Modern office design isolates workers while claiming to connect them

Evidence

To quote Hilberg again, ‘It must be kept in mind that most of the participants [of genocide] did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers … Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk.’ Were they aware of the ultimate product of their ostensibly innocuous bustle – such knowledge would stay, at best, in the remote recesses of their minds. Causal connections between their actions and the mass murder were difficult to spot. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97; Always-on work email isolates workers by removing fellow-worker support — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1882

Broader Connections

• Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors #expands (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97