Accountability Sinks

Understanding “accountability sinks” and justice culture

• Many readers found the “accountability sink” framing clarifying: responsibility flows away into processes, structures, or collectives so that no one person can be meaningfully blamed or can fix things.
• Several connected this to “just culture” and restorative vs retributive justice. Small, traditional communities often focused on repairing harm and reintegrating offenders; with nation-states, crime became “against the king/state,” monetized via fines and removed from victims and community.
• Some highlighted that accountability requires both power and understanding of goals; without both, “responsibility” is hollow.

Historical atrocities, genocide comparisons, and public complicity

• A long subthread debated whether Holocaust analogies are appropriate for contemporary conflicts.
  • One side argued that insisting on uniqueness implicitly creates “first- and second-class” genocide victims and weakens “never again.”
  • Others, especially with personal/educational exposure to German history, felt casual comparisons are misleading or offensive.
• Multiple comments stressed that ordinary people in Nazi-aligned countries largely did know something terrible was happening, citing visible deportations, expropriation, and postwar impunity.
• Some tied this back to accountability sinks: propaganda plus bureaucratic processes enable atrocities while citizens and officials disclaim agency.

Bureaucracy, corporations, and everyday accountability sinks

• Numerous practical examples echoed the article:
  • Airline no-show rules annihilating entire itineraries; agents “unable” to help even in obviously fixable edge cases.
  • DMVs and national ID systems creating Kafkaesque loops, especially with cross-border moves or Real ID rules.
  • Name-length and character-set limits in financial and travel systems quietly excluding people with “non-standard” names.
  • Employment, LLCs, and corporate personhood as deliberate liability shields that enable risk-taking but also dilute responsibility.
• Some argued the KLM squirrel culling was less about unaccountability and more about biosecurity, but the use of an industrial shredder was widely seen as morally shocking.

Blameless postmortems, safety, and cybersecurity

• Debate around “blameless postmortems”:
  • Supporters referenced Sydney Dekker’s “just culture”: “blame-free is not accountability-free,” and focusing only on “who screwed up” hides systemic causes.
  • Skeptics see “blameless” cultures weaponized to obscure misconduct and avoid consequences.
• Cybersecurity and compliance were portrayed as a giant modern accountability mesh: checklists, expensive tools, audits, and insurers primarily redistribute liability rather than actually improving security. This explains seemingly irrational security theater.

Frontline workers, customer anger, and escalation

• There was disagreement over whether getting angry at powerless gate agents or call-center staff is “bad”:
  • Some insisted principled refusal and collective resistance are needed to break accountability sinks.
  • Others argued that systems tacitly reward the most unreasonable customers because escalation paths are hidden and only triggered under pressure.
  • Several people with support experience said persistent but polite escalation works best; being abusive often backfires.

Author, politics, and meta-critique

• Some praised the essay as one of the author’s best and linked to related works (Dan Davies, Cathy O’Neil, David Graeber, Jen Pahlka, Gerald Weinberg).
• Others criticized the inclusion of specific political actors (e.g., UK COVID leadership) as positive examples, given later corruption allegations.
• A few accused the author of ego or hypocrisy (e.g., earning “FAANG money” and then critiquing capitalism), while defenders felt one autobiographical SRE example was reasonable illustration, not self-aggrandizement.
• Toward the end, commenters split on whether the piece drifts into pessimistic overreach (e.g., “pursuit of happiness is dead”) versus accurately capturing the anxiety produced by pervasive unaccountability.