Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class
americanaffairsjournal.org
americanaffairsjournal.org
"Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats. Product managers at Google might have sleeve tattoos or purple hair. They might describe themselves as “creators” or “creatives.” They might characterize their hobbies as entrepreneurial “side hustles.” But their actual day-in, day-out work involves the coordination of various teams and resources across a large organization based on established administrative procedures. That’s a bureaucrat. The entire professional culture is almost an attempt to invert the connotations and expectations of the word—which is what underlies this class’s tension with storytelling. Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation’s counterculture."
Conclusion:
"Absolute pessimism is almost always a sign of a lazy narcissist, and narratives of inevitable decline are used by those who want to absolve themselves of the obligation to act. Possibility has opened up before us in a manner that is rare in history. We need stories which encourage action. Our leaders must rise to defeat a global plague and in the process test whether or not there still exists, in this underused husk of a nation, the capacity for vigorous action—the capacity to produce the types of heroes who will inspire future generations. Now, more than ever, we need a story."
And the people I knew with tatoos did not necessary interpreted themselves as non conforming either. There were aware of raising acceptance of tatoos.
And guy explicitely explained his tatoos as "just result of being in environment where many people have it and talk about it, you kinda shift there".
I mean, we have office manager and she is mostly making sure we have enough print paper and such. In old times, she would be administration.
I meet a lot of product managers and business people who call themselves creative--and some are. The test is whether they are wedded to "established administrative procedures" or they are able to take risks and run experiments that depart from past practice in an effort to explore for possible improvements and better outcomes.
Except in marketing. Call centers are still bureaucracies.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/fingerprint-work-armory...
Also, inept government agencies employee more than you might imagine.
If this were the case, why do many spend grueling over hundreds of LeetCode problems? If the credential was truly enough, we wouldn't have to be grilled in interview processes.
> The university has been in crisis for almost a century, and in 1948 Richard Weaver was already warning that universities had “turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism.”
At one point in college, I held 3 jobs with the impossible task of trying to stay out of debt (I didn't) by working jobs that paid no more than $10/hour on a $30,000 tuition bill. Is the fault of the university that they became corporatized? There would be no crisis if folks had the time to study.
Yes, and specifically the kind of bureaucratic organization-man corporatized that the article discusses.
Tuition keeps skyrocketing at multiples of inflation, yet post docs and adjunct lecturers live in near-poverty. Where's the money go? "Administration".
A dean. Absolutely laughable if it wasn't so sad.
Mundane property issues are probably handled by the dean’s admin at some (most?) CCs, but property in general is often going to fall under a dean’s purview.
Also, note that a dean’s work at a CC is generally going to be fantastically boring administrative scut work.
The specific differences in your perception may revolve around whether the manager/dean has a trusted admin, and whether that admin is around.
Just a guess...
What do you think managers do?
Credentials aren't enough to get you a job as a coder in many tech companies and they aren't enough to get you a job as a ball player in the NFL. But elite credentials do open all kinds of doors not open to those without them.
Bureaucracy itself has become an ideology, and we need more observations of it like this.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
Recommended.
More interesting is to see what aspects of it can fit the HN milieu. How does the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the tech industry?
I think the Gervais Principle answers this question nicely. There was a series of essays based on GP that was written by someone formerly active on HN that can only be found on the way back machine that ties GP into modern Silicon Valley. I’m intentionally leaving out this former HNer’s name because he took down his blog for reasons of professional discretion. I don’t think it’s that hard to find, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574429
I think that’s a sufficient hint while not piercing the blogger’s veil of anonymity
Please respect his/her desire for a modicum of professional privacy if you figure out who I am referring to.
Do they start to become constrained by marketing? i.e. their actual innovation won't earn them many more sales, and only by marketing more they can increase sales? Do all companies that get big enough (in revenue) do this?
Now, in order to make that money for shareholders, they're going to need customers that are satisfied with their product. They might need to innovate to stay competitive. They might need to actually make the world a bit better in order to stay solvent. But at the end of the day, they aren't going to sacrifice shareholder rewards for their customers, innovation, the betterment of the world at large, or for anything else. It's simply not their modus operandi.
like a glove. Tech today is dominated by basically two forms of business. The Googles and Facebooks and so on, which fit the Weberian bureaucracy that the author addresses, arguably even more than actual bureaucracy because they're rabidly trying to codify everything in software, which is in a sense more technocratic than Weber himself could have ever dreamed of, and the startup culture which is basically performative entrepreneurship, consuming a certain lifestyle to signal being part of a certain class, with the products being created performing essentially no meaningful social function and don't constitute any sort of technical progress.
OK, maybe - but only because you say tech today is "dominated" by these two tropes, not "consists only".
There are exceptions. Obviously I have one self-serving example in mind, but let's skip that. As I brainstorm, the first one that comes to mind is NextDNS which is such a fantastic and simple idea (and one I wish I had thought of).
github, too, was a very substantive and progressive model that has really changed the tech world.
The Veblenian Entrepreneur, as they say
>A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a “catapult experience”—a bold and potentially risky career move. Perhaps the same traits that lead to this type of bold action might also lead to very poor outcomes on a college campus. Perhaps hyper-permissiveness actually ends up promoting a form of timidity. We’re left with Silicon Valley dorks who microdose LSD in order to create hookup apps where users exchange sex puns on the toilet.
That last dig pointing out the absurd mix of hyper-permissiveness (hookup culture) and timidity (texting) just highlights how contemporary innovation is the often twisted nexus of these two extremes, and it is the continuation of this pattern being described that makes up the neo-bureaucrat culture's cognitive dissonance.
Pretty good read, I just disagree with the conclusion (final paragraphs). One could argue the article itself is an inverting of the narrative of the narrative, and thus has nothing left to say.
I’m going to confuse myself here I feel, but the article as analysis, if I’m right about itself being an inversion, has to be taken as non-analysis and just a description ultimately.
It’s got nothing left to say because there’s really nothing left to say.
/meta
At the beginning, he's on to something. Fiction has a plot shortage. "Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn’t rely on gimmicks." Movies are stuck in the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] ditch, and the Marvel Overextended Universe. The 25th James Bond movie is supposed to come out this year, if anybody cares.
Some of this is simply the entertainment glut. Everyone has seen all the possible plot twists. Go back in history and read some of the Canterbury Tales from around 1400. Read a story half way through, then ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. There are no plot twists. Back then, entertainment was so scarce that they weren't needed.
A more serious problem is that there's no shared vision of a better world. Fiction doesn't help us get to a better place. This hit science fiction first. Science fiction of the 1930s to the 1960s was quite upbeat, showing a picture of a marvelous future. It's been downhill since the 1970s. Today SF is mostly space opera. Dystopian visions used to be rare. Now most SF is dystopian. Even much non-SF is dystopian. From The Wire to Game of Thrones, the world sucks.
I see it being a fairly scathing critique of the disingenuous narrative of modern day middle class bureaucrats.
Well no, entertainment wasn't scarce. Different, but not scarce.
Audience desires could be different, too: http://arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/2199.htm
Not where I expected to see that sentiment.
I do wonder where this is going.
Agree or disagree with his opinions, this is a fairly high level of writing, and I recommend reading it for entertainment value if not for actual stimulating thought.
Proper chaps are amateurs haven forfend that we listen to actual scientists - you can see this in Boris Johnson and cummings.
And you can see proper literatures disdain for "Genre" on display here.
The next sentence calls Bay area programmers "dorks" who have never taken risk, but I'll take the first part at face value. I've been listening to the podcast "How I Built this with Guy Raz" where founders of companies talk about how they started/grew their successful business. It does seem like many of them either had a hard time with "regular work", or they were stuck in some job they didn't like so they decided to start a business. Many of them have college degrees, which goes against what this article is about though. The more I listen to these, the more I think that there is a "type" of person who would start a business and therefore become a CEO. I've met a few people in real life that gave me a similar vibe, and my company's founder/CEO is like this as well. I can't put my finger on why these people seem different to me, but they just seem to think about problems differently.
Look for survivor bias there. You'd probably get a similar narrative by interviewing people who won big in Vegas.
2. The upper class still has yachts, backyard tennis courts, and polo ponies. The $300 cotton T-shirts and $400 sweatpants are for the working class.
where: working class - needs a job / middle class - has enough property to do without a job for few years, but couldn't maintain their lifestyle without an income / upper class - their property provides their income
alternatively: working class - acquires things whose TCO doesn't involve external employment / middle class - acquires things whose TCO involves fractions of an FTE / upper class - acquires things whose TCO requires multiple FTEs
Yes, Levi's jeans used rock and roll and rebellion to sell jeans.
What's your point, James?
(Besides using more words than even I do to attempt to waffle his way around being WRONG, lol)
(to anyone attempting to bring me back around to the ostensible class critique nexus of this piece, I apparently didn't get it. It went over my head. I'm kinda thick I guess.)
I don't think he's wrong about tech being primarily about increasingly automated bureaucracy, and not about open innovation - certainly not in business, and even less so socially and culturally.
But ultimately this is decided by Wall St, which is controlled by money, most of which is ultimately managed by billionaires, some of whom have exotic far-right sympathies.
Note there's no criticism of right wing story-telling - propaganda - outfits like the Kochs or the Mercers. The targets are exclusively on the progressive side.
Trump may have won as a not-business-as-usual candidate, but that doesn't mean he was ever truly a not-business-as-usual president. It means that was the story sold to voters who felt left behind and excluded - just as Obama was sold as the black history redemption candidate, who turned out to have limited interest in doing anything too controversially concrete or transformative with the opportunity.
Instead of challenging the cynical sleight-of-message involved in the industrial manipulation of all demographics, the author chooses to slant his thesis towards praising one demographic at the expense of another.
It's a good attempt and more literate than most - but it's not nearly as incisive or even-handed as it pretends to be.
Interesting. My takeaway is about 180 degrees from this.
I think he’s saying that the vast majority of college graduates are not particularly well-educated. Furthermore, this class of people is just filling the role of very middle class bureaucrats while being sold on the narrative of being something more (e.g., part of the creative class or upper / upper middle class), all while being incredibly conformist in their non-conformity.
You say that the targets are “progressives”, but I would say his targets are “poseur progressives”. As someone who highly values the former and is ambivalent about the masses of the latter (esp. in the Bay Area), I agree with the author’s lament of the rise of faux progressives (if, in fact, that is what he is lamenting).
The mental gymnastics are all occurring on the new left and hyper vain social media stratosphere where true values and beliefs are a muddled mess. Since they are in this amorphous stage, they are vulnerable to solidifying into forms that propagate the status quo.
I don’t believe this belongs on Hacker News.
It’s all too easy to nod along as you read this sort of thing, but then to become more cynical when you consider the source, the underlying motivations, and the larger body of work into which it fits and associates.
I'm pretty sure I found that on "new", though, rather than on the front page. If front page appearances are your metric, then left stuff may be rather rare.
Having said that, I liked the article. It makes some good points - I think there is dissatisfaction in general with our current time, from both sides. I think both are trying to identify that problem, and it's important to see how it is viewed from both sides. There's just a certain, "schizophrenia," of our time right now, which I think the article highlights.
The old guard who believed in the hacker ethic has long ago faded into irrelevance. I am sorry to say that technology is now run by the mundanes (yes, even the bulk of software developers) and the new hacker ethic seems to be "greed is good".