Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 4 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Look Me In The Eye & Tell Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.14.2013
Alicia: "When I say I'm going to think about it, it's going to sound like I'm placating you. And that's partly because I am, partly because I'm Alicia and I will be thinking about it because it's all I ever think about, but mostly it's going to sound that way because I'm distracted, because I just saw Guy Fawkes entering the courthouse and I got a sick feeling in my tummy."
So, Cary's saying, the old order is hoary with age and cobwebbed with old compromises and built on a foundation that is crumbling and obsolete: They've done so much to save the company that they've damned the company. No villains, just aggregates: Howard Lyman put in his time, nobody's saying he didn't. But the old beast moves slower and slower, it can't change course without each of those rich white guys making their uninformed decisions known, and in cases like this -- or even moreso, as you'll see, the Swartz class action -- any single employee of the company would agree that their lives, the corporation inside whose bones they live, are too big to fail. And when that becomes unbearable, you have to walk away.
Within the corporate structure there's no clear parallel to the "hack their hack" thing from before, because nobody except the people on top of the heap are really hacking the system, and even if they knew they were doing it you can't hack them back without, like, embezzling or something. And we all have an emotional connection to Lockhart/Gardner, we're all happy to be in those halls and conference rooms, and we love both Lockhart and Gardner, and this would be indirectly hating them too, because that's how a snowball works.
But where all these Young Turk lines -- Selwin, Anonymous, Cary, Stack, Swartz -- converge is in the idea that any complex entity that feels threatened is not going to put its own body under the knife: It's going to come after the people that questioned it, that attacked it, that -- like poor Hayden Clarke, who tried to make it Zumba, who was cruelly punished again and again for trying to save its life through bootcamp calisthenics -- in one way or another made its paralysis and obsolescence impossible to ignore. Which, while vicious, doesn't really make it move more quickly so much as hit more forcefully. Otherwise it would just lay down and die, and we can't have that. Every single flake of snow is unique and valuable and good, and none of them can sincerely be expected to recognize the shape of the snowball they collectively are.
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