I would say the average development team gets one show commissioned every three to four months. It’s bullshit through and through.
Such complaints are similar to what one regularly hears in academia: it’s not just the senselessness of the process that rankles, but as with all box-ticking rituals, the fact that one ends up spending so much more time pitching, assessing, monitoring, and arguing about what one does than one spends actually doing it. In film, television, and even radio, the situation becomes even more distressing, because owing to internal marketization of the industry, a substantial chunk of those who work in it spend their time working on shows that do not and will never exist. Apollonia, for instance, did a stint for a development team pitching ideas for reality TV shows with titles such as Snipped (where men voted too promiscuous by the audience underwent a vasectomy live on the air), Transsexual Housewives, and—this was a real title—Too Fat to Fuck. All were cast and promoted, even though not one was ever produced.
Apollonia: What would happen is we would come up with ideas together and then sell them to networks. Which involves sourcing the talent, building a sizzle video (a thirty-second promo for something that doesn’t exist yet), and then shopping that sizzle around to try and sell it to a network. While I was there, we didn’t sell any shows, presumably because my boss was an idiot.
Apollonia did all the work, so that the Vice President and the Senior Vice President—who were the only other members of her team—could helicopter around the city meeting other vice presidents and senior vice presidents for lunch, and generally acting like high-powered media executives. During the time she worked there, the result of such efforts was precisely zero.
How did this happen? And what happens when an idea is accepted? One current Hollywood scriptwriter was kind enough to send me his insider’s analysis of what went wrong and how things now play out:
Oscar: In the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the 1920s to the 1950s, studios were vertical operations. They were also companies headed by one man, who took all the decisions and who banked his own money. They were not yet owned by conglomerates, and they had no board of directors. These studio “heads” were far from intellectuals, or artists, but they had gut instincts, took risks, and had an innate sense about what made a movie work. Instead of armies of executives, they would actually hire armies of writers for their story department. Those writers were on the payroll, supervised by the producers, and everything was in-house: actors, directors, set designers, actual film stages, etc.
Starting in the sixties, he continues, this system came under attack as vulgar, tyrannical, and stifling of artistic talent. For a while, the resulting ferment did allow some innovative visions to shine through, but the ultimate result was a corporatization far more stifling than anything that had come before.
Oscar: There were openings in the sixties and seventies (New Hollywood: Beatty, Scorsese, Coppola, Stone), as the film industry was in complete chaos at the time. Then, in the 1980s, corporate monopolies took over studios. It was a big deal, and I think a sign of things to come, when Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures (for a short while). From then on, movies wouldn’t be made by those that liked them or even watched them. (Clearly, this ties in with the advent of neoliberalism and a larger shift in society.)
The system that eventually emerged was suffused with bullshit on every level. The process of “development” (“development hell,” as writers prefer to call it) now ensures that each script has to pass through not just one but usually a half dozen clone-like executives with titles such as (Oscar lists some) “Managing Director of International Content and Talent, Executive Managing Director, Executive Vice President for Development, and, my favorite, Executive Creative Vice President for Television.” Most are armed with MBAs in marketing and finance but know almost nothing about the history or technicalities of film or TV. Their professional lives, like that of Apollonia’s boss, seem to consist almost entirely of writing emails and having ostensibly high-powered lunches with other executives bearing equally elaborate titles. As a result, what was once the fairly straightforward business of pitching and selling a script idea descends into a labyrinthine game of self-marketing that can go on for years before a project is finally approved.
It’s important to emphasize that this happens not just when an independent writer tries to sell a script idea to a studio on “spec,” but even in-house, for writers already inside a studio or production company. Oscar is obliged to work with an “incubator,” who plays a role roughly equivalent to that of a literary agent, helping him prepare script proposals that the incubator will then pass to his own network of top executives, either within or outside the company. His example is of another television show, though he emphasizes the process is exactly the same for movies:
Oscar: So I “develop” a series project with this “incubator” . . . writing a “bible”: a sixty-page document that details the project’s concept, characters, episodes, plots, themes, etc. Once that’s done comes the carnival of pitching. The incubator and I propose the project to a slew of broadcasters, financing funds, and production companies. These people are, purportedly, at the top of the food chain. You could spend months in the vacuum of communications with them—emails unanswered and so on. Phone calls are considered pushy, if not borderline harassment. Their jobs are to read and seek out projects—yet they couldn’t be more unreachable if they worked from a shack in the middle of the Amazon Jungle.
Pitching is a strategic ballet. There is a ritual delay of at least a week between each communication. After a month or two, however, one executive might take enough of an interest to agree to a face-to-face meeting:
Oscar: In the meetings, they ask you to pitch them the project all over again (although they’re supposed to have already read it). Once that’s done, they usually ask you prewritten one-size-fits-all questions filled with buzzwords . . . It’s always very noncommittal, and without exception, they tell you about all the other executives that would need to approve the project in case it would be decided to move forward.
Then you go, and they forget about you . . . and you have to follow up, and the loop begins anew. In fact, an executive will seldom tell you yes or no. If he says yes, and then the project goes nowhere or else gets made and bombs, it’s his responsibility. If he says no and then it succeeds somewhere else, he will get blamed for the oversight. Above all, the executive loathes taking responsibility.
The game, then, is to keep the ball in the air as long as possible. Just to option an idea, which involves a mere token payment, typically requires approval from three other branches of the company. Once the option papers are signed, a new process of stalling begins:
Oscar: They will tell me the document they optioned is too long to send around; they need a shorter pitch document. Or suddenly they also want some changes to the concept. So we have a meeting, we talk it over, brainstorm.
A lot of this process is just them justifying their jobs. Everybody in the room will have a different opinion just for the sake of having a reason to be there. It’s a cacophony of ideas, and they talk in the loosest, most conceptual terms possible. They pride themselves on being savvy marketers and incisive thinkers, but it’s all generalities.
The executive loves to talk in metaphors, and he loves to expose his theories about how the audience thinks, what it wants, how it reacts to storytelling. Most fancy themselves corporatized Joseph Campbells32—with no doubt, here again, an influence from the corporate “philosophies” of Google, Facebook, and other such behemoths.
Or they’ll say “I’m not saying you should do X, but maybe you should do X”; both tell you to do something and not to do it at the same time. The more you press for details, the blurrier it gets. I try to decipher their gibberish and tell them what I think they mean.
Alternately, the executive will totally, wholeheartedly agree with everything the writer proposes; then as soon as the meeting is over, he’ll send out an email instructing her to do the opposite. O
r wait a few weeks and inform her the entire project must be reconceived. After all, if all he did was shake the writer’s hand and allow her to get to work, there’d be little point of having an Executive Creative Vice President to begin with—let alone five or six of them.
In other words, film and TV production is now not all that entirely different from the accountancy companies mis-training employees to stall the distribution of PPI payments, or Dickens’s case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The longer the process takes, the greater the excuse for the endless multiplication of intermediary positions, and the more money is siphoned off before it has any chance to get to those doing the actual work.
Oscar: And all this for a (now) fifteen-page document. Now, extrapolate that to more people, a script, a director, producers, even more executives, the shoot, the edit—and you have a picture of the insanity of the industry.
At this point, we are entering into what might be termed the airy reaches of the bullshit economy, and therefore, that part least accessible to study. We cannot know what Executive Creative Vice Presidents are really thinking. Even those who are secretly convinced their jobs are pointless—and for all we know, that’s pretty much all of them—are unlikely to admit this to an anthropologist. So one can only guess.
But the effects of their actions can be observed every time we go to the cinema. “There’s a reason,” says Oscar, “why movies and TV series—to put it plainly—suck.”
• • •
The rule of finance has seen the insertion of competitive games of this sort at every level of corporate life, or, for that matter, within institutions such as universities or charities that had previously been seen as the very antithesis of corporations. Perhaps in some it hasn’t reached that zenith of bullshit which is Hollywood. But everywhere, managerial feudalism ensures that thousands of hours of creative effort will literally come to nothing. Take the domain of scientific research, or higher education once again. If a grant agency funds only 10 percent of all applications, that means that 90 percent of the work that went into preparing applications was just as pointless as the work that went into making the promo video for Apollonia’s doomed reality TV show Too Fat to Fuck. (Even more so, really, since one can rarely make such an amusing anecdote out of it afterward.) This is an extraordinary squandering of human creative energy. Just to give a sense of the scale of the problem: one recent study determined that European universities spend roughly 1.4 billion euros a year on failed grant applications33—money that, obviously, might otherwise have been available to fund research.
Elsewhere, I have suggested that one of the main reasons for technological stagnation over the last several decades is that scientists, too, have to spend so much of their time vying with one another to convince potential donors they already know what they are going to discover.34 Finally, the endless internal meeting rituals where Dynamic Brand Coordinators and East Coast Vision Managers35 for private corporations display their PowerPoint presentations, mind maps, and graphics-rich glossy reports, are all essentially exercises in internal marketing as well.
We’ve already seen how, internally, large numbers of ancillary bullshit jobs tend to cluster around such internal marketing rituals: such as those hired to prepare, edit, copy, or provide graphics for the presentations or reports. It seems to me all this is an intrinsic feature of managerial feudalism. Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches—allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it’s like to actually do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it.
conclusion, with a brief return to the question of three levels of causation
At this point, we can return to President Obama’s remarks about health care reform and allow the pieces to fall together. The “one million, two million, three million jobs” that Obama was so concerned to preserve were created, specifically, by the very sorts of processes we have just been describing: the seemingly endless accrual of layer upon layer of unnecessary administrative and managerial positions resulting from the aggressive application of market principles, in this case, to the health care industry. It’s a slightly different situation than most of those we’ve been looking at, since the US health care system, almost uniquely among those of wealthy countries, was always mainly private. Despite this—even more so after Obama, actually—it shows the exact same entanglement of public and private, economic and political, and the same role of government in guaranteeing private profits, as one is beginning to see in Canada or Europe with the partial privatization of national health systems. In every case (and in this case of US health care reform this was done quite self-consciously), ensuring that at least some of those profits are redistributed to creating well-paid, prestigious, but ultimately bullshit office jobs.
I began the chapter by speaking of different levels of causality. The reasons why individuals create, or accept, bullshit jobs are by no means the same as the reasons why such jobs will tend to proliferate in certain times and places rather than others. The deeper structural forces that drive such historical changes, in turn, are not the same as the cultural and political factors that determine how the public, and politicians, react to them. This chapter has been largely about structural forces. No doubt bullshit jobs have long been with us; but recent years have seen an enormous proliferation of such pointless forms of employment, accompanied by an ever-increasing bullshitization of real jobs—and despite a popular misconception that all this is somehow tied to the rise of the service sector, this proliferation appears to have everything to do with the growing importance of finance.
Corporate capitalism—that is, that form of capitalism in which production is largely carried out within large bureaucratically organized firms—first emerged in America and Germany in the late nineteenth century. During most of the twentieth century, large industrial corporations were very much independent of, and to some degree even hostile to, the interests of what was called “high finance.” Executives in firms dedicated to producing breakfast cereals, or agricultural machinery, saw themselves as having far more in common with production-line workers in their own firms than they did with speculators and investors, and the internal organization of firms reflected this. It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes—that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies—effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.
On a deeper level, this realignment set off a whole series of trends that had enormous implications on virtually everything that was to follow, from changes in political sensibilities to changes in directions of technological research. To take just one particularly revealing example: back in the 1970s, banks were still the only companies that were enthusiastic about the use of computers. There seems to be an intrinsic connection between the financialization of the economy, the blossoming of information industries, and the proliferation of bullshit jobs.36
The results were not just some sort of recalibration or readjustment of existing forms of capitalism. In many ways, it marked a profound break with what had come before. If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig vo
n Mises or Milton Friedman. It is increasingly a system of rent extraction where the internal logic—the system’s “laws of motion,” as the Marxists like to say—are profoundly different from capitalism, since economic and political imperatives have come to largely merge. In many ways, it resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.
This was the structural level. In the next two chapters, I will turn to the cultural and political level. Here, of course, it is impossible to be neutral. Even to ask why it is that the existence of forms of pointless employment is not seen as a great social problem is to at least suggest that it really ought to be. Clearly, the original essay acted as a kind of catalyst in this regard—it seized on a broadly existing feeling that had not really found any other voice outside the corridors, a sense that something was very wrong with the organization of society, and it provided a series of frameworks for how one might begin to think about those issues in political terms. In what follows, I will expand on those suggestions, and think a little more systematically about what the larger political implications of the current division of labor actually are, and what might be done about the situation.
Chapter 6
Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work.
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