ltfey

Fascism runs on a certain archaic masculine presence, and that is true whether we're talking about Mussolini's centralized variety, or the kind we see here where we live under the petty tyranny of a thousand employer-states. Toxic masculinity is at the core of old-style fascism and neofeudalist corporate capitalism alike.

If you meet the men (and, yes, they're mostly men) in charge, though, they're all lethargic and unattractive creatures who never had to fight for anything. The system largely exists because they need to compensate for this fact--it exists both to elevate their appeal to women and to dimininsh that of male competitors. Pointing out that they fail on their own terms (old-style masculinity) is useful, because it discredits them and brings to mind questions about what they are really doing.

But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.

The tech companies are not exceptions. You don't become a "level 11" at Google without playing political hardball. In a big company, the CEOs won't even know who you are, certainly not enough to invest in your career or give you opportunities (such as taking on Netscape in the '90s), unless you're willing to go lawful evil and collect some scalps.

In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate, some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones we've got.

Also, one can be opposed to patriarchy while, at the same time, pointing out that the men who run capitalism fail on their own archaic and patriarchal terms. That these self-asserted "leaders" fail at being what they themselves want to be makes it all the more probable that they fail at being what we in society want or need them to be.

Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.

In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.

Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.

Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.

There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about.

Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad.

This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof.

Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless?

Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.

Social media is a huge liability for us on the left, as well as for society at large. Its structure and dynamics serve the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else, but it is associated with its public-facing apparent liberalism, which means that blowback against its failures and heavy-handed actions will diminish our reputation rather than the right's.

Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate.

Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious.

There may be some survivorship bias here. Even in the 1990s, business-grade programmers (the ones who, quite frankly, aren't inclined to learn difficult subjects) either went into management or did something else, although the timeframe and ageism are more aggressive these days due to the infantilization and humiliation (e.g., Agile Scrum) that engineers face today.

Research-grade programmers were the minority, even then, although this problem is a lot worse today due to the near nonexistence of R&D jobs.

All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.

If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.

PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.

In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.

In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.

And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.

The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV.

Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.

The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.