#there’s overlap with characters like Colin Robinson and the very real caricatures of business people we see on Succession

[nighthawkes]

Ok now I’m interested in boring guy. Funny little man. Shaking him in a shoe box with holes in its lid so he can breath. I noticed that some of his tagged posts shares a tag w business casual though 👀 bureaucracy as camp?? Elaborate for the peasants please

this is so exciting, okay:

Yes!! He’s definitely an office worker of some sort so he winds up in my business casual tag too sometimes. I think whatever he does, he doesn’t get paid, he just showed up one day and started working.

Bureaucracy as camp! So “camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value” (Wikipedia) is what I think of when I say "bureaucracy is camp to me."

Little business men and women dress up in their special Professional outfits and gather in groups to do special Professional things like discuss quarterly reports and client dossiers and market research findings. And they jump through hoops to impress people who’ve never had to do the work they’re doing. And they’re sending emails and memos and attending working lunches and “putting it on the company card.” And they’re all treating it sooooo seriously even though all of that shit sounds completely fake and/or pointless.

It’s that tweet that’s like “‘Business school’ sounds so made up. It’s what a kindergartner would say if you asked them where dads go all day.”

I think that American corporate professionalism and business culture is appealing because it’s lame and beyond ironic.

If you've ever seen any posts on here about resumes or office culture or adult etiquette, you'll probably know that of course officespeak and bureaucratic norms have their place in the world for a reason. They function as a common ground/language that people of different backgrounds can use to get work done cohesively (in addition to functioning as a tool of elitism/racism in a lot of ways). Theoretically though: You dress in suits to show respect for clients, coworkers, and your job. You say things like "circle back" to politely give people time to get their shit together. You participate in certain company activities to be a good sport and to build good will with your teams. And these things are valuable for the purposes they serve!

I'm obsessed with the idea of a guy who naturally and perfectly shapes himself to fit these language tools/norms and does so wholeheartedly because he thinks they're what's real. Rather than seeing norms as signifiers, he places the value on them at face value. He's not dressing in a suit to show respect or to fit in or out of a personal sense of fashion/enjoyment—he's doing it to wear a suit. And it isn't begrudging or thoughtless or anything but straightforward.

And I feel like tech bros and American corporate culture in the wake of what I generally know about 80s economic shifts have adopted this sort of serious idea that the business world is the real world. The Kendall Roy archetype. Patrick Bateman and that guy on the bus someone tweeted about who said he'd never seen American Psycho because he's too busy trading. Those types of guys.

So boring guy is like those guys but less emotionally fraught. He's not doing it for a power trip or a sense of superiority or to feed into his daddy issues (of which he has none). He's doing it just to do it.

And that's extra camp to me. The idea that the business world and anything it produces is real or more valuable than most other things—believing that—is camp to me by the Wikipedia definition. And I absolutely love projecting that onto the most bland guy imaginable.

He's no thoughts, head empty. It doesn't occur to him to have hobbies. You'd have to Sever him to give him anything close to a personality beyond "business" and even then his innie persona would just be like "hmm, I wonder if my outside personality is being as efficient as possible. Probably, since he decided to make me." and "Rewards for productivity? No thanks. I'm just here to work. I try not to keep track of metrics like that."

I also like the Merriam-Webster definition:

1. a. : something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate, or out-of-date as to be considered amusing