Sometimes, work needs oversight, and if there is nobody watching, several people can get hurt, which was one of the reasons that the empire used to have several regulations. The presence of those regulations was meant to standardize certain efforts to reduce the need for supervision, which was how training and education developed. However, the main problem with any system within the imperial United States is that the foundation is slavery, ergo control, which means that not all oversight is good oversight. If people need to control the narrative and others, they create unnecessary roadblocks to efficiency and ultimately destroy their own usefulness in keeping a functioning society.
Within government jobs, new technology has been developed and swarms of educated workers have joined the workforce, leading to the possibility of progress. I say “possibility” because the biggest problem within the public sector is a bunch of people who have been in control for a very long time. No, older workers are not the bane of existence–and really, as a 45-year-old Black woman, I am technically a protected class. However, there are so many people who have put so many unnecessary steps in processes because without those processes, their jobs change, and they might lose power, or be entirely eliminated. My greatest disappointment from working with city and state governments is that most of them did not realize the potential of the age and skill diversity because more experienced workers had to be “right.”
Recently, I got a chance to work for the private sector, and I was quickly educated in the understanding that people are people, regardless of where they are. People who were more indebted to old understandings were completely unwilling to either release bad ideas or embrace the possibilities of new ideas. I had always been told that start-up culture was a chance to be more innovative, but basically, the founders were operating under the business models from more than 20 years ago. As a survivor of the dotcom bubble, I was able to finally realize why I would never be a good cog in the technology sector. There was simply too much effort required to support a delusion that no one had seen realized, and over two years of free labor had not been enough to bring anything to the surface.
Community organizing under the dominant narrative has basically gone down the toilet not just because of the technoligarchs, but because of the old hands who want everything to work the way it did when activism first started being televised. I cannot help but admit that I was drawn to the power of the television, and when I was studying in college, all those marching activists inspired me to do the same. Unfortunately, people are still focusing on protest, letter-writing, and voting–all of which involve the same tactics of begging the dominant narrative for permission to exist. Radical movements have been dismantled by even older radicals because people were able to get a small piece of the pie in the past, and they still believe that a corrupt system can work.
Drawing from the same wells that have run dry is the reason that the entire planet is enduring a drought, and it has been the fermentation of bad oversight that has led to the current destruction. Just because people have been doing something the same way for a long time is no reason to leave those people in positions of authority. Leadership requires malleability, and one thing that nobody has seen in the past 7 months is any sign that anyone has the capacity to come up with any new ideas. Asking people for permission to move forward will end in stagnation if the wrong oversight stays in power.
Chasing A Dying Empire 