Engineered: Chapter 7

Big daddy economicus makes us sad. And I blame him.

You wanna know how to build a ship? Or autonomous vehicles? Or a power station? Or a railway? So would most of the companies out there saying they know how. They’d love to, genuinely. They would walk the length and breadth of this country to hear you tell them. They look for people to say, ‘I know how.’ They drive in German metal boxes and Japanese metal boxes and take their pollution very seriously. So seriously that they have to go, in person, to huddles of people who want to know how. A not-know-how-pow-wow. They have dinner, drinks, and one-night stands at these gatherings, call them conferences and sometimes they even unearth a truth or two. Most of the time, it’s just to get ahead, get on top and take not knowing to new levels of shit salary—all the professionalism, the networking, building incompetent nodes of not-knowing. I went to some and came back knowing less. Non-laugh riot. These pay-by-plate pyramids of not knowing, not understanding that professionalism is practice, and not knowing isn’t art. It’s just a state of being. And education does little to shift it. It often puts it there, to begin with.

Conferences, dinners, StinkedIn profiles; all fountains of shite in which we’re invited to drink from the not knowing waters. There’s no truth there, not really. But then the trick isn’t to build anything other than convincing CVs, knowledge capital. To prostitute your professionalism whilst building nothing other than your own personal pitch.

Their peers. My former peers.

All these poor victims are just sat, stuck and struck by the economy. The power sums that don’t have no nothing to do with reality but help shape it. Those poor, busy bums. Those schmucks. Those con artists. Those beautiful victims. For I, too, have grazed where they do. I’ve tasted the delicious nectar of not knowing. I have not known myself for a very long time. And I, too, haven’t built or done anything of note because I, too, come from this note-less, penniless time. We are all sad because the economy is our daddy, and it tells us we can’t have nice things. So we pretend we have nice things. And Pater Economicus he say no. He say, “Get the fuck outta here ya fuckin bums.”