If you have lived in Seattle long enough, you have felt it: the slow attrition of adult responsibility
Paul Tan
If you have lived in Seattle long enough, you have felt it: the slow attrition of adult responsibility, overwhelmed by what I have come to call Managed Care. Speed bumps. Traffic cameras. 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 every possible decision us 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, the box checked, the script followed religiously. 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 umpire overruled by the video review of 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 perfect physical form of the constellation. 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. Honestly, it seems the only number of speed bumps that would finally satisfy our planners is the number at which we stop driving altogether. Speed limits dropped from 45 to 25. Arterials cut from four lanes to two, plus dedicated bike lanes. Each move is defensible on its own terms; together they describe a city quietly arguing with the existence of the car---or just fed up with us human drivers. Zero accidents, after all, is zero motor vehicles. I assume the groceries will arrive by transporter beam.
I do not actually think the planners are villains. Most are probably decent people responding, one rule at a time, to what they see as harms. 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 Codes 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. Sued, fired, blamed if anything went wrong---the constellation gave them no place to stand. To their enormous credit, the family fenced it. A lesser couple would have given up, and a kid would have lost a home. We should be honest about what we just described: 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. Burnout and meaninglessness at work---what David Graeber called bullshit jobs---are not really about pay. They are about agency. The fast-food worker who could have handed the girl a new burger would have carried that small act home with her, and felt the rest of the week differently for it. The licensor who could have looked at the pond, the fence, 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