If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
In the 1999 movie “American Beauty,” we see former ad exec Lester Burnham peddling Happy Meals at Mr. Smiley’s.
His reason for doing so? He wants “the least amount of responsibility possible.”
If I were to sum up the past 15 years, it would be about the presentation of power in a shared Public Square.
Some people were subjected to endless scrutiny, with no chance at redemption: these were the martyrs of Cancel Culture. Other figures seemed to draw destruction into their orbit, like former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who in December 2008 ordered state agencies to cease business with the Bank of America, until it restored credit to a local factory.
Essentially, the past 15 years has been about big chess pieces grinding to a halt. We even experienced a global lockdown as this cycle entered its closing phase.
But now, we’re at the dawn of a new cycle, one that will be more in line with Lester Burnham’s ways of doing things. I suppose that’s why he was such a compelling archetype—an underdog that saw the future wave coming.
The result is that we’re all having to deal with new experiences around goods, products and customer service. Our social infrastructure has become entirely warped by pressure over the years.
In the first newsletter of 2024, I detailed how legacy brands will undergo immense chaos this year.
Now I want to bring it down to the human level. How are YOU likely to experience this shift in culture, as we move into an era where commonly held standards of performance and decency are up in the air?
Spring will no doubt bring great disruptions to the service sector as well as the general distribution of goods and services we take for granted—everything from Happy Meals at the drive-thru to Amazon deliveries.
The disruptions may be small, but they will change how we interact with these areas of life. There will be big disruptions, too.
What you’ll likely see now in late January are the first hints of what could blossom into a union rebellion or a grassroots revolution. Workers won’t be going up against banks through their governor, for example. They’ll be organizing it themselves. Perhaps we’ll hear more about the Hollywood strikes that took form over the summer.
Certainly the state of Texas rising up against federal agencies is a prime example of this emerging trend.
At any rate, at your local level, you may see more “quiet quitting” in the office, or a general lack of shared codes. As I’m composing this newsletter, I’m running across a few articles from late January about Tower of Babel moments at the office. People have emerged from their post-cov*d cocoon, the sources say, but are leaving messes in office common areas or generally committing other cringe-worthy moments.
This may be a bit of journalistic embellishment, but it’s not improbable. We’re beginning a new cycle now where effort is asymmetrical. This is not the “yes, we can” collectivism that brought Obama into office in 2008.
Also gone is that heady, scrappy ambition of the early 2010s, when it felt like a race for who would discover the next app.
Instead, what we’re seeing is the ELIMINATION of apps—not the urgent discovery of a portal that will unite people under the same behavioral codes. On January 18th, it was announced that Uber would be shutting down the Drizly alcohol delivery service it acquired during lockdown culture. The plan was to integrate the Drizly app with the Uber Eats app.
But here’s the key difference: Drizly doesn’t contract out workers like Uber Eats. What the app does is allow liquor stores to offer their own deliveries—a DIY model. So you’re seeing a separation between these fat cats and DIY mercenaries, as the culture no longer supports or requires them to bond.
The Big Tent is broken and I’m sure if you were to dig, some of the liquor stores who used Drizly are probably more than happy to part ways with Uber, as that large of a company has a way of levying its own cuts and imposing its own practices on participating businesses.
This opens up the way instead for more of a Wild West situation, rather than imposed standardization of service delivery.
What’s interesting to me about this coverage is the topic of progression. Many workers report not being interested in the typical linear career progression. Perhaps that’s because they don’t see a guaranteed payoff at the end of their grind. Managers and consultants, on the other hand, are suggesting etiquette camps and charm school as a way to re-introduce common norms in workplace culture.
This strikes me as a bit like saying: “we’ll worry later about whether the carrot will still be there at the end of the stick.”
There’s a restless anxiety around restoring order to a situation in disarray, but not wanting to consider whether that situation might fail to exist in same form ever again.
It’s not too different from Trad roleplayers urging us to bring more classic marble architecture to cities again, without accepting the truth that few people will know how to appreciate the buildings or what to do with them anyways.
The assumption is, by some magic trick, the marble will make people live virtuously again.
Now, I’m all for more beautiful public spaces, but in this example, the classic architecture would merely be there for those who urgently wanted it, patting themselves on the back for restoring glory and order—diving deeper into a cultish use of spaces and services that are supposedly “for everybody.”
It’s not too different from this cultural shift in workplace standards. The charm school cultists may get their way, but the end result will ultimately serve the guardians pushing them, rather than improving the system as a whole.
In that sense, they won’t get the collective good that they really want, in the end. They get a few True Believers to join their cult, along with a lot of reluctant attendees who muddle through as part of their “quiet quitting.”
In other words, our sense of responsibility is changing. It’s highly individualized now, or becoming that way.
This will make it nigh impossible to return to some golden age, as imagined by a top-down manager.
What’s happening is a massive disconnect between leadership and employees—or, in the social media realm, between influencers and audience.
Basically, what’s happening on the other end of the barbell—the employee side or the audience side—is a realization that authority and responsibility does not flow from a top-down source but from an inside-out source.
As people dial into their inner GPS more and more this year, it’s bound to create divergent experiences around the delivery of goods, customer service and products.
And that itself will create broader debates about employment, work/life balance and rights of laborers.
Some of this could be quite good, with new media voices and new forms of work or cultural expression.
But it could be quite brash, edgy, abrasive and rebellious as there’s less disregard for completing things in a linear, “expected” manner.
Your steaming Happy Meal could be delivered with a salutation to “Have A F***ing Nice Day!”
Even Fat Cats Want A Break
Here at the Zeitville Chronicle, we like to look past the binary. Workers disconnecting from managers, as managers try to re-impose a former order, is just the top layer.
Because, digging deeper, it’s not that the managers are trying to re-impose any old order—it’s an imagined one, conjured from a retrospective lens.
Elder millennials were no less brash in the workplace, and yet out of their antics we got glorified tech campuses, agencies with kombucha on tap and edgy digital-first publications like BuzzFeed.
The current trend is reflective of a wider instability, and our attempts to cope with it.
Order can certainly be restored now, in small pockets, but in my opinion it require an acceptance of the tattered remains of the past—rather than trying to view the past through an ideological telescope. That’s why all these remakes of 80s and 90s films absolutely flop.
It’s at just the moment when the concept of work is being destabilized in our collective consciousness, that we act like the workplace was once this pristine crystal palace (until it was ruined by some recent contaminating force).
In reality, the notion of work has been shaky for years, and the early 2020s have dealt enough dramatic, disruptive blows to pull in our attention.
So much of what we’ve taken for granted, running on autopilot, is now in crisis mode—and there’s an impulse to impose a perfect order on it.
But likewise, there’s a simultaneously impulse to fold, walk away, cut losses. Fannie Mae, one of the star players in the 2008 mortgage meltdown, announced in January that it will be vacating its D.C. headquarters and thus ending its lease five years early.
The irony is a bit rich. A massive entity involved in the fiasco over people not making house payments…is deciding that it will self-evict and stop paying for its own housing.
Is this a bit like your local butcher going vegan? It’s astounding to see such a giant shrug at the game it seemed to prop up for so long. When Fannie Mae signed the lease a decade ago, it was the largest private sector office lease in D.C. history. Development boomed around it.
“Like many other companies, we are continuing to embrace our flexible work environment by exploring office space options that support our workforce while being fiscally responsible,” a Fannie Mae spokesperson told the Commercial Observer.
So, who is it that’s causing the crisis—the workers or the managers?
When the avatar of home ownership says that “normal” work is like the idea of Santa Claus, you have to wonder where any of us can look for the authoritative definition of work in the 2020s.
In the same vein, many longtime popular YouTubers are dropping out of the game. It’s a dually-directional crisis: many followers have grown tired of gurus and institutions, but these former institutions and gurus themselves are breaking away from maintaining any cohesive macro narrative.
Further chaotic disruptions were announced in late January when the parent company for Sports Illustrated lost the license to publish this legendary magazine, through a complicated turn of events. The sports giant had to layoff many staff members. Execs said they would continue to publish, but it’s not clear how that would be possible.
Who’s to blame here—the eroding readership or bungled management by Arena Group, the parent company of Sports Illustrated?
It’s at this deeper layer that we see the inherent tension of the 2020s: as all binary models get torn apart, we lose a sense of Big Tent meaning, scattering information to all corners of the Earth.
There will probably be no perfect scenario where these things are put back together again. If Sports Illustrated bounces back, it probably won’t be as a legacy brand or household name, but more like a niche platform geared to diehard sports fans with exclusive access to certain types of information or multimedia presentations.
It’s the same with the building vacated by Fannie Mae. I wouldn’t expect it to be filled by, say, Bank of America. It may be a strong client, but one that’s a bit more to the periphery of public attention.
Carr Properties says it’s looking for a client who can appreciate the building’s luxury amenities and proximity to upscale shops and restaurants. Again, they’re selling a niche, micro tribal experience to the client, not the chance to be known as the next Luxor Hotel.
I mean, really: who could pretend that leasing such a building connotes magical prestige anymore? The previous tenant was one of the most well-known lending agencies for homeowners, and they’ve basically said that having a trophy home doesn’t matter.
It’s going to be a wild year, and this is just the beginning.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Whats the solution for dissatisfaction?
I've been reading these newsletters since 2022 now and its like a game to me linking what happened around myself during the week of a full moon to the description of trends written here.
(I find that this game is easier to do than on a new moon)
My Prosecutor at the office relocated the direct supervisor of mine to another office, due to their divergence in the way of judging criminal matters. They always had conflicts, but apparently it reached a culminating point this week.
Then my new supervisor went there yesterday for the first time, we shook hands and I proceeded to ask 2 simple things:
"1. can we keep the curtain open? I prefer working with sunlight", to which he said no.
And then I asked 2. "I need a new chair - this one have a too small support for my back, it pains me" to which he responded:
"you ask for a lot of stuff, huh? are you really just an intern?"
- here in Brazil we have a work culture of mocking interns and blaming everything on them, which is presumed to be passed down to the generations. -
To which I calmly replied "yeah, sadly, but I'm also a future lawyer, it has to be this way lest things wont work out for me"
And I confess that for a first impression... all of this was pretty inadequate.
He was confused by the audacity, I guess? And I was confused by being denied a simple thing and by being doubted about another.
I am not troublesome at the workplace, really, but the shock was felt and I were the cause. Or it seemed like it.
Further that day I read some piece of news that an old professor at a very traditional school here in the city was being compulsorily retired.
He is a 74yo, worked there for +30years, teaching only to the senior years classes, and he wasn't consulted on this arbitrary decision.
He then decided to release a letter to the press and to the school principals which basically stated what a mess that school is becoming, with teens all around the place doing whatever they wanted, joining classes whenever and leaving the classroom whenever as well, with no sense of respect for the elders...
Man, I could sense in the letter he had no clue as to why the school didn't kept by his side when he tried to discipline those teens. And that he was feeling wronged.
Even if I'm not very fond of traditional schooling and its hazards on freedom of will, I felt his pain. He loved to teach, but he didn't know how to communicate with the youngs anymore.
They were critical of him, mocking his religious talks at a portuguese language class, and being very mean with him in general.
So yeah, this was my week. Spot on with the trend here, but feeling like I'm leaving with more questions than answers.
I hope to make up with my new supervisor for any bad impressions, and to keep the workplace as peaceful and light-hearted as possible, even without my sunlight pouring through the curtains.
Thanks for the letter Paul!