mhoye, 24 days ago

THE COMPUTER MANDATE

AUTHORITY: WHATEVER AUTHORITY IS GRANTED IT BY THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT WITHIN WHICH IT OPERATES.

RESPONSIBILITY: TO PERFORM AS PRE-DIRECTED BY THE PROGRAMMER
WHENEVER INSTRUCTED TO DO SO

ACCOUNTABILITY: NONE WHATSOEVER.

mhoye, 24 days ago

"A MANDATE WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY IS AN ELEGANT FORM OF SUICIDE" is a hell of a sentence.

phire, 24 days ago

@mhoye stares in startup chaos

mhoye, 24 days ago

Here's are other pictures from that set, originally from Twitter user "Bumblebike".

image/png

mhoye, 24 days ago

If you flip the first one over and jack up the gamma levels you can clearly see:

SOME TRAVESTIES:

1. COMPANY AS OGRE
2. COMPANY AS IDIOT
3. COMPANY AS CROOK
4. SALESMAN AS LAUNDRYMAN
5. CUSTOMER AS EMPLOYEE
6. COMPUTER AS MANAGER
7. COMPUTER AS GOD

(... and the compelling title for a page we can't make out, "THE AFFECTER HEIRARCHY")

[corrected from 'affected', thanks Abie.]

[edit - #3 deciphered by Siderea, thank you.]

jonty, 23 days ago

@mhoye I spoke to the IBM archives a year or so ago. They've fruitlessly tried to track down the document several times.

Sadly without more detail than we already have it is probably lost. They said it was common for branch offices to produce material that never even made it into the archives.

PaulGrahamRaven, 23 days ago

@jonty @mhoye It may not have been a firm-wide document, but the stuff it's talking about was IBM dogma; my old man worked for Big Blue in the mainframe era, and he drilled shit like this into me as a computer-obsessed kid in the mid-Eighties.