A brilliant, bitter satirical short on what would happen if a major corporation tried to design something as simple as a Stop sign.
In the last edition of the Grinder Dialogues, I commented that technology wasn't making the managerial class obsolete so much as the collapse of the meritocracy was turning management into a dumping ground for the relatively lackluster scions of the upper and upper-middle classes.
Combine that with a corporate culture that focuses on marketing and image over all else and you have the perfect cluster-fucking storm depicted above: packs of people that can think up buzzwords for anything but have lost all touch with any practical day-day application of product.
This is part of a broader trend during Breaking Times, call it the Age of Illusion. While many of the old institutions and patterns no longer deal adequately with modern challenges, there is a great deal of thought patterns invested in them. Coming up with workable alternatives would be haphazard and risky.
Thus governments, corporations and organizations go for illusions of strength, strategy and competence. Ironically, more time is often spent cultivating images of those qualities than on developing the traits themselves. Add that in with a primary interest in keeping invested social groups happy over effective design and you only increase the depths of the delusion.
Perception is not reality, or at least not all of it. If you doubt that, look at the financial meltdown. Disconnecting things like money or power from any grounding in reality results in catastrophe.
More on this later. Until then, think about how the streets would look with the pink/blue monstrosities above.
(A tip o' the hat to Nadya Lev for this one)
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