Her Job Was Real. So Why Did Her Work Feel So Fake?
FAKE WORK: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge
In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn't sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won't be this.
'Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke,' by Leigh Claire La Berge, offers an early autopsy. Set in the years just before the turn of the millennium, it recounts the time La Berge, now a writer and English professor, spent in the corporate world, helping a Fortune 500 company prepare for Y2K.
Her experience was so surreal — capitalism, in its cubicle era, so far from Adam Smith's touchingly simple original conception of it as the propensity to truck, barter and exchange — that the book's tonic note is disbelief. 'Is this how companies are put together?' she wrote at the time, in a draft of an abandoned novel that she quotes throughout 'Fake Work.' 'I find it incredible. These are the things that organize global commerce? Run governments? Fly planes? My second-grade soccer team was more carefully recruited and managed.'
Part of the absurdity is circumstantial. Working for a 'sprawling global conglomerate over whose imperial territory the sun never set,' she is seconded to Arthur Anderson, the infamous accounting firm that enabled Enron's crimes. There, she works in the 'burgeoning millennial-preparedness office,' helping to forestall a data catastrophe that the reader knows will never arise. 'On January 1, 2000,' a grave slide deck prepared by the firm dolefully asks, 'will I still have electricity, food, telephone, transportation?'
Yet this doubled unreality — a fraudulent firm solving a non-problem — only intensifies the universal elements of La Berge's story. She carefully details the farcical outcomes of corporate policy; for instance, employees have to fly coach if the trip is under a certain distance, so the team conveniently decides that Canada is 'fairly Y2K prepared' in order to fly first class to the Asia-Pacific region instead. And she also tracks, more soberly, the ennui, the dismay, of people doing labor 'so dissociative and diminutive that, for me anyway, the need for bathroom breaks seemed increased in proportion to the amount of it I completed.'
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