A dictionary of modern lifeOriginal definitions · Illustrated satire
Lucifer’s Lexicon

Modern life, properly defined.

The familiar, classified

Subjects.

Different departments. Much the same human nature.

4 definitions

Corporate Speak

Language used to make ordinary organisational behaviour sound strategic, collaborative, measurable or inevitable.

0 definitions

Meetings & Office Life

Ceremonies, calendars, office habits and the anthropology of professional collaboration.

1 definition

Agile & Delivery

Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, delivery metrics, ceremonies and the consultancy ecosystem around them.

2 definitions

Consulting & Transformation

Consultancies, transformation programmes, operating models, slideware and the industrial production of recommendations.

2 definitions

People & HR

Employee measurement, performance, engagement, restructures, leadership programmes and human beings after conversion into organisational vocabulary.

0 definitions

Careers & Recruitment

Hiring, interviews, employer branding, candidate funnels and the rituals around finding work.

0 definitions

Product & Customer

Product management, discovery, roadmaps, customer experience and the organisational study of people attempting to buy or use things.

0 definitions

Software Engineering

Programming practices, testing, developer conventions, APIs and the ordinary absurdities of building software.

0 definitions

Architecture & DDD

Software architecture, modelling, domain-driven design, distributed systems patterns and architectural doctrine.

1 definition

Cloud & Infrastructure

Cloud platforms, containers, platform engineering, distributed infrastructure and the economics of renting computers creatively.

0 definitions

Data & AI

Data platforms, analytics, generative AI, machine learning, corporate AI adoption and the numerical presentation of certainty.

0 definitions

Security & Compliance

Cybersecurity, audits, security theatre, controls, policies and the formal documentation of trust.

0 definitions

Incidents & Operations

On-call life, outages, post-mortems, reliability engineering and the discovery that production is different.

1 definition

Enterprise Software

Large business systems, implementation partners, ERP/CRM platforms and software that gradually becomes organisational structure.

1 definition

Technology Companies

Named public technology companies, platforms and products treated as recognisable cultural objects.

1 definition

Finance & Startups

Banking, investment, venture capital, startup mythology and the movement of numbers until they acquire claims on real things.

0 definitions

Governance & Procurement

Committees, approvals, procurement, risk, vendor processes and mechanisms for distributing responsibility.

0 definitions

Remote & Hybrid Work

Workplace location policy, video meetings, asynchronous work and the effort to schedule spontaneity.

1 definition

Consumer Digital Life

Social media, subscriptions, apps, streaming, online shopping, smart devices and the ordinary digital experience outside formal work.

0 definitions

Sustainability & Corporate Virtue

ESG, sustainability language, public commitments and the institutional measurement of virtue.