On a warm Tuesday evening, a group of young professionals jogs onto the softball field four at East River Park. Williamsburg’s Domino Park signs shines in very deep left on the other side of the brown water. Unlike their opponents, these players haven’t chosen a pun or inside joke for a team name – standard for rec league softball – just the name of their company: Palantir. It’s 20181 and Palantir hasn’t yet built “mega-database” domestic surveillance systems or an “ImmigrationOS.” It hasn’t been awarded non-competitive government contracts by shareholders. But it has built systems for ICE and a "pre-crime" prediction software for the New Orleans police. The company’s neo-reactionary politics are antithetical to the value of most of the 20-something, default-setting progressives in New York, but no one on team Palantir seems worried about the alternative uses of BBCOR-rated softball bats. They’ve got cushy jobs, padded résumés, and no reason to believe norms won’t protect them from blunt force critique .
In white-collar America – especially among tech workers and finance-adjacent operators – the significance of jobs has come uncoupled from questions of virtue, value, or even realness. What a company produces – if it produces anything, and not all do – matters less to its employees than the imprimatur of employment. And for good reason. Producing value – much less moral good – is not explicitly part of the deal. In exchange for a salary, insurance, swag (including very nice softball jerseys), and the chance to develop new skills, productive members of W-2 society perform discrete tasks between Slack chats. Success is measured by the number and complexity of tasks completed and not much else.
This is cultural, not corporate policy. And it’s both fairly new and fairly extreme. Permission structures now allow Stanford CS grads to build civilian face recognition software and Tuck MBAs to dismantle regional hospitals without risking social penalties paid by Dow Chemical employees in the 1970s post-Agent Orange and Exxon employees in the early 1990s after the wreck of the Valdez.
We allow this because employment has been fully gamified and we expect professionals working to attempt to win the various games they play. We also innately understand that winning requires not only playing well, but choosing the right game in the first place. Teaching is not the right game. Caregiving is not the right game. Local journalism is not the right game. Why? None of those games are rigged2.
Rigged doesn’t always mean there’s a lie or conspiracy afoot. Many games are explicitly built to be unfair. Consider the ring toss at a carnival. Only a moron thinks that’s fair, but plenty of people play. Now consider the startup ecosystem. Most VC returns follow a power law – less than 1% of investments generate the majority of profits. That makes Series A investors the carnies and entrepreneurs the marks. They both consent to play, but one is far more likely to win (albeit a smaller prize). The winner is rarely the guy throwing it out there.
That’s not to say that deal sourcing is easy or that slide decks skim themselves. But even if VCs have real jobs, they do what sociologist Leigh Clare LeBerge calls “Fake Work,” recursive labor that primarily serves to deepen a narrative used to obscure precisely how a game is rigged. And it’s not just investor-types doing fake work. With financialization responsible for an ever greater share of corporate profits – non-financial firms hold larger quantities of financial assets relative to their operating assets than ever – fake work has become more and more common. The value of Palantir stock – up about 142% since Trump was re-elected – is clearly driven less by the work of Palantir employees than market memetics and backroom deals, but the company’s success accrues to employees regardless both in equity and prestige.
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