Kliban has another cartoon depicting an ad for the benefits of “improved philosophical mind jelly,” to rub directly on one’s cerebellum for instant insight →.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974).
Kliban drew another cartoon that I used to have taped to my office door, since it captured better than anything else I’d yet encountered the surreal situation of being paid merely for thinking (or for what people now call “cognitive labor”). This cartoon features a man behind a desk, hiring a new employee. The former is saying, “It’s a deal then. You make three dollars every time you think of a chicken, and a dollar extra if it’s a brown one.” The new hire replies: “Thank you sir! I hope the company will be proud of me!” In an added thought bubble, the new hire is already calculating his return. “Wow! I should be able to think of at least four chickens a day, and that’s fourteen dollars, not even counting brown ones” →. (Hopefully the new employee is better at chicken-thinking than he is math.)
Thomas Chatterton Williams, “The People Who Don’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, January 25, 2023 →.
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (MCD, 2025).
Quoted in Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?” Bloomberg, February 9, 2018 →.
