We have reluctantly come to accept that things just don’t work. The fusion of technology and indifference characterizes many of our interactions with man and machine, and that fusion is failing us. In the absence of a higher principle—be it God, nation, or the common good—institutions and organizations suffer a crisis of meaning. If a contemporary corporation had a mouth it would scream, What am I for?
“Organizations of all kinds are forgetting their original purpose.”
When we define, say, a “bank” or a “post office” or a “railway company,” we rely on a working, functional definition. A bank holds and invests people’s money and returns it to them when they want it. A post office sends letters and packages to their destination. Trains take people from point A to point B. But aside from the general crumbling of systems, often privatized into ineptitude, something stranger is unfolding. Organizations of all kinds are forgetting their original purpose and replacing it with another, in some kind of large-scale exercise in productive procrastination, culminating in mass displacement activity.