Cubicle Pirates Stranded on a Desert Island without a Punchline in Sight

A sample of microworker-commissioned palm trees

Back in 2019, I became captivated by a deceptively simple genre of cartoon—the desert island cartoon. These small, palm-dotted sketches, typically featuring a lone person stranded on a tiny island, had long served as a visual shorthand for isolation, absurdity, and the limits of modern life. I began collecting them obsessively, scraping the internet for digital remnants and rummaging through print archives, magazines, and newspapers. What started as a curiosity quickly deepened into an investigation: why did this hyper-compressed format, with its stark and formulaic iconography, endure for so long? What kind of cultural work had it performed in its mid-century heyday—and could it still speak to readers in the fragmented landscape of the 21st century? 

As I dug deeper, a Vanity Fair interview with Bob Mankoff, then cartoon editor at The New Yorker, revealed a telling detail: desert island cartoons had reached their peak in 1957. That year, the magazine received more unsolicited submissions featuring desert islands than ever before. The surge wasn’t coincidental. The late 1950s were steeped in Cold War anxiety, shadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation, and saturated with a cultural appetite for escapist fantasies. But this period also marked a seismic shift in labor. The American workforce was transitioning from blue-collar industrial jobs to white-collar office work, ushering in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. The postwar promise of prosperity came tethered to a new kind of spatial organizations of the workplace—impersonal, hyper-regulated, and increasingly standardized, embodied most vividly by the cubicle.

This made me wonder: was there a connection between the fantasy of being marooned on a desert island and the hyper-optimization of the modern office? After all, the office cubicle and the desert island shared an uncanny spatial logic. Both were small, rigidly bounded units of isolation. One offered an imaginary retreat from society; the other enforced a very real, bureaucratic solitude. In a way, the desert island cartoon functioned as a distorted mirror of office life—a compact stage where the anxieties of labor, leisure, and individual agency were played out over and over again in silent repetition.

In Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, author Nikil Saval traces the surprising origins of the cubicle. It began with idealism: a 1960s design called the “Action Office,” developed by Robert Propst at Herman Miller. Propst envisioned a more humane workspace—one that offered office workers greater autonomy, flexibility, and movement. The concept was meant to improve upon the chaotic openness of the German “Bürolandschaft” (office landscape), which prioritized organic layouts but often led to noise and confusion. Yet by the 1990s, Propst’s vision had curdled. What businesses ultimately embraced was not Propst’s liberating design, but the cost-efficiency of modular partitions. As Saval points out, while white-collar jobs carried more prestige than factory work, they often replicated the same structures of routinization and control—just without the grease.  A 1997 survey by Steelcase revealed that 93% of cubicle-dwellers disliked their workspace. The cubicle became a tool of spatial austerity. Over time, it morphed into the defining symbol of American office life—a visual shorthand for professional alienation, turning the country, as Saval puts it, into “a nation of clerks.” 

This shift in perspective made me want to explore how these cartoons, initially a symbol of lighthearted escape, could be recontextualized to reflect the more complex feelings of isolation and detachment that permeate modern work life.  After compiling, printing, and pinning hundreds of these desert island cartoons to a large felt board mounted on my studio wall, I found myself staring into a silent archive of mid-century escapism. What did stranded executives, marooned dreamers (and a coconut tree), have to say to the realities of the 21st-century workplace? Could relics of Cold War anxiety still speak to gig workers, remote employees, and the entreprecariat living through the automation of their professions today? 

I decided to open the question to others. In a gesture reminiscent of The New Yorker’s own tradition of inviting readers to supply captions for bare cartoons, I stripped the cartoons of their original captions, transforming this large archipelago into a mute provocation—open-ended prompts inviting new interpretations. I compiled the detexted cartoons into a structured database and through Microworkers.com—a platform that facilitates crowdsourced microtasks—I commissioned new punchlines to dispersed contributors laboring in clickfarms that, while distinct from the cubicles of 1957, nonetheless evoke a similar sense of isolation and spatial constraint, shaped by the fragmented and distributed architectures of 21st-century digital labor. 

The process itself was modular and precise, anchored by a single, uniform prompt: “Provide for this cartoon a funny caption no longer than 40 words.” Each day, twenty randomly selected individuals—drawn from a vast pool of microworkers juggling hundreds of similar tasks—were invited, amid routine digital labor, to write, basically, a joke. By day’s end, I would print the submitted captions, each neatly trimmed into a small slip of paper. Paper slips were then arranged on the large board, creating a physical, evolving tableau of fragmented humor, algorithmic labor, and collaborative misfire.

To navigate the swarm of responses, I devised a color-coded pinning system. Each colored pin marked a distinct type of caption: green pins marked genuinely funny captions; red pins flagged offensive submissions (of which there were many); yellow ones signaled indifference, irrelevance or spam—a recurring issue due to the platform’s weak CAPTCHA filters, and blue pins were reserved for captions that, while not quite successful, revealed a flicker of creative potential. Over time, this color constellation transformed the board into a kind of visualized heatmap of the project’s evolution—allowing me, with a single glance, to grasp the emotional and semantic contours of the labor process unfolding in real time. I braced for a profound shift in my professional habits, as I gradually morphed into something akin to a computer vision algorithm—scanning for patterns, clustering outliers, and filtering statistical noise across caption types. The pinboard evolved into an analog dataset, a tactile interface for mapping human expression as a fluctuating field of signal and anomaly. 

What began as a genuine curiosity—an experiment in reanimating the desert island cartoon through contemporary eyes—slowly turned into a quiet disappointment. After fifty-two days of collecting responses, not a single green pin marked a caption as genuinely funny. My felt board, once imagined as a dynamic site of exchange and invention, had become a landscape of red, yellow, and blue—a taxonomy of offense, irrelevance, and unrealized potential. I began to lose faith in the project. Each day brought in more captions, but none delivered the sharpness, timing, or surprise that defines a well-crafted cartoon. I should have known better. Maybe cartooning, I started to think, is simply a much harder art than I had understood. I went in naively assuming that because office work contains so much latent absurdity—like the kind depicted in these cartoons— a form of self-reflexivity would naturally emerge. I assumed that the cubicle—and its digital cousin, the clickfarm— was a site of shared, almost esoteric understanding; anyone inhabiting the structures of contemporary automated labor, even peripherally, would instantly tap into the genre’s irony, its quiet violence, its absurd repetitions. The gap between lived experience and expressive clarity would collapse, the cultural nuances of humor would no longer matter, and metaphors will be laying waiting, ready to be excavated by anyone who had simply logged in.

I was ready to give up and file the project as yet another conceptual failure. Then, something unexpected happened. I remember the cartoon of that day clearly—it broke from the usual motif. Instead of the proverbial patch of sand, there was in the middle of the ocean an enormous stack of cash, out of which, bizarrely, sprouted a single, oversized coconut tree. Out of all the submitted captions, one stood apart from anything I’d seen before. It wasn’t a punchline in any traditional sense, but a grim collage of newspaper headlines: “3 Killed by Noxious Gas at Sewage Treatment Plant in Ghaziabad. 3 Workers Die After Inhaling Poisonous Gas Inside Ghaziabad Sewage Plant.”

I froze. 

The submission hung there, jarring and silent, like a glitch in the system, a scream muffled by the mechanics of content moderation. Was this an error? An act of defiance? Or was I receiving a message—something smuggled in through the cracks of the task interface, bypassing the usual signals of humor and punchlines, to confront me directly with the violent edge of the real? In that moment, the original cartoon’s absurd image of money piles, the industrial fatality documented by the Indian press and the microworker’s stark response collapsed into one another, forming a disturbing mirror between the cartoon’s surface and the systemic violence it inadvertently echoed.

I wanted to know more. Who was the person behind the strange, haunting caption? What kind of mind produced this image-text pairing, so out of step with everything else I had received? Driven by curiosity, I logged back into the microworking platform. I naturally had no name, no profile picture associated with that specific microworker profile, just a trace: the alphanumeric code linked to their user account, a string of characters that pointed to a human being somewhere in the world, sitting at a screen like mine.

More microworker-commissioned palm trees

What I discovered was unsettling—and unexpectedly revealing. This same account had signed up to a full batch of tasks that day—except they hadn’t succeeded. In fact, they had systematically failed almost all of them. These weren’t complex assignments, but consisted in the platform’s most basic offerings: the microworker had to distinguish between photographs of pasta and rice dishes – FAILED; identify traffic signs in grainy camera stills- FAILED; label emotions on pixelated fragments of human faces- FAILED. How, I wondered, could someone consistently fail tasks designed to be nearly foolproof? Tasks that, in theory, any human—with a modicum of visual recognition—should be able to complete?

Then it dawned on me: this wasn’t a person at a computer screen crafting a joke that I had been tracking, but some form or shape of office automation—devised by someone, somewhere—to perform their digital labor in their absence: a glitch-ridden system that transformed distributed automation systems into accidental instruments of neural agitprop, a samizdat of the digital underclass leaking through the cracks of the platform’s intent. 

What I had inadvertently stumbled into not just Artificial Intelligence, not even Artificial Artificial Intelligence (as Jeff Bezos once named its human-in-the-loop systems), but something stranger—a kind of Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence. What appeared on the paper slip of my studio wall was the residue of multiple layers of substitution and performance, not just the product of precarious workers, but also their ghost processes—scripts, macros, auto-clickers, API hacks. Each layer was pretending to be something it was not: the bot pretending to be a person, the person pretending to be an intelligent processor of tasks, and the platform pretending that all of it was seamless labor with minimal transactional frictions. I was no longer working with “crowd-sourced intelligence” in the optimistic, largely dystopian Web 2.0 sense. I was witnessing the outsourcing of cognition itself: workers programming their survival into bots, bots authoring content by misfiring poorly programmed office automation subtasks, and all of it stitched together under the polite fiction of “human labor.” 

Editorial cartoons were no longer a form of authored satire—they were now the site of automation, delegation, and collapse.

At that point, the project stopped being about humor and started becoming a method for listening to the system’s own breakdown. 

When I figured out the machinic nature of the weird punchline, the first thing I did was to reverse my whitelists and blacklists I had been meticulously curating. I stopped filtering out inputs from suspicious or unverified users, and instead opened the gates wider—to spam, to syntactic debris, to low-confidence IPs, to everything the microworking platform system usually excluded. The goal was to unearth meaning not through human intention but through error, to amplify noise and see what stuck. I figured that if bots were going to stumble through language, I might as well become a better listener to their stumbles. In doing so, I found that some of the most jarring textual moments came not despite these reversals, but because of them. They were the unintended poetry of filter failure, and I wanted more of it.

I also began to alter the prompts themselves—subtly, but strategically. I would lace the caption instructions with non sequiturs and bait phrases, trying to confuse rudimentary scraping systems. I wanted to derail their simple logic trees, to see how they’d respond to contradiction, randomness, or deadpan absurdity. Phrases like “lawyer needed” or “insert celebrity” would find their way into otherwise straightforward requests. Sometimes, it worked—bots would try to make sense of nonsense, producing captions that bordered on surrealist word salad. But other times, the result was unnervingly lucid, as if the bot had—through misfire or coincidence—landed on a punchline more haunting than any human could write. This wasn’t just automation gone awry; it was a new genre of authorship, written in the accent of malfunction.

But, more importantly, in the wake of this collapse, I found something unexpectedly generative— pointing to something more fundamental—the very nature of comics as objects. What I had thought of as purely aesthetic units, revealed themselves to be highly tractable technical forms. Each cartoon, once stripped of its caption, became a modular tile—easily archived, categorized, distributed, and recombined. Cartoons lent themselves effortlessly to the logic of spreadsheets: row by row, each image could be assigned an ID, a color-coded judgment, a processing status, even a batch operation for redistribution. Sharing them with microworkers, and rudimentary processes of office automation, wasn’t a detour from artistic practice—it was an exposure of comics' latent infrastructure.

there’s still more microworker-commissioned palm trees

Comics may have been trapped within narrowly defined aesthetic or artistic frameworks—appreciated primarily for their narrative craft, subcultural cachet, or visual ingenuity. But this project made it clear to me that comics also function as operational forms, machinic media that can be dissected, reassembled, and activated across a variety of contexts. Their formal constraints are not limitations, but parameters—ones that lend themselves to modulation, quantification, and experimental re-use. Their portability, repeatability, and discrete visual grammar make them uniquely suited to experimental workflows and distributed interpretation. They can circulate across platforms, accrue metadata, be plugged into research pipelines. In this, they resemble tools more than artifacts—objects capable of doing work across multiple epistemic terrains, from humor studies to labor analysis to the ethics of automation.

This realization also brought an odd sense of reconciliation with my own artistic practice. As the felt board grew denser, I began to feel a strange affinity with the software system I was building. The daily rituals, the tagging, the sorting, the clustering—I was not just observing the machinic; I was mirroring it. My studio practice had quietly absorbed the logics of algorithmic processing. I had started to work, almost unconsciously, like a computer vision system: tagging inputs, filtering anomalies, searching for patterns across a dataset of human expression. The irony was clear: while I had set out to better understand the alienating mechanics of platform labor, I was uncovering the very same structures within my own practice as a comics artist. My pinboard wasn’t just a response map—it was a visual interface, a semantic engine. The green, red, yellow, and blue pins functioned as a crude but effective labeling protocol, the kind any neural net might use to tune its performance. Somewhere along the way, the aesthetic act had folded into a cognitive diagram.

In light of advances in generative AI, I increasingly come to the realization that comics today operate within a dense ecology of software systems, hardware interfaces, and continuous information flows. The editorial cartoon and the comic strips are no longer merely drawn; they are generated, distributed, and interpreted through interlocking technical processes. Yet this distributive nature is not entirely new. The syndication networks of 20th-century newspapers had already revealed the modular, scalable structure of cartoons long before the advent of the internet, distributed labor, or generative AI. A single strip could be replicated across hundreds of publications, detached from its original context, resized, translated, and reformatted—anticipating many of the dynamics we now associate with digital circulation and platform-based media. What has changed is the density and speed of these systems, and the degree to which they are now automated, data-driven, and integrated into creative workflows. 

If cartooning had become tangled in the protocols of data classification, perhaps that wasn’t the failure I feared—but a glimpse into a new kind of authorship. One no longer premised on the solitary genius or the perfect gag, but on curatorial rigor, iterative pattern recognition, and distributed sense-making. My project had not failed; it had mutated. It had taught me that comics—like so much else today are also processed. And, rather than diminishing the possibilities for artistic engagement, this transformation opens new pathways and growing room for creative practices that draw on evolving forms of craft—working with modularity, metadata, annotation, or procedural generation—to explore comics not just as narrative or aesthetic artifacts, but as technical objects capable of operating within and commenting on complex media infrastructures.

Ilan Manouch is the author of The Cubicle Island Pirates –  Microworkers, Spambots and the venatic lore of clickfarm humor, published by La Cinquieme Couche (BE) and Forlaens (DK)

The post Cubicle Pirates Stranded on a Desert Island without a Punchline in Sight appeared first on The Comics Journal.