Nothing new here
This is not an essay. I suppose that the next instalment could tie the large number of disparate strands together neatly into a coherent conclusion, but frankly I doubt it.
Spending the first five paragraphs telling us how it's important not to just rant and complain about things, and then spend the whole of the rest of the piece doing just that doesn't help, but what really sinks this is the lack of focus. We have...
- NASA tried to cover up after the Challenger disaster
- Ships should have more safety features
- Rioters and politicians are both bad
- We have an underclass
- The Church is hypocritical
- News corp is in bed with the government
- The Beeb turned a blink eye to child abuse
- Economists know nothing
- There will be more financial crises
- To much greed can ruin a good thing
- IBM sold stuff to the Nazis (indirectly)
- The British state wasn't nice to Alan Turing
- The British railway network isn't redundant enough
It all sounds like someone in the pub half way through their third pint after a bad day. And as the author himself says, "one can actually keep going like this, but after a while it becomes tedious".
The only thing that ties all this together, as far as I can tell, are the following claims:
- Organisations serve their own interests first and foremost
- Organisations and individuals are bad at risk assessment
- Organisational change is difficult
- Whistleblowing is dangerous and often ineffective
This is supposed to be new, the defining feature of a "new age", no less. Sorry, but none of this is new. This is standard organisation theory, the study of organisations and bureaucracies and their many disfunctions, and there's a large literature going back at least to the mid-20th century on all this.
Here's hoping that the proposed cure is more interesting than the diagnosis.