In days of yore, before the Great Enshittification, companies offered perks to their employees. You see, in these Before Times, the great Slow AIs – those ponderous, long-lived, infinite profit-printing machines – had not yet declared their desire to replace all their human employees with Fast AIs, and as such it was decreed that they should keep their living, breathing, meat-stuffed cost-centres more or less happy. To do this, they gave us Perks. And when I worked for New Zealand’s largest telecommunications company, which shall remain nameless and trades under SPK on the NZX, they let us eat cake, and pizza, and they gave us a Christmas present each year and a cool $150ish of phone credit a month, which meant every employee toted the latest Phone that is Smart.
(Early warning signs were when they reduced the monthly phone credit to something a lot more paltry and replaced the Christmas bonus with the company logo on a circular beach towel – riches, I’m told, compared to what they’re offering now, which is “a job, but only sometimes.”)
Another of the things this great company1 did is put on little events to rev us all up a bit, the better to extol the virtues of the Brand. Their main marketing dude – who I would later witness during one of company’s increasingly frequent rolling redundancy rounds skulling an improbable quantity of beer out of an expensive Italian shoe – commissioned an agency to make an ad, just for employees. It was called “[COMPANY NAME REDACTED] 2025” and it both ripped and slapped. It was a vision of 2025 which featured self-driving cars, implied climate change had been solved, and had those cool clear glass smartphones that are in all the futuristic movies and have never eventuated because they’d be awful. One of the slogans that accompanied the ad was “#littlewins,” hashtags still being relevant a decade ago. We were meant to look for the #littlewins in our jobs, and this we dutifully did, even if our uptake of the hashtag was more ironic than anything else.
I mention all this because #littlewins has stuck around, for me. It was one of the better bits about my best corporate job to date at a company that, current employees tell me, is a husk. Everyone is checked out, withered by constant redundancies, bizarre business decisions, and executive bonuses that have been awarded for services to “making services worse” and “annihilating the share price.”
You can feel the wheels coming off, can’t you?
Well, goodbye to all that. For now. My job for the foreseeable is making an offline-first product to teach kids and adults how to draw, and to make a tiny mountain of art to promote it. I think a lot of artists are frustrated by having to make videos to promote their art, but I’m lucky, because I see the videos as the art and the pretty canvases produced as an enjoyable side benefit. So here is today’s #littlewin; my first long-ish form video in over a year, with more to come. Because that’s what I do now! I write essays like the one you’re reading and I turn them into art and videos.
(The same rules apply as last time: you don’t have to watch this video, but if you do, please watch it until the end, and leave a Like and a Comment. And please do smash that Subscribe button; smash it until your phone screen splinters or your TV breaks.)
This next bit is more of a #bigwin, but last week I asked everyone who was interested to alpha-test my art product to nip over to https://www.arti.ly/ and sign up. I have room for about 20 people in the first cohort and I was expecting about ten people to put their names down. I checked back after a couple of hours and there were more than 50 of you. Now, without any nudging, there are over 100.
This is a bit mind-blowing. One of my main goals for the business – it’s literally in the business plan – was to get 100 people on the email list before week six. This was described by the investors, with some careful emphasis, as “ambitious.” Well, we’ve blown past that in week three. If anyone else wants to get amongst it, the link is below. I’ll be sending the first email tomorrow.
Thank you, as always, for reading. And if you have any#littlewins to share, or thoughts about either a.) the current corpoapocalypse or b.) any boltholes – mental or physical – you’ve managed to carve out from the emerging hellscape, I’d love you to give form to them in the comments.
- The company famously rebranded to a word that rhymes with “ark,” but before that was known as a word that rhymes with “elecom.” But I don’t want to say any more in case people figure it out. ↩︎
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