Intro:
Back in 2019, my hometown of Uppsala briefly made national news in quite an embarrassing way. As it turned out, the municipality was employing nearly 90 people with the official job title of “communicator.” That was bad enough, but the problems hardly stopped there. Not only did the sheer number of “communicators” seem grossly out of proportion to the needs of a city of 180,000, the municipality itself couldn’t seem to get a handle on what these employees were even meant to do. A friend who teaches at a municipal school told me at the time that he had once walked into the communications department during the workday to find the people there using their work computers to play World of Warcraft…