The Default State Is Broken

(This post inspired by Michelle Lyons-McFarland; check her out at http://scmusing.blogspot.com/ among other places) There are a lot of white dudes in IT talking about "inclusivity" in their culture and how it's important, as if "inclusivity" is an end-stage boss they can beat, or a card they can move from the "actionable" to the "done" part of their burn board. It's often used in concert with "diversity" (which is another tricky concept that I might go into later), and is touted as a good thing in and of itself. I can claim a lot of things as a cis white guy in IT, but here's one thing that you should probably trust me on: Inclusivity Is A Bad Thing. It's bad for the individual, it's bad for communities, it's bad for teams and organizations, and it's bad for society as a whole. It's bad because at best it means nothing, and at worst it means a deliberate and willful choice to avoid making decisions....

So a non-trivial number of people whom I respect and enjoy have made the very same mistake about a bunch of inter-related application usage patterns specifically about social media tools and the infrastructures therein. That's a complicated starting sentence, so let me give a specific example (which is just the latest in a long line of argumentation all of a theme): the excellent CGP Grey  made an argument about Youtube and why it can't be better at serving up videos and be more like Netflix when presenting content. It's an excellent point, to be fair: Youtube is fantastically bad at serving up content that I want in the way that I want it when I'm trying to watch stuff, and I'm not even a publisher; CGP Grey's problems are at least twice the difficulty level from mine. The problem is, of course, that the problem reverts to a very old axiom that I've used since I heard it the first time: nearly every question that starts with "why" can be answ...