1999: The Year of the Cubicle Movie
[Unlike] monster movies showing cold war anxieties and 21st-century horror movies conveying fears of acts of terror, [the films of 1999] were not about surviving the present, because the present was actually going well. They were about being tired of that stable present and looking for a radically different future.
Maybe. Maybe-maybe. For me it was more about being told to sit down and shut up after three years of reading Foucault in a university library and having the youthful desire, no the need, to strike out into art and tear the world to pieces. And not being allowed to. For reasons I’m still not completely clear on.
He’s right to note that The Matrix, Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and Being John Malkovich were all released in 1999 and all feature “a main character tired of the stability, monotony, and uneventfulness of their [lives].”
That uneventfulness, to me, didn’t come from “the present going well,” by which he means culturally and economically at a macro level, but from the first cracks appearing in the old doxa that “people go to work and that’s that” and the widespread failure to understand the opportunities presented by the internet.
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UBI Improves Everything
New Scientist (one of the namesakes of New Escapologist!) reports that:
the world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment.
That is can improve mental wellbeing should almost be a foregone conclusion, though obviously these things need to be tested (which is what has just happened in Finland) if we ever want to roll it out and base a society on it. It shouldn’t seem far removed from reality that some forms of depression and anxiety can be salved by having an economic safety net; that not being able to sell enough units or to clock enough hours could result in destitution.
What is interesting is how employment rates slightly improve under conditions of UBI. It demonstrates the hunch that generous-minded (rather than conservative) people have that humans still want to do things once their basic needs are met. No longer being economically bullied into work doesn’t necessarily lead to stagnancy.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is out now in deluxe paperback format and e-book.
A Cubier Cube
Against all odds, working from home [has been] more successful than anyone would have predicted, with many people reporting their productivity [levels] increased during the first two months of lockdown.
“Against all odds” indeed. Bloody hell. As if the mandatory attendance of an open-plan Hell is the only conceivable way of getting things done on the road to fulfillment and is not, as the case may be, its single biggest obstruction.
The article is admirably about the quest for other ways of working though, and how offices might be redesigned in the future to be happier and more pleasant places.
It goes into the story of Bob Probst, whom I mentioned in Escape Everything! as the de-facto inventor of the office cubicle. He invented it as modular “systems furniture” and now sees the classic “veal fattening pen” as an abuse of his system.
What I wanted to mention though, is how the photograph used to illustrate the piece (a) looks sort-of like a miniature rather than a real place, or is that my imagination?; and (b) looks oddly preferable to the offices I have known even though it’s clearly supposed to illustrate the worst excesses of dystopian workplace architecture.
Weirdly, what I like about it are those privacy dividers (splash boards?) between work spaces: actual cubicle walls. We didn’t have those in our office, so we just had to dwell in each other’s personal head space all day, trying not to read each other’s minds and unable to pick our noses. It was exhausting. Yes, I might have actually preferred a cubier cube to the one I had. Weird!
Obviously, I’d rather be at home though. Or in a library. Or on a beach. Or just impaled on a spike.
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UBI roundup
Last weekend’s referendum saw UBI democratically rejected in Switzerland. The people’s choice! Offered Utopia, they don’t want it.
Actually, it’s not that simple. UBI (Citizen’s Income) is a huge idea and is competing with the deeply-ingrained Protestant work ethic. We may need to destroy work worship before (or at least in tandem) with a successful UBI campaign. It’s also expensive and nobody’s quite crunched the numbers convincingly yet, despite noble efforts.
A decent summary of the current state of play in the Guardian is sympathetic to UBI but says the next round of campaigning must be stronger in its numbers.
Before it can be seriously considered for a manifesto, further cost-saving compromises – such as restrictions for citizens who already receive a state pension – may need to be considered. The trick, then, as so often in progressive politics, will be to dream big, and then proceed with care.
Meanwhile, the Economist published a largely superb piece summing up the situation.
Both supporters and critics agree that universal basic incomes would challenge the centrality of paid work to the way people live.
I read it looking for a good argument against UBI but the ones present were a bit flimsy. For instance, the concern that the world would become filled by pointless ice cream parlours as a result of a new play ethic:
Hans Peter Rubi, a 64-year-old in the small town of Olten […] was given a pension of SFr2,600 on being sent into early retirement, and became an entrepreneur. He has used his pension to start an exotic ice-cream parlour. The avocado ice cream is proving difficult to perfect, and the innovation of staying open through the winter has yet to pay off. He needs a good summer for the business to be profitable; but he can afford to fail. “My security now is that I have my basic income. It gives a security to take a basic challenge.” … In a world of universal basic incomes, it is possible that the streets would be lined with mostly empty ice-cream shops, as people used society’s largesse on projects no one really needs.
The dystopian image of streets empty of all but unfrequented ice cream parlours is a chilling one (no pun intended) and one I’ve thought of before, but I don’t think it would happen, at least not in any permanent way. Research shows that (a) most people wouldn’t stop working in normal jobs anyway and (b) after a period of too many of these leisure follies we’d realise the mistake and move onto the next big paradigm, be it idling or space travel.
So UBI was rejected in Switzerland but it really does feel like this is just the beginning of a huge international discussion. Back when we mentioned Srnicek and Williams’ book, Inventing the Future, I said “It feels like the cartridge is loaded” and I think that’s been born out. Mainstream political parties are discussing it now.
Speaking of booky-wooks, I highly recommend Utopia for Realists by UBI campaigner Rutger Bregman. His argument is mainly a pragamatic approach to UBI but he also sticks up for a 15-hour standard workweek and open borders. Weirdly, he and I got off to a bad start (I didn’t care for the first few pages because I disagree with the “nasty, brutish and short” progress argument and a naff quip about dishwashers being great) but I was soon caught up in his optimism and research-based reasoning. Good stuff.
Any old hoo, until we get UBI there’s Escapology. Break free! Run! Save yourselves!
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Cubicle woes
The Guardian‘s Dear Jeremy column is about work and career-related problems. I read it every week as a way of remembering what employment is like.
I really love this week’s quandary. It is titled “I want to throttle my talkative office partner”.
I share an office with a woman who is in her late 30s. My problem is that she talks to herself – all day, every day. If she is writing an email she reads it out loud; if she is working on her PC she talks through the process. The boss won’t allow a radio and because I use the phone, I cannot wear headphones. I have tried doing the same but she just talks louder.
I have also tried saying “Sorry did you say something”, but this is obviously too subtle. I even said “Shush” once and told her to stop muttering to herself as I was trying to concentrate. She sulked for half an hour, then started again. Help – I might just throttle her soon.
Hahaha! Offices.
The A4 Project
Brushing my teeth last night, I started to wonder about how to continue New Escapologist should it become unsustainable after Issue 21. (See the August newsletter to hear about the financial challenge).
One solution is to return to the magazine’s origins and to print it for free on stolen office paper.
Alas, I don’t have access to an office or its paper anymore, but it occurred to me (while flossing) that I could ask OUR READERS to steal office paper and send it to me, ideally through their workplace outgoing mail.
Maybe people could even pay for their copy in stolen office paper. The patrons (those who currently spend a couple of hundred quid when we launch a four-issue Kickstarter) could be the people who send the most stolen office paper, but even those who send just a few sheets of stolen office paper would receive their copy for free.
Some people would still need to pay for their copy with money, as I’d still like to receive some some recompense for my time and also to pay for the stamps.
Is this a good idea? There’s the obvious legal/moral objection in encouraging theft, but I find that I don’t care very much about that. Come after me, employers, I dare you. Another concern is the decline in quality (I enjoy making a good-looking product worth its space on a bookshelf), but this could be outweighed by the appeal of the mischief. The main show stopper is that I’d need to pay for a Mailbox so that I don’t have to give my home address to the type of dubious character (that’s you, madam) who is willing to steal paper from work and send it to me. Could be fun though, eh?
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Let People Be Free
Regular readers of this blog will know our position that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is (a) a likely solution for societies who want to abolish Wage Slavery and (b) an illustration of what happens when you let people be free instead of forcing them into undignified jobs that waste everyone’s time and energy.
In one of the best UBI pilot schemes I’ve seen so far (one with results so promising that it was recently made permanent, albeit in a cautious and limited way), there are some nice qualitative findings.
Only months into the scheme, I found out I was pregnant. The basic income helped me decide to have my baby, knowing I could continue creative work and keep my small studio space
The basic income gave me more freedom to experiment in my work, to write for independent publications and engage with community initiatives. I helped to create events that brought together artists across forms and raised money for a local rape crisis centre.
Before introducing this scheme, Ireland ranked among the lowest in the 27 countries of the EU for spending on culture. In 2022, that amounted to €897m, or 0.2% of GDP, compared with an EU average of 0.5%. A basic income for 2,000 artists increases Ireland’s spending by only about €35m a year, which would be offset by economic gains.
Yet again we see that when people are left to their own devices instead of being economically bullied into bullshit jobs, the advantages to the person and to society are huuuuge.
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AI is Stupid
From The Baffler:
As of 2025, 95 percent of companies that invested in [generative] AI did not profit at all from the investment […] As the tech journalist Edward Zitron estimated in his guide to the racket, by “the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion.” That’s like spending $100 to make $6.25—and then doing it again and again, five billion times.
Upper-echelon tech bros are idiots.
If you’re bored by the ceaseless “AI”-related witterings of a media in thrall to these idiots, especially in light of the revelation above, read New Escapologist instead.
The Baffler, incidentally, is one of America’s few left-wing media outlets with any clout, yet it wrings its hands over the same topics as any business dad of the conservative press. “Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next?” it asks. Yawn.
The article doesn’t mention UBI once, the only seriously proposal for replacing Wage Slavery as a way to feed people. Their use of “bullshit” in the headline — a word generally reserved in work-related conversation for thankless drudgery since our David’s Bullshit Jobs in 2013 — is little better than clickbait. Neither the word nor the sentiment appears in the article.
I don’t think we mention AI once in the current edition of New Escapologist, and we’ll probably maintain our aloof and studious silence until someone convinces us that AI will help real people to escape their day jobs with an income intact.
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Unscreened
Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.
Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?
I don’t say screens are an inherently bad thing. They’re useful when you want to, you know, look something up on Wikipedia or type something or lazily read a few blog posts. But that’s bananas. To be clear, it says waking hours, not working hours. So in other words: half your life. Your LIFE.
This is your occasional reminder that you can at least escape social media if you want to, winning back at least two hours a day and therefore about 750 hours of your life each year.
I recently received some nice paper mail from Jonny, a New Escapologist contributor who has turned his Substack newsletter for writers (already a noble step away from the worst of social media) into a paper newsletter for anyone who requests it. It was lovely to get. My address had been typewritten on the envelope, the newsletter itself was simple and pleasantly laid out on a single folded sheet of A4, and I think he might have coloured in the letterhead (a pineapple) by hand. Thanks, Jonny.
It made me think about Analog Sea Review, a muscular and wilfully offline publishing enterprise. I pulled my copies down from the shelf and spent some pleasant time reading high-quality essays and poetry selected not by dubious algorithm but by a real person I trust.
When I searched for the “at least two hours a day” statistic cited above, the report it came from notes that “despite the apparent expansion of social media’s role in our lives, the amount of time that we spend using social platforms has actually declined over the past two years.”
So there is a pushback against this screen mania. Good.
More from the Guardian:
[we all] already have things we do and care about that put us beyond the reach of the algorithms. We all already know the deepest truth: that true human attention isn’t the click and swipe of screen time. True human attention is love, curiosity, daydreaming and taking care of ourselves and others.
The piece was written by a trio of activists called the Friends of Attention, another pillar of the resistance. They blame this screentime madness on “human frackers,” unscrupulous business interests who pump us full of crap to mine the resource that is our precious attention.
Get offline. Buy a nice notebook. Read books and magazines. Use the library. Walk.
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The End of the Workplace Necktie
From Dickon Edwards’ diary from 2005:
Wednesday 22nd June – a historic date for some. The head of the UK Civil Service announces the wearing of ties as no longer mandatory for male employees. As long as they’re still smart, office boys and men alike can now wear their shirts open-necked as they oil the cogs of government. Must be a relief for those suffering under the current heatwave in offices built before the invention of air conditioning.
It may just be the Civil Service, but I suspect the trickle-down effect for the world of work will be ineluctable. When a similar guideline was made with bowler hats in the past, the trademark headwear of the English businessman soon disappeared from the streets and onto the naughty head of Ms Minnelli in Cabaret.
Fascinating! That was just a few months before my first escape from office work.
When I went back to office work in 2017, I didn’t like the “open collar” lack of formality (so it did indeed trickle down as Dickon expected, though at the time I saw it as Silicon Valley trend-setting). It was as if The Company had sidled up to me, straddled a chair backwards, and said “hi buddy, let’s rap.”
We’re not friends, The Company, and we never will be. Our neckties were there to put distance between us. Well, that’s how I felt until they were taken away.
So I continued to wear a beautiful tie to work most days, despite all of the justified ridicule. It worked too. It said “I am here formally.” It was a Big Fuck Off to the lot of it.
Dickon continues:
I personally welcome this news. Soon, when a man is seen in public wearing a tie, he will no longer be accused of having come straight from work. Tie-wearers will at last be deliberate tie-wearers. All ties will be nice ties, not ugly arrows of drudgery.
Nice.
And a final detail:
This apparently follows an industrial tribunal where a man claimed the forcing of ties upon male workers but not their female colleagues was tantamount to sexual discrimination. He won. The times are indeed a-slightly-changing.
It occurs to me there might be more pinpointable moments like this in the history of work: the day they invented modular office furniture, for example, or the very first building to have air conditioning and flourescent lighting instead of windows. I’ll try not to get carried away.
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