Global — The newly formed Association of Rude People and Commonly Called Assholes (ARPCCA) has filed a formal complaint challenging what it describes as “mandatory niceness requirements embedded throughout modern society,” arguing in a 246-page filing that the contemporary world has quietly criminalized a category of person who, by the association’s own accounting, “is usually the one who finished the thing.” The complaint, which was submitted to no clearly identified governing body and addressed broadly to “whoever keeps making us say good morning,” has nonetheless been characterized by early observers as “structurally coherent,” “deeply annoying,” and, in the words of one mediator who reviewed it, “correct in a way I resent.”
CLASSIFICATION: INTERPERSONAL EFFICIENCY DISPUTE ANALYSIS
DISTRIBUTION: Human Resources Departments, Conflict Mediators, Anyone Who Has Recently Been Told To “Soften The Email,” Managers Who Schedule Recurring Check-Ins, And The One Coworker Who Replies “K.”
PREPARED BY: The Externality Research Division
DATE: May 2026
The filing argues that social norms have grown increasingly hostile toward individuals who prefer directness, bluntness, impatience, and what members repeatedly refer to throughout the document as “communication without decorative packaging.” The association does not dispute that it is unpleasant. It disputes that unpleasantness is the relevant metric. “We have been measured on the wrong axis for our entire lives,” the introduction reads. “The question was never whether we were nice. The question was whether the thing got done. It did. We would like that entered into the record.”
The Complaint
The substantive portion of the complaint is organized around what the association calls “the daily tax” — a series of small, socially mandated interpersonal expenditures that members argue produce no measurable output while consuming a measurable share of the working day. The filing enumerates four primary grievances, each supported by what the association describes as “observation” and what critics describe as “a spreadsheet that should not exist.”
First, that excessive pleasantries slow communication. The association calculates that the average professional exchange now contains, in its phrasing, “a warm-up, a cool-down, and a load-bearing apology,” surrounding a payload of actual information estimated at between nine and fourteen percent of total message length. Second, that greetings often contain no useful information whatsoever. The complaint cites the phrase “Hi, hope you’re doing well!” as “a sentence that has never once been verified and has never once been true at the moment of writing.”
Third, that meetings increasingly begin with what the filing terms “unnecessary emotional maintenance” — a preamble of weekend recaps, weather acknowledgments, and reciprocal inquiries into well-being that the association estimates delays the start of substantive discussion by an average of six minutes and forty seconds. Fourth, and most contested, that people increasingly expect “tone management” in addition to content, requiring the deliverer of information to also serve as its emotional concierge.
The complaint’s most-quoted passage appears in this section. “If the report is late, I don’t need a journey,” one founding member is recorded as stating during the drafting sessions. “I don’t need to hear how the week went. I don’t need a runway. I need the report. The report is the relationship. Give me the report and we are, in every way that matters, close.”
Researchers reviewing the filing noted that the association is careful to distinguish its position from cruelty. The complaint repeatedly insists that members are not asking for the right to be hostile, but for the right to be unornamented. “Brevity is not contempt,” one section reads. “The fact that you experience it as contempt is a problem with your expectations, not with our sentences.”
The Historical Argument
The association’s most controversial claim — and the one most likely, in the assessment of mediators, to derail any negotiated settlement — is historical. The complaint asserts that a disproportionate share of society’s achievements were produced by individuals who were, in the document’s own list, “difficult, demanding, unpleasant, and singularly focused,” and that the contemporary insistence on universal pleasantness would, if applied retroactively, have prevented much of what the association refers to as “the good infrastructure.”
Dr. Ferran Voss, a fictional organizational historian retained by the association as an expert witness, argues in an appended brief that civility and productivity have been “systematically conflated” in modern management literature. “There is a persistent assumption that the pleasant person and the effective person are the same person,” Dr. Voss writes. “Sometimes they are. Often they are two different people, and the pleasant one is in a meeting about the work while the unpleasant one is doing it.”
The historical section is also where the filing process is reported to have encountered its first internal crisis. During a press conference convened to announce the complaint, one member reportedly interrupted another mid-sentence and shouted, “We built this society!” The statement was, according to multiple accounts, immediately followed by an extended argument over who specifically had built it, which portions, and whether the interrupting member had personally contributed any of the building or had merely been present during it. The press conference was suspended after eleven minutes. The association later characterized the dispute as “evidence of engagement.”
Critics seized on the episode as a self-refutation. If directness produced superior outcomes, they argued, the association should have been able to resolve a simple question of attribution without dissolving into recrimination. The association’s response, issued in a single-sentence statement, read: “The question was not simple, and we resolved it faster than a committee would have.”
Proposed Reforms
The complaint does not limit itself to grievance. It advances a slate of proposed reforms, which the association describes as “modest” and which mediators describe as “not that.” The four principal proposals are reproduced below as filed.
The first is the establishment of Direct Communication Zones — designated physical and digital spaces in which greetings, pleasantries, and tone management are formally suspended, and in which “the first word of any message may be the point.” The association proposes signage. The second is the creation of Optional Small Talk Districts, voluntary areas in which weather discussion, weekend recaps, and reciprocal wellness inquiries are permitted, encouraged, and contained, so that, in the filing’s words, “those who need it can have it, and the rest of us can route around it.”
The third proposal calls for Reduced Apology Requirements, citing internal estimates that the modern professional apologizes an average of fourteen times per day, of which the association assesses that “between zero and one” correspond to an actual transgression. The remaining apologies, the complaint argues, are “lubricant,” and the association objects to being required to manufacture lubricant for friction it did not create.
The fourth and most ambitious proposal seeks Federal Recognition of “Constructive Assholery” as a legitimate and protected working style. A draft definition appended to the filing defines the term as “the ability to produce correct outcomes while generating moderate interpersonal discomfort.” The definition is careful to specify moderate. Members who generate severe interpersonal discomfort, the document notes, “are not constructive and are not welcome,” a clause that several applicants reportedly found offensive enough to withdraw their membership in protest, which the association recorded as “the screening working as intended.”
Galen Roe, a fictional policy analyst at the Center for Applied Bluntness, noted that the reform package is more internally consistent than its tone suggests. “Strip away the framing and what they’re actually requesting is the right to opt out of a performance layer,” Roe said. “They are not trying to abolish kindness. They are trying to make it optional, the way it was before someone decided it was a deliverable.”
The Economics of Emotional Bureaucracy
A substantial appendix to the complaint attempts to quantify what the association terms “emotional bureaucracy” — the accumulated overhead of relationship maintenance, tone calibration, and ceremonial pleasantness that members argue functions as an unpriced tax on getting things done. The figures are, the association concedes, “estimates produced by people who find estimating other people’s feelings tedious,” and should be treated accordingly.
The headline figure asserts that the average knowledge worker spends approximately fifty-one minutes per day on what the filing classifies as “non-load-bearing interpersonal labor”: the softening of emails that were already fine, the rephrasing of accurate statements into less accurate but more palatable ones, the attendance of meetings whose purpose was “alignment” on matters already aligned, and the writing of apologies for tones that were never struck. Aggregated across the workforce, the association arrives at a figure it labels “a genuinely upsetting number of years,” declining to specify it on the grounds that “specificity here would itself be a pleasantry.”
The appendix introduces the association’s central economic concept: the distinction between signal and packaging. Signal is the information a message is actually intended to convey. Packaging is everything wrapped around it. The association does not object to packaging in principle — it concedes that gifts are sometimes nicer wrapped — but objects to packaging being mandatory, to packaging being graded, and to the deliverer of an unwrapped but correct signal being penalized relative to the deliverer of a beautifully wrapped but empty one.
“We have built an entire economy of wrapping,” the appendix concludes. “There are people whose only function is to wrap. They are promoted. We, who deliver the contents, are told we have a tone problem. We do not have a tone problem. We have a wrapping deficit, and we are proud of it.”
Public Response
The complaint has drawn significant criticism, much of it organized around the argument that the association fundamentally misunderstands what its grievances are measuring. Critics contend that the movement ignores the importance of cooperation, empathy, and relationship building — functions that, opponents argue, are not overhead but infrastructure, and that appear to be free only to those who have never had to build them.
Dr. Lourdes Antiel, a fictional researcher in organizational psychology and a prominent critic of the filing, argued that the association has mistaken the absence of visible cost for the absence of cost. “The reason the blunt person can be blunt,” Dr. Antiel said, “is that someone nearby is maintaining the relationships that make bluntness survivable. Remove that person and the blunt one does not become more efficient. They become unemployed, with excellent reasons that no one wanted to hear.”
Supporters counter that this is precisely the dependency they object to: that society has become, in the movement’s recurring phrase, “overly dependent on emotional bureaucracy,” and that the existence of a class of people whose full-time job is to absorb and reframe the directness of others is not evidence that directness is costly — it is evidence that the cost has been outsourced and hidden. “You did not eliminate the friction,” one supporter wrote. “You hired someone to stand in front of it. We would like to stand in front of it ourselves, or, ideally, not at all.”
Polling commissioned by neither side and conducted by no one in particular reportedly found that a plurality of respondents agreed with the association in principle and intended to continue disagreeing with it in practice, a result the association described as “the most honest data we have ever seen.”
The Analyst Perspective
Experts asked to characterize the dispute have largely converged on a single framing: that the conflict is not really about manners at all, but about two competing and mutually unintelligible theories of how outcomes get produced. Analysts have labeled these the Niceness Model and the Asshole Model, terms that both sides have reportedly adopted without objection, which observers note is itself unusual.
Under the Niceness Model, relationships enable outcomes. Trust, rapport, and goodwill are the substrate on which work is performed; invest in the relationship and the outcome follows, because people do more, and do it better, for those they like. Under the Asshole Model, outcomes enable relationships. Deliver the result, repeatedly and reliably, and the relationship follows, because respect is downstream of competence and people ultimately trust those who do not waste their time.
The two models are not, analysts emphasize, opposites. They are the same loop, read in different directions. Each side believes the other has reversed cause and effect. Each side has substantial evidence, because the loop runs both ways and a person standing at any point on it can describe themselves as the cause of everything downstream.
One analyst, asked to summarize the entire dispute, offered a formulation that has since circulated widely: “Both sides believe they’re carrying society. They simply disagree on whether society runs on kindness or competence.” Pressed on which side was correct, the analyst reportedly paused for a long time and then said, “Yes,” before declining further comment.
The Question of Who Is Actually Carrying It
The deeper the analysis has gone, the more both sides have come to resemble each other. Researchers note that the Niceness Model and the Asshole Model produce identical behavior in their adherents: a quiet, persistent conviction that one is the load-bearing element of every room one enters, and that the room would collapse in one’s absence. The kind person believes the project would fall apart without the relationships they maintain. The blunt person believes it would fall apart without the corrections they supply. Both are occasionally right. Both are continuously certain.
The Externality Research Division’s own modeling suggests that the truth is structurally hidden from both parties. The relationship-builder cannot observe the work that competence makes unnecessary — the meetings that did not need to happen, the conflicts that the correct answer prevented. The competence-deliverer cannot observe the work that goodwill makes possible — the favors, the patience, the benefit of the doubt extended to a result that arrived rudely. Each is invisible to the other, and so each concludes that the other contributes nothing.
“This is the central tragedy of the dispute,” the modeling section notes. “Both functions are real. Both are necessary. Both are mostly invisible to the people performing the other one. The niceness people think the work happens because they made it pleasant. The competence people think it happens because they made it correct. It happens because of both, which is the one explanation neither side finds satisfying.”
Implementation Concerns
Even sympathetic reviewers have raised practical objections to the reform package. The proposed Direct Communication Zones, critics note, would require someone to design the signage, convene the working group, and gather feedback — a process that would itself consist almost entirely of the pleasantries the zones are meant to abolish. The association has acknowledged this paradox, conceding in a footnote that “the meeting to eliminate meetings is the hardest meeting,” and proposing that it be chaired by someone who does not want to be there.
The Optional Small Talk Districts have raised a thornier concern: that they would rapidly stratify, with the relationship-builders self-selecting into the small-talk districts and the directness-preferrers into the communication zones, producing two populations that never speak to each other and each of which becomes convinced the other has stopped existing. Sociologists warn this could accelerate an already-observed trend toward “tonal segregation,” in which people increasingly interact only with others who share their preferred ratio of signal to packaging.
The Reduced Apology Requirements proposal has encountered a definitional problem. To reduce apologies, the association must specify which apologies are unnecessary, and any such specification has, in early drafting, required the association to apologize for the tone of the specification. “We are aware of the recursion,” the relevant footnote reads. “We are choosing to ignore it, which is itself the skill.”
Federal Posture
Federal recognition of Constructive Assholery, the complaint’s most ambitious request, has received no official response, which the association has interpreted variously as “deliberation,” “cowardice,” and “the most direct communication the government has ever sent us.” Sources described as “familiar with no part of the process” suggested that any formal recognition would require the establishment of a certifying body empowered to distinguish constructive assholes from the merely destructive kind — a determination that would, by necessity, involve a great deal of careful, diplomatic, relationship-driven judgment of exactly the sort the association considers overhead.
“To certify them, we would have to be nice to them,” one hypothetical regulator was imagined to have said. “And to be certified, they would have to tolerate it. Neither party is willing. The program ends there.”
Closing Statement
The association has vowed to continue its campaign regardless of institutional response, noting that institutional response was “never the point” and that the complaint was filed primarily “so that the record would reflect that we said something.” Its final statement to reporters was delivered by a member who declined to be named on the grounds that “the name is packaging.”
“We’re not saying everyone should be rude,” the statement began. A brief pause followed — a pause that several reporters noted was itself a kind of small talk, which the speaker appeared to resent in real time. “We’re saying some of you need to stop acting surprised when the blunt person is the one actually getting the work done.”
At press time, negotiations between the association and an unspecified coalition of its critics had broken down completely, with both sides leaving the room and neither side saying goodbye. The association described the encounter as “a productive first meeting.” The critics, reached for comment, said they hoped everyone got home safely, which the association cited, in a follow-up filing, as the entire problem.
The Bottom Line
The Association of Rude People and Commonly Called Assholes has correctly identified a real cost — the genuine overhead of ceremonial pleasantness, mandatory tone management, and apologies for transgressions that never occurred — and has drawn from it a conclusion that is half true in the most inconvenient possible way. Directness is frequently efficient. Pleasantness is frequently overhead. And the person doing the work is, often enough, the one no one wants to sit next to.
But the complaint mistakes invisible infrastructure for absent infrastructure. The reason bluntness survives is that someone, somewhere nearby, is maintaining the relationships that absorb it — and the reason that relationship-builder appears to produce nothing is that competence has quietly prevented the disasters their goodwill would otherwise have had to repair. Each side performs a function the other cannot see. Each concludes the other is dead weight. Both are wrong, which is why neither will ever be persuaded.
The dispute will not be resolved, because resolution would require each party to accept that society runs on the thing they personally find tedious. The niceness camp will continue to believe relationships enable outcomes. The asshole camp will continue to believe outcomes enable relationships. They are describing the same loop from opposite ends, each convinced they are holding it up alone. That they cannot stand to be in a room together is not a failure of the negotiation. It is the most accurate thing either side has produced.
Editor’s note: This publication invited a representative of the association to review the article for accuracy. The representative responded, in full, “It’s fine,” which our editorial team has elected to interpret as the warmest review we have ever received.
¹ The Association of Rude People and Commonly Called Assholes is fictional. The people it describes are not, and at least one of them has reviewed this footnote and found it too long.
² The fifty-one-minute figure for daily “non-load-bearing interpersonal labor” is fabricated. The sensation of having spent the morning softening an email that was already fine is not.
³ The Niceness Model and the Asshole Model are presented here as opposites for narrative convenience. They are the same feedback loop. This footnote will be ignored by adherents of both.
⁴ The analyst who answered “Yes” when asked which side was correct was not being evasive. It was the most rigorous answer available, and we have been unable to improve on it.