Culture

The Layer of Madness

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve written before how many of our leaders seem, well, insane. I’ve also discussed at annoying length about how we’re often unseriousness and irresponsible as a culture, while also plugging Ted Gioia and The Unaccountability Machine. Lately I’ve been speculating on the architecture of this madness, namely how do so many – maybe all – of our so-called leaders become completely nuts.

You know what I’m talking about even if we’re talking about different people. People with bizarre beliefs that you can’t imagine any sane person holding – and they’re in charge. So-called adults acting like aspiring teenage Instagram Influencers who have nuclear weapons. It all seems like acting, and bad acting at that – and we can’t even blame Regan anymore (well, as much).

I’m not saying leaders haven’t been completely bonkers over the aeons. I mean, we still discuss the Hapsburgs. But as I’ve done my various historical readings, it seems we’ve managed the madness without the genetic damage and a particularly pathetic kind of madness at that. I think it’s because our leaders are so abstract.

It’s like everyone is so far away. You can’t be aware of how the world works, of the impact of your work. It’s because of layers.

Think of society as layers. There’s layers of work on extraction – farming, raw materials. Layers of crafting. Layers of communications. Layers of medical work. These different layers connect and support each others, but it’s easy to forget them. For instance, I work in medical technology, but I have to recall things like where drug raw materials come from or how shipping affects us.

As we pile layers upon layers to manage society – layers of banking and politics and the likes. Each layer ads more ability to coordinate, to administer, to process – but also more ways to get abstracted or distant. That may sound like a problem, but some people like that – they don’t want to be responsible or deal with complexity.

I’m musing now that our society’s layers have become so abstract that we’ve got some “upper layers” of media and politics so merged and so abstract the people in them are entirely out of touch unless they want to be otherwise. People raised or trapped entirely in a mix of low-brow politicking, media-spheres, and whatever science fiction they consumed 30 years ago. Everyone echoing each other like a pathological message board.

We may not have the Hapsburg inbreeding, but we’ve got people living on some airy layer of our culture, totally abstract from us, mentally inbred. It’s hard not to go mad even if you don’t want to, and if you do lose your mind as a politician or media star, people will just decide you’re sane. Which of course makes you more mad.

Plus you’re so far away you’re free of responsibility and surrounded by yes-people they can insulate you from reality – but not the rest of us.

I’m not against our modern society, but I think we have to ask if all the different layers have created a unique form of “royalty” even more out of touch than legendary royalty of the past. We don’t see it as our system of media and politics amplifies their madness – and tells them what madness of ours they can take advantage of.

We need to find a way to change how the layers of our complex world connect, else we’ll keep dealing with the insanity.

Steven Savage

The Responsibility Machine

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve been preaching the virtues of the book The Unaccountability Machine to the point I bought copies to give people for Christmas. You, my regular readers, shall be spared anything but a reminder – it’s about how organizations go insane following simplistic ideas and shield leadership from accountability. I mean I’m still going to talk about it, but I’ll be taking a new tact and pushing it less.

The thing is someone has to take responsibility in governments, companies, etc.. If everyone goes hands off, everyone dodges responsibility, the organization will continue to fall into insanity. Backside-covering does a lot to keep an organization going, but the insanity will predominate. The organization might fall apart, get bought out, get sold, become completely financialized, etc.

I’d wager we’re going to see a lot of that in the next decade or two. We’ve already seen it from the Tories in the UK to Sears.

But anyway someone has to take responsibility. That means, ironically, the more Unaccountability in a system, the more there has to be some responsibility. The Unaccountability Machine is also a Responsibility Machine. People need to step in to do the right thing, even as others don’t.

You’ve probably been there. You might be the person who is the Responsible one – come to think of it, if you’re one of my subscribers, you probably are.

This Taking of Responsibility can happen for a number of reasons. Some people just can’t stand to see things done wrong. Others like a challenge. Others really care about the system. People have a certain responsible streak in them, if only out of sheer irritation of seeing something done wrong.

This urge to take Responsibility isn’t necessarily benevolent either. A chance to take Responsibility can be a chance to advance in one’s career – to where one can finally enjoy the benefits of Unaccountability. Responsibility can be a way to angle for a raise or bonuses. It can be a way to show off or put someone in their place. Don’t assume everyone rushing to prop up the various bad decisions in an organization is motivated by principle.

But the key thing is there’s only so many heroes and opportunists at any organization. It also means that unless the payoff they want – from seeing something work to a fat raise – needs to be coming. If it doesn’t come, there’s going to be less and less people taking Responsibility and more giving up or even seeking areas of Unaccountability

And no one can cause more damage or grift the system better than someone that actually knows how stuff works – and gave up. They’re also the ones that warn others to not fall into the Responsibility trap or to not even get hired or join up. Even the more evil of the once-Responsible types don’t want any competition.

However the people enjoying Unaccountability can coast on those taking Responsibility long enough to get a payout and leave.

So if we wonder how organizations persist when they’ve gone insane with Unaccountability (beyond money and influence), look for the people who are being Responsible. If you can’t find any then you may want to stop looking and get away.

Take a look at the world now and think that over.

Steven Savage

Dungeons, Dragons, The Internet, Simplicity

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’d like to discuss Dungeons and Dragons and the internet, and not just in the many incredibly nerdy ways I could. Dungeons and Dragons gives us an idea of the mechanics that could help make the internet useful again, as opposed to a bastion of advertising and bad comments.

Trust me on this.

So let’s talk Dungeons and Dragons, that game that pretty much launched Role-Playing Games as A Big Thing. It’s popular,and let us be honest, it’s terribly overcomplicated as befits something that originated in war games. I was there playing it in the 80s, and the critique has always been accurate.

Also I remember when a Paladin could roll a horse that was smarter than them.

A funny thing is Dungeons and Dragons and what it inspired also inspired wonderfully streamlined game systems. My favorite are the open-sourced Forged In The Dark system. The foundation Blades In the Dark showcases a streamlined system for a dark steampunk fantasy. The space adventure game Scum and Villainy combined various tropes, and made the inevitable starship a character. The game Wicked Ones inverted generic fantasy so people play monsters, and did everything from making a simple magic system to envisioning the messy idea of “followers” as “secondary characters.”

Forged In The Dark and it’s children got to the basics of what an RPG was, what people wanted, and made straightforward, playable games. If you haven’t checked out the system, do!

The thing is these streamlined, effective, precise games probably wouldn’t have existed without Dungeons and Dragons and its spinoffs. You needed complicated spell systems to realize “maybe this could be easier.” Complicated piles of various dice seem fun, but also lead one to wondering “could it just be six-sided dice?” Maybe you need levels, skills, saving throws, and so on to get the Forged In The Dark concept where characters are defined by “Actions” – general abilities like “Finesse” or “Science.”

Now the internet itself is terribly over complicated – and deliberately so to extract more income for various companies. It’s a simple thing that evolved to have layer and layer and layer on it, leaving us now in a world that’s called “Web 3.0.” But out of this overdone world maybe there’s a clue to what we actually want – we can learn from the pile of what we don’t want.

Mastodon is nice, and I am all for federation, but maybe Twitter was needed to give us ideas of what to do – and not do.. There’s a lovely Fediverse book review sharing program and video sharing, and so on. People are rediscovering RSS and even think of new ways to use it as the web drowns in crap. The excess gives us ideas, sometimes the idea is “maybe we shouldn’t have done that” – I mean there’s a reason I still send out a cut-and-paste-addresses email newsletter.

So for all the horrible stuff we’re dealing with, we can also ask what worked and what we wanted – and what we didn’t. We probably needed to ask that about ten years ago as a society, but at least we can do what we can now. We ask what we want, how to get it simply, and how to make it work for everyone.

It’s a bigger game to play, but we can find the best rules – and we can drop what we don’t need.

Steven Savage