If you’ve ever been to a museum or on a school field trip, you may have had a tour guide walk you through a historical exhibit of 19th century households or of ancient Mesopotamian agricultural tools.
Now, a current TikTok trend suggests that one day in the future, those exhibits will be the modern workstation: standing desks, Zoom meeting headsets and all. The viral series titled “historical tour of a corporate worker’s desk” by marketing professional and content creator Heike Young imagines what that will look like.
“Now in those times, it would have been really common for a corporate worker to sit at a desk, much like this one, and be on calls all day,” she says in the skit, now with over 116,000 views. Behind Young a standing desk is set up with two screens, one for work and the other for online shopping, she says. The desk is scattered with an assortment of beverages, or “brown liquids”, and plastic food containers and packets.
“Believe it or not, this worker would’ve actually been considered very lucky to have a job like this,” she continues. “People would submit hundreds of applications and submit themselves to many humiliation rituals just to get a job like this one.”
In another video, Young highlights a few common tabs workers would have had open on their screens.
“Yes, Amazon. That’s the same name as the extinct rainforest, that’s right,” she replies to a “question”. “We got some history buffs in here.”
She also educates on the linguistic practices of the period, more commonly known as business jargon or “work voice”.
“There was one sound that always got the laborers moving. It was a mild form of psychological torture,” she explains in yet another skit. “Our museum’s immersive effects team will play it now. And there were two common variations. One was more typical among workers who used Windows technology. And the next one is often for people who used Apple Mac.”
The comments are filled with corporate workers who feel horrifyingly seen by the series.
“With every video I watch, the more I’m horrified by the reality of the life I currently live,” one comment read.
Others, though, had the opposite reaction. “This made me feel really hopeful in a very strange way,” another wrote, finding comfort in the fact that, for better or worse, the current economic reality cannot continue forever.
“Much of corporate landscape right now is pretty bleak, and it’s easy to get frustrated with it all,” Young told Fast Company. “But we are living in one moment. There’s so much history before and after us.”
With the series, she thought to zoom out and examine the corporate experience from an entirely different point of view, much the same as we might now look back on laborers in the past and their working conditions.
“When viewing it from the future as a detached museum docent, what is striking?” Young continues. “What little, mundane details seem quaint, absurd, or even grotesque?”
As for what anthropologists will be uncovering about the corporate worker experience centuries from now, Young says: “A bunch of Amazon returns that may never go back. Chips, gotta have chips. A fork with an empty plastic container. Three different beverages; some for their caffeine and some for the illusion of hydration. And a picture of the people you’re doing this for.”