You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.This wasn't because it was magically insightful, but rather because it reminded me of the most memorable thing I heard at SXSW (which I haven't talked about much around here). It came during a talk called Gaming the System with 4chan hosted by moot and Jason Scott. Both came from Jason Scott, first noting that "before there were trolls there were bureaucrats" and then noting that the thing that people like so much about the game of Wikipedia is that you get to play a character no other game has: The bureaucrat. Fun stuff for a Friday evening.