Computer Business System (CBS)

Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans by Simon Head, page 185:

The "Closed World" is a state of mind and a way of thinking that straddles the military and civilian worlds of CBSs, bringing a dehumanized rationality to the workings of the civilian economy. With an authoritarianism bound up with its part-military origins, the civilian "closed world" dehumanizes us by turning is into abstracted electronic and statistical entities subject to the system's science-based rationality. Although this rationality seems to take on an impersonal, abstracted form, all the system's rules and commands in fact have human origins in the superior expertise of the technical, managerial elite whose wisdom is baked into the system. This is what "dumbing down" means in the early twenty-first century.

The dumbing down is also joined at the hip to another practice, one that was a dominant force in American capitalism during the twentieth century and shows every sign of extending its dominance to the twenty-first. Scientific mangement has been a looming presence throughout this book, as it is a looming presence in the contemporary US economy.

...

The CBS world is a great unmentionable, and by keeping it out of their texts and out of public sight they have brought off a distortion of American business history worthy of Pravda itself. The systems they have created are essentially latter-day vehicles of Scientific management, vastly empowered by information technology.

The central principle of Scientific Management has been and remains the separation of the detailed planning of work from its execution, the definition of the practice that Harold Leavitt and Thomas Whisler relied on in their landmark 1958 piece for the Harvard Business Review, "Management in the 1980s." From this unequal division of labor stem many of the inequalities of skill, power, and income noted in embryonic form by Leavitt and Whisler more than fifty years ago and rampant in the US economy of today. These inequalities seperate those who control and create the systems, the managerial and technocratic elite inhabiting Leavitt and Whisler's football perched at the pinnacle of their workplace pyramid, from those who are subject to the system's orders and have to follow them.

These inequalities are rampant because the information technologies embedded in CBSs are being applied to ever-widening segments of the service economy, most notably to core services, complex dealings between human agents, as in health care, financial services, etc.