technoplato

Having worked at large corporations and having repeatedly failed to bear their strikingly Kafkaesque torments, I have come to regard it as self-evident that "productivity" is not even a quaternary concern of such constructions. These are vastly involuted organisms, ruled by an innumerable and unfathomable set of emergent properties, populated by men, yes, but wholly insensible to the infinitesimal whims and futile provocations of their human substrate. Despite the occasional mockery thereof, I find the near-tautological maxim “The Purpose of a System is What it Does” to be a useful pocket-sized reminder to disregard the sloganeering and self-conceptions of these inherently inscrutable orders and their well-inculcated acolytes; to behold their manifestos, mission statements, alliterative enumerations of corporate values, and even the very Words on the Tin with droll indifference, as the self-delusion, newspeak, and indoctrination they so nakedly are. I've seen things you wouldn't believe. I've seen projects developed by no fewer than 50 engineers, spread across multiple teams, plowing headlong into nothingness for years on end without anyone seeming to know for certain whether the object of their exertions was either already in production, just a proof-of-concept, or perhaps a fork of some abandoned predecessor. Now for the hope-inducing section: Many take it for granted that AI poses a threat to white-collar jobs, perhaps as a looming extinction event for this entire caste. Yet this rests on the implicit assumption that such jobs are part of something more logical, more coherent than a stultifying weave of make-work flesh drunkenly grafted onto a puke-slick, palpitating mass of sinecures whose unknowable and alien aim includes, as a byproduct, the sorting of humanity into soul-splutteringly inefficient hierarchies of asexually self-replicating scrum masters and mid-meiosis, daylight-balanced light illuminated middle managers, themselves configured primarily for the incessant heaving of damp air to and fro upon begrimed lenovo thinkpad zoom-call pockmarked stand-up screens, ouroboric and onanistic in their encircling of a charybdis of story points (which occupy a superposition of effort, complexity, and time - and the scrum people will actually bite you if you try to pin them down on this) and so on and so forth. So best of luck to AGI with all that shit. I forget my point. Do you have any blockers?