Dan Davies: The Unaccountability Machine

Although these are not in a particular order, this is the book I’ve found myself coming back to more than the others. Davies sets out to understand why so many modern firms are designed in such a way that it is impossible to communicate with them (“Please hold: your call is important to us.”)

He finds that this is because of failures in the way that their information and feedback systems work, but that this—for them—might be a feature rather than a bug.

This takes him into a project that is about revisiting and popularising the management cybernetics thinking of Stafford Beer, and in particular the viable systems model, which you realise when you read it may have been ahead of its time. (I wrote about this part in Just Two Things).

In turn, this takes him on to the failings of modern finance and economics, which I’ve been meaning to write about here as well. But that also requires me to read Brad Delong’s 4,000 word online review, and I haven’t found time to do that yet.

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Abby Innes: Late Soviet Britain

In some ways, Abby Innes’s book is a companion piece to The Unaccountability Machine. It’s trying to understand the manifold failings of late-stage capitalism (at least they are failings from the perspectives of consumers, citizens, and taxpayers), but she comes at it through political economy and organisational behaviour.

The title is deliberately paradoxical, and the book is dense in places. All the same, she argues that the combination of neo-classical assumptions about how the world works, and neo-liberal assumptions about the way the state works, creates a self-contained and recursive system which serves the interests of producers, and not really anyone else.

In this it is like the Soviet economy, which was a homologous system despite its different ideological underpinnings. The chapter on the way this works in purchase and delivery of outsourced public services is a model of analytical clarity.

Again, I’m planning to come back to this during the year.

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Georgina Voss: Systems Ultra

This was the most interesting book I read about technology in 2024, and there is a reason for this. Although Voss is a technologist, she is also a designer and an artist who works with digital technologies in her installations.

Some of the best chapters in the book are drawn directly from her discussion of this work and the research that sits behind it. Perhaps because my father as an air traffic controller for 20 years, I was taken by the chapter about building a platform that used open aviation and airspace data for an exhibition in Brussels, and the uncomprehending call with a Belgian civil servant who didn’t seem to understand that this data was being publicly transmitted all the time.

The later discussion of digital payment systems for services that mainstream payment systems won’t touch is also fascinating, and the book comes with a lot of intriguing references, precisely because of her design background and feminist perspectives. The six chapter headings give a sense of her approach: Systems/ Scale/ Legacy/ Matter/ Deviance/ Breakage.

Paul Raven has a long interview with Georgina on his blog.

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Constantia Soteriou: Brandy Sour/ Elif Shafak: The Island of Missing Trees

I visited Cyprus this summer, which remains a divided island despite occasional desultory attempts to broker a peace settlement. Nikosia is currently the only divided capital city in the world. I thought I handle on the trauma involved in the long insurgency campaign by EOKA, the 1974 invasion by Turkish paratroopers, and the dispossessions that followed it. I wasn’t even close.

Both of these books are a tribute to the ability of fiction to get to places like this. Brandy Sour is short—more the length of a novella—and traces the period from the 1930s to the later 20th century in Cyprus through vignettes that connect a series of inter-linked characters with a set of liquids, some alcoholic. Brandy Sour was invented in Forest Park, Cyprus’s first elite international hotel, so that King Faroukh of Egypt could pretend that he was drinking iced tea.

Elif Shafak’s novel, set in London and Nikosia over a period of 40 years, tells the story of a Greek-Turkish love affair, and how the trauma resonates across generations. Even when you try to suppress it, it squeezes out of the edges.

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James Scott: Seeing Like A State

I thought I should read this rather than reading about it while reading Scott’s obituaries. I have a lot of notes and a partly finished review. My quick impressions here:

[1] It deserves its reputation that thinks differently about what states do, and by extension about the construction of modernity through measurement.

[2] It’s quite a bit too long. Scott was an anthropologist by training, and I know that in anthropology details often matter. But Seeing Like A State isn’t necessarily an anthropology book, and I could have happily swapped out some of the detail here for the case study that he had to cut from the book to make space for the detail.

[3] The claims he makes for visual tidiness of what he calls “high modernism”, are interesting, but they are not essential to the argument. Certainly architects played an important part in the development of modernism, but you can have modernism in Scott’s model without high modernism. In places it felt like it was being shoe-horned in.

[4] With the benefit of 25 years hindsight since the book was written, the argument that Scott makes in the final third of the book is probably the most compelling now. This is that everywhere, modernity is dependent on the informal systems that surround it. Brasilia, for example, works because of the informal settlements that were created around it, and which had nothing to do with Oscar Niermeyer’s design.

This is the world of ‘metis’ or practical knowledge, that is often local, informal, and not usually reliably recorded. But this informal world is airbrushed out of the picture almost everywhere, and the dependency is never acknowledged. Seeing like a state involves massive blindspots.

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John Higgs: Love and Let Die

John Higgs’ book starts from the fact that the Beatles’ first single and the first James Bond film were released on the same day in October 1962. Perhaps this was coincidence, perhaps it was synchronicity, but it’s too good a moment for a writer who’s always trying to understand the meanings below the surface to pass on.

As Higgs says, most countries are lucky to produce one global cultural icon, but Britain produced two, at exactly the same time. Although the title seems as if it’s just a clever pun on Paul McCartney’s Bond theme song, it’s a lot more than a pun.

For, as Higgs argues convincingly, the Beatles are love and Bond is death. This second part has become a self-referential part of the Bond canon recently: there’s a speech to this effect in Spectre, for example. The Beatles and Bond intertwine a lot, it turns out. The result is a rich history of Britain and its cultural relationship with the world over the last 60 years.

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Samantha Harvey: Orbital

The winner of this year’s UK Booker Prize, and given to me as a Christmas present. And what a wonderful novel it is. Across the course of 150 years, it follows the six-person crew of the International Space Station, four men, two women, over the course of 24 hours and 16 orbits of the earth, passing repeatedly over a huge typhoon building in the western Pacific.

Harvey has clearly immersed herself deeply in the minutiae of life on the International Space Station, and it comes out as a fully realised world as it traverses the world in low orbit. I didn’t know, for example, that it was possible for astronauts/cosmonauts to talk to ham radio operators on earth.

It’s impossible not to read it as a story about the fragility of earth, of our relationship with technologies, or as a story about awe and wonder. It’s also an object lesson in how to write about how to write about our climate and biodiversity emergencies without writing about them.

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Mostafa Ibrahim: The Tofranil poems

Finally: A set of poems that have stuck with me since I first read them earlier this year are the ‘Tofranil’ poems, published in LitHub by the Egyptian poet and activist Mostafa Ibrahim. He was a leading figure in the 2011 Tahrir uprising—his translator, Abdelrahman ElGendy says that his words were graffitied onto walls by protestors—and the poems are memories refracted through a conversation with an interlocutor, perhaps a therapist. Tofranil is an anti-depressant: across the poems, the dose gets stronger. 

Here’s a very short extract:

They say the wounded
—when pain becomes
familiar—heal. The wheel
of the cosmos turns
them, blending
the past into
the future.

There’s a longer post about the Tofranil poems on Just Two Things.

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A version of this article was also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter. Thumbnail image via pwexels.com, CC0.

His starting point here is a cultural one: how is it that in the space of a few decades we have gone from optimistic views of the future to pessimistic ones—from the 1939 World’s Fair to Mad Max and The Road. His subtitle is: ”An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next”.

When the post-apocalyptic Australian film Mad Max 2 was produced in 1981, it was necessary to explain to the audience why civilisation had collapsed. Text at the start of the film explained how, in the near future, the world would run out of oil and this would lead to the dystopia depicted in the story that followed. Now, it is no longer necessary for writers and filmmakers to explain the post-collapse worlds they explore (p2).

Constant progress

There’s also a generational question here as well:

When I was growing up in the 1970s, the idea that society was progressing, and that life would get better, was still a part of mainstream culture… The idea of constant progress and improvement had been the dominant Western narrative for centuries, embedded in everything from the Age of Enlightenment to the American Dream. When the Sex Pistols emerged like harbingers of an unwelcome nightmare and announced that we had ‘no future’, that was really shocking.

In developing this idea he has chapters that seek to understand AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, social media, space exploration, and some other things that crop up along the way. I’m not going to spend much time on those here, because they cover familiar ground, albeit in an interesting way.

Beneath the surface

But I should add a note to any reader who thinks that a discussion of AI from 2019 is going to have been overtaken, because Chat GPT: you would be wrong. Because Higgs is largely a cultural analyst he is interested in what lies beneath the surface of things. And so his discussion of AI spends quite a lot of time on notions of both intelligence and consciousness. This proceeds through Descartes and the consciousness of octopi, but a section in which he talks to Alexa about his cat is also emblematic of his style:

‘Alexa, are you more intelligent than my cat?’ I ask. ‘Sorry, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard,’ she says. The cat shakes his head in a pitying manner…

‘Alexa, does intelligence require awareness? I ask. ‘Sorry, I didn’t understand the question I heard, she replies. Awareness is an intrinsic part of cat, and human, intelligence. Alexa has access to potentially unlimited information, but data is a different thing to knowledge or understanding. (pp50-51)

The reason I’m not spending much time on these is because Higgs has a much bigger story here that he is trying to understand.

Deep narratives

His underlying idea is that all civilisations have a “circumambient mythos”, or a deep narrative structure, that defines how they see the world. (Lyotard calls this a grand narratif). He thinks that our existing mythos has run its course, and that part of the confusion of the current moment is that we are in the middle of creating a new one.

The word ‘circumambient’ suggests something that entirely surrounds us, but also permeates everything so completely that we almost don’t notice its presence. The importance of the circumambient mythos is why I was talking about mainstream Hollywood movies… It is in the bigger picture that the wider concerns of our culture reveal themselves (p9).

Because a circumambient mythos is a narrative, it falls into a narrative patttern. Higgs draws here on the work of Christopher Booker, who argued that there were seven types of plot. These are:

Overcoming The Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth (p10).

From Voyage to Tragedy

There’s a bit of a shoe shuffle here, since Higgs suggests that all circumambient mythos must fall into one of these seven story types , and there are other versions of this list of basic narratives. But it’s not a crazy step to take, so let’s go with it.

His view of our narrative history here is that pre-industrial revolution Christian societies (we’re looking at this through a Global North/western lens) were basically in a Voyage narrative. The Enlightenment substituted a Quest narrative instead: “We were on a journey to a better place, provided we could overcome all the obstacles that the journey tests us with” (p11).

But as we get to the limits of that Enlightenment story (see my previous writings here on modernity and its limits) this has become a Tragedy. I like this: Tragedy happens when the character flaws of the protagonist combine to destroy him or her.

Booker’s account of Tragedy runs like this:

‘For a time, as the hero embarks on a course, he enjoys almost unbelievable, dreamlike success’, he continued. ‘But somehow it is in the nature of the course he is pursuing that he cannot achieve satisfaction. His mood is increasingly chequered by a sense of frustration… The original dream has soured into a nightmare and everything is going more and more wrong. This eventually culminates in the hero’s violent destruction.’

Generational change

This is, Higgs suggests, the narrative we’re all living in at the moment. But his interest here—hence the “optimistic guide” in the book’s tagline—is that he thinks we might be able to transform this into a mythos that is formed by Comedy, not Tragedy. As a narrative form, Comedy is not about jokes or slapstick. It is about a character flaw that doesn’t prove fatal, but can instead be resolved.

After a long diversion through a whole range of technologies, the potential mechanism for this change eventually reveals itself. It is generational change, or more precisely, generational change informed by fluent access to social media and digital networks.

This insight comes from an unlikely source: watching John Hughes’ 1980s film The Breakfast Club with his teenaged children. The film is set in the detention class of an American school. He had fond memories of it from his GenX youth. They hated it. (One of its stars, Molly Ringwald, has also written about why the film is problematic).

‘Just a bully’

I’m not going to go back through the plot of The Breakfast Club here, but Wikipedia is your friend. I’m confident that if it were shown on television next week it would come with one of the those presentation voiceovers advising that it includes “social behaviours, attitudes and language of the time.”

To this (younger) generation, the villain of the film is the very character that my generation viewed as the main male hero, the bad-boy teenager Bender. To the eyes of Generation X, Bender was a character who refused to bend to authority… To the eyes of the post-Millennial generation, Bender is just a bully. He deliberately makes others miserable and takes delight in doing so, and no amount of bad-boy charm or troubled backstory can disguise the fact that the character is an unredeemable arsehole (p121).

Higgs draws heavily on the current mainstream views of generational change. Boomers are a sprawling generation born between 1945 and the mid-1960s; a smaller GenX (of which he is a part) between the mid-60s and the beginning of the 1980s; Millennials between 1980 and the mid-90s; Gen Z from 1997 (p124ff). Gen Z are the first generation to grow up fully immersed in the internet.

Being yourself

Much of the current commentary on GenZ and the internet sees it as a problem—for example causing mental health issues. Higgs suggests that something else is also going on here: GenZ sees that world as networked, and this changes their worldview:

Generation Z inherited from the Millennials a belief in the importance of individuality and a belief that they had the right to be exactly who they wanted to be. But their ability to think in terms of networks added an extra insight to this, which is that individuality can only work when everyone is allowed to define who they are. It is only when everyone accepts how everyone else defines themselves that the world can be trusted to allow you to be yourself (p 145).

The different mythos come with different imagery. In the mediaeval world, this was the ‘Great Chain of Being’, with God and the top, then archangels, angels and other creatures from the spiritual world, and then mankind, itself finely graded from kings down to peasants and slaves. Below them came animals (also graded), trees, plants and then minerals. The Great Chain of Being was a statement about authority: each layer had power over the ones below it.

The great chain of being

As Higgs observes,

The problem is that our circumambient mythos still has the great chain of being buried at its heart. For as long as we believe that we have the right to exploit the natural world as much as we want, attempts to rein in our use of the natural world to sustainable levels will be interpreted as some form of painful restraint (p284).

Our version of the great chain of being may actually be worse than that of the middle ages. The Enlightenment, he suggests, sliced off the religious layers, leaving humankind at the top.

This may have worked when the world’s population was 880 million, but not when it is eight billion:

As the naturalist Michael McCarthy has pointed out, ‘Most Britons remain blithely unaware that since the Beatles broke up, we have wiped out half our wildlife’ (p283).

This story is, in its narrative form, a Tragedy—even if schemes such as E.O. Wilson’s ‘Half-Earth’ project have the potential to turn it into a Quest.

Leaning on networks

There’s a subtext to this discussion about networks that plays out in Higgs’ research method. To test the idea that one’s own networks might be enough, he chooses to speak only to people he knows in walking distance of his home in Brighton, on the English south coast. (He is lucky once, when he bumps into someone he wanted to speak to who lives in London in the street in Brighton). Reading the book, I had noticed this, but had not realised it was an explicit choice until he revealed it. Initially, he thought this might have been a mistake:

Very quickly, however, I found that talking to trusted peers helped me understand all sorts of issues in a way that interviews with experts didn’t… What I learnt from my peers was qualitatively different from what I would have learnt from experts… The act of learning from them was qualitatively different also. The connections between people are mysterious things that are a lot richer than we usually give them credit for (p331-332).

What he learns from this experiment, and from the his research, is that culture is a stronger source of change than he had realised—and this in turn gives him ground for optimism:

It is no use assuming that your own biases and prejudices will be common in the years ahead… Culture is constantly evolving and being born just a few years earlier or later is enough to give people noticeably different values. We can trust that the culture of any given moment will be a logical reaction to the world at that time. In the words of the cognitive historian Jeremy Lent, ‘culture shapes values, and those values shape history’ (p.336-37).

A fight between worldviews

Which takes us back to the values of the GenZ generation and those that follow it. Higgs makes an explicit link between network thinking and the kind of systems-based understandings of the world that will be necessary if we are to escape from the Great Chain of Being to a more reciprocal view of our relationships with the more-than-human world.

Our current crises, he suggests right at the end of the book, are about this fight between two utterly different worldviews. Writing in 2019, he sees populism—in forms such as Brexit and Trump—as the last stand of a “the individualistic fundamentalist, single-vision philosophy” of the twentieth century:

The young are watching all this play out. They are not seeing anything that appeals. Ihey are certainly not seeing anything that works (p345).

He argues that this generation has the same transformative potential of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ of the 20th century, which rebuilt the Depression economies and fought the second world war. There’s a commonality there that he doesn’t spell out, which is that both these generations grew up in the middle of economic and political crisis. (They are both ‘Fourth Turning’ generations). They are, he suggests in the last metaphor in a book that is full of metaphors, “the antibodies” that can finally see off the “virus” represented by our dominant but failing ideologies. We’d better hope so.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

Image credit: VGrigas, CC-SA-3.0

The Wikimedian of the Year is an African woman. Her project is to build an Arabic Wikipedia. But there’s more to it than that.

Women make better leaders than men. They out-perform men on most measures of leadership performance.

It’s time to ban facial recognition technology. Eminent digital researcher Kate Crawford: “These tools are dangerous when they fail and harmful when they work.”

Immanuel Wallerstein, the inventor of World Systems Theory, died last weekend. His intellectual biography is a good starting point. The best obituary I found is here.

Hayes Brown is thinking about the end of the world. But he’s wandering the aisles of the American store Target. (Thanks to Peter Curry).

Project Ocean is a submerged art installation. 24 portraits of multiple generations, on plastic, off Florida Keys. Write your own metaphors.

Re-imagining the 20th century. The English writer John Higgs is working through a series of books that tell a hidden history. Ezra Klein asks the questions. 90 minutes is way long for a podcast, but this is full of intriguing things.

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“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)