Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Stop trying to make synergy happen
‘Workspeak’ has long attracted censure from mainstream media, as varied as BBC2’s Yes Minister and NBC’s Parks and Recreation to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, whose 1994 cartoon strip popularised the Buzzword Bingo concept. Yet it remains as pervasive today as it is unpopular, posing an uncomfortable question: if we all hate it so much, why do we use it so often?
I quit
Most readers will probably fall somewhere between our house-hold’s extremes of embracing and rejecting paid work. But while Silicon Valley has been violently taking up the grindcore ethos for the past year or so, quitting has become very on trend elsewhere. Covid sparked a ‘great resignation’, as people stuck in lockdowns reconsidered their relationship to work and quit their jobs in droves, enabled by temporary expansions of the social safety net. Then there was ‘quiet quitting’, where you still showed up to work but didn’t offer any additional enthusiasm, time or effort. The fact that just doing your job was seen as a sort of ‘quitting’ helped expose the expectation that we invest both unpaid overtime and unacknowledged emotional labour in work.
Cut flowers
Plants climbed all over each other. Everywhere I looked were bees, butterflies, hoverflies, spinebills, rainbow lorikeets… Some of them (the lorikeets) were tearing apart my money makers right in front of me. I opened a beer. Listen: we can’t all be captains of industry. Isn’t it enough just to grow flowers?
California dreaming
It started with a dream. I was on a long walk in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where I live, and I met a woman with long grey plaits, sitting on a gate, swinging her legs. She wanted to tell me something important. She told me she was my future: older me, my crone. Go to California, she said.
Chance governs all
Monday to Friday, you spent most of your waking hours there. It was the place where you fell in love, fell out with other people, or worked side by side with someone who filled your handbag with staplers. It was the fabric of your life, the woof and warp of it. This is the nature of the office, and why so many sitcoms and dramas are set there. But more than that, in the London of that period, just travelling to and from it placed you at the mercy of contingency.
Jobbing writer
Much of the work represented in McGregor’s oeuvre happens ‘out of the office’. In their fiction, the characters are often working class and employed in service or entertainment jobs, be that at a bar or a brothel. (Or they’re shoplifting to survive.) In A Novel Idea and ‘Acts of Avoidance’, they also sidestep any notion of a conventional nine-to-five.
Capital and care
Flavoured with the affective language of therapy and authorised by the stamp of academia, the concept of ‘emotional labour’ built on the macroeconomist vision popularised by feminists since the 1970s: that women’s unpaid work at home limited their participation in paid work in the market, and simultaneously brought a substantive contribution, economic and beyond, to how this world turns.
Disrupting Sam Altman’s magical capitalism
New technologies enable new possibilities and the restructuring of industries. But a technology itself doesn’t dictate the choices that are made regarding its use. Rather, human beings, often the most powerful ones, determine how work will be reorganised around new technologies, who will benefit and who will suffer.
Vale, ‘menial drudgery’
When a potter throws a pot again and again, she learns the coarseness of clay. She internalises the way that small variations in how she spins the wheel, how much pressure she applies with her hands, produce subtly different results. In the same way, ‘entry-level’ tasks are how knowledge workers gain grounding in a particular industry or workplace.
(Im)personal space
Rather than allowing people to focus and retreat into their own spaces, ‘Activity-Based Working’ offers them a bewildering number of options for doing work and conducting conversations, from sitting and standing desks to sofas and individual pods to phoneless phone booths. Employees are expected move between multiple workstations instead of having a permanently assigned desk.
Judgement calls
When we choose our career, we also choose the kind of people we will accept as our future judges. And, for better or for worse, most of us become part-time judges in older age, whatever professional path we take. We become cogs in a power edifice, spewing judgements, right and left, making or breaking careers, sometimes even lives – all in exchange for the privileged positions of authority the system has granted us.
Bandaids and bush turkeys
Personal development is a booming industry. The reported global market size in 2025 was an estimated $51 billion, though this varies slightly between reports, and is predicted to surge to $60.5 billion by 2030 – a trend alleged by GlobeNewswire to be ‘rooted in the growing societal emphasis on self-discovery, mental health, and the continuous pursuit of knowledge and skills’.
