What Is It For? A Song About Meaningless Corporate Work in the Age of AI
Lately, I have spent far too much time thinking about meaningless corporate work: intelligent people producing perfect presentations, precise numbers and carefully aligned decisions—without anybody asking whether the work is relevant at all.
Then AI arrived. It might liberate us from meaningless work. Or it might help us produce more of it, faster and with unprecedented precision.
The idea for this song came while listening to Mick Jagger’s Strange Game, the wonderfully cynical title song of Slow Horses. I wondered what that same dry look at organisational life might reveal about today’s corporate world.
Instead of writing another essay, I wrote a song.
The lyrics emerged in a dialogue with ChatGPT. The music and vocals were created with ElevenLabs. That seems rather fitting.
Listen to “What Is It For?”
Lyrics by Patrick Stähler with ChatGPT. Music and vocals created with ElevenLabs.
Lyrics
Verse 1
Surrounded by yes-men Brown-nosers and henchmen Under the cold office light They nod through the nonsense And call it consensus Then swear every number is right Each figure is vetted Each decimal sweated While relevance dies at the door The numbers are certain The purpose uncertain But nobody asks what they’re for
Chorus
What is it for? What is it for? The dashboards, the briefings, the calls The answer is pending The quarter is ending So polish the numbers once more
Verse 2
You sit at your station In bright isolation And colour the cells on the screen You soften the warning From evening till morning And turn every failure to green You draft the agenda Designed to engender A meeting that changes no thing You capture each action Divide it in fractions Then schedule a follow-up in spring
Chorus
What is it for? What is it for? The roadmaps, the workshops, the calls The strategy’s clever The outcome is never But everyone’s filling the walls
Verse 3
The saviour came coded Pre-trained and uploaded No badge and no desk of its own It swallowed the folders The decks for stakeholders And answered in corporate tone It shortened the briefing That no one was reading Then wrote twenty versions by four The output looked splendid The nonsense extended More accurate nonsense than before
Chorus
What is it for? What is it for? Now output is flooding the floor We asked for salvation Got acceleration And scaled what was pointless before
Verse 4
The machine never tires It feeds the desires Of systems designed to expand It measures each measure With infinite pleasure But cannot decide what should end It drafts the decision With flawless precision Before there is something to choose It writes the solution To polished confusion Then proves there is no time to lose
Bridge
If work has no meaning Then making it gleaming Won’t suddenly give it a soul A faster production Of pointless construction Just buries us deeper in goals So give it the labour The slides and the paper The rituals no one requires Then leave us the trouble Of bursting the bubble And asking what anyone needs
Final chorus
What is it for? Let’s ask it once more Before we produce it at all If nobody needs it No customer reads it Then stopping is smarter than scale What is it for? What is it for? The question we learned to ignore Perhaps our salvation Is not automation But work worth the working once more
Perhaps the most important question about AI at work is not what it can do. It is what is worth doing.
