"Think of it always, speak of it never" was a catchphrase of the prewar German right noticed by Adorno, and it referred to politics: preferring the deed (such as beating up political opponents) the Nazis distrusted "wordy" theoreticians up to (but NOT including) the men at the top.

For the ordinary Party member, speaking and writing presented the leadership with uncontrollable interpretations of Naziism (such as Ernst Rohm's working-class interpretation) for which the leaders would have to answer.

To understand the negative logic of MIS, we need not call MIS managers "fascists", only understand how Fascism gets its power from lower middle class ways of being and thinking that are operant in clerical life.

For example, I raised the idea of the "daily build" to avoid misery at build time. All the same, I am well aware that if the subalterned programmer says, why don't we do a daily build, he is suspect, almost immediately, in MOST organizations as having an axe to grind and a self-interest inimical to the overall performance of the corporation, a performance which is mystified lest it be seen to be identical with the aggrandizement of the suits, and we all go postal.

Generally speaking: precisely to the extent that a programming innovation is clear and distinct it will encounter resistance. Therefore if you write a "white paper" full of false promises and unexplained Utopian hopes, you get into less trouble than if you propose the replacement of Windows by Linux, so there and take that (pow) right in the kisser.

In the Mumps discussion, a programmer came along and itemized its deficiencies. No answer was made other than to say that its mere existence proved its worth in the VAGUEST possible way.

The system as a whole is genuinely invested in precision and performativity. But dialectically, its individual agents in the corporation are well-advised to cultivate imprecision and to "perform" in ways so self-serving that they damage the objective micro-performance of the system.

The dialectic results from a contradiction: the corporation *qua* corporation admits no economics except cooperation-destroying laissez-faire, yet relies on cooperation amongst its members, both egalitarian within the work group and a margin of pure slave labor (unpaid work time "to get the job done").

My kid has read Gilles Deleuze on "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" but I have not, but the title is intriguing.

The programmer is told that "if only" he would learn to "speak management's language" then he'd be able to "sell" his ideas.

Now, I find selling fun. I've had to do it and it cheers me up to buttonhole a customer and get him all cheered up in turn and ready to sign on the dotted line.

Marx thought selling to be evil, but my more sophisticated image is that of "sales" being a sort of economic endorphin, a smile, an improper joke, a cheap cigar and a shoeshine lightening the gloom of Depression, as did Scott Joplin's Wall Street Rag:

"Panic on Wall street: brokers feeling melancholy."
"Good times coming..."
"Good times have arrived!"
"Listening to the strains of genuine Negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares."

And, I've never understood the mulish dull resentment programmers have for sales people.

All the same, the IDEAL would be to dispense with the endorphin. It would be ideal instead to just be able to work at the limit of your capabilities without having in fact to "cost justify" each attempt at improvement...lest some dullard accuse you of wasting "time" by doing quality work.

For this is what it has come to. Computerization has so demonstrated to the ordinary person the ability to equate quality with quantity and it has so removed the very idea of "quality," of a concept not reducible to bits and bites, that today, programmers in the corporation will ASSUME, when they see halfway decent code, that it must have taken "too long" to write!

"Speak of it never". Basically, the replacement of quality by quantity (the "bottom line") in the corporation causes metaphors ("mindless coding", "coding grunt", "the troops", "the trenches" and so on) to become realities. To speak of it, to form a plan, to say why don't we do a daily build, is to take upon oneself the ORAL form of the Pharaoh, the leader and to violate a "real metaphor" of WWI chateaux generaliship (that era's term for managing men about to die from comfortable country houses).

Speak of it never, but internalize, take to heart, the corporation's goals. And then of course to get laid off "for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all".