[nickff]

I actually don't understand what you or the article mean by "meaningful and meaningless work", the article approaches an explanation in one paragraph, but they seem to have left a lot to interpretation by the reader. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

>"In a system where, as Gorz puts it, “we produce nothing of what we consume, and consume nothing of what we produce,” it is up to each and every one of us, connecting with others as a collective mass, to regain control over the meaning of work and over the determination of the needs that legitimize it. This is also the way for us to question the disastrous impact that the economy is having on the environment through its blind logic of profit and growth."

[Pet_Ant]

I once got invited a meeting so that we could bill the client for my time even if I had no idea what the project was about. But they had no work for me to do, so I went to the meeting and ate sandwhiches and faded into the background. So, I got paid: it was useful. However, it did not make an positive contribution to the world in a way that it provided my life with meaning.

I have volunteered at the foodbank and with the homeless. I got paid nothing, but it had an effect on the world that aligned with my values and provdided meaning, but it was effectively useless for me.

[jiggawatts]

My favourite example is one team writing the internal compliance reports for some regulation that was repealed long ago, but the internal requirement persisted because… nobody cared enough to even check if it’s still needed or not.

As a random example of this kind of thing: I saw a manager spend a month manually tallying up the disk usage on a fully virtualised storage array… VM by VM, volume by volume. Not realising that as a consequence of the layers abstractions, the resulting numbers will be totally meaningless. I.e.: an empty 2 TB volume might need only a couple of gigabytes on the array… or the full 2 TB if someone had accidentally “full” formatted it… except that deduplication was enabled across volumes, so… who knows!?

The only number that mattered was the post-dedup allocated block count which the storage array conveniently provided on the status screen. At the time it was 1%, which translates to “don’t worry about it”.

He worried about it. Spent weeks and weeks with Excel tallying up the total, getting nonsense, trying again, over and over.

You see, two decades earlier, storage arrays didn’t dedup, VMware was not a thing, and there wasn’t a nice neat little percentage that they array itself could report. You had to tally up each volume in each server, it was the only way. So a policy was written that it’s someone’s job to go do this every six months or whatever.

So this guy followed the policy. He tallied things up.

Like a meat robot following the last instruction left by a deceased master.

It was depressing to watch.