Clockwatchers is a dossier presented in the latest issue of WIP magazine, which explores what the future of labor might look like in the face of climate uncertainty. Clocking in at 32 pages, it contains interviews with Malcolm Harris on the concept of degrowth, a speculative iteration on the office of tomorrow by architect Fabienne Sommer, and a sprawling essay on The Deck by Charlie Robin Jones, as he explores how it shapes the world we live in.
Images: Sirui Ma
Design: Roxy Zeiher
A Question of Limits
Words: Gregk Foley
It is difficult to think about progress without thinking about growth. After all, the two often have some sort of correlation, or seem to at least. A baby is born, as time passes they grow into a child, and then become an adult. An acorn is planted and, given enough time, water and nutrients, it becomes an oak tree. Conversely, when something stops growing, this is generally taken as the signal that it has begun its decline, however gradual.
The same holds true when we think about economics. Small business owners look for year-on-year increases in revenue as signals of viability. Corporations engage in a tireless pursuit of increased sales, bigger market share, larger territory.
As for states and the governments that run them, the question of a country’s relative strength or weakness has been condensed, over the course of several decades, into a single, shorthand quantitative indicator: Gross Domestic Product, or GDP – the total monetary value of everything produced and sold in and by that country in a year. A healthy national economy is one in which that number grows, and grows, and grows. An economy that is static or, worse still, shrinking, is one that is in decline. This mindset has been instilled in the public consciousness, and for at least the past half-century, elections in the developed world have hinged more and more on candidates’ answer to one question: How do you plan to grow the economy?
But what would a world that wasn’t organized around growth look like? Or, one which operated with a different understanding of what growth is, or where to look for it? This, in essence, is the opening salvo of the degrowth movement.
Though its adherents are diverse in their political outlooks and ideological leanings, degrowth begins with a simple syllogism:
The rapid advancements in human productivity and subsequent economic growth that have occurred during the modern era of industrial capitalism were predicated on the mass extraction and consumption of fossil fuels;
Humanity now faces an existential threat in the form of climate change that can only be avoided or mitigated through a transition away from fossil fuels;
Therefore, to ensure the survival of the planet, humanity must abandon capitalism as our global organizing system, as well as the endless pursuit of economic growth that underpins it.
That’s about as far as things go in terms of a general consensus (and there would surely be some people who would take issue with even the above summary). The broader conceptual terrain remains hotly contested: what the transition sh/c/would look like; how it would be carried out; who would bear the brunt of 𝑥 or 𝑦 change, and so on.
Even the term itself is contentious. For some, ‘degrowth’ misleadingly conveys a purely negative image of reversal or a crude reduction in living standards, when what they are proposing is more a rebalancing of the scales – a transformation of what we understand ‘growth’ to mean. For others, a radical reduction in our current consumption habits (at least in the developed world) is precisely the message that needs to be underscored. For others, it’s the fraughtness of the debate itself, that indeterminacy and contestation, that makes degrowth so appealing.
Malcolm Harris, a writer, researcher and critic based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is in that third camp. In 2023, he published his second book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World which, over 600-odd pages, traces the historical development of what we now know as Silicon Valley, the evolution of the tech industry throughout the twentieth century, its connections to academia, healthcare, and the military-industrial complex, and the global implications of that historical trajectory. Now, he’s turning his attention to degrowth, a new topic with its own blend of industrial capitalism, technological evangelism, and its own implications for society’s ongoing development.
“I’m not even a degrowth guy,” Harris begins. He initially took interest in degrowth because of the debate around the term itself; how that one word triggered such varied (and passionate) responses from different factions. As a somewhat new concept, ‘degrowth’ is still loosely defined, meaning polemicists treat it like wet cement, trying to imprint their interpretations upon it and solidify popular understanding in their favor.
“It's a really good way to get defensive if you're an economist, ‘You want the economy to go down? You want the line to go down? That's simply a call for recession that will contract the economy and cause misery. You’re misery mongers!’ That’s sort of the official line for a lot of people on this stuff, which I think is kind of silly. It's a refusal to engage with the actual ideas.”
So what are the actual ideas? The Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito’s 2023 Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism is one of the first robust articulations of degrowth in theoretical, political-economical terms. In a recent interview, Saito proposed understanding degrowth not as the simple antithesis of growth, but as a process of abandoning the dominant (capitalist) conception of our social and economic world which holds growth as humanity’s ultimate purpose: “Degrowth demands two things: The first is abandoning GDP as the sole measure of progress, and the second is to distinguish between what is unnecessary and what is necessary, to reduce what is unnecessary and increase what is necessary.”
Part of the confusion in the degrowth movement stems from the first part of that demand. GDP is so embedded in how we think of progress that many reflexively interpret its abandonment as a call for the opposite of progress. But that’s a purely quantitative way of thinking about things. The second part of Saito’s definition introduces the qualitative aspect – not simply how much production, but of what and for what reasons.
“Some people focus really hard on the quantitative part of the argument,” says Harris. “They say degrowth means that global Gross Domestic Product has to go down, or that energy throughput has to go down. They're looking at some metric – the rate of output growth has to slow, or even go down, for example.”
And even if we abandon GDP as the all-determining number, what number or numbers will take its place? Harris also points out that quantitative data must always be filtered or interpreted through a qualitative lens: “Like, what is ‘it’? And does ‘it’ have to go down? Are we talking about something derivative, or are we talking about the actual thing itself? Even when we’re talking about purely quantitative elements, there’s a dispute about what number we’re even talking about.”
In spite of all of this, proponents of degrowth believe there is a broad consensus on what the movement advocates, even if some parties remain confused, wilfully or otherwise. “I think underneath those debates, there's some understanding of what the qualitative elements are, which is that instead of chasing solutions through economic growth and accumulation of capital, we must take a look at what we actually need, and try to accomplish that while decreasing throughput.”
Indeed, throughput – the quantity of resources, materials, energy and labor required in production – is one of the most contentious topics when discussing how humanity should respond to the threat of climate change. For many, producing less implies less work, meaning fewer jobs, meaning declining living standards, and so on. Enter ‘green growth’, another loosely-defined camp who believe it is possible to radically alter our systems of production and distribution without the economic line ever having to tick down.
Against degrowth’s positing of a historical link between economic growth and the rise of fossil fuel consumption in modernity, green growthers believe that you can change the nature of that throughput – for example, substituting green energy sources and renewables for fossil fuels and plastics – while maintaining the incentive to innovate that capitalism provides. So, rather than initiating a direct confrontation with the large capitalist powers (which degrowth in any form would necessarily entail), green growthers believe that through various incentives provided by states and international bodies (e.g. tax credits, subsidies, public-private partnerships), businesses can be gradually enticed away from fossil fuels and toward renewables and green energy without sacrificing the monetary ‘carrot’ that growth provides.
This approach (unsurprisingly) is the one preferred by political and business elites. The United States, European Union, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and World Bank all advocate a ‘green growth’ response to climate change: market-led interventions against ecological concerns with a healthy dose of tech innovation. As Harris put it in a 2022 article for Defector, green growthers view the climate crisis as capitalism’s greatest test: It might be the motor driving us towards the cliff of climate disaster, but it’s also, they say, the only system dynamic enough to innovate wings before we go over the edge.
Green growthers are loud in their criticisms of degrowth’s theoretical and practical shortcomings. Telling people in the west to consume less, they say, is unlikely to be a political winner, and even then, the theory of political transformation is insufficiently developed. Rarely do they acknowledge the fraughtness of their own theory of change. One might argue that the reason groups like the OECD and World Bank have signed on to green growth is precisely because it promises existential salvation without any major disruption to the current state of things. But if advocating for a drastic, permanent break from the status quo feels fantastical, surely green growth is too, perhaps even more so. After all, the suggestion is that, given enough encouragement, big business will invent one or several as-yet-undefined technologies that will rapidly reverse two centuries of fossil emissions and environmental degradation. Looking at Silicon Valley’s headline innovations of the past decade, should we really trust them to innovate us out of the crisis?
“No, you shouldn't.”
After a pause and some laughter, Harris elaborates. “So, the consultancy firm PwC puts out this annual report (The State of Climate Tech) documenting venture capital investments in green tech. They go granular. In which sub sector are venture capitalists investing their capital, and how much? How developed is that technology? What are the promises? How much decarbonisation can it really accomplish long-term? What can we expect out of it?” And what did they find?
“That venture capital is really, really bad at investing in climate. They basically say so, out loud. Venture capitalists overinvest in technologies that are already developed, and that aren't particularly promising, specifically cars and scooters. We’re crying out for investment in early stage technologies that are risky, but could change the whole system. And the tech funding response is basically, ‘Nah, we're going to invest billions of dollars making seven different scooter companies that will then compete against each other, very inefficiently, and one of them might win.’”
The capitalist rationalization for this, of course, is that this is just best practice. Why would a VC firm take a risk investing in the latest green technology when investing in something reliable and stable would be more prudent. Perhaps rather than neglecting climate, they’re simply making safe bets?
“But they're not making safe bets! Look at Sam Bankman-Fried (the founder of the cryptocurrency firm FTX that was revealed to be a techno-glossed Ponzi scheme in late 2022, and who was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison on the day of our call). The whole crypto bubble is not a safe bet from a logical perspective, as in, ‘Is this something that's going to be profitable?’ But I think you're right that in some ways, it is a safe bet. It's worth thinking about the ways AI generative software is a safe bet, even though it means spending billions and billions on a product that isn’t well developed and still hasn't done anything. And I think for that, we have to look at labor.”
“What is it, exactly, that they're investing in? What future are they compelled to put money behind? It’s the repression of labor. That's what generative software is for. Not even unemployment – I don't think it's really going to put people out of a job, per se – but underemployment. It's going to reduce the quality of jobs. That's the aspiration.”
This might be the heart of degrowth’s critique of green growth. Ultimately, green growth falls back upon a vision of technological prometheanism; a belief that Silicon Valley understands its purpose as being for the benefit of humanity, and that given enough time, energy and patience, it will create the deus ex machina that solves all of our problems. But at least since the Global Financial Crisis (and in many cases far further back), all of the tech industry’s big innovations have shown a deep antagonism to labor. When not trying to remove the human entirely (so-called AI technologies), Silicon Valley has worked to suppress labor power (Uber, DoorDash, et al., which have rebuffed efforts by their workers to unionize or improve conditions), make work more precarious (the same culprits, through zero-hour contracts and capricious management practices), recreate historic enclosures in the digital age (media streaming services, privatized academic portals), create entirely new technological enclosures (paywalled news websites, premium social media feeds), and even fabricate entire systems that might magically generate value ex nihilo, without the need for any human input whatsoever (cryptocurrency). To the extent that tech produces genuine benefit for human society today, this benefit is always secondary to the primary motives of value extraction, rentierism, and the generation of private profit. The idea that we should place humanity’s survival in the hands of tech isn’t particularly convincing.
But if you want to maintain capitalism and the free market, as the green growthers do, there’s not much else you can do. You can incentivise investment in certain areas, offer tax credits, subsidies, state support, and so on – you can lead the horses to water. What you can’t do, in a capitalist economy, is make them drink.
And as all of this goes on, oil companies are still pursuing new drilling operations in ever-riskier areas (think deep-sea drilling, fracking for gas, or Canada’s tar sands), most with leases of at least ten or twenty years. These are massive investments of money and resources, and once they’re in the ground, those oil companies aren’t going to abandon them until every last drop has been pulled out from below. For that to happen, they might need to be – quelle horreur – coerced.
“Someone's got to force the oil and gas companies to strand those assets, right?” Harris snaps his fingers. “Like that. They're not going to do it by themselves. And I don't think you're going to create a system of economic incentives, laws, or policies that will accomplish that without the teeth of economic coercion.”
But can we really imagine a world where the state directly intervenes to repress consumption? “Yes! Of course, we can! They do that right now, to other countries!” What do you think has been suppressing the working class’s share of product for decades? Coercion exists, right now. It also exists through the worsening quality of consumer items; putting microplastics in everything is a way to make people's lives worse in order to maintain the capitalist class’s profit margins [put another way, if their profit margins are non-negotiable, they’ll maintain them by feeding you crap, and you won’t get a say in it]. That’s not the coercive power of the government, that's capital doing that!”
“You can find theories that were written in the 19th century that said, ‘Now we can overthrow capitalism, because it's done all this development.’ I think it’s interesting that some people will look at that, and then continue to look at the next two hundred-odd years of capitalist development, and think that this is all in our favor in some way, when it's not. In terms of people’s actual lives, their wellbeing, I think it's pretty clear that it's been non-additive – subtractive, even – for a very long time.”
Ultimately, it seems like what is really at stake in degrowth – perhaps the entire climate debate – is the question of limits. It feels simple to say, but as a productive society, we depend upon natural resources furnished to us by a planet that is, in the final analysis, unavoidably limited. Our economic system, meanwhile, is one that is predicated upon an infinite pursuit of surplus. And as that system has developed, the speed at which it ‘metabolizes’ the natural world has only accelerated, while the earth’s metabolism – its ability to replenish those same resources – has remained, well, natural. If nothing else, degrowth feels like an attempt to confront humanity, particularly those with the power and influence to change things, with the mere reality of limits.
The response, meanwhile, is to deny that any such limits ever should, or could, exist. And in some sense, this isn’t wrong. In a cosmic sense, there are no limits. As the philosopher Jairus Grove puts it, the end of the world is never the end of everything. This world will continue in some shape or form, with or without us. But surely, when it comes to humanity’s place in that world, the question of the limit is an existential one.
“I mean, sure, limits don't exist outside of human society. The limit is a concept that we apply. So when someone says, ‘Well, there's no inherent limit to whatever energy throughput,’ then yes, you can play out some SimCity world where you sacrifice everything else for the sake of maintaining that energy input. But that’s the point: When people talk about limits, what they're talking about is imposing social limits on our human production systems.”
“Are there natural limits? I don't know, but I definitely think we should impose some. We should have some natural limits, insofar as we are part of nature. Societies have collapsed when they fail to do so. That doesn't mean the world ends, it doesn't even mean the species ends necessarily. But societies that have failed to impose limits on their extraction of resources, throughout all of human history, have tended to collapse. That's why I always challenge the pro-growth people to explain why growth in and of itself is important to them. ‘I understand, you don't want the economy to go down – why not?’ What's wrong with a zero-sum competition between Green Capital and Fossil Capital?”
Because we’re in agreement on some things. We know we're going to be stranding some assets. We know we have to degrow carbon emissions. Everyone agrees with that. So if we agree that there are some things we need to grow, and we agree there are things we need to shrink, then the question is about values. And I think that it is then incumbent on the pro-growth people to explain: Why do we need to accumulate capital? Or why is it so important to their strategy? Because I don't think there's no answer there. I think there's a really important answer there. But that's the question they need to start answering.”
“Why is capital accumulation important?”
Playbour
THE HACIENDA DOESN’T EXIST
At Playbour we find ourselves oscillating between states of playful freedom and systems of productivity, a relentless back and forth that has been conditioned by an apparent overabundance of choices or selections.
This is an ode to Stanley, the titular character from the cult 2013 video game The Stanley Parable. Under the player’s guidance, and with gentle nudges from an invisible narrator, Stanley is analogous to the clerk in Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby: The Scrivener. Hired by a Wall Street lawyer, Bartleby is initially industrious, but quickly refuses to do any other task required of him, always with the words: "I would prefer not to."
At Playbour, the player-worker is not assigned any work and so starts to look out for his colleagues. This player-worker is incessantly confronted with making decisions – with every step towards ‘free choice’, or refusal to exist within the narrative framework, they are increasing the limits on them, which always eventually leads to ending the game. Only for it to start over again.
Would you follow the player-worker’s yellow line that traces the way to the red door? Perhaps this is a path towards the system design beyond the ‘workscape’; the red mist rising from behind the door with its promise of ecstasy… Or would you stay with the blue door, a sanctuary of blissful ignorance? The choice appears to be yours, but it’s not. It’s a paradox, a choice that isn’t a choice. In this world, the lines blur. Here, the game is the work, and the work is the game.
THE HACIENDA HAS TO BE BUILT
Crossing the threshold of the ‘red door’, we are faced with a total, disorientating reappraisal of the virtual plane. A lack of ‘sky’ over the office landscape and heightened awareness of the presence of screens, interfaces and ‘security’ devices. There is no Hacienda, but instead only small signs and fragmented memories that must have been left behind. They hint at, and beckon us towards, an enticing, speculative level. But are these only the echoes of bygone level-changes? Perhaps the Hacienda now exists as a mental attitude, a mythical place, a space of connection that is no longer elsewhere but instead has, through the gamification of labor, become part of the limitless space of the network.
EVERYONE WILL LIVE IN THEIR OWN CATHEDRAL
The Merchant of Time in this artificial panorama embodies authority over time. Similar to Stanley’s world, here the player-worker must continuously question the nature of the choices offered to them. They must find ways to avoid being instrumentalized for production by subverting the expectations laid out for them, and weave new paths to a critical existence so they can shape their own histories. In the sweet spot of Playbour there is no boundary between work and play. The Hacienda is merging with the network spectacle by incorporating elements of pop culture, media and technology into its own creations and mythologies; a fusion of mass entertainment and détournement. By doing this over and over, it both celebrates and critiques the spectacle, creating a self-aware or self-reflexive commentary that goes alongside ’new work. Re-charged with the values of myth and play, Playbour involves reconstructing the relationships between social and monetary currencies. But also, of time and the metric used to measure it. By abolishing the fictitious ties within rigid hierarchical structures there is a chance to create a playful, spontaneous coexistence: change the gamble, the meaning of labor, and reload it with magic.
The Tyranny of the Deck
Words: Charlie Robin Jones
1. INTRODUCTION / EXEC SUMMARY
This is an article about the deck.
Decks are made on programmes like PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides. They are clicked through on video calls; at desks; or sometimes in person, as soon as someone works out how to get cord to work with the TV.
A deck is, essentially, a sales tool – a set of landscape pages (or “slides”) that business people use to present their ideas to other business people.
A lot of people who wouldn’t think of themselves as business people spend a lot of their working lives making them. In fact, I would argue, and will, that they have facilitated, and in some ways created, the modern idea of work, or at least non-manual labor.
“DECKS ARE THE ROAD TO CHECKS”
– Salehe Bembury, vice president of sneakers and men's footwear at Versace
2. WHAT IS A DECK?
Let’s start with some easy definitions of what the deck actually is.
The deck is made out of visuals and words. Often, there are also some numbers – like, data, or graphs.
The deck needs to be in a format that combines all the above: numbers, narrative, presented in a way that “pops”. It’s almost always composed on one of three programmes: PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote (with some designers sometimes using Adobe Suite etc). The format used is almost always landscape.
The deck is also always a proposal, a pitch. The deck is describing something that doesn’t exist, but could – otherwise, it’s just a report.
Critically, the deck also needs to be able to be sent to others. The PDF is ideal here. It is understood that this file can and will be sent to others in the organization – there is a little higher praise for a deck than to be “seen by the CEO”.
Yet the deck is also private. It’s universally understood that these decks will remain internal. Almost every project initiated by an organization this century will have had a deck attached – every startup’s funding round, every house block built by a developer, every streetwear collaboration, every TV show; even governmental departments, spyware companies, militaries. All make decks to make their case to others involved. Yet we, the public, never see them.
That’s crazy, right?
I mean: isn’t that crazy?
3. HISTORY OF THE DECK
While researching this article, I read one website that claimed that stained-glass windows were the first decks, because they also used narrative and images to persuade people.
But this isn’t true. The word ‘deck’ comes from the term ‘sales deck.’ In the earliest usage, this was a set of literal slides – pieces of celluloid used on a projector. Later, this same word carried over to PowerPoint, which was released in 1987, which meant that pretty much anyone with a personal computer or laptop could make one.
To have a sales deck, you have to have sales. This implies consumers. But a sales deck is not an advert, made for the end customer. Rather, it is for those who sell these goods to them – corporations, essentially. And the deck is produced by corporations who, in turn, sell goods and services to them.
If we’re looking for a prehistory, we’ll find it in the invention of the flipchart, patented in 1913. This is a significant moment: it’s after the great transformations of the industrial revolution, before the carnage of WWI, and right at the beginning of the consumer society we see today. As industry becomes a matter of persuasion, not production, the technology used to persuade becomes paramount.
The first person documented using a flipchart was John Henry Patterson, a pioneering salesman who founded the National Cash Register Company (NCR) in 1884. Patterson ran NCR as one of the first modern corporations. The company is still worth billions today, and is active in computing.
One of his early salespeople was Thomas J Watson, who had said in a sales meeting: “The trouble with every one of us is that we don't think enough. We don't get paid for working with our feet — we get paid for working with our heads”. Wilson went on to write “THINK” on a board, which became a slogan for the company he led from 1914 to 1956 – International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.
4. THINKING LIKE A DECK
“THINK” is a good summation of the creative, stressful future of immaterial labor Wilson helped found. It is working with our head – ideas; cleverness; creativity, whether about a new shoe, or a new org-chart, or the contents of a social media plan, or a tweaked supply chain, or pricing strategy – that defines this type of work. But you don’t just need to think. Not in this economy!
You also need to make, which means that you need to sell your thoughts and persuade people, and persuade people on their quality. Essentially, you need to ‘talk through you thoughts,’ as anyone who has ever been invited to give a presentation has been asked to do. Your thoughts have the be manifested into form, and communicated with others.
The deck is the media that allows this.
The deck proves that you have thought about your thoughts, and put in the work into making a deck. And because the deck helps shape our thoughts, our thoughts are shaped by the deck. Our ideas become simple, bold, and interesting to many different scenarios, as long as they work out financially.
5. DECKS AS WORLD VIEW
If you’ve ever wondered how companies like Uber, WeWork and Facebook managed to transform our world on seemingly shaky foundations, you have to remember that not just what they produce, but the very companies themselves were f(o)unded, first and foremost, through decks.
The deck tells a certain story. This story is encoded into its structure. This structure is always linear: a deck has a beginning (slide one), a middle (slides, say two-nine) and an ending (slide, say, 10).
The deck’s story is also built into its presentation format: because it is created to be blown-up on a big screen, it doesn’t handle detail well. As such, there are some unspoken conventions to most decks:
Then there are social factors implicit to the deck, which also shape the content. First, the language has to be bland enough to be viewed by almost any stakeholder in the organization. But, and this is crucial, it also has to be engaging enough to pull every reader in.
Moreover, because the deck is presented to people right in the middle of their working day, the proposal has to be enticing, and new, and big. This drives people to make big claims, with big numbers.
6. DECKS AS MEDIA
Every great deck has a “What if…” page. Typically, this comes towards the end.
Beginning slides used to tell you about the problem that the deck would go on to fix. Now, it is more common for them to present a huge social shift. Middle slides will tend to show research into the size of the potential market. Then, you get a neat hinge point: a way that a company can be a winner, rather than a loser, as a result of the shift. The deck will then end with some case-closing: numbers on investment needed to execute this solution, weakness with competitors, etc.
The solution should ideally be at once delightful and intuitive. It should make them shift forward in their seats with interest so that you can hear the nicest 11 words in the English business language: “Thanks for that. Looks great. You’ll work out the details, right?”
Every problem has a solution, and every solution has to fit on one slide. But it has to make sense, from a Profit & Loss point of view. The deck, then, has a politics, mandated through its deep narrative structure. It’s one that is at once conservative and speculative, in a way that makes no sense on paper, but a huge amount of sense when you’re just working without thinking about it, as most of us do – finding an image for the slide to make it pop, adding some bigger numbers for the audience slide, making the offer really enticing.
The deck, then, lends itself to a world of creative destruction. It creates this world, then tilts towards gimmicky solutions, with flimsy executions. Embarrassing at the scale of a shoe collab; bleak at the scale of a housing development; catastrophic at the scale of an ecosystem.
But that’s for someone else to deal with, with another deck. For now, we just need a good What If?...
There are 500 million PowerPoint users, creating 35 million decks per day
Google’s Slides app has 100 million downloads
40 words is typical per slide
89% of venture capitalists expect a pitch deck during funding rounds
Only 11.2 seconds are spent reading each slide
7. THE LABOR OF THE DECK
People build decks. And decks build people.
Putting together a deck is not an insignificant task. Just as decks enable a creative agency to speak to a government client, or a finance department to speak to the strategy team, they also encourage collaboration within an organization on their own production.
Expertise is required from many fields: art direction and sourcing for the images, writing and editing for the text, research for the numbers and quotes. That means lots of people working hard and often simultaneously, on distinct parts of the final product, with signoff from a superior.
It’s tempting to scoff at this. “I don’t want to just make expensive PDFs” is something that everyone who is lucky enough to have a job making expensive PDFs has said. It can feel like a lot of work, a lot of sweat for, well, just a PDF.
But the more I think about it, the interesting thing about the deck is the work that’s involved. Work is the production of objects, material or otherwise, or the management of this production. Objects – whether it’s a table, a theater play, a fighter jet, or a deck – are always produced by complex teams coming together under the oversight of a boss. What makes a deck distinct is that the production is the point.
Very often, the material contained in a deck could have been summarized in an email. In a previous job, I watched in wonder as a colleague produced a deck for our CEO, to propose a new project. He did this by simply copying seven bullet points from a couple of Slack messages we had sent to each other, and pasting these points across into a seven slide PowerPoint; one short sentence per page.
By putting this loose exchange into the official format of a deck – by turning an idea into a thing, it became something worthy of weight, of consideration.
The project was approved the next day, and ran for 18 months, with a budget close to £75,000.
The work of the deck is the proof of the work of the deck. Does that make sense?
Decks often include research – quant, like the figures above, or qual, like the quotes below. These are taken from texts some friends sent me when I asked them about their experience with making or pitching decks (they chose their own pseudonyms):
“the darkest times in my life = cooking a deck at 11pm in some godforsaken wework
thinking if i die from an adderall overdose doing this my life would have been wasted fr”
— Aries, futures director
“i insert little fun things for myself, just to entertain myself during my everyday boring job as a presentation designer
i work in a place where they overexplain everything in a hyper optimistic manner
here is what i do: i change facial expressions in mockups”
— Anna, designer
9. WHAT IF…?
No-one really likes making decks, and hardly anyone enjoys presenting from them.
One friend of mine edits short videos from material he’s found online with an AI-generated voiceover to illustrate his argument and show evidence whenever he’s asked to give a presentation, and lets these do the talking. Another friend teaches a course at an architecture school, and gets students to present project proposals from “maps” – big A2 sheets of paper, meticulously crafted, with plans for building, research and narration all on the same plane, meaning that the story can be told in any way the speaker wants, and the audience can interpret back in any way they’d like. I used to commission internal lectures for a strategy company, and instead of a deck, one speaker presented straight from their web browser, clicking between live tabs to reference what they were talking about. Another speaker – who is, for what it’s worth, a God-tier design theorist – had me click through slides, live on Teams. This would be a normal ask, but their 30-slide deck had about 25 meticulously sequenced but also completely blank slides, so while they were talking, I had to click through a PDF of mostly white pages, turning each one at exactly the right time. Absurd, and transcendent. All of these are ways of rethinking a presentation, without a deck. Which I get – for my work, from invoices to lectures to presentations, even this article, I use my own Google Docs template, into which I drop images and so on. I think I’m being clever because it’s portrait, not landscape: making a deck, without making a deck.
But these changes have yet to catch on in a wider business world, let alone reach the unthinking ubiquity the deck occupies. So … What if we lent into the deck?
Because building a deck is not a distraction from work – it is work itself. And in the contemporary moment, that means flimsy, private and speculative. It also means collaborative, and, yes, creative. Now is a moment that prioritizes narrative and persuasion. Decks are an essential mode of business communication, which means it’s an essential mode of getting things done. They’re ephemeral, they mean nothing – but they make the world; let you propose something to someone else; and help you make sense of your ideas to others. Why else do we work?
