Thank you for this comment, it really put into words things that have been passing through my head constantly in the last couple of months, without me being able to put them down in writing as well as you did.
For example just the other day I (a programmer) was trying to explain to a friend of mine the concept of "Cargo cult programmers" and about how an initially good idea (agile programming) had been taken over and perverted by outside consultants and "professional managers". Said friend works in sales and I think she once mentioned to me the "sell me this pen" thingie.
And about people and institutions still living in the 19th century, I'm now reading a book on the 1830s Saint-Simon movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Simonianism) written by an academia darling, French philosopher Jacques Rancière. I don't know how to put it in words, but to me it seems like Rancière would have preferred for the world to have stopped right then and there, i.e. in the 19th century, when bourgeois people had just taken over from the aristocracy and they could look from above at the peasants and workers that stood below them. He (Rancière) is of course trying to be sympathetic to the workers he writes about in his book, but one feels that he's being sympathetic from outside their world, worse yet, from above their world. More than that, there's this feeling of him mocking their (the workers') belief in an better future and improved social relations, especially when talking about Fourierism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourierism). It reminded me of people who not so long ago were still mocking open source.
And last but not least, and it pains me to say it, but I'm afraid that open data (the idea, the concept) is dead. Somehow the forces that be managed to kill it (I'm thinking Google post-2007 or so, FB since its inception, Twitter in the last couple of years, just to name the biggest). It's strange about how no-one wants to bring this subject up for discussion anymore, it's like a foregone conclusion by now.