Communication breakdown

Tower of Babel + Accretions of bureaucracy masquerading as IT = Neo-shithole

In the phone conversation I had this morning while trying to schedule an x-ray, I feel like the new reality stood fully naked before me. With each of the several bureaucracies involved, there was a comprehensive breakdown of that most rudimentary human activity: exchanging information.

To begin with, most immediately, there was an auditory problem. I called the imaging center and the lady who finally picked up was speaking through a pretty distorted phone line — it was flangy and over-driven (to use audio terms). Far worse than a phone connection circa 1975. It was the kind of connection that you might be able to deal with, if you have two people who understand that under such circumstances, one must E-NUN-CI-ATE. But that requires that both parties have what psychologists call “a theory of mind.” That is, they understand that the person they are talking to is a different person than they are, and they have to try to reach that person across a divide. My interlocutor had no such mental picture, as far as I can tell, and ran her words together as though chatting with her friend at home. To make matters worse, she seemed to be speaking in Spanish, as near as I could tell. I had to ask her to repeat each thing she said 2, 3, sometimes 4 times.

I have to wonder if the reason stuff doesn’t work very well in some countries is that the people there don’t have a basic conscientiousness about making oneself understood. To a stranger. As though it matters. Which requires taking a third-person perspective on oneself, from an objective vantage. Hegel called this “objective self-consciousness,” and he regarded it as an accomplishment. I wonder if the ability to take such a perspective on oneself, and the resulting conscientiousness in communication that leads someone to make a real effort to be clear, is the special sauce of prosperous countries — the disposition that allows us to coordinate and accomplish things. And that the situation is otherwise in dysfunctional parts of the world. The condition of not-being-a-shithole country is a fragile thing, and I feel like we’ve tipped over into new territory. In this new territory, getting anything done is difficult.

To the extent we were able to understand one another, I gathered from our exchange that there had been a breakdown of communication between the imaging center, the medical practice that referred me to them, and my insurance company. Given my full name and birthdate, she insisted that I live in Redondo Beach. That’s what it said on her screen. It took a fair bit of cajoling for me to convince her that I do not now, nor have I ever, lived in Redondo Beach. The whole pretext of IT is to facilitate the exchange of information. But I can only think that the breakdown in cases like this is due to the fact that each of these bureaucracies is so clotted up with IT systems that they collapse under their own weight. In addition, when the people who staff these bureaucracies must communicate with one another, they may have as hard a time understanding one another as I do. #DiversityIsOurStrength

We forget that the IT problem got more or less solved with the invention of a drawer full of index cards, plus good phone connections, plus people staying put long enough that they accumulate lots of tacit, institutional memory, stored in their heads (see my last post). If we put aside the internet and email (a massive put-aside, I’ll grant), I submit that the apex of easy information exchange between businesses, and between businesses and their customers, probably occurred sometime around 1975. We had crisp, clear telephony, and we had a population that was mutually intelligible to one another — both in accent and due to a shared stock of colloquial references. We communicated with an ease and fluidity that look miraculous from today’s vantage. Since then, we have been adding frictions in communication — both through gratuitous, ever-changing, ever-thickening layers of IT (a jobs program for degree-holders), and due to an ever-more polyglot population. My hunch is that these frictions are a massive drag on the economy. Just as important, they degrade the lifeworld and induce a quiet despair that transcends any economic calculus. The net effect, I think, is simmering rage.

I am going to reproduce here the first paragraphs of a post I wrote back in 2023 that is loosely related:

Once upon a time, the word “technology” might have been applied to something such as a new design element that reduces frictional losses in a gear set. Today, the word is often shortened to “tech” and it typically means: finding new ways to insert a layer of fussiness into some aspect of life that is not yet subject to fussiness “optimization”, and then collecting rents from the friction this introduces.

We do a lot of clerical labor to register ourselves with entities that have figured out ways to intervene in matters that were once direct and straightforward. For example, you have to download the Parkmobile app and set up an account before you can park your car in Santa Cruz, if you are anywhere near the boardwalk. Maybe you are ready to unwind on the beach after a hard day, or maybe you have a carload of kids with low blood sugar, two of whom desperately need to find a bathroom. But you are going to have to find a cell signal, register your credit card and make a password before you can go on your way. Of course, since the app freezes during the final step, you’re not sure you really did pay for parking, or if instead you will be paying an $85 parking ticket at some point in the future. It’s super relaxing. Ask me how I know.

If you don’t have a smart phone, you are out of luck. You may be paying taxes to maintain the street but you can’t park on it, since you are not quite a full citizen.

Whatever unforeseen transformations of the world they brought, breakthroughs like the steam engine and the telegraph (and indeed the Internet) were productive, as they introduced new efficiencies that percolated through the entire economy. But it is hard to avoid the sense that today’s “tech” is more often a tax on the real economy, inflicting costs that don’t show up in any ledger because they are paid by you and me in the coin of nuisance.

The rest is behind a paywall; you can read it here.