In what sense is “Let Us Work!” a weak message? First, it conflates work with jobs. Second, it represents a denialist response to the problem at the heart of the displaced workers’ predicament. Third, it misses the opportunity to deliver the right message: Stop Stealing!
I initially shared this live video without any introduction. I simply pointed my smart phone camera at the orchestrated action in front of me, and I hit the ‘record’ button. When I finished recording, I didn’t uncheck the ‘email Subscribers’ option that Substack automatically presented.
I realize that this spur-of-the-moment livecast probably raised more questions than it answered. In fact, I doubt it answered any questions. But the questions and reactions it elicited may have included the following:
Why is he sending me this email? What’s the point? Why not at least include an intro?
Is this the beginning of some sort of political rant? Come on, Lev! Didn’t you say this blog is for your professional network?
Even in the context of the essay I had published just a few hours before the live video, these questions and reactions warrant a response. ICYMI, here’s the essay from the day of the livecast: Seize the Means of Perception: Alternatives to Survival through Ignorance.
Seize the Means of Perception
In this post, I share recent readings and writings that suggest fruitful responses to willful ignorance. I felt this was an appropriate subject for a newsletter addressed to my post-LinkedIn professional network because, as Margaret Heffernan points out in the introduction to
For a fuller response to your questions and reactions, read on, subscribe and stay tuned for more.
What I’m Hearing: “Let Us Work!”
In what sense is “Let Us Work!” a weak message? First, it conflates work with jobs. Second, it represents a denialist response to the problem at the heart of the displaced workers’ predicament. Third, it misses the opportunity to deliver the right message: Stop Stealing!
Do Not Conflate Work with Jobs
To a person who lost a job, the job loss may seem like the problem to solve, but we do not get closer to a solution, either individually or collectively, by mischaracterizing the full dimensions of our predicament. The slogan I heard at this protest in front of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan mischaracterizes the predicament by conflating jobs with work.
Whether people lose jobs through firings or layoffs, whether the former employers are government agencies or private corporations, whether the job losses are justified or wrongful, they do not deprive people of their ability to work. They simply terminate the contracts and compensation based on which people agree to shape their work in accordance with tacit and explicit rules. The slogan “Let Us Work!” ignores this reality. As a result, it is imprecise at best or wrongheaded at worst.
Face the Real Problem
The real problem is that, before the recent inauguration of a new world order, the terminated employees worked for wasteful federal bureaucracies that systematically betrayed the people they claimed to serve, and after the inauguration of the new world order, millions of people will continue to work for a public-private partnership that only deepens the betrayal into more brazenly destructive forms.
In other words, the real problem is that modern employees face a false choice: they can serve either covertly or openly corrupt organizations. This choice architecture doesn't explicitly offer an option for “none of the above”, which is why I've argued in multiple posts across my blogs that we must “Seize the Means of Perception”.
Until job seekers follow this call to action, they probably won’t see a way to opt out. Instead, they may continue to think that someone needs to ‘let them work’. During much of my corporate career, I was one of these people, until I realized that, even with all my job losses and long periods of unemployment, I've never stopped working. In fact, since 1996, I have continued essentially the same kind of work based on four core skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Depending on the jobs I've held at any given time, I've shaped portions of my work to serve the needs of clients and employers. Through this experience, I realized that my skillset is potent beyond belief; it can:
Market products and services.
Achieve desired outcomes in contested mergers and acquisitions.
Orchestrate fruitful responses to complex crises.
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
The problem was never in my ability to work or in the value of my work. The problem was always the systemic corruption that, until recently, remained sugar-coated.
Deliver the Right Message
In my introduction to Defense Against Kleptocracy, I sketched out a few thoughts on why the story of this corruption is often inaudible and how one can work around the veil of willful ignorance. I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but this inquiry at least points to a message that improves on “Let Us Work!” The better message in my view is “Stop Stealing!”
This is a superior message for many reasons. It speaks a language that people have understood long before the distinction between work and jobs became a global economic reality. It signals a refusal to consent to economic arrangements that subject workers to theft in many guises such as wage theft, theft of attention, dignity, health, etc. It points to subtler forms of theft such as planned obsolescence and unaccounted externalities. It expresses a readiness to fight for a life without the drumbeat of corporate microaggressions fueled by growth-desperation and lack of genuine accountability to stakeholders.
In Conclusion
“Let Us Work!” isn't just a weak message; it's an incoherent message. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the recently displaced federal workers won't get their jobs back. They may well score some narrow victories in the short term. Movements and protests may succeed despite the incoherence of their messages. MAGA, for example, is an incoherent message, but it still serves as a rallying cry for the new world order now coming into view.
Similarly, replacing an incoherent message with a coherent alternative doesn't necessarily lead to success. For example, despite my ceaseless search for non-kleptocratic employment, I remain unemployed. At times, I've even compared my job search to Diogenes with his lantern searching the streets of Athens for a single honest man. I haven't yet found what I'm looking for, but I still choose to be realistic by demanding the impossible.
What Else Am I Hearing?
Here’s what else I’ve heard lately in the marketplace of ideas. If these excerpts intrigue you, let me know in the comments below.
Markets Don’t Just Reflect Reality — They Construct It
John Maynard Keynes coined the term “animal spirits” to describe the emotional and psychological forces that drive human economic behavior beyond rational calculation. "Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive," he wrote, “can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”
What we're witnessing now is not merely a recalculation of economic probabilities but a shift in narrative, a transformation of the story that market participants tell themselves about where we are and where we're headed. And narratives, once they take hold, have the peculiar power to reshape the reality they purport to describe.
Read the full essay in Notes from the Circus.
Corporate Jobs Are Normalized Insanity
To succeed in almost any career, you have to sever what is human in favor of what is functional…As Erich Fromm writes: “What he may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind… As a matter of fact, his very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture, and thus may give him an enhanced feeling of achievement.”
Read the full essay from The Autodidact.
The Era of AI Employees Is Here
As Anthony Scholle concluded in a recent essay for The Savage Collective, if the technologists are to be believed, the post-work future is really more of a post-job future: “[W]ork will remain central to human flourishing”, he writes, “and to our integration as embodied souls, as whole persons, oriented toward the Good. Jobs may fade, but there will always be work as we act to love our neighbors.” It was not the intention of the technologists who have developed artificial intelligence, nor of the managers who are trying to implement it, to reveal the value of labor. But this, in effect, is what they have done. Perhaps we should be grateful to them—not so much because they offer anything of real value, but because they are helping us to uncover opportunities to reconsider the premises which have limited our appreciation of labor, preparing us, perhaps, to walk away from them.
Read the full report in Ever Not Quite.
Work Is How We Love Our Neighbors
Work, then, is the primary means by which we love our neighbors. Good work is necessarily an expression of love toward the world. To love another person is to will his good. To will another person's good is not only to want it for them, or to hope they get it, but to act and to do real work in the world that moves him toward that good. We will the good of other people, of our communities, and the world at large through our uniquely human God-given capacities.
For the full essay on meaningful work in the age of bullshit jobs, go to The Savage Collective.
The Machine Is Governed by the Small and Callow Soul of Its Creators
What for Wiener in 1950 was a speculative vision, and a “terrifying” one, is today a practical goal for AI-infatuated technocrats like Elon Musk. Musk and his cohort not only foresee an “AI-first” government run by artificial intelligence routines but, having managed to seize political power, are now actively working to establish it. In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of an actual governing machine. Musk is always on the lookout for vessels for his seeds, and with DOGE he sees an opportunity to incorporate his ambitions and intentions into the very foundations of a new kind of state. It’s preformationism writ large.
Read the full essay in New Cartographies.
Federal Workers Organize Against Billionaire Power Grab
Federal worker unions are relatively limited in what they can bargain. Wages are off the table—those are set by Congress, and wage increases have to be passed as law. But they do negotiate over working conditions issues like discipline, scheduling, and remote work. (Postal workers are an exception; although they work for the federal government, they have collective bargaining rights and are covered by the National Labor Relations Act alongside private sector workers.)
Read the full report in Labor Notes.
Techno-Religion Will Snare the Unbeliever
This corporate religiosity—a world where logos are sacred symbols, mission statements are creeds, and top execs are saints—was born of American optimism. Today, that gilded faith is accelerating toward some dismal omega point in the Future™. Artificial intelligence advances just ahead of robotics. Brain-computer interfaces are catching up to genetic engineering. Digital currency pulses through the system like electric blood.
Read the full report in Singularity Weekly.
We Are Digital Serfs
As the online ecosystem increasingly dominates our personal and professional lives, we are increasingly becoming dominated by Big Tech; we are becoming digital serfs.
And digital serfdom is worse than the analog version. Serfs had rights and privileges that aren’t extended to our digital lives. In our new digital serfdom, Big Tech can sell us products we don’t own and can’t keep and erase our business at will—without explanation, without recourse, and without acknowledging that we ever had a right to be there in the first place.
If trends continue, it won’t be long until Baron Mark Zuckerberg can show up on your honeymoon demanding the right to sleep with your bride because it was in the latest update to the Meta T&A.
How did this sorry state of affairs come to pass? And what can we do about it?
Read the full report — Part 1 and Part 2 — in Contemplations on the Tree of Woe.
What We’re Fighting For
So much of the pushback I get in my work — and the pushback I've seen toward others — is that I "hate" technology, when I'd like argue that my profound disgust is borne of a great love of technology, and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I do not turn on my computer every day wanting to be annoyed, and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging onto whatever social networks we're on because we are ready to be pissed off. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume, and want to simply go about our business without a litany of microaggressions created by growth-desperation and a lack of responsibility toward the user.
Read the full essay at Where’s Your Ed At.
Luddites Were Not Anti-Technology
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