Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. A married couple leans over a map laid out on the coffee table of a Victorian Mendocino B&B. “I heard Husch has great QPR,” the husband tells his bewildered wife before clarifying. “Quality Price Ratio.”
“Please speak English,” she retorts. “Now, who makes a decent Gewürztraminer?”
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MONEY ❧ Fauxmo
When Leigh Claire La Berge was 18, she got fired from a Taco Bell for using the wrong soda cup. She realized in that moment that her natural reluctance to grant the premise could lead to professional trouble. Then she took a job with the thinnest premise imaginable.
In Fake Work, La Berge recalls the lucrative entropy of late-1990s corporate America while describing with oddly affecting specificity the work of doing work about work[1]. The result is a treatise on what it means to find meaning in jobs that don’t mean much and the stories we tell ourselves in order to clock in.
Upper Middle spoke to La Berge about fake work, real fraud, and language as a workplace. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book is both a treatise on the meaning of work and a funny story about you having the world’s silliest corporate job. How did you get a job doing fake work?
After school, I got hired by a headhunting agency to work with Arthur Andersen consultants on their Y2K audit. The work wasn’t even data entry – it was checking other peoples’ data entry – and the premise that running an audit would be prophylactic for a Y2K meltdown never made sense. At that time, Arthur Anderson was also signing off on Enron audits that led to the single largest bankruptcy in American corporate history. So I was doing fake work solving a fake problem for a fake company. But it was all deeply meaningful to me.
A big idea that you put forward in the book is that we no longer delineate between work that accomplishes something and work that doesn’t. How did you come to that conclusion?
On January 3, 2000, the first work day of the new year, people walked back into the office and no one said anything like, ‘Oh, hey! I guess nothing happened! I guess our work here is done!” Instead, we were just on to the next thing. Because we could have been doing anything. It didn’t matter. Nothing hinged on realness. That's how we experience capitalism now. It presents possibilities.
You describe “fake work” as recursive: It’s work about work or work about work about work. If the snake is just eating its own tail, why don’t more workplaces devolve into chaos? How can the nonsense of fake work be made to make sense?
In the 1970s the French philosophers like Derrida make the claim that it’s not so much that we’re shaped by our material realities as that reality itself is a kind of text shaped by language. Because language is infinitely mutable, reality is infinitely mutable, and the most real thing is language and textuality. That felt abstract when I studied philosophy in college, but then I got the Arthur Andersen job and the mantra was: “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” It’s like they let Derrida write a slogan. It was a post-structuralist workplace.
That’s both a bit depressing and a bit funny. Was it weird for you to watch your peers at Arthur Andersen take their fake work so seriously?
These people took it absolutely seriously. I was I was impressed with their ability to believe so completely in corporate accounting. It was their Copernican orientation. I have never had that experience of anything. That said, I flew all over the world doing absolutely nothing. I stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong and hung out in the first class lounge of Singapore Airlines. It felt significantly to me because it was significant for me. I just wasn’t doing anything.
You’re a college professor now. You didn’t stay corporate. Was there any part of your experience doing fake work that stuck with you in a real way? Any dust that clung to you?
The language, vernacular, and idioms that I found so interesting and appalling in corporate America have been embraced by universities. I think that, in a way, the liberal arts come to function against their own self definition and against their own best interest as a kind of like finishing school for abstract corporate work. Also, I read the Wall Street Journal every day. To understand your reality, you have to understand the material constitution of that reality. At this moment, that seems like it’s primarily economic.
There’s a big push against middle management these days – lots of layoffs and talk of A.I. Do you think that fake work could become a thing of the past?
Maybe, but what do you do with these professionals? The whole system has to be able to reproduce itself, but no capitalist firm wants to be the one bearing the brunt of that systemic reproduction. People have to do something and they have to justify what they're doing.
Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke is available now via Amazon and better places to buy books. It’s a fun reminder that the nineties were weird.
➺ High-earners are reporting high consumer confidence – but we aren’t spending much. ➺ Semi-private airlines aim to unbundle business class. ➺ Even if you had tomorrow’s newspaper, you’d be a bad investor. Worse actually. Try it.
STATUS ❧ Gainful Unemployment
There are two big labor stories in tech, one overblown and one blown correctly. The first is job loss. BLS data suggests a quarter of programming jobs have disappeared since 2022 (though demand for elite coders is actually up). The second is nine-figure paydays for AI experts – mostly Chinese MIT, Stanford, and Oxford grads. Both stories drive home a critical point: Higher ed has a perverse incentive to credential tomorrow’s workers for today’s jobs.
Between 2015 and 2023, CompSci degrees doubled as a share of bachelor’s degrees. The surge from 3% to 6% didn’t tank demand, but it did explode supply. Academia has a long history of this kind of overproduction and there’s a simple reason why. As sociologist Randall Collins explained in 1979’s The Credential Society: “The expansion of educational credentials is not primarily a response to skill requirements of jobs, but a means of controlling access to desirable positions.” In order to deny proles access to desirable positions and increase the importance of degrees, colleges actually need to overproduce credentialed workers.
This is why there were too many lawyers in the late ’90s, too many journalists and designers in the 2000s[2], and too many STEM PhDs and petroleum engineers in the 2010s. It’s also why there aren’t enough AI engineers (yet). No one with a GED is getting those gigs anyway.
➺ Pessimism isn’t more interesting than optimism, but pessimists are more interesting than optimists. ➺ Meeting the devil is high-status. Succumbing to temptation is not.[3] ➺ Good Jeopardy champion. ➺ Adults should engage in parallel play.
TASTE ❧ Talking Down and Up
“Floorholding” refers to the art of keeping listeners from tuning out. But classic tactics—eye contact, gestures, weird word choice—don’t translate online. Social media algorithms misread dramatic pauses as dead air and kill reach. In Algospeak, linguist Adam Aleksic argues this ADHD ghost in the machine birthed the “educational influencer accent” that now bleeds into elevated IRL discourse.
To sound smart without sounding manic, social media creators fill gaps by talking fast and pitching up at the end of each sentence. Though it descends from much-mocked Valley Girl upspeak[4], the educational influencer accent is best exemplified in extremis by Elmo, who speaks in high-pitched, rhythmic sentences he frontloads with unnatural stress.
As any parent knows, this way of speaking – linguists call it “macrosody” – works despite being unbearable. But it’s not the only strategy that works. Pauses still work fine offline. They might feel uncomfortably long or affected in a post-educational influencer world, but they’re natural. Not everyone need sound like Elmo when Elmo talk about Gaza.
➺ The end of hotel art is nigh. Good. ➺ Etsy shops selling books by the meter are seeing 19,000%+ spikes in searches. ➺ “Why lunch? ‘It’s almost subversive.’” ➺ The Devil Wears Prada 2 press cycle has started. The movie drops in May. ➺ Why Liberals live in Conservative fantasies. ➺ Skims sells medical interventions to people who can’t afford them.
[1] Fake Work is a good book, albeit a heady one. It’s also a book – and this is a rare thing – most likely to resonate with professionals who have occupied an ops role or performed some kind of documentation.
[2] There was an idea that the internet would eventually increase the demand for professional content. This was… half right?
[3] If the Epstein stuff comes up at dinner, here’s a fun game: Ask your friends who the worst person they ever met was. The answers will surprise you. The thing about psychopaths is that they really get around.
[4] There’s a gendered element to all of this, obvi. In a broad sense, reality favors men and surreality (the internet) favors women. This is why male influencers often sound gay even when they aren’t.