Accounting, capitalism & corporate life

Accounting is the language in which the modern world explains itself to itself, and like any language it can be used to tell the truth, to obscure it, or to make a career. The pieces gathered here — fiction, satire, dialogues and aphorisms — keep returning to that ledger: to auditors performing diligence, to IFRS as a kind of liturgy, to the quiet violence of a restructuring, to the recruitment interview as a rite of passage, and to the strange devotion that office life extracts from people who never meant to give it. Capitalism appears less as an economic system than as a set of manners; bureaucracy less as inefficiency than as a way of distributing blame until no one holds any. What links these works is not a subject but an attention: the suspicion that the most revealing thing about a person is what they are willing to sign off on. Everything here already exists elsewhere on the site; this page simply gathers the pieces that keep coming back to the ledger and the open-plan floor.