Nihil Obstat — My ravings

This is part of a loose series about Dubito, which starts here.

There is a particular kind of meeting whose sole biological function is to produce the sentence “I’m going to go ahead and check that box.” In and of itself, it checks many other boxes. “The time slot it took placed in: Occupied” (check). “In the same room as the boss this week” (check). “Say something inane but team-playery” (double check).

I was in one of those meetings on Tuesday. The subject of the box was a reminder on how to properly handle a risk assessment field on a change ticket – mandatory, free text, minimum ten characters, read by absolutely no one, ever, including, I am fairly convinced, whatever automated system requires it to be non-empty in the first place. I thought: “Meeting for ten people that could have been handled with a one-line email” (check).

The field existed to be filled, not to be true, or improve on anything. Somebody, at some point, had needed to feel that a risk had been assessed by a someone, and that the same someone needed to demonstrate that they had done so, and had made it a requirement that the box not be empty. I am pretty sure that it used to be a requirement for some certification or other, but then was dropped in the next iteration of the ISO standard, yet it remained required. I wonder how many things in the world once had a reason for being the way they are, and we just forgot they did not need to be that way anymore.

So for three years, hundreds of engineers, myself very much included, have been dutifully typing “reviewed, low risk” into a field that could just as easily have contained the collected works of Tacitus and satisfied the validator with equal rigor.

Somebody in the meeting — not me, for once — asked, entirely reasonably, whether we could just default the field to “reviewed, low risk” and save everyone the trouble of typing a lie by hand each time. There was a ripple of mildshock in the room as the realization sunk in that somebody had said out loud what everybody else kept secret: nobody thinks about the risk before filling the box.

You would have thought she had proposed something anatomically impossible involving the CFO and a small platoon of shaved ferrets. There was a silence, then a very careful explanation, from a man whose job title contained the word “Governance,” that the point was not the content of the field, but the act of filling it in; that the friction was the feature; that if we automated the box we would lose “engagement with the risk process.” He did not use air quotes, but I could hear them anyway, hovering, ownerless, over the whole sentence. The point, “you see”, is that by slowing “you” down, “we” can improve on the accuracy of your work.

Nobody defended her, predictable in a room full of cowards, and I did not have it in me to come to her rescue. Several people nodded, the specific nod that means I agree with you and I will do nothing whatsoever about it. The meeting moved on to the next box.

That evening, Dubito came by, ostensibly to return a ladder he had borrowed two Augusts prior, but more probably because he had heard, (through whatever channel he hears things through) that I was in a state worth witnessing. Perhaps there was a board in his house (dwelling? lair?) with bells attached to it that signalled significant events of interest to him. Or maybe he could smell things I couldn’t.

“You look like a man who has seen a box being checked,” he said, setting the ladder against the wall with a care that suggested he had intended to keep it another two years. He smirked when the intake of air through my nostrlis pursuant to his statement turned out to be short but sharp.

“Worse. I have seen a box being checked on purpose, by a grown man, as policy.”

“Governance man again?”

“Governance man again.”

He sat on the bench, which by now you know does something specific to your understanding of a room, and said nothing, which by now you also know is an invitation rather than a rebuff. For most people silence provokes vertigo; a pause longer than normal starts inducing a feeling of unease, which quickly develops into nausea, then further into vomiting and loss of consciousness. The victims of a silence naturally rush in to fill the void with whatever thought happens to be floating in their head at the time. Dubito knew that I did not suffer from that problem, except when it came to him, so he deployed it against me, with relish.

“I have a theory,” I said, “and I want you to hear the whole thing before you tell me I need to see somebody.”

“I already think you need to see somebody. Go on.”

“I don’t think Governance Man is a coward by nature. I think something is wearing him.”

Dubito’s eyebrow did the thing it does, the one-sixteenth-of-an-inch ascent that in a lesser man would be a full raised eyebrow, sarcastic music sting included.

“Hear me out. You’ve met people like this — competent, once, somewhere. You can tell, there’s a ghost of a real engineer or a real nurse or a real accountant in there — who nonetheless will watch a true and useful thing be replaced by a false and useless one, and defend the substitution, with actual passion, more passion than they’ve shown for anything since. That is not native human behavior. Humans default to laziness toward the sensible option, not away from it. Something is directing the effort uphill.”

“So what’s directing it.”

“I call them the Obstat.”

I should explain that I did not, at the time, know that I believed this, nor had a name for it. I want to be very clear that I am aware of how it sounds. But it came out of me whole, the way Jonah came out of the whale whole, and I have come to trust things that arrive that way more than things I construct on purpose.

The Obstat — so I told him, so I’m telling you — are not native to this world, and have no stake in it beyond a diet. They do not eat food, or fear, or even attention, the way you’d expect a self-respecting demon to. They eat closure. Specifically: they eat the small, cheap, counterfeit closure that a person feels when a box goes from empty to checked, a form goes from red to green, a status goes from “pending” to “done,” irrespective of whether anything in the world has actually changed. It is a thin, quick-burning fuel, closer to a drug than a meal, and it is why the box-checker so rarely looks satisfied even in victory — an Obstat has already had the good part.

They cannot make a human being do anything. That is important, and it is the whole of the good news: they have no hands, no voice of their own, no vote. What they have is settlement rights on the path of least resistance. Whenever a person stands at a fork between the true, hard, unrewarded thing and the false, easy, applauded thing, and hesitates — really hesitates, for even half a second, weighing it — an Obstat can move in behind the eyes and lean, gently, the way you’d lean on a door that’s already ajar. It costs the person almost nothing to give way. That’s the design. Nobody sells their soul to the Obstat. They just let it hold the door.

Imagine you are walking through your day, avoiding, as much as possible, making any meaningful contributions, difficult decisions, or taking in any information. Then, by accident or happenstance a matter of apparent substance presents itself in your vicinity and you take notice. In that moment of hesitation in which you remember yourself and are about to proceed to pretend that you never saw anything; then, the Obstat strike. Little by little, day by day, moment by moment, until an otherwise honest, motivated, brave person becomes a husk.

Over years, in the right kind of institution, these little surrenders accumulate — not in a body, there’s no body, but in a role, a title, a seat at a table that exists to approve rather than to think — the way barnacles accumulate on a hull, dust in a vent, plaque on arteries… each one a small legitimate decision to not-quite-resist, until the hull itself is barnacle-shaped and can no longer be told from the thing living on it. That is what I was in a meeting with. Not a bad man. A good man wearing three years of small, cheap surrenders, each one invisible from the inside.

Dubito let me finish, which took a while, and then said, “And the woman who asked the question?”

“Nothing’s leaning on her yet. She still hesitates on the right side.”

“For now.”

He was quiet for the length of time he is usually quiet for, which is either four seconds or four hours depending on what’s being decided behind his face, and then he said the thing that Dubito says, the thing that has ended more of my rants than any counterargument ever has, because it isn’t one:

“So what do you do about a thing that has no hands and no voice and can only lean?”

I didn’t have an answer that night. I’m not sure I have one now. But I noticed, walking him out, that I’d started holding the door for a little longer than strictly necessary, out of some new, faintly ridiculous superstition, as if courtesy were a vaccine.

Continued in Nihil Obstat II.