Against control II; the workaround

We live inside systems governed by people who do not touch reality. I don’t mean this as an insult, and it is not a conspiracy. It is a structural fact about how modern power works. The people who make the most consequential decisions in our lives, about work, policy, infrastructure, money, risk, and legitimacy, operate entirely on symbols. They work with language, numbers, abstractions, narratives, and representations of representations. They do not build, maintain, repair, operate, or directly experience the material systems their decisions act upon. This is not because they are malicious or incompetent. It is because the structure of authority in our large, bureaucratic, media-saturated civilization selects for symbolic fluency rather than material contact. Once you see this clearly, a great deal of contemporary dysfunction stops being mysterious.