
Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class - jger15
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/losing-the-narrative-the-genre-fiction-of-the-professional-class/
======
skmurphy
two key grafs:

"Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats. Product
managers at Google might have sleeve tattoos or purple hair. They might
describe themselves as “creators” or “creatives.” They might characterize
their hobbies as entrepreneurial “side hustles.” But their actual day-in, day-
out work involves the coordination of various teams and resources across a
large organization based on established administrative procedures. That’s a
bureaucrat. The entire professional culture is almost an attempt to invert the
connotations and expecta­tions of the word—which is what underlies this
class’s tension with storytelling. Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of
a prior generation’s counterculture."

Conclusion:

"Absolute pessimism is almost always a sign of a lazy narcissist, and
narratives of inevitable decline are used by those who want to absolve
themselves of the obligation to act. Possibility has opened up before us in a
manner that is rare in history. We need stories which encourage action. Our
leaders must rise to defeat a global plague and in the process test whether or
not there still exists, in this underused husk of a nation, the capacity for
vigorous action—the capacity to produce the types of heroes who will inspire
future generations. Now, more than ever, we need a story."

~~~
watwut
Isnt the first paragraph basically bullshit? It made up attitudes out of thin
air. I have yet to meet product manager or manager or business person that
would call himself creative - including those with tatoos and other visible
"crazy" visual style.

And the people I knew with tatoos did not necessary interpreted themselves as
non conforming either. There were aware of raising acceptance of tatoos.

And guy explicitely explained his tatoos as "just result of being in
environment where many people have it and talk about it, you kinda shift
there".

~~~
neonate
I don't think it's bullshit. "Professionals today would never self-identify as
bureaucrats" seems exactly right.

~~~
foolmeonce
An internal censuses during the first dotcom times asked all employees to
identify themselves as either individual contributors or a manager and the CEO
reported there were far more individual contributors than was possible. Most
managers considered their primary work to be as an individual contributor..
Few self identified as bureaucrats..

~~~
watwut
Most managers in these companies don't manage people. It is title slapped on
roles to make them sound glorious for future cv purpose. They don't have team
they would directed. I was manager for project of exactly one person, me, that
took 4 months and most time I spent coding some with analysis.

I mean, we have office manager and she is mostly making sure we have enough
print paper and such. In old times, she would be administration.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
> Solo cup culture flour­ishes because college is simply a pay-to-play
> credentialing service.

If this were the case, why do many spend grueling over hundreds of LeetCode
problems? If the credential was truly enough, we wouldn't have to be grilled
in interview processes.

> The university has been in crisis for almost a century, and in 1948 Richard
> Weaver was already warning that universities had “turned into playgrounds
> for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism.”

At one point in college, I held 3 jobs with the impossible task of trying to
stay out of debt (I didn't) by working jobs that paid no more than $10/hour on
a $30,000 tuition bill. Is the fault of the university that they became
corporatized? There would be no crisis if folks had the time to study.

~~~
free_rms
> Is the fault of the university that they became corporatized?

Yes, and specifically the kind of bureaucratic organization-man corporatized
that the article discusses.

Tuition keeps skyrocketing at multiples of inflation, yet post docs and
adjunct lecturers live in near-poverty. Where's the money go?
"Administration".

~~~
gtfoutttt
I took a side gig teaching at a community college. I had to talk to a dean to
get white board markers. And it wasn't like that dean approved and made a
phone call and I went and picked them up. She physically walked me over to a
locked drawer with the department name on it and handed them to me.

A dean. Absolutely laughable if it wasn't so sad.

~~~
csa
All joking aside, what do you think deans at CCs are supposed to do?

Mundane property issues are probably handled by the dean’s admin at some
(most?) CCs, but property in general is often going to fall under a dean’s
purview.

Also, note that a dean’s work at a CC is generally going to be fantastically
boring administrative scut work.

~~~
gtfoutttt
Fair enough. I always equated deans with management.

~~~
csa
Imho, most managers also do fantastically boring administrative scut work —-
think various aspects of hiring, scheduling, budgets, progress reports,
personnel reviews, handling administrative complaints (EEO, sexual harassment,
etc.), recruiting, etc. Maybe some things are a bit different than a CC dean,
but the genre of work is similar.

The specific differences in your perception may revolve around whether the
manager/dean has a trusted admin, and whether that admin is around.

Just a guess...

What do you think managers do?

------
motohagiography
Good writing that elevates the discourse, even if it does seem a bit smart and
challenging to survive long in this forum.

Bureaucracy itself has become an ideology, and we need more observations of it
like this.

~~~
kiliantics
This idea -- late capitalist corporatism as a form of hyper-bureaucratic
institutionalisation of all aspects of modern life -- has been gaining ground
a lot lately. David Graeber in particular is a good source for articles and
books on it.

------
Apocryphon
The essay makes some astute observations, advances some interesting theses,
and then bloviates all over the place, making judgments of questionable
provenance.

More interesting is to see what aspects of it can fit the HN milieu. How does
the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the tech
industry?

~~~
Barrin92
>How does the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the
tech industry?

like a glove. Tech today is dominated by basically two forms of business. The
Googles and Facebooks and so on, which fit the Weberian bureaucracy that the
author addresses, arguably even more than actual bureaucracy because they're
rabidly trying to codify everything in software, which is in a sense more
technocratic than Weber himself could have ever dreamed of, and the startup
culture which is basically performative entrepreneurship, consuming a certain
lifestyle to signal being part of a certain class, with the products being
created performing essentially no meaningful social function and don't
constitute any sort of technical progress.

~~~
api
There are plenty of startups providing useful functions and technical
progress. They are almost universally underfunded. The money goes mostly to
what you describe, especially the unicorn chasing money. Unicorns, or at least
the ones that post date the coining of that word, are mostly gambling
vehicles.

------
rsync
This article appears to be a less-well-written and less thoughtful version of
the _wonderful_ Ribbonfarm article "The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya
Millennial":

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-
mediocre-l...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-
life-of-maya-millennial/)

Recommended.

~~~
blululu
This was worth the rather long read. Thank you for sharing.

------
voldacar
This has to be the most incredible piece of writing I've read online all year.
So many nuggets of insight, without any filler. I'll be keeping an eye on this
author

~~~
Aeolun
You think? I had to stop after a few paragraphs because I didn’t feel like
they were getting to the point.

~~~
runawaybottle
The payoffs are in the pattern overlapping. Try to read it that way and you’ll
see how he/she keeps aligning the parallels until it’s clear.

Pretty good read, I just disagree with the conclusion (final paragraphs). One
could argue the article itself is an inverting of the narrative _of_ the
narrative, and thus has nothing left to say.

I’m going to confuse myself here I feel, but the article as analysis, if I’m
right about itself being an inversion, has to be taken as non-analysis and
just a description ultimately.

It’s got nothing left to say because there’s really nothing left to say.

/meta

------
jonstewart
One thing to consider: in the wake of institutional violence (police treatment
of BIPOC, US government mal-response to the pandemic) and the protests and
concerns that violence engenders, this essay questions the legitimacy of those
“narratives.” Why? Who is speaking here? From what basis is the author able to
negate the narratives of others?

------
unignorant
On the whole this essay seems to be making a deliberately slippery argument.
It wants to redefine "bureaucracy" to suit its purposes while also maintaining
all existing pejorative connotations of the term.

~~~
zozbot234
Where's the redefinition? Large organizations _are_ bureaucratic and ruled by
internal politicking. It's their nature.

------
yew
> [A] sorting mechanism that elevates people who pay lip service to
> permissiveness, but don't fully participate - a preparatory performance of
> the fake counterculture.

Not where I expected to see _that_ sentiment.

I do wonder where this is going.

------
Animats
That author is all over the place. It's a general rant about the obvious.

At the beginning, he's on to something. Fiction has a plot shortage. "Across
TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story
that doesn’t rely on gimmicks." Movies are stuck in the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate]
ditch, and the Marvel Overextended Universe. The 25th James Bond movie is
supposed to come out this year, if anybody cares.

Some of this is simply the entertainment glut. Everyone has seen all the
possible plot twists. Go back in history and read some of the Canterbury Tales
from around 1400. Read a story half way through, then ask yourself how it will
end. You'll be right. There are no plot twists. Back then, entertainment was
so scarce that they weren't needed.

A more serious problem is that there's no shared vision of a better world.
Fiction doesn't help us get to a better place. This hit science fiction first.
Science fiction of the 1930s to the 1960s was quite upbeat, showing a picture
of a marvelous future. It's been downhill since the 1970s. Today SF is mostly
space opera. Dystopian visions used to be rare. Now most SF is dystopian. Even
much non-SF is dystopian. From The Wire to Game of Thrones, the world sucks.

~~~
csa
You seem to be reviewing this essay as though it is about entertainment
narratives.

I see it being a fairly scathing critique of the disingenuous narrative of
modern day middle class bureaucrats.

~~~
Animats
That essay is all over the place. I just started at the beginning.

------
csa
Fair warning... this guys dumpsters on a group of people who I assume are a
large part of the HN demographic, often via unflattering caricatures.

Agree or disagree with his opinions, this is a fairly high level of writing,
and I recommend reading it for entertainment value if not for actual
stimulating thought.

~~~
walshemj
Very much from the non technical side of C P Snows two nations its a very
English take with its distain for "professional".

Proper chaps are amateurs haven forfend that we listen to actual scientists -
you can see this in Boris Johnson and cummings.

And you can see proper literatures disdain for "Genre" on display here.

------
jalgos_eminator
> A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the
> leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a “catapult
> experience”—a bold and potentially risky career move. Perhaps the same
> traits that lead to this type of bold action might also lead to very poor
> outcomes on a college campus.

The next sentence calls Bay area programmers "dorks" who have never taken
risk, but I'll take the first part at face value. I've been listening to the
podcast "How I Built this with Guy Raz" where founders of companies talk about
how they started/grew their successful business. It does seem like many of
them either had a hard time with "regular work", or they were stuck in some
job they didn't like so they decided to start a business. Many of them have
college degrees, which goes against what this article is about though. The
more I listen to these, the more I think that there is a "type" of person who
would start a business and therefore become a CEO. I've met a few people in
real life that gave me a similar vibe, and my company's founder/CEO is like
this as well. I can't put my finger on why these people seem different to me,
but they just seem to think about problems differently.

~~~
Animats
_A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the
leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a “catapult
experience”—a bold and potentially risky career move._

Look for survivor bias there. You'd probably get a similar narrative by
interviewing people who won big in Vegas.

------
082349872349872
1\. TFA treats universities as fungible, when it is a truth universally
acknowledged that most colleges won't open any particularly interesting doors.
(the ones that do are a handful to a dozen which vary depending upon one's
interests)

2\. The upper class still has yachts, backyard tennis courts, and polo ponies.
The $300 cotton T-shirts and $400 sweatpants are for the working class.

where: working class - needs a job / middle class - has enough property to do
without a job for few years, but couldn't maintain their lifestyle without an
income / upper class - their property provides their income

alternatively: working class - acquires things whose TCO doesn't involve
external employment / middle class - acquires things whose TCO involves
fractions of an FTE / upper class - acquires things whose TCO requires
multiple FTEs

~~~
walshemj
Middle class cant stop working for a few years and life of "property" \- they
are effectively working class yes even you on 250k pa.

------
hootbootscoot
I find it amazing how James McElroy manages to blame "failed" ideologies and
movements from "the counterculture(tm)" for the "Corporate Borg (tm)"'s
sublation/sublimitation of the same.

Yes, Levi's jeans used rock and roll and rebellion to sell jeans.

What's your point, James?

(Besides using more words than even I do to attempt to waffle his way around
being WRONG, lol)

(to anyone attempting to bring me back around to the ostensible class critique
nexus of this piece, I apparently didn't get it. It went over my head. I'm
kinda thick I guess.)

------
augustt
Unsurprisingly meandering for a moral panic piece. Lots of words about how
corporations and universities have become too wishy-washy and how Trump
refuses to play that game, but nothing said of his mostly successful attempt
to normalize bold-faced lying.

~~~
ahelwer
I think the whole point is that politicians were already bold-faced lying, and
everyone knew it, and politicians knew everyone knew it (see the quoted
definition of a hack in the article). But we all played the game. See
_Hypernormalization_ by Adam Curtis.

------
TheOtherHobbes
This is just a very extended rewrite of a stock right-wing trope: you can't
trust educated people, because they're fakes and they don't understand real
down-to-earth hard working middle class Americans.

I don't think he's wrong about tech being primarily about increasingly
automated bureaucracy, and not about open innovation - certainly not in
business, and even less so socially and culturally.

But ultimately this is decided by Wall St, which is controlled by money, most
of which is ultimately managed by billionaires, some of whom have exotic far-
right sympathies.

Note there's no criticism of right wing story-telling - propaganda - outfits
like the Kochs or the Mercers. The targets are exclusively on the progressive
side.

Trump may have won as a not-business-as-usual candidate, but that doesn't mean
he was ever truly a not-business-as-usual president. It means that was the
story sold to voters who felt left behind and excluded - just as Obama was
sold as the black history redemption candidate, who turned out to have limited
interest in doing anything too controversially concrete or transformative with
the opportunity.

Instead of challenging the cynical sleight-of-message involved in the
industrial manipulation of all demographics, the author chooses to slant his
thesis towards praising one demographic at the expense of another.

It's a good attempt and more literate than most - but it's not nearly as
incisive or even-handed as it pretends to be.

~~~
csa
> This is just a very extended rewrite of a stock right-wing trope: you can't
> trust educated people, because they're fakes and they don't understand real
> down-to-earth hard working middle class Americans.

Interesting. My takeaway is about 180 degrees from this.

I think he’s saying that the vast majority of college graduates are not
particularly well-educated. Furthermore, this class of people is just filling
the role of very middle class bureaucrats while being sold on the narrative of
being something more (e.g., part of the creative class or upper / upper middle
class), all while being incredibly conformist in their non-conformity.

You say that the targets are “progressives”, but I would say his targets are
“poseur progressives”. As someone who highly values the former and is
ambivalent about the masses of the latter (esp. in the Bay Area), I agree with
the author’s lament of the rise of faux progressives (if, in fact, that is
what he is lamenting).

------
jonstewart
American Affairs Journal is a relatively recent publication that’s been
somewhat pro-Trump, at least pro-Trumpism. James McElroy also often writes in
American Conservative.

I don’t believe this belongs on Hacker News.

~~~
jonstewart
Downvote to oblivion, but highfalutin essays in neocon journals keep showing
up here on HN with some regularity, particularly on the weekends. I can’t
remember the last time I saw something from Jacobin or Mother Jones, and
certainly not an essay this overtly political.

It’s all too easy to nod along as you read this sort of thing, but then to
become more cynical when you consider the source, the underlying motivations,
and the larger body of work into which it fits and associates.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You don't seem to be paying attention. I see borderline Marxist stuff here
rather regularly.

~~~
Apocryphon
Please cite.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Sorry, I can't off the top of my head. I was reading one on Friday, though,
that was... some guy's unique Marxist perspective on... the global south, if I
recall correctly. That wasn't _borderline_ Marxist, that was openly,
unapologetically Marxist. But again, no, I can't give you a cite. It was on
"new" about 48 hours ago, plus or minus several hours.

I'm pretty sure I found that on "new", though, rather than on the front page.
If front page appearances are your metric, then left stuff may be rather rare.

------
jstewartmobile
He's talking about you people. So many others have reached the same
conclusion.

