As Eugyppius says, “Managerialism is an ever-advancing process of decay masquerading as an administrative system, and it has become a defining pathology of Western civilization.” One result is a spreading “crisis of competence”, or the death of craftsmanship as an ethic. Applied to the culture industry, managerialism seems to generate products that are hard to get emotionally invested in. In the case of the Silicon Valley takeover of television, this may even be by design. The customer’s attention must remain available on multiple fronts.
It is hard to see how the deadening effect of managerialism might be overcome, as our class structure is built on it. Due to the overproduction of degree-holders, the layer of people engaged in the meta-work of abstraction grows ever thicker. It generates its own demand, parasitical on the economy of the real. If the cumulative effect is culturally suffocating, this needn’t be taken as a judgment of the personal qualities of those with bullshit jobs. Rather, they are trapped within a system that demands that they suspend what comes most naturally to a human being: taking an active and affectionate interest in real things.
So let’s keep taking active and affectionate interest in real things, shall we? Effective resistance is as easy as that.