Friday, December 5, 2014

change and tamper monkeys


(via amazon dot com)

It’s true that saktra is all too prone not only to revisit the same restaurant every time, but even to sit in the same chair at the same table, & order the exact same item on the menu. Nevertheless, this is more about an internal sense of the order of the world, than attachment to actual places or things. At odds with this intransigence, seemingly trivial, stands an army of agents of change: sheer randomness, entropic deterioration (resisting this is, alas, not even in favor, often enough, among neurotypicals, who you’d think would like to have their Great Machine run, if not elegantly, at least with unimpaired forward motion--), but most of all by the incessant compulsive activity of a small class of humans i will henceforward refer to as "tamper monkeys".

Their salient trait is an irritation with, not just the rules of the status quo, but its very arrangement. Now, saktra is in favor of any change, even a radical one, so long as it makes the situation better (--or is this just an INTJ trait?...must consider). But why spend hours moving furniture around in a room whose functions & contents will remain unaltered afterwards? Well, the itch will have been scratched. For the moment.

Saktra is apt to feel irrationally persecuted by such spasms. They occur in corporate contexts under the guise of “restructuring” & the like; when not a covert assault upon jobs, pay, or privileges, they often occur when someone who has been undeservedly empowered with such options starts moving colored squares around on a computer screen. Why they can’t be content with video games is beyond me. (Probably it comes from a subconscious realization of being otherwise useless.) Do tamper monkeys serve a real purpose in the scheme of things?

Yes. Because the people with good ideas are not going to be listened to, social evolution depends upon tamper-monkey innovation as the single motor of progress.

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