The pernicious spread of corporatespeak, or garbage language, as Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley calls this kind of talk. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. --- In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism. […] But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide. […] Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves. […] One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself. […] Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul. […] The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.

Low pay, soaring rents, and cities littered with e-scooters. Welcome to the future. --- But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley—rising housing costs, choked infrastructure—to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America’s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars—all while barely able to make ends meet. […] When Uber and Lyft announced they would guarantee California drivers a $15.60 minimum wage as an alternative to a new law aimed at curtailing gig companies’ misclassification of workers, Chair Ken Jacobs of U.C. Berkeley’s Labor Center found that the pledge was largely an empty one. Once you take into account drivers’ expenses and unpaid time between rides, their true gross wage would be $5.64 per hour. California’s state minimum wage is $12.00 an hour—far more than what rideshare companies were paying after expenses. […] There’s also evidence that Lyft and Uber, the two most popular ridesharing companies, contribute to a decline in public transit ridership. City governments thus have less incentive to invest in more infrastructure, creating still more negative repercussions for poorer communities and communities of color. In November, voters in San Francisco elected to levy a 1.5 percent tax on rideshares, in a bid to incentivize riders to consider public transit. […] The companies say that e-scooters are a “greener” form of transit than cars, but the evidence is underwhelming. One study published in August in an environmental journal, Environmental Research Letters, posited that whatever emissions electric scooters saved were offset by the greenhouse gas that gig workers expended chasing after scooters to perform maintenance and charging duties. The companies also say that e-scooters encourage a more diverse ridership, but San Francisco authorities reportedly found that e-scooter ridership tended to skew male, wealthy, and Caucasian.

Is this a realistic demand? Perhaps not yet, but that’s the point. — Amazon gets what it wants by being so big and powerful that it can bring state governments to heel. No one company should have all that power.

Deep-rooted cultural ideas about productivity, success, and gender roles are holding us back.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

Everything is going to be okay.