Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke

by Leigh Claire La Berge

In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You


The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.


While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.


As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Economics, Biography, Social

232 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 2025

About the author

Her work concerns aesthetics and political economy, broadly speaking. Her first book, "Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s" (Oxford, 2014), tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, "Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art" (Duke, 2019) explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, she is the co-editor of the collection "Reading Capitalist Realism" (Iowa, 2014). She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," with Duke UP. She is currently completing a new book called "Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect that Capitalism is a Joke" about her experience with corporate labor, Y2K, and management consultants.

Reviews

[Justin Bitner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. This one went a bit too over my head in waxing romantic on early aughts corporate life.

There are some good, skewering observations here, but the author gets a little too wrapped up in the spiral of “The Process” and seems to repeat the same things over and over.

While some will likely appreciate the extreme lengths to philosophize on the non-essential toils of the Y2K prep endeavor, to me it just felt like putting fancy wallpaper on a sparse premise.

[Till Raether · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

I'm interested in office culture, Marxism, the 2YK phenomenon, memoirs of the late 90's, but not in overwrought metaphor 😭

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke,” author and academic La Berge pens “a more manageable genre of a Marxist-inflected, queer, auto-theoretical work memoir.” I needed to capture that direct quote, as I knew my own language base would be inadequate to describe this volume. In other words, La Berge recounts her two year working for “the Conglomerate” and with the infamous Arthur Anderson accounting firm, providing quality assurance to the countless spreadsheets needed to document preventative steps taken for any end-of-the-world scenario that might occur in the face of the techno rapture that was the Y2K phenomenon. After all, according to the company, “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.”

I didn’t think I would enjoy this book as much as I did. Having worked for a while with these corporate types who’ve “tasted the kool aid” and become drunk on company loyalty and the travel perks of frequent flyer miles and free hotel amenities, I could empathize with the useless Wednesday staff meetings, the Cindy-approved rotating agenda, and the corporate catch phrases of “at the end of the day” and “it is what it is.” I will admit to being a bit flummoxed with the some of the Marxist theories, so I might try reading the author’s Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary as a necessary primer.

My thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for this ARC. It was an enjoyable and edifying read.

[Dupont25 · Rating 2 out of 5]

really wanted to like this book (not least because its title gestures at Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and La Berge has a philosophy background), but was disappointed at how clumsily it came together. LOTS of repetition of what La Berge's work at a consulting firm entails (it seems we're reminded on every page of Y2K and her company's mission to Document The Process). It doesn't help that the book is, in part, what she herself calls an "auto-ethnography," which means she reflects on an earlier novel that lightly fictionalized her experience at the company. She critiques that earlier novel and even includes excerpts from it (in a different typeface). She freely speculates on what her colleagues are feeling (and repeatedly reminds readers that one colleague, Tim, is gay), but given that these are real people, it's odd that she seemingly made no effort to actually talk to them in the intervening decades. As a result, many of these people, including a female superior who called herself a "bitch," come across as extremely superficial--and the author quite judgmental. Ultimately, "Fake Work" seems like a last ditch effort to make good on some notes for another book (that roman a clef) that La Berge wanted to publish decades ago. At most, it makes for an interesting magazine piece, but to spend 200 pages on tiresomely detailed diary entries is asking a lot.

[Marissa F · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is insufferable. I struggled to get through the first 10% due to endless sentences and completely made-up words like "characterologically" and "phantasmatic". But here's the sentence that did me in:

"If there’s a Proustian madeleine of my Fortune 500 life that continues to pull me into the past, that evokes a corporate nostalgia and longing, neither of which qualifies as enjoyable but both of which are uncannily mesmerizing, it’s calling an 800 number."

DNF at 12%.

I appreciate NetGalley and the publisher for access to a digital ARC. My honest review is my own opinion.

[Saira Haider · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone please god teach the academics how to write

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Fake Work, Leigh Claire La Berge tells the story of the two years she spent working on a bogus Y2K preparedness team. It was 1998 when she lucked into this plush gig with a global advertising conglomerate. Mind you, she wasn’t amending lines of code or doing anything else to avert a tech apocalypse. Rather, she worked as a quality assurance analyst, endlessly double-checking “the Conglomerate’s” documentation of their Y2K prep. All this documenting and quality assuring was aimed at defending against potential lawsuits should the new millennium interrupt advertising as usual. Working alongside Leigh Claire and her team were consultants from the now defunct Arthur Andersen, the management consulting firm that had sold the Conglomerate this goofy process. From the start, La Berge recognized something phony about the whole endeavor, so she started doing a little documenting of her own, writing about her experiences and the people she worked with. She collected her observations in what she called her Bildungsroman. However, it would only be with the benefit of hindsight, and a Ph.D. involving extensive grounding in Marxist theory, that she would come to see not only her Y2K work as fake, but all “work” done in the name of capitalism.

Fake Work is a fun nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers Y2K fears, and especially for those just starting their corporate work life around the turn of the millennium. I fall into that group, and La Berge’s descriptions of ridiculous training, corporate true believers, and meaningless, instantly forgotten work, really resonated with me. As a memoir, Fake Work is at its best when narrating do-nothing office days and profligate spending during global business travel. La Berge’s observations are sharp, and these concrete moments shine with her humor and cleverness. However, whenever La Berge steps away from describing actual events and starts running her experiences through the Marxist theory machine, the writing goes slack and starts to sag under the weight of its own theoretical heft. Luckily, these theory-dense passages tend to occur more in the first half of the book, so it picks up momentum as it goes along.

I love ‘90s nostalgia, and I’m grateful I got to be among the first to read this one-of-a-kind memoir. My thanks to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for providing me with a copy of Fake Work in exchange for my review.

[Sarah Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke
by Leigh Claire La Berge

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

Overview
Leigh Claire La Berge’s Fake Work is a sharp, darkly humorous critique of contemporary capitalism, blending memoir, cultural analysis, and Marxist theory to interrogate the absurdities of labor under late-stage neoliberalism. La Berge, known for her incisive work on political economy (Scandals and Abstraction) and Marxist humor (Marx for Cats), delivers a provocative examination of how modern work—especially in creative and knowledge economies—often masquerades as meaningful while being structurally hollow.

Themes and Content

The book’s core strength lies in its:
-Satirical Critique: La Berge dissects “fake work” (e.g., performative busyness, unpaid internships, corporate jargon) with biting wit, exposing how capitalism demands productivity devoid of tangible value.
-Marxist Lens: Drawing on her expertise in financialization and aesthetics, she traces how labor alienation manifests in gig economies, academia, and creative industries.
-Memoir Elements: Personal anecdotes—from adjunct teaching to navigating publishing—ground abstract critiques in lived experience, making the polemic relatable.
-Timeliness: The book resonates with post-pandemic disillusionment, Quiet Quitting trends, and Gen Z/Millennial labor struggles.

Writing Style and Structure
La Berge’s prose is accessible yet intellectually rigorous, balancing academic references with sardonic humor. The nonlinear structure—switching between theory, satire, and autobiography—mirrors the disjointed reality it critiques. However, some transitions feel abrupt, and the humor, while effective, may alienate readers seeking a more traditional scholarly tone.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:
-Original Perspective: A fresh take on labor critique, merging Marxist theory with generational angst.
-Cultural Relevance: Tackles urgent issues like precarious work, “bullshit jobs,” and the commodification of creativity.
-Engaging Voice: The blend of irony and earnestness keeps the narrative dynamic.

Weaknesses:
-Niche Appeal: The humor’s specificity (e.g., academic in-jokes) may limit broader accessibility.
-Theoretical Density: Some sections assume familiarity with Marxist terminology, risking opacity for general readers.

Section Scoring Breakdown (0–5)
-Conceptual Rigor: 4.5/5 – Insightful but occasionally jargon-heavy.
-Narrative Cohesion: 3.5/5 – Fragmented structure reflects theme but disrupts flow.
-Humor/Engagement: 4/5 – Witty, though not universally resonant.
-Relevance: 5/5 – A piercing commentary on contemporary work.
-Originality: 4.5/5 – Stands out in crowded critiques of capitalism.

Final Verdict
Fake Work is a vital, if uneven, addition to critiques of neoliberal labor. La Berge’s unique voice—equal parts scholar and satirist—makes this a compelling read for leftist thinkers, burnt-out creatives, and anyone questioning why modern work feels so futile. While its academic leanings and dark humor won’t suit all tastes, its message is undeniably urgent.

★★★★☆ (4/5) – A darkly funny, intellectually invigorating indictment of capitalist absurdity.

Thank you to NetGalley and the author, Leigh Claire La Berge, for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Alexander Bertoni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overwrought and overwritten. Like a lot of folks, I grabbed this one based on its nominal (and aesthetic) connection to Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Instead of an incisive critique of capitalism, it ended up being a series of run on sentences and poetic waxing about a two year stint in corporate America at the turn of the millennium.

This book seriously needed a heavier editorial hand. I have an undergraduate degree in English and even then I had to double back on sentences that seemed to completely have lost the thread. Some I could eventually parse, but others felt like there had to be typos in there somewhere because they just straight up made no sense.

A disappointing read, based on a really interesting premise.

[Katelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was drawn in by the excellent cover and the premise. Then I was swiftly disappointed by the prose. Overwritten and insufferable – I’m already tired of the telling/not showing, over explaining of y2k, overly long sentences, etc. at only 10% in. To liken this to Severance and Office Space is doing a disservice to those stories. I thought we were going to skewer corporate culture here, not emulate it! This would’ve been better formatted as a lengthy slide deck no one would read.

[Sarah A-F]

DNF at 8% (~19 pages)

just getting that far felt like a slog, i found the writing style insufferable and felt like it was already falling into repetition

[giovi · Rating 3 out of 5]

not bad but the title is rather misleading

[Olivia]

This book had the raw material to be hilarious and insightful and just… wasn’t. I was waiting for the author to simply stop writing in circles explaining why she was writing this book ?? and focus on the initially promising material — pre-Enron Arthur Andersen corporate hijinks, incisive Marxist analysis, etc.

I did read part of this in the office on breaks from updating relatively pointless spreadsheets though, so #praxis I guess?

[Jill Elizabeth]

I was intrigued by the title and cover. I thoroughly enjoyed Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter and was expecting something similar, especially with that tagline... Unfortunately, what I found felt more like someone's journal entries about their job and life in 1999. While I was there and similarly aged (I'm a year or two older), with somewhat similar experience (friends who worked at Andersen and in advertising), I still couldn't find my way into this one. It felt repetitive and like a primer on Y2K more than anything else.

I kept waiting for some snark or eye rollingly-bad behavior but kept finding lengthy expositions on what Y2K was supposed to be and what a flop it turned out to be. It couldn't hold my attention. Honestly, the prologue was the most interesting part - and felt like it gave me the whole story, in like 15 page flips (I read it on kindle). It had more of the tone I was expecting. The rest of the writing was surprisingly dry and felt more like a recitation of information with an occasional interjection of irritation than anything else.

This one wasn't for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You

The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.

While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.

As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Best read by those already familiar with Marxism for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. A memoir of being a minor cog in a massive corporate machine, and working on what ended up being an unnecessary task since Y2K's predicted meltdown was averted by a lot of hard-working coders.

It's absolutely clear to me that this nightmarish experience would radicalize anyone with two functioning neurons and a conscience. The memoir aspect of the story is the more powerful to my mind because someone subjected to a vastly successful indoctrination process woke up and rejected it.

That's a take-away I can get behind.

Since leaving the corporate world, Author La Berge has made her career taking down this system's rottenness with academic books and articles all adding their mite to the reconceptualization of our present system. In her second book, Wages Against Artwork, she introduced me to the concept of "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Labor being capitalism's lifeblood, this made a big shift in my worldview. Is art rightfully not a wage-earning pursuit? Discuss. I have. (My conclusion is redistribution via UBI is the fair solution.)

As someone who has never fitted into any large system I related to Author La Berge's increasing hostility to meaningless "productivity" goals, pointless groupthink reinforcement sessions (aka meetings), and supremely extravagant playthings, eg expensive, environmentally unjustifiable travel, absurdly an performatively wasteful meals, and the like.

In the face of post-pandemic disillusionment with The Bosses in general, it's time to reassess what The Bosses demand from us for the absolutely insecure, fire-at-will "jobs" that—by design—never quite pay enough. This is someone who can report from the inside and shed light on why The Bosses absolutely go all-in for AI as an alternative to the labor she performed that she's discussing. It's obvious these jobs are going away to anyone who even half-heartedly glances at unemployment statistics. Nothing being proposed to fill that gap in employment, it is clear the war on workers has ratcheted up.

This is a memoir; it's told more or less episodically; that means there's some irritating repetition of key points. I was familiar with the economic vocabulary but those who aren't might simply give up on the read. The insights Author La Berge delivers are important enough that I urge you to use a not-Google search engine to look up the concepts not familiar to you. The heart of this critique, while firmly personal, is...literally everywhere...being borne out as valid. You might or might not share he sense of humor, but Author La Berge is one helluva cicerone through the uselessness of capitalism as an organizing principle. It is not to be trusted, and here is an insider's experience of why.

[sunandareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered what life looks like behind-the-scenes at the mega corporations that run the global economy? Have you pondered what it is “business elites” are really up to in those high rises and in their fancy suits? Well, wonder no more!

Fake Work is an ethnography and memoir of the author’s year as a management consultant in 1999, focused solely on Y2K preparation: i.e. preparing for the end of the world that never came. Leigh Claire La Berge offers a fascinating and truly unique perspective into a strange time in modern history that offers us plenty to reflect on, as we consider that moment in time now, two and a half decades later.

Le Berge’s accounts of her year working at Anderson LLC are vivid as she recounts the mundane and the absurd with equal richness and colour. She pulls from her detailed accounts of that year—her Bildungsroman, as she calls it—and it truly does feel like a peek into a moment in history that one might not have otherwise ever gotten to see the inside of.

I loved her attention to detail and how well she fleshed out each of the characters she encountered during her time working there—they seem both utterly absurd and completely believable at the same time, which was quite a delight. One of my favourite lines in the book was this: “She explained that The Process valued consistency over idiomatic accuracy, and she predicted that with more site visits I would find myself transliterating from corporate vernacular into Processor Latin almost unconsciously.” This illustrates how well she’s able to illustrate the absurdity of corporate beige-ness with humour.

It’s worth noting that La Berge is an academic and her prose definitely does read like the work of one. This is not an inherent critique, but rather an observation. Her voice comes through clearly in every paragraph, however the tone and style did feel more academic and like a literary critique than a traditional memoir. As an example, she writes “so obviously symptomatic was I that my presentation wouldn’t have been out of place in Freud’s fin de siècle hysteria investigations.” A line that clearly conveys her strong voice and also can feel a little dizzying for the average memoir reader, if they’re not expecting it. If you go in to this book keeping this in mind, you can still certainly really enjoy her accounts of a truly bizarre moment in time and her specific vantage point, which is well articulated.

This book is a good fit for anyone who’s been disillusioned with corporate life and is looking to feel seen in the pages of a text. Yes, this memoir speaks to a moment in time that seems like forever ago now, but its relevance feels particularly apt today.

I was intrigued by the premise and not sure what to expect, but found myself sucked in by La Berge’s tales of working on the front lines of capitalism at its best/worst. This was an enjoyable read (albeit sometimes a little academic at times) and I’m glad I now better understand what the Y2K panic looked like from within the walls of corporate America at the turn of the millennium.

(Thanks to NetGalley for early access to this book!)

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge, wasn't what I was hoping for but once I adjusted my expectations I enjoyed it.

When I mention adjusting expectations I am not talking about some hierarchical adjustment, no change in what I expect in writing quality. I am talking about what I thought the book was going to be. I expected more of an explicit critique of capitalism, almost academic in nature. Once I realized it was a memoir first and the critique was more by showing than explaining, I could enjoy the book much more. Those of us who have studied and taught such critiques will recognize where the theory is used even if it isn't explicitly stated and explained.

The memoir as such was a mix of funny and horrifying, knowing that what was happening 25 years ago is only more prevalent today puts an element of disgust in a humorous memoir.

The critique is here, and there are places where she explains some of the thinking behind her critique, but if you were wanting a book laying out arguments and coming to a worked-through conclusion, you could be disappointed.

I would recommend this to readers who are looking more for some examples, supported by rational thought, of how dysfunctional our system is. If you want a memoir without commentary on society, or a textbook on Marxist analysis of capitalism, you will need to adjust your expectations, as I did.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Megan Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to be clear: I went into this book expecting a sharp, satirical takedown of corporate absurdity and late-stage capitalism. What I got instead felt more like an overly long journal entry from 1999, packed with vague philosophical musings and very little bite.

📉 Why It Missed the Mark:
🛠️ Not a Takedown—More a Ramble – Despite the bold title and comparisons to Bullshit Jobs, this isn’t a critique of capitalism so much as a meandering, memoir-ish account of the author’s time in consulting. It reads more like a lightly annotated diary than an insightful analysis.
📚 Repetitive and Self-Indulgent – The term bildungsroman appears over 50 times (yes, I checked), and yet it never seems to earn its place in the narrative. There are references to personal development, but no clear arc or deeper takeaway that connects the concept to the reader.
💼 Boring Office Culture, But Not in a Fun Way – The absurdity of corporate life is acknowledged, but without the humor or sharpness you might expect. Instead of feeling exposed, the system feels... untouched.

🤷‍♀️ Final Take: This wasn’t so much a takedown of capitalism as it was a long, loosely political meditation with occasional flashes of insight. I don’t necessarily disagree with the politics, but the execution was flat and not nearly as engaging as the synopsis suggested.

[milk tooth · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was 3 🌟 as a memoir – it was certainly interesting as a peek inside a (fake) high powered nyc professional job in the late 90s. in the afterward the author describes her book as a "marxist-inflected, queer, auto-theoretical work memoir," which it certainly is. that should have been on the dust cover, because i think it would properly temper the reader's expectations.

it feels like for the entirety of the book up until that point it claimed to be something else – theoretical, a partial auto-ethnography, etc – so i was waiting and waiting for a point to coalesce, or for theory and anecdote to intersect in a meaningful way, but the latter never came. she says that the main difference between the original bilsdungroman (🙄 i find this so ... insufferable...) and this new book is "theoretical heft, which, ironically, appears as theoretical simplicity..." no, it appears as theoretical laziness. the notes section is 2.5 pages – why even include marx at all? the author says that she needed marx to make sense of her employment and the fact that the work is fake ... okay, i understand that to a point (except that working class people understand that this work is fake without having to experience these sorts of jobs) and i'm not trying to deride her personal journey. i just personally found this lacking as a capitalist critique. it was fine as a memoir!

[James R. Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Fake Work" could just as easily describe the author's time spent writing this overlong series of anecdotes. Ostensibly, this is a personal story elucidating the "fake" nature of late-capitalist management consulting using a marxist lens. I am a management consultant, and a marxist, so I am perhaps in the unique position of being able to relate to the author's experience. Yet each page I was newly disappointed to find that she never seemed to pay much attention to the events of the story, always missing the forest for the trees, never able to make sense of what she was doing or observing. It seems that in all of her experiences, she learned nothing, and so she teaches the reader nothing. Every potentially interesting branch of the story is abandoned, each character left a silhouette, all historical context unexplained. In a particularly ironic moment, she invokes the allegory of the cave, but casts herself as someone traveling in from the outside world to become trapped in the cave -- a perfect metaphor in fact for those reading Fake Work, who by venturing into it can only become less enlightened.

[Tawney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is sort of an employment coming of age story told well after the fact. Straight out of college, where she studies philosophy, La Berge got a job she wanted. The job title bore about as much relationship to her job as Sanitary Engineer does to unclogging a toilet. Not only was the actual work boring, the project wasn’t what one might imagine. Even after a promotion with different responsibilites it all had the feeling of make work. She kept notes and after leaving she tried to write about it but it didn’t jell. So La Berge went on with her life, entered academia and eventually returned to the notes and wrote this book. It’s the narrative of her experience with this one job. It isn’t especially entertaining and her experience is hardly original although there are some anecdotes that cause eye-rolling, nodding and sarcastic smiles of recognition. To me the book’s real shortcoming is that the author fails to connect her experience to the wider realm of business as unmistakable universal primary attributes.

I received a digital advanced copy of this book compliements of Haymarket and NetGalley.

[Artemyss · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit of a dense read, to be honest. I was intrigued by the title and hoped for something ripping capitalism a new one, but that’s not what I got. I usually don’t pick up memoirs or business related reads, but again, the title drew me in. I expected a good roasting of capitalist corporate America. What I got was the philosophical musings about mundane corporate life during Y2K and the dot com bubble. Not that it didn’t have some good quotable moments or interesting perspectives. Ultimately, I could only get through half it before I had to put it down. This book may have an audience out there, but I am not it.

[I received an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

[Ash J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wanted to enjoy this book, but the author seems to do a lot more telling of what she wants to accomplish with this text than actually doing it. Felt like I kept waiting for the marxist critique to start, which I had to wait until the last chapter of the book to find. I also really have an issue with how the author poses herself as a "middle class" person who somehow found her way into this corporation. Meanwhile she mentions going to a private college and living in NYC over the summer without a job to do an unpaid internship. This book mostly felt like bragging about how much fun she had working this bs job and the travel she got to accomplish. This book ended up providing nothing for someone interested in marxism like me

[Madison Geery · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a while for me to get into this book. The first third felt very repetitive, but maybe that was the point? That said, the story itself is interesting and kind of a hilarious take on how insane our society functions, through the lens of the author's life during the Y2K crisis as a QA analyst.
I picked up this book because of the cover and was hoping it would have covered society as a whole instead of one story, but it was an interesting take on a time I have vivid memories of.
I received an ARC of this book for my review.

[Kelly Burke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the premise of this book and think there are some interesting insights tucked in here, but unfortunately it was a difficult book to get through. The writing felt all over the place because it was more stream of consciousness and less narrative, so it was hard to follow the relevance of various anecdotes or jumping through time. I think it was supposed to create an informal and intimate relationship with the reader, but it just lost me time and time again.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC and the opportunity to read and try this book.

[Jennifer Quiroz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huh. Interesting peak into the corporate world, and into a little historical moment of pre-y2k. I picked it because I remember that time and am just a couple years younger than the author. I love coming-of-age stories set at the time I came-of-age. But this was not that.

It ran long, and with a lot of fancy big words that seemed unnecessary. It seems like it could have been a more succinct essay. And the tie to Marxism didn't feel super well defined: yes, her experience was all fake: Capitalism at its most ridiculous. But how did that turn her into a Marxist? I am still curious.

[Kars · Rating 4 out of 5]

La Berge expertly captures the mood in the business world, and I guess popular culture in general, leading up to the year two thousand. The depictions of the drudgeries of office life are very funny at times. Stylistically, I also found the way she alternates the historical narrative based in her memoir written at the time with reflections on them from the present day, and what it means for her intellectual development, very interesting. This is not a book that is sure of itself. It's not trying to convince you that capitalism is bad, actually (that would be boring). La Berge self-describes as being an "ambivalent Marxist" these days (p. 140), and the book really conveys that sensibility, which I found very refreshing. If you, like me, came of age around the turn of the millennium, you'll enjoy this for sure.

[Hannah Hudnall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately a far different tone than I expected from the title, cover and summary. Pretty repetitive with a constant need to draw on sentences and use as large of words as possible in a seemingly pretentious way. It's an interesting concept but could've been done much more concisely and more straight-forward.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm.. memoirish, Y2K musings and lots on the world of work. At some points I enjoyed it and at others it felt like a bit of a rant. Not quite my cup of tea. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This sounded like it would land exactly in a Venn diagram of my interests, but with no disrespect to the author, I just didn’t find it especially interesting or insightful. It works more as a memoir than as the expanded capitalist critique that was intended.