The Polish language has an excellent colloquial phrase for work that's done shoddily or badly: Faszystowska robota, translating literally as "fascist work". It makes sense why this would come up: fascist regimes (and totalitarian regimes in general) have a disturbing habit of doing bad work, mishandling basic societal functions, building things that collapse disturbingly fast and generally fucking everything up in such a way that you're amazed that it lasted as long as it did.
Unfortunately, it appears that the phrase has wider applicability than we might like. Looking at the way the average workplace is run, it's hard not to conclude that they are basically fascist enterprises. That is to say, they do fascist things, they have a fascist culture, and they train people to function in fascist environments. We should probably be less blase about this than we are.
Why "fascist"?
Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism is one canonical way of thinking about fascist traits. Eco, in his writing, treats fascism as a natural kind: a category (rather like gender) with a set of defining traits but fuzzy edges. This means that not every fascist movement is going to have every trait, and two different fascist movements can have a completely different set of traits to each other, but both movements are still recognisably fascist in important ways. Eco lists fourteen such traits, detailed in the link above. Importantly, even one of these traits being present is enough for fascism to coagulate about it, and no fascist movement is going to have all of these (obviously enough, seeing as they contradict each other).
With this in mind, we can note that a significant number of the traits mentioned exist in the tech world and in workplaces more generally. I've noted some of the more salient ones below; while some of the others might also apply, I don't think they're as relevant so I've not discussed them.
The cult of tradition
At this point, what is Agile, especially in its SCRUM form, but a cult of tradition? Tradition is, in many ways, crystallised cultural learning: cultures develop traditions and institutions to meet a need and then fix them in their culture, where they stick around largely regardless of if they still fit the need or not. A cult of tradition then venerates tradition and aims to impose it regardless of whether the tradition makes any sense in the context in which they're working or what harms this tradition might do, because tradition is a Good Thing in and of itself.
Agile is a clear example of this happening: the Agile manifesto and its associated ways of doing things were developed as a pushback against existing models of project management that denied autonomy and led to incoherent management decisions. The early adopters of Agile developed processes and traditions to support this pushback, which became ingrained in the organisational cultures they worked in and spread to other organisations, often with little to no thought as to what those traditions were for or how they'd work in the organisations they were in.
And so, we have our standups, our sprints and our JIRA boards, all enforced by our SCRUM masters, product managers and a whole class of management staff supporting them. We waste hours on this stuff and permanently damage our ability to do productive work, simply because that's how it's done. And the answer to the method failing is always to do more of the same thing. What else can we call this but a cult of tradition?
Action for the sake of action
This comes up a lot in most workplaces, often in the form of a cult of performative busyness. Regrettably, it appears that most workplaces don't actually care that much about producing anything: rather, what's demanded is constant, ostentation action. You always have to be busy, you always have to be doing things, you always have to be performatively suffering from how much effort you're exerting.
Taking a wider view, this action for the sake of action maps remarkably well on corporate obsession with innovation. Companies must be always innovating, always launching new initiatives, always changing, because this is what the society that the company's embedded in values. It's not important that the work actually produces anything useful, which is why data migrations that don't actually migrate data, machine learning initiatives, crypto and most recently generative AI have been such wonderful assets. They're excellent excuses to generate a frenzy of action and effort, they line up with fascist workplace values, and they cause massive change and disruption that creates even more action down the line. Even when the initiatives fail, this is still a benefit of the initiative in this lens, as it creates even more frenzied efforts and disruption when the time comes to clean up the mess it made.
This also ties into an anti-intellectual and irrationalist tendency in both fascist movements and your average workplace. There's no time to think carefully or critically about problems, and people who do so are treated as outsiders and eventually pushed out of the company. Over time, this creates a deeply anti-thought attitude in most companies, where thinking too hard about anything marks you as a person to be treated with suspicion.
Disagreement as treason
This one comes up a remarkable amount when you challenge established orthodoxy as detailed in either of the two points above. Orthodox belief is heavily stressed in your average workplace, and challenges or disagreements will be interpreted not as a question about fact, but as a heresy or a traitorous statement, depending on the extent to which it challenges the power and standing of the people who instituted the belief.
This happens both internally and during hiring. As Nik noted last week, contradicting established orthodoxy on things like data clouds in an interview is a very effective way to not get hired. What's particularly curious about this is that the technical aspects of the decision are basically not at issue: it's entirely possible for an interviewer to accept an interviewee's argument from a factual perspective, but still reject the candidate on the grounds that they essentially committed treason. Similarly, in an internal situation it's quite possible for SCRUM masters and similar apparatchiks to accept the factual truth of a statement (say, about SCRUM's pattern of generating way too many meetings and wasting developer time) while still chastising people for expressing it and signalling belief in what is an obviously false statement. That's because these aren't questions of fact: they're loyalty signals.
The cult of the leader
This one's a little trickier: in Eco's original formulation, this has to do with everyone being educated to become a hero in the military sense, creating a cult of death. The Ur-Fascist hero is, in this sense, impatient to die, and during the process of trying to die gloriously, he (and it is almost always a he) destroys countless other lives.
I initially didn't think this had a neat mapping to our modern workplace, seeing as businesses usually don't call for heroic martyrdom. On further though, however, there are a number of behaviours that actually match to this quite well. First off and most simply, there's a lionisation of people who go above and beyond and work themselves half to death to meet company goals. We've all seen this, and we're all familiar with it. Thankfully, that's quite simple so far as it goes, but the fact that this happens and is considered a good thing is already a significant contribution to this point.
More perniciously, there is the cult of the leader. Modern corporate workplaces absolutely try and educate everyone into becoming a leader, usually with fairly unclear and inchoate ideas about what leadership is. Startup founders, CEOs and disruptors are lionised, and people are encouraged to be like them: to move fast and break things, to take risks that might ruin their lives. Of course, in the process of this, no care or thought is given to the multitude of other lives that they ruin in the process. Even at the most basic level, the resources wasted on "disruptive" vanity projects could be put to way better use elsewhere (while I'm not usually much of an effective altruist, this is one place where I absolutely align with the movement. How many mosquito nets could a Snowflake migration buy?). And of course, it's not usually anywhere near that innocuous. Just look at Boeing.
Machismo
Well, this one's easy. Have you seen your average tech team?
Impoverished vocabulary
The fact of the matter is that Agile jargon and management-speak represent a form of Newspeak: they're languages deliberately designed to be hard to reason about critically. The goal, obviously, is to get people to internalise and think in this language, making it difficult at best to consider what's being done critically, or to consider the real-world effects of what you're describing. Language and thought are thus emptied of any semantic meaning, being simply a means to signal status and loyalty, and people who have internalised it tend to not be able to think very clearly about what the hell they're actually doing. Even for those people who haven't internalised the language, being able to set social norms that you communicate in this language and making communicating in an actual language "inappropriate" neatly suppresses dissent or the ability to organise effectively.
Taken as a whole, the evidence is pretty clear: the average workplace has a number of significant traits of fascist movements, and can be observed to behave accordingly. They are, in a sense, relatively safe fascist movements: fear of difference and obsession with plots and enemy threats don't usually show up in overtly in workplaces (though I'm sure you can think of a few where this does pop up). Still, fascism is fascism, and it's remarkably easy for the relatively innocuous points (I use this term advisedly: I think they're awful in themselves, but it's easier for them to slip under the radar) to steadily accrete nastier ones around themselves. Moreover, fascism is habit-forming, and being in a fascist environment for a long enough time will shape people, and not for the better. We will detail the consequences below.
How does this manifest?
These attitudes and structural issues obviously don't just stay self-contained: they manifest in certain noticeable ways outside of their own remit. These manifestations don't really fit into the thread of the argument, but they are worth mentioning, so I've put them in their own section.
Arbitrary rules for outgroups
One striking product of this way of being and organisation is that laws and rules for outgroups in a fascist system are essentially arbitrary, and that people in power can essentially do as they like to them. There's no obligation to explain why, to give reasons or to be at all legible, and even when rules outwardly exist, there's little to no pressure to actually enforce them. This happens a lot in the workforce: arbitrary firings might be against the rules, but managing people out certainly isn't. And while of course hiring discrimination is illegal, we can always just pull a reason out of a hat to explain it all, can't we? There's no way they can prove what happened.
For outgroups, this creates a feeling of being constantly on edge and at risk of death, and an inability to control outcomes for themselves, coupled with a downright gaslighty attitude from society (who don't catch the worst of it). This is, of course, completely intentional.
Internecine struggles within organisations
Fascist movements and governments, in general, have considerable redundancy in their structures. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had four different organisations who could be called secret police, all competing for Hitler's time, attention and resources. During the second world war, resources were pulled away from vital wartime production to be used on prestige projects like the V-Weapon system that had no hope of turning the war around. Most fatally, resources and manpower were consistently diverted away from the Wehrmacht and military organisations that might have had some hope of turning around the wartime situation towards the Shoah. The regime was so obsessed with its ideological project of killing Jews and other undesirables that they were willing to sacrifice any hope at victory to achieve it.
This is, of course, a natural consequence of working in the kind of low-information, low-reliability environment that fascism creates. Resources that are needed to achieve goals are controlled by the rulers, who have usually created incentives for people to deliberately deceive them and that are working in an environment and culture pathologically opposed to truth. Moreover, with action for action's sake being a primary marker of status in this environment, demonstrable success, even at something pointless, becomes irresistibly tempting to leaders.
I don't think I need to spell out how a lot of our workforces do this.
Sacrifice of personality to the organisation
I've spoken about this before, but it deserves repetition: all of these underlying situations create a situation in which, as an employee, you are expected to subsume your own reality and personality into that of the company. There is no space in a fascist workplace for your own truth, belief, thoughts or experiences, and that leaves no room for your own individual humanity. In short, fascist workplaces dehumanise their employees, and it's inevitable from there that they'll start dehumanising everyone else. The workplace is structurally designed to treat people like shit.
What kind of person does this create?
Well, you've probably seen them in your workplace. They seem almost incapable of formulating an opinion outside of what the workplace allows them to formulate. They just do work with no thought to whether what they're doing makes sense or actually does damage. And they sure as hell never accept responsibility either for their own actions or for the actions of the organisation they're in: they just... mindlessly follow orders.
You can imagine them running a stand-up at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They very proudly say that they've managed to increase velocity by 20% this sprint and give everyone a pat on the back. They circle the camp guards, the doctors and the commandant, asking for any blockers. There are one or two, and cards are assigned to people to fix them. Everything goes into JIRA, and everyone goes off to their work. At no point was there any reference to what anyone at Auschwitz-Birkenau was actually doing.
I don't think you'd actually have to change the personality of your average team in an average workplace all that much to see this happen.
The worst of this is that actions form habits of mind, and habits of mind are surpassingly difficult to unlearn. We, as a society and in most of our workplaces, are training people to shut off the parts of their brain that do critical thinking, consider problems carefully, push back and have their own values. We are, in effect, training death camp workers.
There's a lot more that can be said about the damage this does to people. In a democracy, it leaves them politically disengaged and easy prey to populists. It leaves them intellectually impoverished, without art or literature to improve their lives. It makes the lives of minority groups miserable even when they're not actively being persecuted, and it leads to, as with the saying we started with, bad and shoddy work.
Ultimately though, it really does come down to the fact that we are training a disturbingly large proportion of our population to live in fascist societies. This is, above all, a massive threat to democracy and everyone who wants to live in a free and fair community.
Why in God's name are we doing this to ourselves?