If you are under 40 or so, you won't remember when jobs were like this. These are photos I just unearthed from when I worked in the trenches as a footnote researcher at Oxford's New Dictionary of National Biography. It strikes me that these photographs come from a more humane and human time. Everyone's personality shines forth; there is a forgiving atmosphere of consensus. There's the guy at the very back standing in the centre by himself. But that was OK. He was the back row centre guy. There are two people in the top row left hanging back. Some people were extroverts. Someone had socks with sandals. Some people were pensive and withdrawn. Others - cheerful. This was a world of live-and-let-live, in which people could work together to achieve a common purpose, and their certainties and uncertainties could support that goal, without being fetishized or demonized.
I recall Douglas Coupland's mid-1990s' definitions of new social realities; perhaps this was in Microserfs. Air Family (noun): the people you get to know at work and for a time, they function like a family. Of course, workplace dynamics still exist, but my impression is that many jobs became industrialized, remote, disconnected, forcing conformity over consensus. I zoom in on myself out of self-interest. But you could equally focus on every single person in these photographs and you would discover a big story - each person was a world unto him- or herself.
I particularly remember a girl who showed up at work every
day dressed like Alice in Wonderland. She is not in the group photos as
far as I can see. Now I wonder - did she change out of her blue pinafore, dark hair ribbon, white blouse, pale stockings and Mary Janes on the day of the group photo? I don't think she departed the New DNB before group photos were taken. No one minded that we
worked with Alice in Wonderland. It all seemed normal. And yet - the camera could not capture her.
Alice was a harbinger of what was to come. After falling for two decades down the rabbit hole, after sitting for way too long at the Mad Tea Party - I miss Alice. A flood of information engulfed the staid world of research depicted here, the early 2000s at the Dictionary of National Biography. It's important to recognize that at its inception in 1885, the DNB was a novel historical instrument and a great national innovation. By 2005, it was an institution.
This was what research looked like before social media and global Internet usage hit full force.
The Web offered oceans of knowledge hitherto denied to us, with unprecedented tools for search and colation. But now, the technocrats are closing the doors. They have revealed that the era of the Free Internet and Creative Commons was a massive AI training exercise. Content that now swamps Youtube and similar platforms no longer features bloggers and vloggers on a mission. We came from this staid world and fell down rabbit holes because we sought freedom of information, revelation and open discussion in order to solve the world's problems.
Organic content is rarer and rarer. It is replaced - as I predicted would happen in this post - by output from a false alternative media whose AI-generated narratives repeat 1990s'-2010s' commentaries from real online researchers. Finally, we arrive at the Dead Internet Theory. Tired, fake content now distracts, diverts and imprisons us, taking us on false journeys, squandering our days, filling our minds with rubbish, so that we are funneled not to the open seas, but down the treacle well. Where is Alice? She's not in this picture.
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