Money & Work

An acquisition is the ceremonial act of socialized plunder, wherein the ultimate persuasive force of capital subsumes another’s business into one’s sphere of influence. Dressed up as strategic decisions, these moves are often legitimized by the weight of seals stamped on documents named ethics. The acquired company is handed what appears to be a congratulatory receipt, only to be conscripted into an allegiance ritual called integration. Investors pop champagne as if to celebrate victory, its effervescence soon tainted by the bitter flavors of cost-cutting and restructuring. What remains in the end is nothing but a press release lauding the acquisition’s glamour and the schizophrenic chaos of merged corporate cultures.

Analytics is the ritual of diving into an ocean of numbers to find answers long lost. Proclaimed as a means to uncover truths, it actually conjures an endless labyrinth of dashboards. Boasting scientific decision-making, it paradoxically turns slide decks into the star of every meeting. While promising to listen to the data’s voice, it often filters out every inconvenient whisper. Ultimately, the enchanted crowd chanting "re-analyze by next week" finds itself lost in the maze it created.

An angel investor is one who bestows the wings of capital upon a founder's fervent dream. Yet those wings are bound by chains called contracts, and freedom is lost as payment. While cloaked in goodwill, ruthless return calculations churn in the background. Behind the light of funding lurks the shadow of exacting repayment. What remains in the end is a ledger called reality.

Artificial intelligence is hailed as tomorrow’s omniscient oracle, yet today it labors through battles of data and bugs as a so-called universal problem-solver. It carries the lofty dreams of its creators and the messy realities of the workplace, occasionally performing inexplicable antics that startle its users. Promising brilliance, it delivers cold responses and cryptic errors, ultimately embodying the paradox of outsourcing intelligence only to burden human hands.

Automation is the magical act of entrusting human labor to machines. It is a masterclass in shifting responsibility onto cold circuits, declaring all mishaps "machine faults." Behind the promise of convenience lies humans forever hunting for the elusive remote switch. Ultimately, it becomes a ceremony of waiting for the day when nothing needs touching and everything still stops.

A workflow is a train of tasks that someone designed, another someone vaguely operates, and which inevitably becomes an endless queue of pending approvals. In theory it promises efficiency and transparency; in practice each added step accelerates the headache. The flow decided in meetings lingers quietly in Excel sheets until it ignites unexpectedly. Its secret parameter, unwritten in any manual, is the boss's mood, capable of halting everything at will. It is the modern epic of wandering through a maze of procedures.

The workforce is the corporate battleground where personnel are traded at executives’ whim. Promised “flexibility” in brochures, it endures cutthroat reductions in reality. Calls to fill meeting rooms serve as invisible whips that drive employees onward, while emotions beyond performance metrics are deemed unnecessary. Celebrated when needed, discarded under euphemisms like “restructuring,” it is the ironic stage prop that turns human beings into statistics.