Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 24.03.19 14:28, Florian Cramer wrote:

> Travis suggests that the 737 MAX fiasco resulted from a combination of
> market economics/cost-optimization management and software 
> being used to correct hardware design flaws.

Yes. I think there are several factors involved that are in fact
indicative of a wider techno-political condition, it's just that in the
case of a plane crash, the effects and the investigation are
particularly public. I'm pretty sure, the set of problems involved here
is very common, it includes:

a) Lax oversight. A massive shift from government (aka public interest,
at least in theory) regulation to industry self-regulation. This is an
effect, as well as a cause of, the power shift between the two poles.

b) Consequently, the narrow interest of corporate actors (cost-cutting,
profitability, short-termness etc) dominate the equation of incentives.

c) Massive rise in complexity that increases the importance of
computation as a way of managing the resulting dynamics.

These three elements are, basically, the ingredients of the system of
neo-liberal globalization. And the most important aspect of this story
was that it has worked, not the least by being able to marginalize all
other systems over the last 40 years.

It's important to remember where this system came from, and here I keep
thinking of Castells brilliant analysis of the crises of
"industrialism", aka Fordism, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which
occurred both in capitalist and socialist countries. The reason, so
Castells, was that Fordism as a mode of organization had reached the
internal limit of complexity it could handle. It was no longer able to
cope with the increasingly diverse and more rapidly changing demands and
pressures that characterized the socio-technical (and ecologic)
environment which it was supposed to organize. The Soviets went into 20
years of stagnation (basically, the era of Brezhnev) while the
capitalist countries went on a contentious processes of organizational
change, that reached its pitting point when Thatcher and Reagan came to
power.

By returning basically to a Hayekian notion of the market as a superior
information processors, by reducing the complexity of lived-experience
to the price signal, it emerged a system that was able to cope with, and
rapidly expand, the rising complexity of society.

The Soviet Union fell apart when belatedly trying to embark on similar
reforms (similar not in the sense of neoliberal, but in the sense of
acknowledging the rising complexity of society, by, for example,
recognizing the existence of civil society).

So, fast forward to today. I think we are witnessing a similar moment of
stasis, this time in the West.  The term gridlock describes both the UKt
as well as the US experience and the attempts to break through it are
seriously damaging the system. In a way, it's like punishing workers in
a dysfunctional system for not meeting their targets. It deepens the
dysfunction.  The EU is probably not far behind.

The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the limits
of the complexity it can handle. The externalities produced by the
radical reduction of the lived experience to price signals are coming
back to haunt the system, which has no way of coping with it. The
attempts to put a price on "bads", say in the case of cap'n'trade have
failed. And similarly, the attempts to save the climate are failing.

The rise in complexity in itself is not a bad thing. Historically, as
far as I can tell, a reduction in complexity has always meant a
breakdown of civilization. That may well be in the offing, but that's
not a good thing.

But that also means that we need massive computation to cope, not
just to handle "hardware flaws", but to make the world inhabitable, or
to keep it inhabitable, for civilization to continue.

The problem, I think, is the combination of two massively reductionist
systems, that of price signals and that of digital simulation, that
cannot account for the complexity of the effects they produce and hence
generate all kinds of "black swans".

In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the
case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in the
case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open,
while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed to
outsiders, to the degree that there is even one.


Felix



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