Erb Garden

Heroes & Bullshit

Abbie

In the spring of 1966, Abbie Hoffman was fired from his traveling salesman job at Westwood Pharmaceuticals. A self-proclaimed "American dissident", Hoffman had been using the company car to ferry civil rights volunteers from Brooklyn, New York to voter registration drives in Georgia and Mississippi when Westwood thought he was selling their drugs.

If you're familiar with Hoffman at all, it may be through the 2020 Aaron Sorkin film "The Trial of the Chicago 7". Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen gives a sparkling performance that at best amounts to a hollow, liberal pantomime of the radical anti-war activist in the American flag button-down. That film isn't really about Hoffman, however, centering the story instead around fellow defendant Tom Hayden (portrayed by Eddie Redmayne) who went on to serve in the California State Assembly and Senate, was married to Jane Fonda for 17 years, and better represented the 'work within the Empire' type that Sorkin could more easily relate to[^1].

My introduction to Abbie came sometime in the early 2000s on Cinemax one Sunday morning while Dad slept in. Directed by Robert Greenwald and released in 2000, "Steal This Movie" was an altogether different portrayal of the merry prankster. It highlighted his brilliant use of spectacle to draw attention to internationalist causes alongside his tragic naiveté, hedonistic foibles, and untimely demise. I loved him instantly, romanticized forever as my first ideological crush. He was only the second[^2] member of the veritable pantheon of Great Men and Women from whom I've cribbed all my best (and worst) ideas.

Budding outlaw though I was, I convinced a well-meaning adult to ferry me to Barnes & Noble so I could purchase the copy of Hoffman's Steal This Book which still lives on my shelf. Part anarchic manifesto and part anachronistic reference guide[^3] for surviving under capitalism, STB served as inspiration for no less than two controversial book reports and one listicle for my high school newspaper.

As a teenager, I watched Vincent D'Onofrio as Abbie Hoffman open a community Free Store[^4] with his friends and defend it from the police officers trying to shut them down. Twenty years later, my friends and I opened an overnight warming station and free pantry in Old First Presbyterian Church, which we would eventually be uninvited from by armed security.

In his 1841 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle argued that "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men". The stories that we're told are told from the top down, centering around the precious few individuals who we deem great; stories from above about how those of us below ought to behave and who we should defer to. Carlyle believed we needed men sent by God to model greatness for the toiling masses, that we should try to understand world events through their actions. It is one of the many ways society excuses valuing some lives over others and a mechanism by which those in power build a saintly mythology around our collected history, with caricatures of characters that obscure their humanity (or lack thereof). The stories we teach children in the US, both fiction and non-, have always been a battleground for maintaining Empire's narratives. This is exemplified by state legislation that prohibits the teaching of "critical race theory" like The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story or book bans targeting young adult novels about LGBTQ characters.

Oscar Wilde famously claimed that life imitates art more often than art imitates life by arguing, "the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy." Life imitates art which imitates life. This is what draws me to stories about people like Abbie Hoffman, Emma Goldman, Fred Hampton, and Afeni Shakur. They each believed themselves capable of changing the world as part of a movement. For a time at least, they each felt a sense of individual power within a collective, and used that power to do great things for their communities. They also shared an intense lifelong persecution for their beliefs by the United States of America; a fact which can have the intended chilling effect on anyone who might take inspiration from them.

(WIP Note: Connect these thoughts by writing about Hoffman citing Jefferson in his trial and the unsatisfying courtroom speeches at the end of both films.)

When Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent nation on September 2, 1945, before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, he began by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." We take inspiration from wherever we find it, but this was also a direct plea for support for their budding democracy from the United States against colonial powers in France. This request would fall on deaf ears. The principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote eloquently of freedom and liberty in 1776 and owned more than 600 human beings over the course of his life; at least 6 of those enslaved people were his own children with Sally Hemings. This "champion for universal rights" inherited Sally and her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, from his father-in-law, John Wayles—who was also Sally's father. Jefferson owned a number of his wife's half-siblings in addition to his own children. His plantation's website, Monticello.org, headlines his complicated biography thusly: "Lawyer. Father. Scientist. Writer. Revolutionary. Governor. Diplomat. Vice President. President. Philosopher. Architect. Slave Owner."

I feel overwhelmed by ideas too big to convey. I'm trying to explain what it feels like to begin to believe in yourself, to have confidence in your thoughts, to seek meaning in a sea of meaningless distraction. This belief in oneself seems to necessitate individualism, but no individual is going to save us. There is no Great Man coming, no Christ figure who can tell us how to live. This is something we have to figure out together, our emergent solutions popping up like weeds in the cracked asphalt of the United States' decaying infrastructure. We don't need permission to imagine a better world for ourselves, and we don't need heroes to worship: we need heroes to embody. However confidently one strolls into the dark woods alone, the creeping fear is inevitable; meanwhile, facing the unknown with friends is the start of many an adventure.

Abbie Hoffman understood something about the necessity of a marriage between individualism and collectivism. His "key to the puzzle" to bringing together people who each had their own preferences and needs and capabilities and dreams was to "...ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO" (emphasis his).

(WIP Note: This idea fits somewhere in here, but Graeber hasn't been introduced yet... As David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” To do that, we have to believe ourselves capable - but that feels like arrogance.)

Dreams

Once I began reading books by myself, I became a passionate storyteller. Growing up in the suburbs of the suburbs of Springfield, Ohio, my access to an audience was limited to my mother, grandmother, adult cousins, or my dad (on his weekends). I'd get neurodivergently obsessed with a topic and read everything I could about it, then perform all the most interesting bits for every grownup in earshot. My little sister and other children preferred less pedagogical games. To hear Mom tell it, I learned to speak in full sentences at 2 and then I never stopped[^5]. My family thought I'd be a writer, so when it was time to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life (age 12), my love of non-fiction was steered practically toward print journalism.[^6]

In 2006, I began what would be both my first and last year studying journalism at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. The first women's college to offer journalism courses, SMWC is a beautiful school with a rich history and a culture steeped in ritual. One visit and I was in love; then I was enrolled. Less than a month after move-in, I was hired by Stephanie Salter, the assistant editor for opinion and commentary at the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, into something of a dream part-time job for an idealistic journalism student with a penchant for the gothic. I love telling people that my first real job was writing obituaries[^7].

The importance of death notices to the public record was impressed upon me as a child when I spent the summer hogging the family computer to scour Ancestry.com for 19th century obituaries and 18th century passenger manifests. Through these documents, I was able to follow my ancestral tree's many branches across the Atlantic to Ireland, England, Germany, and France. At 10, I was a horse girl; at 11, a genealogist.

In the ten months that I wrote obituaries, I learned that much of the job was being an ear for grieving relatives who might cry over the cost or yell at you because they feel so helpless. I learned that there are endless euphemisms for "so-and-so died" and nearly as many ways to spell the name Crystal. I learned that print journalism was a dying industry, that the majority of my coworkers were freelance pessimists, and that funeral directors could be a bit weird on the phone.

Stephanie was a wonderful boss and the work we did actually mattered, but I was a depressed 19 year-old in a toxic relationship that I couldn't see my way out of in a healthy manner. My seemingly impractical dreams of being a journalist, but not in a way that just profits off of other people's misery[^8] died an unceremonious death alongside my traditional college experience the weekend I quit, dropped out, broke up, and moved back to Springfield to live with my mom and sister.

From 2007 on, I worked a number of part or full-time jobs and took classes at a series of community and online colleges. By 2014, I was living with my partner in Columbus and had cobbled together enough credits for a Bachelors of Science in Management Information Systems from Franklin University. I did not attend my graduation, but I did spend the next 18 months trying in vain to begin my lucrative career as a business analyst or project manager. These promised jobs, it turned out, were the sort more often done by burnt-out software engineers than by fresh college graduates with no related experience. I couldn't shake the feeling that my degree had been a $40,000 box-ticking endeavor (with interest) that did not open doors for me.

Unemployed and increasingly desperate, in 2014 I applied for a local pilot program with the Chicago code school Dev Bootcamp. The for-profit education company Kaplan, Inc acquired the school earlier that year and was testing a hybrid in-person and remote approach on Columbus' everyman[^9] market. I could never afford their usual $10,000 program but I could scrape together the pilot's discounted rate of $500. After an extensive application and interview process, I was accepted alongside 13 others. The experience changed my life. After 19 intense 60-100 hour weeks, I graduated with my six remaining peers. Within a month I was hired to refactor Perl for a global payment processor, making twice what my mother made advising students for a university. Six months later, I filed into a rented conference room at 7:30 in the morning with 20 of my coworkers where we were informed we had been laid off, days before my partner and I closed on a house and a week before Thanksgiving. Dev Bootcamp closed its doors in 2017, and that payment processor was acquired by a bigger fish in 2020.

Every bit of work experience from the moment I graduated from high school served to temper my dreams and marked the most direct path to the middle class: bullshit tech jobs.

Bullshit Jobs

On Monday, January 5th, 2015, London tube passengers faced with the twin perils of a return from their holiday break and a gray winter morning were greeted by a bold guerrilla campaign. In place of the usual advertisements were signs that posed a complex philosophical question, "How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?" One must imagine those commuters happy.

Other yellow and black signs made the following challenging declarations:

Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.

The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Signed “#bullshitjobs”, these phrases were all lifted from the 2013 STRIKE! magazine essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" by the late anthropologist David Graeber. Widespread public response to the campaign led market research firm YouGov to conduct a poll to "verify if the attitude expressed in the article is as prevalent as it says". The poll found that indeed, the feeling was pervasive. 37% of working British adults surveyed said their job was not making a meaningful contribution to the world, compared to 50% of British workers who felt theirs did and 13% who were unsure. Men (42%) were more likely to say their jobs were meaningless than women (32%).

Graeber expanded this article into Bullshit Jobs: A Theory in 2018, a book which he dedicated "To anyone who would rather be doing something useful with themselves." By the time I read it in late 2022, I had already been fully radicalized by my bullshit career, an intense self-directed program of study, and heavy involvement in mutual aid work. Chapter by chapter, Graeber recounted work experiences that reflected my own, articulated in great detail by people who felt similarly alienated from their labor. Some responded with shame, particularly those from working-class families who graduated college full of expectations only to discover that the "real world" has no REAL use for them. Others were overtaken by anger or despair like student union convenience store clerk Patrick, whose chief critique was that his unbearably pointless work gave him too much time to think:

"So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive. I couldn't stop thinking about how miserable it made me."

A lifelong job hopper, I was convinced (and my critics may still be) that the capital-p Problem that led to my departure from most employers within a year was my poor work ethic—as much as I tried to care about company objectives, deep down I was a clock-watcher whose greatest failure as an employee was that I couldn't force myself to do anything that seemed.. kinda pointless, no matter how simple or painless it may be. I knew many white collar workers were paid the Big Bucks to fuck around because I myself spent years fucking around professionally across multiple industries. It seemed systemic. I watched my coworkers dodge work similarly with extended lunch breaks, hour-long watercooler conversation, endless doomscrolling, ping pong tournaments, and near-universal Friday afternoon work stoppages. I myself carved out significant time for reading, errands, and 15 minute cigarette breaks[^10] that doubled as walks around the neighborhood. As a slacker, I'd like to think I displayed the sort of gumption and inventiveness in my pretending to work that my employers had hired me to apply to their problems.

When the pandemic began, I was employed as a user experience engineer for ScriptDrop, a healthcare IT company. I respected my coworkers but no matter how hard I tried to make the job something I could care about, this was like wringing blood from a stone. I couldn't shake the sense that nothing I did for that company could possibly be more impactful than the mutual aid work I devoted all my free time (and much of my paid time) to. My last 12 months there were spent working from home and pushing most of the tasks on my plate around like unsalted lima beans, preferring to use my limited hours and energy on community projects doing tangible good.

RadioFlav[^11] began when I spent the first five weeks of the George Floyd uprising in Columbus, Ohio listening to police scanner traffic and Tweeting any relevant bits for whichever protesters might be there looking for local information. This coverage proved incredibly useful and grew into a much larger effort. It was my first taste of starting something real and seeing it blossom; I experienced the "pleasure at being the cause", a term coined by 20th century German psychiatrist Karl Groos for the joy derived from seeing our actions have concrete effects on the world around us, as observed in infants discovering their own power for the first time. Meanwhile, my bullshit paid work languished and my shame and anxiety over it ballooned. In the spring of 2021, I resigned unceremoniously via email on a Monday morning, when the suicidal ideation and my crumbling sense of self had become too much to bear.

If I had waited two weeks more, I could have been let go during a round of layoffs documented in this anonymous review left on Glassdoor:

"... They had to lay off 20 more people recently just to give us a very small pay increase. After lying to those employees about receiving a raise that same week. It feels like blood money. Management is either completely oblivious about what this does to morale or just plain doesn’t care. Anyone with a brain is already looking for other work. Literally all we do is offer software so that random couriers can deliver prescriptions for pharmacies. Do you want DoorDash or Lyft delivering your controlled substances? No? Neither do most of our pharmacies. They’re not told that’s what is likely to happen when they sign up. Much of the job is apologizing to pharmacies about why we’re so terrible ... The company and concept are a complete joke."

Receiving unemployment and a hypothetical severance check might have bought me a few extra months, but I would have been required to sign a separation agreement with a non-disparagement clause. As it stands, I retain (and enjoy) the ability to disparage ScriptDrop full-throatedly.

Recently my therapist introduced me to the term "moral injury", or the distress that can emerge when it feels your values have been violated by either yourself or another—a feeling I've been contemplating since the spring of 2020. As soon as the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was understood, my entire engineering team began working from home. This non-negotiable decision was backed up soon after when, on March 19th, the Director of the Ohio Department of Health Dr. Amy Acton issued a statewide stay-at-home order. Many of our colleagues followed suit. Exceptions were of course made for "essential activities" by workers for "essential businesses or operations". As they were ostensibly running a healthcare company, executives were quickly permitted to classify the customer service representatives as essential. This ensured that the employees responsible for apologizing to pharmacies for ScriptDrop's business model could bring their laptops into the office to take calls under constant supervision. They were overseen by a particularly reviled and COVID-skeptical manager. Masking was not enforced, daily attendance was.

My sense of secondhand moral injury was crystalised months later when all the in-office employees were assembled in a cramped conference room for an announcement. While remote workers watched the 360 degree Meeting Owl camera rotate between speakers, on-site employees were informed that at least one of them had contracted COVID and that they would begin working from home the following day. My feelings of helplessness and horror were validated when a teammate unmuted his microphone to rhetorically ask if this might have been safer news to deliver via email or Slack.