I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to this article, even though I don't agree entirely. In an age when conspiracy theories about "global elites" are rampant, it helps to remind everyone that most human designs fail due to unforeseen complexity and unpredictability. When faced with people who actually believe in "master-plan" type conspiracy theories, I have to really wonder if they've ever actually tried to do anything hard.
That said, it's certainly possible to apply long-term planning and coordination in a very effective way. It's just that hindsight and selection-bias tends to make success stories look like the human agency involved was hyper-competent, while glossing over all kinds of factors like simple luck or even just gross incompetence on the part of those who were opposed to the goals of the planning.
And how exactly is the NSA a refutation of anything? They leveraged enormous government resources to pull off massive surveillance covertly for a while, but now we're talking about it publicly so I guess they weren't exactly so hyper-competent after all.
Seeing hyper-competent human agency and design behind everything is essentially just another example of the general human brain-defect called Apophenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia).
That said, it's certainly possible to apply long-term planning and coordination in a very effective way. It's just that hindsight and selection-bias tends to make success stories look like the human agency involved was hyper-competent, while glossing over all kinds of factors like simple luck or even just gross incompetence on the part of those who were opposed to the goals of the planning.
And how exactly is the NSA a refutation of anything? They leveraged enormous government resources to pull off massive surveillance covertly for a while, but now we're talking about it publicly so I guess they weren't exactly so hyper-competent after all.
Seeing hyper-competent human agency and design behind everything is essentially just another example of the general human brain-defect called Apophenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia).