GELFAND ON … THE YEAR THAT WAS-The year 2013 wasn't what I'd call a fun year, but it definitely ranked among other "interesting times." It was a year that validated the Dilbert Principle. We got a juicy scandal at Yahoo. The biggest revolution in American health care since the introduction of the disposable hypodermic needle got its own start. Perhaps the biggest relief of 2013 is that the world has only one North Korea. And in a decades-long trend, the big media continue to decline and disappoint even as the internet is developing real intellectual and political muscle.
The Dilbert Principle
Back in 1996, cartoonist Scott Adams published The Dilbert Principle, essentially a joke book plus cartoons. But Adams, in having a bit of fun updating The Peter Principle, hit on something that is true enough to be a real head scratcher.
As Adams wrote, "Lately, however, the Peter Principle has given way to the 'Dilbert Principle.' The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management."
Apparently you don't have to rise to your level of incompetence (the Peter Principle) to be in management, because you don't really need to have any competence to start with.
I couldn't help but think of people who were brought into the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment in Villaraigosa's administration. Some of the dead wood eventually moved on, but the damage they did was substantial. I think some of the even deader wood are still around. I can only guess how bad it was in other city departments.
My City Watch colleague Joseph Mailander has made his own studies of Dilbert Principle appointments, particularly as they are put onto city commissions. I'm not sure I entirely agree with some of his targeting, but our views definitely overlap. I wonder if Joseph has been to any recent meetings of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners. You look at them and can't help but see a bunch of pointy haired bosses. Except that their logic is weaker.
The big news for 2013 is that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has survived. It's bruised and bloodied, but as the battlefield smoke clears, it still stands. That means that 30 or 40 million people who have previously been uninsured have a shot at decent medical care obtained in a timely manner.
That "timely manner" part is particularly important, because millions of people have been going without preventive care and millions more have been risking a missed diagnosis at a time when it would allow for the best likelihood of a cure.
The year 2013 was the year that we finally had to admit that racism is deeply embedded in at least a quarter of our population. How else can you interpret polling data and voting data and the popularity of supermarket tabloids? I'm not kidding about the supermarkets. I often shop at the Vons in San Pedro, and it's hard to get through the checkout counter without seeing some nasty, virulent garbage on the front page of one of those papers. It's invariably a swipe at Obama, either the president or the first lady or both. The latest edition claims that their marriage has exploded, and offers as evidence (?) the photo of the first lady at the Mandela ceremony in South Africa. That photo has been explored and explained by none other than the man who took it, but this is never satisfactory to the Obama haters or the tabloids that serve that demographic.
I just wish my neighborhood Vons wouldn't participate in this racist expression, but it does.
And then there is the continuing evolution of print and electronic media.
During the mid-2000s, I wrote a weekly column for another internet site, the American Reporter. My byline was "On Media," and I delighted in discussing how the newspapers and television got science wrong, blew lots of local stories due to their ignorance of simple arithmetic, and failed to understand engineering at all. They even failed to cover (in anything but a superficial way) the endemic corruption that characterizes our politics.
A decade later, nothing seems to have changed that much, other than the fact that newspapers are becoming thinner. TV news continues to be mostly non-news, and the level of investigative reporting has dwindled in all but a couple of serious newspapers. Worse yet, the television news system has divided itself into partisan outlets. It's hard to explain to the younger generation that there was a time when CBS News was respected, and people of all political views watched it.
But in the interim, the right wing has sold the big lie that there is some kind of liberal bias in the major media sources. It's Rush Limbaugh's greatest victory. The fact that the hard-right manages to market soft-core racism on nearly a daily basis should be a national shame. The fact that so many people buy into it is their personal shame.
Of course we do get coverage of the crimes and the gory accidents. I don't actually object to this. People should be informed about the dangers in their midst, and it is a defensible function of the media to induce a certain amount of sensitivity to social problems by showing viewers how the most unfortunate people live. I don't object to the principle that "if it bleeds, it leads." Of course it does, and that is entirely understandable. I just wonder why it is that superficiality in all other topics is the rule on network television.
And then we developed the internet, the world wide web, and something called the blog. Out of these inventions, we have, if we wish to partake, a feast of intellectual argument, deep reporting, and technical analysis. I merely mention Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish, and of course Ezra Klein. There are dozens and dozens more. I suspect that history will show that the 2008 election campaign was the turning point whereby the internet, in all its diffuse manifestations, overtook Fox News in terms of political influence. The 2012 election year continued the trend, and 2013 carried on.
Looking back on 2013, it is painfully obvious that the United States continues to hold onto some of its racist tradition. But it is of a different level, an order of magnitude less than it was half a century ago. The other major difference from that long ago time is that there is only one country in the world madly developing nuclear weapons and rockets, and making threats to its nearest neighbors and to the United States even as it engages in bloody purges. Of course we have Dennis Rodman to negotiate an end to the prison camps and the political executions, so perhaps we can look forward to a wonderful 2014.
Next week, in my final City Watch article of the year, I will talk about the overall cultural picture and defend the artistic and intellectual purity of our much maligned town. I mean, somebody has to talk back to all the 22 year old college grads who get off the Greyhound bus and almost immediately look down their noses at Los Angeles because we are not Elizabethan England. I don't think they really understand Elizabethan England.
Just for Fun: The Yahoo Scandals
Let's go to a more fun topic, at least for those of you who aren't saddled with AT&T internet service. For those of us who are, it's a different matter, because we get Yahoo as the email provider.
A couple of years ago, Yahoo hired a new CEO, but it turned out that he had been a bit inventive in writing his resume. He was summarily fired. And that's not even the juicy scandal I'm talking about.
Yahoo then hired wunderkind Marissa Mayer away from Google, where she had apparently been a star performer. Mayer decided that the email server provided by Yahoo was an important asset that needed to be put to better use as an economic engine.
That's where I come in, as one of the millions of victims. As I wrote earlier this year, I subscribe to AT&T for internet service, and Yahoo is what I'm stuck with if I want to email this story to City Watch.
Earlier in 2013, I got lots of emails informing me that Yahoo mail was soon to be improved, and we would all be asked to upgrade our profiles. I assumed that this was just the standard email spam that is used by fraudsters to get your personal information -- what is colloquially known as "phishing." But no. Yahoo actually did intend to replace its old email system.
In the usual corporate cant, we were told that the new system is a much needed security improvement, and blah blah blah.
What Yahoo did, in fact, was to turn its efficient email server into a bloated advertising vehicle. All kinds of features that a hundred million users had taken for granted were suddenly missing. And any attempt to open Yahoo mail resulted in a slow-to-load advertisement. It seems to me that if you are going to stick me with your ads on a product I'm already paying quite a bit for, then you at least ought to give me the commercial quickly.
It wasn't just the ads. The whole system was much slower. Incredibly, molasses-like, snail with a metabolic disorder slow. Sometimes it just froze up entirely, and you couldn't activate the screen that's supposed to let you compose and send an email. Sometimes you could compose, but the system wouldn't verify that you had sent. Even during the writing of this discussion, the system froze up when I clicked on the "reply to sender" button.
Tens of thousands of users complained. An online petition was set up to ask Yahoo to return to the earlier system. It didn't happen.
Early in December, Yahoo had a massive fail. Screens froze, users couldn't find out if their emails had actually been sent, and -- what else would you expect -- the corporation kept mum about the problem.
Eventually, frustrated users teased some of the details out of corporate. I actually found out that Yahoo was broken by calling AT&T. The nice lady in the overseas calling center was able to discover that there was a reported failure. The best she could tell me was that it would probably be fixed in a few days. Eventually the new CEO admitted they had a problem and offered some lame apologies.
Here's my end of 2013 plea to AT&T. Get rid of Yahoo as the email carrier. At the very least, give Yahoo an ultimatum: Fix your product or don't expect AT&T to feature it with their internet systems.
Yahoo corporation did not return my phone calls.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) [
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CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 103
Pub: Dec 24, 2013