I think there is pervasive recursion in these things. I have been
amazed at how many examples of "fossilized tech" (in the form of
bureaucracy) being dissolved by the COVID lockdown and now re-forming
anew in a much more efficient manner. An annealing cycle, if you
will. My libertarian, socialist, anarchist, communist, capitalist
instincts all have my inner-engineer screaming to "fix" those
ossified/fossilized systems when I run into them and then to shout "I
TOLE YA!" when an event like COVID (or war or economic collapse or ?)
causes them to break or bend out of recognition. Of course, as
adaptive systems do, these systems (and more to the point, the systems
they are embedded in) recover (if/when they do) in a more adaptive mode.
The MVD bureaucracy is one I experienced directly and while it didn't
work at all the way I felt it "should" during/after COVID, it works
incredibly more efficiently and humanely (IMO) now than it did 3 years
ago. The (in)efficiencies that were baked in have been baked back
out. On my travels here, I have little to compare with, but my feeling
is that many in-person, manual processes were automated "overnight"
(actually I suspect it was a nightmare for a while) and the residual
not-yet-mended processes caught us a few times (who knew you couldn't
actually take a ferry from Dover to Calais/Dunquerque without a car, or
at least a bicycle? We do now!)....
I hope I'm not becoming a (conventional) religio in my old age, but the
only word I have found (or at least the one I keep coming back to) in
apprehending these self-healing systems is "Grace" and "return to
Grace". (nod to SteveG here).
- Steve
On 6/24/22 10:33 PM, glen wrote:
Well, I hope obviously, I think the coercion tech exerts on people is
a good thing. I make that argument w.r.t. bureaucracy all the time.
And what is bureaucracy if not technology. What's the difference
between, say, a lab beaker and a lab method? I argue not much, the
beaker is simply a very formal [sub]workflow and the method is
informal. I guess the trick is when (not if) methods/processes are
prematurely (and preemptively) fossilized into technlogy, behaviors
into components.
Coercing a person to travel to a store to keep their phone working
seems like we've prematurely locked-in processes into the object of
the "phone". The process[es] that are locked-in have something to do
with money and infrastructure we use for individuals to engage with
society. Money doesn't seem like the best way to do that, to me ... it
feels a bit like a poll tax ... "pay to play" is resoundingly
denigrated amongst the younger people I know.
On 6/24/22 11:24, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I remember being at the T-Mobile out on Cerrillos road and someone
came in to pay $10 to keep their phone running. I found that a
striking example of the degree of control that technology can exert
on people. Maybe for the good?
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