My employer is under the false impression that I am in the United States building a billing system on his behalf. That would be the job of a programmer. However I am not a programmer. My boss, who likes to think of himself as a lead software engineer, isn't a lead software engineer, at least that's not how I see him. I am a pioneer in an exciting emerging occupational field. I am a digital performer specializing in remote work reenactment. And Gerald, the tired overworked middle aged man who believes himself to be a decision maker, isn't deciding anything. I am. The man who believes himself to be a Lead Software Engineer, I see him as much more than that. He is my patron. He has the honor and privilege of being graced by my art. I am the Michealangelo of Digital Performance Reenactment and Gerald is my audience eagerly anticipating my every show.
Employers operate under the outdated mistaken belief that they are in the business of buying labor by the hour. The truth is that they are in the business of purchasing perceived labor output. Nobody actually works a full 8 hours. They work a modest 2.5 and sham the remainder. This has always been the case and the remote work revolution has only exacerbated this fact.
In an age where people will pay millions to buy a digital image of a monkey smoking weed, the amount of actual labor you perform doesn’t matter. If it takes you 2 hours to do what most wage slaves accomplish in 8, there’s no reason to punish yourself by demanding more work. As a digital performer my goal is not output maximization but perceived output maximization by shuffling tickets on Jira and providing an oscar worthy depiction of an overworked programmer to my zoom audience. I'm using my time to minimize my labor hours while maximizing my perceived labor output, so that my real labor can be properly allocated to empowering women of color, specifically by painting their insides white, so that one day I can grow my own soccer team.
Relocating to LATAM was the obvious choice for me due to its amazing tropical weather, attractive local women who aren’t anesthetized with libido suppressants, (SSRIs and birth control), and low taxes. The United States has citizenship based taxation which means that wherever you go in the world, the medical-industrial and military-industrial complexes will be siphoning more than a quarter of your income to pay for insulin treatments for diabetic blacks and Raytheon Peregrine Missiles to donate to afghan villages. However, the IRS graciously provided US citizens with the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, or FEIE. If you live outside the US for 330 days during 12 consecutive months, you pay zero federal income tax. Now obviously I am taking advantage of that but it begs the question what does my employer think? Well in the words of Sun Tzu, “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle”. Just like a transgender person can decide not to come out as transgender to family and friends, I can decide not to come out as transnational to my employer. My body my choice. Which is why my company has no right to know my location.
In order to maintain my right to privacy as a transnational identifying person, I had to take some measures that some might call drastic. For starters my current job requires me to connect to their SQL database. Their server doesn’t accept connections from outside of the US, so I invested in the GL-MT1300 (Beryl) router and a NordVPN subscription with a dedicated IP address. Any time I have to connect to my employer’s servers I do it through my VPN dedicated IP so it looks like I’m connecting from the United States. On the rare occasions when I must method act, npm is my muse. With a flourish of npm install and my brilliant 5th grade reading level (of the documentation), 5 story points of work is done in minutes and the Product Team throws roses on my digital stage
That covers the technical aspect but there’s also a social aspect to becoming a digital work reenacter. How do I maintain the illusion of productivity while my labor is expended on reproductivity with latinas in a tropical paradise? Every actor understands the importance of costume. The setting of my performance is not the tropical paradise where I live but rather a dreadful gloomy town beset by cold winters. Which is why during my zoom performances I blast the AC and wear a sweater, sometimes even a beanie to best embody my character. Every morning before I start my day I’ll check the weather and local news in my town in the US and about once or twice a week during my standup meeting I’ll make a comment about local events. I also have a running list of fun activities and hobbies that I supposedly participate in, and current tv shows that I supposedly watch. This way if someone asks what I did over the weekend I can quickly piece together a convincing cover story. However most of the time I’ll just ask questions about other people to avoid having attention focused on me. My coworkers love talking about themselves.
Now you may be wondering, how did I get a job as a programmer without knowing how to code? Well it’s almost 2023, and American corporations have collectively decided to a adopt a postmodern post truth position with regard to gender and how many hours per day their engineers are just playing League of Legends. Just as there is no “correct” way to code a loop in Python (you can use recursion, a for loop, a while loop, etc.), there’s no such thing as an absolute truth. At least that is the position my employer has adopted into company policy. Who am I to contest their ontological position?
Truth-effects and morality naratives are arbitrarily imposed from above to mold a submissive and optimally productive middle class to be milked dry by its overlords. My contention is if my employer holds that gender is a social construct to be arbitrarily chosen on a whim, so is location and technical ability. That’s why my resume is filled with programming languages I don’t know. This brilliant logical deduction was enough to overflow my schedule with preliminary interviews. The next step was hiring a technical personal assistant from Fiverr who identified as me during technical interviews. After that I accepted a job offer. Cheating at your job is very similar to cheating on your girlfriend, if you’re good at one you’ll be good at the other.
Two millennia ago the great Aristotle reasoned that men of culture must be free of stupefying labor if they are to achieve their full potential. This required a degree of autonomy only available to aristocrats and artists with rich patrons. As I see it, I am a 21st century DaVinci whose perfomative art is the faithful depiction of the contemporary office drone. Future generations will look back and write their dissertations on the world-disclosure of my portrayal of the remote worker. This is more than reappropriating my surplus labor from my employer/patron. This is about empowering women. This is about giving back to communities of color. This is about creating art.