The world is becoming more Kafkaesque

And that explains a lot of the malaise in the world

Intro: Um, where is my deodorant?

I made an Amazon order on February 12.

A simple purchase; a single stick of deodorant. 

As a prime member, I had been expecting the order to come in on February 13th. 

When several weeks went by and I received nothing, I decided to hop on a chat with a “virtual assistant” — i.e. a guy from India. The conversation was just about as helpful as one might expect; repeated apologies, and “internal inquiries.”

After staying in the chat for no less than an hour, I eventually left — it was a four dollar item and I had other stuff to do. 

Another several weeks go by, and no deodorant. At this point I’ve made a number additional Amazon purchases, none of which are going through.

I end up calling their customer support once more, explaining the situation. It’s not too big of a problem — I just want to know what exactly the issue is. Is there a billing issue? Something to do with shipping? An issue with the suppliers?

Ironically, I never had these issues when I was a non-prime member; the day I decided to sign up for a subscription, everything stopped shipping to my house. So there might be a connection there?

After several levels of escalation, each person keeps apologizing without being able to give an explanation as to the root cause. “But now the problem will be fixed,” they assure me.

An additional several months go by — nothing. 

And then, finally, four and a half months later I receive my order.

When the delivery person hands over the packages to me, I ask if she knew anything about the delay.

She shrugs her shoulders, almost offended, as if I was blaming her. “No idea,” she answers.

***

Another story.

I’m at the airport, checking in my baggage. I have to go to a self-serve kiosk to print out the baggage tag. Except when I do it, it prints out my boarding pass for some reason.

I try again, believing that I made a mistake in the print options. This time I take care to select the “baggage tag” option. I print it out… and receive another boarding pass.

I go to a different kiosk, try it again… again, another boarding pass.

I go to the lady and try to explain what’s happening. Of course, she thinks I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to use the user interface. But then she tries it, and when she specifically presses the baggage tag option, it prints out another boarding pass. 

She is confused, so she goes to a different kiosk and tries the whole thing again… again, another boarding pass.

Puzzled, she refers me to the human assisted baggage check-in. I wait in this line — which was considerable in length, made worse by the fact that the man and woman in front of me seem to be having marital issues. Apparently Jesse doesn’t appreciate just how backbreaking Derek’s manual labor job is. 

I finally get to the helpdesk, presenting him with no less than seven identical copies of my boarding pass. I explain the issue that I’m facing, and of course he thinks I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to use the self-serve kiosk. When he tries to print out the baggage tag, he initially has trouble on his side… clack clack clack, some sort of manual override, and finally I have the baggage tag that I need.

A two minute process turns into forty minutes. 

I ask him: “Do you know what the issue was?“

“No idea.”

***

I have many more anecdotes like the two above. 

• The fact that my company was nearly dissolved because I couldn’t prove that I was born. 

• Government documents where my name is listed three different ways. Thank you Homeland security.

• The fact that I failed my initial driving test because I “took my eyes off the road” i.e. sneezed

• The overflowing-toilet-shawarma-governor-incident (for another post)

• Evernote, who deleted no less than thirty thousand words as their user interface failed to sync the data across my devices. 

All of this seems like pointless griping about everyday first world problems, but I believe it points to a larger issue, which is the fact that…

The world is becoming increasingly Kafkaesque. 

Originally when I heard this word, I just thought it meant you turn into a beetle or something. But after reading The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and several of Franz Kafka’s short stories, I realized the concept pointed to something more distinct, more subtle, and more pervasive. 

There’s a reason why it requires its own word; it’s the perfect intersection of things being arbitrary, absurd, pointless, inefficient, impersonal, bureaucratic, and abstract.

(Side note: ladies, if you’re wondering whether your man would still love you if you were a worm, I would suggest reading The Metamorphosis).

The Kafkaesque nature of the world is all around us. It’s the healthcare insurance systems that get to deny you over a technicality, the difficulty of getting through to an actual human on the helpline, or the indignity of navigating the various school/job/government portals which provide conflicting information.

It’s a sort of gaslighting. The bureaucrats get to hold the Blade of Damocles over your head, and for any reason whatsoever it could come down over your neck. 

Stated another way, it is the asymmetry of bad luck. If you make a mistake, or otherwise show yourself to be ignorant of the intricacies, that’s your problem. If the institutions make a mistake or otherwise prove themselves to be incompetent, that’s also your problem.

Technology was supposed to make this better, but in many ways they’ve exacerbated the problem.

Let’s take two examples based on the recent news.

First: The case of Jeffry Piccolo. He and his wife went to a restaurant in Disney World. His wife had a rather severe nut and dairy allergy, so they checked beforehand to make sure that the restaurant could accommodate. They went online, looked at the menu options, and when they arrived they repeatedly told the staff about her dairy and nut allergy. 

At every single step, they were assured all necessary accommodations would be made.

Spoiler: the wife died.

Jeffry sued, because of course he did, and Disney said “Wait, you can’t do that.“

The reason? Jeffry signed up to a free trial of Disney+ three years ago, and in the fine print, it mentioned that all matters had to be settled in arbitration i.e. outside of court. 

Basically, he gave away his right to sue without knowing it.

Second: The Crowdstrike incident. 

Someone made the cardinal sin of pushing a code change to production on a Friday, and the gods of software development decided to punish him. A seemingly innocuous update to a configuration file ended up crashing over 8 million computers around the world simultaneously — a bureaucratic incompetence which caused more damage than any malicious state actor or cyber terrorist could possibly imagine.

The Disney scenario has received so much press coverage that Jeffrey Picolo will likely get the compensation he’s asking for (although he’ll only have his day in court around 2030) – but we can easily imagine a scenario in which it doesn’t gain any traction in the media. How many similar scenarios have unfolded like this that we’ve never heard of, where the victimized party simply had to acquiesce to the legalese?

As for those impacted by the Crowdstrike incident, the organizations with sophisticated legal teams will be able to seek compensation for the disruption to their operations. As for the rest of us, tough luck, you have to take it on the chin. 

The point is that, if the average person makes an oopsie interacting with these highly bureaucratic systems, it potentially alters the course of their life. At best, their flight gets delayed and they miss their brother's wedding; at worst, their status, their reputation, and their finances could be ruined – ask the many YouTubers who have been unfairly demonetized.

As for these companies… will anybody go to jail for simultaneously blue screening 8 million computers? Will anyone go to jail for killing Jeffry Piccolo’s wife? People will ask them what exactly went wrong, who exactly is to blame, and they will turn into the Amazon tech support, or the guy at the airport; they will just shrug their shoulders and say “no idea.”

The “black box-ification” of everything

I recently read a book called The Ordinal Society, which is an analysis of the potential ramifications of living in an increasingly quantified world.

I can’t really recommend the book¹, though the premise is interesting: while data itself is neutral, data scientists and business stakeholders need to jointly make categorization decisions. 

On some level, they play the part of the sorting hat from Harry Potter, except applying it to gargantuan data sets.

The problem is that these classification decisions, however benign they start out, end up carrying normative value after a certain point in time. 

To keep with the Harry Potter analogy, there’s now a connotation in being associated with a Slytherin, or a Hufflepuff. If that sounds far-fetched, consider the real world Indian caste system. Originally, all castes were pieces of the God Brahma — but over time it became a rigid hierarchy, the basis for some of the most divisive rhetoric and politics one can possibly imagine.

Similarly, these classification systems on large data sets bring about the basis for a techno-caste system. In a lot of cases, the stratification is relatively innocuous; those who choose to share their data with retailers by downloading the mobile app get rewarded with discounts.

In other cases it’s more extreme — China’s social credit system, as an example.

But make no mistake, every company is making these sorts of decisions on the back end, consolidating the various data points and coming up with what the book calls “Eigenstatus” i.e. a proxy for social credit.

Consider the sort of advertising you get on social media profiles, or the sorts of prospects you get on dating apps, or the insurance rates on your car. Add these things up, and your experience of the digital world can be entirely different whether the companies classify you as a techno-brahman or an untouchable.

The point isn’t to distinguish the asymmetries that people have between each other, but rather the asymmetry that people have with the companies that collect data on them. 

For people that use Hinge, or Tinder, or Bumble, the backend algorithms have clearly given you a score as to how attractive you are — but you yourself have no idea how those scores are calculated. 

From this video

This is what makes it Kafkaesque; the completely arbitrary or indifferent nature in how we are treated by these organizations — coupled with the fact that any burden of action is always on us in order to take any corrective measure.

Much like K in The Trial, we wake up one day and feel like we’ve been arrested for… something. Nothing’s actually changed. No penalty has been laid upon us, but we nevertheless find ourselves wondering what the issue actually is. 

And every single time, the people accusing you simply shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t know” whenever you ask for clarification.

The Kafkaesque nature of the world explains a non-trivial portion of the malaise we see nowadays

I’ve previously written about the vibecession — why the economy feels like it’s getting worse, even though all the objective metrics say that it’s getting better.

I think that around 70 to 80% of the situation can be explained by Goodhart’s law — i.e. ruthlessly optimizing certain aspects of our life at the expense of others. Our wallets are fatter than ever before, but so are we — and in addition, we are lonelier than ever before, the world is more polluted than ever before, we treat nonhuman animals worse than ever before.

But I think the last 20 to 30% of it – something I couldn’t really touch on in the piece – comes down to the fact that we’re living in a “black box” world, where everything is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. 

To be clear, in no way am I claiming effort is futile, or that exertion doesn’t bring about positive results. Nor do I live under the delusion that we need to return to the past, where things were supposedly “simpler”. Entropy flows in one direction (quantum physicists play along). I’m simply claiming that all of the expertise and exertions are increasingly directed towards arbitrary/synthetic activities.²

Take the YouTuber MrBeast, the biggest channel in the world right now. He wrote a memo to his team which included the following quote:

Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

(h/t

kyla scanlon

)

From Logan Paul to Lizz Truss to SBF to approximately 89.2563% of all middle managers, success is becoming increasingly detached from being a good person or making any sort of positive contribution to the world — rather, it’s better to learn the rules of the institutions you inhabit, however illogical or arbitrary they happen to be. 

And for those who actually have a conscience, it’s clear that so much of the value of this world is driven by frustrating you into acquiescence. Think of all the subscription services that make it extremely easy for you to sign up, and damn near impossible to cancel. Think of the additional layers of unskippable ads, or the price hike that surprised you because the notification email got sent to your junk mail, or the useless service fees that sites like Ticketmaster force on you.

Think of shrinkflation, or enshittification, or all these other ways that, as Alfie Solomons put it: “Big fucks small.”

And that’s why there’s a sort of malaise in the world. 

It’s not the sort of malaise that you get when you lose a loved one, or find yourself paralyzed from the waist down.

Rather it’s a malaise of a thousand paper cuts, a series of moral injuries that you accumulate over the course of years and decades. It’s knowing that you, a car mechanic or a garbage collector or a financial analyst, are somehow held to a higher standard than these conglomerations or high net worth individuals.

If you want to go to a bar and take a person home, you need enthusiastic consent. Meanwhile, a company can screw you over on the tenth page of an online document, which is a hyperlink to a hyperlink to a hyperlink. 

And if you want justice, that’s too bad, you already gave up that right — even though you didn’t know it.

Social Norms are becoming increasingly Kafkaesque as well

A little over a decade ago, I was pulled aside by my business ethics professor for making some “problematic statements” in class. It was around the time that we were discovering the bias in résumé filtering systems — specifically, that applications with ethnic sounding names were more likely to be rejected, all other things being equal. 

Apparently the professor pointed out that I was appealing to white supremacist logic. 

The problematic comment in question: “We should not judge people by the color of their skin but the content of their character.”

This was before “social justice” had become common verbiage, let alone woke or D.E.I. At the time I just remember apologizing, believing that my business ethics professor knew something that I didn’t.

Now I can look back and laugh at the absurdity — the idea that my professor (a Caucasian woman) is chastising me (an Indian man) for being a white supremacist for quoting Martin Luther King.³

Take three countries: Hindustan (India), Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It’s perfectly fine to call people from India Hindus, and people from Afghanistan Afghans — calling a person from Pakistan a Paki is a racial slur. Calling someone a black or white is OK, calling someone “yellow” is a slur. Calling someone an Irishman or Scotsman is fine; calling someone a Chinaman is derogatory.

And by the way, don’t ask why this is the case. That’s just proof that you’re a racist, somehow. But if you ask the pearl clutchers how they came to learn all the social rules, they turn into Amazon tech support, or the airport baggage guy, shrugging their shoulders and telling you “I don’t know.”

This is why people have a distaste for cancel culture — it’s not necessarily that people are being held accountable, but rather the arbitrary nature by which this accountability is applied.

• If you date a minor, you lose your status and reputation — unless you're Jerry Seinfeld.

• If you beat your girlfriend, you lose your status and reputation — unless you’re Chris Brown.

• If you sexually assault a minor on live TV, you lose your status and reputation — unless you’re Jenny McCarthy.

• If you imply that you want to rape Taylor Swift, you lose your status and reputation — unless you’re Elon Musk.

You are somehow being held to a higher standard than the people we are supposed to look up to — even those who are supposed to take up the highest levels of office.

According to prediction markets, Kamala Harris is predicted to win the upcoming election at the time of writing this. Her main qualifications are:

1. She’s under 75 years old

2. Speaks in complete human sentences

3. Isn’t revolting to the majority of women

This is now the bar for having a job where you effectively get control of the world's biggest nuclear arsenal.

Meanwhile, you have to go through five rounds of interviews just to show that you can import a numpy package and take the dot product of two column vectors.

All of this is why the word Kafkaesque needed to come into existence.

It’s the perfect placeholder for something just being… off. 

There’s a lot of articles covering things like the vibecession, the failure of the dating apps, the fertility crisis, the issue with young men, the rise in conspiracy thinking, quiet quitting, etc. 

The missing ingredient in these pieces is the Kafkaesque nature of it: the idea that we are simultaneously being held to both contradictory and arbitrary standards —  the very same way Kafka himself felt in comparison to his father.

In the modern world, Kafka would have dropped out of society, turning to a perpetual cycle of weed and video games, like so many other men. At least the weed would have gotten him high every time, and the video games have clear and distinguishable goals that take up a logical progression. 

Considering Kafka’s own struggles with women and relationships, he would’ve just been called an incel, and spent the majority of the time waxing poetic on some dark corner of the Internet.

It’s not an intelligence thing. 

Each successive generation has greater intelligence compared to the past, if only for the fact that they get to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Rather, I think it’s an agitation thing.

As an analogy: the relationship we have to society increasingly feels the same way a young woman feels when she’s alone at a bar at 2 AM and the only other people in the building are burly guys. I mean, yeah, most likely nothing’s gonna happen. But the blade of Damocles perpetually lingers over her head. 

Or another way to put it: I think our relationship to the world and its many institutions are becoming increasingly similar to the way autistic people have to relate to neurotypicals. 

Even high functioning autistics understand that they process information differently to the general population, so they have to develop a robust coping mechanism, or otherwise shrug their shoulders and acknowledge the fact that they are always going to be two and half steps behind everyone else, even in the most basic facets of human life.

Except now we’re all becoming autistic, so to speak.

It feels like a high dimensional catch 22, where the world is looking to screw you over along every possible vector. Or, more precisely, it’s knowing that your entire existence is just collateral damage to a greater game that “more important” people are playing. 

The executives told you that working from home was the new normal, so stop complaining and just get used to it. Wait, what’s that? Landlords are losing value on their properties? Never mind, forget what I said about that new normal stuff. Better get back into work, stop complaining and get used to it.

And stop asking questions, that’s JAQing off, a sign of white supremacy. You’re not a white supremacist, are you? Are you?

AI is going to make this problem worse.

While there are going to be a select few AI engineers who understand each of the models down to the individual matrix vector operations, the vast majority are going to have to treat these large language models like miniature oracles. 

As these people point out, LLMs will always hallucinate and we need to live with that.

Most of the time the hallucinations will just be mundane or trivial, the equivalent of “Um, where is my deodorant?”

Other times, 8 million computers will simultaneously blue screen.

Other times still — well, who knows what will happen. The possibilities are endless.

This is not to state that AI will necessarily bring about bad outcomes. To the contrary, I believe the majority of the AI hype is real, and that it’ll bring about good things. I also believe the good things will be unevenly distributed throughout the population — which is a fact that should make people cautious. Ostensibly they already are.

And that’s the thing about technology; it doesn’t get to exist outside of the institutions which create them, or the societies which end up using them.

And all of this at least partially explains why young people aren’t having kids, or are dropping out of dating. It’s why young men especially are dropping out of society. It’s why conspiracy thinking is on the rise, and people are increasingly looking to populists for guidance.

Conclusion: We are all Kitty Genovese

If everything stated above seems sort of mundane and trivial — like I’ve just packaged every first world problem into a single article — well, that’s kind of the point. The ending of Kafka’s books are not sad or dramatic, or otherwise climactic. Rather, they are simply… disappointing. 

Again, this is what makes something Kafkaesque; your suffering has no dramatic purpose, no ultimate ending, no arc of redemption. Rather, your pain can be abstracted away, diffused into something nobody has to take responsibility for. We are Kitty Genovese, only our struggles are the internal frustrations of the mind. 

And all the while we think to ourselves, if there was an aspect of our lives which was noticeably worse, then, ironically, it would make things better.

Nowhere is this better encapsulated than Kafka’s letter to his own father, a brash and arrogant businessman by the name of Hermann. Franz wrote about how he was repeatedly belittled, berated, bullied, and otherwise may feel inadequate along every possible dimension of existence by his father.

And yet, Hermann almost never physically beat Franz. Hermann would always pull out his belt, or raise a hand, and threaten Franz in every possible manner… But the actual blow would never arrive. 

And, somehow, this felt worse to Franz — as though he could never truly be absolved of his sin of living. And so instead he spent his life trying to please a man who was fundamentally unpleasable. 

Thus, in his reflections towards the end of his life, Franz writes to his father:

…if I had obeyed you less, I am sure you would have been much better pleased with me.

And this, ultimately, is the same relationship that so many of us have to the society that fathered us.

Thanks for reading

1. Sociology professors have a way of writing where they quote Carl Marx and Michel Foucault and Daniel Markowitz and all the other usual suspects — all to make a very mundane point. I would argue that a solid 75% of their book basically boils down to: “If you have pre-existing wealth, and you score high on trait openness and extraversion, the digital algorithms will tend to favour you.”

2. I’m aware this is a similar argument put forward in the Unabomber Manifesto. Certified hood classic, worth reading if you’re interested. Suffice to say that I’m not completely on board with his world view, however.

3. Apparently Coleman Hughes had the same experience at a TED conference