If the age of financialization midwifed a dumb new era of work, the tech boom nurtured it into an awkward, cruel, and greedy child. The Internet, at one time a DARPA project that hosted communities of recluses who argued about locking mechanisms and The Rockford Files, became a service everyone used. This inaugurated what became known as the “Information Age.” Because we were used to overvaluing things based on what the stimulant-addled only children in finance said, we took a deep breath and declared AOL to be worth, like, $500 billion and that Pets.com would found a moon colony.
Job Interview Tips and Tricks
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Jobs. We all need them, but how does one obtain one? It’s a lengthy and debasing process, eventually resolved only by knowing someone who knows someone who already has one. Here are a few tricks of the trade to help you land your dream gig!
• Answer every question with another question. For instance, if the interviewer asks something like, “What unique skills will you bring to this position?” answer, “What skills don’t I have?” If they seek further clarification with something like “Name a few” or “I’m asking you,” just keep turning the tables by repeating back some variation of their question. “How can I name a few?” or “Who’s conducting this interview, you or me?” (even though it’s them). This will show that you are confident and motivated.
• Never flatly say no to any question. Always respond with “Yes, and . . .” to advance the bit and keep open any possible avenue of inquiry and action.
• The person interviewing you is courted by people like you all day. They’re used to being complimented and flattered. Throw them off balance and take control of the interaction by doing the opposite and subtly insulting them to undermine their confidence. For example: “That’s a nice watercooler; I’ve seen the same one at every other office I’ve been to.”
• Dress conservatively, but add at least one piece of flair to set you apart: a captain’s hat, a single leather glove, goggles, or a Renaissance-style carnival mask and cape.
• Many employers will now check up on your social media presence during the hiring process, so make sure you’ve posted a lot of quality content. If you don’t have any good content, create a dummy account and fill it with motivational success memes about how “Every stone they throw at you is another brick in your castle” and “A lion is a king of the jungle but still needs a queen.” Make sure to reference memes you saw online and thought were funny during the actual face-to-face interview.
• Do ask to use the bathroom during the interview even if you don’t have to go. Don’t accept any beverage offered; it’s a sign of weakness.
The party came to a stop when everyone finally realized that 98 percent of those Internet firms didn’t generate any revenue, but a lumpy crew of sociopaths got in and got out with expert timing. Guys like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk sold their grossly overvalued stakes in computer crap for nerds, walked away with billions, and were able to transform Silicon Valley from a community of weird garages to a speculator’s paradise, where men in quarter-zip sweaters shuffle around ten-figure capital allocations in between blogging about sea barges where ephebophilia is legal.
That about catches us up to today.
Tomorrow’s Exploitation Today!
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The survivors of the dot-com bubble have created an economy so fucking stupid that it’s practically one of those Old Testament stories in which a bunch of assholes try to build a tower that will allow them to touch the face of YHWH and receive an ironic punishment from God. It’s as if the people who witnessed Hiroshima and escaped safely returned to the same place and built their houses out of yellowcake uranium and played weekly games of dynamite toss.
Yes, the jobs of the future are generated by the incel kingdom of Silicon Valley, where man-children force feed you a subsistence gruel while you slave harder to invent a blood-testing device that streams your results to a chat room of asshole doctors before completely draining the rest of your body. You’re doing something very noble, and that’s why your boss cashed out to the tune of a few hundred million and you have to sublet your closet. The last tech guy who spoke with such flair about his vision for humanity was Steve Jobs, and he died because he decided to cure his pancreatic cancer by drinking smoothies and doing male power kegels. You can kill a man but not his ideas, and so years after Jobs’s demise every single one of his fellow tech lords fancies themselves a “visionary” or “explorer,” words previously reserved for Leonardo da Vinci or Magellan rather than someone who gets VC money for inventing a Wi-Fi–enabled box that will keep all your food cold so it doesn’t go bad.
The present and future of work is a lot like its past: stupid and arbitrary, and everyone’s terrible boss gets to fail upward to the next thing he can fuck up. These days, most jobs are positions that used to be done by five different people, squeezing out every last drop of labor with more hours, more intensity, and more productivity. You receive the privileges of e-mailing people who have sublimated their personality disorders into “management styles” and playing the pawn in bizarre office power plays between proud MBAs. And you’re lucky to do it.
Since a large part of Western manufacturing sectors have been moved to countries where factory owners receive tax credits for each worker killed in building collapses, the economy has seen a lot of change in the past forty years. The two people you, the reader, know with steady jobs are most likely in one of the following businesses.
Jobs You Will Probably Never Have
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MARKETING
If we think of today’s horrifying, depersonalizing, and culture-obliterating jobs as a kind of military hierarchy, marketing would be the Green Berets. Like their Army counterparts, marketing professionals are scary because they’re not just doing this to pay off student loans—they legitimately enjoy their work and think it’s important. Advertising and marketing gigs make up one-sixth of all jobs in America, and if our nation continues to eat its own economic droppings, this figure will likely keep growing. The typical marketing professional is named something like Jordan Adam Taylor, posts things like “Can’t relate to dreading Monday because my job just plain rocks #playhardatwork,” and is dedicated to brand synergy whether they’re asleep, awake, mid-coitus, giving birth, or dead.
FINANCE
Finance is even more harmful to the world than marketing, but members of this industry don’t labor under the delusion that they’re fun people who make a difference. A Wall Street guy’s work life is a dull affair enlivened only by sporadic STD scares, drug withdrawals, and market panics caused by his own actions—but mostly it’s just staring at screens as numbers jump around and increase his wealth by three sets of commas at a time.
Investment banks and trading-house hiring departments look for distinct characteristics in potential employees—bedwetting well into puberty, animal torture during adolescence, all the Dark Triad/Six Sigma personality trait clusters. If you love variable-interest-rate mortgages and creating value for the grandchildren of Nazi war profiteers, finance is for you.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
If you’ve woken up every day of your life and decided that your rage issues and utter fear of anything that doesn’t look like you should dictate who lives or dies, it may be time for your Blue Life to matter.
After all, cops are workers, just like anyone else. Yes, they’ll stave in your skull if you organize for a union, but they also head outside every day, see a meme with an unattributed quote from Kanye saying that rapping is harder than being a cop, write utterly moronic open letters steeped in self-pity despite having a less dangerous job than crab fishermen, and then spend the rest of the day playing with the repurposed Stinger missiles that the federal government gave their department.
ACADEMIA
Once the highest pursuit among naked Greek men, the scholarly professions are now all about getting tenure, doing safe spaces, and getting triggered by logic. Generations ago, professors were h
onorable people. There were science professors who would see a sexy lady and knock beakers and scales off their desks with their nerd boners; old-money classicists who could recite the words of any number of ancient sex perverts while blackout drunk on a boat; idealistic English professors who had yet to make their turn to the right and founded The Journal of Western Greatness after the campus PC-police and feminazis made their students stop sleeping with them; and dispassionate economic scholars who weren’t afraid to take money from United Fruit Co. to report that people in other countries actually enjoy de facto slavery.
Now, however, academia is a Ponzi scheme with beer pong, a soulless grind where you’re expected to turn out long, boring papers called, like, “Fear of Castration and the Western Male Explored through Reggaeton” or face summary execution by the dean. Every year, thousands of freshly minted PhDs compete for a handful of tenure-track jobs, surviving off adjunct appointments and pilfered cafeteria lunch meat. Most of them will burn out and attempt to enter the private job market, which will have no use for anyone who spent a decade studying gnostic imagery in the films of Pauly Shore. The lucky few will hang on long enough to inherit the Distinguished Chair in Kanye Studies at Devilstick University.
If you think you have it in you to talk and write endlessly about subjects you barely know anything about for a bunch of slack-jawed early-twenties layabouts with no prospects, give it a shot, but we can’t imagine living our lives that way.
Jobs You Probably Will Have
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Now, if you’re a fan of ours, the aforementioned jobs will belong to your more successful friends and nonfail siblings. You, dear reader, are more likely to slot into these exciting careers:
SERVICE
Join your peers in retail or food and beverage, where the worst middle-class authoritarians scan your restaurant or store for anything that upsets them so they can scream at you. These are people who’ve never been mad for a legitimate reason, but they love the feeling. You just have to stare at their disgusting wet maws flapping around until they hit a fever pitch and jet cum down their hideous pale legs. Whether it’s a server position at a restaurant, a footwear salesman who must shoo away enterprising perverts, or customer service for a telecom giant whose favorability polls are lower than the Islamic State’s, you’ll witness every fucked-up power trip that those who have never held any authority but have long fantasized about abusing it take.
Since there are barely any job protections anymore, a service employee almost always has to submit to the demands of suburban sociopaths. Does a lawyer with a teetering marriage and a clowncore dubstep DJ son who doesn’t respect him want lobster even though he’s at a burger chain? Better locate the nearest seafood wholesaler, or at least hope his taste buds are too fried by SSRIs to detect imitation crabmeat. Is a man older than dirt telling you “I’d love to see a smile and something else on that face?” He knows that the restaurant can pay you slave wages if you’re a tipped employee, and he’s wagering you’re not gonna make a fuss, given that he’s from a different generation and all.
CONTENT CREATION
You may think you want this job. You may think you can do it. But 99.9 percent of the time, people who emerge as triumphant heroes from the content mines end up with AdSense lung, broken spirits, and empty pockets. Content—be it a think piece, a call-out tweet, or something really degenerate, like a podcast—is one of the only real, tangible products we make anymore. But its creation also puts more physical and mental demands on workers than the most grizzled military operators have to endure. In a sense, content makers are more troop-like than troops themselves, as information is the battlefield of the twenty-first century.
If you really think you’re ready to answer a bunch of awful, piggish fans and find new ways to say someone you’re making fun of is ugly every day, go for it. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.
SERFDOM
You could be run ragged driving for a ride-sharing app created by a company that loses about $535 billion a month while still retaining a $900 billion valuation, until the shifty worm who founded the business is recorded doing his Benny Hill impression in the boardroom, writes a weepy open letter promising to do better, and leaves the company.
CAMMING
A new frontier of sex work that doesn’t involve leaving the house, “camming” is the fastest-growing sector of employment for the millennial precariat. Camming refers to the webcam that will broadcast you masturbating, and if you already spend much of the day lying prone in bed, laptop on your stomach, staring into the void of online social interaction, then you’re already halfway there. Jacking off is a fun hobby that anyone can do, and now it’s one you can get paid for.
If you’re willing to jack off with friends positioned at awkward angles to fill a computer screen, then, friend, you’re now a Web entrepreneur! However, if spending all day responding to comments like “want to see the titty, so sexxy :),” “get that fucking cat out of the way,” or “need natural uncut for space dock!” from anonymous users is not your cup of tea, then you might consider camming-adjacent activities like eating lots of food or whispering.
PRESIDENTIAL TWEET REPLIER
The collapse of American political discourse into a frenzied Internet shouting festival has been disastrous for the country, but it could be a boon to your bank account! Having a president who uses his toilet time to yell on social media means there’s a huge captive audience for the dedicated Twitter influencer who can reply instantly each time the president tweets “Lying media says I never fucked Sandy Duncan. FAKE NEWS! She gave me a hand job at the Mac and Me premiere!”
With millions of people engaging with the replies attached to the bottom of a presidential tweet, the potential for lucrative self-promotion is limitless. If you’re a nebulously credentialed verified account holder who’s sick of the president’s disgusting behavior, you can parlay typing “Sir, how DARE you!” into a crowdfunded podcast in which you lay out just how the KGB funded the career of Larry the Cable Guy. Or, if you’re of the other political persuasion and can program a bot to respond to those tweets with patriotic memes in which troops cry because of hip-hop, then you can make a mint selling coffee mugs that say “Liberal Cum” and “My Other Coffee Cup is a Gun.”
But, you may be asking, what if we eventually reach a point where we don’t have a head of state who live-tweets his mental decline? Luckily, that’s never going to happen. We’ve entered the Aeon of Horus. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. And the president will, from now until the sun gutters out, be a megalomaniacal Internet addict. So start practicing your “I wish Malcolm was still in the Middle and not on the Extreme Right” burns for when President Frankie Muniz starts deporting redheads.
BIO BAG
“Sell yourself,” they told you. In a fast-paced, ever-changing knowledge economy, getting ahead means making yourself indispensable. Hustling, schmoozing, and self-promoting that internship into a job offer or that freelance gig into a staff position. But in a future when automation will render a huge proportion of human labor input superfluous, “sell yourself” is going to take on a more literal meaning. If all you have to sell is your labor and nobody is buying, your only remaining commodities are your blood, sperm/eggs, and organs, which the failing bodies of the ruling class will always have use for. Shaving off a quarter of your liver every six months may sound traumatic, but it beats being picked up in a Loiter Sweep and having all your blood pressed out of your body like a toothpaste tube and used for vampire cosplay by Peter Thiel.
A New Life Awaits You in the Facebook Colonies
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The final cliché meant to keep you on board our system’s sinking ship is that work is fun, that your office has foosball, that pizza is delivered on Friday, and that your boss rides a hoverboard. It’s not really a job as much as a quirky, cool place you never have to leave. Originally associated with Silicon Valley techno-utopias (Facebook is now building Wi-Fi gulags that allow workers to eat, shower, and
sleep at the office),I the idea has now metastasized throughout much of our culture. Some ghoulish app company runs a subway ad campaign with slogans such as “You Eat Coffee for Lunch” and “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug of Choice.” That’s real.
In other words, for a certain cohort of young, white-collar drones, the modern workplace has become a giant, countrywide adult day care center. Of course, those working blue-collar and service jobs will still be subjected to good old-fashioned Panopticon surveillance, but as automation starts to “professionalize” those jobs or simply kill them and drive their workers into the freelance gig economy, the triumph of this Silicon Valley nanovirus seems inevitable.
The expectation that the office should also be the center of your social life, that one need never leave to enjoy activities usually associated with “free time,” is perhaps the most insidious idea about work yet devised. This is the final frontier, the newest batshit notion the ruling class wants to normalize the way it normalized privatized health care, extraction of surplus labor, and thanking your boss for not letting you die in the street. It’s a new, futuristic, permanent utopia where your job and your free time are the same thing. It’s a complete, perverse inversion of the socialist or communist idea, the alternative vision. One we should probably get around to describing now . . .
When freed from the soul-crushing system of wage labor, what we used to call “work” actually becomes the passionate, creative fulfillment the lizards in marketing tell us it is. After setting everyone on equal footing (by seizing the billionaires’ money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys to production over to workers), you’re looking at an economy that requires something like a three-hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery; and—as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 21
