Nobody in the chain feels responsible for what the chain does. This started as a conversation about why nobody has time to stop, and turned into something harder. The speed isn’t an accident of the system. It’s load-bearing. If you never slow down enough to see the whole chain, you never have to hold the part of it you’re carrying. Zygmunt Bauman called it adiaphorization, cutting an act into pieces small enough that no single person holding one can see what it adds up to. He wrote it about bureaucracy in 1989. Before he died he said the market had gotten better at it than any bureaucracy ever was. The receipts are boring and everywhere. Microsoft’s telemetry says the average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day, and nearly half say the work already feels chaotic and fragmented. That’s not a productivity problem. Nobody thinking every two minutes is thinking about what they’re building. We’re not exempt. We rent hours in a building ...