Mia Oberländer’s Open-Plan Babel

Two clusters of workers face each other across a shared desk, leaning into their monitors. Lines of speech radiate outward from their mouths — not toward each other, but into bright red gooseneck microphones mounted where keyboards should be.

Is he talking to me, or is he just talking to himself? In Mia Oberländer’s illustration, the answer is that it doesn’t matter. Everyone is talking, all at once, into the void of their own screen. The office has become a place where speech is ambient, directionless, aimed at no one present.

The piece accompanies a Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the rise of AI tools that replace typing with continuous dictation. But Oberländer, a Berlin-based cartoonist and illustrator whose comics work trades in deadpan exaggeration, doesn’t draw the technology as sleek or aspirational. She draws it as what it would actually look and sound like in a room full of people.

That comics sensibility, where exaggeration is a form of honesty, is what makes the piece land. The two groups mirror each other symmetrically, talking into their respective machines while the monitors form a wall between them. The mirroring makes them look almost like they’re in conversation with each other.

The article quotes Wispr’s CEO: “You are not a crazy person for talking to your computer.” Oberländer’s illustration asks the harder question: once everyone starts talking to their machines at once, is anyone still listening to each other?