corrupting the language center of my brain

On Westworld and corporatespeak

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Dear friend — 

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Yes, I’ve been rewatching Westworld. In this HBO show, there are human-like robots, a.k.a. hosts, created to spend their lives in an amusement park. Each day they wear the same uniforms and reenact the same things on a continuous loop, solely for the pleasure of others.

But there’s a second group in the show too — a second set of beings who also wear the same uniforms and reenact the same things on a continuous loop, solely for the pleasure of others. 

These are the humans who work in the park. 

At night, the humans of Westworld don hazmat-type suits and fix up damaged hosts — taking out bullets, resealing skin. The next night, they do it again, then the next night, again — ad infinitum. 

Many don’t seem to particularly like what they do. Are their lives more enjoyable than those of the hosts? More free? It’s hard to say. The human workers live under constant threat of losing their jobs and thus their livelihoods — a threat that keeps their behaviors in check within a narrow, acceptable spectrum. I suppose the humans have some choice — they could look for another job, for example — but for all intents and purposes, the humans of the park are about as stuck there as the hosts. 

Watching Westworld this time around, I kept seeing the show as a metaphor for our lives as workers. By workers, I mean wage earners — beings obliged to trade a significant chunk of time, energy, creativity, and intellect for money. That is what we do in a capitalist system, isn’t it?

I say this as someone who actually likes her job.

Have you noticed how little of our real lives is actually free? Even when we say we like our jobs, we generally mean not that we enjoy our jobs so much we’d do them for free even if we were independently wealthy, but rather that we believe the requirements of our jobs to be a fair or better than fair exchange for the salary offered — a salary that lets us live our non-work lives in relative comfort. Yes, I may have to spend forty hours a week performing tasks that are ultimately meaningless to me, but doing so allows me to put food on the table, live in a place I like, travel to cool places sometimes — 

This love note might read so far as a diatribe against capitalism and the obligations of work. But I’m actually relatively at peace about my day job. Most days, especially right after I read the news headlines and see the ugliness in this world, my job feels like more than a fair exchange — and I feel grateful.

There’s one aspect of work life that’s been scaring me of late though: I think communicating with my coworkers is corrupting the language center of my brain. 

Let me put it this way: The way people talk at work — at least in my line of work, in the marketing department of a tech company — is not the way people talk in normal life. 

Instead of “I agree,” my colleagues say, “I’d like to double click on that.” Instead of “she told me,” they say, “she surfaced to me.” Instead of “so we don’t waste time,” they say, “so we can minimize thrash.” 

And despite how much I abhor this way of speaking, getting bombarded with it on a daily basis has normalized it. We’re all pretty malleable, you know — humans naturally adopt new accents (think Madonna during her Guy Ritchie phase), new words, new styles of speaking without trying. How long will it be before this language takes over my brain too, and I find myself speaking this way — like a host whose “corporatespeak” gauge has been turned up? 

It’s not just corporatespeak either. I work for a children’s behavioral health company, so there’s quite a bit of what I’ll call wellness-speak too — soothing words and phrases repeated to make sure people feel heard, understood, included, appreciated. For the most part, this is a good thing, but also leads to strange-sounding exchanges sometimes. Once, when a weekly brown bag lunch was renamed “snunch” (portmanteau of snack and lunch), the person announcing this change didn’t just say, “Hey, since we live all across the country and noon on the west coast isn’t lunch time for everyone, we’re going to call this event snunch.” Instead, she began a gentle soliloquy: “So last week, it was surfaced to me that ‘lunch’ isn’t very inclusive a word anymore because it doesn’t recognize the fact that there are people in the east coast who aren’t eating lunch at the same time as those on the west coast. So from now on, we’re going to use a more inclusive term, ‘snunch’, to recognize that we are a distributed team …. I’d like to thank [name of other colleague] for surfacing this issue to me and introducing me to the word ‘snunch’….”

If you’re not familiar with the lingo, it can actually be pretty difficult to decipher what people are actually saying. I can imagine forwarding some of the work emails I get to non-corporate friends, to see them shake their heads saying, “It doesn’t look like anything to me….”

Tell me the truth: When you read my love notes, do you detect notes of corporatespeak? Have I, despite my best efforts, been infected by this language? Do I still sound like a human being, or have I taken on the speech of a worker-host, mumbling jargon in her deep and dreamless slumber?

Love,

Siel

I’m in San Diego now

Three links you might love:

• Why do corporations speak the way they do? “No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.”

• The imagined life of a Westworld lab tech. “You don’t actually realize this when while you’re there, but working at a place like Westworld can really desensitize you to violence.” 

• Exercising the freedom to do the wrong thing. “If I only do what makes sense, what use am I? Why is my consciousness relevant at all? The desire to exercise your autonomy might motivate you to turn against the expected, the reasonable, and the moral—to show yourself, and perhaps others, that you are free.”

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