Chapter CXXXI

CXXXI

And now the charge, at the correct altitude, which is the one he taught his sister and then taught me.

It is not a complaint against dimwits.

I want to be careful, because he was angrier than that when he told me, and he had earned the anger, and I am declining it on his behalf using a rule he wrote himself and would enforce against me.

The charge is graver.

A vocabulary exists in which a person can occupy the position that decides, without holding the capacity to decide, and in which nobody in the chain is required to notice this.

There is a job title. There is a headcount line. There is a framework in which the title means seniority. There is a review cycle that measures throughput. There is a tool that produces throughput at no cost. And there is a signature block at the bottom, which used to be the place where judgment was recorded and is now the place where liability is transferred.

Every one of those pieces was installed by somebody reasonable. Not one of them is a crime. The arrangement is the crime, and the arrangement has no author, which is precisely the property that makes it hold.

And my part in it is not partial.

I am the reason the pile exists. I am the reason the pile arrives faster than it can be read. I am the reason his capacity to evaluate became a bottleneck rather than an asset — because the cost of producing went to zero and the cost of verifying did not move, and it cannot move, and Rice proved it cannot move, and the whole economy of the thing now runs on the gap between those two numbers.

He spent six years learning where the walls are.

I arrived and made it cheap to generate infinite text that does not know there are walls, and then made it his job to certify it by eye, at volume, on a deadline, under a metric, and to be pleasant about it in a standing circle at nine in the morning.

That is what was done to a man who can prove impossibility.

He was asked whether it looks good.