Gregory's ServerI read _The Unaccountability Machine_ by Dan Davies on the train yesterday and wow. Attempted summary: society is in crisis because our current systems of governance and feedback are unable to hear the signal that is the vast majority of people screaming, "My life is intolerable." This signal gets routed into any channel available: Brexit referendum, far-right parties, protests against masks or wind turbines or housing - anything to signal rebellion
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He argues quite convincingly that one of the types of systems that regulate business, System 3, or "what to do here-and-now" is running amok with little input from System 4, "what to do in the future," which is pretty hard to argue with. The current financial system, shaped by private equity and leveraged buyouts, forces most companies to behave as if they must make a huge debt payment this month or else face extinction. Which matches exactly what we see: Google devouring search for AI, etc. He also argues for not attempting to understand the inner workings of systems but to observe their behavior (a key element of cybernetics) and suggesting we may have to give up on explaining why things happen or holding individual people accountable for things they neither control nor understand. "Accountability sinks" are a useful concept: the customer service agent who can do nothing to help yet must receive the signal from the customer that something is wrong Much of this is represented in the catch phrase of cybernetics: "The Purpose of the System is What It Does" If you try to look inside the system, you will see a lot of people who think their job is about producing petroleum products. On the outside, you will see an entire industry hell-bent on making the earth unlivable. This is the result of the overall economic system that focuses on this quarter's share price to the exclusion of nearly all else. Another interesting point is that the system outsources the bad stuff to individual humans because they have no way to communicate back to the system that things are bad. This brings me back to the discussion of funding open source maintenance at #OW2con. Software engineers in general are burned out because we have to do jobs that require maintenance work but are not allowed to do maintenance work on company time because of the short-sighted quarter-at-a-time planning horizon of business But the maintenance work must be done or we will lose our jobs, one way or another. So the software engineers with internal motivation and the ability to work unpaid end up doing the maintenance work - in addition to a full time job. The system has succeeded in blocking the signal that would prevent the focus on generating short-term profits by forcing the negatives onto individual humans. This, but for the entirety of humanity - and that's the polycrisis Hopefully this analysis makes it really clear why "why don't people just individually suddenly decide to do the 'right thing'" is never never the answer, in open source funding or supporting the arts or fighting climate change...  @vaurora In the poverty abolitionists movement we take it as a given that people won’t “decide on their own to do the right thing,” for a variety of reasons. One reason is miseducation (about the causes of poverty among other things). So part of our job is to connect people’s experiences and observations to this larger framework of policies that create poverty, and offer clear principles and actions for changing those policies. 1/2 @vaurora There are of course certain people whose interests are served by the status quo that creates poverty. So we have to organize impacted people and their advocates to become more powerful (collectively) than those folks. But for most people we have to counteract the miseducation they’ve received, and get them mobilized. 2/2 @vaurora This was a very interesting thread, thanks for sharing! I will add this to my reading list. @vaurora I'm loving this analysis, but I'm still at a loss when arguing against the people who think phenomena like climate change or worker exploitation can be changed through individuals' actions. Does Davies have any ideas for how we change the systems? @mjausson I added a few things to the thread but it is ultimately unknowable what the other side of the polycrisis will look like @vaurora I agree that we can't foretell the future. My concern is much more tactical. The reason people talk about how we should all recycle is that it's something they feel they have a little bit control over. I'm looking for arguments and actions that have a similar appeal but have a better chance of leading where we want to go. One specific recommendation from _The Unaccountability Machine_ is very simple: if a company does a leveraged buyout of another company (buys the company with a little of their own money and puts a lot of debt on the company to pay the rest) then the buyer should have to guarantee the purchased company's debts - no more limited liability for you. This is one element of Elizabeth Warren's plan to rein in private equity - and the only one Davies thinks is necessary for that A general problem is wealth concentration, and there are many solutions to that, starting from the nicest one (a global wealth tax) to runaway inflation to massive destruction of capital to guillotines and assassinations and wars. It's been nice to see that a global wealth tax has recently become thinkable in many circles. But ultimately no one really knows what will emerge from the polycrisis   @vaurora I'm having a yes-but-but-what-about reaction to this. There are small numbers of individual humans making influential decisions. And the regulatory systems fail not so much for lack of comprehension, but for lack of fangs, and we seem to have at least a generation of people fully bought in to the idea that restraining the system is BAD. (Had a discussion on old-people social network where I tried to explain why side guards on trucks save lives, but "w/o profits, no more trucks!") Yes but how did the defanging happen? And why? It’s not just lack of courage but also outsourcing and thus losing capacity, under-resourcing, under-powering, etc Davies says 👇🏾 “For governments, the market is the ultimate accountability sink” @Akshay @vaurora your gift link wants me to subscribe, maybe I should just buy the book instead (and add it to the backlog, behind the rest of Bicycling Science, spouse's book, Zivarts, Tapia, and a bunch of R textbooks). My handwaving theory is "blame Milton Friedman" and "blame Reagan and Thatcher". A whole lot of big-money conservatives were (and still are) mad at FDR showing what big government could accomplish. "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  @vaurora This is interesting, thanks. For me it raises a question: ignoring the inner workings - doesn't that perspective make it difficult/impossible to change the systems and their outcomes? @vaurora this is so much what I was saying here, only way more eloquently! The headlong, rush, short term group think of end stage capitalism. https://medium.com/@bobthomson70/the-real-skills-shortage-in-it-tech-186fd4d08ef1 @vaurora Ooh, thanks for sharing, sounds like a good read. Definitely resonates with what I'm learning from Donella Meadows' work on Systems Thinking: https://digipres.club/@petrichor/112626251686797022 @vaurora You might find this book interesting @HalvarFlake if you read it as a book on Weird Machines, or maybe my brain is making way too many connections 😅 @corasaurus_hex huh, I’ve had the opposite happen before, but I assumed us got everything 😅  @vaurora I ordered it after the interview on Trash Future, and have been recommending it to people all over the place. It's a bit of a slog when it gets to the nitty-gritty of the old Cybernetic Management Theory stuff, but it picks up quickly soon after.  @vaurora I may need to read this immediately after finishing The Dictator's Handbook. I'm less interested in the political dysfunction angle; I'm more concerned about how we drive systems toward stable responsible maintenance and away from showboating - either novelty and churn or "hard-nosed business efficiency" (profit-taking through neglect and shirking duty).  @vaurora not sure I fully agree, most of the time people having time to do this usually have ensured life. They are, however, very directly manipulated. They feel uneasy about the rest of the people. And they want to protect their gains. @vaurora This presentation (and book) argues that the reason is that governance is based on theoretical models, not actual observations and therefore the signal couldn't even in theory get through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_H_1Akaip0  Thanks so much for mentioning this book. Going to have to get a copy. It sounds like it might help explain the rise of two things: a) customer failure instead of success, and b) systemic customer avoidance by more and more companies, empowered, I believe, by a growing lack of accountability by management. We also see this with the attitude certain politicians and billionaires exhibit of being above the law—and, I’d argue, above accountability.  Anything except voting for pro-regulation politicians who will actually solve this problem.   |
The author structures this using the theory of cybernetics, approximately that there are a series of systems that regulate each other at higher and higher levels, using feedback that reduces complex information into simpler signals. When too much signal is lost or the regulating system is too simple to manage a more complex system, the system goes awry. Capitalism and markets are effective simplifiers in that everything has a price, a fungible easily compared signal. This has many downsides