*Cory's always at his best when personal indignation fires him up. This essay improves as his list of grievances mounts steadily.
*A benefit of my acquaintanceship with Italian and Serbian legal systems is that I no longer reflexively expect bureaucracies to rationally serve the citizen or customer. Nor do I expect them to actively repress people, which is what one would expect if democratic control over institutions were lost.
*Instead, their behavior strongly reminds me of minority literatures. Sometimes the bureaucracies flourish and exert themselves in spasm, and amazing things occur, and at other times they are somnolent and mostly ignored, but the normal situation is that it's quite hard to get them to exist as cultural institutions at all, much less function as vital aspects of an embattled society.
*For instance, it's quite hard to give money to an Italian utility company, even if you owe it to them and they need the cash to function. Once you've somehow managed to enlist with them, it's as if you'd passed a high school literary exam on the Renaissance poetry of Petrarch – certainly nobody expects you to RECITE any Petrarch in public, or claim that Petrarch might have any relevance to your actual lived existence.
*You'd think that the people of the Balkans would be harassed to madness by the utterly irrationality of their institutions, but on the contrary, everyone's in on the consensual hallucination; they just wait for their governments and economies to collapse, and then mop up afterwards.
http://boingboing.net/2015/12/01/ironically-modern-surveillanc.html
(…)
"Phones are the worst. I changed my UK-based Three SIM to a pay-as-you-go plan, but I can't top it up with a US-based credit-card (I used to have this problem with my Rogers Canada SIM, too, but then I switched to Wind, which lets me top up with a card from anywhere). I'm in Germany today, and I've made a dozen calls and online attempts to figure out how to get my phone working – and now I've been locked out of my account.
"Did I say phones are the worst? No, utility bills are the worst. Getting set up with the local gas and power companies – a prerequisite, weirdly, for enrolling our daughter in public school! – was a bizarre process of showing up with money-orders (sometimes) or cash (sometimes) and handing it across the counter, getting stamped pieces of paper, bringing them to other windows, and...
"Actually, banking is the worst. I got set up with my local credit union (who also needed those utility bills!), only to discover that I couldn't install their app on my phone…."
