On a warm Tuesday evening, a group of young professionals jogs onto the softball field four at East River Park. Williamsburg’s Domino Park signs shines in very deep left on the other side of the brown water. Unlike their opponents, these players haven’t chosen a pun or inside joke for a team name – standard for rec league softball – just the name of their company: Palantir. It’s 20181 and Palantir hasn’t yet built “mega-database” domestic surveillance systems or an “ImmigrationOS.” It hasn’t been awarded non-competitive government contracts by shareholders. But it has built systems for ICE and a "pre-crime" prediction software for the New Orleans police. The company’s neo-reactionary politics are antithetical to the value of most of the 20-something, default-setting progressives in New York, but no one on team Palantir seems worried about the alternative uses of BBCOR-rated softball bats. They’ve got cushy jobs, padded résumés, and no reason to believe norms won’t protect them from blunt force critique .
In white-collar America – especially among tech workers and finance-adjacent operators – the significance of jobs has come uncoupled from questions of virtue, value, or even realness. What a company produces – if it produces anything, and not all do – matters less to its employees than the imprimatur of employment. And for good reason. Producing value – much less moral good – is not explicitly part of the deal. In exchange for a salary, insurance, swag (including very nice softball jerseys), and the chance to develop new skills, productive members of W-2 society perform discrete tasks between Slack chats. Success is measured by the number and complexity of tasks completed and not much else.
This is cultural, not corporate policy. And it’s both fairly new and fairly extreme. Permission structures now allow Stanford CS grads to build civilian face recognition software and Tuck MBAs to dismantle regional hospitals without risking social penalties paid by Dow Chemical employees in the 1970s post-Agent Orange and Exxon employees in the early 1990s after the wreck of the Valdez.
We allow this because employment has been fully gamified and we expect professionals working to attempt to win the various games they play. We also innately understand that winning requires not only playing well, but choosing the right game in the first place. Teaching is not the right game. Caregiving is not the right game. Local journalism is not the right game. Why? None of those games are rigged2.
Rigged doesn’t always mean there’s a lie or conspiracy afoot. Many games are explicitly built to be unfair. Consider the ring toss at a carnival. Only a moron thinks that’s fair, but plenty of people play. Now consider the startup ecosystem. Most VC returns follow a power law – less than 1% of investments generate the majority of profits. That makes Series A investors the carnies and entrepreneurs the marks. They both consent to play, but one is far more likely to win (albeit a smaller prize). The winner is rarely the guy throwing it out there.
That’s not to say that deal sourcing is easy or that slide decks skim themselves. But even if VCs have real jobs, they do what sociologist Leigh Clare LeBerge calls “Fake Work,” recursive labor that primarily serves to deepen a narrative used to obscure precisely how a game is rigged. And it’s not just investor-types doing fake work. With financialization responsible for an ever greater share of corporate profits – non-financial firms hold larger quantities of financial assets relative to their operating assets than ever – fake work has become more and more common. The value of Palantir stock – up about 142% since Trump was re-elected – is clearly driven less by the work of Palantir employees than market memetics and backroom deals, but the company’s success accrues to employees regardless both in equity and prestige.
In effect, this is a reversal in the value chain. It used to be that employees made a product that made a company money which in turn made that company prominent, which made employees jobs prestigious. Now, in many but not all cases, it’s the company that makes money so it has enough prestige to hire employees who can attempt to make a profitable product. Whether or not they succeed is not immaterial, but it’s not the whole ballgame. Narrative matters more than the actual bottom line.
The Nobel-winning Yale economists Robert Shiller (the “Case-Shiller Home Price Index” guy) has suggested that this prestige inversion may account for hard to explain economic phenomena – like the stock market sitting at all-time highs after the imposition of tariffs. “Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at data on changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product, wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk of missing the underlying motivations for change,” Shiller writes in Narrative Economics. “Doing so is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.”
The best example of this might be Lyft, a public company that trades at a 70x to 80x multiple on profits from the trailing twelve months. That’s not a product driven company selling mobility; it’s a narrative driven company selling hope. Sometimes this gets so extreme narrative even becomes the product. McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group sell imprimatur and process rather than outcomes. Whether their advice is implemented or even correct is often beside the point. The value comes from narrative: extraordinary people are doing extraordinary work. And, make no mistake, many consultants – like many Lyft PMs – are extraordinary. Fake work can be – as odd as it may sound – harder than real work. Fake work requires both the ability to engage with details and the ability to grapple productively with abstraction.
Forging a convincing fake Vermeer may be less impressive than painting an original portrait and it may require less creativity, but it requires a ton of skill.
This is why skills, not success – nearly impossible to demonstrate in a financialized environment – have become the reserve currency of the professional world. Skills correlate to tasks, which reinforce narratives even when outcomes do not. Because professional respect is afforded to those who most effectively reinforce a narrative, the focus on skills inevitably leads to a focus on specialization. Specialists are, in effect, people with skillsets so disconnected from specific products that they become fully transposable.
“We’ve divided big tasks up into smaller and smaller tasks so people become specialized,” explains sociologist Michelle Jackson. “When these people do their jobs diligently and they are hardworking and they perform their roles, we treat that as licit3… rather than asking if the tasks are actually worth doing or moral.”
If we treat all tasks as equally legitimate in a social sense, but provide better compensation for some than others, advantage accrues to those who choose the right games (the rigged ones) over those that play the wrong games (also rigged, but the other way). Much has been made of the fact that over half of Harvard undergrads go into finance, tech, or consulting even though almost none arrive on campus saying they want to consult. This is a not moral failure; it’s a strategic no-brainer. Consulting allows for endless skill development and leaves the door open to game-switching. When the most likely way to lose is choosing the wrong game, the best choice is no choice at all (specialized tech and finance skills are also transposable across sectors).
Obviously, the other way to preserve optionality is to become an entrepreneur, but sunk costs make that appealing for many ostensibly qualified young professionals. They’re sitting on narrative value in the form of degrees and internships that can be cashed in via at-will employment. It’s hard to walk away from that table. There’s a personal cost.
For this reason, many parents of young children (this one included) no longer ask children what they want to be when they grow up4. We’ve watched low-conviction, replacement level strivers build comfortable lives and coherent resumes without producing very much. And we’ve watched both public service-minded do-gooders and creative visionaries struggle. And we’ve seen what this does to people. We’ve seen bros soften with success and become generous in their personal lives. We’ve seen artists (or content producers) harden and retreat into work friendships so they don’t have to listen to people discuss different, easier games.
Which brings us back to the threadbare field on the L.E.S. The Palantir team is solid. Not elite, but competent. A bunch of former high school athletes who couldn’t quite hack D2. They take it seriously and seem surprised when they go down a few innings in. They are used to winning. They are confused. Fair games seem unfair when you’re accustomed to stacked odds. They bicker. They swing harder and harder. They don’t produce results. For once – just for a few hours on a Tuesday evening – that matters.
Not very much. But a little.
