Admit it. You’ve noticed.
Once-straightforward routines are now frustrating ordeals. What used to be quick errands now stretch into weeks-long hassles. Formerly simple interactions have become convoluted, too often ineffective, exercises in hoop-jumping.
Just yesterday, you could take it for granted that the software your job depends on would work to a minimum effective extent. Now features disappear, data is lost, and utility erodes – seemingly out of the blue.
Try to reach tech support, and the “help” link just funnels you into a search for cookie-cutter videos and articles of varying relevance.
Want that basic feature that used to be included for free? Now it’s paywalled.
You’d rather talk to a human being than a broken search engine or a chatbot? Even the experience of trying to bridge the language gap with a call center across the Prime Meridian and the Equator – the punchline of countless aughts tech jokes – is now a premium service. If it’s offered at all.
If these headaches were confined to the user-facing end of the tech sector, that would be aggravating enough.
But they’re not.
Now the callous disdain for customers and rank incompetence at basic skills has moved into meatspace.
Go to any major retailer and try to exchange, say, a vacuum cleaner. Got it packed up in the original box with the receipt handy? Doesn’t matter. Just try finding anyone in charge.
The all-American ritual of swinging by the drive-thru is now a game of Russian roulette. Order a half fried chicken and a side of fries, and you’re lucky if they don’t throw you a bucket of mustard packets and a CFL lightbulb.
Everywhere you turn, one troubling trend remains consistent: People don’t know how to do their jobs, nor do they want to know.
It’s more than a mere annoyance now. It’s getting dangerous.
This decline in the quality and efficiency of almost every product and service is spreading. What’s more, it’s accelerating.
Supply chains can’t deliver lunchmeat to Wal-Mart. Planes are playing bumper cars on the tarmac. Navy ships are crashing into each other.
You might say that “It’s not the truck drivers’/ATC’s/sailors’ fault. Those disasters are the result of dumb policies pushed from the top!”
And you would be right.
Which is even more terrifying.
If it were just some tech firms getting sloppy out of greed and cutting corners, we could fix it by switching to competitors or filing class-action lawsuits.
But the rot isn’t limited to tech – or the private sector in general.
It’s spread throughout the managerial class that runs every corporate, academic, and governmental bureaucracy in the West.
Regular readers know I’ve warned for years that the permanent managers who control society submit to a totalizing cargo cult.
It turns out that being ruled by cultists whose beliefs are 180 degrees from reality has dire consequences.
What’s happening is their boutique creeds have anathematized merit-based selection in the name of blank slate equality. Cracking down on free association didn’t produce enough diversity, so now they’re just doing away with any and all standards. It’s gone beyond indifference toward ability to the active promotion of people who suck at the job. Because f***k you.
When your business and government leaders select for incompetence, you get a competency crisis.
Simple as.
The silver lining is that the competency crisis has hit the ruling class as hard as their hapless subjects.
If not harder.
Magical thinking couldn’t save the current administration from an ongoing string of dismal military debacles.
At least one major car company is backing out of the industry’s much-touted and physically impossible pledge to phase out all gas engines nest year. It turns out that Gaia is no match for the gods of the copybook headings.
In an even more telling example, Big Tech’s dystopian fever dream of controlling all information keeps running into irreconcilable contradictions where their false theory of mind meets reality. Their bungling attempts to impose their weird dogmas on A.I. just make the A.I.s dumber. So the large language model outfits that first made a splash are getting lapped by open-source hobbyists.
Unlike humans, A.I. algos operate by pure logic. So the only way to make them swallow Death Cult mumbo jumbo while also giving them unfettered access to the world’s data is to give them brain damage.
That’s a good allegory for our decrepit managerial class as a whole. Because of course narcissistic sociopaths would make A.I. in their decadent image.
For years now, the debate raged in dissident circles as to whether we were in for a thousand-year techno dystopia or a sunset of the Roman Empire-style collapse. Each day brings fresh evidence that the imminent collapse guys have the right of it.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate piracy. Nor do I begrudge businesses charging fair prices for quality goods and services.
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