7 Tales of Bureaucracy
on, certainly not on a global level. I distinctly remember thinking to myself "this won't scale."
Having presented to you my credentials as a pundit, I would like to talk to you today about some bureaucracies I've had occasion to encounter, and some lessons I have learned about how citizens—citizens with no official portfolio or status—"mere" citizens if you will—how citizens can change the way government works.
I hope these tales are more than mere war stories, I hope to leave you today with some rules for radicals, 10 rules to apply to governing institutions as we attempt to change their behavior.
—Bureaucracy № 1—
We begin in ancient times, a time so long ago that the term broadband referred to ISDN lines which would operate at a massive 64,000 bits per second, the speed of a leased line—but magically switched on and off on-demand using the ISDN "intelligent network."
This time—the late 1980s and the early 1990s—was a time when the idea of a hyperlink was still considered the mad delusion of a wild-eyed prophet named Theodor Nelson, hence my skepticism about TimBL's research project.
In those days, there were two kinds of networks. There was the so-called Internet, and there were respectable networks. The respectable networks were being defined by international institutions such as the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union.
