2025-09-16 22:26:00
IN THE CARTOON, two frogs lounge in a cauldron, fire building below, elbows perched over the edge like they’re at the pool. If the cartoon is from the previous century, one of them is smoking a cigarette. If it’s more recent, the cigarette is swapped out for a cocktail glass with a paper umbrella, a cherry resting heavily at the bottom. The other frog is wearing shades. A speech bubble rises from their heads with words about enjoying the water, or what a nice hot day it is.
I’ve come to think there’s something fundamentally wrong about this image, about the notion that when faced with an existential threat we lounge and numb ourselves, pretending that the water getting warmer is nice, actually. But we’re much more likely to cooperate with our end than to sit idly and watch it pass. A more realistic image would show the shades-wearing frog turned around, reaching over the edge of the cauldron, piling more wood on the fire below, building it up, the other frog sipping while egging them on.
In Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write,
Governed by fear, people are largely cooperative with systems that produce torture, mass death, and annihilation. That is the greatest danger that fear poses: not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable—one that is actually poised to bring about our own extinction.
We are awash in cooperation with these days: hospitals abandon trans people, universities capitulate to extortion, corporations ditch their DEI commitments so fast you’d think they couldn’t wait to do it. Senior leaders at seemingly every tech company commit to AI benchmarks they know they cannot hit, while their engineers and designers execute one anti-pattern after another in order to juke the stats. The worst social media network fills up with “How I used AI to supercharge my productivity” posts, as people go about avoiding their own mortality by forgetting how to live. Meanwhile, the story goes that this is all inevitable, because that’s how the story always goes when there’s no other justification for harm done: “it cannot be prevented” is both the watchword of the AI is coming for your job crowd and the people peddling thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting. Often, these are the same people.
We may not have any clear paths out of the cauldron. It’s wide, and deep, and the exits are trapped. But neither do we need to feed the flames. In your work, you will be given a lot of orders. They may, more frequently now, be given in the tone of an ultimatum, of something that brooks no dissent. But you are not a machine to be programmed; you are not an automaton, no matter how convenient it would be for others if you were. You get to choose to do, or not do, everything you bring your hands to. You get to choose how to do it, and who to do it with.
And you can say no. You can refuse to follow an order. You can say why an order is wrong, or call attention to the harm it will bring. You can propose alternatives. You can gather with others and make your own demands, or strategize together about how to break out of this particular eddy. You can do this with people in your organization as well as with those elsewhere, many of whom are dealing with the same challenges in their orgs. You can share your wisdom and observations, letting them out into the world where they can do work, instead of letting them burn you up inside.
I’ve had countless conversations this year with people at their wits’ end with nonsense edicts: to use AI in work where it isn’t even remotely suited; to ship AI to people who do not want it; to performance manage good workers out the door simply because they won’t commute to an office to sit on video calls; to pretend that “race neutral” policies aren’t obviously the opposite; to enforce impossible metrics on arbitrary timelines, and so much more. This is gaslighting at an industrial scale. At some point, the only response that will save your sanity is a hell no.
There will be consequences, of course. But there will be consequences no matter what you do. That’s what it means to be alive and living—everything you do makes change in the world. The choices we make are never between safety and risk, because there is no truly safe path; as long as you are alive you are at risk of harm. The choice is, rather, between kinds of risk, between what it is you’re reaching for when you take the risks you do.
Most employment in the US is what is known as “at will.” Legally, that means both you and your employer can end the job at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all. But to “will” something is to choose it, to exercise the mind and body towards an act. Every choice you make in your work is an act of will, an act of your will, and the collective will of the people you make those choices with. And will is a powerful thing! The story of inevitability is a story that wants you to forget that you have the will to change things; but the future remains, as ever, unwritten.
One word of caution: cynicism may seem like a useful weapon in times like these, but it cuts both ways. To follow orders cynically lets you off the hook: you can say, I know this is foolish, but I have to do it, so I will do it at arms length, my spirit stretching away from my hands. In that way, you can convince yourself you’re not really doing a thing even as you’re doing it. Often, the most cynical person on the team is also the most compliant. And over time, it’s corrosive; you’re trading your creativity and intellect for a resentful submission. When you spot the cynic surfacing within you, take a break, move your body, haul your spirit back into your bones. Ask yourself: how can I help the people I care about? Then go.
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2025-07-11 06:30:00
Brian Merchant asked workers what AI was doing to their jobs and got back loads of thoughtful, hilarious, at times desperate and at times righteous responses. In this post, he shares what he heard from tech workers as they deal with edicts to throw AI at everything, bottom lines be damned. The whole thing is long, but it’s worth reading in full (and the kicker is its own reward); the stories make plain that AI is being used to deskill, de-spirit, and demean the work and craft that so many people have spent years developing, and that the promise of AI is the kind of promise wiser people have learned to expect from the emperor’s tailor. What I’ll call out here: if you’re one of the many, many workers who is angry, fearful, demoralized and worse about the AI sloppification of work, know that you are not alone, and you likely aren’t even in the minority.
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2025-05-28 23:23:00
Oliver Burkeman on the insufferable edicts to use AI in your work: “The obvious answer, of course, is that you might have no choice: that given what’s coming, anyone who wants to keep food on the table must give up their dreams of aliveness, and buckle down to placating the machines instead. I have two things to say about that, the first of which is that I don’t believe it: that aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there’ll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organizations, and bring people together to experience it. But the second is that even if I’m hopelessly wrong about that, and the direst predictions about AI disruption come true, then navigating through life by aliveness is still the right choice, because that’s what makes life worth living.”
To put this another way: even if you believe that shackling yourself to the machines is the only way to keep food on the table, you’re still coming to harm. Any choice you make here isn’t between safety and harm but between different kinds of harm. And maybe the threats are just that—sneering words spit from the mouths of bullies. Maybe it’s time to call their bluff.
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2025-05-08 00:33:00
AMIDST THE UNENDING LAYOFFS and the edicts to use nonsense-making machines, the forced commutes, the increasingly lengthy and arbitrary interview processes, and the retrenchment of already minimal efforts at diversity and inclusion—a question is lurking in the minds of many workers, cautious and careful, afraid to poke its head out of the den it has safely hid in until now, but each day getting a little braver, a little more certain that now is the time: what if I cannot fucking do this anymore?
That question tucks itself in the back of our heads because facing it directly is often difficult and unpleasant. If you’ve built up a good career for yourself but after multiple layoffs and months on the market are finding that all the jobs are terrible, facing that question can feel like being asked to climb a steep cliff face with nothing but your bare hands. You want to throw a tantrum, to demand at least a length of rope—surely that’s not unreasonable. But no rope appears, and you’re left standing there, wondering and seething. It’s not that the question itself is dangerous. It’s the response, the part of you that shouts or whispers or sobs out two horrible but liberating little words: I can’t. Or, I won’t.
The first thing you’ve got to do when those words show up is take some time to really sit with them, to listen and let them move through you, let the knowledge drift across every part of your body, until it’s in your fingers and toes and breath and spirit. Know that the grief and shock of this realization is likely to hit you like a ton of racist executive orders. It hurts, is what I’m saying. But pain is a useful signal: it demands that we slow down, that we attend to it, that we lick our wounds and let time and rest do their work on us.
The second thing is you have to start thinking about what comes next. This isn’t a linear sequence so much as a messy oscillation, moving between grief and imagining, between rest and contemplation, between mourning and experimentation. The good news is there is one tried and true method to work through both, and it’s to talk to your people. Kin, friends, respected elders, current and former colleagues, mentors—all of these people are here to think with you as you both process the loss of something that should never have been taken from you, and begin to build anew among the ruins it left behind. Start talking about what’s on your mind with those who will listen carefully and attentively, and ask them to help you notice what comes up, what thoughts or ideas or desires are just now coming out of the shadows and into the light.
There often comes an immense relief from saying out loud that you may be ready to leave one career behind, that it’s now time to do the difficult work of moving towards something new. Relief and fear, of course—but the latter is your comrade in safely navigating the road ahead, a presence that can keep you on your toes as you venture into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. And once it’s said out loud, some space starts to open up to imagine yourself into: maybe there’s work ahead that gets you away from the desk more often, or work that brings you closer to the kind of people you most enjoy spending time with, or work that makes a better world. Maybe there are also changes that may be less welcome, sacrifices necessary to successfully make it across this terrain: a move to a new city, a trip deferred, time spent mending and repairing instead of buying new. The nature of work under capitalism means there are always costs to making a change, and there’s grief that comes with that too—grief that demands our attention as a precondition of moving itself along.
But it will move along, and you will get through this. And odds are you won’t like every part of the change that you’re going to go through, but if you keep your head up, if you stay focused on what’s important to you, if you keep talking to the people around you and weave trust and love and care among them, you will get to the other side. Maybe it won’t be the future that you once imagined. But your imagination is a beautiful and changeful creature, capable of shapeshifting into new beings you couldn’t have foreseen. Trust that the cautious but curious being that is just now starting to poke its head up will take you somewhere that has life and room for living, room to make a life for every part of you, the wounds and the dreams, the grief and the kinship, the old work and the new.
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2025-04-25 19:09:00
Applications are open now for the summer speculative fiction work/shop. The work/shop will gather a small group of people eager to imagine what comes next in their work, and all too aware that the usual tricks—the planning and projections, the goals and milestones and objectives—aren’t the right tools. We’ll use speculative fiction to break out of those ruts, to open up a lens on how we think about work that creates more awareness, more opportunities to revise and re-story our work, more room to maneuver—even on the darkest of days. If you (or someone you know) feels stuck, uncertain, or lost in their work and wants to open up some space to imagine different futures, if you want room to think more expansively and in community—this is for you.
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2025-04-24 19:53:00
ONE OF THE RHETORICAL moves I often observe in response to fear about work is a kind of casual dismissal. Someone will say to a friend or colleague that they worry about ageism in their industry, and the response will come that, oh, no, they shouldn’t have to worry about that, they’re so accomplished. Or, surely that’s paranoia or imposter syndrome talking; or, of course they’re privileged enough that they don’t need to concern themselves over that kind of thing. It can almost seem as if it isn’t respectable to admit being afraid, as if fear is irrational, nonsensical, uncouth.
I think those responses are, more often than not, well-intentioned. Dismissing fear is one way of diminishing it, keeping it small enough that we’re not paralyzed by it, unable to get through the day. And often the person who responds this way is also managing their own fear, keeping their own demons at bay. But in my observations, fear tends to get louder and more insistent when we ignore it. If we don’t attend to it during the day, it erupts into the night, disrupting sleep, sending nightmares. We expend a great deal of energy trying to keep it down, and end up exhausted from the effort, ever more paralyzed and fearful as a result.
I want, as always, to be plain here: there is nothing irrational about being fearful of our workplaces. A good job is our livelihood, our comfort, our needs being met; a bad one can bring incredible misery, and no job at all is often worse. Given the amount of harm that can emerge from work, it may in fact be more unreasonable to claim that fear is out of place, especially these days. Between the layoffs and RTO plans and the dystopian AI-fueled prophecies, the unmasked plans to resegregate our workplaces, the blatant misogyny and racism and bigotry—we’ve got a lot to be afraid about.
So, what then? What happens when we don’t dismiss those fears? When we don’t reach immediately for behaviors that numb or console? The fear doesn’t go away, I’m sorry to say. But with the right attention, it becomes a useful partner instead of a haunting. When you acknowledge a fear, when you name it and bring it into the light, you open up some space to think with it, to converse with it, to consider what it’s trying to tell you. When you admit in conversation with a friend that, yes, ageism is real and it’s coming for you, you don’t diminish the threat, but you do give yourself some space to consider what you want to do about it.
And, critically, you don’t have to occupy that space alone. The threats and dangers in our workplaces are collective, not individual. That does not mean that they are evenly distributed—they are not. But none of us is without risk, and none of us can thrive on our own; a risk to some of us is a danger to all of us. And our ability to respond and attend to those dangers is so much greater when we do it together. One person trying to navigate ageism or misogyny or the unholy alliance between them has only so many moves to make; but when several or dozens of people attempt the same, more opportunities emerge. Not only strategies for changing our workplaces or creating different ones, but also ways to practice collective care and support, to weave stronger connections, to produce an interdependence that’s creative, generative, constructive of something new—to plant the seeds for a different world.
Sometimes the best response to make when someone admits to being afraid is to say, “I’m afraid of that, too.” And then to sit with that for a moment, to let the connection between you spark and then settle in, to see where it takes you. It’s not that some brilliant solution will reveal itself, or that you will suddenly know how to defeat these interlocking systems of oppression. But that together you might start to explore where that fear is making itself known, what shape it’s taking for you both; you may be able to design some experiments or investigations to better understand it, to discover what paths are open for inquiry or study; to learn how others have moved through this terrain before you. Instead of letting your fear drag you around, kicking and screaming, you get to tell it where you need it to go. Because it’s oh-so-ready to walk alongside you, to be your guardian and co-conspirator, to warn you of the dangers ahead and to arm you against them. It just needs you to admit that it’s real.
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