Circling Back to Corporate Lingo

Flagging that the neoliberal hivemind has beaten your thought process into submission.

---

ChatGPT was taught how to speak like a corporate middle manager—and it is very good at making sure we’re “aligned” and sometimes it flags something really important. People assumed this meant AI was conscious instead of realizing that middle managers aren’t. The corporate yes-man lackey vibe is embodied in phrases like Let’s get the ball rolling. We don’t work at a goddamn bowling alley. At some level, this is just one way in which the asshole capitalists who are wrecking the world would talk like the sort of asshole capitalists who would wreck the world. Amidst the ongoing vandalism of basically everything by finance/consulting/VC and all its cretinous imperatives, and the epidemic of loser energy in the broader culture, the absolute neutering of the English language through corporate lingo sends me off in a mindbending fit of derangement.

Whether this deterioration is the result of buccaneering corporate delusion or just a dumb economic system rewarding succubi who will administer its routine operations, everyone now sounds like a robot. The adoption of this vernacular is an inversion of how ideas like “everyone is equal” and “we’re a family” have traditionally been used in the culture; where it has typically been deployed, always rhetorically and usually insincerely, as HR shorthand for the belief that every life has value and every person’s dignity is meaningful. Corporate lingo is a word salad of nothingness, but one that makes the assertion that every line of work and every person working in it is equally valueless and equally insignificant. It is, in its insidious way, also a statement of purpose: The more these buzzwords are thrown into a mush of ambiguity, the more it conveys competence. Corporate culture has a bizarre tendency to push folks like this to the top, even if their only employable skill is leveraging Microsoft Office products to create teamwork synergies and enhance client satisfaction, whatever that means.

The girlbosses and tech bros who talk like this are midwit narcissists, but they are also deceptive and manipulative. They are all clones of each other, with the same verbatim rise and grind speeches. They don’t feel “driven,” but they are compelled to ascend to the top of structures and shape-shift their persona and connections, conning their way into positions of power. Without a core personality, they read the room and create and recreate a false self. Adopting this kind of HR speak has been a boon for these psychopaths; it gives them an official language to be extremely passive-aggressive while feeling normalized and validated. They can shroud their interpersonal defects with a dialogue tree, canned phrases, and highly scripted social etiquette.

As modes of speech, the managerial and therapeutic lingo both distance the speaker from any more immediate relation to “you” in the singular in favor of a “you” abstracted from any particular relation or identity. This way of engaging others can be rationalizing, but it also assumes the pretense of a “higher” or “objective” POV in a conversation to defuse emotional tensions without addressing anything of substance.

If it was always foolish to expect the free market to improve anything, it feels more fanciful by the day to imagine a future in which the cynics and sociopaths in charge of corporate America do anything but justify their actions through bloodless dialogue. As circling back and putting a pin in this slips further into abstraction, this problem compounds and compounds. We all know these business dipshits are exhausting, but the interesting philosophical part is why the way they speak is annoying. We’re aware that we operate in a completely fabricated world of fake emotions, fake interactions. Any sort of human vulnerability, emotion, or organic nature is shunned, so we adopt this contrived lexicon to mask a decaying world, even if the people who speak like this sound like they have some form of brain aneurysm.

I once received this message from a supervisor:

Hey team!

Let’s touch base on deliverables for the upcoming project. We need to prioritize the low-hanging fruit first, then let’s take a deep dive to create innovative solutions. We need to make sure we leverage our core competencies and synergize with other departments. We need to be proactive—not reactive—but proactive when it comes to thinking outside the box to drive home our key results. Remember, we are aiming for maximum ROI and seamless integration. Let’s go ahead and circle back next week to ensure we’re aligned, on-track, and really have the ball rolling.

I’ll give you back a few minutes of your time…

Based on how I’ve written this post, you can probably tell the degree to which my mind has been poisoned from constantly marinating in this milieu. I hate that I understood that whole message.

---