Some Star Sneezed, Now They're Paging You In Reception

I was about to start complaining about the false promise of technology and how it doesn't eliminate work, it more transmogrifies existing (analog, physical, three dimensional) work into a more abstracted (emotional, time-management, expectational) work. It's similar to the law of conservation of energy, but applied to labor: you can never really create or destroy labor, you just transfer it into another form. The romantic version of this is the idea that every bit of creation was released in the Big Bang, meaning we are all made from the same stuff that makes stars and planets and bugs and sand and in the end we will return thus, back into the cycle of generation and regeneration. If nothing else, it's a thing to say on a first date if your actual personality starts to lose coherence under the pressure.

I'm not being ungrateful or naïve, I don't think, to note that things are just different since the promised Digital Revolution actually had the mundane audacity to actually occur, slowly and incrementally and in the midst the distraction of a thousand thousand false dawns and blind alleys of so many Microsoft Zunes and Google Glasses. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't fall for any of those gimmick-based Great Leaps Forward because I'm some kind of stoic visionary impervious to marketing. I bought a Wii U for god's sake. No, I've just been saved by my antipathy toward spending money. Yes, there were people who laid out thousands of dollars for 3D televisions when those were a thing, but I think of the version of myself who is capable of doing that and I don't know him. It's a dark and foreboding alternate timeline where I'm certain I spend an embarrassing amount of my time and energy trying to figure out how to access the boutique pornography purpose-made for the device. Eh, maybe he's happier, who am I to judge?

To be certain, sure, the world has become less physically burdensome in some material ways, but I'm not sure how that has directly translated into any kind of an easier life. It was supposed to liberate us from the drudgery of a work-centric life and fulfill the promise of the buzzwordy "work-life balance" concept that every new job lies to its employees about. The problem is that there's no technology that is not corrupted by its contact and deployment by people, who tend to ruin everything. Like sure, you could work anywhere now, but that just means you can work anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether or not you should be off the clock, and be monitored while you are or aren't doing it. Oh yes, but also, just to be clear, you can't actually work anywhere when or why you want to, according to your own needs, because, again, people are in charge and people are petty and stupid and bad at everything. You still have to have the same commute, the same shackling to a building that isn't the one your family lives in, but now when you get there, everything is digital and therefore obviously so much more efficient! Look, we used to do this on three sheets of paper and now we do it on 11 PDF files! Which nobody quite 100% understands how to format or use in the same way, so they all come out a tiny bit differently formatted or tweaked, which someone else has to put out an email about that no one will read, and then attempt to reconcile! And which, honestly, you should probably print out a copy anyway just for your own records, you know, just in case!

Please do not misunderstand me: this is not "the Good Old Days were better" here. That's not me. Although, objectively, in a lot of ways things are pretty bad right now and we could do with some reversion, but I'm only talking politically and I mean, like, 2022 at most.

Materially, for someone like me who is in the process of looking for a job, this is a great example of exactly what I mean. Go to any job-posting site, LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever, or a more specialized site like your state's career board or USAJobs for federal work. All of them present the same promise--the same lie--in the exact same way: click this one button to apply! If you're on LinkedIn, though, clicking the "one button" opens a new window to take you to the site of the company to which you'd like to apply directly. Now technically, from LinkedIn's experience, they are correct. You pushed that one button on their site and now you can go apply, but that's not what's implied. There should be a process triggered when I hit that button that involves satellites and lasers, 1,000 secret workers in India, whatever it takes (barring AI because AI is stupid and broken and is bad at everything you ask it to do) to trick me--I'm begging you please trick me--into temporarily losing sight of the border between technology and magic. Like back in the early days of smartphones where you could get that app that made it look like you were drinking a beer.

Alas, the job listings take hours to sort through because now the sites are using AI to "help" me find listings, more than half of which aren't suited to me at all. So I'm being presented volume as though it is abundance, which aren't really synonyms when you factor in quality or usefulness. And then the application process for every single place is arcane, byzantine and discrete. Some are fairly simple, sure, but I will tell you--and this is absolutely true--so far my record for one application is five hours. There are so many assessments, so many questionnaires, so many just basic formatting quirks and "helpful" capture technology that I'm basically re-entering my résumé line by line every single time.

At least the end-to-end process is faster though, right? Well, the accessibility of every listing means the amount of applicants is going to be silly vs. the old analog days, so there's software to help curate the pile, but the pile is now nine miles high. I have no desire to going back to showing up with a paper CV to hand to a receptionist and then sit around in blind hope the right person saw it. That labor still exists and the anxiety isn't any less, it's just now the blind hope is around the AI-powered pre-sorting metadata-and-keyword-scrubbing alogrithm deciding if your own application is worthy to advance to actual human eyes for review. It's just now I can apply to way more things than I used to be able to. Great. Who doesn't love an online quiz?

If this just was nostalgia, I'd be feeling OK about it because honestly, the future is the past is the present. Literally everyone I know who has gotten a job in the last 12 months has gotten it because a friend or family member worked there. If I really wanted to be on the cutting edge I'd get myself a chatbot girlfriend. I'm sure the same basic LLM is in charge of one or several AI departments somewhere. Degrading yourself sexually and emotionally in exchange for work is as time-tested as anything. I'm on it.