{"id":1118,"date":"2007-04-01T09:57:36","date_gmt":"2007-04-01T13:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1118"},"modified":"2007-04-01T09:57:36","modified_gmt":"2007-04-01T13:57:36","slug":"mechanical-mindlesness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1118","title":{"rendered":"Mechanical mindlesness."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is of course a more sinister interpretation of the kind of drivel referenced in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/helmintholog\/archives\/2007\/03\/30\/a_meeting_of_mi.html#001993\">the post before this.<\/a> The abstract nouns &#8212; framework, integration, hallmark, strategy, etc. &#8212; may not all mean <span class=\"loony\">meetings<\/span> or may not just mean that.<\/p>\n\n<p>If one take <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/story\/0,,2047706,00.html\">Henry Porter<\/a> seriously &#8212; and why not? &#8212; they will also refer to government databases. I think this is a much more helpful way of thinking about the seemingly inexorable totalitarian creep of British and American government than supposing that they are all power-mad and want to control everything. It is that they fear they don&#8217;t control anything, and that outside of the world of ritual meetings and spreadsheet voodoo, all is chaos.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is nothing like a database to give the illusion of control. The government is faffing around with IT for the same reason that I have wasted years of my life thinking about software and faffing around with it: because it supplies a little world where it can feel in control.<\/p>\n\n<p>In some ways, I find the fact that this control is quite illusory just as frightening as the fact that quite a lot of it is real.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is of course a more sinister interpretation of the kind of drivel referenced in the post before this. The abstract nouns &#8212; framework, integration, hallmark, strategy, etc. &#8212; may not all mean meetings or may not just mean that. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1118\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1118\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}