The Rhythmic Lie

My fingers hit the ‘asdf’ keys in rhythmic, erratic intervals, a Morse code of absolute nothingness, just as the notification chime from Slack slices through the heavy silence of my home office. I see the name on the pop-up: Henderson. My heart does that stupid little stutter-step, the one where it forgets its rhythm for a beat. I don’t answer yet. I wait precisely 11 seconds. I keep my cursor blinking in the shared Google Document, highlighted in that neon pink that tells the world-or at least the three people currently stalking the file-that Miles E. is ‘active.’ I want him to see the ‘Last edit was seconds ago’ timestamp. I want him to feel the heat of my supposed labor before I grant him the grace of a reply. It’s a dance. It’s a pathetic, digital minuet that has nothing to do with the 41 lines of code I actually need to fix, and everything to do with the optics of effort.

I’m a curator. That sounds fancy, like I spend my days in a museum with white gloves, but in reality, I am an AI training data curator. I spend 81 percent of my day looking at what machines think humans do, and the other 21 percent of my day trying to convince my own human bosses that I am doing more than I actually am. The irony isn’t lost on me. I am teaching models how to be more like us, while I am slowly being forced to act more like a script.

Yesterday, I sat and watched a video buffer at 99%. It stayed there for what felt like 41 minutes. I stared at that rotating circle, mesmerized. It was doing exactly what I do. It was promising completion. It was signaling intent. It was ‘working’ without actually delivering a single frame of content.

Instruments of Observation

We have entered an era where the tools of connection-Slack, Teams, Jira, Zoom-have been weaponized into instruments of passive-aggressive surveillance. We aren’t being managed; we are being observed, like lab rats in a maze where the cheese is only released if we twitch our noses at the right frequency.

The performance of work has become more profitable than the work itself.

I remember when I first started this gig. I thought I could finish my tasks in 3 hours and then spend the rest of the day reading or, I don’t know, learning a language. But that’s not how it works. If you finish early, you aren’t rewarded with time; you’re rewarded with more work. So, you learn to stretch. You learn to dilate time. You become a master of the slow-burn. You send an email at 8:01 AM, another at 11:41 AM, and one more at 6:01 PM. It creates a narrative arc of a ‘full day,’ even if you spent the middle 5 hours staring at a wall or, in my case, curating a dataset of ‘productive facial expressions’ for a startup that probably won’t exist in 11 months.

I’m not saying there isn’t real work to be done. There is. But we’ve buried it under layers of ‘syncs’ and ‘status updates’ and ‘pre-meeting huddles.’ We are so afraid of being seen as idle that we’ve eliminated the possibility of being thoughtful. Thought looks like idleness. If I am staring out the window, trying to solve a complex data mapping problem, I look like I’m slacking off. If I am frantically clicking through 21 browser tabs and replying to ‘lol’ in a thread, I look like a rockstar.

I have a friend, let’s call him Dave, who bought a physical mouse jiggler. It’s a little platform that oscillates to keep your computer from falling asleep. He told me it was the best $31 he ever spent. Think about that. We are at a point in human history where we are buying hardware to lie to our software so our bosses won’t think we’ve escaped the digital plantation. It’s a tragicomedy. Dave spends his ‘jiggler time’ woodworking. He’s actually producing something beautiful in his garage while his laptop thinks he’s deeply engaged with a PowerPoint deck about ‘Synergistic Growth.’

When you finally decide to stop the performance, you realize you need tools that don’t demand a standing ovation just for existing. You need a device that opens the app, sends the file, and then gets out of the way so you can go back to being a human being. Whether you are searching for a way to streamline your physical workspace or looking for the latest tech at Bomba.md to make your communication more efficient and less performative, the goal should be the same: utility over vanity. We need tech that empowers us to finish, not tech that forces us to linger.

The Cost of Unseen Thought

We have replaced the ‘output’ metric with the ‘uptime’ metric. It’s a server mindset applied to a biological organism. But I am not a server. Miles E. is not a rack of blades in a cooled basement. I am a person who needs 41 minutes of uninterrupted thought to solve a problem that a machine will take 1 second to execute once I’ve guided it. If you take away my 41 minutes to give yourself 1 second of reassurance via a green dot, you’ve lost the plot.

Stop Polishing the Brass

The most effective people I know are often the ones who are the hardest to reach. They are hard to reach because they are actually doing the thing we hired them to do. They are in the basement of their own minds, moving heavy furniture around, while the rest of us are in the lobby, polishing the brass and shouting ‘I’m here!’ to every passerby.

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The loudest worker in the room is often the one with the empty hands.

I’m going to go back to my ‘asdf’ typing now. Henderson just pinged me again. He wants to know if I saw his last message. I’ll wait 11 seconds. I’ll make sure my cursor is moving. I’ll play my part in the play. But in the back of my mind, I know the truth. This isn’t productivity. This is just digital noise, and eventually, the audience is going to realize that the stage is empty and the actors have all gone home to do some real work in the dark.