The workplace went from quarry to opium den rather quickly. My father worked shifts at an industrial gases plant. You punched in at 6 am, 2 pm, or 10 pm, and punched out at 2 pm, 10 pm, or 6 am. There was a security check for theft. The 2–10 pm shift was a privilege. It let you have breakfast with your children. The privilege was rotated. The pecking order was salient. Few spoke softly. The big stick was never out of sight. Through my childhood across the 80s and the 90s, and well into the aughts, this was his life.
His son, a lossy replica that inherited the propensity for a needless, constant, frenetic rush of thoughts, but none of the discipline or conscientiousness, started working in 2004. Cubicles. Desktops. Desk phones. Locked down PCs. Any web resource deemed frivolous stood blocked. Check-in and check-out timestamps were plotted, wayward employees flagged as delinquents. Time sheets were de jure, leave applications had web forms that made you yearn for paper. Some spoke softly, the stick kept vigil at a corner.
Much of my work was bridging the wide chasm between the inception of a thought and its realisation. It was a task to keep Microsoft Word from crashing on me. Making a PowerPoint deck not look like a crawling infant’s paw marks on paper required skill. As a young analyst, a Waterfall chart, successfully executed, earned me the warm glow of an honest day’s work. Information was scarce. To understand the inner workings of a craft one had to suffer through phone calls or endure the horror of eye contact, or survive lived experience. Engineers considered deferring to people in suits the natural order. The CIO’s office spent its time keeping ramshackle enterprise software systems from collapsing into a heap. Siebel CRM made you question the project of civilisation. A shared understanding of the tropes of the hero’s journey could be assumed. You toiled, earned credentials in an academic and corporate system considered meritocratic by consensus, and the universe rewarded you for it. A linearity could be assumed in the future’s unfolding.
The four horsemen of the great upping of leverage (it isn’t just software eating the world)
And then something happened. It wasn’t merely what Marc Andreessen’s said about software eating through entire industries and swathes of human experience like legions of ravenous Pac-Man. It wasn’t just that the biggest book store was Amazon, or the biggest music company was Spotify, or the Johnny Carson of the present day was an Internet talking head called Joe Rogan. It was the coming together of productivity multiplying technologies, business models, information availability, and cultural artefacts that radically plugged the gap between the inception of a thought and its realisation.
Leverage has never been higher. The role of the first of the superfecta — software, is often lauded. But the three remaining - business models that allow the leasing of production capacity, the information wellspring that is the public web, and the global homogenisation of cultural norms - are as important. The four have connived to make work for a certain kind of person (let’s call it the Medium reading demographic) the realm of pure thought. All else, the yarn balls made of messy detail, are on their way to being abstracted away, locked up in neat boxes, the risk of unspooling fully contained.
As part of my work as a tech strategist in retail, I swing by the beauty industry from time to time. It’s rather palpable how what was once chemistry with a side of art is now part art, part competing philosophies of the good life, and part commentary on the political moment. Both the consumption of beauty, and its production are primarily the stuff of thought.
A beauty entrepreneur looking to launch a new skincare product has to — above all — conjure a vision, a brand narrative that sticks in a crowded marketplace of ideas. The skincare, cosmetics, and hair care industry, three decades into the 21st century, is an arms race of exotic ingredients, genres of virtue, and cultural motifs.
About ingredients, natural and sustainable are now the price of entry. But beyond such table stakes, things get baroque really fast. Coffee and avocado are old hat. Trending ingredients in the recent past have been cannabis, carrot seed, blue algae, pumpkin, and bakuchiol. Then you have to appeal to the better angels of our nature. The competition is stiff. At the prestige beauty tier (which is to say, several notches above drug store brands sold at CVS), you must be all natural and paraben free, and everything should be sustainably sourced and cruelty free. That just gets you through the door. In search of gross margins and glory, you might consider ‘radical transparency’, a paradigm that involves, among other things, listing ingredients well in excess of the regulatory requirement. You might make sustainability a bedrock of your corporate ethos to a degree that transcends the product. 100% Pure operates out of an eight-acre solar powered establishment called Purity Park.
And then, in search of hearts and minds, you might bring an axe to the fundamental premise of beauty, which is the pursuit of an ideal. That ideal, and even the idea of an immutable, objective ideal, could be deemed anachronistic in the age of inclusivity. Parts of the industry are therefore segueing into ‘wellness’ and ‘health’, assuaging whatever guilt the beauty enthusiast might suffer for the sin of vanity.
Or, you could bet that a section of the audience comprises enlightened utilitarians who don’t care about the twists and turns of the zeitgeist and just wish to be free of acne. And for this group, made of the resolutely soulless, a brand called The Ordinary will sell you just-the-science, shorn of all the imagery that marketing wizards dream up.
What hangs in the air, the air laced with its absence, is the actual business of fixing pimples and dry pores. Pimples and dry pores can be treated respectively by niacinamide and hyaluronic acid. This is known, and has been known for a long time. Invention unnecessary. Sourcing ingredients is eased by B2B portals such as Alibaba. Production is sped up by contract manufacturing, and of course, by the gargantuan expansion of offshore manufacturing capacity in recent decades. For distribution, Shopify will sell you SaaS ecommerce. For fulfilment, VCs have poured billions into third-party ecommerce logistics firms. Martech software will let you push products to narrowly defined audiences online. Above all, the entirety of literature on the efficacy of ingredients in offsetting the ill effects of ageing or dry skin lies in the public domain. It isn’t just text and data tables for desk research. AI engineers have crunched through the corpus of academic output, millions of user reviews, and user generated content from beauty blogs to map ingredients against attributes (oily skin) and problems (acne). In fact, there is a company betting its business on the strength of such AI — Proven Skincare.
And, in a development that is no less consequential, global Internet culture has acquired a degree of homogeneity that lubricates - through shared references and tech — the wheels of transcontinental commerce. We have all seen the same memes that rush through the world like a biblical deluge. We have all laughed at Trump’s gaffes. We have all seen the same TikTok videos of young men and women spinning drama and mirth out of thin air. The global lexicon of business forms a dialect of English with roots in American corporate and tech-speak, and is now a de facto Esperanto. Working with front-end software developers from Bangalore or Kiev, or with process manufacturers from the Guangdong Province is much easier than it was 10 years ago. This combination of software, manufacturing and compute capacity on tap, the explosion of usable information and the convergent evolution of business culture across the globe has increased leverage to a magnitude not seen before. The indie beauty brand founder now has a long enough lever to move the world.
The rise of the corporate polymath and the fetishisation of intelligence
The need to straddle the different shaky rafts and dinghies on the unquiet waters of the tech-economic seascape requires a specific kind of professional. It’s the corporate polymath, it’s the autodidact. What this leads to is a fetishisation of intelligence, building the myth of the savant. The banal embodiment of the myth is the full-stack engineer. But the search for this unicorn is everywhere. The product manager who grasps industry trends, user research, UX patterns, front-end frameworks, big data, the API economy, enterprise architecture, machine learning, agile delivery, and novel hardware platforms. That rumoured data science and data engineering centaur. The crypto researcher who understands macroeconomics, game theory, can build smart contracts on Solidity, and of course, code on JavaScript and Python.
It is important to state at this juncture that the convergence of diverse streams and rivulets into a single mind is not a σ3 IQ, extreme-right-of-the-bell-curve phenomenon. An enterprise software salesperson building a pitch deck would find an extravagance of beautiful templates, a rich palette of icons and text formats, an easy porting of spreadsheet charts into the Keynote file, and quotes and data points galore on the Web. It is the story they would have to master, the ebb and flow of the narrative, not the intricacies of camera angles and cinematography. It is easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case. In the dark ages, when Siebel CRM was the lord of the cubicle farm, mere alignment on PowerPoint required such mastery that office work was indent labour (it feels good to be free men 15 years later).
Heck, even B2B software sales, as touchy feely and tactical a work stream as they come, is no longer about the “man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a Shoeshine” making 50 cold calls before the second coffee. Sales now has huge parts that are content marketing. Clients do the bulk of the research and are pretty sure of what they want by the time of the conversation (if there is at all a conversation). The dynamic again harks back to finding a story that sticks in a competitive marketplace of ideas, with large parts of the funnel automated by the military-industrial complex that is the martech tools landscape. Work increasingly requires fewer, better people, fewer hedgehogs, more foxes.
A part of the work day is now exploration, trekking across the broad contours of a discipline, assimilating its essence, finding the state of the art — and then, tugging at the frontiers a wee bit in a specific direction. It is about formalisation, systems definition, novel assembly of techniques, and the precise ordering of steps. The actual pedal-to-the-metal is done by UX patterns libraries, open source deep neural network packages, autoML platforms, or the newest tableau on the endless parade of web development frameworks (among a bewildering array of technologies). It is the meandering nature of 21st century work that makes the modern office an opium den. I am recumbent. I am hooked to 30 browser tabs; I am mainlining dopamine; I am not straitjacketed, and blinkered into a goal, my mind’s sauntering; and yet — with the alibi of work, with the fig leaf of learning, with a nominal goal, there is the pretence of being in a quarry, and not the opium den.
Work used to be about the tyranny of circumscribed time and the prison of circumscribed space. Work used to be about drudgery. Work used to be about the emotional labour of conversation. Now, in a process started by Marc Andreessen’s ravenous software Pac-Man, and taken to extremes by the plague, there is no reining in across time or space. There is no forced eye contact (on Zoom, I stare at an indeterminate point on my own wall, not at an actual person).
For many in the affluent West, and the global cultural construct called the West, work is less about putting food on the table (or even a sports car in the garage) and more about chasing glory in the latest gold rush dreamt up by tech utopians. We are now all 18th century natural philosophers, gentleman inventors, alchemists, and Kon-Tiki sailors, tinkering in our personal mad scientist’s lab, tending to beakers, fossils, and rafts - the life of a men and women in search of a fortune and a legacy. The net impact of technology is democratising access. Modern plumbing brought running water to those without servants. Social media brought micro-celebrity hood to those born without the violet eyes of Liz Taylor. Container shipping bought trinkets from far away lands to those not born to monarchs. And the four horsemen of the great upping of leverage — software, ‘on tap’ production capacity, information superabundance, and cultural homogenisation — allow us all the megalomania of the enlightened gentleman of leisure, playing renaissance men of the 21st century, working on “the important stuff”, taking angel positions in startups, buying ICOs, taking humanity forward. A linearity can no longer be assumed in the future’s unfolding.
Of course, much of this is indistinguishable from bullshit.
The trouble with it all is that the polymath can look an awful lot like the underemployed lurker. Epochal transitions catch many unaware. Millions of office workers have jobs that are too nebulous to be encapsulated into software. The jobs are not nebulous because they are multidisciplinary. They are nebulous, almost astral, because the work streams are remnants of a time when mere reporting of progress, and the coordination of work, required manual oversight. As reporting and orchestration have come under the purview of software, these corporate citizens, often inflexible with gravitas, have little to do. They have responded with attempts to elevate the work of those that they are nominally in charge of. But let’s face it, the downside of the great upping of leverage is if you aren’t the kind who can summon — at will — the first principles, the norms, and the state of the art of three different disciplines into working memory, you are going to be the victim of the great upping of leverage, not a beneficiary. You will go the way of the whip maker, not the automotive repair shop. We are all running away from the Pac-Man, who is relentless, wielding the scythe of software that automates at ever higher levels of abstraction
To illustrate, consider the marketing function. In B2B tech, it involves figuring out the broad arc of the corporate story, chipping away at long form content (short form, SEO kind of content is going the way of the dodo post GPT-3), dissemination, and lead nurturing. The person at the helm will note that the few people who can weave business, technology, and regulatory arcana into readable prose are doing just fine on their own, thank you. To add value, you have to out-think and out-know these tech analysts who are cursed with the neurology that makes total immersion into product data sheets and research papers pleasurable. Those maintaining the software that hosts content marketing assets and manages inbound leads are also doing fine, thank you. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) eats into legacy a little bit every year, and makes things easier. Those pushing content through martech tools are mostly setting up a pipeline and pushing a button.
For a SVP, Marketing to contribute in this state of affairs, they have to be the reigning authority on the broad sweeps of history in tech, acquire deep knowledge of the particular niche, go beyond the immediate realm of the function - and provide guidance on the product roadmap, and counsel sales on tiny competitive edges that are hyper specific to industry sectors and technographics. It is the life of Sisyphus, forever staving off irrelevance. One miss, a moment’s lapse from keeping up with the great upping of leverage, and you slide into the purgatory between the opium den and the quarry I am provisionally calling Planet Podcast. In Planet Podcast everybody plays at being the polymath, in a never ending pantomime of work. Donald Knuth, the computer scientist, famously checks email once every three months because:
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for (those whose) role is to be on the bottom of things.”
Those in the Planet Podcast purgatory are forever on the top of things.
There is no such thing as pure leisure anymore
Even as work is elevated into the status of a calling, leisure is regressing into work. The joys of ritual, distraction, and craft have been sucked into the vortex of work, churning out routine, habit, effort, grind, and optimisation. Capitalism’s death star weapon has been employed: metrics.
I am a strength training enthusiast. Over the century that has passed since Eugene Sandow made physical culture popular, men and women have lifted weights for nothing more than the joy of lifting. But then in the early 2010s, social media happened to the iron game. Capitalism rolled out its death star. The lord be praised: views, likes, referrals, engagements, amateur bodybuilding shows, and supplementation sponsorships followed.
Our species, essentially monkeys with bipedalism and an efficient heat removal system, has gone from dwelling in caves to US$80,000,000,000,000 in global GDP in a mere 200,000 years. This rise was on the back of a single flaw in our genetic code: any data point that might construe a difference in status is to the human mind what a laser pointer on the wall is to a cat. The data point can be a categorical variable such as social tiers or a continuous variable such as salary. When a man can afford an item, the invisible hand of the market creates an equivalent that is just beyond their reach, triggering the laser-on-the-wall reflex. It is mimetic desire, made legible with numbers.
That dynamic is now everywhere. One no longer just cooks. One no longer just runs. One no longer just swims. One no longer just tends to the backyard garden. Everything is in service of a leaderboard. Software, which works on instructions that brook no ambiguity, has the effect of making the implicit explicit, reifying concepts that quietly undergird society without ever being made visible (NFT proponents, without irony, call their system of rocks, apes, and penguins ‘status as a service’). The process began with social media, creating pecking orders in every kind of human endeavour. Crypto now finishes what social media started, with every tribe claiming its own currency, creating its own mini nation state. I can no longer walk into the gym without hearing the wild call, the clear call that the mere distraction that is deadlifts and squats should be parlayed into a YouTube channel.
Even as we freed work from circumscription by the 9-to-5, and circumscription by the four walls of office, we entrapped leisure into the snare of the eternal race. In every nook and cranny of my life, I feel the tug of the cult of work, the temptation to replace the pleasant absence of a goal, the delightful absence of self-actualisation — with the ferocity, the raving madness of targets, drive, and meaning. In 2021, nothing is work and everything is work.
