Open Office, Closed Future
Corporate AI branding treats human creativity as a marketing slogan while eliminating the humans themselves; the joke is that the company celebrates liberation, innovation, and openness at the exact moment it closes off workers’ futures.
A sleek, cathedral-like AI company lobby hosts a triumphant ribbon-cutting for a monumental chrome sculpture that spells OPEN FOR HUMAN CREATIVITY. Smiling executives in minimalist suits pose with comically oversized ceremonial scissors and applause-ready expressions. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall directly behind them, the real scene unfolds: a line of employees silently feed their ID badges into a machine labeled EFFICIENCY UPGRADE while friendly service robots carry away desk plants, family photos, and coffee mugs in neat little bins marked PERSONAL EFFECTS. A banner near the ceremony reads Empowering the Future of Work, making the background layoffs impossible to miss. The composition should make the executives’ staged optimism and the workers’ quiet erasure visible in one glance.
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