I didn't get that at all. The premise of the article is that society, for agrarian/industrial revolution reasons, has conditioned us to be "packers" - reactive

I didn't get that at all. The premise of the article is that society, for agrarian/industrial revolution reasons, has conditioned us to be "packers" - reactive cogs. It implores us to learn from the Japanese post WWII practice of Total Quality Management / Kaizen to become imaginative mappers. The article strongly divides people into one of the two camps, with frequent Dilbert references and disparaging remarks towards packers as "holding their toothbrush with chopsticks". It strongly criticizes packing as worthless ceremony for the sake of social ritual. (If you squint hard enough there's also a parable in there about premature API layers and strong typing, but I'll concede that part's subjective).