4 Dec, 2016
Work in progress - this is a combination of thoughts and quotes, all of which need refining into something a bit more coherent and closer to what I really think. Have a read though and see what I've read if you like.
Other bits I want to read:
https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/brexit-the-populist-surge-and-the-crisis-of-complexity/
http://limits2016.org/papers/a2-raghavan.pdf
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/archaeology/archaeological-theory-and-methods/collapse-complex-societies?format=PB&isbn=9780521386739
I've been chatting with Alex, and we came up with a hypothesis we'd like to test: Whilst it is clear that technology can replace, jobs, it also seems to be true that the databaseisation of everything is actually making every business a) the same (so there is no chance of competition and profit) and b) beauractratised and pointless - small scale innovation isn't possible because the database constrains everything that can be done. Worse databases make it easy to check that people are following the rules for everyone. If this hypothesis is true, we should see a reduction in the number of useful jobs and huge increase in the number of compliance jobs.
I've seen this in my own work. Organisations spend millions on a big database that treats them the same as every other organisation that buys the database, and the poor people at the bottom are left with the impossible task of making the damn thing work, with the people at the top patting themselves on the back for a multi-million pound roll-out (even if another one is needed a year later because the first doesn't actually work).
Societies improve by solving problems with a little more complexity. For example, by sharing crops in silo, the risk that a harvest failure the following year wipes you out is reduced at the expense of some complexity around organising the gathering and distribution of food. This process can continue until over time, society is so complex that it just can't function any more. It needs to be refactored or collapse. (There's a parallel to software here too).
Anyway, as part of that discussion Alex suggested I read this book - The Utopia of Rules, On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber. I really loved David Graeber's previous book - Debt: The First 500 Years and I recommend it to lots of people (my copy is in Berlin at the moment I think). I've also just finished Post Capitalism which was a little disappointing.
Here are some notes...
The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing total regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.
There's also the idea that bureaucracy only works because of violence. You don't drive the wrong way up a one way street because the police will turn up with big sticks, and if you protest you'll be hit and handcuffed.
Bureaucracy makes you stupid, but it is those without power who are forced to deal with the problems.
I have a feeling that capitalism is always about squeezing people, planet and resources ever further to extract ever more from them. It isn't about innovating to solve problems - that's just a lie that justifies the extraction of wealth when people believe it.
Imaginative labor - This is the most interesting concept in the book for me. The core idea is that those in power don't need to spend any time or effort at all worrying about what those that work for them think. Those without power need to spend a huge amount of effort trying to guess what the boss thinks so that they don't accidentally upset them, get fired and end up in massive debt, with all the threats of violence that comes with it. The result is that those at the bottom probably care more for those at the top than they should, and those at the top think everything as fine, even when it is not, because those at the bottom are making sure it is fine even if the boss has made catastrophically bad decisions, because they'll be affected by failure much more than the boss.
There's a nice analogy with feminism. Women spend much more time worrying about what makes men happy than the reverse, because men are still on the whole more powerful than women in our society. "Women's intuition" could simply be the result of more imaginative labour on behalf of women then men.
"A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it"
The point about imaginative labour is that it takes time and effort. The more time you spend trying to second guess the person with power over you, the less you have for other things, so while the boss has time to play golf, the worker doesn't.
There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970's, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures, to investment in technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control.
"All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being" - John Stewart Mill
Yet even those areas of science and technology that did receive massive funding have not seen the breakthroughs originally anticipated. - The reason is that today there is a "sea of documents about the fostering of "imagination" or "creativity", set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle". Everyone has accepted that at least half of their job is to be spent on admin, and the other half on imaginative labour to create convincing reasons why to account for that not being the case.
Capitalists have worked out that labour is cheaper than automation. And that financialisation of individuals (where people pay interest on debts) is more profitable than innovation.
The role of a Physicist today:
You spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems.
That's why we don't have teleportation devices or flying cars. Just ever better computers as a poor substitute. How good do you need your computer to be? Does anyone care about face chat? That could have been done in the 60s if anyone thought it was actually important.
There are all sorts of forms of privatisation, up to and including the simple buying-up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations for fear of their economic effects.
More subtle is the way the managerial ethos itself militates against the implementation of anything remotely adventurous or quirky, especially, if there is no prospect of immediate results. Oddly the internet can be part of the problem here:
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this "new" idea is, in fact, an old one; it - or at least vaguely similar - has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it's presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have "first-mover advantage" and will have created "barriers to entry". The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed this way must number in the millions.
A timid, bureaucratic spirit has come to suffuse every aspect of intellectual life. In the past people had mad crazy ideas, and then went out and tried to make them work. Now agility, creativity, brainstorming and everything else is part of the dogma, but everyone knows there is zero chance of actually implementing anything. We have a cargo cult of innovation, not the real thing.
**And if we're actually going to come up with robots that do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power - one that no longer contains either the super rich or desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshalled towards human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs - to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history. **
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