Admit it. You’ve noticed.
Once-straightforward routines are now frustrating ordeals. What used to be quick errands now stretch into weeks-long hassles. Formerly simple interactions have become convoluted, too often ineffective, exercises in hoop-jumping.
Just yesterday, you could take it for granted that the software your job depends on would work to a minimum effective extent. Now features disappear, data is lost, and utility erodes – seemingly out of the blue.
Try to reach tech support, and the “help” link just funnels you into a search for cookie-cutter videos and articles of varying relevance.
Want that basic feature that used to be included for free? Now it’s paywalled.
You’d rather talk to a human being than a broken search engine or a chatbot? Even the experience of trying to bridge the language gap with a call center across the Prime Meridian and the Equator – the punchline of countless aughts tech jokes – is now a premium service. If it’s offered at all.
If these headaches were confined to the user-facing end of the tech sector, that would be aggravating enough.
But they’re not.
Now the callous disdain for customers and rank incompetence at basic skills has moved into meatspace.
Go to any major retailer and try to exchange, say, a vacuum cleaner. Got it packed up in the original box with the receipt handy? Doesn’t matter. Just try finding anyone in charge.
The all-American ritual of swinging by the drive-thru is now a game of Russian roulette. Order a half fried chicken and a side of fries, and you’re lucky if they don’t throw you a bucket of mustard packets and a CFL lightbulb.
Everywhere you turn, one troubling trend remains consistent: People don’t know how to do their jobs, nor do they want to know.
It’s more than a mere annoyance now. It’s getting dangerous.
This decline in the quality and efficiency of almost every product and service is spreading. What’s more, it’s accelerating.
Supply chains can’t deliver lunchmeat to Wal-Mart. Planes are playing bumper cars on the tarmac. Navy ships are crashing into each other.
You might say that “It’s not the truck drivers’/ATC’s/sailors’ fault. Those disasters are the result of dumb policies pushed from the top!”
And you would be right.
Which is even more terrifying.
If it were just some tech firms getting sloppy out of greed and cutting corners, we could fix it by switching to competitors or filing class-action lawsuits.
But the rot isn’t limited to tech – or the private sector in general.
It’s spread throughout the managerial class that runs every corporate, academic, and governmental bureaucracy in the West.
Regular readers know I’ve warned for years that the permanent managers who control society submit to a totalizing cargo cult.
It turns out that being ruled by cultists whose beliefs are 180 degrees from reality has dire consequences.
What’s happening is their boutique creeds have anathematized merit-based selection in the name of blank slate equality. Cracking down on free association didn’t produce enough diversity, so now they’re just doing away with any and all standards. It’s gone beyond indifference toward ability to the active promotion of people who suck at the job. Because f***k you.
When your business and government leaders select for incompetence, you get a competency crisis.
Simple as.
The silver lining is that the competency crisis has hit the ruling class as hard as their hapless subjects.
If not harder.
Magical thinking couldn’t save the current administration from an ongoing string of dismal military debacles.
At least one major car company is backing out of the industry’s much-touted and physically impossible pledge to phase out all gas engines nest year. It turns out that Gaia is no match for the gods of the copybook headings.
In an even more telling example, Big Tech’s dystopian fever dream of controlling all information keeps running into irreconcilable contradictions where their false theory of mind meets reality. Their bungling attempts to impose their weird dogmas on A.I. just make the A.I.s dumber. So the large language model outfits that first made a splash are getting lapped by open-source hobbyists.
Unlike humans, A.I. algos operate by pure logic. So the only way to make them swallow Death Cult mumbo jumbo while also giving them unfettered access to the world’s data is to give them brain damage.
That’s a good allegory for our decrepit managerial class as a whole. Because of course narcissistic sociopaths would make A.I. in their decadent image.
For years now, the debate raged in dissident circles as to whether we were in for a thousand-year techno dystopia or a sunset of the Roman Empire-style collapse. Each day brings fresh evidence that the imminent collapse guys have the right of it.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate piracy. Nor do I begrudge businesses charging fair prices for quality goods and services.
Just ask my elite Neopatrons, who enjoy tons of premium benefits each month. Join them to get subscriber-only posts, access the Neopatron Discord, and get the chance to influence my writing.
In this week’s patron exclusive, get every question asked during November’s subscribers-only AMA. Access these fun and valuable insights now. Sign up through Patreon or SubscribeStar.
What makes things worse is that Zoomers have only learned how to deal with existing services. Music sites everywhere are littered with comments of “I heard a song I liked but it’s not on Spotify so how can I listen to it again?” They are so used to dealing with phones that concepts like opening a zip file or using the print screen function are beyond them.
Now I’m not blaming them, since they were raised in a world where they had little choice but to do that. Companies are heavily pushing lowest common denominator subscription services while simultaneously forcing you to go through them for all repairs. (Can ANYONE do anything beyond the most basic of maintenance on a new car?)
But this puts them in an extremely bad position when things break down. If your conception of getting food is to use UberEats, and UberEats is no more, what then? You see the same thing on the tech side where most tech jobs consist of using standardized tools, existing cloud services, with minor local or cosmetic differences. But if the basic architecture goes down, these skills are worthless.
The bright side is that the Zoomers who are self motivated enough to look into this stuff do tend to be pretty knowledgeable through self-teaching, but they are in the minority.
Millennials are also in a bad position, but this is more because they’ve intentionally allowed their survival skills to atrophy, rather than never learning them in the first place.
For Gen Y the question is whether we can figure out that things need to be fixed by replacing them with something new, rather than trying to clumsily reimplement the old broken system.
This relative uselessness of most men in the 3 most recent generations is all the more baffling in light of the internet. As Ed Latimore said, YouTube means that if anyone doesn’t know how to do something, it’s because he doesn’t want to know.
A fair amount of the competency crisis is due to the fact the various players have no skin in the game. Your call to tech support? Just some contractor, he doesn’t care about service, he’s just following a script. So what if your problem isn’t resolved and you change services? Doesn’t bother him, even if he gets fired, he’ll get another job next door doing the same thing. *ALL* of the government agencies are like this, too. So what if the FDA approves a drug that kills 1000s? No one will be held accountable (fired/jailed/etc.) Do the teachers at your school suck? Oh well, it’s nigh impossible to get them fired because they’re bad.
The number of people that actually give a f* are rapidly diminishing. Some of it is due to the fact that the competent people are aging out of working, but I suspect there are some who are “going Galt,” who would otherwise give a f*, but simply do the bare minimums, get the paycheck and get on with their lives. Who can blame them, when they could get laid off at the drop of a hat.
My advice to anyone working for the government, an academic institution, or any corporation would be to start stacking money while planning his exit. Developing a hobby into a marketable skill to start a business would be a key part of that plan.
Yes, it’s definitely time to work on an exit plan.
– I can’t simply log into a service any more. I have to get a verification code through email or an authentication app. This includes the Windows login for my laptop, which now requires confirmation of the login attempt via an app on my phone. Sometimes, this app doesn’t work and I have to log in twice due to some kind of silent failure.
– Our business partners change their APIs with little or no notice; they often go down, or never quite work right in the first place. Even when the API works, the software may be misconfigured on the customer side, resulting in us having to jump through hoops because they don’t know how to (or simply won’t!) fix their configuration.
– I’ve had to remove data validation in two different parts of our system this past year (both involving externally verifiable data from official sources) because “that’s what the customer gave us,” as if the customer’s data is somehow infallible.
– A large chunk of the workload management and reporting tools that I’ve created are now inaccurate because a segment of the workforce now works primarily out of Excel, using an import tool originally designed to assist in processing third-party updates more efficiently to update our system once every few weeks. Management is OK with this.
I could go on, but I’m preaching to the choir.
Sometimes the choir needs preached to.
We shouldn’t have to live like this. But people get the treatment they tolerate.
… and here I thought it was just my industry.
On the plus side, if you’re even as competent and enthusiastic as you were 30 yrs ago, you stand out! Anytime something breaks/no-one knows what to do, it’s an anguished email that I at least know who to pass on to.
That option of starting my own Linux hobby is looking better and better. I’m fresh out of fiction ideas, maybe that will be easier.
We’re sliding into the “The State pretends to pay us and we pretend to work” phase of Soviet meets Kafka-style of government run by the grifting class.
But this is good news! As things destabilize the more opportunities arise for everyone who has humbled himself before God Almighty.
I go to the chapel of a Franciscan elementary-to-high-school that’s conveniently across the street. In the past, the congregation used to sing the mass hymns, with varying degrees of competency, but respectfully and, if I can be allowed a poetic license, from the heart.
The change started when I’ve of the friars started singing songs instead of liturgical hymns during mass. And then, when he moved, a secular Franciscan from across the city would come to fill in. The songs are awful but they were mostly competent and had good to great singing voices.
Recently, there’s an emerging OFS fraternity in the school grounds (from now on, the frat), which was formed mostly by neighbors and attendants, which I joined. At some point, a bunch of female school teachers joined, fronted by the female school principal, who thinks she can sing. Now there’s a band on Sundays that performs the same awful songs (including some “Catholic” knockoffs of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel) comprised by the principal and her husband in lead vocals and only acoustic guitar, the rest of the teachers in background vocals, the husband of one of the teachers (who rocks his head like Flea) in the electric bass, the principal’s daughter in the rock drums, and a couple of his from the frat playing sorted Caribbean drums.
Now the electric bass became an expat, so imagine the sound and competency level of a band that, in order to allow everyone to participate, has one guitar, three different drums, and six voices crammed in two microphones, on a chapel that’s barely the size of two large classrooms.
Clapping along is now normal (not clapping is considered rigid) and sometimes, they even get the attendance to twist and shake their booties, when the chorus of the song sings, and I kid you not: “moving your bootie oooh! That’s how you worship God”.
Why is this rant relevant to the post? Well, I’m afraid the crisis of competency doesn’t only affect state and private institutions but also the church, as all this had been done with the blessing of the school Rector, who happens to be the superior of the OFM in this country. Let us remember that the same people in charge of the band is in charge of the school and of teaching the next, post zoomer generation.
I’ve witnessed troubling things like not having decorations concerning Saint Valentine on February 14th or anything about the sacrament of marriage that got him martyred, but there was a kiss selling booth, something I hadn’t seen since “Revenge of the Nerds”. Now I don’t think they had the kids actually selling tongue kisses, yet, but it’s sole presence is troubling to me…