Triage

In the software industry there is a balance between innovation and maintenance. This healthy balance allows the industry to both sustain and grow. The risk for future health is found in the risk a group is willing to make in spending time in innovative research or the maintenance of health. I find a gap in how we see cultural systems. Unfortunately cultural systems are not evidently profitable like software is. So cultural systems appear to be unworthy of innovation or investment. When a cultural system is broken or buggy, few in society are willing to investigate the source code. Many prefer swapping or outsourcing cultural systems.

So what does this do to the broken cultural system? In software a buggy system can be addressed in a spectrum of ways from by being rewritten all the way to being retired. There is intentionality to fix a system that is influenced by profitability. Our value for human systems is not as dualistic or motivating as our monetary profits. With human systems retirement is shamed, but attempted in the evidence of genocide. In software buggy is identifiable, but in human systems I have come to understand buggy as subjective. Or possibly I am refusing to see in the computing world that there are often systems design for broken processes. In may human systems I see how the system is functional and productive but is expected to function in a broken process. Our indigenous cultures represent these functional and productive systems. The broken processes I see as the consumer mentality, the convenience hoarding, and the power dependence.

As a potential professional in the helping arena I am worried that the incentive that we are pursuing is simply triage.