How Tech Grifters Use Workism and Groupthink to Manipulate People
The Assignment:
Develop a thesis for a 1,200-word essay that answers the following question: How do the new Tech Grifters take advantage of Workism and Groupthink to manipulate their employees, investors, and consumers?
The Method:
Watch at least of two of the following three documentaries:
- WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
- The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
- Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
Then compare how the grifters featured in these documentaries use Workism, explained in Derek Thompson’s Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” and Anne Helen Petersen’s “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” and Groupthink explained Karen Webster’s “The Dangers of Groupthink” and PYMTS’ “Theranos Guilty Verdict Shows the Dangers of Groupthink.”
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize the major points in Derek Thompson’s and Anne Helen Petersen’s essays.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that compares at least 2 tech gurus’ 5 similar patterns of manipulative behavior that takes advantage of Workism and Groupthink.
Paragraphs 3-7, your body support paragraphs
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis
Works Cited, your last page which should have an MLA format of citations with the following:
- WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
- The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
- Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
- "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” by Derek Thompson
- “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen
- “The Dangers of Groupthink” by Karen Webster
- “Theranos Guilty Verdict Shows the Dangers of Groupthink” by PYMTS
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking
Best-selling author of Chaos Monkeys and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez has said that young people right out of college with no organizing principle to their lives and no understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religion redirect their spiritual hunger and find a sort of religious substitute by working for tech companies. These companies become a surrogate for religion, shared transcendent experience, meaningful connection, higher purpose, and the sense of feeling special. To foster this sense of communal mission, the workers can practically live at the tech site, often a large campus, where the employees have access to cappuccino bars, gourmet cafeterias, laundry services, state-of-the-art gyms, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries. The workers live in a glorified dorm where they not only work but become indoctrinated in the virtues of their company CEO who becomes their Dear Leader, a false messiah figure, who persuades everyone that they are on a mission to change the world, create disruption that will bring humanity together, and other saccharine bromides in the service of manipulating the employees to toil long hours and drink the Messiah’s Kool-Aid. Popular culture is rife with books, movies, TV series, and documentaries about this phenomenon. Megalomania, hyped promises, grift, fraud, and the Cult of the Personality are addressed in the TV series Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs and in the documentaries WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Combining the Cult of the Personality with Groupthink, there is a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. There is yet another factor in breaking down critical thinking, the cult-like attitude toward work itself, explained in Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable." The Cult of the Personality, Groupthink, and Workism are part of a potent cocktail for manipulating young people at the workplace. This topic is becoming an obsession of mine, and I suspect I will have my critical thinking students write an essay on this topic.
Excerpts from Derek Thompson’s Essay
Workism
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
Replacements for Traditional Faith
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Arms Race for Status
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
The Cult of Workism Helps Employers Take Advantage of Employees
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
What’s Wrong with Workism?
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
Choosing Between the Force of Goodness or the Mercurial Forces of Money and the Free Market
One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.
Today’s Generation Is Raised from Childhood to be Brainwashed into Believing in the Cult of Workism
As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a viral essay on “Millennial burnout” for BuzzFeed News—building on ideas Malcolm Harris addressed in his book, Kids These Days—Millennials were honed in these decades into machines of self-optimization. They passed through a childhood of extracurricular overachievement and checked every box of the success sequence, only to have the economy blow up their dreams.
Social Media Contributes to the Cult of Workism
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
Workism Breeds Overwork Without Higher Wages
There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.
Excerpts from “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Peterson
Self-Optimization Is a Form of Exploitation
As American business became more efficient, better at turning a profit, the next generation needed to be positioned to compete. We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.
And that process began very early. In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris lays out the myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace — first in school, then through secondary education — starting as very young children. “Risk management used to be a business practice,” Harris writes, “now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.” Depending on your age, this idea applies to what our parents did or didn’t allow us to do (play on “dangerous” playground structures, go out without cellphones, drive without an adult in the car) and how they allowed us to do the things we did do (learn, explore, eat, play).
Harris points to practices that we now see as standard as a means of “optimizing” children’s play, an attitude often described as “intensive parenting.” Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.
Young People’s Intrinsic Self-Worth Dependent on the Job
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
Social Media Creates Illusion That Job Provides Shared Meaningful Experiences
One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children, the landscapes inhabited and the food consumed seems not just desirable, but balanced, satisfied, and unafflicted by burnout.
And though work itself is rarely pictured, it’s always there. Periodically, it’s photographed as a space that’s fun or zany, and always rewarding or gratifying. But most of the time, it’s the thing you’re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life.
The social media feed — and Instagram in particular — is thus evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself. The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. But of course, for most of us, it hasn’t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.
Technology and “Efficiency” Equal Exploitation
But the phone is also, and just as essentially, a tether to the “real” workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they’ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working “off the clock” misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway.
“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”
But as sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg points out, that efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. In short, better jobs.
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
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