On Facebook, Generation Z trolls “start-up” culture and the corporate world

This is a press article from a very serious newspaper, the title of which is “Management through humor, a rising value”, and which tells how humor in business “Has a beneficial impact on performance” of collaborators. Beneficial? Shared on the Facebook group “Neurchi of labor market flexibilisation” (NdFlex), it sparked a cascade of mocking comments: “You’re fired, hair on your nose!” “,” I’m attacking you at the Prud’hommes, hair on your scrotum “.

Created in 2019, the Facebook group Neurchi for the flexibilisation of the labor market has become the sarcastic outlet of a professionally disenchanted youth. Available on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch and even Discord, NdFlex is a phenomenon. Now the most popular of the “neurchis” (verlan bargain hunters), these Facebook groups organized around various themes, where Internet users post “found” photos or texts online or that they create specifically. It even has subsidiaries such as Labor inspection does not exist, a Facebook group of false conspirators denying the reality of an authority ensuring respect for labor law.

If the veterans will perhaps get lost in this hilarious mess of valves, gifs and screenshots, young people are seduced: the NdFlex group has nearly 155,000 members. 80% are 18-35 year olds, looking for spaces to laugh out loud at what they can only whisper quietly within the company. Also in this galaxy is Neurchi from LinkedIn (65,000 members on Facebook); the Disruptive humans of Linkedin Twitter account, with more than 51,000 subscribers; or the TechTrash newsletter which has 30,000 subscribers… These communities mock the excesses of “personal branding” and the culture of performance, the managerial newspeak, or the pompous narration of the start-up nation.

“Everything remains very codified”

If these groups are successful, it is because they are changing the codes of a certain open space humor “Felted and conventional”, Explain Lauren Boudard, co-founder of the humorous TechTrash newsletter. “In the office, these are valves of the type ‘it’s going like a Monday’ or jokes that are in reality a call to order, like “You take your afternoon” launched to an employee who leaves at 5 pm. Everything remains very codified ”.

These communities thus open up a critical space for the “start-up nation”. “The start-up nation has integrated some criticism, has fun with the cliché side of the ping-pong table, but is not going to change its organization for all that”, continues his colleague Dan Geiselhart, who cites the example of Too Good To Go, a start-up which presents itself as a movement against food waste, which was pinned for its deplorable working conditions by the Instagram account Balance ta start-up.

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