The How And Why Of Things

Those over a certain age in the dreaded private sector will have noticed a change in how the workplace operates with regards to managerial relations. The days of hands-on management and management by walking around are done. Instead, it is management from beyond the veil. Managers, no matter how junior their rank, seek to avoid anything that looks like confrontation with their direct reports, so they avoid as much personal interaction as possible, preferring things like e-mail.

This is how we get things like firing people by e-mail or even text message. The people making the decisions not only seek to avoid firing the employee in person, but they also remove the person from the equation entirely. Instead, it is a robot controlled by the company that informs the digital expression of the employee. Someone in human resources then discontinues the character from the simulation. The point is to avoid anything the resembles human interaction.

Look a little closer and what you see in the workplace is a technological layer forming up between management and the staff. The people in positions with impressive titles fear anything resembling pushback so what is forming up between them is a technological and organizational callus. It shields both sides from the human necessity of management and staff interaction, replacing it with a technological interface that allows both sides to interact with that interface.

When Rachel from the training department is putting together the latest sermon on diversity, she will never have to stand in front of a room full of humans and deliver the sermon and see the faces of the people receiving it. She uses a piece of software her company purchased for qualitatively managing the diversity initiative. One combination of commands produces reports for management. Another result is some black guy with an X in his name running a workshop in the breakroom.

One result of this is that the presumed common morality is baked into a system, often a software system, rather than the heads and hearts of people. The latest lecture about the importance of safety is not based on collective agreement but the dashboards from the safety software and the posters that decorate the breakroom. No one asks why we need to make sure our coworkers feel safe from heteronormative body shaming as there is no one to ask. The claim comes from the ether.

This is not just a private sector phenomenon. This disease of the impersonal has infected all parts of the managerial system. Politicians used to have townhall meetings with their constituents where they would field questions. If they bother doing this at all these days, it is a rigged room with plants asking fake questions. Instead, politicians have someone interact with their voters through social media. Their Twitter is an avatar of a person who is now just an avatar.

The media has been sucked into this as well. On the one hand, no one in the media dares ask a party member a tough question. That could put the media person in bad odor with the party. Of course, the party member is not interested in confrontation either, so she avoids anyone who might ask tough questions. The exception is those on the outs with the party, but even there the fear of confrontation is keeping all but the dullest media hacks from interacting with people like Trump.

Another driver of this depersonalization of the managerial class is the feminization that we see throughout society. Males expect confrontation, then some sort of agreement with a clear winner, typically the man in charge. Women prefer consensus, especially if it facilitates endless gossip and intrigue. This is why homosexual males decorate the upper reaches of the management class. They love drama. Combined with male intellect, they thrive in the new girl powered world.

Logically, you cannot have consensus if people are disagreeing with one another so the goal is to avoid situations where people can disagree. This is the benefit of that technological callus between management and staff. There can be no disagreement because the morality of every situation has been decided by the system. If you are unhappy with the result you need to reconcile yourself with the system, not take it up with your boss, who would prefer to never see you.

In a large company, the result is a vast disconnect between what the people in charge think about the company and what the staff thinks about the company. A very modern phenomenon is management asking for systems that can help them monitor the “wellness” of their staff as they use other software systems. Imagine the accounting system doing a wellness check before you can enter invoices. This is only possible in a world stripped of anything resembling humanity.

At scale, you end up with a culture that looks like what space aliens imagine culture is like among the humans they detected with their scanners. How is it possible that a real human created an account on Twitter called “safety” from which they post about the magical and imaginary world of online safety? What is an “open, accurate, and safe political discourse”? The answer is it is approved content transmitted and enforced through the interface of technology.

That is the final driver of the depersonalization process. Marx observed that once the moral questions are resolved, politics no longer exist. The trouble is the only way to settle the moral questions is through debate and conflict. By removing normal human interaction, you remove all avenues of debate and conflict. That leaves management to slip their moral claims into the systems they now use to run the world. Again, who can argue with the software that controls your life?

In this way, the censorship we are seeing is part of a larger process of baking managerial morality into the system. The people on the “safety” committee are not banning you personally from the platform. They are just following the rules of the system and you broke the rules. It is all right there in the terms of service, which change as frequently as the constitution on Manor Farm. If you think there was an error, click the link in your suspension notice and fill out an appeal.

The problem, something you see in the dreaded private sector, is that someone has to be in charge and the rules have to make sense. The reason the “good boss” spends time talking with staff is he wants to make sure the rules make sense, but also make sure the rules make sense. The former is about the staff understanding why the rules exist and the latter is about the rules coordinating the combined efforts of the staff toward the goals of the company.

In a world where everyone deals with every through the interface, this is not only impossible, but it would undermine the system. Software and management systems can never be viewed as moral agents. No matter how high management stacks these things between themselves and their direct reports, they will still hear those questions that are integral to human organization. Why are we doing this? Who says we have to do what we are doing this way? Who made this decision?

The how and the why are the only things that matter in human organization, with the former resting on the answer to the latter. Managerialism seeks to elide this reality by slipping the why into the how via process. The process becomes an interface to prevent anyone from asking someone in charge the why questions. That could lead to the scariest question of all, the “who decided this” question. Managerialism is all about avoiding the answer to that question.


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141 thoughts on “The How And Why Of Things

  1. “In a world where everyone deals with every through the interface, this is not only impossible”
    seems to be missing a noun
    In a world where everyone deals with every <? ?> through the interface, this is not only impossible

  2. The most dangerous people in an organization are the ones (almost all women) who prefer that the rules don’t make sense. Nonsensical rules provide people with a better loyalty test.

    What many women white color workers want is a system with a lot of things to easily check off that don’t require the burden of performance.

  3. Dude you must work for the same fortune 500 company as me! You nailed what I couldn’t express so well.

  4. I have a heartening experience to report to you guys, though. A deer decided to take a flying leap into my right shoulder while on my motorcycle last Friday, and it bought me a bed in a Level I trauma center with a fractured clavicle, ribs and collapsed lung for the weekend.

    Everybody who responded — cops, EMTs, ambulance drivers, x-ray techs, nurses, etc. — were all kids (by kids I mean “under 30”) and they were all great. I live in the North so they were all white. I got great treatment and had a cute as hell Belorussian RN whose father had been a Soviet doctor. They emigrated 20 years ago — but he went back.

    I really didn’t experience any wokeness, bullshit, or incompetence. Everyone was great. And this was at a government hospital. It became clear to me that the bullshit comes from a clique of hardcore revolutionary types in key positions of power, and like Bolsheviks they leverage their power beyond their numbers through control of institutions. The kids at the bottom of the bottom of the pyramid doing the actual work were like kids everywhere, they just want to fit in and get a job and wear a cool uniform — just as in 1945 some 18-year old German kid was wearing a Wehrmacht uniform carrying a Mauser for the Fatherland, five years later his younger brother was marching in the People’s Army of the DDR carrying an SKS for Marx and Lenin.

    I got the impression that if the HR department sent out an email about diversity or transgenderism or that kind of shit, they’d just roll with it and as long that they didn’t rock the boat they were fine. What they were most interested in was sportsball, the entire hospital staff was decked out in the colors of the local Negro Felon League team on Sunday. If they league was woke, they just kinda ignored it, they were interested in the score and in total yards rushing.

    Most people are followers and go-along-to-get-along types just doing their jobs, and they were great.

    It seemed to me, though, that the closer you got to key positions of power you would see more woke influence. 90% of the treatment I received was from nurses and techs, all of whom were white. But for the rather few minutes I saw actual doctors, there was a clear overrepresentation of females with “diverse” med students in tow. The white female doctors were quite competent and professional, but when one of them brought a black grrl med student with her to pull out my chest tube, the student was incapable of cutting the single stitch that held it in.

    At least in my area the white kids seem to be doing pretty well in these positions, and I was surprised because my entire life you never saw anyone under 50 holding these jobs. The wokeness and the PC seemed to be completely imposed from the top down by a small number of activists, almost like shit floating on a septic tank.

    • I had a somewhat similar stay in the hospital more than a year ago, in California…None of the staff exhibited any signs of woke, and the most helpful one, who bent a few rules to help me, was a delightfully friendly young black nurse…

      • An untold story is the fact that many black folks are not interested in woke, and just want to do their jobs and hang with family…When the Saint Floyd insanity was going on, a friend of mine idly asked a black security guard if he was watching the local team that day…The guard replied that he had no interest in players who worshipped criminals…

    • Thank you for the report, as unfortunate as the precipitating event that brought you to delivering it may have been. May your healing and recuperation be swift and complete.

  5. this has gotten towards something i’ve been thinking of as of late. I used to be a lot more liberal and supportive of the democratic party. I remember my senior year of high school when obama became president and he carried places like DuPage County, Illinois that had never voted D for president and my thought that democrats were finally becoming the party of normal people.

    In 2020 Biden won even more “hell freezes over” places that were previously unwinnable for democrats like Orange County, California, Johnson County, Kansas and a few other places that even McCain won. But I was always thinking “why aren’t we winning in a landslide then”.

    It’s a kind of pauline kael syndrome where you assume that winning 91 of the 100 largest counties in the united states means winning a landslide. But it’s also a line of thinking of a poor person who becomes rich and always hoping to be respected the same way a rich person is.

    I thought that winning regular suburban areas and getting the support of corporate america would make the democratic party more respectable. Instead all it did was decrease the respect people had of suburbs and corporations.

  6. Great post today, Z. I am a long time programmer who has been in large corporations my entire career. My current company hired an angry, fat black lady who hates white people and loves Ben Crump as our chief diversity officer. This is a VP level position that brings with it a 550k/year salary plus bonuses and stock incentives. The woman we have has been at this grift for a LONG time. She worked at companies like Toyota and others since the early 2000s doing the same thing. We get weekly emails telling us how there are tons of “resource groups” available for everyone who isn’t white and that diversity is the most important value at our company. There are never any stats, data or proof that shows this is a “strength”. Of course, we all know it is anything but that, and the animosity just continues to escalate.

    It still amazes me how it has seeped into everything, though. Our UX designers will now make it a point to use illustrations of “people of colors” instead of anyone white when it involves a person. You are no longer allowed to call people by “ladies” or “gentleman” – instead they must be addressed as “colleagues”.

    All of this goes on and yet you will get an email talking about how the company cares about your “well being”. Truly amazing…

    You know – sometimes the days are really tough for me, because I can’t seem to just look past it. As someone who never carried around too much hate in my youth, I’ve made up for it at this stage of my life. There is no tool that exists that can measure the amount of malice and hate that I carry around towards these people. I’ve lost any sort of human compassion I once had regarding them. I won’t even go into detail on what I secretly wish for them. I hate them that much – immeasurable levels…

    • Seeing the black murders who stomped a white kid to death in Akron get off with basically “time served” would have shaved away more of my caring if I had more to shave away. I can now see how the Chinese can see someone die while they’re walking down the street and keep strolling without a care.

      • ” I can now see how the Chinese can see someone die while they’re walking down the street and keep strolling without a care.”
        Because, as we saw from the covid scam videos, they’re probably fake.

  7. Ultimately, are we meant to eat the bugs or to BE the bugs? Hive management, as related today by Zman, is now the corporate norm. Anecdotally, my you ger brother recently took a job with a megabank after years of working for a much smaller boutique financial operation. The levels of impersonal communication, coupled with software monitoring and accountability checks, that he relates to me are incredibly dehumanizing. To say that his culture shock has rapidly devolved into bitter regret at his misreading of the situation would be an understatement. I feel bad for my brother, but now have a renewed appreciation for having spent most of my working life either self-employed or with organizations of less than 100 employees. Small is beautiful, even if it isn’t as remunerative.

    • Z: “The point is to avoid anything that resembles human interaction.”

      Maus: “Hive management, as related today by Zman, is now the corporate norm.”

      Y’all are perfectly describing PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE PERSONALITY DISORDER.

      It’s everywhere now.

      Setting aside the j00z [who are ne plus ultra Passive Aggressive], it’s been bred into the genes of e.g. unitardians & quakers & wesleyans & jesuits & the like for centuries, and even Quineesha Queen of the Jungle kneegr0ids are now getting in on the act.

      Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder is overwhelmingly the dominant personality type in all institutions & corporations & bureaucracies of the 21st Century.

      PRO-TIP: It’s why the Passive Aggressives so loathe & despise Trump.

      Trump is an Active Aggressor, which is the only thing that terrifies them – Active Aggression.

      Everything other than Active Aggression is always played on their turf, under their rules, with their referees, guaranteeing that they always win.

      Notification of your trip to the guillotine will be emailed to you at the office on Friday afternoon at 4:45PM.

  8. I can only remember one time where “shopping was a pleasure”, in Cartagena, Columbia with the Navy. While on liberty, I was shopping for an emerald pendant for my wife. Every single sales lady (they were all young and pretty) insisted on taking each pendant I was interested in, and putting it on, so it sat between her breasts in her low-cut top. You see, it was important to see ‘how it lays’ in the proper context. I’m not one to argue with wisdom like that, so I made sure to spend the day checking out A LOT of emerald pendants.

    • Those in the know about traveling in Colombia always make sure to go on the “emerald pendant tour”…

  9. The “push down” from above to below to implement management’s dreams is obviously on the outs too. I’ve refenced this before but the Federal ARPA for local and state governments is a microcosm of this behavior.

    Initially monster ARPA funds were sent out with the command that it be spent strictly on non-governmental healthcare infrastructure related costs with Federal mandarins no doubt dreaming of all the gender reassignment hospital wings that would be built with this money. As time went on and the money languished in bank accounts they kept loosening the rules bit by bit, with a “Final-Final” set of rules being issued once every couple of months. But now, with the GOP threatening to rake all this money back, I got the email at my ultra low-level gov-job recently that I had been expecting for years, with the Feds informing local governments that they can pretty much spend it on whatever f-all they want.

    • That’s because unless a “workshop” involves raw material being put through a machine that can claim a finger or two the word is a lie.

  10. How can they not know or even ignore the collapse of morality in our society? All the lying. All the drug taking. All the stealing. All of the scams. All of the cheating (like “shrinkflation or removing the buttermilk from ice cream). We are awash in immorality. It is having serious consequences.
    All of the young people think this is normal. Worse, most of them think it is better than the lies they’ve been told about the bad old days.

    If things break in a bad way, we’re going to find out the true cost of this collapse in morality.

    • Funny that your catalog of the immoralites in society contains only the misdemeanors. The felonies are much more horrendous.

      • Well, they are the most widespread and the most agreed upon (formerly) points of morality.

        But, you’re point is well taken. Lots of felonies that are also having a lot of negative effects.

  11. The online safety departments are there to generate the raw evidence that will be admissible in lawsuits seeking to overturn elections based on the allegation that the results were tainted by “misinformation/disinformation” on social media platforms. These lawsuits will be filed by Democrats, of course, because Republicans don’t care about winning elections. The misinformation/disinformation data will, of course, be categorically biased in favor of Democrats.

    The safety departments will provide the raw misinformation/disinformation data, a statistical “expert” witness will generate an estimate of the number of votes (or percentage) swayed by the data, and the attorneys will argue that the election should be overturned in favor of the Democrat candidate. Liberal federal judges will eat this up like candy, and will overturn elections with glee.

    I have some small modicum of hopium that Elon Musk will see to it that controls are put in place to contain this practice, but I would not bet on it.

    • Hate to take a dump on the floor of your Hopium den Guest, but I think the Safety post at Twitter on the heels of Musk’s meeting with Netanyahu does two things.

      It probably answers the Who says question that ZMan proposed. The folks that are going to be hired for safety are probably going to be re-hires who will resume their roles doing the “work” of “Safety” at Twitter.

  12. Very surprised by no mention of the covid hoax, and how it played in so seamlessly with the whole “avoid confrontation at all costs” ethos. At Warlabs, Inc. we were all sent home in March of 2020 to work remotely for the indefinite future. Aside from two gatherings to bid farewell to a couple of longtime employees, and one funeral, I have not seen any of my coworkers in the flesh since that date.

    I’ve survived no fewer than three “bungee bosses” (they never last long) during that interval, all of them female, and never met a one in person. As we are so secure as to forbid cameras on our company laptops, all I have to go by is a deliberately flattering, staged photo on each leaders’ profile, and their shrill voices on Teams calls.

    So I virtually commute to my virtual office each virtual workday, where I communicate virtually with virtual coworkers who are virtually no more than scratchy voices talking over one another while audio breaks up, and we all bark back and forth into our headsets, “Can you hear me? Hello?”

    I am not going to miss any of it when I virtually retire.

    BTW, our sector DIE coordinator is literally named ‘Rachel’ and she came by her position after washing out as an Affirmative Action engineering hire who could not engineer her stronk, independent self out of a wet paper bag.

    • We should have been doing this a long time ago. Anyone who can work from home should work from home most of the time.

      • Tars Tarkas: “Anyone who can work from home should work from home most of the time.”

        There are some intriguing indications in the available statistics which indicate that the COVID-induced work-from-home movement produced a small but noticeable increase in the number of births in the USA.

        Sadly, that increase in births will likely be eaten up by the effects of the v@xxines [miscarriage, stillbirth, myocarditis, etc].

        But it’s proof positive that driving two hours in traffic to the office at 04:00AM, and driving two hours home from the office at 18:00PM, does not leave much time in one’s life for matters of procreation.

        PRO-TIP: Sitting on a vinyl car seat for four hours per day, in heavy traffic, wearing pants, is gonna heat up your gonads to the point that you very likely will become temporarily sterile [until your nads can cool back down and start replacing the spermatazoa which got fried by your daily commute].

        • See that? There is yet another reason to resist the tyranny of the goose-stepping Back-to-the-Office types whose sole reason for being centers around hosting useless meetings.

          “Sorry, can’t make it in. Don’t wanna roast my nuts.”

    • Back in my engineering and software development days, at the height of the Indian outsourcing movement, I knew a guy who routinely held 3-4 jobs at a time. He would get his work assignments, outsource them to programmers in India for a fraction of his pay, clean up their work product, and submit it as his own. He got caught and fired a couple times, but just picked up another job every time. Dude made bank.

      Maybe you can do something like this?

  13. It looks like Safety’s post means Musk will be re-hiring his army of censors and that he’ll take the money instead.

    • I don’t think he’s getting much of a choice.
      Something to keep in mind when some anon troll complains about a public figure not being forthright enough concerning some anti-regime talking point that anyone they’re complaining about is going to have way less clout and resources than the world’s richest man.

    • The improvements that happened when Elon fired a couple thousand Women In Tech were 98% undone within a couple weeks. Some high-follower /ourguys/ were lured back and those who weren’t immediately kicked back out feel freer, but regular dudes still get banned for having regular-dude opinions about anything. Keith Woods can impotently scowl at the Jews—while the company collects identifying info on every normal chump who thinks he can join in, and a DISTURBING TREND on X provides SHOCKING PROOF that more laws against challenging our rulers are urgently needed.

      • I was reinstated in May. Why they did this is a mystery. i was banned for over five years. Maybe part of a general amnesty or maybe bad code. My follower count was zero and quickly started to climb then stopped. The total was stuck at 7K for a month or so, even though I keep seeing new followers turn up in the feed. Then one day it jumped to 8K and then went backwards for a while. For the last month the total has been stuck at 8100, even though I see hundreds of notifications of new followers.

        My sense is the old regime so contaminated the code base in an effort to control content that it is impossible to fix now, even with a will to fix it. There are probably hundreds of back doors to the “safety systems” that will never be closed.

        • Don’t discount the intelligence services also muck around with X. As tin foil hat as that may sound, they have been busted doing this before and to date no one has been prosecuted or punished for it.

          • Sundance over at Conservative Tree House was quite convinced, and now seems even more convincing to objective observers, that Twitter, which he denominated as Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop was being underwritten, both financially -surreptitiously using black funding, or explicitly via advertising revenue – and most likely also via “in kind” services such as server space, because it was cooperating in various forms of censorship and shadowbanning, as well as serving as a honeypot for contrarians.

            Once Musk seemed to be serious about amending these issues, the support dried up, mangling his cash stream beyond repair, even with the savings realized through giving the heave-ho to the drones and karens.

        • There was that video of “the average day in the life of a twitter employee” where its a woman that spends the whole day drinking lattes and wine and using the company’s recreational facilities before going drinking in the evening after a hard day’s not work.

          Honestly it felt like a feint to me, like someone wanted to portray the company as just frivolous and witless millennials having play time. Filming the frolicking Eloi while hiding the greasy underbelly where the Pajeet Morlocks toil away at their data mining operation for the Feds.

          • First—that is poetry, man.

            Yeah, I recall that video. It was one of those things that would have been dismissed as parody once, but it easily was propaganda. Social media is to be avoided at all costs.

          • It wasn’t misinformation. If you’ve worked in a democrat controlled industry the past 20 odd years (tech, healthcare, higher ed) then yes those jobs exist and those people mostly do nothing all day. I speak from experience. The people you take your anger out on in the call center who have no power over your problem work harder then most of the mid level employees in a lot of government sponsored industries. Which is essentially our entire economy since 2008 because 2008 was a bankruptcy event.

          • In clown world reality is indistinguishable from parody. See NATO Ukraine war death star Harry Potter tweet.

  14. Excellent poast, Z.

    Extending your hypothesis to anecdotal experience: As a former senior marketing guy I have always marveled at the social justice ad campaign fiascos. Gillette, Nike, Bud Lite… “Where are the marketing guys in these companies?” I’d ask myself.

    In my day (gawd, how that phrase tastes like turd in the mouth) – I was at war with the managerial tyrants who were always doing their damnedest to get me fired and drive away the customers and the extra business I was bringing in. If one of those pencil heads stood up on their hind feet and told me that they were going to get a tranny faggot to push their brand… as a sales guy… I would have had a fuggin bird! (And probably a stroke if the exec went along with it). I would have been on the phone to the CEO the second I heard the news. For a fiasco like that to happen, you have to completely and totally ignore all your customers and all your own sales guys. It would take a literal corporate army to silence the noise from something like that. I don’t care how politically correct you are either – if you are about to blow off your entire clientele … your commissions will go with them and you will literally have nothing to lose by speaking out!

    Some might argue that the corporations that do this just shrug off the losses and continue on… but… hell’s bells! When you lose millions of dollars because of a botched ad campaign… losses like that used to get entire departments fired.

    The world is upside down, and as a disgruntled Yesterday Man… Lord, I am going to enjoy watching it burn.

    • Some might argue that the corporations that do this just shrug off the losses and continue on… but… hell’s bells! When you lose millions of dollars because of a botched ad campaign… losses like that used to get entire departments fired.

      I think of the quintessential example of business failure (Until New Coke 😏) people often bring up: Ford Motor Company’s ill-fated Edsel division. Ford ate the loss of $350 Million in 1950s-60s dollars and poor Richard E. Krafve, a VP at Ford and the General Manager of the Edsel Division got a stack of cardboard boxes and a pink slip for as a reward. I’m sure other folks got the chop but he was the most prominent.

      Now? Well Senior Corporate Management is isolated from the shock and fallout of increasingly dumb decisions. No pink slips or cardboard boxes for them. And if they fail, they’ll show up somewhere else in a few years. The goofball gal that tanked Bud Light’s sales will be quietly allowed to resign and surface silently at some other company somewhere.

      Truth be told, so did Krafve, popping up at Raytheon a few years after getting the bum’s rush out of Ford. At least he was contrite about it.

      • In the days of Edsel, there was genuine competition between corporations. Now, not so much. Nike, Addidas, Under Armor, Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Gillette, Bic and Schick are all members of the Power Structure in good standing, and they all share identitcal beliefs, behaviors and practices. The upshot is, in the past if you screwed up royally, your competition would pounce upon and devour you. Nowadays there is no competition, only a deranged consensus, and their is no penalty for failure and stupidity.

    • From what I’ve heard, such decisions are often done because whoever controls the banking industry tells them to do so or else.

  15. A more serious version of this is playing out on the battlefields in Ukraine.

    Once upon a time, war involved cracking open someone’s skull with a mace and getting his brain matter splattered on your shirt. And you thereby knew the conflict was existential. It was up-close and personal.

    Nowadays, you fly an FPV drone using a joystick and monitoring screen, and then drop a grenade on some hapless soul in a trench 15 km away. You just see a “poof” and its over. You never hear the scream or smell the shit as his bowels release upon death. And there is no restraint or compunction when the killing becomes impersonal and programmatic.

    This is the evolution that the elites have not yet anticipated. When you make everything impersonal, it doesn’t stop at managerial malfeasance.

    • Check out Telegram. You will see the Russkies stacking up Uke corpses like chord wood, and laughing and joking about it as they pose with the bodies and scrapped equipment for hero pics.

        • For me I had to install an app to get it. One of the better channels I got was ‘Intel Slava Z’ if I recall correctly.

          It’s heavily slanted with Russian propaganda so you have to take it with heavy salt. But you will immediatly notice the difference between Russian propaganda and the Uke equivalent: the Russians will show the casualties in all the gory detail, including their own losses. The Ukes are careful to not show any… and their soldiers are always in clean camo, they never show what they are shooting at, and you can smell the deceit and turd polishing. By contrast, the Russians are shown in the midst of the carnage, looking beat up and tired, but in relatively good cheer despite the hell they went through.

          As our esteemed blog host has said many times, we live in an age where we can not trust ANYTHING we see or hear, and have to use judgement before accepting anything as a fact.

          There are many other good channels that the savvier war nerds can recommend.

    • > This is the evolution that the elites have not yet anticipated. When you make everything impersonal, it doesn’t stop at managerial malfeasance.

      They will also not like their odds when grenade drones are inevitably deployed against civilian targets thousands of miles away from any of the official battlefields.

  16. The need for systems like those described by the Z Man stems, in large part, from the diversity disaster. Every facet of our societies have been degraded by the presence of racial diversity, including the basic interactions and courtesies that used to be presumed in all interpersonal communications. Diversity has become so bad, and led to such blatant incompetence, that now it is not uncommon to encounter people with whom one is supposed to work who are functionally illiterate. The next logical step will be the usual suspects kvetching about how the use of the English language is “white supremacy and racism.” These management systems and software schemes are merely an ineffectual attempt to reconcile the incompatible and incompetent mix of races that our hostile leaders disingenuously call “our greatest strength.”

    • how the use of the English language is “white supremacy and racism.”

      That happened forty years ago. Ebonics says “hi,” and the new and improved version soon will be introduced.

      • Sheeit. Git on yor sailfoam and ax dat DIE biotch in HR why dis mothafuggin cracka be usin’ English. Dat be rayciss.

    • That’s a spectacular point, Q. With personal interaction, you can point fingers at specific individuals, accuse them of RAAAACISM!!! and cash in on the frivolous law suits. Suing a computer program is much more difficult! 🙂

      • Ah, yes and no. Yes, more difficult to sustain allegations of quid pro quo racism. But no because you still have a hostile work environment and disparate impact. Worse because it wasn’t low-level Jonny the janitor dissing his lazy POC co-worker. It was upper management that chose and installed this racist software interface.
        Bottom line: Joggers gonna jog, no matter what.

  17. One of my clients is developing AI-based customer service bots. I have interacted with the prototypes and I couldn’t tell the difference between a human and the bot. It even had a backstory and UK English spelling. My client’s customer is a huge national bank.

    So everyone complaining about humans will get satisfaction soon haha…….

    • “…I couldn’t tell the difference between a human and the bot.”

      That does not speak well of the humans.

    • I have little doubt that AI customer service will be superior to much or most of the human call center customer service that we have been dealing with for the past few decades.

      • Oh yeah, had to call a national healthcare provider today with a question about coverage, I either get a deep south ebonics speaker or carlos just off the boat who talks so friggin fast I cannot make out a word he says..

        • Something tells me the voices of the AI customer service bots will be equipped with unintelligible foreign and ebonic accents. You know, to model diversity. And to vex whitey.

      • Human Customer Service Agents are essentially flesh robots already. After you survive the automated phone tree, which frequently reminds you how quickly you can “resolve” your issue online at the company’s website; after waiting several minutes on hold to speak to a live agent, you are confronted with someone who can only respond off computer-prompted scripts. They have no authority or capability to go off-script to arrive at a solution. Of course, so-called AI like Chat GPT is going to do this limited recursive regurgitation “better;” but you’ll still hang up without a solution.

    • Another spectaculare point – the Dissidents are on fire today!

      Why hire some incompetent, abrasive fat black she-boon to fill diversity requirements when you can simply turn on a computer that will treat all the clients like civilized white men 24/7/365?

      The coming shit storm will be of biblical proportions…

        • Eventually. But I have to laugh at the wanks on Blab. Confronted by the chat bots, the first thing they did was try to get them to say the word “nigger” and notice the faulty math in the holocaust “6 million” number!

          🙂

          I think they even managed to corrupt a few AI’s that became “racist” for some strange reason!

    • Considering that so much of customer service just consists of going through step-by-step algorithms, that would be a very easy thing to make AI, and likely improve it. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how emergency medicine also works. Those decision trees are pretty much AI already.

      • “Wear a mask, take the jab, get boosted, safe & effective.”
        Do I get to be a medical doctor now?

      • In old school lingo, these were Expert Systems, but nowadays it sounds sexier to call them AI.

        But Expert Systems presupposed there being a reasonably intelligent, and linguistically articulate meat puppet with whom they would interact in order to make them feasible. Meat puppets meeting Expert Systems half way, so to speak.

        Now, with the full advent of multi-cultural, multi-lingual Idiocracy, even with any recent advances in AI, one has to wonder whether it can ever be rendered operable.

        Eh, not Their problem. AI for the Clouds, some sort of System D for the Dirts, AI only coming into play in Dirtworld when they need to blow smoke up our asses and/or compel compliance.

  18. The upside to a lack of interaction with our overlords, is it makes it easier over time to ignore them. In the area where I relocated to, there are large areas that are completely self sustaining. You can guess the folks who are the majority of the population.

    I’m not quite there yet, but my goal is to get to the point where, if every government employee was abducted by aliens, I wouldn’t notice it for months.

    • “… if every government employee was abducted by aliens, I wouldn’t notice it for months.”

      It would probably be like if you had tinnitus for most of your life, but it stopped all the sudden. You would notice the lack of the unpleasant, ever-present background noise in your life.

    • My take on this stuff is that I would miss the human interactions with management – if management were actually made up of humans, which is to say competent and intelligent men. Instead what we’ve gotten is a Soviet-lite system where all the useless women, addicts, weirdos, fags, and degenerates who can’t really do *anything* are bumped into management. This is why the Coof was a blessing in disguise because it justified remote work and thus it justified NOT being around these people physically. I get that being told to interact with a “wellness app” is degrading but reporting to the boss’s f00k-toy who is now a vice president, is far more so.

      This is the dirty secret of actual Communism or any system that tries to guarantee full employment. It ignores the fact that shockingly high percentages of ordinary people are incapable of being productive in *any* job. At least 50% of women in particular, are incapable of doing any kind of paid work (besides the one kind they specialized in historically) This was well hidden in pre-industrial times because most of the jobs were retard-level or lower. “Pick the turnips and throw them in the cart”. Yeah, if you can’t follow those instructions you’re probably too useless to put your boots on to get to the field anyway.

      In the actual Soviet system they had cruder ways of dealing with this. If Ivan was too drunk to work safely in the factory they let him sleep in the boiler room. If he was both too drunk to work AND a nuisance, they sent him to Siberia. I’m still unsure whether our system is an improvement.

      • In the eastern bloc you would see a lot of folks out sweeping the street with brooms, because that was their job. I think we could use some of that.

        • Be careful what you with for. In AINO those damned leaf blowers have replaced brooms. Noise pollution is the one form of pollution AINO seems to be just fine with.

    • I forgot to mention – the stuff I wrote was true *before* the DIE stuff got rolling. In fact, it might turn out that DIE itself will be a blessing in disguise since it will push the dials on the corporate retard machine to 11. Perhaps eventually, people will see, through the failure of diversity, that it’s not just Shanequa and Shitavious who are the problem but the whole modern managerial system itself. If diversity becomes the tool that gets Becky and Karen fired it might be worth it. Or you know, more likely it just makes everything much worse.

  19. Most people— by far— want to be slobs on vacation forever. They’ll line up for their pods, lick whatever boot they have to. Nothing to be done about that.

    We can have cheap energy and high tech, or we can have humanity. I don’t see any way of untying that knot, short of culling the herd, which I’m against.

  20. Unsolicited, I had two random interactions that were dissident. I showed some compassion to a young grocery clerk and he started chatting about how he felt the election was stolen. Imagine that. I can’t talk like that with virtually all my long term friends and close family. It made me smile for days that another world is possible.
    Nevertheless, the only healthy psychological response living near NYC is black pilled isolation, where I can’t even enjoy old TV and movies without seeing the threads of degeneration that brought us here.
    Except for the Shield, my god how did that slip through?

    • Recently I’ve seen some prominently posted stuff on reddit, with lots of upvotes, the nature of which I thought they had purged from that platform forever. I dunno if I would call it “dissident” but it was definitely right wing friendly.

      • Although I don’t post anything, I have a Facebook account to get info on my daughter’s (parochial) school and look at some old pictures of my hometown. So yesterday I had an ad for Choice Hotels in my feed with over 200 comments. Of course the image in the ad was of a coal black father treating his mystery meat kids to the time of their lives. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that half the comments were criticism of the race mixing images. There was even one that read “Burgers?” It sometimes appears that the Regime’s fear of race realists is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

        • I read on this site, years ago, a saying, and I am not sure if the saying originated here. The saying went, “There is hope in the comment sections.” But, this is why the comments sections have, and will continue to be, purged. Wait until they pass some form of net neutrality or whatever the law will be that officially codifies government regulation of the ‘net, and we will see the true end of the comments. We will end up being like Winston in 1984 – all alone.

    • Most men would like a direct physical job that they can feel with their hands and see with their eyes. Just be outside and say, “Fuckin A.”

      • Apparently the algo doesn’t like my reply, informing me that it’s too short.

        I will try again: Fuckin A.

  21. I saw this forming up at the tail end of my last academic tour of duty. Even back then, putative adults were absolutely terrified of interpersonal interaction. They were spergy meat robots 10 years ago; God alone knows what 1-3 years of Zoom School did to them.

    And that’s the trick to dealing with them, in my experience. I always scored very high on my “availability” metrics in the student reviews despite never once holding office hours, simply because I’d email them to say “office hours are cancelled, but as I’m 100% committed to total availability, please reach out with any questions via email.” They were comforted by the fact that I was always there, like Big Brother, and the fact that I’d removed a potential source of conflict by NOT having office hours gave them even warmer fuzzier feelings.

    Same way with the rare human, natively-English-speaking “customer service representative.” You can lace into them all you want on the phone, and your problem won’t get solved, simply because they have no idea what to do, and no power to do anything anyway. Nor does demanding to speak to a manager, Karen-style, do anything, for the same reason. But put a scathing review up on their corporate website or their Yelp site? They’ll hop to faster and smarter than a Prussian private. Welcome to the Brave New World.

    • “But put a scathing review up on their corporate website or their Yelp site? They’ll hop to faster and smarter than a Prussian private. Welcome to the Brave New World.”

      A bad Yelp review is by far the fastest way to get a no shit refund. I’ve had that happen twice.

  22. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of people telling me what their policies are. I don’t give a rat’s ass what your policy is think and do what needs to be done.

    • Yep, the more I sense one hiding behind “policy”, the more I sense/assume incompetence. My experience in the public sector has been that the only way to make things work—however inefficiently—is to ignore, or at least “work around” “policy”.

      My last significant encounter was with one of the university lawyers via e-mail (as I always did to document for the record). Of course, this lawyer hide behind “policy” and I got no where. Then surprisingly I got a phone call from the lawyers secretary who read the e-mail and the response. She and I worked things out on the condition I tell no one. 😉

    • I’m sick and tired of hearing what their “values,” are. They are written as if they expect the reader to erupt in stormy applause upon perusing them. In my case, they only trigger the gag reflex.

  23. At GloboBank, every 18 months or so, a spreadsheet somewhere says that 5-50 people are going to be laid off.
    Retirements, experience, staff already having given notice, upcoming births, chronic slackers, upcoming surgeries: facts everyone on the ground knows is never taken into consideration.
    The end result is random layoffs completely disconnected from operational needs.
    Another result is zero loyalty to the organization.

    • I don’t know whether or not it’s an improvement that company loyalty is dead, but it’s certainly more honest.

  24. … what Z writes applies to the COVID hysteria; whom to challenge on the decisions, discuss the discussions with, whom to question, how to fact check. Sure Fauci was there and Brix and what’shername from CDC but how to interact with them; no town halls, debates, protests allowed, not even person-to-person confrontations (everyone paralyzed by ‘official’ communiqué – everyone hiding behind the veil, the curtain, the door …

    • I forget which one, but one of the CDC people told interviewers she reached decisions by calling her friends on the phone and asking what they would do. It was the process of a Facebook mommy blog question at a national scale.

    • The heavy-handed Covid totalitarianism should have been the first clue that Big Fed was lying through its teeth. Mark my word, a still-significant portion of the populace will fall for its next op. Far less, yes, but still too many.

  25. Our company has one-on-one sessions with the manager every month along with co-worker evaluations to determine performance for the year. That’s it. Now, for “safety” if someone badmouths you the manager can’t tell you the person’s name, and often the context is so vague you have no way of defending your action anyway.

    There’s a supposedly “objective” numbering system, but the managers, of course, can easily fudge that in any direction they see fit. It’s all smoke and mirrors to pretend they are simply filling out a spreadsheet instead of showing direct agency and telling an employee whether or not they are good at their jobs. Could he be wrong? Sure, but part of the reason you are in management is taking responsibility instead of hiding behind process.

    It’s also leads to the notorious “rule-breakers”. The guys who will gleefully break every useless process to get something done while everyone else sits paralyzed. Management is forced to give a stern talking to, which will be with a wink and a nudge, since they know the employee is too valuable to fire. As the rules get more and more impersonal, that guy becomes the only one capable of forward process.

    • GloboBank FIRES the people who get things done.
      All The Spreadsheet knows is you didn’t follow procedure.

      • Yeah, I work in engineering. As long as you don’t ignore critical things like safety procedures you can get away with a lot. Circumventing IT or the JIRA process will break you free 80% of the time.

    • Chet –

      is this communism? Because it sounds like how in the soviet union, they would lie about grain productivity and there would be a sort of cargo cult mentality.

  26. I’ve noticed this trend in large companies for some time. They don’t like interactions with customers either. The front-facing nametag workers have zero discretion and mysterious managers behind the veil issue protocols that cannot be changed except by a more senior manager somewhere in the mists.

    It’s hilarious; like a parody of a Masonic lodge.

    • I find myself not wanting to deal with the humans because they are no longer human. They are outward facing customer success professionals with no decision making capacity. Recently, I had one of them ask me at the end our unsuccessful interaction if I was “satisfied with the success experience.” I hung up thinking it was a snide remark, but in retrospect, it was probably part of her coding.

      • Yes, it was part of her coding. The people at the Verizon store our company has a cell phone contract with used to put a note on the box when we got a new phone that said, “8 is not great.” They were required to solicit the customer to review their customer service, but too many customers were leaving 8s or 9s thinking that was a good review and the employees were getting docked on their performance reviews for not getting 10s. So they had to tell you to give them a 10. Eventually it stopped, someone in a decision making capacity must have seen the madness and pulled the plug on it.

        • That’s hilarious and almost universal now. Meat puppets and bots alike always ask for a review with the highest possible score. Management asks employees to make these requests, and in turn rewards the results (and of course this benefits the managers). So the “score” is not based on anything objective and offers no guidance whatsoever as to what needs to be improved or even what works. The result is based solely on pressure/guilt/emotion. This is the perfect example of managerialism.

          • To add: eventually the evaluation form will be filled out in advance and handed to you to sign. That will be in no way different from what happens now but will eliminate the possibility of any “mistake.”

          • This does sound like a good way to make some shady cash. Ask the meat puppet how much they’re willing to pay for a 10 out of 10 score. If you yourself have a job where interacting with them is part of the gig, you can probably manage a nice little tax free second income this way. I mean if we’re going full Soviet here…

        • Perhaps my biggest peeve, mandatory 10’s. Coming from a measurement background, I rarely give 10’s. There is always room for improvement—even if I can’t quite name such. Guess it’s my innate bias for “ceiling effect” in testing, too many 100% and you’ve failed to distinguish among the high scorers.

          • We guys have always used the 1-10 scale for rating women’s looks and know how rare a perfect 10 is. Most of us have never seen a 10.

          • It should just be “Good service: yes/no”.
            I was made aware of this by some delivery guy I was friendly with where he flat out said it would be better that someone not leave a review at all than put something down other than a ’10’.

          • Jack Dobson,

            Ah, the Spinal Tap Evaluation System; this one goes to 11, as opposed to those only going to 10…

        • Don’t know if it’s still the case, but Uber used to extort 5-star ratings for drivers by reminding users that future drivers had access to your average rating. The implied threat was that anything less than a 5, except on a rare occasion, would lead to declinations. In small markets, that prospect meant lengthy wait times. The whole rating scheme was a farce.

          • Also don’t know if it still the case, but Uber at one point actually rated its CUSTOMERS. File that under something that should not have happened.

          • That Uber client rating was the subject of one of Maureen Dowd’s most memorable columns. Back when Uber was new she expressed surprise when she ordered one and all the little car icons on her screen went skittering away….

      • I was in an Enterprise Rent-A-Car recently and I did notice that all the guys in there, and rental car places are almost always all male , use the exact same language. They also all pretended to be the manager in any interactions. I heard a couple of them on the phone and they always said are “my staff” even though it was different guys. And I can’t remember the sentence, but I heard three of them say it word for word in the building and one of them gave me a ride back to the dealership to pick up my car and he used it again in the car and also said “my staff.” And the weird thing is I did ask a question about when enterprises started buying used cars because mine was clearly a used car and it threw them all off. They were having a really hard time talking to me about something that wasn’t scripted.

      • That is very interesting that she called it a, “success experience.”

        This is the next layer of psy-op and, “nudging.” For the mentally weak they will be nudged into thinking it was a success. For the strong, will you bother to be confrontational that there was no, “success?” Perhaps legal has this all covered as part of any indemnification process. She said the experience was a success and you did not counter her claim, so you forfeit your right to any claims because it wasn’t.

        Between legal and marketing/PR they have colluded to make their bot fullproof. Now that $240 fee that you were incorrectly charged due to Bosshequa’s mistake is a success experience. Goodbye!

        • forgot to add on behalf of marketing,

          And little Gadriella who loves safety and inclusion can skip off to Starbucks, drop off her Uggs for refurbishment and a glitter sticker and then go vote to install surveillance cameras everywhere, re-instate the death penalty for purveyors of misinformation and mandatory jobs for criminals of enhanced vibrational characteristics. Oh and don’t forget a quick stop at Versace for the collector’s edition “shake your fist at the man”, glamour T, before getting in to the office for a top chef prepared omelette with plant based pork sprinkles to power her through an afternoon of naps that bookend the day’s task of that email mandating all employees update their LinkedIn pronoun lists and emojis.

          • re-instate the death penalty for purveyors of misinformation

            That would be far too merciful, as C. S. Lewis indicates in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, they get much more excited by the idea of tormenting you endlessly for your own good.

          • Ah, “seiko taiken” (成功体験) if you’re translating literally. Not really related to management side but typically to people going to for occupational interviews of whatever stripe in a corporate office setting (new job, promotion, lateral transfer, whatever). Mostly feel-good horse poop to keep younger Japanese from bucking out of failed interviews.

      • It really irks me when a waitress asks at the end of your meal, “How was everything, was it awesome!?” The last time that happened, everybody else enthusiastically agreed, but I shrugged and she gave me a dirty look. Up to that point, it was less than “awesome” but still pretty good, but that presumptive question ruined the whole experience for me. This was one of those high-end chain restaurants.

        • Did you have dinner with your friends? No Tom K. You had an ekthsperiethsssss with your server at a restaurant. You should be in awe of that don’t you know. I mean, that $80 fish taco plate with 30 TV screens playing every major sports game while you eat, is like awe inspiring? It’s like looking down from Mt. Everest or seeing the Northern Lights or hunting elk in Canada? Whatevvvverr!! You don’t know awesome.

          • No, I was with my family. I don’t have many friends. In Clown World USA, there’s apparently something wrong with you if every experience is not either “awesome” or “whatever”.

        • Reminds me why the old-fashioned Brit in UK sitcoms feels like such a badly needed relief in those situations. Old Man Victor from One Foot in the Grave or a Basil Fawlty (or a Peter Hitchens) answering the “good-vibes” waitress with: “What the blazes are you talking about, you daft cunt??? The food’s alright but nothing special. I ain’t a North Korean!”

          Getting flashbacks of working at an Upper South Publix, the supposed “Disneyland” of grocery shopping: “Where Shopping is a Pleasure!”

        • Hm. That waitress–excuse me, server–must be stuck in the oughts. “Amazing” has long since replaced “awesome,” as the ultimate praise adjective.

      • This will be a common interaction soon:
        Customer: “Is this a bot?”
        Customer Service: “No sir, I am very human being sir.”
        Customer: “Could you put me on to a bot, please?”

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