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Alien invaders walk among us!
Viral website template here in the offing. Are we truly being invaded by a conspiracy of idiots, bent on mediocrity?
A viral website template is here in the offing. I just need to work out what the format and interactions should be. Watch this space for idiotconspiracy.com. This video and the stuff below gives you some idea where I'm coming from.
Background
Had a good chat with one of the CASCADAS crew over dinner. We were just discussing the kind of hugely over-engineered bureaucracies which people have to deal with every day in a typical large organisation, in which division of labour and scale should make things easier to do. I was wondering what this continued trend away from common sense in to a kind of bureaucratic groupthink might mean for our survival as a species, and therefore, who might be behind it all [dramatic chords].
Example please
The typical example which rang true for everyone was the mandated 'internal', outsourced travel booking service. When a company signs up to one of these, its employees are required by mandate to interact with travel-booking systems entirely unlike those which compete and succeed on the internet. Successful travel booking sites on the internet thrive through a combination of low cost, easy navigation and convenience. These qualities are never even accidentally delivered by travel outsourcing companies.
Despite their incompetence, these travel cartels have negotiated the use of their systems as a mandatory policy across your organisation, despite the adequacy of publically available systems already available to everyone, like Travelocity, Expedia and a thousand others.
The obvious explanation for this apparently bizarre policy choice is the huge buying power and influence that this 'cartel buying' will bring to your company. So the greatest triumph of all is that these systems typically offer prices which are actually more expensive than those available to anyone with a credit card on the open internet. Fantastic! Well worth the effort.
Where are you going with this?
This set of circumstances, taken alongside other evidence gathered over the years got me to thinking. Suppose there really was a conspiracy of deliberate idiots, who lived among us, indistinguishable from everyday people. Their single-minded objective, to make everyone's life as hard as it is possible to be, whilst never actually revealing to their superiors that they are being deliberately incompetent. This subtle intervention would retard human economic and social progress very effectively. Idiot bureaucracies would be the perfect tool to undermine the success of the human race. Who are the invaders? Why would they do this? To serve some higher power? I dread to imagine their nefarious ends.
You can't be serious!
What other explanation could possibly be provided for
- Paying three times the council tax owing to the number of occupants - and only being allowed only one bin per household
- Having no visible clocks and no power outlets where people are waiting for planes and using laptops
- Railway charges doubling at peak hours, so you pay twice as much to stand in the corridor
- Banking institutions which open an hour after working people have left for the office, and which close an hour before they return
...and perhaps most revealing of all...
- Seats in planes, coaches, airports and bus stations which are impossible for someone with human morphology to rest comfortably
The Truth is Out There!
Could this theory possibly explain the strange behaviour of your colleagues, retailers, public officials?
It is a conspiracy reminiscent of the 60s bodysnatcher series The Invaders which I watched weekly as a kid. In this series, David Vincent, rogue architect, was on the run from an alien horde who could pass themselves off as human, but were slowly infiltrating the authorities and all human institutions in order to take over the world. Only he knew the secret.
I certainly feel an empathy with him sometimes.
How do we defeat the idiot horde?
The idiot invasion is already underway! To defeat them, we need to think like them, understand their practices, and root them out wherever we find them.
Perhaps they gather together in secret to share their techniques of calculated idiocy. These intensive training sessions could enable their policies and contributions to appear sensible on the surface, yet be devastating in their practical impact on unsuspecting humans.
They sometimes cover their tracks by authoring finely interlocking policies in concert with other idiot moles, a craft by which two departmental policies seem sensible when taken in isolation, but taken together prevent any form of human activity to proceed at all.
Can David Vincent convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun?
We desperately need more evidence of how the idiots work, and a shared understanding of the most effective ways to identify them, isolate them, and remove them to a place where they have no access to the tools of bureaucracy.
In 'The Invaders', the aliens were revealed by the following characteristics (taken from this fan site).
- No Pulse
- Don't Bleed
- No Heart Beat
- Some Have No Emotion
- Pure Oxygen Kills Them
- Strange Body Xray
- Deformed Small Finger
In our case, things aren't so easy. Idiot invaders can only be detected by a superficial examination of what they actually do all day, and whether it tends to help or to hinder any useful work being done or other human endeavour to be achieved.
How will a website help?
As we begin to understand their mode of operations, we need to deploy our own tools and techniques to unite real human beings against the invaders, turning the everyday human population into a well-informed engine of counter-espionage to defeat the idiots within our ranks.
The idiots appear to have infiltrated so deeply, and so effectively, that their idiocy is beginning to be accepted. This must be stopped. If reports are gathered from anonymous contributors across multiple organisations, they could then be collated and cross referenced to close the net on this conspiracy and eliminate infiltration of our organisations by these idiot bodysnatchers.
Collaborative internet technologies could provide us with the perfect robotic helper, a server maintained in secure conditions, in an unknown colo tirelessly gathering and matching together reports of idiot behaviour throughout our society. This Invaders clip sums up the idea nicely
If this website is successful, idiots should not be able to move freely from one 'added-value' role to another, moving on just after they have screwed their responsibilities completely, but just before it is discovered.
Using the site, the resistance will identify them and pillory them alongside the ridiculous circumstances for which they are responsible. They will remain branded for life. Perhaps they are merely a puppet of another idiot behind the scenes. They will be offered their chance to speak, but justice will be swift, and typically involve snotty emails and a webpage dedicated to a comprehensive record of that individual's idiot exploits.
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