I wonder if the author knew today was going to be a Woot-Off.

The Internet, while useful, is also TV for people who are proud of not watching TV.

Fuggin Bizzy: The Internet, while useful, is also TV for people who are proud of not watching TV.

True, but it is also a library for people who do not read, the way that drugstores used to be prior to about 1960 (before airports took over from train stations).

Mark Twain's observation that "the man who does not read good books is no better off than the man who can not" may be falsifiable. True, very few of us are reading even the Gutenberg Project books that we are downloading. But it's just possible that the numbskulls who are blathering and trolling on the web are now learning something, although apparently it hasn't gotten as far as basic social skills yet.

One reason why technology is not increasing productivity as much as expected is that it just doesn't work.

The time you waste rebooting, waiting for windows to load, trying to fix whatever is freezing your screen, etc., is considerable and did not exist when you used a paper and pencil.

Also, having your information split over several different channels (emails, faxes, telephones, cellphones, Blackberries, land lines, etc.) makes it that much more unmanageable.

And let's not forget Dumbth.

People expect you to reply to emails and other communications as fast as they are sent.

Just because you can ask me to do something in 0.2 seconds doesn't mean I'm going to look at my email in the next three hours. I have things to do.

And don't get me started on search engines. We are overwhelmed with demands to do things instantaneous, but we can't find an email that was sent yesterday because it's either in the wrong email account or is buried under 400 emails, with no subject line, the wrong subject line, the right subject line but unguessable keywords, the wrong coding, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Information has exploded. By that I mean that there is more of it, a lot more of it, and it is blown to smithereens.

George Bernard Shaw, that sharp old tack, said:

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

I have to do a lot of things that depend on the communication skills of many very stupid and many very intelligent people. You can imagine how easy it is to gather the bits and bytes of information that I need to do the simplest and most complex jobs from people who THINK they are communicating but are leaving out the most important details in their haste.

There are a lot of blue sky thinkers who don't give a damn about administratie niceties or bureaucratic regulations. They are peculiarly endemic to the modern office and this place in particular.

They are very bright, but they aren't very thoughtful in the philosophic sense of taking thought and due care to think things through efficiently, promptly and thoroughly.

This is where a lot of our money, time, and effort are disappearing.

We have a nice shiney widescreen TV notice board. It's almost impossible to get any information on events out of it because you'd have to stand there and wait for them to scroll through. The bulletin board is in front of the elevators, where there are already thundering herds of people loitering at peak times, which is when most people are there. Ergo, the screen does not do the job of the piece of paper.

One person thinking can out think a committee of thousands. In fact, one person thinking can out think a committee of three people who think they are thinking.

No one thinks and the technology encourages ever greater haste and waste, while discouraging thought.

The web is not the worst of it. I can think just as well typing as I could writing, or almost. I can think as well typing or reading as I might sitting.

But emails, Twitter, and other crap, including much of Fark's most prolific trolls, are as useless as teats on a boulder.

At least teats on a bull might work. Very rarely. Rarely enough to consitute a freak of nature or a miracle.

Unless you give people time to think, they don't. And they can really screw up a lot of resources quickly and think they have done a great job if they don't think.

As the Church of the SubGenius warns: BEWARE THE STEALERS OF SLACK!

You need slack to buffer against peak demands and to allow you to think, plan, correct, understand, be efficient and productive.

Without slack, there is no productivity, only business,in the old sense of busy-ness. Futile action is friction. It is is heat. It is entropy. It is temporal kibble. It is waste.

By the way, the book mentioned is available on Kindle for $3.20.

It is only 10,000 words long, but worth every second, I suspect.

Tyler Cowen's e-book, The Great Stagnation. I think that we are beginning to understand where we went wrong for the last thirty years, maybe the last 30,000.

Executive summary:

George Bernard Shaw: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

Well, I'm back from the Kindle store! Did you miss me?