What if...the curse of the Corporate Girlies?
On productivity, time management, and self-surveillance
Hello!
Spooky season might be over, but I am still dealing with a haunting. More specifically, a creator that the clowns at Meta have decided I must be positively clamoring to interact with. They are incorrect.
The thing I don’t understand—and probably don’t want to understand the nauseating intricacies behind—is how one company (Meta) can have two connected apps that are not on the same page regarding their recommendation algorithms. To better paint the picture, here is a sample of what my Instagram “Explore” tab looks like:
Terrifying to be known like this by a corporation. But they more or less nailed the general themes (although they’re really forcing knitting on me. Not sure I’m there yet re: fiber crafts). There are major problems that I’m not going to get into here on the economics of surveillance capitalism, mostly because I want to move beyond the context (algorithms) and get into the content.
Because Facebook (yes, I still use this hell app because I am in dozens of niche groups stemming from a podcast I stopped listening to three years ago) serves me nothing but Colleen Hoover-centric repurposed BookTok, what I eat in a day diet videos, and what haunts me the most: Corporate Girlie daily routines.
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Corporate Girlie is a combination of all the shit that I hate bottled into one. It’s self-serious, incurious, productive at all costs. This is not a knock on Natasha Lu, the Corporate Girlie who is most often served to me. She seems like a perfectly lovely person. It’s the fact that this content exists at all.
Because I’m usually shielded by the algorithm that serves me cats and criticism of things like labor, diet culture, and the publishing industry, I am admittedly late to this. Corporate Girlie has been around for a minute. But even the discourse around Corporate Girlie is another layer of bleakness. This Business Insider article from March 2023 essentially asserts that Corporate Girlie is not great because “high-profile layoffs have some rethinking the value of romanticizing corporate life.” O-K.
Obviously, a publication like Business Insider will be on the side of, uh, business, but the reporting is cackle-worthy. There are girlies who talk about the importance of still taking care of your wellness outside of work, girlies who wonder about whether women can have it all, girlies who remind you that if you get laid off, you still made an impact, and you’ll make one again. There’s a former Corporate Girlie who states she’d only return to that “9-5 grind…if it was a startup, where she could make a significant impact and own a piece of the company.” [Insert your own eye roll here.]
When I watch Corporate Girlie post-work routine videos, what unsettles me most is not the dead-eyed stares, the individualism, or the monotone cog of it all. All truly miserable, but what really fucks me up are the time stamps. So many of the commenters are in awe of Girlie’s motivation to still go to the gym at 8 pm after a full day of working (some days, she goes to Tesco and cooks a healthful meal in addition to the gym). Frankly, so am I. But my awe is less Wow, how do I become this productive and more Save yourself before it’s too late.
This is the part where I could easily slot in an entire book report on Saving Time by Jenny Odell. (If you haven’t read, I strongly recommend, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t think Southern California has seasons.) For now, though, what’s most prescient is the surveillance that Corporate Girlies continue to hoist upon themselves in their “free” time. In her book, Odell goes long on “who is timing whom,” exploring the power dynamic that exists between the timer and the time-ee.
Yes, Corporate Girlie is admittedly doing a performance of free time for content, but it’s impossible for me not to feel like she’s living her “off-the-clock” time as if she’s being watched by a particularly obsessive employer. And in some ways, maybe she is. In hopes of transitioning from Corporate Girlie to Influencer Girlie, the “boss” must also transition from whoever sits above her in the office hierarchy to her new “manager,” the viewers on TikTok/IG. As Odell states, “productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin,” and Corporate Girlie’s policing has expanded from corporate monitoring software to the machinations of her brain. The panopticon internalized! Silliness and inefficiency will be reported to management and dealt with accordingly!
Another thing that gets me about Corporate Girlie is the upper-middle-class privilege of it all. It can be hard to feel bad for her—she presumably chose this life and likely has the material baseline needed to escape it most extreme forms. It’s difficult to watch, even in tightly edited clips, someone actively choosing a life that relegates the lush parts of living—love, wonder, community, nature—to the weekends. If there’s room for them at all.
Because it’s not about time management. It never was. When remote workers push back on return-to-office mandates, it’s not merely time they’re fighting for. As Odell writes, “What first appears to be a wish for more hours in the day may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose.” And autonomy, meaning, and purpose are never going to be found under the frameworks of corporate capitalism.
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Our evil tech overlords!
The first episode of Nathan Fielder/Benny Saftie’s The Curse, which is exactly the stressful, unsettling Nathan For You x Uncut Gems mashup you’re expecting.
Six months of being full-time freelance! Will it be forever? Who knows, but I would be unable to wander down weird little paths like this at 10 am on a Wednesday without it.