I recently saw an advertisement for a job in financial services that offered a modest wage to college graduates, but also provided juicy perks, like: “Delicious lunches at the office” and “Regular team gatherings and fun company events.” The company organizes beach days, with management and workers making merry together. The wages might be a pittance, but it all sounds like fun and games, and better than an unpaid internship. Another perk: “the possibility of Home Office two, or even three times a week.” One’s living room or bedroom, part of the private world in the past, where you had parties, entertained friends – maybe even made love to one or two of them – becomes an extension of the workplace. And what to make of the final perk: “Take care of your mental and emotional well-being with unlimited appointments with psychologists and personal coaches.” This is supposed to make you want the job?
Big Tech in Silicon Valley generously extends perks to even provide female employees with the possibility to have their ovaries frozen at company expense. As Marxist philosopher Nancy Fraser puts it, the message is: “Wait and have your kids in your forties, fifties, or even sixties; devote your high-energy, productive years to us.” Thus, the privacy of the lifeworld is appropriated and cannibalised by the system. The private community of family is exploited by the public community of the corporation. The firm comes to encapsulate the worker like a mollusc. This blurring between work and nonwork leads to increased anxiety and depression. There is no way to switch off. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests, the “violence of positivity” where “projects, initiatives and motivations” saturate and exhaust the achievement-subject, lead to burnout. This is symptomatic of the work culture that some young people now inhabit, where work provides the illusion of community, and the system of work and administration enfolds the lifeworld of the individual, where the corporation colonizes the leisure time of the employees and play time is no longer to be enjoyed in the private sphere.
I was once invited by a friend to visit Google’s research headquarters in my hometown, Zurich. She was Global Manager of something or other and had just flown in from California. I was struck by the campus feeling, where work and pleasure mixed, with activities like yoga and mindfulness plus organic cookies and vegan foods freely available. Googlers can have full breakfast, lunch and dinner on site, with wines, excellent coffee and healthy vegetarian choices. And here’s the best bit – it’s free of charge. No need to leave work at all. A variety of cafes and relaxation spots, each with a different theme, populate the building, and each serves free delicious coffee, fresh fruit, cookies and brownies, and so on.
You can enjoy an entire social life within the building. Employees are encouraged to sign up for leisure activities together. The corridors are studded with a variety of cool features – cable cars with couches and telephones, and inviting bean bags. There’s a fitness centre and a massage centre and a yoga/mindfulness centre, a couple of snooker tables and a playroom with psychedelic lights and electric guitars. At every corner there’s a cool box, with drinks, and ice cream. If your bored, or you’re lonely, or if the world of grown-ups scares you, you can spend your life in the workplace, if that workplace is Google. Here you can develop your authentic self.
Although his ideas on community had a direct influence on Martin Luther King’s concept of the Beloved Community, few people today will remember the works of the Christian American philosopher Josiah Royce. He wrote a great deal about community in the early 20th century, suggesting that the life of the individual is meaningless unless they are a member of a community. He argued that the greatest enemy of community was individualism and that once the individual becomes detached from their community they are lost and beyond salvation. Royce argued that community – “[o]ne’s family, one’s circle of personal friends, one’s home, one’s village community, one’s clan, one’s country” – all work to engender a sense of loyalty in the individual and this loyalty to something greater than oneself provides the basis for universal loyalty to all of humankind, what he called the universal community.
Royce had a deep influence on post-World War One management guru Mary Parker Follett, the so-called ‘mother of modern management’. She introduced Royce’s ideas into the world of business schools, where they found a warm reception. According to James Hoopes, Parker Follet took from Royce the idea that a community is a social group that shares some of the same personal unity as individual persons. She suggested that a profitable business corporation could be run along the lines of what appeared to be a non-hierarchical community. This gave the American corporate world, with its utopian aspirations, a new “all embracing sense of mission.”
The Australian psychologist Elton Mayo was the founder of the human relations approach to management at Harvard Business School during the 1930s. Building on the work of Royce and Parker Follett, Mayo went further, discovering a link between the mental health and productivity of the worker. Thus, he introduced manipulative, psychological practices to get the most out of the worker by creating the illusion that the worker had some autonomy. So, for instance, instead of increasing wages or providing more paid holidays, the company could involve the workers in managing their own canteen. Hoopes argues that these attempts at “manipulative control” have now become widespread in corporations and business schools.
In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello compared the management literature produced in business schools in the 1960s with the literature of the 1990s. One of the main changes in the 1990s was the rejection of hierarchy in the workplace. Instead, on the one hand, there was an obsessive attention to adaption, change and flexibility, and on the other hand, the building of trust between management and workers. The management literature of the 1990s resorted to the metaphor of the network, rather than any hierarchy, a sort of Deleuze and Guattari for business studies. In the non-hierarchical networked space, everyone should be encouraged to develop themselves personally, cultivate self-knowledge, personal fulfilment and individualized relations. Authenticity had been appropriated by capitalist production. No wonder Deleuze and Guattari mourned the shameful moment when disciplines like marketing, design and advertising seized control of universities, claiming: “we are the creative ones … the ideas men.”
Boltanski and Chiapello submitted the manipulation of authenticity by business management to a chilling analysis. They argue that in the non-hierarchical culture of the connextionist workplace, a network of relations is valued. This means that there is no place for an authentic self that is separate from, or resistant to the crowd. There is no place for an authenticity that chooses voluntary solitude. Wordsworth and the romantics would not survive long in the networked campus that is the office workspace today. On the other hand, a new type of authenticity is highly prised – the worker who is reliable, enthusiastic, spontaneous and friendly. New forms of management, emanating from experts in business schools, place a premium on this type of worker’s authenticity and flexibility.
While workers are under pressure to develop ‘authentic’ relationships with the clients in order to produce a profit for the company, Boltanski and Chiapello also describe what they call “a grammar of authenticity” that rules the relationships within the workplace. This grammar consists of techniques or mechanisms, promoted by business schools, in which managers learn to shape the development of spontaneous, friendly relations within the workplace. Trust, friendship, sincerity and personal care for each other are thereby enhanced. But as the hierarchical structures are gradually replaced by mechanisms of consent and agreement, this leads to manipulative practices that induce people “to do what one wants them to do by themselves, as if under the influence of a voluntary, autonomous decision.” Workers are asked for advice or encouraged to join collaborative groups where they have input into decision making and the creation of aspiring visions, but the outcomes are already predetermined by management.
In this new workplace environment, one seems to gain a certain level of autonomy by choosing an independent project (organising the decoration of the canteen, or setting up an after work yoga group for instance), and one proves one’s reliability through demonstrating genuine authenticity, by caring sincerely for the client, the product, and the wellness of one’s colleagues. What is demanded of the worker, much like in Mao’s China, is enthusiasm and genuine participation in a sincere, authentic manner. But enthusiasm, sincerity and authenticity are interior qualities, states of mind. Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshit proliferates when we turn inward, in pursuit of the ideal of sincerity. If we are true to our own nature (in other words, living an authentic life), than we can achieve sincerity. However, the problem is, knowing oneself is no easier than knowing any aspect objective reality. For Frankfurt, “sincerity itself is bullshit.”
The purpose in all of these manipulative business techniques is to increase value for the shareholders. That is why the employer provides personal coaching sessions, vegan meals, and offers to freeze ovaries. The enthusiastic employee works hard and does a good job. But they can never have autonomy when the point of the exact task isn’t fully clear to them and is certainly not of their own choosing. Actual autonomy is limited, however it may seem.
Apple television’s Severance skewers this aspect of extractive capitalism in a savagely persuasive satire. Workers at Lumon are persuaded to sever their private selves from their working selves entirely. The latter are totally controlled by the company. In episode five, the manager says: “The surest way to detain a prisoner is to let him believe he is free.” The purpose of erasing all memories of their outside lives keeps the workers compliant, doing their pointless tasks at their computer terminals.
The managers at Lumon do their utmost to instil a feeling of community. The workers learn to revere the founder of the company, much like Apple acolytes revering the guru Steve Jobs. The founder’s writings gain a type of cult quality. His house is kept like a temple, to be visited during special moments. Everyone is trained to show gratitude, to be patient and nice, to follow proper procedures and protocols, to set professional goals and gain some perks when these are achieved. The workers occasionally enjoy treats, little tokens, a music-dance experience or a watermelon party. This creation of a sense of community works to a certain extent. The main character states: “We are a family.”
The character Helly rebels. Her name, from Helena, in ancient Greece meant “shine a light” and sometimes we see her doodling, she is drawing a picture of a lamp. She is the character who casts the light of reason onto the community bullshit. At one point she shouts, “This work is bullshit.” At another point she says: “Too bad no one told you everything here is bullshit.” In the second episode, the main character utters: “I’ve heard some are so deluded they don’t even know they are victims.”
Much of Severance reflects the work of David Graeber. His Bullshit Jobs is based on the fact that polls indicated that 37% of workers in Britain and 40% in the Netherlands find their job to be pointless. A bullshit job is, according to Graeber, “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” He prefaces his study by writing that: “It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.” He claims that the worst torture ever devised would be “to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task”, and notes that such work is “soul destroying”. His book is filled with examples taken from the service industries – banking, finance, IT, Human Resources – areas where workers suffer “spiritual violence … feelings of hopelessness, depression and self-loathing.”
Yet, the performative self of the tech worker, well-educated, liberal, open, determined, single and childless, is convinced that this is what they want – to spend their best years attentive to and serving the needs of Mammon. Unlike the slave of the 18th century and unlike the wage earner of the 19th century, they do not need to be chained, and they do not need to be whipped; they willingly give up the capacity for private contentment in order to work themselves to death, all the while believing in the chimera of an authentic community within the capitalist enterprise. They are emblematic of a new era of capitalism in which a hybrid bourgeois-worker gladly engages in auto-oppression. Rousseau warned that the worst form of slavery is when the enslaved loses the desire to be free and comes to love their servitude, for to renounce one’s freedom “is to renounce one’s humanity.” Yet the office worker today gladly sacrifices the family community to earn a respectable place in the corporate community. This feeling of community, strongly promoted among the workers of Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley, approaches the dangers that are outlined in Aldous Huxley’s prophetic Brave New World.
Brave New World is the proverbial fictional account of the totalitarian state. The motto of Huxley’s dystopian World State is “Community, Identity, Stability.” In this state, solemn commemorations consist of “Community Sings and Solidarity Services”. The most solemn services are led by the “Arch-Community Songster of Canterbury”.
Being alone is hugely frowned upon. In an anticipation of cancel culture, a lecturer who introduces students to the concept of “being alone” is reported immediately to the principle; after all, the students had been indoctrinated with “warnings against solitude”. The leader of the state, Mustapha Mond, admits that “people are never alone now” and he adds” [w]e make them hate solitude”. Brave New World is a warning that when community is co-opted by capitalist corporations and triumphs over society, then we are in deep trouble.
It is often thought that the chief authoritarian figure in Huxley’s Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, represents some sort of Big Brother or dictatorial political leader. After all, the book appeared in 1932, coinciding with Hitler’s rise to power. But this is a fallacy. After World War II the book mistakenly was read as a criticism of political totalitarianism. In fact, Huxley’s target was not political totalitarianism at all. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism were not what Huxley originally had in mind. The context against which Huxley wrote his novel included what George Woodcock called “the perils of Fordism to the human psyche” and “the implications of the attempt to make man primarily a consumer”. Woodcock describes “the scientific-industrialist ideal of Mustapha Mond” as having been derived from the great antisemite, Henry Ford.
Henry Ford’s assembly plants had reduced the time it took to assemble a Model T Ford automobile to just over two hours. This was done by introducing the assembly line process in which manufacturing was broken down into dozens of discreet units. Each factory worker focussed entirely on just one unit. The human was thus transformed into a mindless robot serving the machine through simple, repeated movements. This was memorably visualised in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in 1936.
Ford was a huge admirer of F. W. Taylor, the man often considered to be the first business consultant. The application of Taylorism coincides with the growth of modern schools of business and management. Taylorism aimed to achieve maximum efficiency in the workspace by exerting total control of the worker. Taylorism engendered the concepts that are taught in every business and management school today – human resources, workflow, optimization. Taylorism can best be seen today in the management of workers at Amazon warehouses, where the bodies of workers are controlled minutely, and the workers are forced to respond to non-stop incoming electronic instructions. Huxley’s Brave New World describes what happens when this efficient management of humans is applied to a whole society and that society becomes a closed community under the leadership of a top business manager, someone like Henry Ford or, for that matter, Donald Trump or Elon Musk (both graduates of the same business school).
For many, any sense of genuine community has collapsed under endemic uprootedness brought on by neoliberal capitalism. But in typical solutionist manner, the machinery of capitalism that overrides the local and destroys communities also supplies the solution. It is Royce’s legacy, via the lineage of Follett and Mayo, that corporate business leaders today can engage in chimeric bullshit by referring to the consumers of their brand and the producers of their product as being members of one happy community, a universal community.
Meta, Google, Twitter or X, all offer membership of communities free of charge. There is no doubt that Big Tech leaders see themselves as contemporary Mustapha Monds, the oligarchical leaders of a global community. For instance, the website of Meta’s headquarters declares “Facebook stands for community. That commitment extends from our global community to our physical home in Menlo Park.” In an open letter called “Building a Global Community” and posted to his own Facebook page on February 17, 2017, Zuckerberg mentioned the term “community” no less than 88 times. In a time of huge global threats, Zuckerberg argued, we must reach beyond cities or nations, and the most important task of Facebook, he claimed in a line that he emboldened, is to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”
A danger today does not emanate from political dictators alone, but also from unelected billionaires who wish to create one community, with a Big Tech Manager at the helm, a contemporary Mustapha Mond. Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are all likely candidates.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, society is overseen by an elite of guardians who oversee the destruction of individuality and privacy and the triumph of a new sense of community. Happiness is the goal and this is achieved, but at the cost of freedom. We are repeatedly told today that we can enjoy living in one networked community. It will bring happiness to us all. The problem is, to achieve this best of all possible worlds, our lifeworld will be cannibalized by the system, and we will forgo our freedom. The corporate appropriation of Community will initiate techno-corporate feudalism.
Works Cited
Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2018).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994).
Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It (London and New York: Verso, 2023).
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society, trs. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
Hoopes, James. False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today, (Cambridge MA: Perseus Books, 2003).
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2004).
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Social Contract, trs. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968).
Royce, Josiah. Selected Writings, edited by John E. Smith and William Kluback (New York: Paulist Press, 1988).
Woodcock, George. Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).