Don’t tick boxes

From The Jolly Contrarian
Revision as of 14:55, 8 August 2020 by Amwelladmin (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights.
Index — Click ᐅ to expand:
Tell me more
Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Modern dogma writ large. In the mortal, unlistened-to words of tiresome Victorian librettist Otto Büchstein, La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza.[1]

This disposition that ticking a box - fulfilling a formal requirement to have taken a step, followed a process, or sublimated an original thought should generate any comfort other than a false one, feeds on, just as it nourishes, related dogmas: of cost reduction, at all cost, that all unknowns can be known, that all vestiges of risk can neutralised, bifurcated, cauterised and eliminated to leave a pure, crystalline residue of concentrated reward. That history is at an end, that the universe can be brute-force computed, and the fact that it hasn’t yet is a minor inconvenience that we can tide over just as long as we check of few boxes and keep a clear audit trail.

Box ticking is tedious, in the technical sense of being intrinsically wasteful.

See also

Otto Büchstein’s dreary but important opera La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza.

References

  1. Literally, “The Victory of Form over Substance”. Never popular.