By Michael Laurence
I
The Predator. The corporation is the most powerful entity on the planet. It is dynamic, mutable, evolving, and ruthless. It operates beyond territorial constraints, subsuming everything in its path. In the hunt for profit, it operates like a predator: it mutates, changes form, and deploys strategy and cunning at every turn. To fight this predator we need to know it well. We need to understand its intelligence. Reveal its traps. Its ruses. To formulate effective strategies to combat the corporation we must reveal the strategies of subsumption, extraction, and control it uses. The techniques it uses to colonize and kill us with work.
II
Office Space. The 1999 cult classic film Office Space depicts the corporation as a zone of death. A soulless place. A place without feeling. Company VP Bill Lumbergh, played by Gary Cole, embodies this evacuation of spirit. He is characterless, colorless (with the exception of his tie), and dreary. His voice drones on monotonously about reports, cover sheets, and company memos. He is the alienation of office work personified. A living corpse. There is nothing that resembles life at his company, Initech. Endless rows of cubicles that all look exactly the same. Legions of employees wearing the same fake smiles and reproducing the same counterfeit gestures. The main character, Peter Gibbons, simply can’t take it anymore. He hates his job. The lifelessness of work haunts him even at home. In his dreams he hears a high-pitched voice drone on endlessly: ‘Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.’ It has a nightmarish quality. After a bizarre therapy session, Peter has an awakening. He declares to his coworker: ‘Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms, and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.’ He’s had enough.
Peter undergoes an internal transformation. He sleeps in and misses his weekend shifts. He decides that he won’t show up to work during the week either. When he does finally arrive at the office, he struts in carelessly late wearing sandals and shorts. He knocks down his cubicle wall in order to let sunlight in. Eats chips and plays video games. He even brings a live fish to work and fillets it on his desk. Peter has blown apart the repressive machine of the corporation. Yet he isn’t fired for this! Instead, he is given a promotion and a raise! He is the manager, the CEO, of the future. The one who hates capitalism and alienation. The one who preaches that we only have one life to live so we should make it count! The one who writes books about the 4-hour workweek. Lumbergh’s time has passed. His monotonous voice and dead routines are finished. The new corporation will be made in the image of Peter, in the image of life. It will rise out of the ashes of the old. After Initech burns (thanks to the rage of another alienated employee named Milton), Apple, Google, and Facebook will emerge to inaugurate a new era.
III
The New Corporate Era. Fast forward to the 2005 American comedy series, The Office. The new corporate era has begun. The star of the series is Michael Scott (Steve Carell), regional manager of a dying paper firm called Dunder Mifflin. Scott sets out to transform the atmosphere of the corporate office. While a failure at first, over time he succeeds in replacing the subtle and repressive authoritarianism of the old corporation with the contagious laughter and vitality of the new one. Scott even sees himself as a comedian and a friend to his employees before anything else. In the pilot episode, Scott explains the logic of his leadership style: ‘I guess the atmosphere that I’ve created here is that I’m a friend first, and a boss second, and probably an entertainer third.’ The entire show bases its humor on what happens when bosses like Scott and employees like Dwight Schrute practice self-expression and enjoyment rather than self-repression at work. From show to show we witness the dead zone of the corporation miraculously transformed into a place of vibrant life full of personal drama and relationships, intense affects, and unpredictable moments of hilarity. We witness the transformation of work into a situation that feels like non-work. This is what viewers find so endearing about the show. The ways in which the death of work seems to become the vibrancy of life. The ways in which the dehumanizing space of the office is transformed into what seems like a humanizing one. The genius of this show is that it has convinced millions of people that they would enjoy their enslavement if only they could work for a company like Dunder Mifflin and have a boss like Scott. All the while the ruthless corporate drive for profit and efficiency continues to drive all operations. The company is repeatedly downsized, employees are laid off, health benefits are cut, resources are slashed, and wages frozen. Yet thanks to the energies and eccentricities of the characters, these cutbacks are rendered liveable, even laughable. Scott tells jokes and expresses care for his employees while their livelihoods burn. Dwight Schrute perfectly embodies the ruthless corporate drive for efficiency but combines it with hilarity. In his presence we literally laugh ourselves to death. Our attention is diverted and we forget that the livelihoods of human beings are being sacrificed, that our entire lives are being colonized by work. We learn to enjoy our own destruction. Cut backs and lay offs are enacted, and a vibrant corporate culture provides the Vaseline that helps these policies succeed without resistance. We learn that the new corporation wants us to be ourselves and laugh while we work ourselves to death in return for less and less.
IV
The Corporation Discovers Life. This is a remarkable transformation. The corporation has discovered life. It no longer sees life as its enemy, as something to be barred from entering the workplace or something that gets in the way of bureaucracy and the crude mechanics of profit making. It now sees life as something to be absorbed entirely into its monstrous structure. It now desires to put the whole of life, including our social abilities, connections, unique personalities, emotions, and desires to work in order to transform its dead space into a space of vibrancy. Bill Lumbergh has been replaced by Michael Scott. Michael Scott is overtaken by Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Initech is replaced by Dunder Mifflin. Dunder Mifflin is supplanted by Facebook and Apple. What began with the simple gestures of bringing the family photograph or eccentric coffee mug to work has led to the annihilation of the distinction between work and life, a never-ending Hawaiian shirt day, where employees must laugh, have fun, and be themselves while working themselves to death. The new corporation says: Come to work but don’t leave yourself at home! Don’t hide your emotions! Be your self! Feel free! Laugh! Enjoy your enslavement! The new boss wants to be your friend. He buys you a present on your birthday. Perhaps he even reads Karl Marx and hates capitalism. He believes in humanity. He is full of energy and inspiration. He wants you to feel inspired. He wants to change the world and make it a better place. He wants you to do the same. The corporation has discovered that employees perform better and that profit is generated more effectively when the workplace feels like social and personal space. When it has been infused by life.
The corporation now spends billions to make the death of work seem and feel like life: mandatory team building exercises. Office games, sing-a-longs, humiliating rituals, sales competitions, charity fundraisers, barbeques, corporate marathons, and the hiring of ‘fun-sultants.’ The aim is to make employees feel excited and motivated at the prospect of their own enslavement. This is done out of necessity. The work itself is often so deadening, so lifeless, so endless, and so alienating that the workforce exists in a perpetual depressive state, needing to be constantly infused with artificial fragments of life to maintain even a minimal degree of consciousness. The thirty-something corporate manager who sings U2’s It’s a Beautiful Day loudly every morning before working the phones. The CEO led pep-talk/Beyoncé sing along. Corporate Idol and company flash mobs. These are small but significant attempts to infuse life into dead spaces. Capital wants to suck us dry while simultaneously convincing us to sing along and enjoy it.
This perverse process reaches frightening heights with major corporations like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. All have engaged in architectural megaprojects that are completely reconfiguring the nature of the contemporary workplace. They have built colossal monuments of glass and steel. Vast bio-domes fusing life and work together to an extent that the distinction between the two becomes incoherent. Life subsumed by work. Work by life. In March, Facebook moved into its new 433,555 sq. ft. building complete with a half-mile walking loop and over 400 trees. Meanwhile, Google’s 2.5 million square foot headquarters in Mountain View, California is adding more bike paths and retail spaces to better fuse with nearby communities. Corporations know that workers will be more productive and ideas will be generated and captured more effectively if employees are ‘happier’ and ‘in the right spaces’. The result is that the new corporations no longer look or feel like work. This is their secret, their ruse. Capitalism has always been remarkably adept at cunning and self-mutation. It incorporates and uses anything, everything, in its drive for profit. Like some hideous shape-shifting monster, it swallows up all of life. By 2016, it is estimated some 12,000 employees will live permanently inside Apple’s 2.8 million square foot building in Cupertino, California. Today’s most effective prisons are the ones that glisten. The ones that don’t look or feel like prisons at all. In this monstrous drama of subsumption, the world increasingly becomes one massive corporation. The corporation expands infinitely outward, increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the world itself. The ‘corporate world’ becomes a literal and frightening reality.
V
The Entrepreneur. He is the great symbol of our age, its crowning subjective type. He is the priest figure that ensures the rule of the corporation through its subsumption of life. He helps capital swallow up all rebellion, negation, and opposition. He himself is negation commodified. He is the highly educated, idiosyncratic geek that wears t-shirts and sandals to the office and professes to be challenging the status quo. Mark Zuckerberg rants about taking risks, breaking through conventions, and empowering people. Steve Jobs droned on about being authentic and listening to your inner voice. He spoke approvingly of the rebels and misfits, the round pegs in the square holes. The entrepreneur, we are told, is the misfit. The rebel. The authentic individual that breaks free from the herd. We are taught to admire entrepreneurs. We want to be entrepreneurs. We endlessly repeat their cheap clichéd mantras. They are priests of kitchen sink psychology and self-help. They are serious about ecological and social responsibility. They gloat about creativity and innovation. Yet the entire existence of the entrepreneur serves the market alone. Their very being serves the marketization and enslavement of all life. The entrepreneur is therefore, the human mask slapped on the face of capital and its ruthless destruction of the world and everything in it. He is a cheap simulation of creativity, change, and newness that cloaks the inertia and stasis of a system that is rotting and taking with it all life. He wants to improve the world but never sees himself as part of the cause of its ongoing debasement and destruction. The cult of worship surrounding the entrepreneur signals the successful ideological conversion of enslavement to creative freedom and the affirmation of a cultural blindness dragging us all into a catastrophic abyss.
The entrepreneur. Our sacred figure. The one who we believe changes the world. Yet with all these self proclaimed entrepreneurs running around unleashing their so-called creative energy and ideas, how is it that the deadening stasis of neoliberal capitalism still reigns? How is it that life for most people on the planet continues to grow worse and not better? How is it that economic policies of austerity have become the rule? The better, more honest question is: how is the entrepreneur so effective at convincing everyone that he is an agent of progress and good? How is it that the entrepreneur conceals his parasitical and priest-like function so well? The entrepreneur is not our savior. He is a symptom. He signals not the improvement, but debasement and decline of life. This is because the entrepreneur serves, above all else, the logic of profit, and therefore he does not think or act independently or autonomously. He has no imagination. No thought. He only serves. The entrepreneur is motivated, enthusiastic, and innovative. Yet this is necessarily the motivation and enthusiasm of a slave. And the worship of the entrepreneur is nothing more than the worship of enslavement to the market disguised as freedom.
Like the vampire, the corporation lives off of us. It needs human life to function. It needs our intellect, energy, motivation, enthusiasm, social skills, and humanity in order to profit. The entrepreneur is the subjective model that seeks to capture these things and put them to work for the corporation. He presides over the subsumption of life by the corporation. One of the great political challenges today is to take life back from the entrepreneur and from the corporation. To render the corporation a skeleton, a ruin. To send the entrepreneur to the gallows. We must refuse to surrender life to the corporation. We must refuse to hand life over to the desires and schemes of the entrepreneur. We must destroy and overcome the entrepreneurial and corporate forms and collectively construct a post-corporate, post-entrepreneurial world where all life can flourish.
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Michael Laurence
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