“There’s no escaping the longhouse! There’s no escaping the longhouse!”

The meetings will continue until morale improves

In the grim darkness of the third millennium, there is only cringe

As I read through the Warhammer 40 K series, I occasionally go online to learn a little bit more about the lore.

Recently I came across this particular video which ranks most powerful killers in the fictional universe. As it turns out, in a world filled with orcs, demonic gods, aliens from other galaxies, and every sort of savage murderer conceivable, the greatest killer is a pencil pusher by the name of Greta Vern.

Vern is not a killer in the traditional sense; rather, she brings endless suffering by misplacing documents, failing to file requisition forms, or otherwise engaging in bureaucratic neglect. As a result, her victims end up starving to death because they don’t get the food they need, or otherwise they get garbled orders which puts them into dangerous battle situations.

And all the while, it’s impossible to trace anything back to Vern herself.

We’ll get back to this in a second.

That “gen z boss” video is making the rounds again

if you don’t know what I’m talking about, first of all I envy you, and second of all enjoy this rabbit hole.

When the video first came out last year, my friends and I didn’t think much of it. Occasionally we would take the piss out of it, thinking up scenarios where we could use that same cute tone in the least appropriate situations.

“You have fibromyalgia! You have fibromyalgia!”

But apparently, nearly a year later, the video is making rounds once more. The video is a magnet for hatred — and yes, let’s be honest, misogyny. But underneath that, I think it’s a pointer to something else.

Why did this video receive so much hate? Well, in order to understand this, we need to talk about…

Brooklyn Beckham

For those who don’t know who he is, once more I envy you; Brooklyn Beckham is David Beckham’s son.

Brooklyn is fascinating to watch, because you can tell that he’s a guy who’s never really gone through any sort of struggle in his life.

Brooklyn has a wide ranging career, starting off as a photographer. During that phase of his life, he became so skilled at photography that he nearly managed to get a photograph of an elephant:

But of course, not happy with settling on his artistic success, he decided to pivot to becoming a chef, where he tried out experimental recipes such as frying chicken in about $30 worth of avocado oil.

Now let’s talk about another trend: the growing number of “alpha male” boot camps, where I guess men just start screaming at other men, and that supposedly… reasserts their manhood somehow?

Now I personally cannot imagine paying thousands of dollars just for the privilege of having another man call me a retard; if you play your cards right, you can get people on Substack to do it for free.

Nevertheless, anyone who watches these sorts of alpha male videos must feel secondhand embarrassment in the knowledge of how “down bad” these poor chaps must be.

Which brings us back to the Gen Z boss video. That video has all of the unwarranted self-confidence of a Brooklyn Beckham, only it’s combined with the cringe worthy assertion of identity, similar to the alpha male Boot Camp bros.

It’s two different categories of cringe, fusing together, creating a force multiplier.

Listen, I’m not saying that these ladies deserved all this hatred; but I would be lying if I said some of the reactions weren’t at least mildly entertaining:

The fact that it’s in a workplace makes it significantly worse

I think a lot of people recognize that this sort of behavior is considered unprofessional — which is why this particular video gained so much more traction than the original that it was based off of. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but I’ve never been in a workplace where it’s been considered acceptable for me to film a video where I talk about my “itty-bitty cock and a high fade.”

“There’s no escaping the long house! There’s no escaping the long house!”

Ultimately, this video is a placeholder for a phenomenon that most people can recognize but don’t intuitively have a word for it. Personally, I call it the “Louksification” of the economy, named after Ally Louks — the lady who wrote about smelly people in literature. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, once more I envy you).

I’ve written about her before, so I won’t belabor the point, but I think that people like Louks — as well as the people in the Gen Z video — have unfortunately become symbols, a placeholder for upper middle class Karens who have a disproportional number of credentials in relation to the skills they actually possess.

This phenomenon is nothing new. About 10 years ago, a person by the name of Amy Cuddy released an extremely viral TED talk, where she talked about the benefits of “power posing” — i.e. standing like superman. The science behind that TED talk was shown to be dubious at best, and it sparked a much greater conversation about the validity of the social sciences.

As a result, through no fault of her own, Cuddy became the symbol of bad social science, a heuristic for everything that was wrong with the discipline.

When people look at the Gen Z boss video, they are reminded of David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs. These are people with dubious credentials, who take up fancy job titles — but who don’t actually do anything: product managers, process managers, project managers (yes those are three completely different jobs).

They also disproportionately comprise most HR departments, so at some point everyone else in the company has to interact with them.

These people engage in endless Zoom meetings, and spend the majority of their time on emails and slack channels. And despite all of this, they get to occupy relatively high status positions with comfortable compensation.

What is frustrating for a lot of people is that they intuitively recognize the increasingly bullshit nature of these jobs, and yet find themselves at their mercy, on account of the fact that these…

Karens disproportionately make up the gatekeepers of many institutions

That is to say, these upper middle class white women tend to occupy jobs that have little value in and of itself, but nevertheless have a tendency to make everyone else’s lives significantly worse.

Anecdotally, I have seen this many times in the tech nerd world, where groups of intelligent and competent programmers (primarily male) were hampered by a plethora of box checking middle managers (primarily female).

And to be clear, the most vocal advocates against this phenomenon were actual female engineers, women who had achieved their positions through nothing more than merit and hard work. They, more than anyone, were aware of how much people were being hampered from getting anything done.

In the best cases, many incompetent middle managers were blissfully unaware of how much groundwork had been laid out to make their lives easier; in the worst cases, I would see the equivalent of a Greta Vern phenomenon, where a combination of neglect and indecision led to terrible consequences.

In my own little world of software, the mismanagement of the corporate girl boss ended up leading to code bases that would look like this:

Ultimately, I think this is contributing to the right wing shift of big tech. For leading edge companies in the space, they understand that there’s only so much you can “girl boss” before you end up in a competence crisis.

And indeed, we’re already seeing aspects of the competence crisis playing out in several domains. Two examples that spring to mind are the Boeing airplane fiascos, as well as the Los Angeles wildfires, where they somehow ran out of water despite being right next to the largest body of water on earth.

In these scenarios, the competent engineers/workers were pushed out by corporate bureaucrats and who demanded artificial quotas, and paid the consequence.

***

In Warhammer 40 K, when the Warmaster Horus became injured during his great crusade to unify the galaxy under mankind, he had fever dreams of a future world. A world that was utterly broken and ruined, devastated by religious fanaticism and never-ending turmoil.

But the most horrific part of this new world was the fact that it was a hell-scape held in place by bureaucracy, a sclerotic network of interconnected systems that did not fight against entropy, but instead facilitated it.

And perhaps this is hyperbolic, but I think the reason people had such a negative reaction to the Gen Z boss video is that it serves the same purpose as Horus’s fever dreams.

So many people looked at that video and had a vision of a world where things like competence and capability no longer mattered. A world of endless zoom calls and Slack channels, a world where the meetings continue until morale improves. A world where people like Greta Vern had completely taken over.

Or I don’t know, maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe the video was just cringe.