Edgelord #4: Be Competent, by Lev Parker
Wondering why your books and records don’t arrive on schedule—or why nothing at all seems to work anymore? You’re not alone. Lev Parker bemoans it all
“Quiet quitting” is many dictionaries’ words of the year for 2022. Thousands of staff in non-essential jobs are indeed #quietquitting on social media, but anyone who has left the house after Covid can say with reliable frustration how vast swathes have disengaged from their roles in the economy without bothering to say anything.
Most stations in society that haven’t been replaced with a digital interface are now manned by a worker who is decidedly not engaged in organized resistance or industrial action. By simply zoning out and refusing to lift a finger (“I’m sorry, I don’t know, have you looked on the website?…”), the quiet quitters who we rely on for essential everyday tasks, but who seem intent on doing the absolute bare minimum, are passively enabling civilization’s terminal decline.
The gulf between the complexity of systems and the individual’s ability to navigate them has never been greater. Average citizens, small businesses and publishers such as Morbid Books must now navigate an inaccessible labyrinth of digital applications and unmanned “customer service points” to make basic infrastructure function at all, let alone on time. The result is a downward spiral in every realm of human endeavor, from delivery of our titles to subscribers to mental health and personal relationships.
Standards of life have disintegrated so much that people in major cities now have less reliable mail services than soldiers of past generations on the front lines of world wars. Since technology came along to replace them, companies’ own employees are clueless about how the machines operate: for most people, online interfaces are harder to follow than a Thomas Pynchon novel. Each step of governments’ and companies’ elaborate processes now require hours of research, YouTube tutorials and interactions with chatbots which frequently get them nowhere.
An increasing army of middlemen such as Virtual PA’s have sprung up to profit from the new upsurge in demand from people who recently discovered that basic functionality in everyday life is now a luxury billed at $50 an hour if you want to do anything with your waking hours besides fill in compensation forms for books lost in the mail (we wrote off over $2,000 worth of lost books during Covid), connecting devices, installing plugins, and other tasks that ultimately amount to making up for society’s ever-worsening deficit of competence.
Technologists are said to be on the cusp of creating artificial intelligence, yet I find myself increasingly unable to locate organic intelligence. How can it be that governments and tech giants are sinking billions into 5G broadband, yet I still struggle to get a phone signal by the coast?
It isn’t surprising that increasing numbers of people are coming around to Ted Kaczynski’s apocalyptic way of thinking. In 1995 the “Unabomber Manifesto” predicted: “Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.”
The machines have advanced, but a lesser-told version of the story is how humans have become so stunningly weak. We are rapidly losing not only our ability to act in the world, to make things happen and keep them running on time, we can’t even communicate with one another clearly and effectively.
When people contacted one another by telephone, they had to know how to say “no,” because they answered it before they knew the question or who was asking. Text messages changed our inbuilt response system by enabling us to ignore all but the pleasant or convenient messages. When the mail system was digitized, companies discovered they could spam thousands of recipients in one go, so people became further detached from their innate call-and-response system.
By 2022, the word “no” has become largely unused by most people who own a smartphone, which signals a stunning and rapid degradation in our fundamental human abilities. Our inability to communicate clear and simple truths and agree on a single objective reality outside the technological bubbles in our own heads may well be the beginning of the end for us as a species.
Futurists warn us that if Artificial Intelligence isn’t monitored and curtailed, the machines are in danger of enslaving us for their own ends. But those of us who have witnessed humans’ increasing powerlessness at the hands of the systems we created wonder if this is an absurdly misplaced concern, given how technology has already captured, weakened, rendered useless and incompetent most human beings already.
How is it possible for individuals or small groups to resist such powerful forces as entropy? Is it worth bothering doing anything at all to uphold basic standards when the entire species seems destined for extinction? I have been driven to despair, and wanted to give up doing what I love countless times, because the administrative frustrations of materializing any of my books or records seemed too dependent on other people’s apathy and ineptitude.
Most humans have subconsciously accepted their own powerlessness. From the Post Office to the police, the human beings still manning the stations yet to be automated, which keep society functional, no longer accept any responsibility for the processes they are tasked with upholding.
Capital’s imperative to cut costs while increasing output has lowered wages and squeezed budgets. Companies no longer bother to train staff, who respond to their disempowerment and lack of long-term prospects by not bothering to learn or perform any more than the absolute basic required to prevent them from losing their job.
Within living memory, there existed experts and specialists who could install and fix most of our tools and infrastructure, and they were contactable. In one generation the internet technician, university lecturer, postmaster and swathes of other frontline professions have been wiped out, replaced by outsourced ignoramuses whose main function is to evade responsibility and pass you on to somebody else—most likely an outsourced ignoramus in another department, at another company, in another country, or refer you back to the ultimate gods to whom we seem to have abdicated all control: technology.
Is resistance to such a system futile? Most people probably haven’t even considered the problem in these terms, so it would be inaccurate to say that they have actively concluded that it is futile. More like, they have just succumbed to apathy and mindless conformity to society’s downward trajectory. Encountering such people in everyday day life is tiresome enough, but depending on them for core tasks such as delivering your books or making your software work on your machine can be infuriating, leading to stress, depression and suicide.
Many bureaucratic establishments known to tip people to the brink of sanity have responded by putting up signs in the windows stating that staff deserve to be treated with respect. Citizens coming up against such effrontery can expect to be patronized, misdirected or treated with contempt by an untrained ignoramus who has no respect for them and no recognition that another person’s problems are equally deserving of diligence as their own.
In the face of such a system, anger and despair are proven to be self-defeating. The passive nihilism of the “quiet quitter” only furthers our demise. Resistance requires that people and organizations don’t even strive for excellence anymore—just basic competence.
Illustrations
1. Be Competent
2. Ted K
3. Marinetti
Adam Lehrer’s Manifesto for Psychological Warfare is the first title published by the Safety Propaganda imprint of Morbid Books, an unholy alliance with global distribution by Amazon.
Morbid Books continues to offer print subscriptions for its books and magazines, with packages making their way through the bureaucratic labyrinth as quickly as Lev and his volunteer supporters can make it happen. Subscribe to the Morbid Books mailing list to receive the Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto in a matter of days, and the other Morbid Books titles as quickly as the system allows!