Upset and Angry

I’m So Bored With The USA

What’s going on in the USA right now breaks my heart.

I’ll skirt around the wider political issues and focus on the government machinery that is being hacked about by Musk and his band of fresh-faced uber-nerds.

People are being summarily sacked for no reason, ruining their careers and their lives, endangering the health of them and their families. They are being treated with bad faith, promises that they based key life decisions on broken in a moment. Veterans who have served the country being discarded without a care.

One employee was sacked one day before the end of his probation period. He had been promised promotion opportunities if he passed his probation (which he would have done) and was on the verge of completing his student loan replacement. On that basis, he and his wife moved and bought a house in DC and started a family. Now that apparent security has been pulled from beneath him, an $80,000 loss in the immediate term, and who knows what damage financially and psychologically in the longer teem.

The USA has always has a more brutal employment environment than the UK and the rest of Europe but this is off the charts.

It offends me.

Partly because it is so stupid, so unnecessary and so counter-productive. Smashing things up is not the way to improve efficiency. The law of unintended consequences will surely come to pass, and the costs will exceed any savings. Morale amongst government employees will plummet as any goodwill is destroyed. Posts will become harder to fill because trust has been destroyed.

An efficiency drive was carried out under the Clinton administration, cutting 400,000 from the government workforce. It was a six-month programme focused on improving government, not simply on cutting it. It was driven by the employees themselves, who knew how things could be improved, and managed by people with deep expertise in government administration. It was implemented without disruption.

But disruption is the aim here. Importing the ideology of Silicon Valley, disruption is seen as an unalloyed good. It’s the new god to be worshipped.

It also offends me because either is deliberate. This performative cruelty is intentional, it’s objective is to cow government employees into submission and neutralise their functions as a constraint on executive power.

Don’t believe me? The hand behind all this is not Musk, or even Trump, but Russell Vought, Head of the Office of Management and Budget. One of the architects of Project 2025, Vought spoke of the plans for a second Trump presidency;

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Yes, that’s US government policy. They are saying the quiet bit out loud. It makes me feel physically sick.

It’s the naked use of power. It uncaring, reckless, ruthless - in other words, it’s sociopathic.

I’m upset and angry. And that’s exactly how I felt about the world of work when I started Decrapify Work and this newsletter.

We Don’t Care

I’ve come the same conclusion here as I have about organisations more broadly. They do not do the things that would produce the outcomes that they want, even though these things are known and proven. They do not do the things that the evidence points to.

This is not because they are stupid, it’s because they don’t want to do those things. They want to use their power to force everyone to conform to their worldview. They don’t care about the damage that is done, to people or planet, they just want to impose their will, bend the world to their ideal.

Trump is just pursuing this more openly. He pretended to care last time, now he’s not bothered about showing his indifference and callousness.

In his wake, he gives permission to other ‘leaders’ to also stop bothering. In fact, he insists on it. Drop that DEI nonsense. Get rid of the green crap. Purge your organisation of the woke mind-virus.

Some follow because they’ve been dying to do that anyway. They’ve been given permission to put their employees ‘in trauma’ and they aren’t going to miss out on that!

Some follow because they want tax cuts and less regulation. Some follow because they want the government contracts that Trump is eyeing as his personal gift. They want to be at the court of the Don and get the favours he dishes out to favourites.

Ah the irony of the Broligarchs, with their excessive concentrations of money and power that dwarf many sovereign states, demonstrating their fealty to Trump to get their hands on even more money. These ‘entrepreneurs’ who want to suck at the teat of the taxpayer to sustain their bloated, exploitative empires and their overweening egos.

They claim that government is too big and costs too much, all the time simpering at Trump’s feet to get the government money to play with their rockets and see who’s got the biggest one.

Who knew the Master of the Universe would turn out to be such a bunch of losers?

I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down

Sorry if I’m a bit rant-ey this week but it’s been a challenging time for my mental heath, and I’m sure for many of you (if you think what’s going on is all fine and Trump’s a stand-up guy, pease unsubscribe now).

This is my third attempt to write this, such is the maelstrom of thoughts whirling around my head.

So let’s talk about our new business god, disruption, shall we?

As I said, disruption has become this unalloyed good. Every company wants to be ‘disruptive’, everyone wants to be a ‘disruptor’. Business gurus cry out ‘Disrupt or be disrupted!’ Disruption is exciting, thrilling, dynamic.

Disruption is sexy!!!

Unless, of course, you happen to be disrupted. Or collateral damage.

This fetishisation of disruption is essentially driven by greed. It comes from the mantras of the Silicon Valley startups, such as ‘always in beta’, ‘fail often, fail fast’ and the one beloved of Zuckerberg, ‘move fast and break things’. From these sentiments, start-ups have grown into global behemoths, making their owners some of the richest people ever to walk the planet.

Everyone wants to find the next Facebook, everyone wants a piece of a ‘unicorn’, so everyone wants disruption.

Disruptors claim their favoured tool is software, which, as Mark Andreesen proclaimed, is eating the world. Turns out that is often accompanied with the circumvention of regulations, taxes and other constraints on established players. Success is as much about gaining unfair advantage as it is about innovation and software prowess.

This is not Schumpeter’s ‘creative disruption’, this is not the innovation and change that marks the renewal of capitalism as we pass from one business cycle to the next. This is a land grab, the aim being to sequester markets and establish monopolies so that super-profits can be extracted.

What innovation has come from the ‘big 5’ tech companies in recent years? Their core products are a decade or more old. They are simply extending those products, at best. At worst, through the process named by Cory Doctorow as ‘enshittification’, they are making them worse in order to extract ever more money from their, now largely captive, users. (You’re going to say AI, aren’t you? Well, I think you need to read this previous missive and this one on why that’s not going be what they are talking it up to be. And it’s not really here yet, other than as another part of the enshittification).

This ‘disruption’ is not sexy and it’s not going to be productive. It’s just destructive.

I do think we are coming to the end of a business cycle and cataclysmic change is due, we are approaching a phase of ‘creative destruction’. We were going to go into a state of chaos at some point. I just didn’t think the USA would decide to initiate it by blowing themselves up.

Hold On

It is something of an understatement, then, to say that we are in a period of uncertainty. We know how that impacts the world of work. Businesses hold back investment and hiring, they seek to reduce costs and they seek safety. For some, that means returning to what they know, to their place of comfort, which often appear to be some time around the late 1980s. So DEI is gone, Return to Office is in, experimentation is over. They are hunkering down and hoping to weather the storm.

This is totally wrong-headed. Building a stockade just makes you a sitting target. What is needed to survive is daring, experimentation, agility.

Darwin didn’t say that evolution was the survival of the fittest. He said it was the survival of the most adaptable.

So I still think that moving towards more progressive working practices, more democratic and self-organising organisational structures, to a more high-trust and human culture, are the right things to do. In fact, I’m even more certain of it. But the headwinds have just got a lot stronger. For the short term, at least.

Who knows what happens when we emerge from the chaos? The world will certainly be changed, and perhaps there lies the opportunities.

In the meantime, I am sadden and angered by what is happening, and my heart goes out to those who are being treated so brutally.