We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person

TEXT START: When I awoke on RTO Day (officially “Remain to Office,” since management maintained that I’d misremembered and we’d always been in office six days a week), I was not as excited as I should have been.

The Dissection

This is an autopsy of RTO as corporate liturgy. The employee is not doing substantive cognitive work; they are certifying machine output by clicking GENERATE and APPROVE. The office exists to surveil, discipline, and manufacture obedience—not because SlurryHose requires human bodies nearby.

The memory revisions, contradictory corporate alliances, absurd executive surplus, coercive wellness language, and employment-linked healthcare expose management speech as a control technology. The joke’s real subject is a workplace where AI has hollowed out production, leaving ritualized compliance as the employee’s remaining function.

The Core Fallacy

The text treats RTO primarily as an irrational management preference. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, it is a predictable lag defense: physical presence preserves surveillance, hierarchy, and employment-based rationing while human productive necessity declines.

RTO cannot restore the wage-to-consumption circuit. It can only delay its visible failure and sort workers into compliant Servitors. The company’s stated pursuit of “power” is also less absurd than the narrator assumes. Control of AI capital, data, energy, logistics, and distribution naturally makes power more important than conventional profit.

Hidden Assumptions

• AI is already competent enough to perform most of the employee’s nominal work, while humans remain as approval infrastructure.
• Employment remains the gateway to healthcare, income, status, and survival.
• A tiny ownership class can consolidate the productive economy into a few firms while retaining institutional legitimacy.
• Legal, cultural, and physical inertia can force workers back into obsolete workplaces even after the technology makes presence unnecessary.
• Individual survival is achieved through compliance and promotion rather than ownership or indispensable control.
• Corporate incoherence is merely managerial absurdity, rather than the visible surface of a system reorganizing around power over automated capital.

Social Function

Primary classification: partial truth and ideological anesthetic.

The satire accurately exposes RTO as coercion, AI work as slop certification, and corporate culture as enforced self-deception. But it converts structural terror into an entertaining grotesque. Managers, HR departments, and executives appear ridiculous, allowing the deeper mechanism—ownership of automated production and the collapse of mass productive participation—to remain offstage.

It is also transition management: audiences are taught to laugh at the post-work order before being required to confront what replaces their economic role.

The Verdict

The article is correct about the office being an obedience theater. It stops short of the terminal implication. Its world of three corporations, automated labor, and employees clinging to health insurance is not just a joke; it is a compressed model of the emerging order.

P1 appears in miniature, P2 appears through corporate concentration, and P3 appears in the worker’s dependence on a job that no longer requires meaningful human production. RTO is hospice care for the employment system: it keeps the corpse upright, monitored, and insured while ownership consolidates control. The promotion is not liberation. It is a better collar.