• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, September 5, 2016

In a humorous effort to, perhaps, distract everyone from the fact -- at least according to a recent breathy article from a trade journal -- that Barbarian Group is "literally being run into the ground," the agency disseminated a press release last Friday announcing the sale of the office's famous Superdesk, that crazy, wavy 4,400 square-foot-desk the agency installed in 2014.

The release was issued after an ad for the desk appeared on Craigslist. It's unclear whether or not someone at Barbarian Group, or a former employee, placed the ad but the agency grabbed hold and ran with it by issuing a release that screamed, "the agency has transcended the physical office model and migrated to a Massively Multiplayer Online Workspace."

Why? Well, apart from the fact that any news other than the aforementioned "run into the ground" piece, the agency says: "The decision to part ways with the desk was inspired by the high-performance computational geometry capabilities of the open-source Cinder framework to create an auto-scaling virtual work environment for all employees, rendered in real-time. Office partitions and meeting rooms have also been removed, as all internal meetings will now take place in VR."

Right.

Explaining things further, the release read, “the agency says they have already migrated all internal communications to Slack, doing away with email and IRL person-to-person interaction. Each employee has been equipped with gesture-controlled, wearable tech and wifi-enabled devices which are linked to a private IoT network. This virtual workspace lowers overhead for the agency, but they are also considering the role of agency culture in this new paradigm. A much-loved Barbarian tradition of 'Healthy Snacks Wednesday' will now be replaced by a daily regimen of Soylent Patches - a beta product administered via time-release transdermal patches being jointly developed with the Silicon Valley start-up.”

But wait, there's more! 

Possibly beating the proverbial dead horse or pulling a Bandi (look it up), the release hammered things home with, "As Barbarian continues to recruit new talent, certain key positions will be filled by Slack bots running on a DGX-1 deep learning system and compiled by scraping social data and email archives of select past employees. The effort will be led by Jeremiah Johnson, Barbarian’s Senior Creative Technologist. Staff members have been informed that, starting September 1st, all payroll will be distributed entirely in untraceable cryptocurrency." 

I mean say what you will about Barbarian Group but 20 or even 10 years from now, the way things are headed, this humorous press release could be released word for word by another agency and taken as the gospel truth.