Paul Tan
If you have lived in Seattle long enough, you have felt it: the slow attrition of adult responsibility under what I have come to call Managed Care. It shows up as speed bumps, traffic cameras, and No Turn on Red signs the size of billboards, with giant red dots in case you forgot what red means. Each one, on its own, makes a kind of sense. A dangerous intersection earns a four-way stop, then a blinking light, then a full signal. That is how reasonable people respond to a real problem. But somewhere along the way, the reasonable response stopped being a response to a specific problem and became a general posture toward any decision we human beings might make.
I noticed how far it had gone when I finally made it through the new bump field on my path to the Safeway. Shocks, struts, and springs got their usual workout. Tillamook ice cream was on special, half off, and I reached for the freezer door, which would not budge. You guessed it: five or six doors in a row, all locked. This is on top of the gated entrance, the checker with his marker at the exit, and the cameras over every checkout register. (My favorite story from this store: when the city banned plastic bags and put a charge on paper, the plastic shopping baskets all disappeared. The manager told me more were on order. Yes, customers were taking them home as containers. Not one or two. An epidemic.)
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has a name for what is happening here. In his recent work Situation und Konstellation, he describes how modern life is being reorganized away from situation (the lived, particular moment, calling for judgment) and toward constellation, the systems and protocols that process us. In the situation, we act. In the constellation, we execute. Action is the human capacity to move and be moved by what is in front of us; over time, it builds the everyday wisdom of when to turn into traffic, when to extend grace that isn’t strictly deserved, when the rule should bend to the person. Execution is the rule applied and the box checked. Rosa’s examples are small and recognizable: the fast-food worker who isn’t allowed to replace a dropped burger, the conductor who can’t waive a fare for a rider in obvious need, the soccer referee whose goal call is taken back by a video room in Cologne. An American reader can supply the strike zone. In each case, a human being who used to be trusted has been moved aside so the system can do its work.
The speed bump is the constellation in physical form. It does not ask you to slow down; it makes you slow down. It does not trust you; it replaces you. And once a road has enough of them, drivers find another road, at which point the speed bump crews fire up their blacktop machines and get to work again. The logic has no natural stopping point. Arterial speed limits dropped from 30 to 25. Four-lane arterials became three, with bike lanes. Each move is defensible on its own terms; together they describe a city that has stopped trusting the person at the wheel. I assume the groceries will arrive by transporter beam.
I do not think the planners are villains. Most are decent people responding, one rule at a time, to harms that are real: a child in a crosswalk, a cyclist on a dark arterial. The planner wants the funerals to stop, and the driver wants to be trusted with judgment, and both desires are good. That is what makes it so hard to see what is being lost. The cost of the constellation is not visible in any single rule; it is visible only in the shape of the life the rules together produce.
Here is the shape, in one story. Years ago I licensed foster parents for the state, and the Washington Administrative Code governing the work kept growing. One year we had a sixteen-year-old who needed a home. A good family was ready to take him. The licensing hold-up was a small koi pond in their backyard, which lacked the required safety fence. The rule exists because children have drowned in pools and ponds, and the rule applies to all licensed homes regardless of the age of the child placed there. The state licensor could not exercise judgment about a sixteen-year-old and a koi pond. The licensor would be sued, fired, or blamed if anything went wrong, and the constellation gave them no place to stand. To their enormous credit, the family fenced it. Another couple might reasonably have given up, and a kid would have lost a home. What we have just described is a system in which the survival of a good placement depended on the willingness of two adults to do something unreasonable on a teenager’s behalf, because the people inside the system were no longer allowed to.
This is what Rosa means by the atrophy of judgment. David Graeber, writing about what he called bullshit jobs, found that what wears people down in pointless work is seldom the pay; it is losing what the psychologist Karl Groos called the pleasure of being the cause. The fast-food worker who could have handed the girl a new burger would have carried that small act home with him, and felt the rest of the week differently for it. The licensor who could have looked at the pond, the kid, and the couple, and said yes, would have done real work that day. Instead, both of them executed. And the rest of us, on the other side of the counter, learned to expect less of one another, because the people in front of us were no longer permitted to give it.
A simple act of kindness, in this environment, has become something close to civil disobedience. It is available mostly to those who break the rules, work around the rules, or slow down enough to notice the person in front of them instead of the protocol. We do not have enough speed bumps, we are told, and more are coming. What we do not have, and what no amount of asphalt will give us back, is the everyday trust that lets a person on the spot determine for themselves how to just do the right thing.
Paul Tan, Founder, Good Protocols, SPC · goodprotocols.ai