided it. Luckily, the budding capitalist and landowning classes had a foolproof method for creating a motivated, agile workforce: enclosure. That’s where you go to a piece of land that had been used for common grazing and foraging for generations, throw a fence around it, and say, “This is mine now.” Deprived of their means of subsistence, peasants flocked to cities and filled factory floors, working endlessly to pay for food and lodging that just a few years earlier had been theirs by birthright. This process of dispossession and exploitation was repeated much more brutally for slaves in North America. The lower you were in the labor economy, the more your bosses could squeeze out of you and suck the marrow.
But for the burgeoning middle class and above, life couldn’t be better. The wonders of factories, railways, and overall more efficient technology allowed them to acquire wealth while doing very little, and at a greater pace than had ever been seen before. Around this time, the culture of the upper middle class was created. These lucky folks who achieved a decent income needed to differentiate themselves from their mud-drinking forebears, and they did it with the dullest cultural affectations and lamest hobbies possible. They formed a scene that differed from that of the gentry, who entertained themselves with bum fights, “racism orgies,” and pederasty.
So, the petite bourgeoisie started eating curiously wet cheeses, seeing plays to make sure they were bad, and babbling endlessly about university wait lists. These things remain the cornerstones of the global upper middle class to this day. Trends such as dog therapy and making one’s own bead jewelry may come and go, but the most boring people you know today can trace their intellectual lineage to these middle managers of yore. But if one wasn’t incredibly rich, solidly well off, or poor enough to be killed with zero recourse, one had to take a different path. Yes, the lower middle class was relegated to the dumbest occupations yet seen.
After industrialization, a typical lower-middle-class job would be to ride a boat around the world, find rare species of birds, and kill them with your bare hands. The less wanderlust-filled of this type could also slot into occupations like flagpole dancer, iron-lung feces remover, and child catcher. Only the last job is recognizable in today’s economy, as it merged with plantation overseer to become what is now known as “police officer.” In the later 1800s, these demeaning lower-middle-class jobs dovetailed nicely with colonialism. Colonialism had always existed, but the aforementioned technological and supply-chain advances allowed foreign wealth and labor extraction by rich powers to happen at a previously unimaginable clip. This necessitated a massive presence of officers and their support staff, who were often former bird annihilators and accordion cleaners.
Or, perhaps you were a British colonial officer in India. As an upper-middle-class striver, your true talent came from what you learned by socializing in boarding school. To wit: you may have been charged with overseeing slave labor, working out logistics for mineral interests, and meting out punishment to your colonial subjects, but you actually collected the bulk of your income by looking the other way when your bosses would, say, have a bunch of children pee on their backs while they masturbated. If the colonial underlings were discreet and helpful, they would be rewarded with class mobility.
Today, we can trace accountants, small-business owners, and even the very minor gentry to those imperialist helping hands who could keep a secret a century or two ago. Their descendants don’t usually have to witness such rampant murder or sexual psychosis firsthand, however, but instead they must relegate their approval of it. Like many things, the personal touch is lost as time goes on.
THE MODERN AGE
If two features of the premodern world were blaming Jews for plagues and writing long, boring posts, they were about to merge in a new and horrifying way. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured inconceivably destructive wars, catastrophic economic depressions, and crushing austerity in the face of horrors that seemed to interrupt one another before the first cataclysm had even reached its climax.
With every boom comes a bust, and the modern economy had its fair share. In the olden days, you could lose your job if the species you were skinning went extinct, or you could die because your boss made you drink mercury as part of a science experiment. Once capitalism was in full swing, workers were subject to volatile business cycles, rapid extinction of entire industries, speculation that fucked up the markets, and financialization that frequently cratered the economy and wiped out everyone except for those at the top.
While this may be hard to imagine now in the age of perfect markets, this system chewed up the working class and spit them out, jobless and penniless, while the barons above them profited off the carnage. This new era of industrialization barreled along with more booms and busts than ever before, not to mention the ongoing droughts and famines. In the early twentieth century, the draconian punishment doled out to the losers of World War I combined with the rampant, unregulated vampirism of the upper class led to a global economic calamity that ended up reshaping the world—fascism, Hitler, dance marathons, Fanta, all that stuff.
Finally, as 9/11 fell on December 7, 1941, America entered World War II, and wouldn’t you know it, the US actually recovered from the Depression. It turned out that with state control of production and jobs for all, a nation could spend its way out of misery. Of course, this proof of concept of planned economies was instead interpreted as a reason to constantly go to war. Postwar jobs seemed to have been informed by this fact. As the country setting the terms for how the world would look, America could impose a slightly subtler imperialism on the globe than could its Euro-cousins of old. Now those who previously wrote boring screeds on Jews could write about how it was necessary to launch ICBMs at Jamaica to show Cuba we could take a dump on them if we really wanted to.
With the world at America’s fingertips, the middle class experienced great upward mobility, buttressed by New Deal and wartime planned-economic policies. A typical workday during the Cold War:
9:00 A.M.: Head into the office.
10:00 A.M.: Tell the only woman who works in your division some weird line like “Your tits could set the sun, Janice,” and then have her fired for not acknowledging your cool remark.
11:00 A.M.: Drink seven martinis at a prelunch meeting.
11:30 A.M.: Fall asleep while on the phone with a big account.
11:45 A.M.: Piss yourself.
12:00 P.M.: Drive home to get new pants.
1:00 P.M.: Get distracted because you keep thinking about how hot your mistress’s new beehive hairdo is.
1:30 P.M.: Get a five-star hotel room downtown for thirty-five cents.
2:00 P.M.: Have unsatisfying sex during which you don’t finish because you’re shitfaced.
10:00 P.M.: Drive home to find your wife already passed out on Valium.
10:30 P.M.: Try to tuck your kids in with a bedtime story but end up in tears as you tell a weird tale from your childhood about how your mom made you wear a sailor outfit until you were twelve and your uncles hit you on your ass with parade batons to “de-sissify” you.
11:00 P.M.: Fall asleep under the coffee table.
9:00 A.M., Next Day: Show up to work in the exact same clothes you wore yesterday and get a promotion to VP of Big Accounts, because it turns out you and your boss’s boss served in the same Navy unit during the war. You now make a handsome salary of $2,500 a year ($1.7 million in 2018 money).
Not a bad deal, if you were white and male and aged twenty-five to eighty-five. But everything must come to an end. As the West deindustrialized and production moved to places where factories could still kill a bunch of people, blue-collar workers began making less and less as their wages were adjusted for changes in the Consumer Price Index. Loads of manufacturing processes were automated, resulting in fewer and fewer decent-paying jobs for the working class that supported the lifestyles of heroic, alcoholic, predatory middle managers. Ignoring the contradictions of capital and labor suddenly wasn’t so easy.
That was, until someone had a revolutionary idea: What if a bunch of numbers were displayed on a computer, arbitrarily assigned value, and traded back and forth?
As American manufacturing and commerce shriveled and died, the finance industry slammed a needle full of adrenaline into the puffy chest of the capitalist class. Before the late 1970s, if you wanted to do cocaine, perpetrate sex crimes, and generally make the world worse, you had to work in film or TV production, and that industry had an incredibly high barrier of entry. In finance, however, you could rule the eighties and be as evil as you wanted to be, so long as you abandoned most of your friends and principles, attended an elite university, and were willing to jack off onto a skeleton or whatever people do to get into a Harvard dining club.
Imaginary money exploded everywhere as the Right took a hatchet to hard-won pension programs and worker protections. With rivers of cheap cash flowing like Bawls at a LAN party, new, even dumber jobs could now be created. Before, one may have been a mechanic or worked in an auto plant. But with loose, runny capital spraying everywhere, made-up professions like “marketing director” and “creative consultant” sprang up. Blue-collar wages lagged far behind CPI adjusted for inflation, but a college degree and adequate connections still allowed you to take a job you loved, if you loved truly stupid shit.
If the age of financialization midwifed a dumb new era of work, the tech boom nurtured it into an awkward, cruel, and greedy child. The Internet, at one time a DARPA project that hosted communities of recluses who argued about locking mechanisms and The Rockford Files, became a service everyone used. This inaugurated what became known as the “Information Age.” Because we were used to overvaluing things based on what the stimulant-addled only children in finance said, we took a deep breath and declared AOL to be worth, like, $500 billion and that Pets.com would found a moon colony.
Job Interview Tips and Tricks
Jobs. We all need them, but how does one obtain one? It’s a lengthy and debasing process, eventually resolved only by knowing someone who knows someone who already has one. Here are a few tricks of the trade to help you land your dream gig!
• Answer every question with another question. For instance, if the interviewer asks something like, “What unique skills will you bring to this position?” answer, “What skills don’t I have?” If they seek further clarification with something like “Name a few” or “I’m asking you,” just keep turning the tables by repeating back some variation of their question. “How can I name a few?” or “Who’s conducting this interview, you or me?” (even though it’s them). This will show that you are confident and motivated.
• Never flatly say no to any question. Always respond with “Yes, and . . .” to advance the bit and keep open any possible avenue of inquiry and action.
• The person interviewing you is courted by people like you all day. They’re used to being complimented and flattered. Throw them off balance and take control of the interaction by doing the opposite and subtly insulting them to undermine their confidence. For example: “That’s a nice watercooler; I’ve seen the same one at every other office I’ve been to.”
• Dress conservatively, but add at least one piece of flair to set you apart: a captain’s hat, a single leather glove, goggles, or a Renaissance-style carnival mask and cape.
• Many employers will now check up on your social media presence during the hiring process, so make sure you’ve posted a lot of quality content. If you don’t have any good content, create a dummy account and fill it with motivational success memes about how “Every stone they throw at you is another brick in your castle” and “A lion is a king of the jungle but still needs a queen.” Make sure to reference memes you saw online and thought were funny during the actual face-to-face interview.
• Do ask to use the bathroom during the interview even if you don’t have to go. Don’t accept any beverage offered; it’s a sign of weakness.
The party came to a stop when everyone finally realized that 98 percent of those Internet firms didn’t generate any revenue, but a lumpy crew of sociopaths got in and got out with expert timing. Guys like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk sold their grossly overvalued stakes in computer crap for nerds, walked away with billions, and were able to transform Silicon Valley from a community of weird garages to a speculator’s paradise, where men in quarter-zip sweaters shuffle around ten-figure capital allocations in between blogging about sea barges where ephebophilia is legal.
That about catches us up to today.
The survivors of the dot-com bubble have created an economy so fucking stupid that it’s practically one of those Old Testament stories in which a bunch of assholes try to build a tower that will allow them to touch the face of YHWH and receive an ironic punishment from God. It’s as if the people who witnessed Hiroshima and escaped safely returned to the same place and built their houses out of yellowcake uranium and played weekly games of dynamite toss.
Yes, the jobs of the future are generated by the incel kingdom of Silicon Valley, where man-children force feed you a subsistence gruel while you slave harder to invent a blood-testing device that streams your results to a chat room of asshole doctors before completely draining the rest of your body. You’re doing something very noble, and that’s why your boss cashed out to the tune of a few hundred million and you have to sublet your closet. The last tech guy who spoke with such flair about his vision for humanity was Steve Jobs, and he died because he decided to cure his pancreatic cancer by drinking smoothies and doing male power kegels. You can kill a man but not his ideas, and so years after Jobs’s demise every single one of his fellow tech lords fancies themselves a “visionary” or “explorer,” words previously reserved for Leonardo da Vinci or Magellan rather than someone who gets VC money for inventing a Wi-Fi–enabled box that will keep all your food cold so it doesn’t go bad.
The present and future of work is a lot like its past: stupid and arbitrary, and everyone’s terrible boss gets to fail upward to the next thing he can fuck up. These days, most jobs are positions that used to be done by five different people, squeezing out every last drop of labor with more hours, more intensity, and more productivity. You receive the privileges of e-mailing people who have sublimated their personality disorders into “management styles” and playing the pawn in bizarre office power plays between proud MBAs. And you’re lucky to do it.
Since a large part of Western manufacturing sectors have been moved to countries where factory owners receive tax credits for each worker killed in building collapses, the economy has seen a lot of change in the past forty years. The two people you, the reader, know with steady jobs are most likely in one of the following businesses.
Jobs You Will Probably Never Have
MARKETING
If we think of today’s horrifying, depersonalizing, and culture-obliterating jobs as a kind of military hierarchy, marketing would be the Green Berets. Like their Army counterparts, marketing professionals are scary because they’re not just doing this to pay off student loans—they legitimately enjoy their work and think it’s important. Advertising and marketing gigs make up one-sixth of all jobs in America, and if our nation continues to eat its own economic droppings, this figure will likely keep growing. The typical marketing professional is named something like Jordan Adam Taylor, posts things like “Can’t relate to dreading Monday because my job just plain rocks #playhardatwork,” and is dedicated to brand synergy whether they’re asleep, awake, mid-coitus, giving birth, or dead.
FINANCE
Finance is even more harmful to the world than marketing, but members of this industry don’t labor under the delusion that they’re fun people who make a difference. A Wall Street guy’s work life is a dull affair enlivened only by sporadic STD scares, drug withdrawals, and market panics caused by his own actions—but mostly it’s just staring at screens as numbers jump around and increase his wealth by three sets of commas at a time.
Investment banks and trading-house hiring departments look for distinct characteristics in potential employees—bedwetting well into puberty, animal torture during adolescence, all the Dark Triad/Six Sigma personality trait clusters. If you love variable-interest-rate mortgages and creating value for the grandchildren of Nazi war profiteers, finance is for you.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
If you’ve woken up every day of your life and decided that your rage issues and utter fear of anything that doesn’t look like you should dictate who lives or dies, it may be time for your Blue Life to matter.
After all, cops are workers, just like anyone else. Yes, they’ll stave in your skull if you organize for a union, but they also head outside every day, see a meme with an unattributed quote from Kanye saying that rapping is harder than being a cop, write utterly moronic open letters steeped in self-pity despite having a less dangerous job than crab fishermen, and then spend the rest of the day playing with the repurposed Stinger missiles that the federal government gave their department.
ACADEMIA
Once the highest pursuit among naked Greek men, the scholarly professions are now all about getting tenure, doing safe spaces, and getting triggered by logic. Generations ago, professors were honorable people. There were science professors who would see a sexy lady and knock beakers and scales off their desks with their nerd boners; old-money classicists who could recite the words of any number of ancient sex perverts while blackout drunk on a boat; idealistic English professors who had yet to make their turn to the right and founded The Journal of Western Greatness after the campus PC-police and feminazis made their students stop sleeping with them; and dispassionate economic scholars who weren’t afraid to take money from United Fruit Co. to report that people in other countries actually enjoy de facto slavery.
Now, however, academia is a Ponzi scheme with beer pong, a soulless grind where you’re expected to turn out long, boring papers called, like, “Fear of Castration and the Western Male Explored through Reggaeton” or face summary execution by the dean. Every year, thousands of freshly minted PhDs compete for a handful of tenure-track jobs, surviving off adjunct appointments and pilfered cafeteria lunch meat. Most of them will burn out and attempt to enter the private job market, which will have no use for anyone who spent a decade studying gnostic imagery in the films of Pauly Shore. The lucky few will hang on long enough to inherit the Distinguished Chair in Kanye Studies at Devilstick University.
If you think you have it in you to talk and write endlessly about subjects you barely know anything about for a bunch of slack-jawed early-twenties layabouts with no prospects, give it a shot, but we can’t imagine living our lives that way.
Now, if you’re a fan of ours, the aforementioned jobs will belong to your more successful friends and nonfail siblings. You, dear reader, are more likely to slot into these exciting careers:
SERVICE
Join your peers in retail or food and beverage, where the worst middle-class authoritarians scan your restaurant or store for anything that upsets them so they can scream at you. These are people who’ve never been mad for a legitimate reason, but they love the feeling. You just have to stare at their disgusting wet maws flapping around until they hit a fever pitch and jet cum down their hideous pale legs. Whether it’s a server position at a restaurant, a footwear salesman who must shoo away enterprising perverts, or customer service for a telecom giant whose favorability polls are lower than the Islamic State’s, you’ll witness every fucked-up power trip that those who have never held any authority but have long fantasized about abusing it take.
Since there are barely any job protections anymore, a service employee almost always has to submit to the demands of suburban sociopaths. Does a lawyer with a teetering marriage and a clowncore dubstep DJ son who doesn’t respect him want lobster even though he’s at a burger chain? Better locate the nearest seafood wholesaler, or at least hope his taste buds are too fried by SSRIs to detect imitation crabmeat. Is a man older than dirt telling you “I’d love to see a smile and something else on that face?” He knows that the restaurant can pay you slave wages if you’re a tipped employee, and he’s wagering you’re not gonna make a fuss, given that he’s from a different generation and all.
CONTENT CREATION
You may think you want this job. You may think you can do it. But 99.9 percent of the time, people who emerge as triumphant heroes from the content mines end up with AdSense lung, broken spirits, and empty pockets. Content—be it a think piece, a call-out tweet, or something really degenerate, like a podcast—is one of the only real, tangible products we make anymore. But its creation also puts more physical and mental demands on workers than the most grizzled military operators have to endure. In a sense, content makers are more troop-like than troops themselves, as information is the battlefield of the twenty-first century.
If you really think you’re ready to answer a bunch of awful, piggish fans and find new ways to say someone you’re making fun of is ugly every day, go for it. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.
SERFDOM
You could be run ragged driving for a ride-sharing app created by a company that loses about $535 billion a month while still retaining a $900 billion valuation, until the shifty worm who founded the business is recorded doing his Benny Hill impression in the boardroom, writes a weepy open letter promising to do better, and leaves the company.
CAMMING
A new frontier of sex work that doesn’t involve leaving the house, “camming” is the fastest-growing sector of employment for the millennial precariat. Camming refers to the webcam that will broadcast you masturbating, and if you already spend much of the day lying prone in bed, laptop on your stomach, staring into the void of online social interaction, then you’re already halfway there. Jacking off is a fun hobby that anyone can do, and now it’s one you can get paid for.
If you’re willing to jack off with friends positioned at awkward angles to fill a computer screen, then, friend, you’re now a Web entrepreneur! However, if spending all day responding to comments like “want to see the titty, so sexxy :),” “get that fucking cat out of the way,” or “need natural uncut for space dock!” from anonymous users is not your cup of tea, then you might consider camming-adjacent activities like eating lots of food or whispering.
PRESIDENTIAL TWEET REPLIER
The collapse of American political discourse into a frenzied Internet shouting festival has been disastrous for the country, but it could be a boon to your bank account! Having a president who uses his toilet time to yell on social media means there’s a huge captive audience for the dedicated Twitter influencer who can reply instantly each time the president tweets “Lying media says I never fucked Sandy Duncan. FAKE NEWS! She gave me a hand job at the Mac and Me premiere!”
With millions of people engaging with the replies attached to the bottom of a presidential tweet, the potential for lucrative self-promotion is limitless. If you’re a nebulously credentialed verified account holder who’s sick of the president’s disgusting behavior, you can parlay typing “Sir, how DARE you!” into a crowdfunded podcast in which you lay out just how the KGB funded the career of Larry the Cable Guy. Or, if you’re of the other political persuasion and can program a bot to respond to those tweets with patriotic memes in which troops cry because of hip-hop, then you can make a mint selling coffee mugs that say “Liberal Cum” and “My Other Coffee Cup is a Gun.”
But, you may be asking, what if we eventually reach a point where we don’t have a head of state who live-tweets his mental decline? Luckily, that’s never going to happen. We’ve entered the Aeon of Horus. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. And the president will, from now until the sun gutters out, be a megalomaniacal Internet addict. So start practicing your “I wish Malcolm was still in the Middle and not on the Extreme Right” burns for when President Frankie Muniz starts deporting redheads.
BIO BAG
“Sell yourself,” they told you. In a fast-paced, ever-changing knowledge economy, getting ahead means making yourself indispensable. Hustling, schmoozing, and self-promoting that internship into a job offer or that freelance gig into a staff position. But in a future when automation will render a huge proportion of human labor input superfluous, “sell yourself” is going to take on a more literal meaning. If all you have to sell is your labor and nobody is buying, your only remaining commodities are your blood, sperm/eggs, and organs, which the failing bodies of the ruling class will always have use for. Shaving off a quarter of your liver every six months may sound traumatic, but it beats being picked up in a Loiter Sweep and having all your blood pressed out of your body like a toothpaste tube and used for vampire cosplay by Peter Thiel.
The final cliché meant to keep you on board our system’s sinking ship is that work is fun, that your office has foosball, that pizza is delivered on Friday, and that your boss rides a hoverboard. It’s not really a job as much as a quirky, cool place you never have to leave. Originally associated with Silicon Valley techno-utopias (Facebook is now building Wi-Fi gulags that allow workers to eat, shower, and sleep at the office),I the idea has now metastasized throughout much of our culture. Some ghoulish app company runs a subway ad campaign with slogans such as “You Eat Coffee for Lunch” and “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug of Choice.” That’s real.
In other words, for a certain cohort of young, white-collar drones, the modern workplace has become a giant, countrywide adult day care center. Of course, those working blue-collar and service jobs will still be subjected to good old-fashioned Panopticon surveillance, but as automation starts to “professionalize” those jobs or simply kill them and drive their workers into the freelance gig economy, the triumph of this Silicon Valley nanovirus seems inevitable.
The expectation that the office should also be the center of your social life, that one need never leave to enjoy activities usually associated with “free time,” is perhaps the most insidious idea about work yet devised. This is the final frontier, the newest batshit notion the ruling class wants to normalize the way it normalized privatized health care, extraction of surplus labor, and thanking your boss for not letting you die in the street. It’s a new, futuristic, permanent utopia where your job and your free time are the same thing. It’s a complete, perverse inversion of the socialist or communist idea, the alternative vision. One we should probably get around to describing now . . .
When freed from the soul-crushing system of wage labor, what we used to call “work” actually becomes the passionate, creative fulfillment the lizards in marketing tell us it is. After setting everyone on equal footing (by seizing the billionaires’ money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys to production over to workers), you’re looking at an economy that requires something like a three-hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery; and—as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable.
But right now, the gap between the promise of technology and the actually existing, deeply stupid reality couldn’t be more obvious. Instead of a means to liberate you, technology is a tool for your boss to track you, message you, and harass you at any time of day, whether you’re on the clock or not. It doesn’t enhance your free time, it destroys it. It has you checking your phone, e-mail, or Slack feed every three hundred seconds while you’re awake, and, once the next generation of iPhone rolls out, during your REM sleep as well. Meanwhile, the same people preaching the gospel of “innovation”—the Cory Bookers and Paul Ryans both—are scheming to privatize every last facet of your life, grooming everyone born after 1980 to work, work, work until they all keel over.
The supposed trade-off, of course, is that the more you work, the more stuff you get. There was a commercial a couple of years back featuring the blond guy from Band of Brothers in which he owns France for taking two-month vacations, bragging that, in America, we take just two weeks off and earn the money to buy a Lexus instead. He walks into his McMansion with his hot wife—and so can you.
Except this is also a lie. There is no Lexus, no McMansion, and no gold-encrusted bidet waiting for you, no matter how hard you work. Thanks to an unrelenting class war waged since about 1973, wages have stayed the same for four decades, while money has been funneled to the top. Even supposed nest eggs like 401ks and pensions are wired to the insane, wealth-obliterating machine of the stock market, which can and will implode again and again.
And if we manage to get across one thing in this stupid book, let it be this: it doesn’t have to be this way. Even weak-ass, social-democratic France passed a law a couple of years ago making it illegal for companies with more than fifty employees to hound staff after hours, and no matter how hard neoliberal pod-person Emmanuel Macron tries, he can’t seem to pry the country’s labor code out of the hands of the citizens who like it. It’s why a century ago, even the assholes who liked the system didn’t think it would last this long: in the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we would have a twenty-hour workweek by now. America itself was on this road in the twentieth century, slicing down the workweek, granting labor rights, and taking care of all the shit your paycheck had to cover. The tragedy of the 1970s wasn’t that the cycle was broken but that it simply started over.
So don’t believe the tech lizards, the reactionary billionaires, or the Democratic paypigs who tell you that work is actually cool. It won’t be cool until their bank accounts are emptied into everyone else’s and “work” becomes something you squeeze in between posting, gaming, and having a nice, big wank.
I. Avery Hartmans, “Facebook Is Building a Village That Will Include Housing, a Grocery Store and a Hotel,” Business Insider, July 7, 2017.