I’ve been mapping how the professional class sustains itself, and I'd like to share my findings with you as I work through them. This isn’t finished, and that’s the point. You’re here because I build systems and think out loud in a time when people expect fully formed opinions (that are generally uninformed because they don’t read). I resist the imperative that I must be certain about everything I write and that my mind should never change. I also aim this particularly toward my fellow software architecture nerds.
I’m explaining this minimally because I want to know what you all think it means. What am I missing? What’s unclear? What other diagrams should I make?
If you use this yourself, I would appreciate a citation.
Interesting, obviously people have different ways of visualizing it but the way that I think about it is this.
Similar to your own diagram, I think critical theory sits at the kernel.
But on top of it I would collapse managerial and libertarian feminism just down into “Schrodinger’s feminism”. Basically, at the hardware level, feminism means whatever you want to mean. It sits on top of critical theory because it allows feminist to simultaneously be empowered while embodying victimhood.
At the operating system you have classical liberalism (basically the options to build whatever applications you want)
But the main application is credential ism. (You can have whatever you want… As long as you have the right credentials for it)
And then things like emotional labor, passive aggressive behavior, feminized discourse, these can all be seen as a combination of APIs and firewalls. Basically ways to control the user interface.
I think Voters and Institutions need to be in here somewhere, since so much of managerialism comes down to disempowering voters by vesting decisionmaking with unelected bureaucrats managing institutions.
See https://x.com/wesyang/status/1679161496377389058
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-fourfold-attack-on-democracy
Managerialism essentially reroutes executive power away from elected officials (and thus voters), and firewalls said power behind shadowy institutional bureaucracies.