Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going…

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the challenges facing them. Short thread. /1

Nearly every person I’ve spoken to expressed relief to be free of the burden of trying to keep things going with bits of string and sticky tape. And being the constant target of abuse from both internal managers, and customers, reacting hysterically to the collapse. /2

This isn’t enough seen. That a society takes many years, decades, to shift fundamentally. The massive push to de-regulate our societies, to privatise them, has come to a disastrous endgame right now, after 70+ years. There’s no fast or easy way to restore what’s been lost. /3

As the globe has grown exponentially in population, a counter-movement of all-out assault on the collective institutions that are needed to manage that heaving mass of humanity could not have been more disastrously timed. But here we are, trying to fix global catastrophes…/4

…with ‘personal responsibility’. Like trying to put out the Fire of London with a water pistol. it gets even worse, sadly, because as that great fanatical, fundamentalist wave of privatisations and re-regulation unfolded, it entered deep inside organisations too. /5

Expertise continuously outsourced to external consultancies has meant there’s no real succession happening. As the experienced staff retire, there’s nothing left to replace them. Nobody has a clue what to do. The consultants long since gone, to enjoy their big payouts. /6

Other industries have been entirely privatised, and ‘corporate knowledge’ there is entirely at the whim of the longevity of those who bought them. Often today those are cowboy financial institutions, there only for quick ROI. So there’s no build-up or passing-on of knowledge. /7

Infrastructure being run into the ground, look at the electricity generators. Talk to the engineers and maintenance staff there and you’ll hear nightmare stories. The whole infrastructure of social life is collapsing. And the perversion of this? /8

The people who did it TOLD us that’s what they were doing. ‘There is no such thing as society’, they said. And that’s where we ended up. Because there was such a thing as society, obviously, but decades of them doing everything in their power to dismantle it have worked. /9 https://t.co/jh2WmsstfP

People want a positive message, and apart from the sheer complexity of the technical infrastructure needed to keep societies running now providing some inertia against this wrecking ball idiot belief system, there really isn’t one. The Ayn Rand groupies have stuffed us. /10

It’s going to be a (privatised) roller coaster ride from here, and there are no guarantees we’ll survive with any of our normal expectations of social life intact. The idea that a popularity-based mechanism like elections might save us is ridiculous. /11

We’re so in love with the team sports initiative rivalry of social life that we’ll happily Tweet away as civilisation collapses, convinced we’re mobilising the resistance and setting up support groups etc. The Titanic’s band playing as the ship goes down. /end

And bloody auto-correct in some of those Tweets, sorry, can’t edit it now.