American Fez

The Purge

Here is Jim's old computer tower, tied to the railway tracks of its own obsolescence as the relentless Bullet Train of Technology flattens it flatter than an iPad Air. And here is the temperamental office printer, facing the firing squad, permitted one last piece of paper instead of a cigarette. It could've printed its own reprieve but unfortunately the paper jammed as usual. Those overhead projectors were found guilty of counterrevolutionary focus, then carted off to the guillotine to get their lamps chopped off. All the whiteboards have been sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, these unrepentant file cabinets condemned to a purifying pyre, and untold thousands of manila folders suffer the death of a thousand staples. Vive Le Conference Room Insurgency, I guess. So many symbols of the Ancien Regime have been toppled today, betrayed by the receptionist's Quisling telephone (soon to have its own cord ruthlessly cut by an unknown assassin lurking by the elevators). The winds of change are filtering through the air-conditioning and brighter fluorescent strip-lights starkly illuminate the surviving staff members of the big purge. Meanwhile, thirty floors below, in the concrete ghost town that is the Loading Dock, a regiment of cruel dumpsters are stuffed with unwanted swivel chairs, modular desks, cubicle dividers and low-maintenance potted plants. 

For the last ten years we'd been told there was a Five Year Plan in place, but details of the plan changed every six months and the place got switched from department to department every week. A steering committee met every Monday morning and an action group convened each Wednesday afternoon. Systems were reorganized, new workflows implemented and all operations networked. Project managers without current projects became non-persons and employees without regular assignments were disappeared overnight. But I'm still here, the last of the Old Guard, trying to make myself comfortable on an executive beanbag, one hand adjusting my bluetooth headset and the other clutching something called a Chromebook. From time to time I 'hop on' a Zoom call, attempting to explain facts and figures I don't truly understand myself to colleagues who couldn't care less. And so the Golden Age of Communication ends, not with a bang but buffering images and witless sales associates who forget to turn their microphones on. But yesterday, bored out of my mind between such unproductive calls, I persuaded my intern Zak that he should make Fax Machines cool again. If vinyl records and flip phones are fashionable once more, then why not vintage office equipment too? Bring back buzzing and whirring hardware with a beige plastic cover, typewriters and paper clips, white-out and While You Were Out memorandums. Retro-office is where all the hipsters will send their resumes in the future. Write your manifesto with inkjets, I told him, and publish it as carbon copies. I can help you. After all, I've been here long enough to know where all the bodies are buried.

The 1980s Did Not Take Place

In the mid nineteen-eighties, when I was about sixteen-years-old, I read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation with a simulation of understanding. I examined the words on the page but their combined meaning escaped me. I repeated the sentences aloud in my head but my brain found itself shrouded in the shadow of silent incomprehension. But this did not stop me from boring people at parties with brief synopses of Baudrillard's philosophy. I was the simulacra of a French intellectual in my black turtleneck and dark sports coat; intimidatingly aloof with a severe expression on my face and clouds of Gitanes smoke billowing around my head. Back then, I lived every day like it was my own personal May 1968; a suburban rebel protesting the ubiquity of menthol cigarettes, drum-machine music performed by men wearing make-up, the lack of post-structuralist programming on network television, and the fact that my mother refused to cook Coq au Vin every night.

The nineteen-eighties were hard times for those of us who slouched around in dystopias of our own creation, oppressed by the hyperreality of instant decaf coffee, polyester clothing, and self tanning machines. I think even the losers who loved The Catcher In The Rye had more fun than me; and, of course, the illiterate ignoramuses who read nothing whatsoever had the greatest time of all. If only I'd been less concerned about the specter of Consumerism I could've gone to Miami with Cynthia Ersatz at spring break. As it was, the People's Court of my faux Situationist mind condemned her hair as too big, her lip gloss as too shiny, and her bikini as far too pastel pink. Apparently, should 'Sous les paves, la plage!' turn out to be true, I wouldn't go to the beach anyway. Instead, I stayed home that summer, attempting to compose an atonal jazz melody for saxophone called Feelin' Really Existential until our neighbors complained. 

In films from that period, such a character would still be part of the local gang of kids, accepted and celebrated for his eccentricity. But I was always a guest at Resnais' Marienbad rather than a member of The Breakfast Club. As the other Marx supposedly said, I wouldn't want to join any club that would accept me as a member. In my case, I guess the teenage semiotician was the father of the man, as I'm still very much like that now. I belong to no political party, no professional association, no community group, no college fraternity, no social organizations of any kind, not even an Online Jean Baudrillard Chat Room. I suppose this blog links to some other blogs, and they link back to me, but that system of information exchange is long since defunct. Nevertheless, maybe fifty years from now, when the nineteen-eighties are back in fashion, some pretentious juvenile from the future will discover these posts of mine in a digital archive of obsolete verbiage, confusing their irrelevance and obscurity for dissident wisdom and historical truth. Now that would be not only the triumph but also the revenge of the simulation of understanding. Just don't take up smoking, kid, and take Cynthia to Miami.

Robots Don't Wear Ties

The good news, when those Quislings in 'Human' Resources replaced Frank with a robot, was that he wasn't required to clean out his desk since his entire desk was scrapped also. Robots, you see, don't need desks to go about their whirring and beeping business, so Frank could leave immediately after termination without the demeaning ritual of wondering what to do with his old stapler and those topless pens and rusting paper clips in the back of the desk drawers. Everything simply went into the trash alongside Frank's career, sense of self-worth, and his health insurance. Now that's what I call efficiency.

The bad news, however, was that the robot replacing Frank was merely the Basic Office Drone model: a grey cylinder on wheels equipped with extending utility arms and mechanical pincers, and Frank's incompetent ex-boss was given charge of the remote control. Frank was hoping his successor would at least be some sleek, futuristic android that calculates obscure equations in nano-seconds and can speak every language known to man. But no, it was just a dumbed-down version of R2D2 with a WiFi router welded on its back like Quasimodo's hump. Thirty years of his personal expertise and experience regurgitated in a digital belch as technology so rudimentary that even Jules Verne would delete those paragraphs from his fledging science-fiction novels.

We'd known Frank was going for some time, engulfed by the fog of obsolescence that waits for us all. He was an executive dinosaur on stilts, a walking fax machine wearing an endearingly ill-fitted suit and a delightfully old-fashioned tie. Frank had winning personality in abundance, which the robot replacing him did not. His jokes were so unfunny that their complete lack of hilarity became funny in itself. His home-made, stodgy brown lunch was always unappetizingly unidentifiable. And his comically optimistic projections about diminishing sales and declining profits always brought the house down. In short, he brought much more to the conference room table than job performance and productivity figures. Our rotund morale booster had been usurped by a metal morale killer. Such is the price of progress, I guess.