Deproceduralization
Late Life Learning
This Amazon box feels like a huge indictment of how lazy I’ve become. All I know of the digital world is how much I have turned tasks I once undertook, over to a keystroke.
Something about that has caused me to reexamine my anger and fear at the knothole through which we’re being drawn.
I asked a financial guy whose judgment I respect, what he thought of what Trump/Musk are up to. He went into a long explanation of the way he sees the growing national debt, as crippling innovation and initiative. Though he was careful not to give approval to the current chaos, he did suggest it will take young, tech-savvy people to do what Congress has been unable or unwilling to do.
Which is to seriously address the bureaucratic (I had to go to my online dictionary for the spelling) morass that perpetuates and protects what may no longer be needed.
In today’s NY Times, Jennifer Pahika, Deputy Chief Tech Officer under Obama, has a piece: This Is How The Democrats Can Counter Elon Musk.
She calls for Deproceduralization.
Reading her piece woke me, again, to how little I consider the ways I navigate day to day life has changed. And how little I understand how they have impacted me.
She writes that much of the anger that fuels and encourages the Musk efforts to dismantle our entire system, is the unwillingness, inability, of the deeply entrenched government agencies to streamline and adjust to digital reality.
She writes of the massive programs Biden got passed early on, to address long overdue work on infrastructure, as well as other neglected areas.
But due to bureaucratic impasse, only a fraction of that money has been spent. And now will likely be erased altogether in the current bloodbath.
She suggests the way forward for Democrats is not merely to deplore the madness, nor to reflexively protect the gigantic panoply of programs, but to elicit help from young, digitally savvy people, who can use their technical insight to help congress write budgets that cleanse obsolete fat, without decimating the life of the nation’s people.
Since there’s no argument for returning to simpler days, are we brave and open enough to realities that are racing at us at breakneck speed, to seriously address the ways those realities may serve rather than destroy us?
Seems, either we make that scary decision, or we turn our fate over to the Musks whose agenda does not include our well being.
No one’s excused.
I think you're probably right. I'm trying to understand some of what motivates once sensible people to support this mad man. I'm technologically challenged, so I'm hoping to make some sense of how the digital realities are going to make us change in ways I couldn't have imagined.
I've found no evidence that "young technical people" are more efficient or cost effective. I only see monopolistic practices that put a technical "tax" on everything we try to do.