bureaucracy
A segment of the enormous file
As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.
Each fascinating crisis
The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Unborable
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Institutional structure
'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'
The Pale King
A Novel by David Foster WallaceCubed
A Book by Nikil SavalDeadlines are bullshit
An ArticleIn software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.
- External vs. internal deadlines
- Why are internal deadlines evil?
- Engineers who love their work
Big company tale: six months for a list and a button
An ArticleWhenever you wonder what it's like at a big company... sometimes, it's like this! And, hey, sometimes it's even worse!
In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism
An Essay by Chia AmisolaProfessionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.
Dolor
A Poem by Theodore RoethkeI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.
Every Tool Shapes the Task
Imagine the world like a cake
Imagine the world like a cake. Imagine that you slice it into the customary slices by vertical cuts. Each slice of that cake should signify for us, a constituency. Each is geographically located as one segment of the larger cake. Each slice is more influenced by its immediate neighbors than by what might be in the cake quite far away.
What technology has done in the world increasingly is to put horizontal cuts in that cake. You don't only talk up and down. Now you can talk across barriers.
Power makes knowledge sufficient
Whether it is civil rights' violations in many countries, whether it is the increasing numbers of unemployed people in our own country, whether it is the homeless we see on our way to work, it isn't as though we don't know.
But there is that horrible realization that, while the knowledge of facts may be a necessary condition for action, and we talk about democracy in civic action, it is unfortunately not a sufficient one.
While knowledge may be a necessary condition, it may in fact be a less necessary condition that the one that makes that a sufficient condition, and that is access to power.
To do some more pushups on the internet
There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.
Adding up to hair-brained
I have for myself come to the point where I say that people or groups or governments make the decisions that make sense to them, even if they look totally hair-brained to me.
My task then is to figure out the constellation of forces, the pushes and pulls, that in fact do add up to that hair-brained decision-making. Then we can go into the next iteration and say, "What can we do about the balance of the push and the pull that seems to result in totally non-constructive decisions?"
Who the problems are
Recently my attention was drawn to a quote from Peter Drucker who said, "If there isn't dissent, we would not know where the problems are."
I said to my husband, "Look, if there isn't dissent, we wouldn't know who the problems are." I think one has to keep that in mind.
Your new electronic microscope
Learn what is in this Internet. But then keep your head clear and go back to your goals. What in fact, in the best of all worlds, do you want to do? Do any of the activities with your new electronic microscope bring you closer to that?
Cyberspace as a global dump
If we think that cyberspace is a public space, then let's think of the oceans. They used to be as much of a world resource as anybody could think of but didn't belong to anybody. So everybody put their garbage into them. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial.