This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Mike Judge’s Office Space. The film tanked its opening, grossing less than $10 million in theaters, but its later release on DVD allowed the film to steadily become a cult classic. Its resonance lay not just in the mass relatability of its depiction of 9–5 office life, but in the dark, biting humor that steadily picked apart the indignities of neoliberal work culture and management that were beginning to take hold.

In Office Space, characters are continually admonished for not adhering to office procedures by adding the wrong cover sheets to reports and receive several copies of the same memo from their numerous supervisors. All the while this top-down intensification of authority and “anti-production” bureaucracy is taking place, we see the emergence of attempts to placate workers. Workers attend office pep rallies, are reminded that Fridays are “Hawaiian shirt Fridays,” and gather round a cake to dolefully sing Happy Birthday to a boss they all despise.

The late theorist Mark Fisher believed that no film “better captures the bureaucratic immiseration of late capitalist managerialism labour.” But in the two decades since its release, as we face multiple crises of work is it the case that Office Space “feels like science fiction from a distant realm”? Can we still laugh at the skewering of the corporate 9–5 lifestyle when even the notion of a secure office job seems distant for so many workers?