I've seen the future and it is ...

As readers of my novel in (slow) progress may have gathered, I am a bureaucrat. My current role in the leviathan of municipal government has me dealing with a great many consultants who have been hired to decipher and improve the bureaucracy. For those not familiar with the sweet science of consulting, it consists of paying a bunch of guys who used to work for you upwards of $250 an hour each to ask people who work for you now what they do, writing down their answers in a report that's more nicely copied and bound than what your own graphics department can produce, and doing a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that state the obvious in obscure ways.

OK, not the consultants I manage (ahem), because I know how to extract real value out of these guys. But pretty much any consultant project parachuted from enough levels above where the work gets done to scare people into cooperating does tend to play out this way. The best part, of course, is the Powerpoint. There's a recent trend poo-pooing Powerpoint as everything George Orwell told us to watch out for (google "powerpoint crashed the space shuttle" or "powerpoint makes you stupid" to see what I mean). I think this is mostly wrong, or rather confusing correlation with cause. The ascendency of Powerpoint doesn't so much make people stupid as it reflects the inexorable ascendency of stupidity.

For those not familiar with this product, Powerpoint is a Microsoft software package that empowers one stupid person to convince a group of other stupid people that he knows what he's doing. Per Bill Gates' plan to take over the universe by bewitching worldwide upper management with shiny objects and paralyzing the able-minded by not telling them how to turn off Mr. Paperclip, if there's a smart person in the room when a Powerpoint presentation is on display, he's so busy rolling his eyes and having his ironic comments go over everyone else's heads that he fails to notice that he has been assigned all the "action items" and "touch points" for the follow-up session until the end of the meeting.

It all kind of reminds me of "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley's novel about a totalitarian future in which introspection is treated as a crime, cosmetically perfect people at the top of the food chain carry out simulated fornication endlessly without consequences, and people speak almost exclusively in what sounds a lot like leetspeak. BNW is usually described as "dystopian", because it presents a vision of a future stripped of all nuance, complexity and irony. But unlike "1984," which depicts a totalitarian world in which suffering is redefined as pleasure, BNW shows shows most people enjoying themselves, which leaves some room for some people to view it more as a how-to manual than a cautionary tale.

Powerpoint is evidence of this. But it is also a reflection of something much deeper in the human psyche. Bear with me now, because I'm about to lay out a theory of everything for the perfection of the human experience. It's all about shape and it's all about the future. For instance, in BNW, a book about the future, human beauty is idealized with the adjective "pneumatic", i.e., inflated, plumped up, no longer angular, but ... what's the word I'm looking for? Round.

Another example (and the one that inspired this vitally important cross-cultural, highly scientific examination of human nature during a long layover) is Charles DeGaulle airport outside Paris. CDG was planned in the early 1960s, at the apogee of futurist idealism. It is round.








Extravagantly so. Terminals, passageways, flight information screens, water towers, taxi-ways -- it's one futuristic curving swoop after another. The plan of the whole place is round. Other examples abound. From the eastern bloc, we have the embodiment of communism's triumphant future, Sputnik.

In contrast, we have many examples of non-round visions of the future ending in failure or obsolescence, most notably the wedge-shaped angularity of rusted, underpowered 1970s automobiles

and post-war public housing projects.

So what does all this have to do with bureaucracy and management consulting? Everything. Bureaucrats toil in misery in square, dimly lit cubicles. They drown in reports full of lists, tables, and bar chars, all square, defined, and limited. The quintessential artifact of the bureaucratic craft is the organization chart -- people in boxes tethered to the hierarchy, defined by their function, not their essence or aspirations. But bureaucrats dream, and when they do, they dream of the future. A future where things go smoothly, processes flow unimpeded by insecurity, ineptitude, or turpitude. A future that is ... Well I'll let you guess.

To illustrate, let me first tell you the true, inner secret of Powerpoint presentations: They are all the same. They come in many colors, jargons, and templates, but they all follow the same story arc. They foretell two futures. One is the path you are on today, and where it will lead you without the guidance of the presenter. It is full of loss, disharmony, and suffering. The other offers the possibility of redemption, renewal, and remuneration and can only be reached through the wisdom of the elders and their knowledge of best practices. Something like this:

Now a cynic might say that this what you get in a society ruled by marketers schooled in conformism. But no, I say it is something else. It is a yearning, for a voluptuous, pneumatic, curved ideal, rejecting the piercing angularity of the past, embedded deeply in all of us. Without knowing it, when we speak of revitalization and change in the corporation, we express ourselves in the visual language of visions of the future. Heck, it might even be genetic, a sort of transformational grammar of the visual. Somebody get me Chomsky, stat! Anyway, I have seen the future, perfected, and it is round.