"Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
I was reminded of the gradual but seemingly inexorable shift of control in the digital world away from the user and towards the provider: EULAs. Register for this. Sign in for that. Do you want to upgrade now or be nagged again tomorrow? (Not upgrading is not an available option.)
Also, for the last three years I was working for a startup which was recently acquired by a huge multinational corporation which I will not name. The sudden onslaught of bureaucracy was a real shock. Before, if there was a technical problem, I could either fix it myself or, at worst, talk to a sysadmin who would take care of it, often in a matter of minutes. Now progress is measured in days. And some problems just can't be fixed. They are the result of some policy instituted by someone -- no one knows who -- and the policies are immutable. That some of these policies result in egregious inefficiencies or even security vulnerabilities doesn't matter. No one cares. There isn't even the pretense of a "suggestion box" whose contents gets dumped into the trash. They are not even trying to hide the fact that no one in power gives a flying fuck what anyone on the ground thinks.
I work at a (very) small electronics manufacturer (in a low-regulation industry), and the amount of regulatory compliance we have to do is almost crushing. Everything from having to report our company's ownership in a 30-page form, to having to fill out another 25-page mandatory 'industry survey' that has nothing to do with us, to having to answer impossible questions about conflict minerals... it just never ends, and the governments keep adding requirements that I'm sure nobody is actually reading.
"Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
I was reminded of the gradual but seemingly inexorable shift of control in the digital world away from the user and towards the provider: EULAs. Register for this. Sign in for that. Do you want to upgrade now or be nagged again tomorrow? (Not upgrading is not an available option.)
Also, for the last three years I was working for a startup which was recently acquired by a huge multinational corporation which I will not name. The sudden onslaught of bureaucracy was a real shock. Before, if there was a technical problem, I could either fix it myself or, at worst, talk to a sysadmin who would take care of it, often in a matter of minutes. Now progress is measured in days. And some problems just can't be fixed. They are the result of some policy instituted by someone -- no one knows who -- and the policies are immutable. That some of these policies result in egregious inefficiencies or even security vulnerabilities doesn't matter. No one cares. There isn't even the pretense of a "suggestion box" whose contents gets dumped into the trash. They are not even trying to hide the fact that no one in power gives a flying fuck what anyone on the ground thinks.