Note: I was angsty and working corporate at 18 when I wrote this, I'm sorry. -Jas, 2022
Redundancy essentially means uselessness. It's an ambiguous term which demands many parameters. Yes, I've become useless, but how did I become useless? In what ways am I useless; in my ability to perform a certain task? In my ability to match the job description? In my ability to cooperate with my colleagues? Who gets to define 'useful' in this context? And what did I do to stop becoming it?
It was most likely when I started napping at work. I was employed as a casual 'Systems Analyst' (the definition of which, I found immense trouble externalising due to the discrepancy between the Techopedia definition and What I Actually Did, Everyday) at a financial institution. I seemed to assume the role of corporate factotum for five months, which was generous for an undergraduate. In at least three different teams at any given time, I did just about everything, save for purchasing coffees. Which was a tragedy, as the office was near a wharf, and on sunny and cloudless days, leaving the building felt like debauchery. Instead, I slaved away at Pivot Tables and communal refrigerator small talk.
But, I liked the numbness of this life. My brain-machine could run on autopilot for a while. The days became sedative. It was calming, because the tasks I performed were nothing I was ever interested in getting better at, or practicing, or critiquing. It simply Was.
I was not attending university classes at the time, so I read Pynchon and Foster-Wallace novels on the train rides into the city. They were not as challenging as non-fiction; yet not vacuous enough that I did not feel intellectually stimulated. This made me spry, and different from my antiquated co-workers. I pulled many muscles performing the mental gymnastics necessary to convince myself I would not end up like them. I would not go on lonely lunchtime jogs, drink capsule coffees for routine’s comfort, carry groceries on the bus home, complain to my faux-interested colleagues about my daughter's senior formal dress. I promised myself I would not, when I bought boxes of green tea from the crowded Woolworths, internally complaining about the price, scrunching up my face as I waved my iPhone against the self-service EFTPOS terminal. When I swung into the office lobby, finally past the snail-like revolving doors, those same antiquated co-workers were purchasing their fourth or fifth soy piccolo latte for the day (it seems the essence of corporate life are beverages). In the end, we both felt unsurprisingly desensitised to phone calls from our mid-level managers, claiming that we were suddenly useless.
In truth, what they mean to say is, you've always been useless; a need not needed, not no longer needed. This is the need not needed; uselessness. In a synthetic way, uselessness is also very necessary.
We, as white-collar technologists, do not ever commit acts in accordance with the natural law, in moralist theory. Yet, we are required for capital to run its due course. We sit at blue lights all day developing and documenting and still, when we walk out on the street, or breathe in the rancid air of the central business district, none of this truly matters. And it is not just what matters which should be considered, but what is natural versus what is moral. Deleuze interpreted Kantian moralism as a dialectic. Consider the processes, tasks, frameworks, or controls of corporate technology as a form of repetition in accordance with moral law. Fundamentally, moral law represents successful repetition through the form of duties which humanity has created for ourselves, allowing us to define acceptance criteria for our work. Hence, we can deem acts of moral law as successfully repeated. In systems development, technologists also create moral law – processes, tasks, frameworks, or controls – for ourselves, and continually define its parameters, so as to be in control of it and legitimise it. In this way, we hold legislative power over moral law (our work). When we illustrate process models, we also render process modelling as a moral law; a duty which may be successfully repeated.
Opposing this is natural law, which cannot be defined by conscious beings, as they observe primal instincts such as pleasure or passion. There is, hence, a lack of legislation over natural law. After all, we cannot control what emotions we desire to experience, only the means by which we do or do not experience them. Further, there is a striking absence of acceptance criteria for successful repetition of natural law. Even if we manage to experience primal, desired emotions, what criteria would indicate that we are satiated by this? Either way, both moral law and natural law are designed for repetition (even if true repetition, according to Deleuze, can never be achieved via these laws).
However, technologists in particular are horrible at upholding natural law. In theory, technologists should seek to measure the end results of any act, especially those which are repeated. Similar to the ways in which goals or milestones must be measured in a project. However, natural law cannot be measured unless we presuppose that truly natural actions are transcendental. Thus, there is no point in measuring at all. Moralists claim that this lack of criterion causes boredom and despair, as one may never quite fulfil these primal desires. But, if the alternative is moral law; something which cannot ever be repeated unsuccessfully, as any practitioner of it also holds legislative power over it , then I much prefer natural law's repetition. Success can also be its own boredom and despair.
And so, anyone enduring the tertiary education cycle at the moment who is hoping to analyse systems/business, or manage products, or even develop software for a living, has been hounded through a maze of expectation and reward. These expectations and rewards are always set for us. Students do not ever hold legislative power over moral laws; control over the work we must do, unlike professional corporate technologists. In this way we are coddled into believing that our natural law is calling functions, or drawing flowcharts, or writing user stories. Even social functions such as shared kitchen small-talk, attending conferences, and post-work Friday night drinks with colleagues become a part of this moral law, a sort of work which one must perform to avert redundancy. So that when we enter the workforce this is all we know, and eventually, moral laws blend in with the natural, and suddenly the dialectic vanishes.
Our natural law becomes defined by industries or the institutions which entertain them; so we never end up repeating, or even attempting to repeat, acts of natural law. However, if we simply practice unproductivity, or, in the perspective of capital; uselessness, we will quite rarely undertake moral law. The need not needed is therefore, necessary. By being useless, we find ourselves unable to carry out moral laws, perhaps psychologically in our self-esteem, or literally in our redundancy. Our primal natural laws require little hippocampal effort, and will blossom into our subconscious.
I think about what emotion I felt while on lunch breaks by the wharf; where I watched ferries arrive and depart at the dock, felt the misty sea breeze on my skin, and was blinded by the glistening of the sun on the ocean’s waves. It was not bliss, not admiration, not introspection, not numbness, not even gratefulness. I can’t describe what it was, but I would just be there. I was a living and breathing organism and I was thoroughly useless, even before my redundancy. So, I think that maybe sometimes, we, as students of corporate technology, need to be told, by a somewhat authoritative figure, "hey, you're useless”, and not let that bother us at all.