Cybernetics, a detour (Part 1)

Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine

[This is the first post in a series on Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine. See also Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.]

As the off-season draws near and I’ve been sharing my summer plans with the people around me, the best (or worst, depending on the time and patience they have for me) question that someone can ask is “What’s your book about?” My answer is still way too long and chaotic, but practice is the point, the chance to gradually zero in on a throughline that begins with ancient rhetorical tropes and ends with contemporary efforts to repair our democracy.

The closer my argument gets to the present day, the trickier it becomes. Back in the day, Aristotle distinguished among three branches of rhetoric, corresponding to the past, present, and future. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but I’ve been thinking about the ratio between past and future, and paying attention to how that ratio plays out in the things I’ve been reading lately. It’s often (always?) easier to use one’s insights to understand what’s happened in the past than it is to predict what might take place in the future. I’m overgeneralizing, but deliberative rhetoric (the branch that deals with “what we should do”) usually occupies the final chapter in many of the books I read (or the final section of an article).

Photo by Lilian Dibbern on Unsplash

It may be the same for me. The framework for my project is largely diagnostic, a different way to think about how we’ve come to understand our world (and selves) discursively. But I don’t want to arrive at the next-to-last chapter and answer the “so what?” question with the equivalent of a verbal shrug. I don’t want that, even as I recognize that it may, to a certain degree, be unavoidable. That won’t stop me from trying to avoid it as best as I can, though.

I mentioned last week that, as I was reading Immediacy, I left myself a bit of marginalia saying something to the effect that irony helps us avoid accountability. The immediatist answer to the ironic distance between what we say and what we mean is to minimize that distance by simply erasing half of the equation:

The paradox of immediacy is a cultural style that imagines itself unstyled….style is understood as emphasis (expressive, affective, or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed¹. Language expresses and style stresses. In immediacy, though, the express/stress difference falls away; to express is to stress.

Whether this is technically possible, much less desirable, is besides my point today, which is that Kornbluh got me thinking more concretely about accountability itself.

This in turn meant that, when Dan Davies’ brand-new book appeared on my radar (quite literally as an algorithmic rec while I was searching for something else), spurred by its title, I followed my hunch and grabbed it.

The Unaccountability Machine (Amazon) ended up being one of those books that, on the surface, seemed to have very little in common with my current project. When I’m writing about something specific (even if it’s book-length), my radar tends to self-adjust, becoming more mercenary about how I spend my reading energy. I’ve got shelves of books that I’d like to read, but that probably aren’t going to contribute much to my immediate efforts, so I’ll save them for an undetermined Later. And if accountability hadn’t been on my radar, Davies’ book might have suffered a similar fate. Instead, it ended up being pretty transformative for me, and I want to see if I can explain why.

Several chapters in, Davies writes

I wanted to write a sort of cybernetic political thriller, but it didn’t quite work out that way. It seems that in order to get to the point where the story begins, you need to write eight chapters explaining the construction of the murder weapon. But here we are.

While Unaccountability Machine doesn’t quite manage that leap, I have to say that I understood the impulse. I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis’s style of book—and I’d argue that Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short are all books that scratch the itch that Davies describes, at least in their adaptations. More recently, I’d include Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle in that category as well. They are books that manage to dramatize the intricate and complicated webs where people find themselves ensnared, and they typically feature protagonists able to understand (and sometimes exploit) the blind spots of those systems. Part of the thrill of these books is that the reader almost ends up a Watson to the protagonist’s Sherlock Holmes; even when we’re a step behind, our access to our hero’s thought processes gives us more insight than the other personae in the story.

Had he managed to write that political thriller, Davies’ book (obviously) would have looked a lot different. But his prose is crisp enough to give us that sense of the big picture, and I had that same sense of things falling into place that a compelling mystery or thriller will often provide.

Photo by Karla Hernandez on Unsplash

Unaccountability Machine is a book about cybernetics and economics, and the roles that the two disciplines have played in our society since the end of the Second World War. I’m going to dig into some of the details in more depth over my next couple of posts, but the book focuses in particular on the ideas of Stafford Beer, even if the history it offers is broader than a single figure. Davies writes that

over the last century, the developed world has arranged its society and economy so that important institutions are run by processes and systems, operating on standardised sets of information, rather than by individual human beings reacting to individual circumstances.

One primary consequence of this shift is that “accountability has atrophied,” as human beings have largely vanished from those processes and systems.

The decline in individual accountability for unpopular decisions is not–or not only–a form of moral decline on the part of our rulers. It’s also a consequence of the fact that there are fewer decision makers than there used to be. Nearly all the commands and constraints which afflict the modern individual, the decisions which used to be made by identifiable rulers and bosses, are now the result of systems and processes.

We find ourselves now surrounded by problems (Davies borrows Adam Tooze’s term “polycrisis” to describe it collectively) whose solutions not only can’t be reduced to a single decision but they’re embedded in systems where no one is authorized to make decisions. Davies describes “The principle of diminishing accountability:”

Unless conscious steps are taken to prevent it from doing so, any organisation in a modern industrial society will tend to restructure itself so as to reduce the amount of personal responsibility attributable to its actions. This tendency will continue until crisis results.

For Davies, I think, this principle emerges from the fact that cybernetics/information theory and economics, for all of their potential overlap, grew apart from each other: “The mathematical revolution in economics, which was happening alongside the beginning of Beer’s career, was a huge achievement. But along the way, a lot of things were lost.” Beer’s work committed, in Davies’ account, to “respecting the complexity of the problem” of an organization matching the variety of its environment, but the novelty of this worldview “turned out to be a quite important obstacle to communicating his ideas to the people who might otherwise have been his natural audience, economists.” Economics (and particularly that strand of the field associated with Thomas Friedman) “didn’t have a way to describe big, complicated economic entities,” so they “ended up solving this problem by denying it,” by reducing that complexity to fit a particular model, then asserting that model in place of complexity. Rather than adapting organizationally to environmental variety, those economic entities instead simplify the environment, measuring it according to (and against) a single variable. “[C]orporations prioritise their financial results, and appear to be unable to change course even when faced with the imminent extinction of human life,” in the case of global warming, for instance.

I fear that this is already getting more complicated than I’d planned on for this initial post, and yet there’s much more to Davies’ book than I’ve let on so far. I’ll say just a couple more things. As I was reading Unaccountability Machine, and the way that Davies’ model also accounts for “decisions…which have disastrous long-term consequences as a result of relatively trivial short-term cash savings,” I couldn’t help but think about Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification,” which I’ve mentioned here a number of times. If we momentarily bracket off the notion that enshittification is driven by horrible people, I left this book with the sense that those people, as well as the havoc they wreak, are actually themselves consequences of the system that Davies describes. In other words, Davies’ book might just be a really good way to understand how and why enshittification happens—if economic (as opposed to cybernetic) management is about simplifying the environment, one way to think about monopolization is to see it as a particularly powerful way of reducing the variety of the environment, by eliminating competitors.

The final thing I’ll note before I try to isolate and discuss some of the book’s ideas is that cybernetics as it’s presented here is not exactly utopian. As Davies makes clear, part of the reason that accountability diminishes is that being held accountable, especially when things go wrong, pretty much sucks. These organizations are recursive “decision making systems,” and returning human beings to the loop might foster a renewed sense of accountability, but it doesn’t guarantee that the decisions that result will necessarily be good ones. “If the ‘fundamental law’ is correct to link accountability with the possibility to change things, then the only way to bring accountability back into the system is to increase the ability of individual human beings to make exceptions to policies. And that’s often bad…”

Davies’ book doesn’t “solve” the polycrisis, but it makes the case that some of Stafford Beer’s ideas might help us temper the worst pathologies of our current system. It presents a pretty persuasive narrative about how we’ve gotten to where we are today, and it offers an alternative (with some recommendations) for how that can change. “Otherwise there’s a risk that the system will go bonkers, and that it will start pursuing maximising objectives, oblivious to the danger that it’s on course for making human life impossible. Like it actually has done.”

If nothing else, I hope that I’ve given the impression that this book is worth reading. I went into it hoping to find an idea or two that might help me in my own work, and what I found is already making me see the world around me differently. Round these parts, that’s pretty high praise. I’ll have more to say about it over the next week or so.

1. This may be more particular than I need to be here, but I don’t quite agree with this read on style, which strikes me as a bit off. It’s close enough for my purposes here, though.