Proof of Work

You are not paid to work. You are paid to prove you are working.

The first few times you see it, it’s a curiosity. A cultural artifact. It’s 3:17 PM on a Tuesday in Ho Chi Minh and the air inside the coffee shop is thick enough to chew (it was a Phuc Long, of course). It’s a terrarium of exposed brick, tropical plants, and MacBook Pros. The humidity of the rain outside is a physical presence, but in here, the only heat comes from the processors. A dozen faces—a mix of Western expats and local Vietnamese tech talent—are bathed in the same cold yellow-blue light. Me, and my friend witnessed this scene with a mild sense of amusement. They weren't collaborating. They weren't in flow. They were silent, save for the furious, rhythmic clatter of keyboards. Their eyes are glazed over with a specific kind of exhaustion. This is the exhaustion of a soul taxed by the sheer, grinding performance of availability.

After a month, the curiosity curdles into a low-grade horror. After six months, you see it for what it truly is: the most honest, unfiltered expression of the modern human condition. You realize you are not looking at a train car full of people. You are looking at a distributed network of human servers executing the most computationally expensive, spiritually draining, and ultimately pointless protocol ever devised by man.

I call it Proof of Work.

And no, I’m not talking about crypto. That was a limited, metaphor. The real Proof of Work is the invisible, soul-crushing consensus mechanism that governs all of modern corporate life. The protocol’s objective is not to build a product, or innovate, or create value. The objective is to validate your own existence within the system. The work is not the work. The work is the proof. The work is the endless stream of emails meticulously CC’ing the entire chain of command, the PowerPoint decks filled with stakeholder-aligned synergistic frameworks, the Slack notifications that are nothing more than digital heartbeats to show the organism is still alive, the Very Important Meetings that could have been a one-sentence memo but are stretched to an hour to properly fill a calendar slot.

These are not outputs. They are hash functions. They are complex, energy-intensive, and fundamentally arbitrary calculations performed to add another block to the corporate chain, a chain that secures nothing but your own continued employment. You are not a builder or a thinker or a strategist. You are a miner, chipping away at the rock face of institutional legitimacy with the blunt pickaxe of your own time, your own life-force. And for what? For a token that grants you access to the network for another 24 hours.

What gives?

The answer is that we have systematically severed the link between action and consequence. We have engineered a world where the vast majority of the “decision-making class” has absolutely zero skin in the game. This is, of course, the central thesis of Nassim Taleb, but seeing it play out at a societal level is something else entirely. It’s one thing to read about the fragility of insulated systems; it’s another to watch it flicker in the dead eyes on the evening express. The man who designs the PowerPoint that dictates the strategy for a new product launch will still collect his paycheck if the product fails catastrophically. The risk has been transferred. To the shareholders, to the customer, to the poor bastard on the factory floor who actually has to build the damn thing. The modern knowledge worker is a creature of pure upside-insulation. His only real risk is not a market failure, but a signaling failure. The only way he can truly fail is by failing to produce adequate proof that he is a Serious Person Doing Important Work.

This is the great inversion. The real world—the world of physics, of cause and effect, of profit and loss—is a world of agency. It’s the world of Alexander the Great. When Alexander stood before his men at Gaugamela, facing a Persian army that vastly outnumbered his own, he didn’t “circle back” or “workshop some deliverables.” He grabbed a spear, mounted his horse, and led the cavalry charge that broke the enemy line. His proof of work was the collapsed flank of Darius’s army. The consequence of failure was not a bad quarterly review; it was a spear through the throat. The stakes were absolute. The agency was total.

Now look at us. We are the anti-Alexanders. We spend our days in hermetically sealed environments (like that very cafe), performing intricate rituals to convince each other that what we are doing matters. We follow the corporate "pattern language"—a dead, sclerotic version composed of empty jargon like "synergy," "optimization," and "leveraging best practices," a mockery of the living, organic one described by the architect Christopher Alexander. These are incantations for warding off the terrifying suspicion that none of this is real.

This all presents a rather grim, solitary picture, doesn't it? The conspiracy of silence is the heaviest psychic tax there is. You know the slide deck is bullshit. The VP you’re presenting to knows it's bullshit. The VP knows that you know... But the protocol must be observed. The hashes must be generated. The fiction must be maintained, because our entire economic and social structure is now built on it. It’s the legacy of an era where money was free and corporations were valued on the power of their stories. We are all just actors hired to fill out the set.

So what's the takeaway? What's the actionable advice? There isn’t a clean one. You cannot single-handedly dismantle the protocol. You cannot convince the other nodes on the network to stop hashing. To try is to guarantee your own expulsion from the system—career suicide.

The only real trick, I think, is to start your own ledger.

This part is partly stolen from the first few chapters of SITG, where my advice to anyone trapped in the protocol is always the same: build one real thing. A table, a line of code, a stronger body. Create a small pocket of reality where cause and effect are still married. Put a little of your own skin back in the game. Avoid the spiritual drawdowns. This is good advice for an individual. I believe it.

But it’s also a coping mechanism, not a cure. One man building a solid chair in his garage doesn’t stop a venture capitalist from funding a decade of bullshit with free money. It doesn’t stop a central planner from insulating the entire system from its own failures. Your personal ledger of reality is ultimately a rounding error in the great public ledger of fiction.

Imagine a world that enforces the “Bob Rubin rule,” where the multi-million-dollar bonuses of bankers are subject to a multi-year clawback, forcing them to pay back every cent if their “brilliant” financial instruments blow up the system down the line. Imagine we revived the law of the Roman engineers, who were forced to stand with their families directly beneath the arch of the bridge they had just built. Imagine a world where the hawkish pundit who advocates for war on television must not only enlist himself, but also knows that, by law, at least one of his own male grandchildren will be conscripted into the military.

The original Code was clear: If a builder builds a house and it collapses and kills the owner, the builder is put to death. The rule was not about a bloodthirsty desire for retribution. It’s was about creating a world where no one can afford to build something that is not real. It is the only way to make the fiction too expensive to maintain.

note: I can already hear the counterarguments. "The world is too complex for such simple rules!" "You'll stifle innovation!" These are the predictable defenses of a system designed to protect the decision-maker from his decisions.

The point of reviving the Roman engineer’s law is not literally to stand every software developer beneath a collapsing server rack. The point is to make the consequences real enough that the bullshit becomes untenable. It is to distinguish between the noble failure of a team that swung for the fences and the entirely predictable failure of a team that was forced to build a fence out of paper because a man far up the chain wanted to optimize his quarterly budget. One is risk. The other is fraud. A healthy system encourages the former and ruthlessly punishes the latter. Ours has forgotten how.

Would love to hear your viewpoint on this. This is obviously shaped by my own lens, and I'm eager to hear how it resonates—or doesn't—with others. I'm especially interested in counterarguments or perspectives from different fields. Feel free to share your thoughts through DMs or Comments, I love talking to people.