I must first disclaim that I have not read Mr. Barnett’s book, but I have skimmed his web site. Therefore with something approaching more authority than most pretend to have, I offer these two observations.
The first, regarding the SysAdmin force, is more a question. Where in the First Principles of System Administration do we state that we look for more work? A sysadmin is, first and foremost, lazy.
Secondly, I beg to differ regarding his analysis of the election of Benedictum XVI. Mr. Barnett writes,
Until a real New Core or Gap pope succeeds Ratzinger … the papacy will decline in global relevancy to an amazing degree.
The peoples of the Southern hemisphere tend to be more extreme in their beliefs than those of us here in the Mid-Atlantic States. They are, to an extent, in conflict with the Church’s orthodoxy, but more out of ignorance of the finer points of theology than because of any essential disagreement with it. As the Society of Jesus was crucial to the success of the Counter-Reformation, and the Order of Preachers was to the Inquisition, so may be Benedict XVI to his time. There is tension there, between those historical precedents; the question is how it will be resolved. I think he was the obvious choice.
Now, speaking strictly as a sysadmin, one of the Church’s problems is that the priesthood does not scale. We Protestants have got y’all beat on scalability.