Economists, who can be relied upon to be wrong about everything, have somehow convinced us that computers contribute to human productivity.
With complicated formulae and measurements of time, effort, and the relative cost of communicating between continents, the economics profession has concluded that we’re all better off, and the world is a great deal more prosperous, because we’re all connected to the internet.
Anyone who works for a living – or, for that matter, anyone who has employees – knows that’s nonsense. And anyone like me, who has things to write and deadlines to meet, knows that the internet is the enemy of productivity. Give me a computer and a task to accomplish with it and I will ignore the task and surf the web instead, as I did for the past week while pretending to be hard at work on a television script.
I’ve learnt some interesting things. For instance, if you explore the website for the US Central Intelligence Agency, you’ll find a copy of a declassified spy manual from 1944. That’s towards the end of the Second World War, as the allies in Europe were pushing towards Berlin and, in the Pacific, the Japanese were being pushed out of South East Asia.
At that moment, spies were connecting with their counterparts behind enemy lines, acts of sabotage were being executed, and underground resistance fighters were being activated.
The manual – which, honestly, you can read on the website – was written by Bill Donovan, “Wild Bill Donovan,” they called him, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the modern CIA (if you can bring yourself to think of the CIA as modern). The manual is called Simple Sabotage, and it outlines ways that covert agents can make things difficult for the enemy on their own turf. There’s a lot in it about blowing up bridges and derailing trains, but the part that grabbed me was a guide to making life confusing, inefficient and difficult for the enemy on his own turf. This is a “how to drive your enemy nuts” manual.
Here’s a snippet, suggesting that covert agents create discord in their workplaces and “adopt a non-cooperative attitude”, which “may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickering, or displaying surliness and stupidity”. This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the “human element”, is frequently responsible for “accidents, delays and general obstruction even under normal conditions”.
To win a war, the manual suggests, it helps to create a toxic atmosphere in your enemy’s places of business, which sounds about right until you remember that “bickering, surliness and stupidity” pretty much define the working conditions of anyone who works in a large modern corporation, with layers of management piled on top of each other, endless email chains, non-specific work requirements and double-speaking senior management.
Someone, it seems, is putting that old manual to use in the modern business environment.
There’s even more eerily prescient advice about the best way to slow everything down, impede progress, frustrate decision-making and undermine productivity: “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions. Make ‘speeches’. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never fewer than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Be worried about the propriety of any decision – raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated is within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”
In other words, to destroy your enemy by infiltrating their defences, hobbling their efforts and undermining their progress, ultimately you bring them to their knees by making sure you have a lot of pointless meetings where nothing gets done, which describes every business meeting I’ve ever attended.
To be totally honest, I’ve indulged in at least some of those behaviours, especially the one admonishing a saboteur to “cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks”.
So here’s the question: are there clever “simple saboteurs” hiding within the ranks of every major corporation on Earth, or are these behaviours – talking too much, putting off decisions, surliness, stupidity – simply normal human organisational behaviour?
Realistically, of course, it’s probably the latter. But it’s hard not to at least entertain the thought that some diabolical genius has read that old spy manual from 1944 and is busy implementing its suggestions through a vast network of corporate saboteurs.
On the other hand, that all seems like a lot of trouble to go to, when all you want to do is slow productivity to a trickle. The simplest and fastest way to do that, as we all know, is to issue each employee a brand new computer.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
