Anthony sent me a link to The Last Time America Lost a City, a fairly poignant writeup by SensibleShoes. As an aside, blogs like Kos normally grate on my eyes, just because they’re twinged with a bit too much bitterness. Their authors write as if, if we all just hated the other side a little more, everything would be okay. It’s not that I’m Republican; I just don’t have much patience for politicized rancor. But SensibleShoes’ post caught my eyes; it’s worth a read. (And it’s shorter than the one I’m about to write.)

Of course, the technology of the day was fairly primitive, and the U.S. was a much poorer country. No doubt we could move more quickly today.

It touches on something I ranted about to Brittney this past weekend when I’d drank a lot of coffee (but she didn’t really listen). I think modern technology is making it harder to communicate high priority information.

Now that we have email, voicemail, fax, priority mail, regular mail, intra-office mail, intra-bureau mail, secure email, system alerts, inter-system alerts, statistical red flags, television broadcasts, newspaper reports, radio communications, instant messaging, and… cough

So what do most people do when something is really important? You send it via multiple mediums, of course: fax it to the affiliate branches, send out a company-wide email, publish bulletins on the intranet, put up posters on the walls, and make some phone calls to some other people you know. And that is exactly what Doris the office manager does to remind you that next Friday is Hawaiian Shirt Day.

Modern communication networks make it hard to indicate priority. When you want to get in touch with someone, do you write a letter? Write an email? Make a phone call? Is it urgent enough to leave a voicemail? If you see them on IM and they’re away, how many “hey call me back” messages do you leave?

For two friends trying to figure out dinner plans, this overhead is negligible. But when you scale it up to the organizational level, and you impose the additional constraints of large bureaucracies and complex alerting systems, you get a system in which chains of command get broken and people don’t do what they need to do. If everyone has to invent their own best practices for culling critical information from non-critical information, then communication as a whole slows down.

So beyond the fact that FEMA and DHS are bureaucratic nightmares, it’s harder for people to organize in time-critical situations. Whether you’re going up the chain of command or down, you have a wider range of potential communication media, all of which have different strengths, weaknesses, latencies, and points of failure.

In 1908, when something happened, you got on the phone and the radio and you yelled uphill. It’s that simple. What’s the response? Contain the situation and wait for further instructions.

Today, there simply isn’t any way to press the big red “PANIC” button and let the people uphill know that you’re really in trouble and you don’t know how to handle it. Organizations can’t do that anymore. They have to send emails, make phone calls, stamp and fax documents, open support requests in a tracking system, and trigger a number of other conditions within their byzantine mix of computer systems and communication workflows, before the whole organization starts to move.

It means that instead of taking hours to dispatch the National Guard, it takes days. It means analysts and journalists who shout upwards about the dangers of a hurricane don’t get heard by the right people. It means police, guardsmen, and FEMA officials can all visit a convention center where people are starving to death, at different times on the same day, and each time assign responsibility to one of the other three groups (then drive away).

What’s the solution? Damned if I know. I’ll just keep on doing what I do now: act irate and uncooperative when people send me email at the wrong address.

I’ve been meaning to write some lengthier posts here, and maybe I will soon, but right now there’s a lot going on. My roommate Ilia is moving out this weekend, I’m moving my stuff into another room, and preparations are underway to redo a lot of the apartment. On top of that, I’m trying my best to keep the Axiom HOWTO updated and expanding, so that I can help make Divmod’s latest project more accessible to those of us who want something elegant and easy.

But despite the hectic trivia of my own life, a lot is going on in our badly prioritized and notoriously mismanaged country right now. I think this quote is worth reposting:

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.

From the Washington Monthly.