I couldn’t help but think of “woke” as a kind of bureaucratic party line. It’s used to purge the ranks, enforce discipline, and motivate the minions. Etc. It’s also a good cover for graft and laziness.
Good insight. Most people are mystified by how bureaucracies so inevitably swallow their organizations entirely, leaving nothing behind but a husk on which they suck like a plague of bugs. It may be a chicken and egg question, though. Is the graft and laziness a product of this takeover, or the cause?
The people who are good at it, wielding power through gaslighting & manipulation, etc., are also not committed to the organization's fundamental mission. For example, rather than teach and try to educate students on how to think (I.e., hard work), it’s easier to rant and propagandize and blubber on at the level of emotion and not the intellect, which requires discipline and courage. It's easier to tell the students what to think and, in the process, build an ideological fiefdom. The methods are actually similar to how cults function. And therein thrives the graft, etc.
> My opinion is that these revisionists are torturing the Watson example a bit too painfully, if they expect that Mister IBM was thinking in terms of clouds of millions of computer servers linked together into individual global entities called clouds, especially in 1943.
My understanding is he was thinking of economies of scale and communications bottlenecks that made it more efficient to consolidate all the computation in one place and give the user a dumb terminal.
Given that we don't even know if he said it - he never, to my knowledge, admitted to doing so - I suspect people just hang whatever raiment they wish on that particular hat rack.
I couldn’t help but think of “woke” as a kind of bureaucratic party line. It’s used to purge the ranks, enforce discipline, and motivate the minions. Etc. It’s also a good cover for graft and laziness.
Good insight. Most people are mystified by how bureaucracies so inevitably swallow their organizations entirely, leaving nothing behind but a husk on which they suck like a plague of bugs. It may be a chicken and egg question, though. Is the graft and laziness a product of this takeover, or the cause?
The people who are good at it, wielding power through gaslighting & manipulation, etc., are also not committed to the organization's fundamental mission. For example, rather than teach and try to educate students on how to think (I.e., hard work), it’s easier to rant and propagandize and blubber on at the level of emotion and not the intellect, which requires discipline and courage. It's easier to tell the students what to think and, in the process, build an ideological fiefdom. The methods are actually similar to how cults function. And therein thrives the graft, etc.
Okay, and now consider how much overlap, how many similarities, are enfolded in two concepts - cult, and ideology.
> My opinion is that these revisionists are torturing the Watson example a bit too painfully, if they expect that Mister IBM was thinking in terms of clouds of millions of computer servers linked together into individual global entities called clouds, especially in 1943.
My understanding is he was thinking of economies of scale and communications bottlenecks that made it more efficient to consolidate all the computation in one place and give the user a dumb terminal.
Given that we don't even know if he said it - he never, to my knowledge, admitted to doing so - I suspect people just hang whatever raiment they wish on that particular hat rack.