At its base, this is an attempt to articulate something largely ineffable, an impression of social texture and quality. A feeling that one gets from being immersed in something that one can't quite get far enough outside of to see in its entirety.
Now, I've lived in California all my life. I've spent some time in places like Montana, Colorado, and Idaho and I've seen my share of severe weather, but I haven't traveled extensively enough to see the behavior of multiple authorities in different contexts of extreme weather or generally stressed conditions. And it becomes very difficult speaking precisely about broad social and economic patterns, as the further you zoom out, the more complex a body of phenomena is that you are trying to understand, coupled with the passage of time.
Sort of like trying to predict the weather. We call weather systems chaotic because of how incredibly complex they are, and how dramatically they are affected by so many different factors. If you isolate each factor, you can study it with some confidence and get some good data out of it, but the further you zoom out, the more difficult things become, and the more watery and loose our explanations become, which is OK. One can get a general idea of how a weather system works and make pretty decent predictions about that system, provided with a healthy tolerance of ambiguities and possible error.
With social, political, and economic phenomena, you can compare differing subjective experiences across time, as well as anecdotal data from other people, and then extrapolate from there with information taken from news media, history, philosophy, the sciences, and etc. With those disclaimers out of the way, I can continue about this general feeling taken from observation.
I found my experience at the airport to be very curious, especially coupled with the general trends I know about the world today. The snowstorm that nearly shut down the airport was not that severe, and I personally was not inconvenienced nearly as much as plenty of other travelers I've heard about in similar situations for perhaps the last 20 years. Nevertheless, there were some disconcerting things to take note of, one of them being the haphazard quality of service and disconnectedness of authorities in the airline company that ran the terminal I was stuck in.
I was amazed that I was able to get out of there, because there was a mass confusion and disorganization that seemed uncharacteristic for such a large, sophisticated airport.
An older, more experienced friend of mine noted that there's always been a quality of haphazardness in travel services, or really any service, which I can abide by. But with a larger company or agency there should emerge a certain regularity of service: theoretically this company has gotten as large and powerful as it has because it has systematized its travel procedures with a degree of competency - though there are often other reasons for this, such as political connectedness and luck. And as a general principle, a centralized authority has increased power to regulate its constituents to behave along certain guidelines.
But there is also a tension between increased centralization and the flexibility required for local services to respond to their own issues. Our larger companies repeatedly fail this balance, including the airline that was running the terminal. If you've ever worked in retail, you can experience this right away. The executive department issues rigid, generalized guidelines that are pretty much impossible to follow on the ground, and so employees basically try their best to do what they can with what they know, independent of but still attempting to adhere to the guidelines.
On a social level there is increased pressure on the individual workers. If someone experiences poor service, it is because this worker hasn't been courteous or deliberate enough and that if this bad worker is simply disciplined or replaced, everything will function smoothly. Attention has been shifted away from the underlying structures of corporate entities and their relations with greater society.
In the few workplaces I've had the pleasure to experience, there was a profound experience of fragmentation and apathy. Workers, upon being socialized into a given working environment, lose the expectation of affecting change or implementing their ideas, so they lose interest and do the bare minimum to keep things functioning. Or you have those power climbers that play political power games to get into higher positions so they can secure more control for themselves. The daily tasks have less to do with accomplishing anything meaningful, and more to do with either securing naked power or getting by effectively enough to put one's energies into outside pursuits. So what's happening everywhere else?
Perhaps we can cut the airline slack for the sudden bout of extreme weather. But the weather was not that extreme. We aren't talking about white-out conditions, just steady snow-fall. This airport is in the middle of Salt Lake City. The place gets snow. This airport is a national hub and it is very important that it function smoothly, so why not be prepared? Take a look at the baffling complexity of a modern airplane design. Incredible machines! But we can't keep snow off of a runway? This isn't an isolated incident either. And these patterns show up in both corporate and government entities.
During the holiday season, there were all sorts of reports of shipping giants like Amazon failing to fulfill large portions of their orders, due to either weather or unexpected surges in demand. Or you have cruise lines breaking down in various places for strange reasons. Or consider the responses to a long string of increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters. The world was shocked at the US handling of New Orleans after Katrina, but since then, reactions have become increasingly numb.
How about Afghanistan? Iraq? Or numerous other locales across the world: increasing instability, and the inability of empire to cope.
Try dealing with any telecom company today. Doing even the most simple things can take hours of frustrating wrangling.
Consider the fiasco surrounding healthcare.org. I waited for the chaos to die down and tried applying for health care myself, and ended up being pinballed across several different departments who all had different ideas of what I was supposed to do.
And then I've seen economic writers speak all the time about economic devolution, of the decreasing quality of manufactured products over time, due to several processes which can ultimately be traced to simple greed: cost-cutting and implementation of cheaper materials, outsourcing of manufacturing processes, and of course, planned obsolescence, about which a recent documentary came out which I eventually plan to see. Don't get me wrong, there are still great innovations that see the light of day, but it seems as though these things aren't made to last long.
It is all very strange. All of this seems to contradict this classic Enlightenment idea of the rational man mastering the universe, and what's more, the classic bourgeois idea of the self-interested man facilitating this mastery. One of the central thrusts of ideological capitalism was that these silly state-socialist or state-communist regimes (the biggest of which being the Soviet Union) were doomed to fail, since upon attempting to control the natural commercial activities of man (which really aren't that natural if you look at the history), they strangled the self-organizing powers of the free market by short-circuiting essential price signals that are emitted by the self-interested man acting in the market.
Boosters of capitalism pointed to organizational problems and commodity shortages, among other things, as evidence of the failure of centralized planning. Now, this is partially true: markets are much better than the state at handling certain informational problems, such as how to distribute goods across a population, though they are terrible at handling necessities and natural monopolies such as energy.
But now we see similar problems creeping into our own neoliberal "free market" economies. This could be partially due to over-centralization, but the over-centralization in this case has to do with large economic entities, which are growing ever larger with more and more mergers every day. This is exactly what was happening in the early 1900s robber baron era: huge monopolies were forming, which were creating all sorts of socio-political and economic distortions.
There is an overriding drive to squeeze more profit out of an already contracting populace, a populace that is contracting partially because of the diversion of energy to concentrated and voracious economic entities. Accounting for a contracting populace requires cost cutting, layoffs, and a squeezing of the productive capacities of staff kept on the job. The people that still have jobs are overworked and strained, barely able to fulfill any given task when there are so many. This is a self-perpetuating problem: as more is extracted from a populace, the populace has less to give, necessitating increased efforts to extract at previous levels but with less energy, which continues to cause contraction.
Extreme weather events catch authorities off guard, who maintain bare bones staff and equipment which is often ill-equipped for these events. And then thinly staffed companies - which keep lean departments to account for weak economic activity - are overwhelmed with sudden spikes in activity such as with holiday shopping.
The repeated failures of companies in every industry to deliver decent service and products, and the frequent failures to account for extreme conditions betrays not just an increasing fragility in rigid and top-heavy political and economic institutions, but an increasing instability in the environment and the economic activities of the populace itself.
There is a descending air of impotence and inefficacy. A resistance, an inability to pursue one's needs and desires. This is a sensation of the dropping away of centralized security, of the ability of a society to collectively regulate its own functions, with the resulting social experience of atomization and recklessness. It is something that no one wants to talk about, but everyone knows its there.
I know I'm becoming a bit of a broken record at this point, so in the final part I'd like to bring attention to an old myth that might be illuminating - or further obfuscating perhaps - as well as some thoughts for an appropriate future trajectory.
