Re:Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
by dundarious on Saturday December 18, 2021 @02:00PM
(#29607404)
OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
Re:Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
by yjftsjthsd-h on Sunday December 19, 2021 @03:18AM
(#29612324)
> to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?
Re:Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
by dundarious on Sunday December 19, 2021 @11:22AM
(#29615137)
Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).
Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.
Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.
Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.