bureaucracy

Strains of Reality.

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I live a somewhat undisturbed life, as I designed, so I can think about other things. It’s what we all do to an extent for work, that thing that many of us do because we need to get paid so that we can pretend we have some value in these artificial systems we were born into.

It wasn’t as if we gave permission, and it’s not as if when we are considered adults we could reconsider our positions. We end up doing what we do and become part of the machinations of bureaucracy we are born into.

Today, I had to deal with a few things, and I found my day just getting physically sucked out of my head.

Go here. Do this. Sign this. Do that. Email this. Can’t receive that by email, have to to go to the office strategically located where there’s traffic and poor parking. Sit. Wait. Get a letter. Give someone else the letter. They email, messages fly back and forth, and that piece of business should be done in the morning by parties unknown who will do it because their company is presently unpaid.

Weird how that works.

Another order of business required me to write this, hand this to someone with a photocopy of my ID (really) so that they could go about doing something, but I was not feeling well enough this morning to risk spreading whatever macabre disease I potentially had. No, it’s not Covid (tested), it seems like it was just a headache and sore throat and I have neither now.

I don’t run around much outside where it’s peopley, so the odds are good it’s just my body telling me to slow down and rest a bit today – which I haven’t done yet because I’ve been dealing with moving information around between companies in inefficient ways. Well, one company. The newer company has suffered as well because of the previous company.

At times I wonder how it is that people don’t go crazy.

I look around and realize that they do, but in acceptable ways for the most part.

At times I wonder if crazy people didn’t design the systems, and I think not as much as we would like to think. If you ever want to ruin something you’re designing, get a committee together. They’ll beat out an unworkable solution over budget in as much time as they can possibly get – it won’t be finished, they’ll move on, and the broken system will flop around, punishing all who come into contact with it for the rest of it’s unnatural life.

There. I feel better.

From the Islands.

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It’s not often I switch my focus to Trinidad and Tobago, though I live here. In the minutiae, it’s always very busy with cars going to and fro in a rush to go stand in some form of line somewhere, or to drop children off to a school, or to go to the nearest KFC so they can get to the front of the line and then decide what they want to get.

There is a charm to it, the lilting accent Trinis are famous for a form of spoken poetry, an evolving pidgin that has all but lost some of it’s French Creole roots. When I grew up here, ‘oui!‘ was still but rarely used to end sentences, now replaced with the English, ‘yes!’. Language changes. The lilt does not.

This was a lyrical land, though it’s hard to see it now. Waves of subversive lyrics would cast spells over the populace, not direct enough to be offensive to those in authority, but understood well enough that they became popular, were sung, and parts of the lyrics often injected in conversation as a subversive poke at whatever needed to be poked at. There was always plenty.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find that in lyrics. I won’t say it’s impossible, I simply haven’t heard much of it other than David Rudder, perhaps the last popular spokesperson of that world. Now it’s clamoring bass with witty lyrics like, “Wave your hand in the air!”. Such originality lost in paradise.

As a teenager, I saw promise in the magazines I impatiently waited for. I would wait for my Uncle’s subscriptions to Time Magazine and National Geographic to go visit him, as I could, and I would read hungrily these missives from the rest of the world about the dawn of an Information Age. There was promise, there was a future. Oddly, at the dawn of the Information Age, in a tropical nation, those who were in authority were afraid of sunlight. They still are. Transparency, making decisions based on data, seems like a version of magic considered evil by some.

On returning to Trinidad and Tobago again and again over the decades, I saw what could only be described as arrested development. I saw it as a tidal pool, something I wrote about. I still do. And looking at Trinidad and Tobago through the lens of the future of artificial intelligence, I see a self-inflicted artificial extinction as more people from Trinidad and Tobago will go abroad to join the global economy.

The wheels of government, when they move in the right direction, move too slow and for political reasons. The impatient world will not stop or turn around for Trinidad and Tobago, it will press forward even as I imagine political parties will try to leverage ChatGPT to stay in power – because that seems all they wish to do. Education isn’t what it used to be while crime has people huddled on WhatsApp chats sharing video of shootings, attempted home invasions and standard political nonsense.

All this nation knows is self-congratulating bureaucracy in most regards. Perhaps the red on the flag has come to symbolize the red tape.

Yet there is hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but that’s the spirit of hope. It’s peculiar to see a nation I grew up in so hopeless, but when I grew up was imperfect too – and maybe because dinosaurs will not die the future will not come. Generations of promises broken have taught the younger generations distrust, generations of not opening the economy beyond distinct special interests has left an economy closed to all but those who pay the tolls through political donation.

But it is not that different from the rest of the world. Not the world piped into flat screens by Hollywood, or the BBC, which even ring hollow in parts of their nations.

What is different is the capacity to change things.

The Queue Issue.

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We have had lines since people had to get things. I would think that this would coincide with the agricultural revolution, but it could have been before then. However it happened, we got lines, or queues.

I bring this up because Wendy’s is going to be using chatbots in drive-thrus. They’re doing this, they say, because they want the lines to go faster. I don’t think that would be the choke point, but I also wouldn’t want to think that they haven’t done studies on this, had metrics for how long things took in line, etc. I don’t want to think that, but… I think that. I wrote about that already so we can skip that.

We need to talk about people who slow the lines down.

I live in a gated community, possibly to keep the lunatics in the asylum with a question as to which side of the gate is the asylum. To get in and out while driving, we swipe these cards, which requires winding our windows down and waving our card at a little sensor.

This is hard for some people.

The security guards sometimes open the gate for people because they left their card somewhere, can’t find it, etc. This can cause issues. Recently, I noticed the guards enjoyed watching me pull through because… I have a method.

I have a card, in hand, window already down, pull up to the sensor and slow almost to a stop and swipe the card. It’s fluid, it’s fast, and I noticed that the guards would tap each other when I was coming through and point. “Here he comes!”, they seemed to say. I pulled over once and went and talked to them about it because I am a curious sort of person, and they told me that I’m one of 2 people who has rolls through quickly.

There’s about 160 families in the community the last time I checked, so let’s call it maybe 200 drivers. 2 of us know how to get through the gate efficiently, roughly 1%. And we’ve all been in lines most of our lives. In fact, some people think we stood in line to get lives and some people think there’s a gate to some version of an afterlife which will have a… line.

When I was growing up, lines were efficient. You jumped in the queue, everyone seemed to know what to do, they got to the front of the line and did what they had to do and moved on with their lives. It was brilliant. It was clockwork. When you got to the head of the line you were ready.

No screwing around, no asking stupid questions, you got it together and things got done so the people behind you wouldn’t be inconvenienced… and you want to go do something else, which likely involves a queue somewhere else.

This is one of the foundations of modern civilization. Lines. Queues. They are the lifeblood of modern civilization. We all do it all of our lives, and by the time one gets past 18, you should be expert level.

It ain’t happening.

Around the world, there are people who don’t get it.

There are people who go through an entire line at a fast food outlet, one that conveniently folds for maximum visage of the menu, and get to the front not knowing what they want.

I’ve seen people fumbling at the front of the line at Kentucky Fried Chicken where the only things you need to know are the number of pieces, what sides, what drink. They even dumb it down into combos, easily visible to anyone with operational eyeballs. People get to the front of the line and… don’t know what they want.

You want chicken or you’re in the wrong place.

Some are distracted by the children orbiting around them at speeds that make them look like rings sometimes, and that’s understandable I suppose. The idea of sending the children to find and hold a seat, as I did as a child, puts them at risk of… of… well, I don’t know, I’m not a parent, so someone help me out here? My nieces and nephews, once they were around 7, could go and hold a table while our elders would stand in line.

Maybe that’s seen as child abuse these days. I don’t know. But we did it, it worked.

Some are staring at their phones, which has me thinking about that recent study on attention spans (now 47 seconds?!). Maybe it’s impossible to know what they want while they’re sexting with someone else in a line somewhere else, I don’t know, but they get to the front of the line and are completely unprepared.

My personal favorites are the ones who do fish impressions when woke from their revery.

This is not hard, people. Homo Sapiens have been standing in lines for millennia.

I’m considering writing The Commandments of Queuing so we don’t devolve.

Any thoughts?

Comm Failure

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Arctic CommunicationsI’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about communications, information, and how one can weave ideas into the fabric of other people’s minds.

Writing has always come easy, and for a long time was something I took for granted because it simply helped me or hindered me. If someone didn’t understand what I said or wrote, I took it upon myself to get better at communicating. Lately, though, I find myself feeling less responsible for what people don’t understand or misunderstand – no one likes a pedant, not even other pedants, and there are some people who are simply unreasonable and unreachable. I turned to writing long ago because shouting at walls makes no sense.

Yesterday, two people took issue with this article about the digitized paper processes of Trinidad and Tobago, and it was a little revealing. To understand this, you have to understand that getting a credit or debit card in Trinidad and Tobago is a daunting process that many people don’t qualify for. It’s a bureaucratic process that, instead of getting approved in one day, can take months (I know) – and even then, teeters on the brink of whether or not you’re presented well to whoever is behind the Mastercard or Visa system associated with it. Because the majority don’t enjoy this luxury, I didn’t write about it.

Two people took issue with that. They began commenting on Facebook about how one didn’t have to print bills because you could pay with the credit or debit card… which is true, if you can get one, and in the weighted world of finance specific to Trinidad and Tobago, is not the majority of people. Further, the point about those who lacked that financial luxury taken for granted elsewhere – in the U.S., banks give out debit cards like candy, as an example (more really, most banks don’t have candy anymore). So those who don’t have the financial tools in Trinidad and Tobago, the majority, have to print out the same bill.

It’s not as if one can depend on the local postal service to get you your bill on time, assuming that the relevant service provider has sent it on time – so people interested in uninterrupted service end up going to the website and using their ink and paper to print the very same bill – which is 2-3 pages, usually, when really, done right, you could just print one and go to a more convenient outlet to pay. Parking at the offices is always problematic, so they have ancillary places where one can pay.

Why do people have to print out all those pages? Largely because the bills are inefficient and have been for as long as I remember. After all, one might just hand someone the account number and the amount to pay – and they should be able to handle that, but because of receipts and bureaucratic fail-safes, and because… well, because they just digitized a paper process.

And that was the point of the article. I’ve written more than enough about the failure of banks to provide better online payment services for more people, but these two people were stuck on their ability to pay their bills online.

They were stuck in their perspective – nothing existed beyond their perspective. Even saying that they were correct in that they could pay their bills online while the majority could not was a bridge too far for them.

This ground away at me for all of 5 minutes, before they removed themselves from my audience (thank you!). Their minds didn’t stretch that far, stuck in the ice-tray of their own little worlds they were completely cut off from the rest of the world and liked that so much that they wanted to impose their world on everyone else.

We all do it. Oddly enough, though, it has something to do with a software project I’m working on and a bit of the philosophy behind it. When I write about it on KnowProSE.com, the link will appear below.

 

Swimming in Ambiguity

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without a trace
“For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;–nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”
 ― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852)

Generally, it seems that people don’t handle ambiguity well – a call, maybe, to the tunnel vision that we unconsciously cling to like straw.

The ambiguity of our reality is perilous. We build ships of ways to live – philosophies, religions, bureaucracies, traditions – to ride upon the ambiguity of our world. It leaks through, and society has those at the pumps to try to keep it on the outside of the ship. Sometimes they’re lawyers, sometimes they’re educators, sometimes they’re even politicians – holding onto a way of life, trying to keep everything together even when the shoals drive toward us with a strong wind behind.

We like our society. Some of us like it more, some of us like it less, the degree is unimportant: We all resist understanding the ambiguity below the hull of the ships we sail in. We wish to understand the hull, the structures that we can understand, the things that we are used to. It is the fool who looks to dismantle the ship with no plan for that ambiguity.

Mutinies – revolutions of a minor sort – rarely take this into consideration. A revolution with no plan of the aftermath isn’t as much a revolution as a harsh criticism with no constructive plan for progress.

Then there are the people who unwittingly fall into the ambiguity, somehow not meeting the requirements of being on board that ship. Maybe they were thrown off, discarded into the ambiguity. The souls of society we cannot understand – the criminals, the insane, the misfits, the artists…

And then there are the people who manage to swim in that ambiguity, boarding different ships – strangers aboard that somehow get past an intruder alert. They come aboard maybe to explore, maybe from a respite from the ambiguity of the world underneath the hulls of these ships. They see, they meet – maybe they meet their fate involuntarily going overboard, maybe they voluntarily take a swim, and maybe they even stay because of the comfort of the lack of ambiguity they find aboard.

This is really our last realm of exploration. How we deal with the ambiguities. As the world changes faster and faster, the ships falter, the storms push them too and fro, and so many are left to swim in ambiguity. Some drown.

Some don’t.

 

Plodding Toward Progress

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Slow ProgressWe have a tendency to set goals and get tunnel vision – we see everything directly between ourselves and the goal.

Yet everything directly between us and the goal is connected to other things, and those things to other. We forget the circumstances, the environment, through which we try to progress. There is more in our way than we find directly in front of us, and there is more that can help that is not directly in front of us or behind us.

This is the real world – not some facsimile that they teach about when they hand out diplomas and certificates, but a world interconnected. These days, the interconnections themselves are accelerating. Writers have tackled this over the decades, trying to communicate that the world is getting Faster.

Most recently, I’ve finished reading Friedman’s, “Thank You For Being Late” – an appropriate title as I’ve been making my way through various things in Trinidad and Tobago, a nation where bureaucracy can be harvested and exported. On a global level, ‘thought-leaders’, predominantly of the developed world, have the luxury of seeing things above the clouds of the developing world.

And they write about it.

And it’s disconnected from the rest of the world – even people in their own countries.

There’s this growing tension because of that which I would like to think could be healthy – where people aspire toward such lofty goals. And yet, the same ‘thought-leaders’ don’t understand the world that they live in as much as the world they are familiar with – just like everybody else. Reality defies us. And that content spreads like a wildfire around the globe, right or wrong, good or bad, and people see it through their tunnel vision.

We all want things to be better. The problems arise when we don’t agree on what’s better.

The tunnel, though, comes to define people when the world is larger than the tunnel. Where stopping now and then and looking around makes us aware of more possibilities. Where we are not limited to or defined by what we’ve done before. Where we can find a small effort indirectly can bring us so much closer to our goals.

Where even the systems we use to define how we get to our goals should be constantly suspect.

We plod forward when we should dance toward.

Change

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Black Hole Sun

They paint their world full of shadows and then they tell their children to stay close to the light.

Their Light. Their reasons, Their judgments.

Because in the darkness there be dragons. But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true.

In the ‘dark’, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.’
– Flint, “Black Sails”, Season 4, Episode XXXVIII

There’s a difference between growing up in the dark and growing up in the light. The results of growing up in the light are plain and are hinted at above. Beaten paths are chosen, and yet when the dark is somewhere they depend on someone else to light the path, to hold their hand and guide them.

But no one has been to the dark places, or those that have are victims of popular thought – the outliers, those that don’t play by the rules of their Light, their Reasons, their Judgement. And yet to push back that darkness takes people who are willing to go to the dark places and make light of them – to walk through the brush and feel the land under their feet, creating an echo of it in their minds. The explorers. The discoverers. Those unfettered from the popular Lights, the popular Reasons, the popular Judgements.

And people who grew up in the dark learned not to fear it but to embrace it, to taste of the dark brownian motion of the soul and master the unknown, to make sense out of nonsense, to find the order in what others see as chaos or be doomed to the chaos.

There’s a branch of people growing up in the dark who never find the illuminations, for whatever reasons. Then there’s the branch you can drop some others off with no more than a knife and some rope to find a civilization in a few decades.

Fear is the master of all of this – and mastering fear determines how people deal with the world. If they only know the black and white, they do not truly appreciate the dusk of sunset and the colors of the pre-dawn, where the light bounces through the atmosphere and it’s contents to give the brightest of colors that those waiting for the light will never see.

In 2018, we see the world changing. Storms in Europe, temperatures in Canada that make Antarctica a tropical paradise, flooding, earthquakes – some Lights call these acts of God, other Lights self-flagellate for all of humanity calling it climate change. We see things faster with technology and watch how weak our civilizations have always been, only now able to see how slow and cumbersome they have become as our ability to see it has improved. Resources once plentiful are now more scarce, geopolitical lines that were greying become more black and white. Statesmanship morphs into a reflection of our systems – those that rise to power know how to game the systems, they have become parts of the systems. People are blamed because, implicitly, ‘it couldn’t possibly be the systems‘. Of course it’s the systems. People are inherently flawed, every one of us, and systems are simply agreed upon designs of flawed humans.

People live in fear of crimes the systems allow for, people have shifted their ethics to what they can get away with by Law and Law abandons Ethics.

Meanwhile, we have more humans arriving like Earth’s sexually transmitted diseases, with no natural predators other than ourselves.

The world is darker as the false lights fail one by one, under their own weight. This scares people tied to how it is, how it was, how they think it has always been.

To those used to the dark, there’s a freedom there – a cascade of colors of a pre-dawn sunset to come, an opportunity to look at things anew and do better.

The world is changing and it scares people, often for the wrong reasons.

 

Retirement Eclipse.

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eclipseI’ve grown used to not worrying about things. It’s a comfortable way to live, like a hobbit in the Shire, having done my travels and having avoided coming how with any rings. I’m content, my health is better, and I sleep well at night – something that I’ve not been able to do since I was an infant. I may not live a life many people want but it is a life I have been content with. I’ve been writing a lot more. Some of it has even managed to slowly become something like a book.

I’d forgotten that I’d promised to attend the 13th Caribbean Internet Governance Forum at a local hub here in Trinidad and Tobago for at least one day. Flattery was tried to get me to go, and that almost never works because I don’t believe thinking highly of one’s self is of worth – knowing one’s value is. And in the end, it was the latter that got that promise out of me. From there, it was a simple matter of me keeping my word.

Well, it wasn’t a simple matter. The morning of, as I sipped my coffee and planned the day as I usually do, I realized just how much I didn’t want to go. For about 15 minutes, I toyed with the idea of saying I would come on the last day… but I had given my word, and I had written a day, so I could not do otherwise. Instead, I thought about why I didn’t want to go. Here’s what I came up with. I expected:

  1. The organization of the event to be done on the cheap, with glaring issues, and with inhibited participation.
  2. To hear much the same things I had heard before.
  3. To see more bureaucracy being created to try to change things, which is exceptional in that bureaucracy is created so things do not change. (Read James Gleick’s book, “Faster”).
  4. I would meet new people who would be thinking that these problems were all new and that we hadn’t been working on them.
  5. I would meet old people who had gotten so lost in the details that the larger picture was not as clear to them anymore (it happens; don’t protest too much).
  6. I would have to listen to bureaucratic doublespeak, something more tedious than Latin because Latin has the good sense to be accurate and does not tolerate ambiguity. Bureaucratese, on the other hand…
  7. I would end up involved since so few people are involved and engaged.

And, as it happens, I was exactly right. 

Technology, Bureaucracy and Corruption

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WireIt’s been an accepted opinion that technology reduces corruption. Examples abound. India is a popular example, and is mentioned in books (such as Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption) and articles on the Internet. And, at least in the ways that people are used to, corruption is mitigated. Reduced? Maybe.

It moves, or at least the potential for it does. And that is largely a good thing, where fewer people have the opportunity to profit from the bureaucratic systems put in place to manage things – be it land, licenses and permits, or registrations. With less human hands touching these things in the process, there is less injection of ‘human error’ – conscious or otherwise. And that, too, is a good thing since such human error slows things down to the point where the system is bypassed or ignored.

When the system is bypassed or ignored, the bureaucrats will say that it’s corruption and create Law that makes it illegal to – or they might actually start enforcing Law that already exists. They do this rather than fix the system as appropriate, which creates resentment in the populace. This simmers. Boils. And now and then, given the right circumstances, it erupts – and when it does, violent or not, those that boil over almost never have a plan for overhauling the systems if they are successful. The cycle continues.

Every sociopolitical space on the planet has these problems – it’s a matter of degree, and it’s a matter of Will to remedy these problems. In implementations of democracy around the world, this Will is rare to see used on things that are unpopular. Politicians like to get re-elected.

At some point, people might figure that out. At some point, people might identify this flaw on a collective level and do something about it – because that is the root of the problem.

The Will to fix things versus the Will to be re-elected.

 

Scorned Dreams

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Commercial Seafront

“ I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
— Tyler Durden (Fight Club, 1999)

People are angry. At the turn of the millenium, though, just about every model showed that there would be more social unrest.

Every day, my generation and those after are inundated with marketing about how products and services are going to make their lives better – with the goalpost of better being set culturally by old ideas that bureaucracies were built to attain. They grew like trees, twisting and turning with the weather of domestic politics in every nation until the Internet, where global politics still sways them like a hurricane force wind.

These are largely all flawed systems that some have grown to depend on. The systems are sometimes failures, based on notions that no longer seem to apply in society, but citizens around the world were told that the benefits of the systems outweighed any negatives. There are generations now that beg to differ.

And they’re angry. Sad. Disillusioned. In the U.S., I’ve seen people my age working 2 and sometimes 3 fast food jobs at a time in a downturned economy where the banking systems quite literally strip-mined people of latent wealth through bad mortgages and loans. In the Caribbean and Latin America, I’ve seen the shifts of global politics make economies tumbleweeds. In Trinidad and Tobago, where the economy was never diversified as it should have, I contrast the people at Starbucks with the people that still use outdoor latrines almost daily.

And they are all told that the world is better than the lives that they have – and they are all lead to believe that things are better than their situation and that if they work just a little harder so that they can spend just a little more, they’ll rise to better lives.

Ahh, marketing. Immigration becomes an issue for the mass media producing countries- the world looks so much better on a flat screen, which used to be only a large white screen for a projector but now includes wall displays, computers and yes, even phones. “We’re wonderful. You’re not allowed here. Special terms and conditions apply.”

And if you do get there, a different reality sets in.

People all around are figuring this stuff out – that they can’t have what is being branded as developed nations. Terrorists, for all the wrong reasons and for imagined good ones, started attacking these ‘evils’ that they see just like a crab drags other crabs down in the barrel. “It is our reality, let us share it with you…” – horrible atrocities, branded under religious fervor but really just really, really bad marketing that directly kills people – a waste of life – too combat the overly good marketing that indirectly robs the majority of the human population with a sense of value.

Every bright eyed idealist and gilded futurist looks forward optimistically. I do so myself, though I’m careful with expressing my thoughts since all these flawed systems came from people not thinking things through beyond political terms, or because of emergencies.

We have been walking into thorny bushes. It might be time to reassess the systems we’re using that lead to all these injuries on our more sensitive parts of society.