“Fake Work is a real story about a fake one.”
We are used to work that feels pointless. Those mandatory online modules for compliance, mid-year reviews, pre-meeting preps It was the long turn of the millennium. The future shimmered. New Labour had just swept to power in a landslide, and Tony Blair grinned like a man who believed his own press releases. The internet whirred through 56k modems, CDs were labelled in biro, and Y2K paranoia flickered between punchline and prophecy. As I’ve written elsewhere, the period felt on the cusp—not of collapse, but of a rebrand. Capitalism in body glitter and chrome.
In Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, Leigh Claire La Berge suggests the joke wasn’t just cultural. It was structural. Her tale begins in Manhattan at the tail end of the 1990s, in the late-empire shimmer of Clintonite optimism, when consultants from Arthur Andersen still roamed the earth in dark suits, and the Y2K bug threatened to erase the infrastructure of modernity with a single calendar glitch. She is hired. Despite her credentials, or perhaps because of them, by one of the world’s largest advertising conglomerates. The job title is “quality assurance.” The task is to review spreadsheets. The mission, ostensibly, is to prevent collapse. But as she quickly realises, “Fake Work is a real story about a fake one.”
Y2K provides both setting and conceit: a forecasted catastrophe that never arrives, a crisis whose theatre swells precisely because its substance is so threadbare. “Y2K,” she notes, “was also somewhat fraudulent.” The problem is not that modernity broke. It’s that the jobs invented to fix it were fiction. She is paid to check records, record that she has checked the records, and then record that she has recorded the checks. “At a certain point,” she writes, “all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation.” The logic is recursive. The labour is exhausting. The threat, always implied, never materialises.
The book reads as memoir, but it operates like a surrealist audit of late capitalism. The corporate world appears not as a site of production, but of textual invention. In a chapter titled “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—there is no outside the text—La Berge repurposes poststructuralist theory to describe the Kafkaesque banality of her job. “Reality follows the text,” she writes. “The text does not record reality. Reality might not even exist; it might itself just be a text.” Her task is not to guarantee technical readiness, but to confirm that a task has been noted, filed, and replicated. When pressed, the consultants explain: “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” Once you accept that, almost anything becomes defensible.
The ideology wasn’t confined to the office. It was in the air. Colette Shade calls the Y2K era “capitalism’s soft power, dressed in body glitter and bubble fonts.” La Berge gives us its administrative back end: the status meetings, silent Play-Doh therapy sessions, fake promotions and spreadsheet rituals that kept the glitter from peeling. One sold the dream; the other filled out the forms. The future was being written in bubble font and Excel macros at the same time.
If the American version shimmered in chrome, the British variant wore a suit and called itself modernisation. Crossrail is the perfect coda: engineers lay track, install systems, declare stations ready—only to dig it all up again and call it “scope realignment.” At Bond Street, tunnelling delays meant contractors were stood down, then remobilised at vast cost. Entire sections were redesigned post-completion. The Elizabeth Line opened three years late and billions over budget. It wasn’t called failure. It was “stage delivery optimisation.”
But nothing captured Britain’s millennial delusion quite like that bloody Millennium Dome. A £789 million white elephant built to celebrate a future nobody could define and fewer wanted to attend. Launched with fireworks, Blairite hubris, and a puffed-up vision of ‘cool Britannia’, it ended up hosting an incoherent exhibition sponsored by BT, filled with “zones” about work, time and money. Empty signifiers arranged in corporate Helvetica. By March 2000, the Dome was already a punchline, its visitor numbers tanking, its legacy secured as a monument to managerial optimism without content. It was, in La Berge’s sense, entirely consistent: an immersive experience in fake work, built by people performing belief in a future that would never arrive.
La Berge’s position in the system is slippery. She’s not a true insider. Her degree’s from Hampshire, not Harvard; she’s queer, over-educated, undercredentialled. But the whole point of this economy is that the rules don’t matter until they do. “You’ve been selected because you’re Andersen quality but not Andersen price,” one manager tells her, as if plucking fruit from the reduced section. The performance is all that counts. The logic of merit has been replaced with that of simulation. “Even the economy in which we were daily immersed wasn’t entirely legitimate.”
The gender politics of the office are no less brittle. In “A Total Bitch and an Absolute Fraud,” we meet a female manager whose ambition is simultaneously feared and mocked. La Berge is allowed to rise only as long as her presence can be discounted, laughed off, absorbed as anomaly. Capitalism can tolerate women and queers, so long as their power remains decorative.
And the work itself? It’s not that it’s meaningless. It’s that it generates meaning through its own repetition. The Process (always capitalised) is treated like doctrine. “On a project of this magnitude,” her manager chirps, “I always say remember the three-thirds: it’ll take 33 percent longer, cost 33 percent more, and be 33 percent more complex.” “Than what?” La Berge wonders. No one asks. No one has time. They’re too busy updating yesterday’s updates.
The lesson, if there is one, isn’t that work is fake. It’s that capitalism is. Or rather, that the labour of capitalism. The decks and briefs, its vision statements and inventories—is a fiction that demands real bodies, real time, and real submission. In Shade’s book, Y2K is remembered through Astro Lounge and inflatable chairs from Target. In La Berge’s, it’s legal disclaimers and printouts, stored in fireproof vaults in New Jersey, waiting for a future that never arrived.
La Berge doesn’t offer a climactic departure. She just leaves. That’s all. “Given every inducement to stay,” she writes, “I elected to quit working as a businessman and to begin writing about economic history.” There’s no rupture, no redemptive arc. Just the quiet refusal of a system that had already refused her. Shade loops Smash Mouth. La Berge audits inventories. Both are trying to understand how something so loud and confident. Cool Britannia, e-commerce, “best practices,” Third Way optimism—could end in such silence.
The culture didn’t lie to us, exactly. It just wrote itself into process documents, backed them up on servers, and declared them compliant. The future broke, and we filed it under completed.
Leigh Claire La Berge has written the only work memoir I’ve ever read that doesn’t lie to you. Fake Work isn’t about burnout or hustle. Instead it’s about the structural madness of capitalism at the millennium: when spreadsheets replaced meaning, promotions meant nothing, and Y2K was sold as catastrophe just to justify another tier of managerial abstraction. She’s funny, sharp, class-conscious, and completely unwilling to redeem the system. No triumph, no life lessons—just the quiet horror of realising the economy might itself be fake. Read it.
“Even the economy in which we were daily immersed wasn’t entirely legitimate.”
