The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

Not a bad deal, if you were white and male and aged twenty-five to eighty-five.

The last tech guy who spoke with such flair about his vision for humanity was Steve Jobs, and he died because he decided to cure his pancreatic cancer by drinking smoothies and doing male power kegels. You can kill a man but not his ideas, and so years after Jobs’s demise every single one of his fellow tech lords fancies themselves a “visionary” or “explorer,” words previously reserved for Leonardo da Vinci or Magellan rather than someone who gets VC money for inventing a Wi-Fi–enabled box that will keep all your food cold so it doesn’t go bad.

The present and future of work is a lot like its past: stupid and arbitrary, and everyone’s terrible boss gets to fail upward to the next thing he can fuck up.

You receive the privileges of e-mailing people who have sublimated their personality disorders into “management styles” and playing the pawn in bizarre office power plays between proud MBAs. And you’re lucky to do it.

Advertising and marketing gigs make up one-sixth of all jobs in America, and if our nation continues to eat its own economic droppings, this figure will likely keep growing. The typical marketing professional is named something like Jordan Adam Taylor, posts things like “Can’t relate to dreading Monday because my job just plain rocks #playhardatwork,” and is dedicated to brand synergy whether they’re asleep, awake, mid-coitus, giving birth, or dead.

If you’ve woken up every day of your life and decided that your rage issues and utter fear of anything that doesn’t look like you should dictate who lives or dies, it may be time for your Blue Life to matter. After all, cops are workers, just like anyone else. Yes, they’ll stave in your skull if you organize for a union, but they also head outside every day, see a meme with an unattributed quote from Kanye saying that rapping is harder than being a cop, write utterly moronic open letters steeped in self-pity despite having a less dangerous job than crab fishermen, and then spend the rest of the day playing with the repurposed Stinger missiles that the federal government gave their department.

old-money classicists who could recite the words of any number of ancient sex perverts while blackout drunk on a boat; idealistic English professors who had yet to make their turn to the right and founded The Journal of Western Greatness after the campus PC-police and feminazis made their students stop sleeping with them;

Now, however, academia is a Ponzi scheme with beer pong, a soulless grind where you’re expected to turn out long, boring papers called, like, “Fear of Castration and the Western Male Explored through Reggaeton” or face summary execution by the dean. Every year, thousands of freshly minted PhDs compete for a handful of tenure-track jobs, surviving off adjunct appointments and pilfered cafeteria lunch meat. Most of them will burn out and attempt to enter the private job market, which will have no use for anyone who spent a decade studying gnostic imagery in the films of Pauly Shore. The lucky few will hang on long enough to inherit the Distinguished Chair in Kanye Studies at Devilstick University.

If you think you have it in you to talk and write endlessly about subjects you barely know anything about for a bunch of slack-jawed early-twenties layabouts with no prospects, give it a shot, but we can’t imagine living our lives that way.

SERVICE Join your peers in retail or food and beverage, where the worst middle-class authoritarians scan your restaurant or store for anything that upsets them so they can scream at you. These are people who’ve never been mad for a legitimate reason, but they love the feeling. You just have to stare at their disgusting wet maws flapping around until they hit a fever pitch and jet cum down their hideous pale legs. Whether it’s a server position at a restaurant, a footwear salesman who must shoo away enterprising perverts, or customer service for a telecom giant whose favorability polls are lower than the Islamic State’s, you’ll witness every fucked-up power trip that those who have never held any authority but have long fantasized about abusing it take.

Since there are barely any job protections anymore, a service employee almost always has to submit to the demands of suburban sociopaths.

Is a man older than dirt telling you “I’d love to see a smile and something else on that face?” He knows that the restaurant can pay you slave wages if you’re a tipped employee, and he’s wagering you’re not gonna make a fuss, given that he’s from a different generation and all.

But, you may be asking, what if we eventually reach a point where we don’t have a head of state who live-tweets his mental decline?

But in a future when automation will render a huge proportion of human labor input superfluous, “sell yourself” is going to take on a more literal meaning. If all you have to sell is your labor and nobody is buying, your only remaining commodities are your blood, sperm/eggs, and organs, which the failing bodies of the ruling class will always have use for. Shaving off a quarter of your liver every six months may sound traumatic, but it beats being picked up in a Loiter Sweep and having all your blood pressed out of your body like a toothpaste tube and used for vampire cosplay by Peter Thiel.

In other words, for a certain cohort of young, white-collar drones, the modern workplace has become a giant, countrywide adult day care center.

But right now, the gap between the promise of technology and the actually existing, deeply stupid reality couldn’t be more obvious. Instead of a means to liberate you, technology is a tool for your boss to track you, message you, and harass you at any time of day, whether you’re on the clock or not. It doesn’t enhance your free time, it destroys it. It has you checking your phone, e-mail, or Slack feed every three hundred seconds while you’re awake, and, once the next generation of iPhone rolls out, during your REM sleep as well.

So don’t believe the tech lizards, the reactionary billionaires, or the Democratic paypigs who tell you that work is actually cool. It won’t be cool until their bank accounts are emptied into everyone else’s and “work” becomes something you squeeze in between posting, gaming, and having a nice, big wank.