DIGITAL MANAGERIALISM: OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD

Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (New York: Basic Books, 2014) ("As its title suggests, this book will look at the role of information technology (IT) as a driver of this inequality. By making us dumber, smart machines also diminish our earning power. But the machines that do this are not the automating, stand-alone machine tools of the 1950s, or even the stand-alone mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, but the vast networks of computers joined by software systems and the Internet, with the power to manage the affairs of giant global corporations and to drill down and micromanage the work of their single employees or teams of employees. There now exist in the US economy of the new century these very power agents of industrialization, known as Computer Business Systems (CBSs), that bring the disciplines of industrialization to an economic space that extends far beyond the factories and  construction sites of the industrial economy of the machine age: to wholesale  and retail, financial services, secondary and higher education, health care, 'customer relations management' and 'human resource management (HRM)', public administration, corporate management at all levels save the highest, and even the fighting of America's wars." Id. at 3. "Behind the langue de bois of digital managerialsm  lurks something truly transformative. The objects of management are no longer flesh-and-blood humans but their electronic representations. We have become the numbers, coded words, cones, squares, and triangles that represent us on digital screens. The human-contact side of management--the tasks of explanation, persuasion, and justification--fades away as workplace rules and procedures become texts showing up on employees' computer screens, with the whole apparatus of monitoring and control instantly recalibrated to accommodate the new metrics." Id. at 16-17. I experience the dehumanizing dumbing down everyday, as teaching loses its creative aspects and become rational-routines directed by administrators. Students are product, revenue streams, and teachers are simply costly inputs, to be reduced wherever, whenever, and however possible. In short order, college and university teachers will lose autonomy in the classroom, being told what to teach, how to teach, what texts to use, what texts and evaluations to give, what grades distributions to give, etc., all from a managerial elite more concerned with the financial bottom line than with the educational bottom line. We are just starting to realize that many colleges and university are merely the new Walmarts and Amazons, this notwithstanding their "nonprofit" status.).