DRAFT: Waiting for the Algorithmic Society

A not-yet-successful draft of my March column for Public Syndicate;

In my view, the most profound and insightful work of political economy written in the 2010s was edited by Henry Farrell. Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber Book Event <https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/RedPlenty.pdf> was not an article in a journal or a monograph from a scholarly publisher, but rather an internet discussion on a weblog—people using a new mode of print-communication to digest and react to Francis Spufford’s very interesting book Red Plenty<https://archive.org/details/redplenty0000spuf>, itself a reaction to and a meditation on the stunningly unsuccessful attempt in the Soviet Union to combine bureaucracy and mathematics to construct a better society than could be built using a market economy or a synthesis. Every time I return to Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber Book Event, I am again struck by the density and creativity of insights into the political-economy dilemmas brought us by the business class’s successful construction of the market economy, and our so-far unsuccessful attempts to transcend them. And I am struck, also, by how that book event demonstrates that that the internet drives changes in the quantitative speed and reach of thought and communication that can add up to a qualitative shift, and we hope an advance, in how we think together to understand the world.

I am thinking about these issues right now because Henry Farrell is back, this time with his coauthor Marion Fourcade. They are back with The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/03/01/the-moral-economy-of-high-tech-modernism/#more-50946>. They are back to argue that the internet and its progeny—what they call “high-tech modernism”—may well not just shift our understanding of the world but also change the world, and change the world in ways as profound as did the engineering of the market economy by the business class, or the coming of bureaucratized society as engineered by the developing modern state.

Back up. We East African Plains Apes are, each on our own, lame and hapless. We need the knowledge that each of us gets from human culture to even survive. And we need to organize and coordinate ourselves—become an anthology intelligence and a distributed entity—to be productive. Broadly speaking, for thousands of years we have had three different modes of organizing and coordinating ourselves:

• Redistribution—information, resources, and useful products flow into a center and then out again in the form of tasks assigned, tools provided, and rewards and assistance provided.

• Reciprocity—each household is linked to a few others in long-term gift-exchange relationships that need, in the end, to be roughly balanced; and because in human society there are at most six degrees of separation the needs of any one ultimately affect the actions of the many.

• Democracy—debate and discussion ultimately result in rough consensus, and in buy-in to an agreed-upon common and coordinated plan.

And, of course, each mode of organization entails a mode of distribution and of authorization—who in particular among us gets more of the good things, and in particular among us gets to count as more equal than the others. That is, respectively, the one at the center of the web, the one with many resources and many friends, and the one with the silver tongue.

With the coming of modernity—the imperial-commercial and then the industrial-modern growth age—we added two more modes of organization and coordination. They are, as I noted above, the market economy as engineered by the business class and bureaucracy as engineered by the developed modern state. The market is uniquely powerful and capable in its ability to crowdsource solutions to problems in ways that other systems of organization and coordination cannot, but it is very badly flawed in that its vision is restricted to satisfying the demands of the rich by making sure that things that turn out to have hit prices are efficiently used. Bureaucracy is uniquely powerful and capable in its ability to classify, and so see much further and much deeper, and then respond, than a reciprocity system that can only see one link along the chain of mutual obligation or a redistribution system that is limited to one-size-fits-all.

And on our three original modes—reciprocity, redistribution, and democracy—and our extra two—market and bureaucracy—we have built a mighty, if flawed and unequal, civilization.

Now Farrell and Fourcade are here to tell us—to warn us—that we are right now building a sixth mode, the mode of the algorithm. The enthusiasts for a society of algorithms, Farrell and Fourcade claim, see it as better than market and better than bureaucracy along all dimensions. Unlike a market, it is not restricted to seeing only money demands by the rich and only money costs imposed by those who have managed to claim property rights. It will, rather, have a much broader field of vision and provide you with much more freedom than the freedom you get when your ability to do things must be backed up by cash, and hence is limited by the lack of cash. Unlike a bureaucracy, it will not force you as a square peg into a round hold, for it will not be “experts” who make the decisions about what bureaucratic category you fall into. Rather, affinity groups will spring up spontaneously as revealed by your actions and your words, and the algorithmic society will then attempt to mobilize resources to serve you taking as much advantage of economies of scale as it can.

Bureaucracies erased tacit forms of knowledge, disrupted the messiness of people’s lives, and forced people into categories useful to those with levers of power over the protests of the people themselves. Markets simply did not care about the non-rich or about external costs—and thus cared negatively about those on whom externalized costs were imposed. Is the algorithmic society going to repair these flaws and bring us to utopia?

Perhaps we can make our fears about the algorithmic society more solid by picking up some concepts from Danny Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow <https://archive.org/details/thinkingfastslow0000kahn_b1q8>. The algorithmic society sees and serves the engaged—which means the fearful, the enraged, those thinking fast. And those are we at our most impulsive rather than at our most thoughtful and considered.

A clickbait society is not a utopia. Yet I fear the trends, forces, and patterns identified by Farrell and Fourcade may well be carrying us there.

---

And let me add two of my favorite passages from the Crooked Timber Red Plenty symposium:

Cosma Shalizi (2012): In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You <https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/>: ‘Calling the Tune for the Dance of Commodities: There is a passage in [Francis Spufford’s] Red Plenty which is central to describing both the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, and vision we are trying to awake into. Henry [Farrell] has quoted it already, but it bears repeating:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. … And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming.

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find “a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all”, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision7 or through other institutional arrangements8. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.

These are all going to be complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second best solutions is going to demand “bold, persistent experimentation”, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles. We will not be able to turn everything over to the wise academicians, or even to their computers, but we may, if we are lucky and smart, be able, bit by bit, make a world fit for human beings to live in.

---

Henry Farrell (2012): You Are Alone, In A Dark Wood. Now Cope https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/RedPlenty.pdf: ‘A collision between the real world and an imagined one, which somehow seems better, denser, more ‘real’ than reality itself, but is in fact a reflection of it. A moment of choice, connected with that collision, in which everything seems to be possible. The falling away, as reality reasserts itself, so that the moment of choice recedes… but still haunts the world, present as a sense of possibility and of failure…. Consider several passages from Red Plenty in this light.

First — the closing sentences of the opening chapter:

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the indus- trial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be cre- ated. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born.

And he could hasten the hour, he thought, intoxicated. He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity.

He could help to do that. He could help to make it happen, three extra percent at a time, though he already understood that it would take a huge quantity of work to compose the necessary dynamic models. It might be a lifetime’s work. But he could do it. He could tune up the whole Soviet orchestra, if they’d let him.

His left foot dripped. He really must find a way to get new shoes.

There’s a lot of work being done here — the argument moves back and cross between at least three levels.

The first is the grim material reality of Soviet life in the late 1930’s — the passengers’ faces indented by “the associated toothmarks of necessity” (a lovely phrase); the leaking shoe.

The second is a dream, not just of simple material prosperity, but of, as Spufford describes it, a cornucopia, a plenty that is fundamentally transformative, building a future that is somehow more real than the world of ordinary privations that reflects it, as in a mirror, darkly.

The third is the techniques of linear programming, which will shuttle back and forth between the two, weaving the latter more closely with the former, by 3 percentage points in each movement.

Red Plenty here is much the same kind of artefact as Harrison’s Viriconium or Couer — a fantasy that promises somehow to redeem and transform a grubby, messy material existence, making it more itself, and hence better than itself.

The second passage presents a different version of the myth:

But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when ev- erything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.

Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.

That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

The irony of this passage is more grim than the Chaplinesque comedy of the leaking shoe — the economist articulating these ideas is about to come up against the aftermath of the collectivization process. Yet Emil believes that economics can transform what had been brutish political relations — “primitive extraction … very nearly robbery,” by making the economy into the kind of narrative where everything somehow ties together:

He was having a new idea. He was thinking to himself that an economy told a kind of story, though not the sort you would find in a novel. In this story, many of the major characters would never even meet, yet they would act on each other’s lives just as surely as if they jostled for space inside a single house, through the long chains by which value moved about. Tiny decisions in one place could have cascading, giant effects elsewhere; conversely, what most absorbed the conscious attention of the characters — what broke their hearts, what they thought ordered or justified their lives — might have no effect whatsoever, dying away as if it had never happened at all.

Yet impersonal forces could have drastically personal consequences, in this story, altering the whole basis on which people hoped and loved and worked. It would be a strange story to hear. At first it would seem to be a buzzing confusion, extending arbitrarily in directions that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. But little by little, if you were patient, its peculiar laws would become plain. In the end it would all make sense. Yes, thought Emil, it would all make sense in the the end.

Again, there is a fantasy being spun here — that human history can be not only be made legible, but can be redeemed.

The Marx here is the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the Marx who is primarily concerned with alienation and its human consequences. And again, both these passages work on multiple levels. The dance of another nature is juxtaposed with the aftermath of famine. The aspiration to a novel in which the causal logics are traced through economic relations that are sometimes nearly invisible to the characters entangled in them is, very obviously, a comment on the form of Red Plenty itself. It is a novel of just this kind (so too, the extraordinary sequence on lung cancer towards the end of the book serves both as a metaphor and as a reminder that the causes shaping human destinies do not always lie in intel- ligible human action).

Yet the hope that it will all make sense in the end is mistaken. As the closing sentences of the book make clear, it doesn’t:

Three thousand kilometres east it is already night, but the same wind is blowing, stirring the dark branches of the pines around the upstairs window where Leonid Vitalevich is sitting by himself, optimising the manufacture of steel tubes. Five hundred producers. Sixty thousand consumers. Eight hundred thousand allocation orders to be issued per year. But it would all work out if he could persuade them to measure the output in the correct units. The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room.

And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?

Optimization was supposed not only to produce material abundance, but to decommodify the world. The golden transformative light of the idea’s beginning, which seemed capable of turning rags into finery, becomes the absent blue-white glare of the book’s last sentences, into which its imagined future forever falls away. The zombified pavane of the commodities resumes. Did it ever stop? Could linear programming — even if it had worked — have reversed the transformations that made human skin into metal, and metal into human skin, or was it just its own dehumanizing alchemy? Wasn’t the whole thing faintly ridiculous from the beginning?

Leonid Vitalevich’s shoes let the rain in, and always were going to. The world is obdurate; the idea is too good for it. Which is, of course, another way of saying that the idea wasn’t ever as good as we thought it was going to be.

And yet, the wind still whispers: can it be otherwise? Even as the moment of possibility disappears, it haunts the present with the suspicion that things could have been different, perhaps might be different in the future.