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6 hours ago
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There's a request from my US publisher in my mailbox to submit an updated W-8 tax form. Of course, nothing has changed since the previous six times I sent them the exact same form (with a new date). It's just standard procedure to keep asking for that information and do the same bullshit work or else they won't pay me.
There's a similar request from my bank asking me to update and submit the Ultimate Beneficial Owner forms. Last time I did that was three years ago. Again, nothing has changed. But if I don't comply and submit to the blackmail, they'll cut access to my own bank accounts.
I regularly receive requests for similar non-added-value work I need to do for pension funds, payment gateways, and several supplier portals (the big consultancies excel at generating bullshit work for their vendors).
It will only get worse.
Right now, the only thing keeping bullshit work in check is that humans still have to do most of it. And humans—bless our inefficient souls—have limits. We have only 168 hours in a week; we cost money; some of us get cranky when asked to do pointless tasks repeatedly, and occasionally we call out the emperor's naked ass. These constraints create natural friction against bureaucratic sprawl.
But AI doesn't get tired. It doesn't complain. It doesn't have a finite number of hours to waste on administrative theater. And it certainly won't stage a revolt over being asked to fill out the same form for the seventh time in one month.
We're about to witness bullshit work achieve escape velocity.
Step 1: Schedule a Meeting to Align on Priorities
Launch with a sync to "get everyone on the same page"—a page nobody reads. Auto-invite 12 people who won't attend. Record everything for "transparency," guaranteeing zero future views.
Step 2: Auto-Transcribe the Meeting
Deploy AI to transform managerial word salad into a transcript that everyone will studiously ignore. Bonus points: extract "action items" vague enough to mean nothing but specific enough to track.
Step 3: Summarize the Transcript into a Slide Deck
Have GPT-Whatever distill 45 minutes of circular conversation into 15 slides featuring gems like "Drive Alignment," "Empower Teams," and "Synergize Strategy." Garnish with stock photos of diverse people high-fiving in conference rooms.
Step 4: Blast Across All Platforms
Distribute via Teams, email, and Notion to ensure nobody knows where the "source of truth" lives. Title it "Q2 Strategic Enablement Recap." Zero opens, maximum existence.
Step 5: Auto-Generate Feedback Forms
Deploy AI form builders to create surveys asking employees to rate the "usefulness of the alignment session." Include mandatory text boxes. Reward completion with digital badges that mean nothing.
Step 6: Trigger Workflow Analysis
Funnel form results into an AI dashboard that uses sentiment analysis to conclude everyone is "cautiously optimistic." Auto-schedule a follow-up meeting to "dive deeper into these insights."
Step 7: Assign AI-Generated Tasks
Auto-create tasks in Asana, Jira, and Monday.com based on algorithmic tea-leaf reading. Assign to people who were on vacation. Each task includes deadlines, subtasks, and comment threads devoid of context.
Step 8: Monitor Everything for "Accountability"
Track mouse movements, app usage, and Slack status to "measure engagement." Flag users who take longer than five minutes to respond. Deploy a motivational bot named Nudgr to send passive-aggressive reminders.
Step 9: Compile Weekly Reports
Automatically aggregate tasks, feedback, summaries, and fabricated progress updates into beautifully formatted reports. Post to #reporting channels that exist in digital purgatory.
Step 10: Archive Into the Knowledge Base Abyss
Push everything into Confluence or SharePoint. Tag with 14 keywords and mark "important" to guarantee it vanishes forever into the void.
Step 11: Celebrate With Virtual Coffee Chats
Schedule AI-hosted Zoom rooms complete with background jazz, auto-generated praise, and deepfake avatars saying "Great job, team!" based on calendar activity rather than actual accomplishment.
Step 12: Rebrand and Restart
Take a breath. Rebrand the same initiative as "Project Phoenix" or "Next Horizon." Restart the cycle. Pretend it matters.
In 2018, David Graeber wrote a book that should have been required reading in every MBA program: Bullshit Jobs. His thesis was elegantly damning—modern capitalism manufactures meaningless work so effectively that even the people doing these jobs know they're pointless. The book resonated because we've all been there, trapped in roles that exist primarily to justify other roles that exist to manage the first set of meaningless roles.
Since then, we've identified a few natural constraints that historically kept bullshit work in check: budget limitations, worker resistance, and public scrutiny. Humans cost money. Humans get fed up. Humans sometimes blow whistles.
But what happens when those constraints evaporate?
AI agents don't demand salaries, vacation time, or healthcare. They don't get existential crises about spending their days generating compliance reports that nobody reads. They won't organize unions or post angry LinkedIn rants about the futility of their work. Most critically, they operate in an invisible layer of automation that humans rarely monitor or question.
We might soon be approaching escape velocity: infinite capacity for meaningless work, zero resistance to performing it, and complete opacity around what's actually happening.
Soon, armies of digital agents might spend their days filling out W-8 forms, UBO forms, supplier onboarding documents, and payment provider compliance checks—not because these serve any genuine purpose, but because someone, somewhere, decided adding another bureaucratic checkpoint was prudent. The agents will do it all without complaint, generating reports that other agents will summarize, creating tasks that additional agents will track, all while we remain completely oblivious to the administrative theater unfolding in our name.
The outlook is equally hilarious and terrifying. When bullshit work was expensive (requiring human time), market forces provided some natural limits. When it becomes essentially free, those guardrails disappear. Every risk-averse manager, every compliance officer with a quota, every consultant looking to justify their retainer will have unlimited capacity to generate process theater.
We're not just looking at more bullshit work—we're looking at a bullshit work singularity.
The irony is exquisite. We built AI to eliminate repetitive, meaningless tasks. Instead, we're about to unleash it to create infinite amounts of them. We dreamed of a future where technology freed us from bureaucracy. We're more likely to get a future where bureaucracy achieves technological perfection—humming along invisibly, generating endless work for its own sake, while we remain blissfully unaware of the administrative universe expanding in parallel to our own. We'll be working out in the gym and pay no attention to yet another transcript automatically generated for a meeting attended only by our non-human avatars.
We'll soon reach escape velocity for bullshit work.
The only question left is whether anyone will even notice when the machines achieve peak bullshit.
Jurgen
AI isn’t magic. It’s not a monster, either. The real winners are those who understand it, adapt to it, and leverage it for success. Allow me to show you how. Subscribe to my Substack.
