Meaning of the phrase "Death by a thousand paper cuts"

Question

Context: Talking about a product or a project. During a meeting someone used the expression "Death by a thousand paper cuts".

I understand the concept of the original version Death by a thousand cuts that in this case would translate to something that suffered so many micro or mini criticism that it eventually got canceled or finished.

My first take on the paper cut version is that it has the same meaning with a more "light/comic" version to remove the dark+torture effect from the expression.

Does it make sense? Or does it mean something entirely different?

Answer 1

The literal death by a thousand cuts was an execution method in which the victim was slowly dismembered (Wikipedia), and has come more popularly to mean anything that is a slow process in which a multitude of small, bad things happen which ultimately culminate in the demise of whatever was suffering the changes (UE).

The paper cuts form is a bureaucratic pun, therefore. It's used in the sense of minor administrative or legal actions which ultimately aggregate to weigh down or destroy a system. Since the actions are paper-based, they can be termed paper cuts.

Examples include:

• Where an energy construction project collapsed due to the weight of letters filed by objectors
• Where a particular financial product dropped significantly in value due to the confluence of several events (in this context, the paper represents the trading transactions)
• Where a conservative talk show host uses the phrase to describe what he sees as the increasing intrusion of government into daily life

Answer 2

It means the same thing.

A paper cut can be extremely painful, even though it's very small.

In the context of a project, it means failure due to many small problems instead of one large problem. This is exactly what it would mean without the "paper" part.

Answer 3

It means working in an office job (think of Dilbert) and slowly letting your employer suck the life out of you, until you are nothing but a hollow shell of the person you used to be, usually near suicidal or completely numb.

Can be associated with any meaningless (in the sense of what gives your life meaning) office job such as accountant, lawyer, engineer, clerk, programmer, etc.

This would be in contrast to any job that may actually give job satisfaction by letting you create something, such as any construction job, doctor, artist, etc. Typically any job where you do not live in a cubical for 9 hours a day.