Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?
When Brad Wang started his first job in the tech industry, right after college, he marveled at the way Silicon Valley had turned the drudgery of the workplace into a sumptuousness of game rooms, nap pods and leafy hiking trails. This is what it must have felt like to be a guest showing up for a party at Jay Gatsby’s house, Mr. Wang thought.
But under the glitz was a kind of hollowness. He hopped from one software engineering role to another, toiling on some projects that he felt were meaningless. At Google, he worked for 15 months on an initiative that higher-ups decided to keep pursuing even though they knew it would never launch. He then spent more than a year at Facebook on a product whose primary customer at one point described it to the engineers as unhelpful.
Over time, the pointlessness of his work began to incense Mr. Wang: “It’s like baking a pie that’s going right into the trash can.”
There is a long tradition in the corporate world of clocking in only to wonder: What’s the point? During the pandemic, tens of thousands of people joined the subreddit page r/antiwork to share quips about rejecting drudge work and, in most cases, all work. In the 1990s, “Office Space” parodied the grind of corporate life, making famous the sentiment: “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” Long before that, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” followed a law clerk — the original quiet quitter — who responds to every one of his boss’s demands by saying “I would prefer not to,” until he is put under arrest, and, eventually, dies.
The corporate office and its paperwork have a way of turning even ostensibly good jobs — the kind that provide decent salaries and benefits and take place behind ergonomic keyboards in climate-controlled comfort — into soul-sucking drudgery.
In 2013, the now deceased radical anthropologist, David Graeber, gave the world a distinct way to think about this problem in an essay called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” This anticapitalist polemic by the man who had helped coin Occupy Wall Street’s iconic “99 percent” slogan went viral, seemingly speaking to a widely felt 21st Century frustration. Mr. Graeber developed it into a book that delved deeper on the subject.
