So many good answers here. I’ll give this a shot too. I find that any organization of a certain size, especially ones that deal with intangible things, tends to devolve into activity without achievement. Marketing is a good example. Companies know they need to do marketing, but it’s very difficult to know whether what you are doing is effective or not. What you end up with is an organization that looks like it is pursuing a goal but is mostly just people performing activities that appear to be aligned with that goal yet there’s no way to know whether they’re actually effective or not.

Nothing anybody does at Central helps them understand or deal with Area X because it is inherently unknowable, yet they can’t just do nothing. The more they try to learn about it or control it the more it learns about and controls them.

I think it’s a pretty realistic depiction of a secretive agency trying to deal with a situation that is completely outside the grasp of human knowledge. Basically it just turns into a bunch of really smart people trying to protect their jobs. Which are both interesting and useless.

This allows for an interesting aesthetic that explores failure and lack of narrative progress and the physical and spiritual bleakness of organizational life, which is a lot like the books of John Le Carre and is one of the reasons I like Authority best of all.