So, in the last blog entry I discussed loosely this idea of systems and data loss during turnover between administrators. I’m using very “generic” language right now, because I think these systems can manifest in all kinds of places around us. I explained that there are different “phases” of function for a system as it experiencing these transitions, but that these phases are not distinct from one another, but rather a spectrum.

A few other important points, they can only exist on a timeline. This is not data you can read from a single point, you ultimately need to be able to compare a few different points of data to observe trajectories, but this is not to say that these states are necessarily sequential either–and one single administrator can embody traits that cannot be boxed into a single “phase” descriptor.

The founder for some system might be the de facto “innovator” who created most it, while ALSO exhibiting tendencies that will lead this system into a state of decay. And similarly, a person can transcend these states more or less at their discretion, so long as they are instilled with the ability to actually succeed. This might be a matter of training, of resources, or some other externality, but if a person lacks the basic needs required for success then obviously they aren’t going to get very far.

And, since there are many, many different systems interacting all the time, an administrator can be an agent of decay in one or an agent of innovation in another.

In fact, where I yesterday described the first phase as “introduction”, “innovation” is more appropriate since it doesn’t necessarily imply a position in a sequence.

And also, these systems being all around us and not bound by time, they are rising and falling around us all the time–and old systems are occasionally resurrected or repurposed as some new thing.

So to call all of this complex is something of an understatement, arguably a massive chunk of the human experience is directly tied to it since the trajectory of human progress through history is essentially a function of our ability to relay information, culture, art, and values from one generation to the next. Without some basic effort to overcome the decaying influence of time, we wouldn’t have anything, we’d all be living in mud huts and perhaps practicing some kind of nomadic agrarian society.

So… how the hell do you approach something like this? How do you try to pick apart the human tendency to create legacy? How do you analyze what works and what doesn’t when it comes to this formation of shared history, reality, past,whatever?

I used to have this sense that there was “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns” in history, in terms of things that had been lost to time, never to be re-discovered.

But in the last decade or so, I have concluded that that’s not really entirely right. There’s a substantial gray area of material that existed in the world and was not exactly deliberately preserved but can still be uncovered for those willing and able to search for it, but that being said research is not exactly a trivial thing to undertake. First of all, getting access to adequate research libraries is itself challenging, you need to be associated with some institution of higher learning generally or else you need to pay out of pocket for it.

Now, assuming you have access, you also need to know how to go about finding what you are looking for, and how to parse out the integrity of it. Just because something EXISTS doesn’t mean it’s inherently truthful, I’ve got books and books full of literary criticism from the 1930’s-50’s and remarkable amounts of it aren’t fit to be printed and it’s a wonder it ever passed as legitimate criticism. Yvor Winters famously encouraged Romantic poets to kill themselves rather than subject the rest of the world to their “morbid” poetry (I still think he was just a hater because he sucked as a poet, sorry not sorry).

And not only do you need to parse out truth or at least whatever is plausible from opinions and propaganda, you also need to be able to figure out how to FIND whatever you are looking for. Remember, this isn’t stuff that’s indexed in Google, you might have whatever information you are looking for stored in a footnote about some other larger subject, so effective research is at least in part related to the effective navigation of the connections between these different subjects so that you can use a tertiary source of information to find something actually relevant to what you are looking for.

And then, lastly, you need to be able to organize and synthesize all of this information into something meaningful.

So all that is to say–there’s a lot more out there than just “lost” and “found” data; our civilization is built upon the ruins of every preceding generation, and all of those histories are preserved in varying states, so long as anyone cares to dig for it and attempt to understand it or make it somehow coherent.

I think there is also a tendency to try to render history into, well… a “story” for the sake of coherency, but that’s only really useful in understanding sequences of events–history is constantly happening and never really stops, so a more accurate rendering of history would include not just a single sequence of events but every parallel sequence that could somehow impact events as they play out.

I think a lot of what I described above is important because these tendencies impact data-transitions between systems as administrators shift, not just in a historical sense but in a “day-to-day” sense. In my workplace, I can probably look up the way that things were done in some niche area before I got hired, if I had any reason to. I could surely find someone who could give me the information, but in my normal day-to-day I don’t really have any reason to seek out that information since it isn’t particularly useful to me as a “maintenance” administrator. Professionally, I’d like to think my role is somewhere between those “maintenance” and “innovation” states, but really a lot of the work I actually do involves preserving a status quo in these systems and preventing problems from arising.

So… my duties are not really to “innovate,” though I am invited to innovate occasionally at the behest of the important folks who relay messages to me from my bosses. On rare occasions where I am indulged, I love to try new things and experiment. But from a functional perspective, that is not really how I am most valuable to this organization–they would rather I keep things stable and keep the data accurate, so that’s what most of my time is dedicated to.

I do get opportunities to innovate as new systems and problems are encountered–new problems require solutions that are not always straightforward, and so innovation is required for solving unfamiliar problems for which no pre-determined “fix” is assigned. Otherwise, I maintain.

I’m getting into the weeds.

My point in this ultimately is that as far as the systems I engage with, I am likely somewhere in the “maintenance” phase/group, with occasional dips into the “innovation” area, and I think that at least for the area of the system I interact with this indicates that it is relatively healthy. We have a high degree of accountability, so most of our stakeholders have to do what they are responsible for, and apathy or lack of care is generally punished with poor output, so as far as systems go this one is relatively-self-sustaining, because there is accountability.

I find errors, and bring them to the attention of those that need to correct them, and they get fixed. That’s my job. I also relay best practices to new administrators joining our system, as do my peers.

So my role, essentially, is to ensure that this system is sustained for as long as possible; to prevent system decay.

Maybe this is why this has captured my interest. I’ve spent so much time fighting “system decay” professionally that I’ve begun to see it everywhere. “To the man holding a hammer, every problem is a nail.”

I don’t think I’d argue that my specific role needs to exist in every system, so long as my primary functions are reproduced in one fashion or another. Errors need to be identified and flagged for correction and there needs to be accountability. Those who make errors must be made aware of their errors and correct them.

This is where we run into trouble, I think. Because any given system is being administered by a person and as people we are all flawed and prone to weakness, impulsivity, laziness, and any other number of unflattering traits. And that’s not to say humans are universally terrible, but we all have at least a little terrible in us that we indulge sometimes and it really only takes a moment for us to lose that battle. If it becomes a pattern of behavior, then naturally system decay would follow.

Whenever an individual feels that his needs are being pitted against that of the system he or she is administering, you will have to expect there to be temptation that one will succumb to weakness and favor themselves over the system.

This might most easily be observed in terms of workload–if you feel your workload is too high, you might start slacking off and doing less work. I’ve done it. I don’t know too many who haven’t, at least once.

I think in the same territory, you will also find that some administrators over a system find that they can enrich their lives or experiences through manipulation of the system, so they may appear to function in their primary duties while also performing other tasks that are more geared around their own edification rather than anything that might maintain or improve the system they are charged with supporting.

For example, as a high-ranking professor you might make a deal with one of your subordinates, and you might say “hey, I’m planning to retire, if you use this book I wrote as the required textbook for our classes, I’ll make sure you get my job.” Now, this book may not be the best book for the students, and this subordinate may not be the best person for the job, but neither of those factors are relevant to the individuals who have bent the system to their benefit.

This is what corruption is, and this is how systems fall into decay, even without passive data loss.

The interesting thing about corruption is that while any given system can fall apart due to decay because simply maintaining things is challenging enough if nobody is specifically dedicated to the task, corruption is a kind of parasitism that depends on the health of the system for the individuals to continue to benefit from their corruption. Corruption, then, is MOST EFFECTIVE in a healthy system, but the more corruption that becomes present in a system, the less effectively it will function, which will ultimately make it progressively more difficult for existing and future corruption to hide behind the overall collective health of the system.

You see, if only one professor decided to make a corrupt deal to earn some extra income in their retirement, probably nobody would even notice. But if it was discovered by some other professor who thought “hey, I work hard, I should deserve a little extra too,” and THEY go on to make a similar deal… sooner or later many more follow-suit, because those that are in the positions to make these deals see that the corruption has succeeded without attracting notice or any negative consequence, so they want the reward without penalty too. Why “be punished” for “doing the right thing”?

And so, in this way, corruption can become infectious to a system in which it is present, a bit like “broken windows” theory, but while broken windows do not necessarily encourage an increase in general crime, the presence of corruption in a system opens up the possibility for more corruption because onlookers will frequently favor enriching themselves over turning in whatever corruption they uncover.

And even in the event that someone doesn’t witness corruption and decide to participate in it, they are not necessarily more likely to report it to an appropriate authority. In my past experiences, this was because of a combination of liability and lack of outcomes. Reporting issues to the wrong authority can result in damaging your working relationships without actually any resolution to the corruption at hand. So, systemic corruption can be a difficult illness to treat because for the average administrator, there is some risk, no direct reward, and possibly no resolution even comes from it. Why take personal risk if nothing is gained from it?

So this general perspective means that only the most egregious forms of corruption will typically come to light, but this, too is tricky because for any given system there is a kind of Overton Window. If no corruption is known to be present then ANY corruption will appear unacceptable, but the more petty corruption you learn about (like people cutting corners to make their jobs easier), the more acceptable it becomes, and so the threshold of how significant a form of corruption must be in order to face some kind of reckoning increases as the overall amount of corruption increases.

I think these tendencies result in a kind of death spiral phenomenon at times, because when corruption reaches a certain threshold, finding administrators who are not somehow participating in it becomes increasingly challenging. And if an administrator is participating in corruption, they are extremely unlikely to risk having that drawn attention to by trying to resolve some other form of corruption, so these agents of corruption will generally avoid addressing corruption, even when they do not personally benefit from it, because to do so would threaten whatever arrangements they are benefiting from.

But if everyone in a system is exploiting it for their own gain then it’s like a horse covered in a million mosquitoes; death by a million cuts. Any singular instance would barely make a scratch but only so much can be sustained before the system falls mercy to its corrupt administrators.

And corruption is not limited to business and politics. You could easily describe infidelity as a kind of corruption within a system of relationships. It’s the simple subversion or exploitation of a system for personal gain. If you were driving, this corruption might be using the HOV lane with only one driver, or running red lights.

And to be fair, as individuals we do not think of ourselves as players in systems. When I run a red light it is almost always a result of my bad judgement and a light becoming yellow sooner than I anticipated. I’m not violating traffic laws with the intention of subverting the entire traffic system, but I don’t think anyone ever really IS deliberately approaching corruption in this way. Corruption is often simply what happens when we put ourselves ahead of the things we are supposed to be caretakers over.

In traffic, on the roads, we are meant to be caretakers of ourselves and our fellow drivers, but generally we just view one another as obstacles or potential dangers (I certainly don’t trust most other drivers). So I don’t go into this system thinking of myself as an administrator of the system, I passively exist within it… except I do influence the system by existing in it and behaving in accordance to its laws.

So it’s hard not to conclude that at least in America we have arrived at some strange paradoxical individualism.

We don’t think of ourselves as belonging to larger systems, of how we contribute to the things we are apart of–we think of ourselves, singularly, and how we can navigate the obstacles of these systems for our own personal benefit.

But we also accept that as individuals, in many ways, we are no different/better/worse than anyone else. We don’t, on an individual level, matter. We are all replaceable cogs in the great machine. And therefor, our moral and ethical failures are of little overall significance. If our contributions are without meaning, then so too are our failures.

And because we are detached from these systems we participate in, only to be packaged into these homogeneous little boxes to fill the same roles and all be as replaceable as the parts on an assembly line, we accept our agency only as something defiant, but not as readily as something generative or productive.

It is easier for us to raise our fists and say “fuck you, I exist,” than it is for us to say “I am a part of this community and I want to help it thrive.”

And if you know me, you know I am introverted enough that the idea of me championing “community” is a joke, but my point remains–I can’t help but think perhaps we have been conditioned to favor our own individual scraping-by, rather than appealing to an idea that we collectively work to overcome challenges and maintain those things that we care to preserve.

So in some sense, I cannot help but view a lot of the ills in our society of late as a symptom of this overall mentality and acceptance of this as our station in life–in the face of systemic decay and corruption, we can fight individual battles on our own behalves, but orchestrating any greater challenge to the damages occurring within the system is nearly impossible. We’ve been discouraged from viewing our peers and neighbors as resources, and instead only as threats, obstacles, or distractions.

But in a healthy, functioning system, administrators all rely on one another to preserve the system. There’s inherent give, and take, and mutual support. Very little is accomplished in a vacuum by a lone individual.

So how do you overcome the challenge of the administrators of a system being conditioned to believe they are incapable of improving it? Of innovating? Or even maintaining?

How do you change course of decaying or thoroughly corrupted systems?

I don’t know. I guess I’m not done thinking about this whole “systems” thing yet, so maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

So, recapping–systems drift between “innovation,” “maintenance,” and “decay” phases based on the effective preservation and transmission of data, and corruption can exist anywhere in the system and will often continue to metastasize once it has taken root. We are capable of steering systems in healthier directions when we are both willing and able to, but we seem to have lost the will to do so for those who are able, while many have lost the ability to influence these systems directly. Further, we are divorced from cause and effect, and we no longer recognize clearly our own personal impact in our communities or the world around us.

How to fix it, I haven’t a clue.

If you read this, I hope it helped you pass the time and maybe gave you something interesting to consider. I probably sound like Charlie Kelly in the mailroom, but this will all probably be a lot more coherent if I ever decide to turn it into a formal paper. Believe it or not, this is what a lot of my formal papers look like before they come out of “pre-write” phase. Until then, you’re stuck parsing these mad ramblings. Take care of yourself, be well, and go make something new. Or old. Make whatever you want. Just make something.

-E