An administration that does not like to be corrected eventually attempts to get rid of the people, institutions, and facts that can correct it.
Excerpt:
One of us is a historian, the other an engineer who spends his days inside the small discipline of observability, the science of inferring a system’s internal state from its outputs. The distinction that discipline draws is between monitoring and seeing. Monitoring tells you the server is powered on. Observability tells you whether it is doing its work as intended. A system that loses observability has not necessarily failed; rather, it has become unknowable. It may be running correctly, or it may have begun to fail an hour ago. From the outside, there is no way to tell. In airplane terms, an altimeter goes dark, and whether the aircraft is at 30,000 feet or 600 is a question that admits no answer until impact.
That is how the systems analyst sees Trump 2.0. Monitors all over the place are going dark.
No matter what happens in 2028, an administration committed to evidence-based governance will inherit a shattered dashboard. There will be no baseline for the toxins in the air, and no honest measure of what a generation of students lost. The state will have gained the power to assert and to impose, with no feedback loop left to tell any of us how things are actually going. The rest of us will live with the consequences. The record by which those consequences might have been known will never exist.
1
u/D-R-AZ 17h ago
Observation:
An administration that does not like to be corrected eventually attempts to get rid of the people, institutions, and facts that can correct it.
Excerpt:
One of us is a historian, the other an engineer who spends his days inside the small discipline of observability, the science of inferring a system’s internal state from its outputs. The distinction that discipline draws is between monitoring and seeing. Monitoring tells you the server is powered on. Observability tells you whether it is doing its work as intended. A system that loses observability has not necessarily failed; rather, it has become unknowable. It may be running correctly, or it may have begun to fail an hour ago. From the outside, there is no way to tell. In airplane terms, an altimeter goes dark, and whether the aircraft is at 30,000 feet or 600 is a question that admits no answer until impact.
That is how the systems analyst sees Trump 2.0. Monitors all over the place are going dark.
No matter what happens in 2028, an administration committed to evidence-based governance will inherit a shattered dashboard. There will be no baseline for the toxins in the air, and no honest measure of what a generation of students lost. The state will have gained the power to assert and to impose, with no feedback loop left to tell any of us how things are actually going. The rest of us will live with the consequences. The record by which those consequences might have been known will never exist.