What Is the Value of a Knowledge Worker?

There are a few structures of knowledge working that I think won’t last much longer. There is the building of the Great Cathedral — the idea that anybody working in ‘knowledge’ will be assigned a small slab of existence and will dedicate their careers to polishing that slab. The university system of course does this explicitly, but it’s a structure that’s been copied over into different domains as well. It’s in what Walter Lippmann called for with “the administrative state” and which shows up with the bewildering panoply of impossibly-dull-sounding agencies, policy centers, surveys, etc, all of which are dedicated, essentially, to sending accurate information up the chain of command so that well-meaning, super-rational executives can make decisions using gold-plated data. It’s in the media, with its careful structuring into bureaus, and its assumption that the ‘map’ of what it’s depicting matches smoothly with the ‘territory.’ But all of that is — as I think is obvious by now — pretty unrealistic. It’s based on a fundamentally naive idea of how decisions are made, and fails to account for the fact that the ‘map’ almost always is being built for some reason or other as opposed to being an ‘objective’ depiction of the world, and its real purpose is simply to employ a great many white-collar workers.