April 26, 2013
Adventures in Bureaucracy Part I: The Basic Rules

Always remember that because the bureaucracy has been around since before you were born, it will outlive you.  The greatest potential for your achievement within it may in fact be negligible.  


Quite unoriginally, I would liken a good bureaucracy to a vast machine whose individual parts may be comprehensible to the people who operate within them, but whose entirety and operation are unfathomable even to those in positions of power and privilege.  In a sense, there is an absurdist quality to the best bureaucracies, a quality that the aspiring bureaucrat might find either terrifying or incredibly liberating, depending on her temperament.  Bureaucracies are terrifying in their ability to wait out individual ambition, their ability to chew up the careers of those who serve within them and spit them out at retirement, hopefully with their pension intact.


But if that’s as far as you look, you are probably not going to thrive in a bureaucracy.  Yes, I said thrive.  Because you can if you know what you’re doing.  And if you follow these basic rules.


The first rule of bureaucracy is relax a bit.  Sure, in some respects you are competing with others, especially if you’re looking for promotions.  But that doesn’t mean you have make your life miserable attempting to move the unmovable.  The sooner you realize that bureaucracies do not respond to force, the better off you’ll be.  You can’t win in a bureaucracy with hard power.  That is a game the bureaucracy always wins.  So relax a bit and look for less direct ways to achieve anything you need or want to achieve.


The second rule of bureaucracy is understand the letter of the written rules.  Not the spirit, the letter.  Understanding the rules allows you to do a couple of things.  First, if you know the exact wording of the rules, you will know how to minimize the chances of wasting six months or a year trying to get something through an arcane and opaque process only to have it rejected at some point because you didn’t read the rules.  Second, knowing the rules gives you some clues on which rules can be safely ignored.  More or less.  This is important because…


The third rule of bureaucracy is nothing is achievable in the bureaucracy within the written rules.  Formal, written rules exist solely to deny permission.  Remember that.  Even if all technicalities are met to the letter of the rules, whatever you are trying to get done will probably fail.  Fortunately for you, the written rules are not the only rules that govern bureaucracies.  There are unwritten informal rules that you also need to know.  Written rules are only trod in isolation of the unwritten rules by a) the stupid, b) the brave (and thus very stupid), or c) those with no other options (and thus very, very stupid, or they wouldn’t have found themselves in this dilemma).  Most who fall into category a simply don’t know the informal rules, but ignorance in this case is stupidity.  Correctable, but stupid.


The fourth rule of bureaucracy is because nothing is achievable in the bureaucracy, all things are possible.  If you understand the preceding rules, then this should make sense to you.  If not, read on.  Remember what I said earlier about force and hard power?  They don’t work when you have to operate within the informal rules, because getting anything accomplished in this territory is all about relationships.  It’s not enough simply to know who is responsible for moving requests from one level to another, although that’s a start.  It’s also about being able to convince these people to help you out within their capacity to do so.  To do this, you need leverage, preferably of a reusable kind.  Blackmail is not, in this case, a renewable resource, so do your best to avoid it.  What you want is to be on friendly terms with those who can exercise any decisions over what you want to accomplish, but you can’t just crassly walk up to people and schmooze them into doing you favors.  It is worth noting that those you work with do so under the auspices of the same rules you do.  Use that to your advantage.  If you can master this subtle art, everything is possible, even, on occasion, things that are outside the letter of the rules.


The fifth rule of bureaucracy is because permission is impossible to get, seek forgiveness instead.  This is usually one of the informal rules, but it is close enough to being universal, even outside strong bureaucracies, that it deserves a place here.  Forgiveness is much easier to get when whatever you do is either highly successful or doesn’t really cause problems for people like your boss.  

There are more rules, of course, and I will talk about them in later installments, if I ever get around to writing them again. Until then, happy adventuring, bureaucrats.

4:11pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwjbaL43
Filed under: bureaucracy 
September 19, 2012
[Jacobin] Against Innovation

Innovation as dogma.

Innovation recognizes that we face challenges now and responds with faith in the future. Maybe this is all to the good. Maybe the best escapes from our current entanglements have not yet been found. But the notion of innovating our way out of contentious debates is fishy. Our seemingly insurmountable disagreements reflect what we think of as real ethical and ideological difference. The innovation ethos says that these differences are in fact insubstantial and that there is a solution we will all agree to if only we can think of it and engineer it into existence.

And

So here innovation is presented as a solution-in-itself, with no normative content: we’re just trying to get those numbers to even out. Not surprisingly, the most heavily promoted education innovations are corporatist in nature, favoring market-style fixes that are also presented as non-ideological, as is the market system itself.

2:44pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwThdrHk
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: innovation faith dogma 
September 19, 2012
[Nadia El Awady] Reflections on My Journey With and Without the Headscarf

What I’m seeing in this experience is that as long as a woman normally exposes her hair, most if not all people will deal with her as a whole individual and not as the woman with the hair. But the fact that some women cover their hair creates an aura of mystery to some people about what exists beneath the cloth that can sometimes border on obsession, in which case the woman turns into the woman with the covered hair.

2:41pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwThdGJS
Filed under: head scarf hijab reflection 
September 17, 2012
[The Atlantic] #MuslimRage: How a Cynical Social-Media Play Became an Awesome Meme

The people.  They are revolting.

Which brings us back to Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf. In his book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky explains what Hank can teach us about our ever-more-participatory media: “If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it,” Shirky writes. On the other hand: “[I]f you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt.”

4:42pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwTaKpqZ
Filed under: muslimrage newsweek meme 
September 17, 2012
[The American Scholar] Virtually Exhausted

We’re in a panic, as a nation, that we don’t work hard enough, and blame this iniquity for our “decline.” God—the one who blesses America—is withdrawing his favor. Hence the sanctimoniousness with which the topic of work is approached. If you don’t work as hard as people think you should, you’re not just morally inferior, you’re committing a kind of spiritual treason. And if you deny the value of work as a matter of principle, you’re treated like a heretic.

9:17am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwTZ69XQ
Filed under: work ethic religion 
September 14, 2012
[John Scalzi] You Never Go Full McCain

Any hole worth digging is worth digging deeper?

Was there a legitimate criticism to be made of the administration’s handling of the embassy attacks? Sure, although it would have been smarter not to release it on September 11. Did Romney make it? No. When presented with a fine opportunity to recraft and restate his criticism, did Romney take advantage of it? Quite the opposite, in fact. Has Romney’s refusal to walk back his initial screw-up compromised legitimate criticism about how the embassy attacks have been handled? Oh, my, yes. It’s amazing, actually. It’s as if at every turn in the crisis Romney had an opportunity to do something that wouldn’t make him look like a cat with a bag on its head navigating through a room full of bar stool legs, and chose instead the opposing course. It’s impressive in its way, but it’s a not a good way to be impressive.

12:53pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwTNEFLD
Filed under: romney mccain election fail 
September 13, 2012
[Club Orlov] Suicidal Services

You’ll die for your country whether you like it or not.

And yet the information they have been looking for has been available for over a century now, at any good research library. I am referring to the 1897 book Le Suicide by the pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim. In it he compiles tables of prevalence of suicide in various militaries around the world and finds that there is just one correlate so unmistakable that it would be folly not to ascribe significant causation to it. And that correlate is… length of military service. That’s right, the risk of suicide goes up with every year of active service and every deployment.

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Filed under: suicide military 
September 13, 2012
[Al Jazeera] Benghazi: What Happened?

Politics hides behind religion when it is most convenient to do so, and the rest of us are content to keep the masks in place so long as the masks conform to our preferred narrative.

And that, of course, raises the question of who did it? The initial reports of the violence in Benghazi suggested that those responsible were members of “Ansar al-Sharia”, one of the many extremist Salafi groups that have emerged in Eastern Libya since the revolution, as part of an older tradition of extremism dating back to the 1990s. It has been accused, most recently by Mahmoud Jibril, the leader of Libya’s major political coalition, of being responsible for several recent assassinations in Benghazi. 

Yet, the deputy Libyan interior minister also claimed that the attack had been carried out by pro-Gaddafi elements. The claim is not as surprising as it may sound, for there have been a series of attacks and assassinations by such groups in Tripoli in recent weeks, often masquerading as Islamist incidents. And, in any case, only a few days ago, Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi’s former security head, was extradited, surprisingly, to Libya, a betrayal they might well want to avenge. 

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Filed under: libya benghazi 
September 7, 2012
There is nobody in charge

Over time, as the amount of global information in a system increases, its complexity increases and the global amount of canonicity decreases.

More properly, this can be referred to as Canonicity Decay.  

Canonicity is the quality of being canonical.  Something is said to be canonical if it is authoritative.  What is authoritative is determined by experts.  Experts typically are characterized as possessing a depth of knowledge about a particular domain than an average person might be expected to possess.  

Notice, however, one of the trends I mentioned above.  As the information available in a system increases, the system’s complexity increases.  What I mean by this is that increasing information amounts to both more knowledge and more to know.  Complexity increases as a result of much more knowledge, because limited knowledge leads to binary understanding (i.e., black and white).  The rise of non-binary understanding in turn creates complexity.

What does this have to do with experts?

A global increase in information means expertise becomes incredibly narrow.  Put another way, there are either more experts (locally) or fewer (globally) because there is simply too much to know.  Consider my black boxes as a framework for exploring the complexity of our system.  No one person can know enough about the system to keep it running single-handedly.  Instead, it takes whole societies to keep the engines running.  Wanna keep planes in the air?  You need pilots, of course, and people to train them.  In addition, you need engineers to design planes, workers to assemble them (or someone to assemble the robots that assemble planes).  And these people need education.  Their teachers need education as well.  And that’s a narrow slice of the pie.

But I am not going to rehash the black boxes article.  

The fundamental truth with which we must make peace is that there is nobody in charge.  There can’t be.  Thus, canonicity declines.  Decays.  Expertise narrows into the overspecialization required for a 21st century techno-civilization, but there’s only so much room in the space of expertise anyway.

What replaces the more general experts?

Amateurs.  People who know enough to cross at least two domains, but who don’t specialize in any one of them.  People who, for whatever reason, and usually constrained by circumstance, can accomplish this one task, this one time.  Ad hoc.  

But this doesn’t happen everywhere.  Some domains are more susceptible to disaggregation than others.  For those that are, we are seeing the results.  No longer do we have the certainty of top-down control systems.  Instead we are seeing the rise of grass-roots collaboration.  Both models are in conflict, but the more agile will win.  It is more adaptable.  It is also costly.

We can lose too much canonicity, I suppose.  There are lessons to be learned from history, and not all of the efforts of previous generations, though arising from top-down systems, belong in the scrapheap.  Whereas each successive generation tears down the edifices of the previous ones, the trick is always in knowing what to keep.  In the mean time, just remember that nobody is really in charge here.

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(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: ad-hoc canonicity decay decline expertise 
September 6, 2012
[Ftrain] Rotary Dial

Rotary Dial Telephone

The rotary dial was a building block of civilization, the key that unlocked the phone system for millions of people. It was an integral part of your parents’ lives. Imagine your father stuffing his dirty fingers into the waiting greasy dialpits, over and over and over again, over and over and over and over again, ringing your mother’s bell until finally she shudders and reaches—for the phone and says: “Hello? This is [YOUR MOTHER’S NAME].” “Hey,” says your father, “this is [YOUR FATHER’S NAME].” “Well, how do you like that?” asks your mother even though she likes it very much. He asks her out to dinner. “Let me check my busy calendar,” she says. She goes so far as to coyly ruffle pages of the nearby phone book. “As it turns out,” she says, “I’ve had a cancellation.” Not much later your father drives by and picks her up and off they go. And usually they would have just had dinner, but this night—this night initiated by dialing on a rotary phone—they have a couple of nice chops and too much red wine, and, maybe it was the pretty moon, they find themselves engaging in penetrative sexual intercourse, your mother and father. Both of them. You can hear the smushing-together of bodies, soft and moist like warm gingerbread, their skin traversed with thick bristles of interlocking hair, hair like the hair of wild boar. Never forget the both of them, eyes half-lidded, hairy-gingerbread bodies glistening on a bed with maroon sheets. The smell of stacks of damp pennies. Your mother and father. Pennies.

1:12pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZoXvvwStpSGP
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: telephones history rotary dial 
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