Tech bosses converted their workplaces into whimsical“campuses” with gourmet cafeterias, luxury fitness centers,free dry cleaning and massages, and egg-freezing services so that tech workers could stay on the job through their fertile years without ever taking parental leave.It worked.So long as all this set dressing was accompanied by high-minded slogans—like Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s“Connect every person in the world”—tech workers could tell themselves that they were pampered geniuses rather than patsies who’d been gulled into working like government mules.There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty,especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh,vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers,and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students,patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty.

— Enshittification by Cory Doctorow