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Social media made it easy to pierce the social veil. Your boring nonwork life is no longer hidden by default, it is assumed to be public. Thats the blurring between personal and work, which means your boss can know if you're a true believer outside of work. I don't think you can even put Dilbert comics on your cube anymore, mainly because cubes are now dead thanks to 'collaborative spaces' that were the rage precovid.
Thats the big difference, not just COVID and remote work. Social media is the arms race for 'authenticity' and so you have to fake authenticity to fit in with the culture. Are you secretly a heretic? You can't be private, you have to declare your adherence openly, because other people are more enthusiastic than you.
But therein lies a question: why the arms race for authenticity, instead of just, you know, being good at your job. We need to realize that it is entirely possible that being Good At Job is simply becoming less and less important these days. Opportunity to not fuck up is more important than grindmaxxing. So many bullshit tasks in office are busywork to pretend one is productive, when most of it is not actually accretive to task fulfilment. Meanwhile many actual work deliverables that need bullshit microchanges as it is being worked on - coding, writing, drafting, anything manual - were made efficient by productivity tools and then it became representative of our own executive microfailures to use the tool rather than the difficulty of using the task itself. Random fuckwits can do a due diligence of a company financials for fundamental analysis just by ratiomaxxing, you don't need a genius to do it, just grind the formulae out diligently. Good is less important than discipline, and since discipline is only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control, performative performance is a visible proxy.
This is the world we live in, outcomes divorced from inputs or at least sufficiently muddled by layers that our own roles as cogs are known to be unimportant. To not be swapped out we gotta pretend we believe the mission of the machine, and the incentive to publicly deepthroat the corporate mission is so high precisely because it is easier than actually trying to do great work. Who knows, we might end up liking the sensation of being choked out by slogans. Enjoy your corpospeak ASMR, piggies.
Apologies but if you have the time, what do you mean by "Good is less important than discipline, and since discipline is only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control, performative performance is a visible proxy." What is performative performance a proxy for, and why is discipline only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control? I thought discipline in this context would be doing the cog work diligently, which is in ones control? Not disagreeing or agreeing with you, just trying to understand better. And I agree that if we're all cogs then a cog that buys into the corpospeak is going to be preferred over a cog that doesn't, if I understand you, you are basically competing for who has most allegience to the mission? Incentivizing allegiance to the mission?
It's because the outcomes are divorced from inputs.
The role of a corporation and bureaucracy is to avoid risk, or more simply put, to build infrastructure to the extent that a single human cannot damage it all. The inverse of that is that humans become so unimportant that doing good doesn't affect the outcome either. Naturally, the system no longer optimizes for doing good, but for avoiding risk.
So what's left to differentiate one cog from the other cog, aside from metrics and KPIs that can be efficiently gamed (since the difference between performing well and performing badly can be negligible on the actual business value and bottom line)? Signaling allegiance. So that then becomes competitive, and people fall all over themselves in attempts to signal their allegiance harder than the others.
Imagine you are Amazon, with their stupid policy about how a minimum number of people need to be fired from your department every year. Would you eliminate the bottom 15% performers? Does it matter if they perform? You're in corporate communications, does it matter to Amazon's bottom line at all if they're better or worse at releasing internal emails? How else would you decide who to fire?
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I think you're spot on here. I've long believed that one of the reasons behind a lot of current employment isn't any actual requirement for productive work to be done, but to satisfy primitive primate desires to have flunkies and exert authority over other people. I'd be surprised if anyone who has worked in an office environment for more than a few months hasn't encountered a time when a decision was made that was bad for the business and reduced profits but satisfied the psychological needs of the managers in question.
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