I recently rewatched the popular and influential espionage TV series 24 after two decades. Nothing on TV before that had seemed quite as intense, like a life-or-death cliffhanger sequence that never ends, with its main character, Counter Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), constantly having to make rule-breaking decisions to prevent mass-casualty terror attacks, a clock ominously ticking throughout the season. Mostly brilliant (drama-wise it holds up very well), periodically ridiculous, and morally troubling—in different ways depending on which political era you watch it in.
Back when it was on, I told a friend who cowrote speeches for Dick Cheney that he should watch the show but should think of it as “utilitarian porn,” its protagonist constantly being lured, despite his heartfelt insistence that he didn’t want to hurt anyone, into breaking the law, putting hapless innocents in danger, and torturing suspects, all to prevent imminent far greater harms perpetrated by enemy agents who were routinely armed with nukes or large amounts of poison gas they planned to release in dense urban areas.
When I watched it the first time, I had without realizing it missed a couple episodes in which nukes actually detonated, which made my recent viewing startling, in part because most of the characters survived and went on with their lives.
Back in the 00s, in the immediate wake of 9/11, the tradeoff in most people’s minds while watching the show was that between the danger from terrorism and the countervailing danger from an overly brutal, lawless, or paranoid response to terrorism. Watching the show a decade later in a calmer state of mind in the 2010s, the most noticeable tradeoff at work would rightly have been that between real threats and overhyped ones, especially given the way the latter can be manipulated to justify all manner of authoritarian political mischief (see: wars, surveillance, travel restrictions, militarized policing, secret “black sites,” etc.).
But watching it yet another decade later, in the 2020s, still more relaxed and removed from it all (even if government hasn’t gotten tamer), what struck me most was how convincingly the show captured the frustrating idiocy of bureaucracy, including the ample opportunities bureaucracy creates to pressure good people into playing along with idiotic schemes, lies, and power grabs by their superiors in the hierarchy, be it of the policing kind, the welfare-statist kind, or the corporate kind. Lone wolves like Jack Bauer aren’t casually to be trusted in the real world, but neither are the honeycombed systems of control that supposedly exist to constrain and guide his ilk.
And lest one be tempted to think the market, unlike government, yields bureaucracies so rational that the kind of cruelty and stupidity seen in government largely melts away, I must confess that in hindsight, the fictional Counter-Terror Unit’s frenzied tone, claustrophobic cubicles, barked orders, nervously-watched computer screens, incompetent but bullying superiors, disastrously misunderstood communications, pretense of methodical rationality, constant spying on colleagues, and above all recurring interrogation sequences (albeit at the hands of Jack Bauer on the show rather than manipulative H.R. and legal department drones) reminded me of nothing so much as working at Fox News, which I did in 2010 right around the time 24 went off the air (not counting a couple brief revivals). This rewatch almost gave me PTSD-like flashbacks.
I know what it’s like to have a bureaucracy cover its own ass by lying about you, with occasional hints that security can escort you out if you don’t play along (or that police can be sent to your residence, as happened to the guy one cubicle over from me when Fox concluded he’d stolen some footage from them, or at least digitally copied it). My considerable enthusiasm for capitalism has been slightly muted ever since by my firsthand awareness of how easily a corporate bureaucracy can be weaponized to make it sound like every innocent thing you did while you were working within it was in fact a grave, possibly firing offense, even if you were conscientiously following your colleagues’ instructions at the time.
Companies, especially paranoid and profoundly amoral ones like Fox News, keep dossiers with which to discredit even the most loyal and naive of employees later if they deem it useful to do so. That blog post you wrote at your superiors’ request about upcoming shows might later be deemed an unauthorized marketing decision. That person you held the door for out of common courtesy might later be deemed a corporate spy with whom you were collaborating.
Your bosses can do practically anything to you and say anything about you, and the bigger and more “legit”-seeming the bureaucracy they control, the more easily they can avoid having any honest, human, face-to-face conversation about it all—or direct confrontation with the consequences of their insanity. Who can gauge inefficiency, let alone injustice, in a buck-passing machine that vast and callous?
Maybe some of the paranoia and urgency of 24 bled into other parts of the network, including the ostensibly non-fictional ones. More likely, the writers of 24 had plenty of dealings with network bureaucracies or even humbler, less glamorous real-world organizations before they decided to depict the nightmare scenario of such systems holding the fate of the world in their hands. As one is tempted to say after viewing Dr. Strangelove or Fail Safe, it’s amazing this civilization functions at all, let alone survives brushes with nuclear disaster.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey