Time for a redesign

 

Evidently trapped in a world fixated on blame games and constantly pummelled by media obsessed with fear and sex, I stand here, nearly forty years old, looking down at my two knowledge-hungry children, wondering how the fuck I’m supposed to propel them into a future that has never been more uncertain.

 

But I do love a challenge.

 

Let’s start with the patriarchy. Or, more specifically, blaming the failings of multiple generations on willy’s. I do not say that just to reduce the argument, but more to implore you to look deeper at the sale of yet another convenient story about why the world feels broken.

 

It goes something like this: centuries of patriarchy built a system that privileges power, suppresses equality, and leaves everyone else picking up the emotional bill. It’s a story that gives shape to real pain, burnout, inequality, alienation, all if the feels, but it points the blame in the wrong direction. The patriarchy isn’t the architect of our dysfunction; it’s just another cog in a much older, much deeper machine.

 

The true culprit is, and always has been, the operating system we still run on… the industrial mind.

 

It was written not by villains (as much as my inner Tony Stark wishes it was), but by engineers, bankers, and administrators at the end of the nineteenth century. Men like Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford, and J.P. Morgan, who, in their pursuit of efficiency, built an entire worldview around optimisation, standardisation, and control. They didn’t just build factories. They built a philosophy. One that quietly escaped the factory floor and rewired everything from education and government to family life and self-worth.

 

What began as an economic model became a moral one.

 

You work hard not just to survive, but to be good. Schools trained obedience, offices rewarded predictability, and faith was replaced by productivity. The rhythm of the assembly line became the rhythm of the modern psyche. It’s linear, it’s repetitive, and it’s always behind schedule. The industrial age didn’t just mechanise labour – it mechanised meaning.

 

And because it worked so well, we never questioned it.

 

Even today, when we discuss freedom, equality, or identity, most arguments are still fought within the same industrial framework. The same obsession with metrics, efficiency, and control, only now applied to morality instead of machinery.

 

This isn’t a feminist, anti-feminist, woke, or anti-woke story. It’s not political at all.

 

It’s a story about design, about how a handful of nineteenth-century paradigms created the blueprint for the twenty-first century’s confusion. And if we can trace where the blueprint was drawn, I’m hoping that I can stand in front of those two kids and offer some light into the ever-growing abyss.

 

Every system has a moment of invention, a point where a new logic sneaks in quietly and never leaves. For the modern world, that moment wasn’t the Enlightenment or the moon landing. It was a three-decade stretch between 1880 and 1910, when a handful of industrial thinkers decided that human beings could be optimised.

 

Frederick Winslow Taylor held the stopwatch that changed everything. In The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), he reduced craft to calculation: the worker was viewed as a variable, not an artist. Henry Ford took that theory and gave it steel and motion. The moving assembly line turned human rhythm into mechanical cadence. And J.P. Morgan provided the missing ingredient: financial consolidation, proving that whole industries, not just factories, could be standardised.

 

Together, they created mechanical morality, the belief that measurable output equals virtue. That worldview slipped quietly into government, education, and everyday life until no one noticed it was optional.

 

Once the factory proved itself as a profit engine, its logic spilt everywhere.

The early-twentieth-century West asked, ‘If assembly lines can produce cars, why not citizens?’

 

Education adopted the bell, the timetable, and the grading curve. Children became outputs in a system built for predictability.

 

The government adopted bureaucracy and metrics. Policy became production planning. Success was whatever could be counted.

 

Corporate life turned hierarchy into ritual. Loyalty replaced imagination: compliance replaced craft.

 

For the first time in history, most people spent their waking hours not making things they owned but maintaining systems they didn’t. The tip-toe in the water of the madness in which we now swim.

 

By mid-century, the industrial mindset had largely colonised the world. The factory was no longer a place you went to; it was the air you breathed.

 

Then the post-war world faced a new challenge. Once needs are met, how do you keep the machines running?

 

Simple: turn identity itself into demand.

 

Advertising became the new assembly line. It didn’t sell objects, it sold selves. You bought confidence, rebellion, and sophistication. Being a longstanding member of kids who idolise sex, drugs and good old rock and roll, it breaks my heart to say it, but countercultures were absorbed, packaged, and resold. The worker became the customer, then the product.

 

By the 1980s, the illusion of choice had become the norm.

 

Every selection fed the same optimisation loop. The factory moved inside the psyche, and the punch clock became craving.

 

Then came the internet.

 

Algorithms inherited Taylor’s stopwatch and Ford’s assembly line, but their raw material is (and was) attention. Every click is a gear turn; every pause is a data point. Humanity entered the algorithmic phase of the same industrial story.

 

Finally, when everything else was optimised, only morality remained.

 

Now, the same logic that once measured bolts per hour measures beliefs per minute.

 

Social platforms are assembly lines for virtue. Outrage and purity are quantified through likes, shares, and reach. Both woke and anti-woke camps use identical machinery, standardised language, centralised narratives, and quality-control of thought. Two sides of the same factory wall.

 

My heart breaks again every time I see the absolute vehemence people pour into social movements, only to be filtered into the same outputs of selfies, likes and the inevitable label of ‘influencer’.

 

The brutal part was finally seeing how the culture war is a civil war fought within the same operating system as all the others gone before.

 

We measure compassion by virality, justice by engagement, and empathy by the number of comments. Moral worth has become a productivity metric, a new form of labour that never clocks off.

 

Look closely and you’ll see the same DNA everywhere, the drive to optimise, quantify, control:

• 1880s: physical labour.
• 1950s: bureaucratic output.
• 1980s: consumption.
• 2000s: attention.
• 2020s: morality.

 

Each promised freedom, each deepened standardisation. The system survives through convenience, not conspiracy. You agree to its terms every time you pick efficiency over depth or data over dialogue.

 

Even self-improvement has been industrialised. Step counters, productivity hacks, quantified selves – the punch card has just migrated to your wrist. We’ve internalised the foreman. And as someone who loves technology, I think that’s mint, what an achievement, but the irony is that every measured step takes us further away from our core selves.

 

The machine isn’t our master; it’s our mirror.

 

We built it to make life easier. It did. But it also rewrote what we mean by time, worth, and self until we forgot we were the authors.

 

We write the music.

 

And getting out doesn’t mean abandoning civilisation. It means re-programming our defaults.

 

So this is what I’m going to work on to show those two little beaming faces of innocence:

• Redefine value.
  • Would this still matter if nobody measured it? That question alone rewires motivation.
• Re-localise reality.
  • Shorten feedback loops, buy, trade, and learn where I can see the faces involved in all processes.
• Relearn pre-industrial literacies.
  • Philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and manual craft – the disciplines that train judgment instead of compliance.
• Audit dependencies.
  • Know who owns my tools, my data, my time, replacing one invisible system with something I control.
• Take back time.
  • The clock was the first manager. I will protect unmeasured hours.
• Re-enchant the world.
  • Spend time with what can’t be optimised: music (of course), art, friendship, weather, silence.

 

This is a quiet revolution. It’s not a fist, it’s not a flag, it is not withdrawal. It is a redesign.

 

If enough people could choose meaning over metrics, the system would adapt to us.

 

Every civilisation eventually forgets why it built itself. It could be argued that that’s the true measurement of an advanced civilisation (and there we go measuring things again).

 

The industrial one confused its means with its purpose. But it’s time for a reboot.

 

We’re not anti-modern, we’re post-industrial. The next leap isn’t stronger AI or faster hardware but re-humanised intelligence. More than ever, it is imperative that we have people who can still think, feel, and discern amid infinite automation.

 

Imagine education for curiosity, work measured by genuine outcomes, technology that amplifies empathy, and economies that reward regeneration. That’s the renaissance waiting on the other side of exhaustion.

 

The future isn’t about smashing the machine; it’s about remembering what it was for.

 

Say it again: The machine was never our master. It was our mirror.

 

To step outside it, we don’t need new gods or gadgets, only a new gaze.

 

Once you see the operating system, you can write your own code.

 

And that will be my quiet, courageous, silent, two-fingered salute to the establishment, that hopefully prepares those hopeful little faces of joy, for the unpredictable chaos of what is around the corner in the next chapter of this absolutely mental world.

 

Peace x