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When I was a teenager, I thought Office Space was representative of real life. Yeah, you'd have to show up to a job you hate, but at least you could openly hate it and call out its bullshit brainwashing culture to your friends and coworkers. You could all be united in a "this is fucking stupid, no one actually enjoys this, and all the weird office mannerisms, politics, and minutia are only bought into by the tools who no one likes."
20 years later, that wasn't really true. People seem to buy into the BS, or at least keep plausible deniability about it, such that you never really know. You can't openly call this out to your acquaintances, because you need rely on them for job referrals.
I don't know if this is a real difference between the 90s and 2010s/2020s, or maybe it's just the way it's always been. But it would seem the honesty and rebellious "fuck the man" attitude of the 90s has given way to the "live the hustle" attitude of the 2010s.
Maybe our economic situation being such shit has enforced this, since people don't have the ability to stick it to the man by even pretending they can opt out anymore. Unemployment in the late 90s was around 4%. It's possible that major economic shocks like the 2008 crisis or recent inflation changed how people think about job security.
Maybe also social media caused this, the same way it (in my opinion) caused the major ramp up in politics in the past 15 years. LinkedIn has turned everyone into their own personal brand. In the 90s - or at least in the Office Space/Fight Club version of the 90s - you clocked in and clocked out. Now you're expected to be passionate about quarterly earnings, and if you want to be secure in getting that next job after you're laid off from your current one, you better make sure you have a passionate public image, too. Note also, globalization may have something to do with this as well, since you're competing in a global market now, so you need to be better than more than just the local competition.
I posit that maybe being in a world where everyone seems to believe and live the BS has similar negative effects as social media does for causing people depression due to the highlight reel effect. The plausible deniability of "everyone seems to buy into this crap" makes others pretend to buy in too. This has obvious political parallels as well.
I don't think it's unemployment; unemployment in the late '90s was low, in the early '90s it was high and people were no less cynical. In fact, Office Space was a bit unrealistic when it came out (as I recall noting at the time) because of that; it was a boom time and if you could spell computer (or at least get close) you could get a programming job; nobody at Initech would need to worry about being laid off.
Both Office Space and Dilbert were about tech, and speaking specifically about tech, I think what changed is the rise of the profession. In the early to mid '90s, software was just another white collar job. Then came first the dot-com boom, when people realized you could get stupid rich in software. Then following the dot-com crash, the rise of Google, stock options and much higher salaries in established companies, and a new wave of startups getting people rich. Now software was a prestige job, up there with doctor or lawyer or at least stockbroker. Not the kind of thing associated with the grind. Google, earlier on, made some attempt not to feel like Dilbert's company. And the startups... well, you might be doing a death march, but probably not a steady endless grind. But all things come to an end; the big software companies have become fully corporate and the final startup wave seems to have completed. Salaries are still high, and full cynicism hasn't yet returned, but it probably will. The only thing permanently gone is the cubicles; cost-cutting, you know, it's all open desks now.
Agreed. Something odd is going on as well, where under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. Unemployment has only very rarely been lower than it currently is.
I think this is a big part of this dynamic, and also the dynamic of the American Left as a whole from the Clinton third way era to today. 1990s Gen X anti-establishment thinking was built around rejecting boring mainstream corporate jobs and the evil corporate bosses they served. Enter Google, with its "Don't be Evil" corporate catch phrase, and a thousand start-ups followed the same logic. Infinite PTO, beer carts on Friday, ping pong tables and nap rooms! The tech companies were just as against the soul-sucking corporate bullshit of Halliburton or GE as you were! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et al were understood as left-wing Obama-voting humanistic champions against the traditional corporate world.
The development of those tech companies into new kinds of corporate villains, and the failure of the Obama administration to deliver on much of anything beyond reasonably competent middle-of-the-road governance, lead significant portions of the young to turn a lot more radical. Whether it's pseudo-marxist anti corporatism or hard-right tradcath fascist anti-capitalism, the common factor is the disillusionment of realizing that new hip tech companies weren't going to fix everything. No capitalist corporation is going to fix everything.
True. It is, however, rising. And as far as I can tell, every other slight rise of unemployment has been followed by a sharp rise (and recession) -- 2007, 2001, 1979, 1974, maybe 1960. That's technical analysis and technical analysis is BS, but it's tempting. I also suspect some of the doom and gloom talk has been attempts at stock market manipulation; e.g. talk of AI bubble and how we were in a recession if you didn't count AI was reaching a crescendo and then NVidia reported great earnings (entirely predictable since even if there is a bubble it manifestly hasn't popped yet).
I feel like we've worked through several technical explanations for why a recession is due since 2021 and each has come and gone, and what it comes down to is that it's due and everyone knows it. The biblical theory of economics that there are seven fat years and seven lean years is in most cases as good as any. The identity of Mrs O Leary's cow or the Austrian crown prince that sets it off is ultimately unimportant, the line can't go up forever without going down.
We've had two quarters of negative GDP growth since then. We've gone about 10 years without a recession in the past (1991-2001 and 2009-2019) and we're only 5 years into the current growth period. The doom-and-gloom seems unshakable though. As I said, some of it might be manipulation, either market or political. Holiday travel is way up this year, which seems to me to be an indicator of positive sentiment. Holiday shopping has been predicted to be below-trend this year. If that plays out we probably are headed for recession. If it doesn't, I smell a rat.
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