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Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing work". However, pointing it out made that person the enemy of the greater cohort that was "performing work". The results were not important to them, their metrics about units of work completed was. I see this pattern frequently. And it's hard to say those "performing work" are wrong. "Performing" is rewarded, "doing" is punished - Perhaps right to the top, as many companies are involved in a public performance designed to affect the short-term stock price.

The slippage between work and meaning is due to the arrival of post scarcity.

There isn't enough meaningful work to go around because work is still predicated on delivering some useful transformation. But when 80% of the useful transformations can be done by 20% of the people and we have enough to keep civilization going, you don't need full employment any more. But due to the moral hazard doctrine, the elites want to retain control and discipline as is.

For being afraid of a world where people don't care about maintaining the system anymore because it's not needed to house and feed everyone and people can just do art or learn or rest, the system keeps inventing meaningless work.

We're shipping fruit half way across the world to be packaged and then halfway back to be consumed. None of this is efficient or necessary. But it keeps the control system intact and that's the goal.

This is a pretty clear summary of a real problem in most work environments. I have some thoughts about why, but I'm holding onto your articulation to ruminate on in the future.

Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society.

I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.

Workers are many times more efficient than they were in the 50s or 70s or 80s or 90s. Where are our extra vacation days? Why does the worker have to make up for the efficiency with more work while other people take the gains?

Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.

focusing on efficiency is very depressing. Machines seek efficiency. Process can be efficient. Assembly lines are efficient. It's all about optimization and quickly focuses on trimming "waste" and packing as much as possible into the smallest space. It removes all that's amazing about human life.

I much prefer a focus on effectiveness (or impact or outcomes, or alternatives). It plays to human strengths, is far less prescriptive and is way more fun!

Some of the most effective actions are incredibly inefficient; sometimes inefficiency is a feature. I received a letter mail thank-you card from our CEO a few years ago. The card has an approx. value of zero dollars, but I know it took the CEO 5-10 mins to write a personal note and sign it, and that she did this dozens of times. The signal here is incredibly valuable! If she used a signing machine, or AI to record a deep fake message I would know or quickly learn, and the value would go negative - all for the sake of efficiency.

Kropotkin wondered the same in the 1880s [0]

[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...

I think this is a big part of it. Workers would feel a lot more motivated to do more than just perform if they were given what they know they’re owed for their contribution.

Europe stole them.

Faced with increasing efficiency, Europe by and large appears to have chosen to work less and let expensive things remain expensive. The US, by contrast, now has ridiculously cheap consumer goods, and works all the time.

crazy that this is true and GDP just keeps increasing anyway

Of course GDP increases when the money supply does. It’s like people being incensed at “record corporate profits” amidst inflation - profits will always be record (give or take) because remaining the same is losing money relative to the free money being minted each day, etc. For whatever reason, people naively buy into GDP as a valuable metric, even knowing well that there would be something extremely mysterious going on if that number somehow shrank while the real value of the medium exchange also shrank

Since when did increasing money supply increase GDP? Why didn't that work for Zimbabwe?

this is not how GDP works

"Doing work" vs. "performing work": the epitome of this is consulting. Companies pay huge sums of money to consultants that often spend most of their time "performing work", doing beautiful slides even if the content and reasoning is superficial or even dubious, creating reports that are just marketing bullshit, framing the current mission in a way that makes it possible to capture additional projects and bill the client even more. Almost everything is bullshit.

For better or for worse, you’ve described the exact output some of those client companies want, so they can show off the shiny slides and have the status symbol of expensive consultants.

Just yesterday I watched a video blaming China for "oversupplying" electric cars at low prices and how that was hurting car manufacturers elsewhere e.g Germany. These manufacturers were trying to secretly lobby for tariffs to be placed on Chinese cars, while publicly denying this because THEIR largest and growing market was China. They had some "expert" talk about how China is known to oversupply and is doing this to recover from their housing bubble. All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago, but now the balance flips and they all tell you how important tariffs are and how evil China is instead..

In summary, China makes useful things in mass and sells them to get out of a recession,the West prints money instead and shits on China for doing it better. They preach free trade while it helps them and put up tariffs when it doesn't.

I'm not Chinese or some mega fan but it really struck me how corrupt and full of propaganda western culture is becoming and people don't seem to recognize it.

> All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago

10 years ago? Try 40-50 years ago.

Maybe we should stop subsidies to buy electric cars and let China subsidize on the production side instead, while lowering taxes on the production of our own cars.

I agree with you, but it’s really simpler than that. China makes things and the west increasingly just sends emails.

I like this take on modern tech motivations.

The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irrefutably fast and effective at (e.g. writing tests).

I do agree with the missing substance with modern generative AI: everyone notices when it's producing things in that uncanny valley, and if no human is there to edit that, it makes people uncomfortable.

The only way I can reconcile the almost existential discomfort of AI against my actual day-to-day generally-positive experience with AI is to accept that AI in itself isn't the problem. Ultimately, it is an info tool, and human nature makes people spam garbage for clicks with it.

People will do the equivalent of spam garbage for clicks with any new modern thing, unfortunately.

Getting the most out of latest information of a society has probably always been a cat and mouse game of trying to find the areas where the spam-garbage-for-clicks people haven't outnumbered use-AI-to-facilitate-substance people, like here, hopefully.

Just one nitpick. The thing about test is that it’s repetitive enough to be automated (in a deterministic way) or abstracted into a framework. You don’t need an AI to generate it.

I find it helpful for generating automated test suites in the style of the rest of the codebase. When working across multiple projects and clients, it reduces the mental load of having to remember or figure out how tests are expected to work in each codebase.

I agree with your theory about tests. The reality of it is most code is garbage - often including my own - and in a lot of environments, the task is to get the job done in a way that fits in with what's there.

While I occasionally have the pleasure of creating or working with a test suite that's interesting and creative relative to the code under test, the vast majority of unit tests by volume are slop. Does it call the mock? Does it use the return value? Does "if err != nil { return err }" in fact stop and return the error?

This stuff is a perfect candidate for LLM generation.

AI seems really good at producing middling content, and if you make your living writing mediocre training courses, or marketing collateral, or code, or tests you're in big trouble. I question how valuable this work is though, so are we increasing productivity by utilizing AI, or just getting efficient at a suboptimal game? I for one just refuse to play.

> So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management.

I was speaking to a design lecturer the other evening. His fascinating insight was that:

1. The best designers get so much fulfilment out of practicing the craft of design.

2. With the advent of low cost “impression making”, the role has changed to one of “review a lot of mediocre outputs and pick the least crap one”

3. This is robbing people of the pleasure and reward associated with craftsmanship.

I have noted this is applicable so many other crafts, and it’s really sad!

Edited afterthought… Is craftsmanship being replaced by “clickandreviewmanship”?

> You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.

Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."

Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.

In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

>Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate.

For a very short period between 1945 to 1980 while the generation who remembered the great depression and WWII was in charge. It's been longer since that's not been the case. And it wasn't the case for most of history before then.

I'm not sure it isn't a reflection of the rise of neoliberalism.

Who says these are mutually exclusive? Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.

Nobody, but the focus on individualism as the driver of everything might cause a breakdown in social objectives.

So weak men make hard men? You're welcome.

How graciously the womenfolk leave us to our tragic autopoiesis.

Sure, by way of traumatizing an entire generation. Nobody thanked you.

I'm being sarcastic. This entire concept is bogus.

Hah! I'm certain a lot of people want to believe it's bogus, mostly because of what that says about their character. Observed reality suggests there's some truth here. An example in miniature would be the frequency with which family fortunes are lost within a generation or two.

You can outfit an adult life with all of the useful manufactured objects that would reasonably improve it for a not-very-impressive sum. Beyond that it's just clutter (going for quantity) or moving into the lifestyle/taste/social-signaling domain anyway (going for quality). There is just not an unlimited amount of alpha in making physical things. The social/thought/experiential domain is a much bigger opportunity.

Echoing other comments in gratitude for this very clear articulation of feelings I share, but have not manifested so well. Just wanted to add two connected opinions that round out this view.

1) This consuming of the host is only possible on the one hand because the host has grown so strong, that is the modern global industrial economy is so efficient. The doing stuff side of the equation is truly amazing and getting better (some real work gets done either by accident or those who have not-succumbed to PR and ad culture), and even this drop of "real work" produces enough material wealth to support (at least a lot of) humanity. We really do live in a post scarcity world from a production perspective, we just have profound distribution and allocation problems.

2) Radical wealth inequality profoundly exacerbates the problem of PR and ad culture. If everyone has some wealth doing things that help many people live more comfortably is a great way to become wealthy. But if very few people have wealth, then doing a venture capital FOMO hustle on the wealthy is anyone's best ROI. Radical wealth inequality eventually breaks all the good aspects of capitalist/market economies.

Thanks for writing your comment, I think it’s a public service.

Cultural commentary that makes complex long term trends simple to understand isn’t often this clear or concise. What really makes it powerful though is that it manages to stay in a relatively detached observer-mode without becoming an angry rant. And so rather than provoking (understandable!) anger in others, hopefully it’s inviting more reflection.

People who haven’t thought about it this way might take a harder look at what they are doing and who they really want to be. People that are already thinking along these lines will probably benefit from a reminder that they aren’t crazy.

Very well written. I assume you haven't read "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, that's why your description is so authentic and is more convincing then just referring to the book. Saved this post for future reference.

> draw, write, compose

The primacy of these artforms is subjective, and there's no accounting for taste.

this is a top notch comment !

> Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done.

And what did that get us? Radium poisoning and microplastics in every organ of virtually all animals living within thousands of miles of humans. Our reach has always exceeded our grasp.