...And This Is My House

To return to the Shire’s utopian status, as I have said before elsewhere, the Shire is not exactly an egalitarian peasant commune, the Shire is like. Idk man. Devon. Surrey. The Bagginses and Tooks possess histories and estates while the Gamgees occupy a different social position, though labour is largely invisible because the rural economy is aestheticised into a state of abundance. Sam's relationship to Frodo is genuine and profoundly important yet also its a relationship whose feudal residue isn’t ever stated to be directly oppressive. The social order is legitimate because it is imagined as reciprocal and organically evolved.

As a subject of study, I do think Tolkien's pastoralism becomes more interesting if you don’t simply call it nostalgic or resistant to progress, and once again I think he’s probably spinning in his grave like a chicken on a spit whenever it is flattened as such. The guy doesn’t once say all change is bad. He is perfectly capable of imagining desirable change, eg Aragorn's restoration transforming a ‘degraded’ political order. He does, however, distrust change that severes itself from inherited forms. It’s the basic ‘RETVRN’ formula: good political change is restorative and returns something to health, while bad political change assumes that society can be redesigned according to an abstract theory of change (sorry for the nonprofit speak, I am in recovery…).

And across the books, Tolkien repeatedly makes organic growth the standard against which modernity fails, and his ideal social forms often tend to develop gradually and acquire complexity without being deliberately engineered. Saruman does pollute Isengard, yes, but his pollution involves the sudden reorganisation of living systems according to an externally imposed logic, and Mordor takes this to its extreme, where the landscape itself becomes a military-industrial apparatus. 

In his very famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman he describes the central conflict of his mythology partly in terms of the desire for domination, and generally across his letters he repeatedly returns to the relationship between machinery, power and the pitfalls of imposing one’s will upon the world, wherein his hatred of industrialisation is inseparable from his hatred of instrumentalisation. And this is very interesting! He is a clever and extremely well read man, who can clearly see how mass industrialisation is and has thusfar been a transformation in the relationship between humans and the non-human world, and he actually is hostile to the concentration of power that accompanies technological mastery. Bro would actually fucking hate Amazon, because he recognises the violence involved in treating living things as objects; and disagrees with the idea that more productive capacity constitutes social progress. And honestly, same! I think so too! Hi-5 bro! 

But the difference between me and Tolkien is that the alternative he imagines is a return to embeddedness where production is embedded in locality and people embedded in local community, local community embedded in inherited custom, and all three embedded in a wider national landscape of differing peoples with a similar goal. And this is why the theme of ‘belonging’ and positive social bonds in Tolkien also very much fascinates me, where it’s often one of the things people are most compelled by and one of the reasons many are drawn to the legendarium, including me, even though it’s clear that the opposite of domination, for Tolkien is not emancipation but an idea of belonging, which is a different and difficult ecological category.

If the ‘value’ of a landscape is measured exclusively through the history of a specific community's relationship to it, you cannot avoid the question of who legitimately belongs there. And while there is a definite attempt to resolve that question through traditional racial exclusion, he also repeatedly distinguishes between peoples who are of a landscape and transformative forces that arrive from outside it. And these boundaries are not geographical alone, because Khand, Harad and Rhún are both part of the same landmass that makes up Middle Earth and Beleriand. 

It isn’t that Tolkien outright says “natives good, foreigners bad”, because I genuinely just find it uninteresting when the conservative argument is made in that flat and extremely boring register and wouldn’t even care enough to analyse it. But Arda is full of migration, exile, intermixture and displaced peoples, across ME, Beleriand and Valinor, not to mention how Númenórean history itself is founded upon migration, the War for the Jewels kicks off when the Noldor cross the sea, the awakening of the elves is followed by a mass migratory movement, so on and so forth, an entire mythology structured by movement across landscapes across thousands of years, where time itself conveys political authority. 

Conservatism at its most simple definition is a theory contingent on the spiritual and moral authority of accumulated social forms, ie the Burke-ian idea that institutions accrue legitimacy through development rather than fact of establishment. And that’s what I think is really interesting in looking at Tolkien’s pastoralism through the temporal lens, how he consistently trusts what has grown over what has been made. And so, if you look at it from that light, sure, Tolkien absolutely is a conservationist in the most literal sense of the world, because, and I am quoting from my own fic here sorry, though I use it in a very different context:

Do you understand now? How every successful conservation project must be, at its core, an explanation of why other people should care about something precious to you? A study of what has been lost already, and why, and what could be lost that might be worth saving, and why.

Because I anticipate this line of questioning, please note I don’t actually think there’s inherently reactionary about distrusting industrial capitalism or defending local ecological knowledge or opposing the commodification of land or arguing that human communities should exist within rather than above ecological systems. I agree with all of that, but I do think it’s worth looking at how Tolkien’s agreement with the same attaches those positions to a further proposition, in which the existing inherited community is itself an ecological good, needing only minor internal tweaks. 

Returning to his environmental approach, the threat to the Middle Earth landscape is consistently depicted as a destruction of accumulated time, and the ‘dying world’ of LotR presents us infinite varieties of ruin, all characterised as the long defeat. And when social continuity is treated as analogous to ecological continuity, the immigrant moves from another participant in a society's continuing history to a symbol of ecological rupture, or a natural disaster. 

“…the enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn… childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.”

Faramir, commander of forces in a territory directly bordering ‘the Harad’, where Haradrim incursions are common in Ithilien. 

And this is, mind you, written all in the context of the English countryside in the ‘final days’ of Empire where inward migration from ‘the colonies’ is still not as much as the ‘outward migration’ to them, yet is now noticeable enough that it becomes a ‘national’ problem instead of an urban one constrained to docks and industrial cities. And like I just said, the apparent timelessness of the English countryside is itself the product of substantial privilege. 

I can actually give a pretty good example! I’ve lived in a couple of rural areas in the UK (and much of it in Oxfordshire itself) and I can tell you that much of the English pastoral landscape today is inaccessible because land has been fenced off, or ‘conserved’, as private property or agricultural land. Ie it’s pretty easy from that position to see the romantic pastoral ideal’s real face: a landscape engineered to be represented as belonging to all “native Brits” culturally while being materially controlled by a tiny fraction of said “native Brits”.

Which is incredibly funny to me personally because the most recent example of this whole sentiment is how Oxfordshire has actually become one of the first counties in the UK to ban people hanging English flags on public property like lamposts. For those outside the UK: this is a recent occupation explicitly associated with far right groups, because there are extremely active groups doing that in rural Oxfordshire… not so much in the city of Oxford itself, because obviously the city is pretty diverse thanks to the university, and this brand of brave patriot generally tends to be too cowardly for the ‘finding out’ stage of ‘fucking around’. And the argument re: the far right hanging up flags on lampposts isn’t exactly a case of progressives claiming that Union Jacks are racist or whatever. But a flag is universally agreed to be a very efficient instrument for turning an abstract political claim into a claim about space and says, in effect, that this specific piece of public landscape should visibly signify a specific national community. 

The crucial seeming paradox here is that rural Oxfordshire was the first place in the country where this specific brand of ugly far-right activism, so often presented in the media as an urban problem due to increased interaction with immigrants, has ramped up to the point even the courts took notice. Because rural Oxfordshire is one of the wealthiest and most heavily protected parts of England, marked by large concentrations of inherited land, prestigious rural settlements, aristocratic landholdings, large conservation areas and wildlife conservation projects, AONBs (places legally declared as ‘areas of outstanding national beauty’) historic estates. And extremely powerful cultural investment, historically and in present day, in the idea of the English countryside. A third of the countryside in the region is owned by the Mountbatten family, of ‘Partition of Indian Subcontinent’ fame, and several estates lay empty because they used to belong to Russian oligarchs for decades before their assets were frozen in 2022. 

Basically, apart from Oxford itself and the university population, much of Oxfordshire doesn’t actually resemble the migrant-populated, working-class urban environments through which contemporary anti-immigration politics is usually explained and ‘justified’, and the county is full of basically variations of Tolkien himself, ie people considered as ‘genteel conservatives’ (🙄). Yet it still was a place where explicitly far-right mobilisation became particularly intense, and this a mobilisation not being carried out through the aristocratic population (many of whom live full time in foreign countries, including the Bahamas and the UAE) but the middle+working class white British population who form the rest of the regional majority and share this ‘pastoral utopia’. 

What wouldn’t Sam do for his Mr Frodo? 

And in doing right by his Mr Frodo, he does right by the world. 

Which, in terms of both class and race, I think should make us suspicious of an account of anti-immigration politics based exclusively on the idea of contact. If hostility was just a reaction to the experience of proximity to an unfamiliar/undesirable demographic, you’d think the most homogeneous rural regions would be the least anxious about immigration. Instead, you find anticipatory nativism, which is the political depiction of a threat to an imagined community whose defining characteristic is having not yet been irreversibly transformed. Which is a sentiment I’ve seen myself across rural Germany as well (although ‘apparent timelessness’ is somewhat easier to counter in that setting, for a myriad of reasons). 

Anyway, the case of Oxfordshire shows the anxiety is not “these people have changed my village”, because they haven’t. Instead of that, it’s “this village is one of the last places these people have not yet changed, and we have to prevent it from doing so”, where it’s not driven by the desire for an imagined past or utopian present but rather the fear of a counterfactual future. Which is exactly what plays out with the Hobbits’ storyline: the high drama of the Scouring of the Shire is plonked right at the end of the book after the main war, very interestingly going against established narrative formula, serves to prove that the Hobbits’ fears and anxieties about the possible plight of their homeland were absolutely correct. 

The temporal-ecological undercurrent in the legendarium is just so interesting in that it’s a fantastic demonstration of how the conservative pastoral imagination tends to first turn a historical and social arrangement into a landscape and then turn the landscape into what is deemed natural. And thus, defending the arrangement is equivalent to defending nature itself, and anything that alters these arrangements can consequently be described as ecological destruction. So the flag-lampost people, ie the hardest and most explicitly far right version of contemporary British conservatism, are simply just radicalising the idea that a place has an authentic historical character which political action ought to preserve, which is a deliberately embedded idea within the English pastoral tradition. 

And this rhetoric absolutely works! You have ‘ordinary’ white British working class folk trying to drive a small handful of immigrants out of a region where the vast majority of the landscape is inaccessible to said white British working class folk. And the rhetoric works because there is something worth conserving. The rural English landscape is beautiful, mass industrial development can destroy ecosystems, capital displaces communities, national approaches flatten local particularity, the urban housing market transforms villages into commodities. The rhetoric works because it engages with undeniable material contradictions, which is fine, and then offers a more ‘humane’ cultural homogeneity as the ecological solution, which is dangerous.

Because in a world of urban alienation and climate collapse, the desire for continuity is incredibly tempting even for people who in any other situation would not be radicalised so far rightwards. And I think Tolkien and other writers like him are at their most perceptive when insisting that a human life cannot be reduced to economic utility. It’s the perfect bait for economic and social discontent, the equivalent of blaming some Indian Deliveroo rider being the sole reason for your unemployment: there was once a place of abundance in which we all belonged together and had more than enough, and it is possible to get it back. 

Which I think leaves us with a more uncomfortable yet more interesting question than whether or not Tolkien was a ‘real’ environmentalist. Because he was! He genuinely is one! He enjoys his trees! Every good character is some brand of treefucker! But his environmentalism is part of a larger conservative ontology in which an accumulated past leads to a presumption of legitimacy. In the legendarium, home is morally privileged over elsewhere, continuity over rupture, inheritance over invention, development over upheaval, and restoration over transformation. And these are all ingredients for a very humane critique of industrial capitalism, but only in the right hands. Outside them, it just turns the preservation of a social landscape into a moral environmentalist imperative.

And I’m saying this partly because I get really fucking annoyed when people respond to this sort of critique in bad faith and intellectually lazy ways like “oh so you’re saying the Shire is fascist” or that “loving English hedgerows is now a cancellable offence huh” or “is Tolkien the only problematic writer in your eyes”. Nobody said that. I like a hefty hedgerow myself. I think all writers should be some brand of problematic. I am only saying that the legendarium’s underlying ecological conceit is often read as a politics detached from his views on race and gender, when it is absolutely establishing a conservative and reactionary theory of belonging by framing it in a compellingly emotional ecological register. 

Across the trilogy (and also across much of the writing of Beleriand), the landscape moves gradually from a vessel through which history has passed into evidence of whom said history, and thus the landscape, belongs to. The conservative pastoral is excellent at playing this remarkable trick of making migratory history and power structures disappear by actually preserving its traces, giving you ancient walls without enclosures (Shire, Girdle of Melian), ancient borders keeping out a dehumanised Other (say, Gondor-Harad) without the breaches (Haradrim boys being taken to Gondor as ‘tributes’), or certain contested territories without the complexity of conflict (‘Harondor’, Umbar). 

I’m not at any point denying that Tolkien was a genuine lover of the English countryside and the pastoral environment. He was! He genuinely did care about it! I just think that, imo, caring about the environment does not make someone ecologically progressive. What I want from ecological progress is less consoling and probably more difficult, ie I want to defend the conditions under which there can still be a future that doesn’t need to look like the world which produced us, and I give very little fucks about preservation because preservation always comes with custodians and custodians always come with curatorial decisions. I think that ecological conservation, at its most compelling, should have nothing to do with the preservation of anything that is or once was, and everything to do with defending the natural world’s capacity to pleasantly surprise us. As Elros says in the bird fic:

Still, the natural world is indifferent to our accounting. It keeps no column marked those deserving of death. Remove the cormorant and the mullet multiply until the eelgrass thins beneath them, empty the eelgrass and the fry lose their nursery. All of us are stumbling sword-first in the dark, dealing victorious wounds in the name of righteous restoration. Even though the world is composed not of victors but of a series of obligations: weed to current, current to fish, fish to bird, bird to salt, salt to rain. 

Colloquially, Corporate is the name we give large labor forces that are organized under a single hierarchy and function under a distinct identity. I'm talking about the work force and not the Corporation itself, because as part of the fun (read: unconscionable and corrupt) structure of modern day Capitalism, a Corporation is just a piece of paper that obscures individual ownership of things. We're not talking about the legal and financial entity of a Corporation (and the source of all those fraud ads about not paying taxes if you set up an S-Corp! Totes legit!).

I'm talking about the labor force. I'm talking about the actual people that make up a Corporation and how those people are organized and how that structure works.

Corporate at its core is bureaucracy under another name. Privatized bureaucracy, to tell it apart from Government bureaucracy, which is also deeply stigmatized and presented as an inescapable labyrinth that no mere mortal can traverse. This is equally bullshit. Don't buy that snappy, snarky nonsense. If governance and organized labor are inaccessible and incomprehensible, that only means they're forever out of reach. That you have no hope of affecting change or taking control of it.

That's a lie.

Ultimately Corporate is just a way to organize a large group of people to more or less effectively get shit done. And I know. I know. You've worked in Corporate and spent hours doing nothing. You think Corporate is the most inefficient fucking thing to ever exist. There's meetings and meetings and endless chains of emails. "Middle Management" is just a bunch of assholes collecting a large paycheck for doing nothing!

But see, that's the propaganda. That's taking your misunderstanding of how Corporate works and weaponizing it to keep you out. To keep you from seeing the purposefulness of it. If you don't understand WHY things are done a certain way, you can't identify who made those decisions and who benefits from them. And you can't really tell, at a glance, if you're dealing with a Corporate entity you want to interact with or not.

Ultimately, Corporate is bureaucracy: it assigns a role to each person and each role comes with responsibilities. What is obscured in most cases is how these roles and responsibilities interact with each other. And that's where people fail.

How it breaks down.

Let's say, for example, that you're hired as a secretary or personal assistant. And one of your roles is to manage meetings for your boss. Their entire job is meetings, it seems, with all sorts of people. And your job is to make sure their calendar doesn't contradict itself, and maybe that the meeting room is setup properly, for each meeting: i.e., if they need to present, there's a projector or the right cables or the right speaker, etc.

This is pretty straightforward, right? And when you're first hired to work Corporate, it really does feel like it's a simple job. You can manage someone's calendar. Send a few emails. Sure. And then friction happens: two very important, very busy people want to meet with your boss on the same day and at the same time. Or something is broken, in the meeting room.

The first friction, double-booking, is within the scope of your job. You need to reach out to their secretaries and negotiate time and see if it's possible to reschedule or move things around: you might need to reschedule other meetings and reshuffle the entire calendar to accommodate. But that IS your job. To manage the calendar. And that's something to keep track of to show you're doing your job properly. That you send cordial emails or networked with other secretaries to resolve this with a real time chat instead of a long email trail. Or traded favors to shuffle schedules, etc. That's within your role. That's something you're expected to do.

The second friction, however, it's not part of your job. It's a trap waiting to snare the unaware. Because your job is to make sure the meeting room is ready to be used. But your job is not to fix whatever was broken. And here is where the nature of bureaucracy/Corporate breaks some people. Some people will look at a frayed cable or a missing speaker and go "that's an easy fix, I just need to go to the hardware store." And what's worse, they'll do it. Out of their own pocket, they will pay for a cable or a speaker or what have you, and personally fix the problem. And they will feel very accomplished and satisfied with themselves. They will note this down and present it as "going above and beyond" when they talk about their performance with their boss. "Look at me," they say, "I'm fixing SO MANY THINGS."

Well, we have a name for people like that, in the Corporate sphere: The Well-meaning Idiot.

Because they're idiots. Full stop. They're in fact fucking up and documenting they're fucking up, and they're so busy self-congratulating over how Good They Are At Work, that they don't notice all the ways they've fucked up royally. But they're not mean-spirited idiots or actively trying to cause problems. They're well-meaning. They are trying their best.

It's just that their best doesn't work.

How it's SUPPOSED to work.

I know, I know. Hear me out. The thing about working in Corporate, is that there is probably someone whose job is to "fix frayed cables" and "replace missing speakers." There's probably a policy or an intake or a way to contact them and say "look, this meeting room needs to be ready by this time, and this needs to be fixed by then." And they would be able to help you deal with that friction without having to pay out of pocket for things. Or worse, they might not be able to help, because they're understaffed or underfunded, and your request not being fulfilled could be a blessing to them. Because they might have been telling their boss "we need more people/money" for months, but their boss can't actually give them anything, because there's no evidence of it. No one has complained. No one has documented it.

You went out of your way to be "a team player" and "think outside the box" and sure. You fixed your problem. But systemically. Structurally. The problem remains. The "fix cables and missing speakers" team is still understaffed and underfunded. Your fix is temporary. And possibly only benefiting you, individually. After all, if you bought the cable, you're not leaving it in the meeting room. That's your cable! You keep it for yourself and your boss' meetings.

But you will never be repaid for that cable. And you will not be graded on that cable, either. Because it's not part of your job so it's not something you're expected to do. It will get you a pat in the back and maybe some warm, social capital and maybe being treated as "a hero". But it won't reflect in your performance or your metrics or the things that decide if you get a better salary.

And that's the view that people don't see, about Corporate. Corporate runs on failure.

What you should have done was raise a request with that other team. And if they replied back and said "sorry, we're backed up and it's not possible for us to do this now"? You escalate to your boss. "Hey boss, FYI, the meeting room is not going to be ready for this meeting: the cable is broken and the team responsible doesn't have time/money to fix it." And then your boss - if they're a good boss - sends an email to the boss of that team, asking to be prioritized. To get it solved. And now there's documentation. There's evidence of an impact. So the boss of THAT team can reach out to THEIR boss and be like "see? I need more people/money." And because there's evidence, there's documentation, there's a paper trail, there's a bunch of people from varying ranks in the hierarchy speaking up about this being necessary? Yeah, something will be done.

The minimum viable solution will be applied.

And it will always be the minimum. As it should be. Remember, the point of a corporation is to make money. The reason there's policies and structures in place that demand evidence before authorizing fixes is because this is a measure against waste.

Imagine a world where, rather than going to the "fix cables and missing speakers" team, you had the option to just. Order a new cable. You don't pay for it, the business does. But you ordered it and they send it to you and it feels like YOUR cable. So instead of leaving it in the meeting room as public property, you decide to keep it. It's yours, after all. I mean, it belongs to the business, but you ordered it and it was given to you. It feels like your work laptop. Yours, but not really. But still yours enough to be exclusive.

What happens if someone else needs to use that meeting room? Well, they'll order their own cable. And now there's multiple cables, for the same meeting room, because without the friction of having a team administering those fixes and having to provide evidence of failure to release resources, you perceive things to belong to you, instead of being common goods.

Corporate policies have a tendency to be misrepresented as inaccessible and archaic and just straight up nonsense. That's propaganda. That's saying "I don't understand why this works this way, therefore it's nonsensical." Instead of "I don't understand why this works this way, therefore I should research and try to learn more." It's a thought-ending cliche designed to keep you from learning how to navigate this kind of dynamic.

And it's important that you learn how to navigate this dynamic. That you get comfortable and used to the fact "failure drives action" and "evidence justifies results."

Because that's how large scale groups of people operate.

Sike! We were talking about bureaucracy the entire time.

Bureaucracy runs on failure. Bureaucracy requires evidence of failure, in order to dispense a fix. The reason for this approach is to prevent waste. Waste can take many shapes! It can be money or food or time or people.

Bureaucracy is the best way humans have found to coordinate large scale groups of people towards a common goal. In the case of governments, to distribute and administrate common resources towards the common good. (Think, spending tax money towards improvements for the community.) In smaller scales, like activist groups or common good advocacy or sociocracy organizations the point is to divide labor up and distribute available resources towards specific goals.

Here's the thing though. In real life, we're not playing with cheats on. Money runs out. People burn out. Corporate (and bureaucracy) is frustrating and annoying until you realize the whole point is to preserve whatever resources we have and trying to route them to best possible recipient. This means people go without. This means there's always someone getting left behind.

That is the cruel reality of not having enough resources to do all the things you want to do. And in the majority of social endeavors you find yourself organizing large scale groups of people? You will not have enough resources pretty much ever. This is where compromises come from. This is where concessions and negotiation comes in.

This is where ideological purity seekers get shattered inside out and refuse to engage with the system. Any system.

Because there's not enough to go around to fix EVERYTHING. And if you don't understand how priorities are built, you are never going to be able to advocate for YOUR priorities to be taken seriously. You need to document failure. You need to build evidence. You need to SPEAK the language of bureaucracy, to get what you want.

But failure feels bad!

The elephant in the room is that failure sucks tho. Failure feels bad. Failure might require people to incur harm. Preventable harm! Harm that you could personally stop if only you step out of your role and-

Nope, nope. Look, I get it. I do. I'm brown and queer and fat and neurodivergent and VERY expendable. I understand there's a human cost, down the line. I understand there's a level of detachment and cruelty to requiring failure to action... and even then it doesn't guarantee that there WILL be a solution.

What that means is you don't put all your eggs in a single basket. And you become aware of what you personally can do. Where do you fit in the large scale system, what shape of cog are you. And where ELSE might you fit.

Because the thing that people forget in the midst of being paralyzed by the horrors is that there ARE multiple systems in action at the same time. Sure, there's government: but there's Federal and Local and State government. And even outside government, there's private and public support networks.

The lie is the idea that there's only one singular system and it's too complex and big to change or move with any kind of velocity. This is a lie. There are MANY and multiple systems of varying sizes and speeds, to respond to your needs. The more urgent your needs, the smaller the system you need to push for, because it's less numerical and more personable.

But the bigger the problem, the more long-lasting the solution you want, the bigger the system you want to tackle.

One of the most important things I have ever learned in my time as an activist has been the ability to scope out a problem and match it to the right size of system to interact with. Because yes, actually, it's insane to tell someone who is fucking starving "I get it, you're hungry, but we need DATA of starving people in order to start the multi-year process of reallocating resources to get people like you food." It's fucking evil!

It doesn't mean it's not true.

But you can get that data from a soup kitchen that's serving starving folk. You can route the starving individual to a immediate fix for their FUCKING STARVATION, while also engaging with the soup kitchen to use their data and use it as evidence to pressure local government.

All of these interactions are nuanced and complex, but they boil down to "someone has a job that is JUST to fix this, and by not routing people to them, you're fucking them up and setting them to fail." Think of all the librarians desperately asking people to use their services. Think of all the advocacy non-profits desperately wanting people to attend seminars or workshops. Because that's THEIR job and they have metrics and quotas. Because the resources are limited. And they need to justify the resources they've been given, to keep existing.

So how do I navigate this?

First and foremost, you need to accept that social problems cannot be solved individually. Please stop looking at issues as opportunities for you personally to be a hero.

Instead, figure out the shape of your cog. Where do you sit in any of these systems? And if you don't... then figure out how to join. Join local town halls. Join neighborhood watches. Join local humane aid societies.

Figure out what you are responsible for, and then try to route anything you're not responsible for to the person who is. Give them data. Give them examples. Make sure people and their needs are documented. That they don't end up as a conversation that no one remembers a month later.

Understand what are the metrics your resources are tied to. What do you need to demonstrate to get increased scopes. And also identify what are short-term solutions for those long-term goals that can be passed on to people in need.

Help people understand that challenging and reforming systemic issues is a long-haul, slow, tedious but extremely necessary process, and that it is a distinct thing from helping people who need things immediately. And that very often the people doing one are NOT the people doing the other.

Educate yourself and those around you, and do not let yourself be radicalized into paralysis. Don't let people convince you that you're too small to matter. That you can't possible affect any sort of change anywhere. But also be on guard against the people who see any kind of concession or negotiation as a betrayal. Watch out for attempts to diminish or negate efforts to improve things because they're not efforts to improve ALL things. Whether they know it or not, those people are spewing propaganda and trying to rob you of your ability to impact the world around you. Do no fucking let them.

Sure, sure, Comrade, but what the fuck do I do about my Corporate job?

Fair, fair. My main bone is the fact negativity towards Corporate structures very often bleeds into negativity about bureaucracy, which is truly negativity about large scale organization and the paths to empowerment that individuals have when they join a group of their peers.

And while these are all principles you can apply to your Corporate job, here's a few things to help you decode how to navigate that world:

Read the fucking policies.

Every Corporate job out there has policies in place. These are the ground rules. These are the things that truly dictate what needs to be done and by whom. Sure, a power tripping manager might be giving you all sort of grief, but what matters is the policy.

Read it. Understand it. If you don't understand the policy, ask the person who wrote it until you do. And then follow it.

And if you're ever asked to break or circumvent that policy: DOCUMENT IT. Get it in writing. Don't be aggressive or combative. Play the clueless nerd card.

"I'm sorry, I know in the meeting you told me to do X, but as I understand, it's policy to do Y. Can you confirm you want me to do X?"

If someone wants you, repeatedly, to break policy and is being slimy about confirming it in writing, document it yourself anyway, and consider passing it on to HR.

HR is not the enemy. They're also not your friend.

HR exists to keep the company from being sued. The moment you threaten a lawsuit, that's the moment HR starts treating you as a threat instead of part of the company.

While HR is not your friend and will not go out of its way to look out for you, personally, and you should not expect them to: HR exists to protect the company from lawsuits. Policies were written to enable the company to complete its work, comply with regulatory requirements and avoid lawsuits. When you avoid or break policies, you're a danger to the company and will be targeted by HR. Redirect that shit to whoever is demanding you avoid or break policy and duck your head to avoid the fire.

Do what you're paid to do, not what you think they should pay you to do.

The most important thing to be able to survive and even thrive in Corporate is to know what the fuck they're paying you for. What's your role. What are you responsible for. If at any point you're not sure, go ask your boss. Get it in writing. If your boss can't or won't give you clear expectations of what your role and responsibilities are?

Fucking.

Run.

Do not look back.

Do not let yourself be swayed by promises of future growth or raises.

If you can afford to, quit immediately. Otherwise, start looking for employment elsewhere.

Remember, the whole point of Corporate is that you're a cog in a machine. You have your little scope of what you're responsible for and what people expect you to do. You're the guy who wrangles the calendars. Or the dude who schedules the meetings. Or the guy responsible for replacing frayed cables. The system only works when everyone has a role and they KNOW what their role is.

When your boss can't or won't define your role, your boss is trying to exploit you. If you don't know what you're being paid for, you don't know what counts as extra. You have no real visibility as of what's considered the minimum you should do, or what success looks like. This is a common problem of companies that are large enough to be Corporate, but small enough to still have people who run things on vibes.

Nope. Fuck that. There is no amount of promised pay that makes that kind of environment worthwhile. I promise you, they will exploit you for all they can, squeeze every tiny bit of usability out of you, and then kick you to the curb and scam you out of as much money as they can, on the way out.

Figure out what you're being paid for. Get it in writing. And also get in writing what your boss considers "minimum" and "acceptable." You'll find in Corporate there's always the whole "year end review" about what you did and what you can improve and how to grade your performance. Well, you can't be graded without a metric. If you don't know what your boss thinks is "Satisfactory"? You will never be able to make decisions about your own work.

In toxic work places, this is by design. If you don't know what "good enough" looks like, they expect you to just. Work endlessly. Tirelessly. As hard and as fast and as much as you can. And that's a one way ticket to burnout city.

Which brings us to my favorite piece of Corporate advice:

Do not ever fucking put 100% on anything. Ever.

So the truth of it is, even if your manager isn't actively trying to sabotage you. Even if they're not a massive dick. Anything they see you do once is something they will expect you to do always. Unless you make a big deal out of it and get it in writing that it's a big deal and make an effort to remind them that it's a big deal? Yeah, they saw you do it which means you can do it, which means you should do it.

So no, do not stay late without overtime pay. Do not switch to work a double shift. Do not do more than you're required (BEING PAID FOR), without thoroughly documenting and clearly getting IN WRITING notice that it's a one-off and also what reimbursement you're getting for it.

But I just want to be nice to my coworkers! Right. So you're taking on the extra work instead of letting the system fail and your manager realize they're understaffed and need someone else to join. I mean, are you REALLY understaffed if you're there and able to do the work? For no extra pay? Why would they hire new people?

It all circles back to: what's your place in the machine? What were you hired to do? If they want you to change or move or do more, politely request a meeting with HR and ask to explore your options for further compensation.

You do this for money. They want you desperately to forget it's all about money. Do not fucking let them.

In the most general way, you're exchanging labor for money. However, you should be aware of whether you're selling specific actions/end results, or if you're leasing your time. These are not the same. And one might be better for you than the other.

Here's an example:

I get paid for doing a report. The report is my responsibility. The expectation is that I deliver the report on time. If I'm selling a specific action, that means I will be paid the exact same if I take an hour or forty, building the report. All they care about is that it's delivered on time. And in that scenario, the faster I can make that report, the more my time is worth.

Conversely, if the report is not as important as me being available during a certain hour window to answer questions/respond emails, I am leasing my availability. And since my boss is paying for that window of time, they probably want to see me look busy as much as possible, to feel like they're getting the most out of their investment. But looking busy doesn't mean being busy. And if it's been established that I get a certain amount of hours to do something, and I manage to do it faster? There's no real benefit to anyone about it. Because I will not get a break. I will get more tasks to do. And if it was a fluke, getting rid of new tasks is a lot harder than being assigned them.

You're not a slave. You're not a serf. Your purpose in life is not to be working 24/7.

But what if I'm idle? What if I could be PRODUCTIVE? Are you? Actually productive? Or are you putting the entirety of your sense of self on your ability to be a Good Cog and get a good grade in Working, to the point you sacrifice any kind of freedom and space to breathe you can afford? Are you actually helping or are you being a Well-Meaning Idiot and fixing shit before it fails and therefore ensuring it NEVER gets properly fixed?

It's just a job, dude. As long as you know your role and your responsibilities and you're keeping up with those?

It's okay.

A job should not feel like torture. I get it, we're in a Capitalistic hellscape and everything is awful all the time. But like. Do remind yourself, even if you can't, for any reason, remove yourself from the Torment Nexus that is your job: a job should not feel like torture. You're not insane for wanting to be treated with respect. There are in fact places where you can exchange labor for money and not be routinely exploited. I hope you're able to find one.

But mostly?

Understand the systems around you. Understand the systems you belong to. Identify when they're broken and when they're fixable.