Just An Illusion

I’ve said before that Corporate Life is an alternative reality, an illusory world where the usual rules don’t apply, where words mean something completely different, where everyone speaks in riddles whilst telling everyone how realistic and pragmatic they are being. To live in this world we have to believe many things that are untrue, and often contradictory, and we kind of know that but we can’t admit it. We pretend that it’s all normal when we know in our bones it’s nonsense.

It’s why, when we leave, we go through a period of disenchantment. It is because we have literally left the enchantment, the spell has been broken and we see the world as it is, rather than as we have been pretending it is for so long. This is one of the most painful realisations we go through because it means two things. Firstly, that we have been fooling ourselves and so are, by definition, foolish. And secondly, that the life we have been living has been hollow and meaningless.

It didn’t use to be like this. Businesses and organisations used to be connected to their customers, to their environment and to their employees in a very direct and physical manner. They were geographically bound, largely, to a town or a region or a country. They people that ran them were part of the community, mixing with the people who did the work. They answered to local communities and governments, they were part of the social fabric. The work you did was directly involved in the end product, whether that was the production of good or delivery of a service; or you were near enough to see it and understand how you had contributed to it.

But the organisations have become disconnected and abstracted over the decades, the product of a variety of forces - globalisation, market concentration, technology and automation, financialisation. The work has also become abstracted, conducted largely by moving bits and bytes around in the ether. The outcomes are not directly connected to the activities, people are not engaged directly with each other but are intermediated through tech platforms, much of the work is carried out in a virtual digital realm. What isn’t has been off-shored or outsourced, so you never see the end product. Companies that appear to be in one business actually create value in another e.g. Delta airlines in the US make most of their profit through their credit card link-up. They are a financial business that happens to fly people around as a their primary marketing channel.

It is this abstraction that leads to people feeling disengaged and detached from their work. It also leads to some seemingly perverse outcomes. I say seemingly perverse because when you look closely, you can trace the cause and effect but it looks perverse because it’s not what you expect from what you think you see, but in fact you are looking at an illusion, an echo of what used to be.

We have passed through the looking glass and now we are trying to work out what we’re looking at on the other side.

More Than A Feeling

So we’re floundering around, looking for meaning and trying to make sense of the world and along comes AI, the ultimate abstraction. If we believe the hype (spoiler alert: I don’t), it’s an intelligence without a body or a soul.

AI is a double abstraction (I’m talking about the Large Language Models here, the stuff that been stuffed into all of our online tools, the chatbots that are going to ‘take all the jobs’). Not only the product but also the whole industry.

To summarise the work of Ed Zitron, this is a product that has yet to find a compelling use case after 3 years and its imposition on large swathes of the corporate workforce and much of the toolbase that they use. There is no ‘killer app’, there is no major revenue stream that has emerged. There is also no path to profitability because the two main AI companies, Open AI and Anthropic, lose money on every customer and have to raise enormous amounts of investment to keep going. They are promising to pay for ‘compute’ (a horrible word) that requires eye-watering amounts of capital investment but don’t have the future revenue streams to cover it, so they need to get more investment.

The big tech companies who are building the infrastructure (the hyperscalers & Nvidia, the chip-maker) are now proving investment to the AI companies, which will allow them to pay their compute suppliers, who are … er, the big tech companies. At the same time, the same tech companies are competing with the AI companies in case the latter go bust, something they make more likely by competing with them. So as well as giving money to Open AI and Anthropic so that they can give it back to them for the compute, they are also undermining that investment.

TL:DR It’s madness. The basic rules of business have been suspended. It’s a mania, a bubble. And yet it’s got the biggest companies and the ‘brains’ of Wall Street firmly ensnared in its madness.

We’ve all experienced that moment at work when you look at what’s going on around you, the ridiculous targets, the unhinged strategy, the inexplicable decision, and you think “This is all bonkers. Am I the only one who sees this?”. Well, this is that at the macro level. The logical endpoint of abstraction.

Wall Street buys into AI because they are only interested in how the stock performs and have lost sight of what the underlying businesses do. They aren’t interested because you can make tons of money manipulating the numbers or betting on the movements. The big tech companies are hooked in because they are run by ‘business idiots’ (another term coined by Ed Zitron) who have little understanding of the the business and no interest in the craft but just want to see the number go up. (A classic recent example of this is Boeing, who ditched their engineering and safety ethos in favour of cost cutting and pumping up the profits to the point where planes started falling out of the sky and they had spend huge sums repairing the damage whilst also taking an enormous hit to their share price).

This is where we are. Detached, floating free, untethered. Like a balloon in flight, at the mercy of the winds.

This doesn’t end well. We either get blown somewhere dangerous or come down to earth with a bump.

Out Of Touch

So this abstraction is why we feel disassociated from our work, and our life. We don’t have record collections to show our friends anymore, we have a playlist sitting in a cloud somewhere. We don’t have a bookshelf, we have files on our kindle that we don’t really own because we can’t give them to someone else. We don’t meet in person but sit in front of screens looking at a simulacrum of interaction but one with most of the information missing, the physical and sensory cues, the feel.

We don’t shuffle paper anymore, we manipulate pixels around a screen all day. We don’t have an in-tray and an out-tray and the satisfaction of watching the pile in the first go down as the pile in second gets higher, we have endless workflows serving up screen after screen without let-up. We don’t have a ‘knocking off’ time, a clear end to the day where we can forget about work, we have constant access to an endless stream of messages and information that creates a pressure to keep working into the evening.

And for what? It used to be that there was a job for life that also meant making yourself subservient to the organisation but the reward was a stable life, regular income, a chance to buy somewhere to live, to have a family, to build a rich personal life and save for a comfortable retirement. Now, none of that deal holds except they still want to the subservience to their needs, until they decide they don’t anymore and you get dumped.

We can rationalise all of this, find reasons for all the decisions that led to this (even if we disagree with why they were made) but we can’t rationalise away how we feel. And it feels wrong. In our bones, in our soul. A day of meetings on Zoom or Teams may functionally be fine but at the end of it we feel exhausted because it lacks physicality. It’s a day of living in an abstraction and we miss the connection that appears to be there but isn’t. So we feel disassociated but it’s not obvious to us why. After all, we’ve been talking to people all day, so we should feel connected, shouldn’t we?

Do you know where else you find the word ‘disassociated’? It’s one of the things you might experience if you are suffering from PTSD or Complex PTSD. Disassociation is a natural response to trauma while it’s happening. It’s also something we can all experience temporarily when we’re intensely stressed or extremely tired, or after drug or alcohol use. Some people may dissociate while experiencing war, kidnapping or during a medical emergency. In situations we can’t physically get away from, dissociation can protect us from distress. But it can also be harmful, especially if it’s persistent.

PTSD is not just caused by a traumatic event, however. It can be caused by a prolonged period of abuse or low-level trauma, the accumulation of distressing events that individually would not affect us. These events could be persistent bullying and abuse, or working in a toxic environment, or being robbed of agency and control.

I know from personal experience that working in a corporate environment can cause complex PTSD and that is partly because you feel you have to put up with because you need the salary to fulfil your obligations to others, or just to maintain your current lifestyle. You feel you have no choice but to remain, that there is no easy way to escape.

Isn’t that what we’re being told about AI? That it’s inevitable, that it’s coming for our jobs and resistance is futile. That we need to ‘get with the program’ and embrace it, learn to use it (more work, more pressure), whilst it is learning how to do our job and replace us (as I wrote about last week)? AI not only threatens our jobs and our lifestyle but also threatens to turn employment into a type of Hunger Games for knowledge workers.

And isn’t that what we’ve been told about the workplace for the past several decades? That it’s a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world, that we’re competing with the world now, that companies have to be efficient or they will die? That if cuts aren’t made and you don’t pick up the slack, you will lose your job. That you’re going to have to uproot yourself and move your whole life across the country, continent or world or someone else will take it. That there is no alternative, that it’s just economic logic (it’s not) and sorry, but you’re no longer required. That if your job is taken by technology, then it’s your responsibility to reskill and start again because ‘that’s the market’.

It could be a bit of a leap to connect the madness of modern life and work that is caused by the compounding effect of abstraction upon abstraction with mental health issues and symptoms of PTSD. But maybe it’s not much of a leap, eh?

No

There are signs this is beginning to dawn on people. Whilst we hear about the AI enthusiasts and the wonderful things that are doing with AI (none of which add up to a widely applicable use case, let alone a killer application), underneath the hype a backlash is beginning to emerge.

I’ve written before about the 40% of corporate employees who are avoiding or even sabotaging AI use, and how AI is ruining the (already broken recruitment) process. Now research shows that AI interviews are being used in 63% of US job interviews but that 38% of interviewees are rejecting the AI interview and dropping out of the process. What’s more, another 12% say they won’t carry on with an application if AI is required.

Meanwhile, Ryan Page PhD, a university professor, says that his students hate AI. He remarks that when he was in his twenties like them, technology was cool and allowed you to carry all your songs around with you and record an album in your bedroom (he teaches music). He was, like many of us, a bit of a techno optimist. In the intervening 15 years, the tech industry has completely destroyed that goodwill.

It’s point Ed Zitron often makes, that tech companies don’t make stuff that is cool anymore, or actually helps us much. They are more focused on farming us for data, and enshittifying their products to grab more of our precious attention, just in order to push the number up and make themselves richer. The people running the big tech companies are Business Idiots who know little about the technology and how it impacts their customers and care even less. These billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaires) could solve world hunger and child poverty, or just make cool and useful stuff like they used to, but instead focus on growth, dominance, self-enrichment and pushing us all into techno-serfdom.

Anyway, these students are now terrified of technology and what it could do to them, but at the same time feel obliged to use it, to look like they are keeping up and staying relevant. I really can’t think of anything more stress-inducing. It’s like having to eat something to survive that you know is damaging you, possibly irreversibly. And having to make that choice every day.

The Kids Are Alright

I try not to focus only on the bad stuff, I don’t want to be a ‘Boomer Doomster’.

I don’t want to be that old guy that talks about ‘the good old days’ when everything used to be better and who wants to turn the clock back to a time that never existed and can’t be returned too even if it did. I’m not ignoring the positives of the economic and technological developments that have happened over my lifetime. Don’t forget, I used to be a techno-optimist, a techno-enthusiast, in fact. That was my job, using the technology to build new products and services. I worked on email in its early days (yeah, sorry for that, but I’m not responsible for how it’s been misused and abused).

But the good times are over. The benefits of the market fundamentalism that became Neo-liberalism have been realised and largely sequestered by the rich and we are now reaping the consequences (which were predictable (to me as an economics undergraduate) and why I opposed it from the start). The same is true of globalisation as the real world firmly reasserts itself on the abstraction of global supply chains through the crises of COVID and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.

The technology industry has moved from being additive to extractive, replacing innovation and competition as drivers with market capture and cartels. Market concentration has reached a point where most markets are effective monopolies or oligopolies, pushing up prices, enabling super-profits and stifling competition and innovation. Financialisation has extracted value from every aspect of business and funnelled the gains up to top 1% (or 0.1%, in fact), and squeezed all the juice out.

We are reaching the end of the road and AI is the last stand of the fabulists who have driven and created this illusion. It’s the last abstraction, the last denial of reality, the last burst on the burner in this balloon of hyper-growth, free market, techno-capitalism. They’ve ignored the Global Financial Crash, they’ve ignored the rise of populism and nationalism, they’ve ignored the rise in geopolitical instability and warfare. Indeed, they’ve sought to turn all these signs of sickness to their advantage, seeing them as opportunities for growth. But you can’t defy gravity for ever. The basket eventually comes back to earth, and this is coming down with one hell of a bump.

I don’t know when. I don’t know what happens afterwards. I can’t say it’s going to be better, it could be worse. Maybe much worse. What I do know is that my generation, the one that led us here, the one that is still inflating this balloon of improbability, is not the solution. We’re the problem.

So the way I differ from most grumpy old men is that I don’t want to go back to a previous time and I don’t blame the younger generation. Quite the opposite. We need to move to a new model, we need new paradigms, we need to build something new to replace what is falling down. And I believe the younger generation are the ones to do that. Indeed, they are our only hope.

They can see what’s really happening, they aren’t taken in by the illusion. That’s why they aren’t signing up to the broken corporate contract, either seeing the relationship as entirely transactional or finding another path entirely, through entrepreneurship, creativity and self-direction. That’s why they are techno-sceptics and are rejecting AI. They are not entitled, needy airheads, they are smart, switched-on realists.

I just hope they are not too traumatised by the world we’ve created for them or too lobotomised by AI and other technology to be able to fulfil their destiny.

It’s going to be messy but let’s be hopeful, eh?