It’s Monday! It’s July! Here’s a letter for Monday, July 6th.

A Liminal Office Space

If you’ve spent enough time around me, you’ve probably heard me ask, more than once, “Have you seen Office Space?” The 1999 film by Mike Judge (who also created the hit TV series Silicon Valley) follows a guy who wakes up one day and decides to stop going to work. Chaos follows, but at its core the movie is about rejecting the social contract and giving in to your (presumably) hedonistic inner voice: moving through life in a Camus-style Absurd way, doing and saying whatever you feel like. All because you’ve been asked to include a cover sheet on your TPS reports one too many times.

Now, despite my love for this movie, I really do enjoy my job. I’m fortunate enough to be around great colleagues and contribute to a mission that I think really matters (that is, malleable software). Still, this movie hits such a nerve for me; there’s no completely escaping the occasional preposterousness of the modern workplace. Everyone wastes some amount of time in an effort to achieve the Bureaucratic Good. The real challenge of my job is figuring out what to do (as opposed to doing it). This was somewhat true before AI got good. Now it’s most of the job.

One of the most common ideas I hear in San Francisco circles is that “work,” as we know it, has three to five years left. Pick up knitting or something, because that’s all you’ll have. “AI will take your jobs” is part of the broader AI narrative that seems to have hit escape velocity and reached the rest of America. It’s clearly unpopular; if you listen closely, you can hear the warning shots ring out across the country.

In fact, I think the future is more insidious than a world with no jobs. My larger fear is that we’ll get more meaningless ones. Meta offers a first glimpse, restructuring its famous and talented engineering organization around data labelling: some of the best engineers in the world reduced to grading a machine’s homework.

The reason isn’t hard to see. Too much of society is wired to work for us to simply knit all day. In America, healthcare is, ridiculously, coupled to employment; so is most people’s status, their social lives, the shape of their week, their sense of being a contributing adult. Many religions emphasize the value of labour. Strip away the economic need for a job and you’re still left with a civilization that has no other machinery for distributing dignity. So we won’t let the jobs vanish. We’ll manufacture them. The question was never whether work survives, but what survives as work, and on current evidence the answer is the cover sheet, not the craft. We are very good at inventing tasks. We are much worse at inventing meaningful ones. (I mean, why has there been so much early focus in AI on making crappy look-a-likes of Ghibli art? What’s even the goal there?)

I don’t have a good answer. Neither, as far as I can tell, does Dario Amodei. In his now infamous essay Machines of Loving Grace, where he makes the case for everything going right with respect to AI, here’s what he says about labour:

[…] our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized. […] It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution. […] Perhaps the economy runs on Whuffie points.

The rest of the essay is quite moving; this section, though, feels adrift. Dario is imagining a clean break: the old economy stops making sense, and something new and rationally designed (UBI, a “secondary economy,” Whuffie points) takes its place. I don’t think the transition will be fun at all. We don’t leap from industrialism to post-scarcity utopia; we spend a long, awkward interregnum keeping the old machine running for reasons that have nothing to do with output. It’ll be humanity’s large, confusing Sisyphean quest. His optimistic future and my pessimistic one aren’t really in conflict. The meaningless jobs are that broader societal conversation, just conducted in the worst possible way: through inertia instead of intent.

This is all to say: we should stop pretending the singularity will arrive and hand us our knitting needles. Looking at the world today, it seems far more likely we’ll be filing TPS reports on a 40-hour workweek long after the machines could have freed us from them.

Office Space is funny because the absurdity is optional; Peter can walk away, burn it all down, become a free man. The future I’m describing isn’t optional, because we will have wired meaning, healthcare, and identity to work we no longer strictly need to do. The Bureaucratic Good stops being a punchline and becomes the actual organizing principle of a life. If work is going to be something we keep around on purpose, then the real task, the one no UBI cheque solves, is deciding what makes a job worth a person’s hours in the first place. Better to answer that deliberately, before the cover sheet answers it for us.

Now, on that cheery note, here’s what I’ve been up to!

• The World Cup! Canada pumped Qatar 6-0, and I got to witness it in person. History made. Beyond winning our first group-stage game, we also (thankfully) drew South Africa in the Round of 32 and managed a 1-0 win. Unfortunately, our run came to an end against a very skilled Moroccan side. Even with the exit, I couldn’t be more proud.
• Fittingly, I started watching Ted Lasso. It’s really, really good. I also picked Welcome to Wrexham back up (season 4, where I think they earn promotion to the Championship, meaning back-to-back-to-back promotions).
• I’ve been tearing through a new Chuck Klosterman novel, Football. It’s somewhat about football, but mostly about culture. It answers questions like: who’s the real G.O.A.T.? Why is high school football so big in Texas? What makes a great coach? Where did football come from? (And much more.) In the process, it serves as a fascinating lens into how America ticks.
• I’ve watched a couple of great films recently as well. Namely: The Prestige (2006), Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie (2025) (happy Canada Day), and Shrek 2 (2004).

That’s all for now!