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Blame as a Service

humaninvariant.com

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Re: Blame as a Service

#3

Post by amarant »

I was really hoping this would be doing something obscure with git, I was curious why someone would pay a subscription for something that's a built-in git feature.

Unfortunately this was much more nefarious. I do see why some would pay for, I just wish they wouldn't/didn't have the option to

Re: Blame as a Service

#8

Post by stego-tech »

I love the rebranding of corporate villainy as “Blame as a Service”; it makes it easier to discuss these sleaze-bags in the open without getting into nitty-gritty technicalities that derail the core conversation.

Also fitting that McKinsey (and by extension, most “business consultancy” companies) get the first shoutout as a prime example of BaaS. Despite lending their support to decades of awful, and at times morally evil decisions, the arrangement allows both business elites and McKinsey themselves to escape blame via simple finger-pointing, the masses largely unaware that said negative outcomes were the goal all along.

To fix broken systems, we must find ways of distilling complex and nuanced topics into simple-to-communicate concepts, vocabulary, and slang. Blame-as-a-Service accomplishes that nicely, and will hopefully allow a redirection back towards the core point of many such discussions: accountability, or lack thereof.

Re: Blame as a Service

#9

Post by calvinmorrison »

How about the most obvious ones? AWS? Cloudflare outage? I saw nobody get anything other than a grunt this week. Who cares? What can we do? It'll be up when it's up.

I also had a client this week have a physical server catch on fire and burn down everything. Backups don't count when they're in the same room.

Re: Blame as a Service

#10

Post by yoz »

Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.

Davies writes: "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system."

For a good short overview, see this piece by Mandy Brown: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...

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