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Agreed. In addition, this modern obsession with worker productivity, where you're purposely not given any downtime to collect your thoughts or reflect on your achievements and failures is a big driver in creating this "fake" or perhaps better described as "unproductive" work in the first place.

To add to other points in the thread, the concept of the 8 hour workday itself is flawed. It might have worked fine in a factory because you can actually have people work like slaves for 8 hours straight but it doesn't work in a modern office job setup. Humans can't focus for 8 hours straight. Fake work exists to basically to utilise the whole workday.

I always assumed they were just "jobs" for the buddies of the capitalist that eventually just became part of the organization structure

You need to keep the proles engaged in wage slavery to prevent them from organizing. That way, they get invested in the capitalist system and are resistant to change via employer-provided health insurance, 401k, and so on. Make every worker a little capitalist so they never want to revolt. It also helps that the jobs are completely soul-sucking and reduce their will to live.

The division of labour became so deep that you require a lot of people to coordinate the production, and this coordination apparatus grows so large that nobody knows who is doing what, what work is required and so on. Then you add office politics, alienation of labour and make-believe work as a replacement for welfare and everything turns into this bullshit.

I don't think this particular societal ill is capitalism (I know, I know, they usually are), but rather a symptom of tree-shaped hierarchical management structures. I saw the same shit working for the government.

Middle managers are judged by how important the stuff they manage is, which their bosses guess from reports and how many headcount they have, neither of which are actual work. The further you are from the executive board (who are directly exposed to the whims of capital) and the line-level workers (who are exposed to, you know, the material reality underpinning actually getting anything done), the further you are from any sort of grounding in fact, and all you have is reports by people trying to make themselves look important.

I think about this a lot and to me, a large part of this is the fact that most tasks in a corporation need to be carried up and down the chain several times in order for them to actually get greenlit. At each stop, the person who wants the task to happen has to explain to someone who is hearing about it for the first time what needs doing and what they need. A giant game of telephone basically.

This makes it so that the boss of your boss only knows what your boss is telling him is happening. He doesn't know what most of the actual work even is. And the CEO gets informed by the boss of your boss of your boss what the boss of your boss thinks is going on. So while the workers are in the trenches, making do with whatever the fuck the actual work is, some guy four or more steps removed from their reality decides how much budget they should get to do the work he doesn't know shit about.

This is also why you can so easily pretend to do work in this system. If you can fool your boss, or ideally have several bosses you answer to, they won't have time to talk to each other all the time. So if you got to do Four different tasks for four different bosses...you can tell all of them that it's taking longer because of the other three tasks and goof off for half the day each day, deliver everything late and still get thanked for it.

People who have free time might think about better ways to organize society. Gotta find ways to keep people occupied so they don't get their own ideas.

I have a personal conspiracy theory that this idea is behind the broader "content" push of tech companies. Nobody at the top actually cares about the quality issues inherent in "AI" because the goal is just to manufacture distractions, keep jacking up throughput to keep everyone in a state of cognitive overwhelm.

Office politics, i.e. power plays. Having information and deciding who gets it is a massively powerful position in an office. So Senior Manager Butt Dickdong who otherwise has nothing to do with the thing has to sign off on the slides because it allows him information before the rest and the chance to torpedo it or give some favours away. Of course having nothing to do with it, Butt doesn't really know anything about it and as such needs constant explanation because he thinks if the slides are for an egyptian client you should use Papyrus font like they do over there.

It is also why these things are so hard to get rid off, it'd mix up power structures. I don't think most of the people doing it are consciously aware of it in the Machiavellan sense but they do know it internally. Also partly why consultants are so common now, it gives the C-Level Suite an excuse to say "oh this is just objectively better" to Butt who can't really argue against it. Now of course consultants also design the worst shit known to man because they depend on you coming back to them because otherwise they'd slowly work themselves out of a job, which they are accutely aware of and trained on.

I have been reading David Graeber's Bullshit jobs and It does cover the process somewhat. I recommend checking it out.

Hello from within the NGO adjacent bullshit