"In the book Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her time at a management-consulting firm in the waning days of the 1990s to explain her gradual realization that there was something off not just about her own job but about capitalism as a whole. The work that La Berge was engaged in at the murkily named “Conglomerate,” was tangentially related to what is commonly referred to as Y2K, though La Berge’s work at the Conglomerate was associated with documentation and legal protection, as opposed to technical remediation. As the book’s title makes clear, the work at the firm seemed largely “fake” to her, a sentiment which she in turn repeatedly projects onto the entirety of Y2K which the book repeatedly describes as a “fake crisis.” Though couched in a historical moment, Fake Work does not present itself as a history, or confine itself to a single genre, and is instead, as La Berge describes it, “a Marxist-inflected, queer, auto-theoretical work memoir” (206) in which La Berge moves between recounting office stories, commenting on Marx, and describing how her time at the Conglomerate eventually led her to her understanding and appreciation of Marx.
Fake Work provides a theoretically rich and often amusing picture of the banalities and absurdities of certain types of work. And those who have labored in such environments are likely to feel that she gets a lot right in her descriptions of those sorts of workplaces. Unfortunately, almost everything that Fake Work has to say about Y2K is either sorely lacking in historical and technical context, or is simply wrong.
In fairness, Fake Work isn’t really about Y2K. It’s about capitalism. But the book’s thoughtful and amusing critiques of capitalism are consistently undermined by the way this book misrepresents and oversimplifies Y2K."
https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2025/08/07/if-the-work-seems-fake-does-that-mean-the-crisis-is-too-a-review-of-leigh-claire-la-berges-fake-work/