Simple sabotage & soulless systems
Conceptualize in your mind’s eye a society supervised by / structured in / which has built soulless systems. See people who’ve stowed away their souls, or left them to flutter (like tattered Usonian flags) on balconies secured by suspect clothespins. These people don’t care about doing their work well. They clock in and clock out; they hold jobs for a few years, just enough time to get the line on the résumé, and then they head out. They don’t try to make things (maybe the bureaucracies or systems they’re stuck in) better, so their work is unhelpful to their customers, their organization has a reputation for inefficiency, and everyone is just trying to get out of there. Not only do they not care about whether they do their jobs well, but also they don’t care that most others around them act the same, and in fact it’s even normal.
During the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, declassified parts of a document called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (PDF (cia.gov)) and distributed the information to “citizens of enemy states”. This document contained instructions on how to make things as difficult for the occupiers as possible. (When the CIA says “parts of it” were declassified, I’m not sure exactly which parts those were. But let’s run with it.) In among the detailed instructions for screwing up various kinds of machines important to the war effort are tips on how to be a very annoying person, and one way to be a very annoying person is to not care about doing your job well. To not care about doing things (in)efficiently; to let things break; to misallocate talent, resources, and tasks; to put roadblocks in the way of action; to not correct (others’) errors. These are the advice drafted by the US government on how to defeat (I presume) Nazis. The modern equivalent for software engineers is “How to Be a -10x Engineer”. But these are also too often the status quo modi operandi maintained by people in our society. We are basically sabotaging ourselves, but we are not the enemy!
Conceptualize now a society where we don’t burn our souls. Then, whatever our jobs might be, we care about doing them well. (This doesn’t preclude wanting to get the hell out of there, of course. But until you get the hell out of there you must be excellent.) We act in the most efficient ways possible. We keep things running. We allocate talent, resources, and tasks well—so those whose talent we allocate have the chance to be fulfilled as well. We do due diligence but fundamentally support good action. We act as redundant machinery and adjust for others’ errors. Then we act well, and we expect others to act well. (We give people the room to stop doing things they don’t want to do well—perhaps via a UBI. People often half-ass things when they’re not allowed to not-ass them.) Then society runs smoothly, and the systems we maintain are efficient. We expect efficiency and we get efficiency, and we collectively waste less and less time mired in meaningless misery.
Of course there are times when the machine must be prevented from working at all. Many people are in such situations right now. That’s why the OSS wrote this document. But when that is not the case, then we must help the machine work as well as possible.
Maybe you will decide that you are in a situation right now where you must throw your body upon the gears. If you are right, I wish you luck.
But I ask you, like David Foster Wallace did, to stop living life on autopilot, to check your default settings, and to actually live, to actually act, be an actor, be agentic, be an agent in this world. To either decide to be excellent because it is the right thing to do, or else to prevent the machine from working at all because that is the right thing to do. Then we will have utopia or we will have war. And from war we can get to utopia.
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