“Over six years, my title changed—Enterprise Architect, Director of Strategy, Principal of Technology.” This is a wonderful essay. For a couple of months recently, I watched a group of men build a house next to where I was staying. They were skilled and produced something both useful and enduring. I asked myself how it came to be that we valued bullshit jobs with bullshit titles more than what I saw these men do.
I lasted about six years at a Fortune 500 company. For years I had a recurring nightmare that I was back there and would wake up in a state of panic. The only good thing about the nightmares was that I was still young and skinny. My former coworkers still believe the empty slogans. Thoreau had it right, “the mass of men (and now women) lead lives of quiet desperation.”
This is everywhere. I worked for a local government and my reviews were centered around process improvements and extra curricular activity. As a PM you’d think excellent project management would be a priority. No. As long as the projects were not going badly then the focus shifted to virtue signaling in other ways. I pulled back on extra curricular activities and my boss said I wasn’t “engaged”. What? I was spending more time doing my job.
I work for a government. Man do I feel this. With ever increasing calls for efficiency which result in cycles of cuts to positions like admin, biologists, engineers, etc; however, we seemingly get more and more of these jobs like "Director of Strategic Innovation". Unfortunately, when people think government is bloated, its the productive jobs they disproportionately get cut (rather than getting more efficient, we get less done and less efficiently so). Because some decision maker thinks that a director of innovation is cheaper than a team of actual staff who do stuff, which may innovate. but they manage air and write briefing notes. Still, I also hold the public accountable because they reach for the laser like a cat, rather than actually trying to have better government.
I wrote something about this, from a professor's perspective, many years ago (http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html). My theory (though surely only a partial explanation): with the expansion of higher education, we are producing large numbers of people whose apparent credentials far exceed their actual ability. (Not a comment on you personally, Sarah!) They require jobs that match their own perception of self-worth. Therefore we need to produce lots of jobs that appear important even though the people holding them don't actually do anything.
Thanks, Peter. I read it…it reinforces a lot of what I’ve been thinking about higher education.
With two kids in middle school I wonder how I’ll navigate that landscape when the time comes - how to measure what it’s truly worth, and how to prepare them to filter out all the bureaucratic, political, and their own ego-driven distractions along the way.
Sarah, thank you for the reply. I'm still in higher ed, so I do obviously think it's worth it. But not for everyone. It's important for students (with their parents!) to think hard about what they really want. The opportunity for a liberal arts education is a tremendous blessing for the person who wants it, appreciates it, and can make the most of it. But our very expensive model is not necessarily the best path for someone who is really just after a credential. I think we will see more alternative models spring up, but also that AI may cause increased appreciation for a classic, in-person, Socratic approach to liberal education. Time will tell. I hope that you can help your children may wise decisions about their own future. And thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my old piece. : )
I liked your article as well, Peter. My wife (and many of my friends) are academics, and my wife has spent a lot of time on self-assessment committees and accreditation activities.
I toy with the idea that assessment should perhaps be a much more significant part of a professor’s job. I’m dreaming of a world where you don’t assign a quantitative grade at all, but rather write a thoughtful review of each student’s demonstrated ability.
I’m led to this by the atrocious degree of buck-passing that I see in evaluating people’s performance, from education and into professional life. Nobody wants to be the one to make real value judgments. You take the SAT and get your number. Schools admit you based largely on the number the College Board assigned you. Every student’s GPA is high, and you get a job based largely on which college you attended. You get later jobs based on the prestige of your prior employers; nobody actually asks your old boss how good an employee you are. Every decision-maker in the chain assumes that someone upstream of them has already decided who’s good and who isn’t. It would be a valuable service to society if someone would do this work for real.
Jay, thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment earlier. I was not deliberately ignoring it but was traveling and had a laptop breakdown while away. But it was kind of you to read my old essay and chime in here. You certainly make a very good point about the rarity of serious evaluation. Grade inflation is pervasive, and no one professor can fight against it successfully alone, since if you aim at intellectual rigor, you don't want to penalize the students who are bold enough to take your class. In our honors program, which is pretty writing-intensive, we engage in what I describe to the students as "honest grading," something (I tell them) they've probably never seen, and we hand out plenty of C's, D's, and even F's early on. But we have a full year to work with them very intensely, so that they make genuine progress, and by the end we can (for the most part!) in good conscience give them the grades they would have been getting in regular non-honors coursework. (And of course there also we don't want them being penalized for having had the good fortune to be admitted to the honors program!) I don't have a beef with grading as such, but obviously the more critical, formative feedback you can supply, the more helpful it is for students. But of course that all takes a lot of time....
I like your grading philosophy. It also brings to my mind a difference between writing and, say, chemistry (which my wife reaches).
Your students start off as pretty poor writers. From the beginning, they are tasked with producing an entire paper, and their output is bad. That’s expected. It would be unfair to say that in order to get a good grade in a writing class, you have to arrive already knowing how to write well.
In a chemistry class, you spend the first week talking about dimensional analysis and unit conversions. The first assignment will consist of this exclusively, and a good student who arrived with no prior knowledge of chemistry will be able to do it well.
These are probably endpoints of a continuum, with most STEM subjects lying closer to the chemistry end and humanities closer to the writing end. Maybe you and your colleagues have had this thought long ago, but it just occurred to me, and it was interesting to think about. This is what I come to Substack for. Thanks!
Jay, it doesn't matter a lot at this point, but I wanted to apologize for not noticing/responding to your comment earlier. I've been swamped with e-mail and the notification got buried deep in my inbox--just found it. The continuum you describe makes sense to me. Thanks again for the kind words.
Well said, Sarah. My employer puts a huge amount of overhead resources into internal research and development (IRAD, as the military-industrial complex calls it), and has been highly praised for its commitment to “innovation”. I don’t fault the intentions, but I get the same icky feeling you describe that a lot of this work is performative.
I theorize that part of the driving force here is our intellectual property laws. “Innovation” is mostly about novelty because the law allows you to own and monetize novelty. Generating a ton of useless patents signals to your investors that you’re laying claim to territory in the world of ideas, allowing you to extract rent from anyone whose playing piece lands on your square.
I would prefer to emphasize problem solving over innovation, but that’s a less lucrative road. If your solution isn’t novel, others will just copy you and your investors won’t get rich, regardless of how effective your solution is. Problem solvers never get the celebrity that innovators do.
This article reminds me of a great quote from the Yes Minister tv series (though I am not sure if the quote originates there): "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
I think of this quote often. I've worked in tech, for example, and seen updates rolled out that were worse than useless: they simply changed things because updates had to be released and changes had to be included.
There's a strange amount of wheel spinning. Perhaps the guiding principle (conscious or not) is that with sufficient wheel-spinning in place, something of value might accidentally, finally, and actually happen!
One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead and should be justifying your cost daily. (I see that things haven’t changed much since I left corporate America.)
Yes but what then? Where does the surplus of money go?
In the current system either salaries of the highest executives would go up or the shareholders would gain more.
The machine, the system, the algorithm…has been doing the work for decades now. So yes, if I am not doing anything valuable, i shouldn’t be there. But the real question is: who gets the money that’s been freed up by me not being there?
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, large corporate organizations actually benefit from dramaturgical labor (with one big exception). Dramaturgical labor is important, because it becomes a vessel in which to displace fantasy and separate it from reality. And all organizations subconsciously engage in fantasy, so the healthiest approach is to ensure that this escape into fantasy can exist, but compartmentalized from the primary tasks of the organization. And sure, periodically this dramaturgical labor can and may hit upon something of meaningful significance to the organization's primary task, in which case great.
The harm of dramaturgical labor is when it is not compartmentalized, and it instead is given primacy above the main tasks of the organization and outcompetes the main tasks. The prime example of this in Organizational Psychology case studies is The Challenger Disaster, whereby the dramaturgical fantasy of the Teacher in Space program became the primary force for decision making at NASA. Instead of engineers and safety analysts being required to do their primary task of safe space flight within the brutal constraints of a limited budget and "people will die catastrophically if you get this wrong", these workers were tasked with participating in a symbolic goodness fantasy of "little children will be inspired to greatness by seeing a teacher in space."
And like you write, dramaturgical labor is often revered as “complex” and “more powerful” and given higher status than “simple” and “mundane” primary task labor. In my experience in large, medium, and tiny organizations, this reverence leads to dysfunctional leadership that mistakenly tries to solve primary task problems with dramaturgical labor. Like the pizza party meme. The harm of this is increasing burnout among frontline primary task labor and subsequent failures to fulfill primary tasks. I don’t think this is happening at places like Mastercard, where primary task labor is likely treated as significant and well-compensated and has easy access to resources to problem-solve. But in essential-need public good institutions (or clothed in the public good) like Healthcare, Education, and Civic Infrastructure, as they try to emulate this corporate model, it is absolutely leading to burnout, organizational dysfunction, and primary task failures…which harm us all. It’s not that, “Bullshit jobs aren’t just a phenomenon of bureaucracy. They’re in tech too.” Rather, bullshit jobs are in bureaucracy because they are in tech. The difference is that tech can usually sustain an outsize proportion of bullshit jobs without totally derailing itself.
So, I don’t think we get rid of the dramaturgical labor in the private sector. It’s a jobs program that contributes to civic stability, cultural comforts, and subjective quality of life, and also does provide a benefit to the corporation if adequately compartmentalized. But the tax dollars (and closing tax loopholes) on dramaturgical private sector labor should be going to systems that increase pay, benefits, and access to problem-solving resources for frontline public workers who contribute to primary tasks (objective quality of life), while also limiting public good institutions from over-using tax dollars on dramaturgical labor positions. This probably gets to be a bit DOGE-y, except for the fact that the goal is not to eliminate public workers but to reject the tendency of public good institutions to emulate the corporate model and instead shift the majority of labor resources and prestige from dramaturgical to primary tasks. Hopefully, this might also entice a new class of workers away from private sector dramaturgical work and into public good frontline work...especially K-12 teaching.
But wait?! When you say “private corporations can tolerate dramaturgical labor,” you’re speaking from an organizational psychology lens, not a MORAL or ECONOMIC one.
Who funds that tolerance? Consumers do.
Those symbolic or performative roles don’t come from efficiency or innovation...they’re paid for through extraction. Through fees, rent-seeking, and network effects that skim value from the real economy.
So yes, corporations like visa and mastercard and banks can afford it...but only because they’re feeding off everyone else’s work.
Oh, completely agree! But many of those consumers are also themselves employed in dramaturgical labor with private corporations. So, there is an economic argument there as well. But where the economics and morality break down is at the level of the less paid (if not downright exploited) primary task public good frontline. And the obstacle is that this organizational psychology lens of private corporations is then mistakenly embraced by public good organizations. Healthcare, schools, and social safety net orgs try solving problems using this corporate innovation dramaturgy because if it "works" for big corporations then we should do it too. But unlike the private corporate sector that can cross-fund tolerance for dramaturgical labor, in the public goods sector this dramaturgy consumes limited resources.
Right…and that’s where we differ. You draw the moral line at public-good institutions…I draw it earlier.
You kind of skip over the moral and economic part in the private sector when you say “many of those consumers are also employed in dramaturgical labor”. Sure, some are… maybe the top 10% with inflated incomes.
But everyone else ..including the poorest - are still paying for it. Those fees (Visa, Mastercard, banks) aren’t abstract; they’re baked into the price of everything. Merchants just pass them along by raising prices on the goods we all buy. Even people who never use cards …who pay cash… still cover those costs because essentials like food are priced higher to offset the network fees.
So it’s not a closed circle…it’s an extraction loop. It’s not equilibrium - it’s really an upward redistribution.
This is inaccurate: "One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead"
Among other things, there is also running (or executing) the product or service, troubleshooting the product or service, and managing the product or service. The words "develop, produce, or sell" do not adequately encompass these or other functions.
OK, if you do not do the development, production or selling, then it should be clear how you support development, production or selling of the product or service. For example and especially in regulated industries, there are many employees who work to ensure product or service quality and regulatory approval.
Great article. But it was not all for waste, remember there was a lot of credit card competition in the 70's and at least some of your efforts allowed them to survive over others. A more pertinent issue might be how our corporate tax code subsidizes the vaporous as well as the innovative. A subject that I am currently writing about.
I wasn’t even born then :-) so I missed the glory days …but during my six years at Mastercard (2017–2023), I can’t think of a single thing I did that added real value. But I did a lot of innovation signaling.
You seem to think in the absence of those businesses you list, their services (payment processing, internet infrastructure, enterprise healthcare software, etc) would still be available but for free. If that’s your assumption for any given service, then no business adds value.
No, it’s not that these businesses add no value. They’re necessary.
The problem is the thick layer of “knowledge workers” orbiting the core systems …the networks, switches, algorithms, and automations that actually do the work of authorizing, authenticating, clearing, settling, or tracking.
The machines are efficient enough to handle most of it, yet around them spins an entire ecosystem of people in motion …and it’s empty motion. They are performing what’s essentially innovation signaling.
You probably need about 20% of the workforce to maintain and improve those systems. The rest …roughly 80% - just orbit them, sustaining the illusion of productivity.
I also noticed several companies in your list didn't even exist before 2010, making them a strange choice of example for entrenchment and failure to innovate.
Across all those companies…the unifying common point is control over a chokepoint …whether that’s credit, data, identity, or logistics. They capture economic rents by inserting themselves between public necessity and private access…they are charging tolls on what should be open networks.
I live in Chicago and in August 2024 the DNC was here for 4 days for their convention. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder why people like me voted for someone like Trump.
SW Side man tried to leap over bench, threatened to kill city judge: prosecutors.
Is this obviously such a bad situation ? I remember reading Bullshit Jobs and thinking the same thing.
We often hear that, many of the jobs people will be doing in twenty years don’t exist yet, and that while technology might replace many of today’s jobs, it will lead to the creation of new ones.
Well perhaps these are the jobs that didn’t exist before, and more of them will be created as technology progresses.
The main problem with technology replacing humans is not that humans won’t have meaningful work, it’s that they won’t have the money required to live a comfortable life.
Better to be employed in a well paid Bullshit job, than to be unemployed.
We just need to stop thinking that a fulfilling career is all that gives our lives meaning. Take the corporate dollar and take up oil painting or playing the harp!
“Better to be employed in a well-paid bullshit job than to be unemployed,”
Hmmm. It depends on your philosophy and your personal moral values….and what kind of world you actually want to live in. Bullshit jobs aren’t free. They cost money. And sure, you might shrug and think, who cares if Mastercard or JPMorgan Chase waste their budgets? Not my problem.
But they extract from the society to give you your bullshit job salary.
"Mastercard’s “switch”—the company’s bread and butter, the monolithic system that authorizes, clears, and settles transactions—was built during the Nixon era. It’s still the same."
Still the same? No, it's not! Back in the Nixon Era, MasterCard was called MasterCharge!
The switch - the core technology - is still the same, written in C and COBOL. The name of the company / the logo changed multiple times, but that’s precisely how they maintain the illusion of innovation. They have to change something, so they rebrand.
I was actually being facetious; I realize that this was no change at all. Mainly I was just drawing attention to my age, as one who can remember when MasterCard was MasterCharge and Visa was BankAmericard.
“Over six years, my title changed—Enterprise Architect, Director of Strategy, Principal of Technology.” This is a wonderful essay. For a couple of months recently, I watched a group of men build a house next to where I was staying. They were skilled and produced something both useful and enduring. I asked myself how it came to be that we valued bullshit jobs with bullshit titles more than what I saw these men do.
I lasted about six years at a Fortune 500 company. For years I had a recurring nightmare that I was back there and would wake up in a state of panic. The only good thing about the nightmares was that I was still young and skinny. My former coworkers still believe the empty slogans. Thoreau had it right, “the mass of men (and now women) lead lives of quiet desperation.”
This is everywhere. I worked for a local government and my reviews were centered around process improvements and extra curricular activity. As a PM you’d think excellent project management would be a priority. No. As long as the projects were not going badly then the focus shifted to virtue signaling in other ways. I pulled back on extra curricular activities and my boss said I wasn’t “engaged”. What? I was spending more time doing my job.
I work for a government. Man do I feel this. With ever increasing calls for efficiency which result in cycles of cuts to positions like admin, biologists, engineers, etc; however, we seemingly get more and more of these jobs like "Director of Strategic Innovation". Unfortunately, when people think government is bloated, its the productive jobs they disproportionately get cut (rather than getting more efficient, we get less done and less efficiently so). Because some decision maker thinks that a director of innovation is cheaper than a team of actual staff who do stuff, which may innovate. but they manage air and write briefing notes. Still, I also hold the public accountable because they reach for the laser like a cat, rather than actually trying to have better government.
I wrote something about this, from a professor's perspective, many years ago (http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html). My theory (though surely only a partial explanation): with the expansion of higher education, we are producing large numbers of people whose apparent credentials far exceed their actual ability. (Not a comment on you personally, Sarah!) They require jobs that match their own perception of self-worth. Therefore we need to produce lots of jobs that appear important even though the people holding them don't actually do anything.
Thanks, Peter. I read it…it reinforces a lot of what I’ve been thinking about higher education.
With two kids in middle school I wonder how I’ll navigate that landscape when the time comes - how to measure what it’s truly worth, and how to prepare them to filter out all the bureaucratic, political, and their own ego-driven distractions along the way.
Sarah, thank you for the reply. I'm still in higher ed, so I do obviously think it's worth it. But not for everyone. It's important for students (with their parents!) to think hard about what they really want. The opportunity for a liberal arts education is a tremendous blessing for the person who wants it, appreciates it, and can make the most of it. But our very expensive model is not necessarily the best path for someone who is really just after a credential. I think we will see more alternative models spring up, but also that AI may cause increased appreciation for a classic, in-person, Socratic approach to liberal education. Time will tell. I hope that you can help your children may wise decisions about their own future. And thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my old piece. : )
I liked your article as well, Peter. My wife (and many of my friends) are academics, and my wife has spent a lot of time on self-assessment committees and accreditation activities.
I toy with the idea that assessment should perhaps be a much more significant part of a professor’s job. I’m dreaming of a world where you don’t assign a quantitative grade at all, but rather write a thoughtful review of each student’s demonstrated ability.
I’m led to this by the atrocious degree of buck-passing that I see in evaluating people’s performance, from education and into professional life. Nobody wants to be the one to make real value judgments. You take the SAT and get your number. Schools admit you based largely on the number the College Board assigned you. Every student’s GPA is high, and you get a job based largely on which college you attended. You get later jobs based on the prestige of your prior employers; nobody actually asks your old boss how good an employee you are. Every decision-maker in the chain assumes that someone upstream of them has already decided who’s good and who isn’t. It would be a valuable service to society if someone would do this work for real.
Jay, thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment earlier. I was not deliberately ignoring it but was traveling and had a laptop breakdown while away. But it was kind of you to read my old essay and chime in here. You certainly make a very good point about the rarity of serious evaluation. Grade inflation is pervasive, and no one professor can fight against it successfully alone, since if you aim at intellectual rigor, you don't want to penalize the students who are bold enough to take your class. In our honors program, which is pretty writing-intensive, we engage in what I describe to the students as "honest grading," something (I tell them) they've probably never seen, and we hand out plenty of C's, D's, and even F's early on. But we have a full year to work with them very intensely, so that they make genuine progress, and by the end we can (for the most part!) in good conscience give them the grades they would have been getting in regular non-honors coursework. (And of course there also we don't want them being penalized for having had the good fortune to be admitted to the honors program!) I don't have a beef with grading as such, but obviously the more critical, formative feedback you can supply, the more helpful it is for students. But of course that all takes a lot of time....
I like your grading philosophy. It also brings to my mind a difference between writing and, say, chemistry (which my wife reaches).
Your students start off as pretty poor writers. From the beginning, they are tasked with producing an entire paper, and their output is bad. That’s expected. It would be unfair to say that in order to get a good grade in a writing class, you have to arrive already knowing how to write well.
In a chemistry class, you spend the first week talking about dimensional analysis and unit conversions. The first assignment will consist of this exclusively, and a good student who arrived with no prior knowledge of chemistry will be able to do it well.
These are probably endpoints of a continuum, with most STEM subjects lying closer to the chemistry end and humanities closer to the writing end. Maybe you and your colleagues have had this thought long ago, but it just occurred to me, and it was interesting to think about. This is what I come to Substack for. Thanks!
Jay, it doesn't matter a lot at this point, but I wanted to apologize for not noticing/responding to your comment earlier. I've been swamped with e-mail and the notification got buried deep in my inbox--just found it. The continuum you describe makes sense to me. Thanks again for the kind words.
Well said, Sarah. My employer puts a huge amount of overhead resources into internal research and development (IRAD, as the military-industrial complex calls it), and has been highly praised for its commitment to “innovation”. I don’t fault the intentions, but I get the same icky feeling you describe that a lot of this work is performative.
I theorize that part of the driving force here is our intellectual property laws. “Innovation” is mostly about novelty because the law allows you to own and monetize novelty. Generating a ton of useless patents signals to your investors that you’re laying claim to territory in the world of ideas, allowing you to extract rent from anyone whose playing piece lands on your square.
I would prefer to emphasize problem solving over innovation, but that’s a less lucrative road. If your solution isn’t novel, others will just copy you and your investors won’t get rich, regardless of how effective your solution is. Problem solvers never get the celebrity that innovators do.
This article reminds me of a great quote from the Yes Minister tv series (though I am not sure if the quote originates there): "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7336003-he-s-suffering-from-politician-s-logic-something-must-be-done-this
I think of this quote often. I've worked in tech, for example, and seen updates rolled out that were worse than useless: they simply changed things because updates had to be released and changes had to be included.
There's a strange amount of wheel spinning. Perhaps the guiding principle (conscious or not) is that with sufficient wheel-spinning in place, something of value might accidentally, finally, and actually happen!
One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead and should be justifying your cost daily. (I see that things haven’t changed much since I left corporate America.)
Yes but what then? Where does the surplus of money go?
In the current system either salaries of the highest executives would go up or the shareholders would gain more.
The machine, the system, the algorithm…has been doing the work for decades now. So yes, if I am not doing anything valuable, i shouldn’t be there. But the real question is: who gets the money that’s been freed up by me not being there?
That’s the larger question.
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, large corporate organizations actually benefit from dramaturgical labor (with one big exception). Dramaturgical labor is important, because it becomes a vessel in which to displace fantasy and separate it from reality. And all organizations subconsciously engage in fantasy, so the healthiest approach is to ensure that this escape into fantasy can exist, but compartmentalized from the primary tasks of the organization. And sure, periodically this dramaturgical labor can and may hit upon something of meaningful significance to the organization's primary task, in which case great.
The harm of dramaturgical labor is when it is not compartmentalized, and it instead is given primacy above the main tasks of the organization and outcompetes the main tasks. The prime example of this in Organizational Psychology case studies is The Challenger Disaster, whereby the dramaturgical fantasy of the Teacher in Space program became the primary force for decision making at NASA. Instead of engineers and safety analysts being required to do their primary task of safe space flight within the brutal constraints of a limited budget and "people will die catastrophically if you get this wrong", these workers were tasked with participating in a symbolic goodness fantasy of "little children will be inspired to greatness by seeing a teacher in space."
And like you write, dramaturgical labor is often revered as “complex” and “more powerful” and given higher status than “simple” and “mundane” primary task labor. In my experience in large, medium, and tiny organizations, this reverence leads to dysfunctional leadership that mistakenly tries to solve primary task problems with dramaturgical labor. Like the pizza party meme. The harm of this is increasing burnout among frontline primary task labor and subsequent failures to fulfill primary tasks. I don’t think this is happening at places like Mastercard, where primary task labor is likely treated as significant and well-compensated and has easy access to resources to problem-solve. But in essential-need public good institutions (or clothed in the public good) like Healthcare, Education, and Civic Infrastructure, as they try to emulate this corporate model, it is absolutely leading to burnout, organizational dysfunction, and primary task failures…which harm us all. It’s not that, “Bullshit jobs aren’t just a phenomenon of bureaucracy. They’re in tech too.” Rather, bullshit jobs are in bureaucracy because they are in tech. The difference is that tech can usually sustain an outsize proportion of bullshit jobs without totally derailing itself.
So, I don’t think we get rid of the dramaturgical labor in the private sector. It’s a jobs program that contributes to civic stability, cultural comforts, and subjective quality of life, and also does provide a benefit to the corporation if adequately compartmentalized. But the tax dollars (and closing tax loopholes) on dramaturgical private sector labor should be going to systems that increase pay, benefits, and access to problem-solving resources for frontline public workers who contribute to primary tasks (objective quality of life), while also limiting public good institutions from over-using tax dollars on dramaturgical labor positions. This probably gets to be a bit DOGE-y, except for the fact that the goal is not to eliminate public workers but to reject the tendency of public good institutions to emulate the corporate model and instead shift the majority of labor resources and prestige from dramaturgical to primary tasks. Hopefully, this might also entice a new class of workers away from private sector dramaturgical work and into public good frontline work...especially K-12 teaching.
But wait?! When you say “private corporations can tolerate dramaturgical labor,” you’re speaking from an organizational psychology lens, not a MORAL or ECONOMIC one.
Who funds that tolerance? Consumers do.
Those symbolic or performative roles don’t come from efficiency or innovation...they’re paid for through extraction. Through fees, rent-seeking, and network effects that skim value from the real economy.
So yes, corporations like visa and mastercard and banks can afford it...but only because they’re feeding off everyone else’s work.
Oh, completely agree! But many of those consumers are also themselves employed in dramaturgical labor with private corporations. So, there is an economic argument there as well. But where the economics and morality break down is at the level of the less paid (if not downright exploited) primary task public good frontline. And the obstacle is that this organizational psychology lens of private corporations is then mistakenly embraced by public good organizations. Healthcare, schools, and social safety net orgs try solving problems using this corporate innovation dramaturgy because if it "works" for big corporations then we should do it too. But unlike the private corporate sector that can cross-fund tolerance for dramaturgical labor, in the public goods sector this dramaturgy consumes limited resources.
Right…and that’s where we differ. You draw the moral line at public-good institutions…I draw it earlier.
You kind of skip over the moral and economic part in the private sector when you say “many of those consumers are also employed in dramaturgical labor”. Sure, some are… maybe the top 10% with inflated incomes.
But everyone else ..including the poorest - are still paying for it. Those fees (Visa, Mastercard, banks) aren’t abstract; they’re baked into the price of everything. Merchants just pass them along by raising prices on the goods we all buy. Even people who never use cards …who pay cash… still cover those costs because essentials like food are priced higher to offset the network fees.
So it’s not a closed circle…it’s an extraction loop. It’s not equilibrium - it’s really an upward redistribution.
This is inaccurate: "One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead"
Among other things, there is also running (or executing) the product or service, troubleshooting the product or service, and managing the product or service. The words "develop, produce, or sell" do not adequately encompass these or other functions.
OK, if you do not do the development, production or selling, then it should be clear how you support development, production or selling of the product or service. For example and especially in regulated industries, there are many employees who work to ensure product or service quality and regulatory approval.
Great article. But it was not all for waste, remember there was a lot of credit card competition in the 70's and at least some of your efforts allowed them to survive over others. A more pertinent issue might be how our corporate tax code subsidizes the vaporous as well as the innovative. A subject that I am currently writing about.
I wasn’t even born then :-) so I missed the glory days …but during my six years at Mastercard (2017–2023), I can’t think of a single thing I did that added real value. But I did a lot of innovation signaling.
You seem to think in the absence of those businesses you list, their services (payment processing, internet infrastructure, enterprise healthcare software, etc) would still be available but for free. If that’s your assumption for any given service, then no business adds value.
No, it’s not that these businesses add no value. They’re necessary.
The problem is the thick layer of “knowledge workers” orbiting the core systems …the networks, switches, algorithms, and automations that actually do the work of authorizing, authenticating, clearing, settling, or tracking.
The machines are efficient enough to handle most of it, yet around them spins an entire ecosystem of people in motion …and it’s empty motion. They are performing what’s essentially innovation signaling.
You probably need about 20% of the workforce to maintain and improve those systems. The rest …roughly 80% - just orbit them, sustaining the illusion of productivity.
I also noticed several companies in your list didn't even exist before 2010, making them a strange choice of example for entrenchment and failure to innovate.
Across all those companies…the unifying common point is control over a chokepoint …whether that’s credit, data, identity, or logistics. They capture economic rents by inserting themselves between public necessity and private access…they are charging tolls on what should be open networks.
I live in Chicago and in August 2024 the DNC was here for 4 days for their convention. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder why people like me voted for someone like Trump.
SW Side man tried to leap over bench, threatened to kill city judge: prosecutors.
CWBChicago. Sept 16, 2025
https://cwbchicago.com/2025/09/sw-side-man-tried-to-leap-over-bench-threatened-to-kill-city-judge-prosecutors.html
“Suburban woman punched, knocked out downtown Chicago.” (3 min)
ABC 7 Chicago. Sept 2, 2025
https://youtu.be/XO4fiMnDYPY?si=VF787BPRWN-uEI2B
The dog waited till it was safe to come out!
“They were ambushed in front of the house…A violent attack on a woman and a child in France.” Translation of the title.
Alhurra. July 23, 2025. (1 min)
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ztw_qN0xSa8?si=fvmWdjnzqLprW78i
Is this obviously such a bad situation ? I remember reading Bullshit Jobs and thinking the same thing.
We often hear that, many of the jobs people will be doing in twenty years don’t exist yet, and that while technology might replace many of today’s jobs, it will lead to the creation of new ones.
Well perhaps these are the jobs that didn’t exist before, and more of them will be created as technology progresses.
The main problem with technology replacing humans is not that humans won’t have meaningful work, it’s that they won’t have the money required to live a comfortable life.
Better to be employed in a well paid Bullshit job, than to be unemployed.
We just need to stop thinking that a fulfilling career is all that gives our lives meaning. Take the corporate dollar and take up oil painting or playing the harp!
“Better to be employed in a well-paid bullshit job than to be unemployed,”
Hmmm. It depends on your philosophy and your personal moral values….and what kind of world you actually want to live in. Bullshit jobs aren’t free. They cost money. And sure, you might shrug and think, who cares if Mastercard or JPMorgan Chase waste their budgets? Not my problem.
But they extract from the society to give you your bullshit job salary.
"Mastercard’s “switch”—the company’s bread and butter, the monolithic system that authorizes, clears, and settles transactions—was built during the Nixon era. It’s still the same."
Still the same? No, it's not! Back in the Nixon Era, MasterCard was called MasterCharge!
The switch - the core technology - is still the same, written in C and COBOL. The name of the company / the logo changed multiple times, but that’s precisely how they maintain the illusion of innovation. They have to change something, so they rebrand.
I was actually being facetious; I realize that this was no change at all. Mainly I was just drawing attention to my age, as one who can remember when MasterCard was MasterCharge and Visa was BankAmericard.