It’s good to see you
Today we conclude the first month in the first season of our serialized book, DEEP SOCKS. Please peruse the table of contents to catch up on the previous ~3.667 chapters.
This week we have examined what we call the Millennium Prize Problems of Management. These are the pressing and unresolved issues of managerial society, the successor political economy to Corporatism and Capitalism. The first is the unresolved problem of war—infowar versus meatwar, and the necessity of creating and delimiting conflict spaces and creating methods of deconfliction that can successfully make World War 3 a shadow war that is unknown to the public, but very known to its pitiable but quite doomed victims. The second is the unresolved problem of iatrogenesis; that is the creation of medical problems and disease by medicine, chief among them bifurcated realities and mass death events, best seen in the years 2019-2022, the covid years. This black mark on the medical industry and the practice of medicine more generally must prompt a reform in the conception of health to begin resolving the structural problems in the management and provision of care and attendant policies.
Today, we examine The Great Resignation—the mass attrition of workers from quality jobs in the middle and upper strata of the economy following covid. Why did people suddenly give up on work and seek their fortunes elsewhere? What about the experience of working during the covid-related hygienic house arrests drove them out of the economy? How can it be resolved, before the next mismanaged catastrophe?
The Great Resignation
The Great Resignation will probably not end managerial society as we know it. No, that might be the economic depression coming our way thanks to a failure to integrate vital nodes in the world production system. It might be from a war resulting from that failure of integration. The failures of integration of right-socialist and right-neoliberal political formations is a tragedy of our age. It is tragic not merely because of the consequences. It is not tragic that Hamlet dies. It is tragic that he dies because he could have lived, and perhaps should have lived.
We live in a time where many things are dying that may not have needed to. And many people are fleeing some sector of work and life, and they may not have needed to. This is the Great Resignation. A large amount of educated, well-paid workers have decided that there is not sufficient value being discovered in their lives through the daily drudgery of work in managerial society. These are people with the Good Jobs. These are people who got to Work From Home. These are people with skills and roles in society. The pandemic didn’t crush their dreams, and it didn’t destroy their lives and finances.
Why flee the system now, as its poised between recovery and ruin?
Psychic anguish and effective causes
The most likely cause behind the Great Resignation is a sudden uptick in the experience of victimization, injustice, and mental-spiritual complaint. They categorize themselves as people living under incredible anxiety, sadness, misery, and pressure. Their lifestyles are producing subjective misery and difficulty.
In other words, people are burnt out. They have spent a year on call, working from home, and dealing with their hated families and hollowed-out personal lives in varying states and durations of isolation. What is it all for? You spend years in school, making the right decisions, and some jackass in China turns everything you worked for into elevated delivery privileges. All the stuff you did and do is now to secure better grocery hauls and takeout and the ability to buy entertainment on subscription.
The privileges of working hard in managerworld seem extremely shitty suddenly, and you think, I can do it better. I don’t have to do this anymore. And so, in large numbers, people resign and make plans to change companies. A mass reshuffling of the upper-middle strata of the global economy.
The next crisis can only be superficially different
But why did it really happen? Why did the layers of the economy with the most subjective freedom and most objective privileges suddenly become more dissatisfied when they were separated from their offices? When they were obligated to spend time with their families, live on takeout, and consume media freely people’s sense of well-being went down considerably. Certainly there is the effect of the pandemic and its now-comical mismanagement and the willful introduction of deceptive, contradictory, and apparently malicious information to the public. A great deal of psychic distress can be felt when the CDC appears to be conspiring against you, or is telling you in no uncertain terms it is the Bad People’s fault you can’t go outside.
Without getting much further into the dangerous and tick-filled weeds of public health policy let it suffice to say that doctors provably do not know what is best for us. The conditions of covid and the public upheaval of 2020 are not truly unique, merely individual. The police will kill more people, it will continue to be filmed. More loud, obnoxious, and nationalistic politicians will run, and they are still probable victors, even in the sort of categorically fraudulent elections of the extremely corrupt and politically decaying developed nations. Just look at Bad Korea. And in another few years, or next year, or next fall, there will be a new virus and a new pandemic. Covid was SARS-2 after all, we will surely have SARS-3. It is obvious there are no learnable lessons about preventing respiratory virus transmission, save for prophylactic suicide. People who say otherwise are stupid, lying, or both. The next crisis will take some superficially different shape. The superficially different future crisis will be capitalized on to extend the domains of the manageable and managed in society.
The question is, will the world of work be able to stave off avoidable attrition caused by global psychic anguish? So instead of focusing on the external and effective causes of a psychic breakdown among the winners in the managerworld, let us ask more specifically: what was it about work that made people want to stop? What are the ultimate causes of the Great Resignation?
Two obvious realities
The forced house arrests created an unbearable and schizoid reality among the working-from-home, the laptop caste. They were forced to acknowledge:
Managerial society is out for itself
Managerial and intellectual work is only rewarding insofar as it is social
Managerial society is out for itself
Work and society did not particularly care whether we lived or died, merely that we did not die and add to the embarrassing pile of bodies. Instead, those of us lucky enough to continue to work for a paycheck throughout the enforced periods of house arrest saw firsthand—work would, and could, make demands anywhere it felt like it. Should you be an essential factory worker in China? Welcome to closed-loop management. The factory is your home, until they run out of food or work material. Deadly pandemic? Wear this napkin, you’re still DoorDashing. Got a nice job as a manager? Boot up that MacBook, it’s time to install Zoom.
The last spatial barriers that nominally separated the private from the economic had been made porous by computing and networking technology. With the onset of the coof, they were at last formally done away with. In order to continue its existence, the world of work, managerial society, would fill every crevice and corner it needed.
Managerial and intellectual work is only rewarding insofar as it is social
Office work is like most forms of work: tolerable for many because it is sociable. Work is a place outside of home, and it satisfies a basic desire to move, to be among others, to exist in society with other apes like us. If we were hunter-gatherers or foragers, we have seemingly always preferred to shit, eat, sleep, and get food in distinct places.
Many were happy to see work from home and its confusing abstractions and monotony end, and be replaced by the old confusing abstractions and monotony. We’ve had informants telling us of offices that seemed delighted to be back in their drab sea of desks—anything to break months of virtual isolation. The pressures of work are mentally alleviated by the somewhat communal nature of work, and by the legible hierarchies of actual, physical groups of other humans and human-shaped reptilians. Whatever you trick your brain to do or believe, what doesn’t go away when you stop believing dictates background conditions of life. Should you be at home, you are at home, and for work to appear is for it to intrude.
Bottling it in
At home, under hygienic house arrest, the pressures of work must mount in an environment that is not suited for them. At home, you cannot go and have a drink after work and kvetch about how everyone is an idiot except for you. Instead, you are now an alcoholic. Welcome to the club! At home, no work-stress can be released or shared with true efficacy. Unreleased psychic energy does not simply dissipate. Freud, that old smackhead, theorized that psychic energy that is repressed—unexpressed, that is, becomes neurosis over time. His romantic reification of metaphor into ‘science’ aside, there is an intuitive and obvious truth to this—stress, problems, injuries, and slights that are not dealt with thoroughly and effectively become greater problems as time goes on.
What good is all of the Fourth Industrial Revolution doing for us? It is in its early stages, but what about telepresence? Couldn’t you video chat your work friends? Wear a VR headset. VR Chat! Zoom dinners, Google Hangout drinking sessions, whatever other nightmare blends of telepresence exist? Why is taking orders from the grainy picture of your boss galling?
For the same reason why incels aren’t satisfied with simping for egirls and anime waifus. And we all know where that dissatisfaction leads.
Telepresence, or increasing systemic pressure
In normal conditions, work from home is a pleasant excuse to do a bit less and spend a bit more time on chores. You’re ‘sick,’ sick of giving a shit that is. There is not much of a ‘bottling effect.’ Telepresence manages to effectively bridge the gap. Work from home is commonly accepted to mean work a bit less, live a little more during normal times, and functions best as a happy exception to the normal work-from-workhive nature of professional labor. It is commonly accepted to be this way because telepresence is a shitty stopgap for the immanent reality and unbelievable efficacy of direct human communication. There is no technology on the horizon that is not disorienting, antisocial, and actively harmful to the living of life that can bridge these gaps.
Yet, we are shackled, often psychically (though users of wearable technology are quite physically) to devices that can moment to moment invade and dominate our attention and time. Telepresence, shitty as it is, is always a possibility. The office’s pressures, embodied and compressed to a couple hundred grams, now are part of your basic kit to go outside or remain inside. The office’s demands are now present with you. I could press my thumb to your forehead for a while. I could do it for an hour. After a bit, it would stop feeling like anything. But after a good while longer, perhaps after a little, minute shift in your position, you might just notice—what is on my forehead, why is this pressure there? Why won’t it go away? This basic lesson is commonly explained with the slowly-boiling-frogs analogy. But, unlike the frog, our lives aren’t in jeopardy. Just our sanity, which is generally not necessary to live and function in society.
The rules are made up
The division of public and private is, as Hannah Arendt has said, a fiction. Society is a gigantic family space, a massive massive inside that defines everything. This is a handy way to begin understanding the patterns of relation that we have to each other and the world, why we have sympathies and altruism that extends past the home. Because it never does leave the home. It helps us understand why economics has a bit of etymological irony to it. Oikos, the root word in Attic Greek for economics would imply that economics is the study of the rules of ordering the home or household. It certainly isn’t that, it is about the ordering of public life, the world of work and the state. The study of economics as we know it today was often called political economy, and differentiated from personal and home economy. But if the division of public and private is nonexistent, and what we have is the private, what about the deep senses of division of spaces that we feel in our lives? The inside and outside persist, the space of me and them persist. The inside and outside cannot be our national or civic borders, and they surely are not our physical bodies.
The division between personal and managed space is what exists. And here is the fundamental breach that omnipresent, potentially unending work from home represents, and why the gradual mounting of pressure breaks people, burns them out, has them casting about looking for a new answer as to what to do with themselves.
The managed space is the office. The street. The hospital. The apartment compound. The Internet. In managed space, you are expected to perform to rules of decorum, to rules and standards of behavior. These are spaces where you cannot expect ‘privacy.’ It is often called ‘public’ but these are often not owned by any civic authority. The rule when you are being watched is not necessarily to be on your best behavior, but to affect mannered and appropriate behaviors. Your best behavior might involve taking risks! Helping others, or being outgoing and sociable. This is discouraged in managed space. There are particular, mannered behaviors needed. Usually professional manners, which are risk-averse and liability avoidant.
This is contrasted with the unmanaged, or apparently unmanaged spaces of the personal. The office toilet, or any such where people sleep, smoke, shit, masturbate, and watch things on their phones or play games on their Switches or aging PSVitas. The apartment. The house. The bedroom. Moments where one can be reasonably assured that there is no observer, and no standard being held. These spaces are characterized by comfort, womb-like comfort and womb-like desires. These are the places where sad people get weighted blankets, smoke weed, and fuck. You may enter managed space from your personal space, you may put it to use for leisure and being a vegetable. But the demands of management are often extremely passive and mild. Pornhub merely asks you to let spyware run on your PC, and for your identity to be sold. Netflix merely asks that you not care too much if there’s anything worth your time, and for something like a tenner a month. And video games merely ask for some combination of time and cash.
The points don’t matter
The tools by which personal space is converted to managed space have a deleterious effect on the working process. Telepresence, videoconferencing, shared documents, web tools, chat apps. Unless the work process was already heavily dehumanized and aseptic, you will be working with an inferior facsimile of the working world, shrunk down and scaled to your screen. To rely on inferior facsimiles of reality is to fundamentally degrade the quality of the final product. Microsoft reports that their work from home adaptations are going well. Remember though, Inferiority is Microsoft’s best-selling product.
Many companies and employees that are choosing to remain with their jobs are demanding work from home flexibility. This is perhaps a good thing—people should work less, there is not all that much that needs doing in the world of professional and intellectual labor. Why is this degradation of work product acceptable?
Because for one, house arrests will ideally not again be implemented outside of the People’s Republic of China, where many of the benighted citizenry prefer misery to joy, and unlife to both death and life. The second is, rent is an expensive and perhaps unnecessary cost. Over time, work from home might become optimizable, at least in terms of work product. Why not offload office rents onto your schmuck employees? Why not offload burdens like scheduling? If it can improve cost efficiency, and people will accept any quality of professional work so long as its accredited properly, why not go for it?
The need to expand
If the world of professional, highly-managed labor makes the jump and embraces work from home, it represents a potentially short-lived triumph for the extension of managed space. For managerial society to thrive, managerial space must expand.
Management is a forward-looking, objective process, and this is key to its success. It does not seek utopia. Instead, it seeks optimization, according to principles of increase; profit, power, prestige. The old 3 Ps, warmed over. Perfection is utopic though, and iterating towards perfection means the goals of management are asymptotic. They approach the line. They never cross the line. They never become the line. At some scales, they may approach or occasionally hit the line. But at a local view, they only trend toward convergence.
This is a fine distinction, and it only makes sense in mathematics. It does not make sense in the practical and highly fuzzy space of human interactions and business. A business can be run at optimal practical efficiency. It is not particularly challenging from an organizational perspective—Standard Oil managed it. The trains can run on time. Even Mussolini managed it, and he was Italian. To somehow improve beyond running on time requires whole new levels of coordination that are simply unworthy of the investment.
Hitting perfection’s first cousin, more-than-good-enough, is a problem for a business seeking INCREASE. To continue justifying itself and the generally inhuman demands it makes on humans (so often placed at the feet of ‘Capitalism,’ as empty a word as ‘Freedom’ at this point), managerial society seeks expansion. This is often distinguished and lionized as a process of innovation, optimization, market discovery, business model invention, entrepreneurial spirit. It is the expansion of management into a space that was un- or under-managed. Social media is the expansion of management into an undermanaged space: human relationships. Find a business that is mediated by apps, or a new business of any sort, look at the space it acts on. The problem that they solve is almost certainly a problem of organizing labor, rather than a problem of a particular good or service simply not existing. Instead, they bring the benefits of modern management technique to a space where it was lacking.
Discarding an inheritance
Regarding work from home, one wonders about its historical viability. Should you, through magic or sufficiently advanced technology, go to the past and give the factory workers of the late 18th/early 19th century a new way to work from their meager homes, would they have done it with the enthusiasm and dedication that we do now?
A thought experiment: You do go back in time. You’re in Lowell, Birmingham, Dusseldorf, or some such dreadful place. You give to each worker the means to accomplish discrete part of their task. They pull a lever, they get a lever. They reach their hand into the baler to remove the obstruction, they get a lever. They smell check the solvents, they get a pot to inhale dangerous fumes from. Whatever mechanical task they had, they can now do it from home, and the real result of their work will be transmitted by elves or cyberelves to the next stage in production. The factory is completely networked amongst the homes of the workers. Should everyone do their job in synchronization, the factory runs more or less as it should.
The catch is, they must do it now any time there is a problem or a task. Often, there will not be one that’s off schedule. But you never know! They must treat work from home as we do, a potentially unlimited demand on time. You can never truly know the actual schedule of things.
You, like us, might suspect they’d fuck off and ignore the task when the time came. Over time it’d become an annoying and unsightly cuckoo clock. They’d leave. There would be less enthusiasm. There wasn’t much to begin with! But Our work today from home is not factory work. It is quieter, safer, we will not die of some awful Dickensian cough, our coughs get other adjectives.
What does this show? That there was in fact a very particular attitude towards time, work, and discipline in an era of work before the modern managed corporation. Authority, task, site, worker were all collocated, and given a similar problem, they were put into isolation with each other, constituted as a system, for a sentence of (should we be so lucky) no more than 12 hours.
The new managerial society, the newest political economy, is making a very different set of demands on particular workers, the protagonists of its own narrative of history. Obviously, factory work still persists under similar conditions quite often—but in the 1800s serfdom persisted. In fact, in the 1900s serfdom persisted!
This inheritance of control via delimited space and present hierarchical authority has been cast off in favor of an unlimited demand on space and hierarchies that area seemingly virtual. The question for many looking The Great Resignation in the face has been who is the worker, and who is the manager? In this new world where personal space is contingent upon not being currently occupied by management, the worker is quite often their own manager. And when a worker is their own manager, the question of motivation and organizational sympathies come into play, and for some strata, this is a category that is far more pressing than the mere obligation to earn wages to survive.
Hotswap X and Y
Xes and Ys are not mutually exclusive categories of worker. Instead, X and Y are best understood as being types of worker for a particular task. In some places, you are an X. In some, you are a Y. A mathematician is a Y in a room with a chalkboard and a proof to prove. A mathematician is an X in a steel mill.
The question is, where are most people Xes, where are most people Ys? For many people with success in managerial society, they have discovered a high level of motivation that is intrinsic to their character, relative to the type of work they do. But this motivation is related to space and context. They must feel they are in an office, doing their task, with their coworkers. The sociality of the space is what creates context—what makes a dining room a dining room and a meeting room a meeting room.
Some people are true Ys, some people are contextual Ys. There are those who are always possessed of a high desire to do work, do it well, do their task. There are those who take that hat off when they catch the train home. The experiential conflict becomes intolerable when they are asked to keep the hat on, or to put it on as needed, in a place where they have personal conflicts to deal with, in a place where stresses and reality pile on without limit.
The Third Millennium Prize Problem for Management
How can workers stop hating their lives, even as comfort increases and toil decreases? Why did The Great Resignation happen?
Workers are not always workers. Managers are not always managers. But management must constantly expand its territory, discover new optimizations. The wheel of iterative, learning-and-doing process must not merely turn, it must turn over, roll forward. When the next crises come, be they war, meteorological, pandemics, famines, or god knows what else, it is not improbable that the ad hoc responses will involve sequestering populations in their homes, asking them to shelter in place, and hoping that those who can keep working from home do so. To avoid unnecessary and avoidable attrition in the workforce (which can only exacerbate the financial and social panics following the crisis’ resolution) there must be a way to keep workers from coming to hate their life in managerworld. They must be able to tolerate the reduction of personal space to a mere contingency. If they are not, the next crisis, which will (based on the performance of industry and governments in 2019-2022) be worse, and more poorly handled than the last, will have even more destructive and potentially revolutionary consequences for managerworld.
Redefining the liminal space of managed/personal
Take a brief look at this propaganda piece. It is poorly written and argued, its point is shallow and stupid, but it does raise (in spite of itself) an interesting point. Are there such things as personal actions? Obviously the Supreme Court along with the poor author is operating in the classical dichotomy of public/private rather than our neologistic managed/personal. Are some actions intrinsically personal, such as prayer? Or are they subject to the prerogatives of managers? What if the denotation of personal and managed ceased to be about space and boundary, but instead action and time?
A recent and illustrative real example. An informant recently purchased a microwave to put at their desk at their office. The office manager informed her that she must remove the microwave. While it is not against the rules, her manager had told her, it must go. The typical response, beyond the initial go-fuck-yourself, would likely be, get rid of it. Why cause problems. Bend a bit. It’s not your house. It’s an office. They’re in charge.
But heating up your lunch, is that a justifiable action to manage? Does management gain according to any of its principles in a way that is rational? Of course not. It is the steamroller of a dry and stupid office culture being combined with the prerogative of power. But what if management truly cast aside its inheritance of collocation of authority, site, worker? And instead adopted a new and very powerful category of managed/personal alongside the lines of this decision that allowed school prayer?
That is to say, if the personal is no longer a category of space, but a category of action, it therefore must take on new modalities and qualities of temporality. Work is no longer what is done in a workspace. Personal life is no longer what is done at home. This is perhaps not the best of all possible worlds. But It is a better one, and one that many people who adapted more successfully than others to the changing demands of management likely intuitively adopted.
Transitioning to visibility
Managerial society operates and spreads invisibly by perceiving and acting in the overlap between the conceptual space of public/private and acting vigorously in that great family space where everything is private. The distinction between managed/personal is often invisible. It is one of distinguishing between comfort and productivity, stress and indulgence. But it must become a visible and acknowledged distinction. No system operates best when it is unseen.
Even in a world where everything is private, where society is properly viewed as a large family, there is still separation between what is done either for the individual or in service to others. It is the spatial framework of the office and the home, the factory and the outside that are barriers to overcome.
To overcome these barriers, the same as any other of the Three Millennium Prize Problems is to guarantee a new lease on life for the managerial society. The greatest hurdle before managerworld is that people simply do not like being in it. It is rigid. It holds us tight. It is in fact the greatest and most perfect totalitarian system ever invented. Totalitarian is not a bad word per se, it is merely descriptive of a modern society. Any modern society must be totalitarian, or it is unsophisticated and weak.
Chocolate or Vanilla
Mangerworld is totalitarian. It does not have camps for us, though it has an impressive archipelago of prisons of its own. There is no state sponsored morality, but it is moralizing. It dictates individual conduct in all spaces that are nominally public and most that are nominally private. It may not be perfectly effective, or incorruptible, but then again neither was the USSR or the PRC. It is stern and unforgiving, and its justice is seen with fear and confusion when it is not beheld with majesty and awe. This is a better justice than most. It does not liquidate people, it liquidates positions and hands out welfare checks and opioids so the unwanted schmuck kills themselves, their families, and their towns quietly and anonymously, and hopefully so their last drops of lifeblood benefit the Sacklers or some other lich coven.
It is totalitarian because it is not managed. Managerworld is unmanaged. What is unseen is unmanaged. It is invisible to itself, because it persists in a delusion about spatial limitation, while acting on instinctual and unconscious knowledge that to survive, it must keep moving. Sharks don’t know they’re sharks. They know they’re hungry. But what is unseen is unmanaged. Managerworld, to become total, must become visible, and to be a visible order in society, it must either repress heavily, or offer up a false choice. The ontological grounding of this might possibly the broadly held differentiation between managed/economic action and personal/leisure action, replacing the difference between private and public space.
This is the eternal problem of a totalitarian society, it is the difference between Yarvin’s two-stroke and four-stroke regime.
When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it.
Yes or no. Do it or get the fuck out. Compare with: Chocolate or Vanilla?