When Sarcasm Is Taken Too Seriously

[peristaltor]

From a book I just finished:

The funny thing about meritocracy is that the concept comes not from any coherent political ideology or sociological research. It comes from satire. In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a book lampooning the then-stratified British education system. In it, he depicts a dystopian future where IQ testing defines citizens' educational options and, eventually, their entire lives—dividing the country into an elite ruing class of "merited" people, and an underclass of those without merit. The public loved the term, but lost the point. Almost immediately, the term "meritocracy" was cropping up in a positive light—particularly in the United States (we've never been great at detecting British sarcasm).

Young didn't take kindly to the public's positive adoption of his work. "I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book," he wrote in the Guadian in 2001, shortly before he died. "The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded)."

(Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017, p. 174, I emboldened.)

Reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano, where you could only work a non-manual-labor job or stay out of the military if you had a college education. It seems both have come to pass, sadly.