This is a Carousel guest piece by an anon
Work has many synonyms: drudgery, toil, the grind, the great, big suck. All these words signal the same thing—work is hell. This has been true since getting kicked out of Eden. Work breaks your back and your spirit. It makes you humble. It makes you value little things like your daily bread and the prospect of eight hours of peace in a warm bed. In our contemporary epoch, office work, which was once lauded as the preferable alternative to manual labor, is especially hellish.
The office worker is subjected to daily humiliation rituals of Kafka-esque complexity like attending “optional” birthday parties for Susan in Accounting’s dog or sitting through the same DEI training seminars again and again. The HR harridans who rule over this dystopia, never completely log off and are always ready to file a complaint about the mildest touch of spice. Fifty thousand a year is nice, after all, and it would be sad to part with it. The office worker repeats that litany again and again as yet more dead weight is piled on his back.
The archetypal desk jockey who is hassled and tormented and forced to walk on a million eggshells daily is pale man with hidden reactionary sympathies. The type is you. The type is me. Until recently, the break room Bircherite and the fax room fascist had only chat rooms and message boards to assuage their troublesome times in the cubicle sarcophagus. Now, thanks to two anons from within their ranks, there exists a world of dissident literature dedicated to exposing the modern office in all its horror.
The authors in question are the Englishman Mencius Moldbugman and the American Zero H.P. Lovecraft. Though their biographies are sparse, little breadcrumbs left behind in their fiction and online indicate that they are men used to wearing white collars. One gets the feeling that both make a good bit of money, even when compared to the rest of the salary class. And yet both are class traitors who use their objectively mighty pens to gut the burdensome beast of the woke office. And like the haruspices of Rome, Moldbugman and Zero H.P. make prognostications about the state of things courtesy of the gory guts of employment.
Mencius Moldbugman’s crowning achievement, Unsqualified Preservations (Terror House, 2022), has the initial impression of a joke. After all, “Mencius Moldbugman” is a play on Mencius Moldbug, the famous nom-de-plume for popular Dark Enlightenment figure Curtis Yarvin. The book’s title is another goof, as Yarvin’s old blog was called Unqualified Reservations. And yet, the only kind of humor in Unsqualified Preservations is obsidian. This short story collection deals mostly in cruel and wicked horror, albeit a type of horror that is less supernatural and more earthbound. For instance, “Dumplings,” is a gruesome little yarn set in the fictional industrial city of Huaishi in China. The story is focused on the Golden Crane Dumpling Shop and their amazing dumplings. The city, especially its business and Communist Party bigwigs, are obsessed with learning exactly why the dumplings taste so good. The horror comes not in the revelation of the true origin of the dumpling skins, but rather in how nonchalant the city’s elite are about the revelation. Indeed, the cynicism and obscure ways of China frequently appear in the volume. As the author states in the book’s introduction, “China, due to its strangeness, its extremeness, its sheer foreignness to the Western world, represents an ideal landscape upon which to inscribe dystopian fantasies.” The introduction makes it clear that Moldbugman lived in China for some time, and is able to read and speak Mandarin (possibly Cantonese). Unsqualified Preservations knows China well, from the one-upmanship of mid-level party bureaucrats in “Dinner Party” to the dour socio-sexual dynamics of over-thirty women as represented in “Leftover Women.” Lovecraftian themes appear as well (“Nadir”).
But Unsqualified Preservations is more than a Western dissident’s look at the strangeness of the Far East. Far from it, in fact. Unsqualified Preservations is predominately an examination of just how bad things actually are. The modern world is full of semi-humans who are preyed on by even worst types. In “More Than Just a Housemate,” a liberal urbanite white woman becomes the sex slave of Muslim Londoners. “More Than Just a Housemate” may be fiction, but its real-world relatives can be found trying to hide their scars in Rotherham, Telford, and many other English cities. “Rickadoodle Applestrudel” is a disgusting takedown of Internet fame as well as an honest confession about the psychological hell of doxxing. “Shadowmen” and “Safe Space” do the uncomfortable work of getting deep into the cortex of a social justice-type female and her world of perpetual threat assessment.
Of all the manifold horrors in Unsqualified Preservations, the most terrifying may be the story “Human Capital.”` Much like Delicious Tacos’ groundbreaking “Autopilot,” which dissects the hell that is wage work (and futuristic alternatives to said hell), this story epitomizes the perdition that is the modern office. As it says on its very first page, the white male protagonist is “not in the office to work,” but rather “there to participate in social rituals” designed to humiliate. The protagonist is an unnamed white male who works for an unspecified company doing God knows what. That is not the point; the point of “Human Capital” is to show the white-collar experience in graphic detail. The narrator is 35 years old and trapped in a cycle of endless Mondays. Every day is the same—reading emails, trying and failing to find peace and quiet in an open-plan office, and doing the work of less competent employees. The narrator is convinced that he has wasted his life, and the world of work around him doubles down on this impression through sheer absurdity. There are the mundane annoyances, like Jane from Finance forcing everyone to pay $5 for her birthday cake, or sixty-plus emails from “sick” co-workers asking the narrator to perform their duties. There are more vicious actions, too. A Family Day celebration on Sunday is mandatory, and even a co-worker’s own family obligations do not qualify for an excused absence. “There can be no family fun outside of Family Day.” And for the IT department, which is run by two grumpy Indian men, only their co-ethnics are worthy of timely and efficient help. This is especially onerous given that nothing seems to work right in this particular office.
The true monstrosity, the unsinkable Cthulhu in “Human Capital,” is the ever-present deity of DEI. Because Zoe from HR takes issue with the protagonist’s “tone,” he is sent to an all-day respect seminar where the very first thing that occurs is a disrespectful joke at the protagonist’s expense (his pants are covered in spilled tea because of a green initiative to only provide paper cups in the office). The seminar is death-by-PowerPoint and other exercises in futility. And when everyone breaks for lunch, the protagonist is forced to pay for a Hawaiian pizza that he did not want and that will not clear through expenses. Such psychosis-inducing idiocy is enough to drive lesser men to weep in the all-gender toilet. Our unlucky hero merely escapes to the lavatory in order to watch anime.
At the end of the week, when everyone in the office shouts “TGIF” like trained seals, the protagonist and the other men in the office are forced to wear dresses in order to show their solidarity with transgendered Somalis seeking sex changes. The protagonist is called “gay” by the Head of Respect and Equality for not coming to work in a cocktail dress. Rather than explain that he had slept in the office all night in order to catch up on all the missed work from the week, the narrator puts on a dress that once belonged to Zoe from HR’s grandmother. As an extra touch, the narrator shoves a bloody tampon up his anus. In this motely, the narrator meets with the company’s CEO to conduct a performance review. The boss is grim and outlines the narrator’s sins: “You used the wrong tone to Zoe in HR. You raised your voice to a person of colour in IT. Your invoices are late. You lack team spirit. You tried to put a pizza through expenses.” There is only one way to resolve these issues and secure a promotion at the same time, the boss says. The company’s commitment to diversity and to promoting only women in the quarter necessitates a gender change for the protagonist. “Are you committed to gender balance?” the female boss asks. When the protagonist answers in the affirmative, he commits himself to a kind of spiritual death.
The narrator ends the story as a newly proclaimed transgender woman. His proclamation is greeted warmly in the office, but, on Facebook, one of his old schoolmates reacts to the news with, “I WILL NOT LIVE IN THE POD! I WILL NOT EAT BUGS.” This message is ignored, and the narrator ends the story with a grin covered in vegan cake. “TGIF” they shout as it all fades to black. “Human Capital” is so disturbing because it so familiar, albeit slightly exaggerated in some respects. What the story gets absolutely right is the sense of all-pervasive surveillance in the contemporary office . There is no separation between work and life, which is blackly comical given how frequently business leaders and their mouthpieces stump for the necessity of a “work/life balance” for all employees. The offices of our day combine Foucault’s Panopticon, with is unblinking surveillance, with Weaver’s Great Stereopticon, where those in power “project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated.” There is also the specter of the Longhouse, wherein the increasingly feminine quality of the office (and general tenor of Western life) has lead to a cloying communalism that stifles creativity and mandates ever-present “mindfulness” for the safety and feelings of the entire office hive. Such an existence is maddening.
Those currently in power across all facets of Western civilization have a certain view of life that they want imitated, even if many of their citizens seek quite the opposite. The unnaturalness of it all is represented well by the artificial transformation of the protagonist at the end of “Human Capital.” Whether this transgender transformation is legitimate or not is immaterial; what is important in the story is the fact that all nodes of the power spectrum encourage such transformations until resistance is defeated. This is what full control looks like: the autonomous individual is proven to be anything but, as their precarious existence can easily be swallowed up by the savage, Lovecraftian monster that always seeks new suffering to satiate its own, highly fluid self.
Alongside Mencius Moldbugman, Zero H.P. Lovecraft, the king of dissident lit Twitter, has used his many talents to expose the blasphemous nature of work in the age of woke. His best-known story, “The Gig Economy,” is a complex, labyrinthine philosophy tract masquerading as a short story. The plot is essentially a minor vehicle towards pontification about money, the marketplace, the Internet, and the hidden occultism that links them all. Told in a distorted, piecemeal fashion meant to parallel the narrator’s broken brain (“I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been addled by the casino reward schedule of social media.”), “The Gig Economy” is truly Lovecraftian in its explanations of a secret intelligence controlling the modern world via occult tomes, ritual singing, and obscure gods, most notably the biblical Mammon. This is a pale explanation of a wonderfully intricate tale. Suffice it to say, “The Gig Economy” presents the entire techno-capitalist landscape as malevolent in design. The “ocean” that is the Internet swims with monsters unconsciously perpetuating a process of dehumanization. Said process is often started and extenuated by human volunteers, thus compounding horrors upon horrors.
Zero H.P.’s fiction is not meant for amateurs. His is a prose heavily versed in big-brained terminology and philosophical concepts. Like his namesake, Zero H.P. is interested in the complexity of the cosmos, albeit his fiction is less supernatural and more grounded in the darker edges of socio-political reality. One unique exception to this rule is his short story “Dagon.” Similar to a lot of Zero H.P.’s fiction, “Dagon” incorporates multi-media like screencaps, Twitter posts, or emails. Specifically, “Dagon” is told via a series of email screenshots, comic book-style text bubbles, and stock images slightly modified with blue and red overlays. The story starts how most real-world nightmares in the office start—with an H.R. complaint.
We’ve received a complaint. I’m sorry, I can’t say from whom, apparently one of your coworkers overhead a conversation between you and your teammate, Joanna. In the context we received the complaint, you were discussing her date from the previous night, and you made the remark, “there are plenty of fish in the sea.” You’re not in trouble. We just ask that you think a little bit more next time and use more inclusive language. Instead of that, why couldn’t you say something like, “there are plenty of others out there.” When you say something like “fish in the sea” you are, maybe unwittingly, invoking the legacy of fishing, and that can make some people feel unwelcome. We just want everyone who works here to feel comfortable in their own scales or skin, as the case may be.
What follows is the apology email, which is de rigueur in American life across the board but is especially acute in the office. What the apology email reveals is that, in “Dagon,” the standard American office has been replaced by one that features both humans and “Thalassian people,” aka human-fish hybrids cultivated by the Deep Ones. As described in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the Thalassians, also known as the natives of the vile town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, are the offspring of decades of copulation between sacrificial women and the Deep Ones, a primordial race of fish-humanoid hybrids who live in underwater cities. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is philosophically connected to the majority of H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre in that it warns against miscegenation and the importation of foreign customs (Innsmouth began commingling with the Deep Ones because the influential Marsh family brought the practice back to New England after experiencing it in the South Seas). In Zero H.P.’s “Dagon,” the origins of the Thalassians are not as important as their new roles as the mandatory diversity in the office. What the O.G. Lovecraft made freakish, Zero H.P. made familiar. The Thalassians in “Dagon” have been fully incorporated into the office and are in fact members of a protected class. Human employees must watch their words to appease the Thalassians. H.R. works on behalf of the Thalassians. The parallels with our reality are so obvious that they do not need further explanation. On top of that, Zero H.P. makes it abundantly clear in “Dagon” that the privileged place of the Thalassians is managed by inter-office functionaries, all of whom are women.
“Dagon” is a short, punchy story that ends on a joke. Two human and male co-workers, one white and one black, have a private conversation that both find refreshingly earnest. They talk about the foul smells that emanate from their co-workers, their revolting diet, and abrasive language. At the sake of sounding like a “Humanist” (shorthand for human supremacist in this context), one of the co-workers reveals that he just does not like the Thalassians. The denouement involves a joke about Chinese culinary oddities, which, in this world, includes an oblique reference to boiled Thalassian meat. Once again, as in Unsqualified Reservations, it all circles back to China as the land of dietary aberrations.
“Dagon” is a black comedy about alienation in the office. It is also about modern society’s inability (or unwillingness) to recognize threats. The Thalassians are not just non-human entities, but they are hostile to humanity and seek its enslavement. Such types do not make for good co-workers. The Thalassians, who were once stand-ins for all things foreign to WASP New England, now stand in for the DEI monolith, or left-swimming Cthulhu. It is the DEI agenda propped up by business and government interests, and secured by mid-level harridans, that consumes all and enslaves those forced to cohabitate with it. The creeping dread of “microaggressions” or social media posts seen by the wrong eyes are all the horror required in our epoch, and that is a direct result of the proliferation of American university culture, which became American office culture. Both Zero H.P. and Mencius Moldbugman inhabit this cloying culture, and as such, their unique horror stories exemplify and excoriate this culture from similar angles of attack. Techno-capital is anti-human, the office is a maze of torment, and forced multi-culturalism and globalism have unleashed bewildering minefields of bureaucracy that take on occult significance to true believers (i.e., everyone in H.R. anywhere).
The best horror, like the best comedy, includes the common with the perverse, the known with the unknown. Moldbugman and Zero H.P. often traffic in the arcane, but even their most outré offerings are grounded in reality. The overarching problem though is that our reality is unmoored from anything natural. And nowhere is that wretched reality more painful than in the office, where, for eight to twelve hours a day, normal men are subjected to endless mental torture that corrodes the soul and kills the spirit. From the capital P political to the small-scale stuff like prickly personalities and lazy co-workers, the office of today is something like the Chinese concept of Hell (地獄)—a multi-layered inferno where evil entities seek to purify the soul not of true sins like murder or adultery, but of transitory ones that only entered the civic religion sometime around 2011. Thus, the horror of Moldbugman and Zero H.P. is all the more maddening but it is so clearly fake. Cthulhu is real in ways that diversity quotas are not. That’s the horror of it all.
Nice haha lol
The antidote to office horror is to walk away from it, move to a small, college town in the mountain west, where the landscape always overwhelms the socio-political madness, embrace minimalism, and transmogrify the horror into comedy. The problem is the addiction to the horror, the horror being far more compelling to the brainiac than peace of mind.