“P

“paula”@paularambles

You see, what fascinates me about “remember to not smile” is that he needs his pain to be witnessed. He suffers at 4am, okay, fine, many people suffer. But then, immediately, he makes a slide! He gathers the entire company! He writes an article! Is it not clear what is happening here? Suffering without an audience simply does not count. This is ideology at its purest. We see here the old Protestant trick in its Silicon Valley form: success alone is vulgar, almost pornographic. My god, you cannot simply succeed. It must first be purified through unnecessary suffering. So you get this obscene reversal where pain stops being a cost of the product, and instead becomes the product itself. The developer documentation is, how do you say, merely the byproduct, the excrement of the true production, which is the suffering. As Hegel already knew, and here I think even Lacan would agree, although perhaps not, the true obsession is always with deserving success. Here I must tell you this old joke from Soviet Union. A worker says: "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Now here it is inverted, which I claim is much worse. They are paid perfectly well, wonderfully well, and so they must pretend to suffer. Do you see the perfect madness of this? And now, the ultimate obscenity. Imagine the company succeeds while everyone leaves at 5pm. Catastrophe! Total ontological catastrophe! In this worldview, I am tempted to say, failure would almost come as a relief. Failure means you simply did not suffer enough, go back, suffer more. But success at 5pm? This cannot be explained. So when he says "remember to not smile," this is a desperate command of the superego. If you smile, we will all discover the pain was never necessary.

AG

Anna Gát@TheAnnaGat

@paularambles @macbohannon I never know whether these guys are writing parody