Between the sheer ubiquity of the practices and the effort put into suppressing cognitive dissonance described above, people functioning in these environments wind up believing that this is simply how business is: the deeply coercive, consent-violating and harassing nature of these practices fade away and become invisible. And at that point, we have a problem, because participating in this culture becomes key to being accepted by the business community, and thus, for anyone working primarily business-to-business, to winning clients. You have to post constantly on LinkedIn aggrandising yourself. You have to have a large email list which you consistently spam. You have to use socially comprehensible sales tactics to sell, no matter how toxic and obnoxious they are, because they're part of the social script. And if you refuse to use these tactics, you will, as sure as night follows day, wind up marginalised and not allowed into the business world.
Fortunately, while the year ahead is likely to be hard and horrific in a general sense, I have good reason to hope that it will bring more agency and capacity to act for me personally. We begin the year with a death and a burial, but as hard as that is, it is the end of a rather painful process that has been going on for the last four years. My hope is thus that this year can be a year for endings, new beginnings and renewed energy towards the things that are important to me: my personal relationships, writing and building my consultancy.
Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language models are *actually doing*.
But how can I say what needs to be said? How can I go into work and say with a straight face that I'm having difficulty because I'm terrified that my friends are going to lose the healthcare that they so desperately need? How can I face the fact that if I did that, I'd likely be met with blank, incurious faces and the *a priori* assumption that I'm just being dramatic? How do I face the fact that, to make the money to keep myself alive, I need to exist in an environment that denies that anything about me or my life could *possibly* hurt that much?
I am fundamentally done with defending my right to exist and thrive to people who speak and argue in bad faith. No, what I want to ask is the following: Dear fascists, how exactly do you think you're going to win this fight?