I can’t argue that we need our monoliths, those huge, slowly churning machines that make things like passports and licenses and federal highways possible.
There’s just too many of us anymore to expect individualized service.
Massive immobile systems work best when you give them exactly what they want in exactly the order needed.
Follow the system precisely and you’ll get precisely what the system is designed for, even if the picture on the ID never really catches your best personal essence.
But get on the wrong side of an intractable system and, simply put, you can’t get there from here.
Some monoliths, like the courts, form the backbone of our democracy, but ironically are probably the closest thing we have to a Soviet bloc operation.
They are strictly authoritarian, rigid in process, not made to be user friendly, and more than anything else, run on paper work, the true lifeblood that courses through any monolith.
“Do you have your YRX-dash-4?”
“Uh, well …what?”
“NEXT!”
It’s the reason why we’ve all been reduced to numbers; computers can stack numbers in neat little piles of tens and hundreds and thousands.
I’m a nine-digit entity to the Social Security Administration, but only eight numbers are needed to make me me to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Six little piggies make me unique to my Credit Union but only three are needed to remind the officers at the East Erie Turners that I’ve paid my yearly dues.
As I stand in yet another line to pay another ridiculous amount of money to feed yet another machine that ultimately does more to self-sustain than perform for me and mine, it crosses the mind that numbers don’t have to go to the bathroom.
Numbers are quiet and dependable and always come up in the right order.
Human beings, on the other hand, are messy.
Humans have excuses and mitigations and exceptions.
Humans have reasons and alternatives and exemptions.
Humans fall through the cracks; they seek delays and wonder why we can’t just put our heads together to come up with a win-win.
Humans, at least some of them, can be spontaneous and creative and versatile, concepts that just wouldn’t do for any self-respecting monolith.
In short, humans and monoliths don’t work all that well together.
That thought struck suddenly, as I shifted from Person Number 8 to Person Number 7 in line.