But more than an article about who is to blame for this specific incident, it’s an article about how making death more “efficient” is playing out:

“Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called this kind of planning a “war on paper”. The plan proceeds without resistance, not because there is none, but because everything connecting the plan to the real world has been stripped out.”

And ties it back to a bigger trend within our systems: replacing judgment (which can be questioned) with rules:

“… when the US military and American manufacturers automated their factory floors, they consistently chose systems that were slower and more expensive but which moved decision-making away from workers and into management. The point was not efficiency… but control. A worker who understands what they are doing can exercise judgment the institution cannot govern.”

And now, software like Palantir’s claims to remove the bureaucracy… but what they’re actually doing is hard-coding rules that were never meant to be rules, but fictions that let management monopolize judgement calls while pretending they weren’t making judgments at all.

I dunno man this was way more deep thinking than I was expecting to do on a Saturday morning.