Knowledge Work Apple Picking
On post-post-industrial nostalgia
As older forms of labor fade, we seem increasingly drawn to simulate them. Apple picking becomes a weekend activity. Visiting an old assembly line becomes a curated experience. What happens when the knowledge worker’s office joins this lineage?
I have always found the phenomenon of agricultural labor as leisure to be a bit strange. One of the great achievements of humankind has been for more and more people to exit the backbreaking conditions of farming. Why would I want to simulate those conditions by spending an afternoon picking apples? Especially because the pleasant, Instagrammable apple-picking afternoon isn’t anything like what real farm workers do, out there in the heat, all day, with no cider donuts at the end. There is clearly a kind of romanticization at work here.
To be fair, some of this might be a personality quirk. I recall one time as a kid when my parents made me go on a hike to the top of Yosemite’s Glacier point. I spent half the time lecturing them about the fact that we have invented machines and infrastructure to get us there with a fraction of the effort. The point is the view, is it not? Shouldn’t we be optimizing for that?
Still, I get the impulse. I like hiking now. I just got back from a multi-day canoe trip in Northern Ontario, in which motorized transport would have been far more efficient. There is, I admit, something satisfying in reacquainting yourself with forms of labor that have been mechanized, and in doing so, reconnecting with some deeper layer of the human story. Apple picking becomes a way of reminding ourselves that food comes from somewhere and somebody. And anyway, kids seem to really like it, and I am not so churlish as to deny them that or make them endure a lecture about how your ancestors would think it bizarre that you would pay to do something like that.
Even stranger is the genre of industrial tourism: visiting the ruins of the industrial age. There is a whole Detroit aesthetic to it: oxidized steel, blown-out windows, the remains of some factory wall tagged with ghostly graffiti. You can also find it in pretty much any small post-industrial town. The feel is part “Ruins of Empire,” part “Fallout expansion pack.” These were the sites of enormous collective labor: gigantic coordination projects, iron-clad schedules, orchestrated movement. And now, we go there to take selfies.
A related impulse (maybe its counterpoint) is to reenact that labor itself. I once stayed in a New England town where one of the top tourist draws was visiting a small, still-functioning assembly line. You got to wear a hairnet. You could try your hand at tightening one bolt as a piece moved past you on a conveyor belt. A few steps of low-stakes repetition, just enough to say you’d done it. Like apple picking, it gave you a glimpse of a seemingly bygone form of work (for you at least). Not the real thing, of course, but enough for a theme-park souvenir.
Which brings me to my actual point. The knowledge economy, too, is now passing into the realm of cultural memory. With generative AI, remote work, and a growing detachment from the office as a physical place, the knowledge worker’s world is already halfway to the museum.
And so I propose we take a little imaginative trip into the world of Knowledge Worker Nostalgia Tourism: a modestly funded experience park designed to let people relive the strange rituals of 9-to-5 digital labor from the early 21st century. All aboard!
You arrive at the park, called KWO Commons, to a warm greeting from a receptionist. She wears a headset and a laminated badge that says “Megan (she/her) – Guest Experience Facilitator II.” She explains what a receptionist was. “Before AI scheduling overlays and biometric presence logging, humans used to greet other humans at the door. Sometimes they handed you a physical clipboard.” You nod, intrigued. You’ve heard the word but never met one in person.
The Email Station
First stop: The Email Station. A vintage Dell desktop slowly flickers to life replete with the whirr of a fan full of dust. “Smell that?!! Now you’ll need to log in,” Megan says. You look at her blankly. “Try typing your name into the password field,” she suggests.
On the screen is an Outlook inbox. The top message is from “Karen,” a fictional colleague created by the KWO design team. “Wow,” you say to yourself, “I thought that name disappeared in 2017, haven’t heard it in decades.” The subject line reads: “Out today – family emergency.” You click.
Hi all — just wanted to let you know I’ll be out today. My grandfather passed away unexpectedly. Thanks for understanding.
You’re asked to respond, using only your wits. You have no GenAI, no sentiment filter, no tone calibration slider. You type:
“al gd, c u l8r”
Megan smiles kindly. “Would you like to see what GPT-10 would’ve written?”
She taps a laminated panel mounted above the station, where the same message is printed in calming blue ink:
Dear Karen,
I’m so sorry to hear this. Please take all the time you need. We’ll manage things on our end, and if there’s anything I can do, just say the word. Thinking of you and your family.
— Daniel
Below it is a line of text in small italics: Generated by GPT-10, Empathy Plugin v3.2, Tone: “Warm Professional.”
You are allowed to keep your version as a souvenir. A technician appears and places it into a small wooden shadow box labeled “My First Human Email.”
The Memo Lab
Next stop: The Memo Lab. The receptionist ushers you into a room styled like a mid-2010s coworking space: exposed brick, Edison bulbs, fake succulents. A poster says, Think Outside the Inbox.
You’re handed a sheet of laminated topics. Today’s choices:
“Q2 Optimization”
“Digital Transformation”
“Stakeholder Alignment”
“Onboarding Flow Enhancement (Beta Users)”
“Lunch & Learn Policy Review”
You pick “Stakeholder Alignment,” mostly because it sounds the most cryptic.
A docent in a Patagonia vest gestures toward a terminal running a legacy browser. “This is Google. Circa 2026.” You type:
stakeholders... aligned?
The results are bewildering: PDFs, LinkedIn posts, a Medium think piece by someone named “Logan,” and a terrifying wall of blue links.
“Try Boolean logic,” the docent offers. “Use AND. Not vibes.”
You try again:
stakeholders AND alignment AND strategy
“Better,” he nods. “Now click on the McKinsey link. Back in the day, that’s what everyone did.”
You click. A full-screen cookie warning appears. It takes five minutes and two docents to dismiss.
The Research Library
Then it’s off to The Research Library. You are warned in advance: No Search Function. No Filters. No TL;DRs.
The room smells like dust. It contains more books than you’ve ever seen in one place, maybe twenty or so, arranged in no discernible order: Good to Great, Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Outliers, Sapiens. You pick one at random and flip it open. No helpful popup tells you where to find what you’re looking for.
“Where’s the search box?” you ask.
Megan shows you the back. “It’s called an index,” she says. “An alphabetical list of concepts.”
You try your best, but you can’t remember what order the letters go in. “Don’t worry,” Megan says, “happens all the time.” On cue, a recording of the ABC Song comes on. “Wait for S, and try to remember what it comes before and after.”
Before “T” and after “R” you find it. “Nice work, you’re a natural,” Megan compliments you.
Stakeholder Alignment: pp. 42, 78–81, 119, 202–203, see also Buy-in; Change Management; Executive Vision.
You flip to 78. It’s a diagram of a triangle labeled “People–Process–Purpose.” You stare at it for a while, then write “triangle good” in your notebook.
A few guests whisper excitedly near the card catalog. One finds the Harvard Business Review Anthology: Volume I. Another accidentally checks out Who Moved My Cheese? and is told they can’t return it. It is now part of the permanent collection.
The Report Team
At last, you arrive at The Report Team. You’re assigned cubicle B3. On your desk is a three-ring binder, a ballpoint pen, and a copy of Microsoft Word 2011: An Introduction. Your task: copy the section headers from the brainstorming notes into a template.
The headers are printed in Courier New. They read:
Executive Summary
Key Findings
Strategic Recommendations
Next Steps
You input them manually. It takes you at least twenty minutes to get it right; there is no autocomplete.
Across from you, another tourist mutters, “What’s a tab stop?” A facilitator appears, gently adjusts their margins, and whispers, “You’re doing great.”
Once your part is done, the rest of the report is assembled by a team of actors playing “Knowledge Workers.” They sit at matching desks and type silently, occasionally sipping from branded mugs. A small speaker plays the sound of Slack notifications for ambiance.
An hour later, the final report is printed, bound, and presented to you in a navy-blue folder with an embossed KWO logo. Title: Executive Summary: Stakeholder Alignment 2026. Beneath that: Produced by Hand, with Thought™.
The Break Room
You spend your final hour in The Break Room Café, which has been painstakingly modeled after a Silicon Valley startup office circa 2005. There's a ping pong table. A foosball table. A refrigerator full of LaCroix (only Pamplemousse and Lime). On the wall is a framed poster of a cat hanging from a tree branch: Hang in there.
The café menu features “Productivity Smoothies” and “Power Salads.” You order an “Agile Bowl” and get a quinoa salad shaped like a burndown chart.
You overhear another guest whisper to their guide: “Did they really work like this?” The guide smiles: “Worse.”
Exit through the gift shop
When it’s time to leave, you are given a drawstring tote bag. Inside is your framed condolence email, the spiral-bound report, a free trial coupon for Notion (historic edition), and a button that says I Survived Email Without AI.
You go home and place the report on the mantle, right next to last fall’s jar of orchard apples and the bolt you tightened at the New England factory replica. You’re a little sore from all the typing, but satisfied.
Tomorrow, you plan to visit a park that lets you experience the gig economy: ten simulated minutes of delivering a burrito during a snowstorm in a Ford Focus that always needs gas.
But for now, you rest.