Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

The philosophy of technology behind this is fascinating. The need is the clearest case of non-functional requirements I have ever seen. When a process owner brazenly does not care about the outcome, but cares only about forcing people to go through their arbitrary steps, it is to stamp their seal of authority and control upon the other.

As Bill Hicks says "Hey, pretend like you're working!"

Everything else is post-facto rationalisation. In other words, they'll dream up anything as a way to explain why you have to conform to their process, variously invoking "standard practice", "regulation", "security", with total disregard for the truth. It is the process with which they identify vicariously, are attached to, and are obliged to defend. The process owns them.

As for the solution. Funny as it is, it's an example of tragic new realm of digital technology whose purpose is to fake human agency, and create desired appearance over any actual reality.

I'm not just talking about spambots, or automated essay mills for students to buy their way to a degree one cheat at a time. These are what Douglas Adams called "Electric Monks". They believe in make-work bullshit so that real people don't have to. This is the future of AI, the adversarial workplace, a technological arms race around make-work wage-slavery which creates no tangible economic value; avatars that stand in for people remote working so they can sunbathe in the garden... like that little pecking bird that Homer Simpson gets to run the nuclear plant by pecking on the Y key.

Whoever can afford the best Electric Monks wins the game, because they will be able to free their attention for real life.

edit: italics

I've actually never seen the phenomenon through this lens, but I like it!

I think the clearest indicator that this is going on is when you can circumvent the process arbitrarily. Two example memories spring to mind:

In a visa office: "fill out form X, you can get one from the table over there" / "There are none left" / "OK never mind give me your passport and I'll stamp it".

At my Big Tech employer: "please fill out this document template detailing the update and version history of your service, for an audit" / "really? This looks time consuming and I don't really understand the the reason why you need it" / "OK, never mind then"

(Actually, at Big Tech I have found that replying along the lines of "really though?" is a very good first response when confronted with Processes. Sometimes when reporting bugs the template asks you to e.g. gather traces with browser extensions or whatever. I always say "I will do that if you first confirm that it will actually be useful for this bug" and haven't yet received such a confirmation)

Great commentary. I'd add shamelessly that whoever can _build_ the best electric monks dominates the game. The price of developing them will be miniscule.

Really hoping AI ushers us into the resource based economy where humans are freed from rudimentary labor.

A Tulane student got a bunch of funding because he developed a stand-in for folks for zoom meetings. Logs in, records, transcribes, the works. He developed it so he wouldn’t have to attend lectures during Covid. What you’re describing reminds me of this project.

It’s also called “Buelr,” which really captures the energy of what you’re talking about.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ferris-bueller-inspired-produ...

> It’s also called “Buelr,” which really captures the energy of what you’re talking about.

Brilliant. Thanks for that. Exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

Hey man you were the one with that brilliant write up. I saved your comment to review again later. Incredibly insightful stuff. Already passed it to a few coworkers.

touché!

But there is something about the aesthetic of such things, it's why the IETF RFC's (example https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html) are made to look like typewritten pages even decades after typewriters stopped being in common usage. I am surprised that they don't "go all the way" with that look and also apply some simulated coffee stains, dog-ears, and stapling artifacts.

ASCII is read everywhere. Perfect to read standards on any machine since 1970.

Typewriters have hard line breaks. This aesthetic makes RFCs harder to read than necessary on the majority of consumer devices sold since 2012.

Form should match the shape of the medium, not fight it.

The html version looks pretty good even on my iPhone. The words are small but legible. The text version is zoomed in, but wraps unnaturally, and is hard to read. The pdf is hard to read, too zoomed out.

I think they did a pretty good job making a document that can be navigated as people are accustomed to, while adapting to the medium. The aesthetic is not without function.

Not all RFCs have a HTML version available, sadly.

It's not just the looks. That way it is possible to reference something by line and column.

No man, it's a deliberate look which sacrifices readability for some kind of retro-aesthetic whether they admit it or not. It's easy enough to reference things by section numbers.

And really, if they cared about being able reference things to the n-th degree, the figures would have been captioned and have their own figure-number instead of just sort-of "in there" like a paragraph (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html#section-4.4).

We have a word for it within the domain of philosophy and literature: Kafkaesque.

> We have a word for it within the domain of philosophy and literature: Kafkaesque.

I was thinking of something a little different and even considered specifically excluding Kafka and indeed Weber (I've read a lot of Franz Kafka but am a Cliffs Notes imposter on Max Weber) from my comment.

In The Trial, or Before the Law, the anxiety lies in not knowing the mind of a, possibly ambivalent, judging other. In modernity, Weber's modernity, it is spelled out in intricate, mind numbing detail, in reams of forms that must be gymnastically navigated. One step further in the direction I am describing is the officers of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk In this incarnation bureaucracy is not an all-powerful force to be feared, it is a stumbling, stuttering, inconsistent fool of a thing that can be easily tricked. It brings tedium not anxiety. I'll wager many hackers relate to that experience of encountering systems.

That is what I mean by the vision of AI versus AI. Two broken retarded robots sprawling about in the mud while humans gather around in a circle and laugh. But the last laugh is on us for building them and getting enchanted by the spectacle.

Fantastic comment. You gave me both something to think about and research!

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