24/7?

Andy Tegethoff writes that his team must perform "the labors of Hercules" merely, if I understand him, to get to the starting gate of having management trust his new technology.

In the actual legend, Hercules performed his labors on behalf of an ungrateful goddess, and when he returned home, he slaughtered his wife and his children: the story appears in dramas by the Greek playwright, Euripides and the Roman playwright (and tutor of Caligula), Seneca.

The Greeks, and perhaps also the Romans, always seem in their drama, sacred to the Greeks, to tell us something indirectly and widdershins.

In Seneca, Hercules is a case of post-traumatic stress and the scene in which he awakes from his madness, to find his family in pieces all about him, is unbearable. Hercules wakes, and he asks, quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga, what place is this, what region, what corner of the world.

The Greeks, perhaps even the Romans under even Caligula, knew at the level of daily life that things have to make sense somehow in the large, a large that was represented in the germination of the seasons, and narrated as Demeter, as Apollo's transit of the sun.

Today's "rationality" involves a deliberate sacrifice of what for Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno was indeed a human need.

"This is America, baby. Our names don't mean shit." - Pulp Fiction

And this is why there is indeed a personality who exults in having to manually reformat 2500 stored procedures on a nice summer's day when he could go to Wrigley Field.

Recall that despite the capitalist theodicy, nothing has to make sense as a whole, especially if we participate in the deliberate manufacture of insanity.

The management that forces programmers to work 24/7 may have no rational basis whatsoever. In fact, their name may be Alec Baldwin's name in Glengarry Glen Ross: "my name is fuck you".

I am reminded here of a prediction made in the 1980s by military analyst John Keegan, that "the next war" would be fought by its soldiers 24/7, using close air support and night vision to overcome natural barriers to a continuous combat.

[Their commanders will get their beauty sleep while claiming they didn't. This happened in WWI and there is absolutely no reason why it won't happen now.]

In the current conflict in Iraq, the motto of the troops was indeed "no sleep until Baghdad". This of course reversed the situation at Agincourt, where good King Henry could not sleep but the merest slave, crammed with distressful bread, slept in Elysium.

This was "rational" in that it was part of the Powell doctrine of sudden, continuous, unrelenting and overwhelming force, combined with the Rumsfeld doctrine of not waiting for all logistics and being willing to overextend supply lines, especially if you're an idiot and a thug.

It caused casualties, drug use, and post-traumatic stress, but in the new world order of rational irrationality and irrational rationality, it makes perfect sense, since it subordinates human needs to a "system" which in the case of Iraq decided *Carthago delenda est* (Carthage must be destroyed).

Carthage was destroyed in the case of Iraq, but because the war was justified as part of an irrational whole, we're now like, now what.

The object lesson wasn't even the destruction of Iraq, instead it was the demonstration that a systemic telos must always supersede human needs, or else we might (shudder) go back to the 1960s.

Or something.

The "rationality" that justified the war, whether in Bush's barks or Blairs more mellifluous tones, was very postmodern in the sense that it tried to incorporate irrationality, for example when Rumsfeld claimed during the offense on Baghdad that "no plan survives contact with the enemy". In fact, the plan was no plan at all, since leading generals said after considerable study it was insufficient, particularly as regards pacification, and it went through a last minute "patch" when the parliament of the Turks refused American forces transit rights.

Just as programmers find themselves reminding managers of things the latter should have learned at school, it's probable that the decisionmakers of March 2003 didn't know that the Turks HAD a parliament. Knowledge is for little people.

In programming, the *telos* of the shop can be in fact the invisibility and meaninglessness of the programmer's jobs which then, in an irrational rationality, reassures upper management and the owners that there is no possible point of failure represented by chaotic humanity, or if there is, there's someone to blame.

Horkheimer is clear enough. "Rationality" as a collective expression wouldn't equate to "self-interest" (Hobbes figured that one out). It would instead seek a collective Utopia in the form of the Pareto-optimal reconciliation of society.

Wow. That hurt.

What it MEANS is that society would allow everyone to better themselves so long as this disadvantaged nobunny else. Zero-sum games would be like, out.

Imagine that (John Lennon had a song called Imagine, didn't he. They killed him, didn't they.)

A society in which ANYONE can become rich IF he can demonstrate that he didn't screw anyone else.

Utopian? But the lesson of solid MIS applications design, so seldom seen indeed, is that as soon as you can put the goal into clear natural language, you can do it unless it is self-contradictory.

The problem is that the collective "rationality" of today seeks Utopia only for some (the "successful", usually selected by an accident of birth or a willingness to kick mega ass) and since this "rationality" is linked to the domination of nature, AND man is part of nature, this necessarily implies the domination of man by man.

Which makes Utopia truly Utopia, or nowhere, because insofar as the dominated struggle they are going to bring down the proud tower.

This system will, I think, generate meaningless business offices in which people expend energy, not on solving problems (even the pseudoproblems presented by greed, selfishness, fear and n-level reinsurance), but on demonstrating that they are eligible for continued employment.

Here, the project manager will indeed ensure management that his boys are studly duddly programmers who will sleep on cots to get the job done, yes sirree Bob.

As C. Wright Mills realized, much of the energy generated by the white collar is waste motion, since it consists of assurance that the white collar is worth his hire, including 24/7 work.

It becomes in fact the doomed attempt at a negative self-mastery, the cartoon reversal of self-realization.

I am being precise, because I have seen the best minds of my generation wasting their spirit in an expanse of shame, at Hooters and elsewhere.