At the 'on the street' level, I've considered how it might turn out if whilst I were heading down 24th St to the riverfront trail, the (probably otherwise) well-intended driver of a Model Y in self-driving mode averted a collision with an oncoming pickup and mowed me off my '69 Raleigh. $300 K and a year later, my leg's re-attached to my hip, and the driver and his cold-blooded insurance company are contesting both their degree of fault in the loss and my culpability; Model Y's corporate counsels, all of them, are pointing to Para. 75, Sec 12 / d of the 'agreement' that's been 'signed' by the driver of the Y that They're not accountable, and I'm all out of attorney money. Unaccountability at the street level, too? Interesting back stories on Beers, and somehow, therein again, are the best intentions of Allende and the worst of Pinochet, (not so) long ago. At least Beers was linked to the more human of the two before the less human scrapped Beers program in Chile.
Davies talks about "red handle" feedback (kind of like an emergency brake or a fire alarm) that is supposed to connect "street level" with the higher scales of decision making, and cutting that feedback out is part of this larger trend he discusses. Towards the end, he talks about our current political moment in the US as a massive red handle "scream." Red handle feedback is not usually good (e.g., the place is on fire!), but designing it away is even worse. I was thinking about talking about this in the context of what's happening across the country on college campuses...
Whoofff. It strikes me that when the system one designs is endeavoring to have the systematic answer to all situations AND dilemmas one might have encountered (or could, with ai enhancement, describe even more that no one's encountered) that such a system would be somewhere between "hard to navigate" and so inexplicably byzantine as to be unentanglible (Again, scenes of the guerilla heating system repairman in Gilliam's "Brazil"). And, gosh: perhaps that's the point.
Like trying to sort out why HP wasn't sending me ink cartridges per the 'schedule' and having to irritate the ai 'solutions help desk' sufficiently that you'd finally get a person on the phone. To a more important level, and perhaps to your point: Here we are, in re college campuses and student efforts to say "We're not OK with dropping hundreds of tons of anti-personnel ordinance on Gazan civilians for a problem Israeli leadership has ignored or aggravated for years WHILE the bad guys actually get away". Or, per Lee Siegal, May 4 New Statesman:
"Protesting students are acting like feckless students; protesting students are the only people in society free enough to protest an ongoing mass slaughter.
The universities have misappropriated Said’s excoriations of scholarly malfeasance as admonitions against politically unacceptable speech altogether; the Republicans are threatening the universities’ independence, which is the lifeblood of a democracy; the universities have to be allowed to handle their own affairs; the universities are incapable of handling their own affairs. In 1968, everything converged. In 2024, nothing is aligned with anything else – even as everything is connected in some way."
PS: The RI Public Library doesn't have "The Unaccountability Machine" yet, but I'm looking.
At the 'on the street' level, I've considered how it might turn out if whilst I were heading down 24th St to the riverfront trail, the (probably otherwise) well-intended driver of a Model Y in self-driving mode averted a collision with an oncoming pickup and mowed me off my '69 Raleigh. $300 K and a year later, my leg's re-attached to my hip, and the driver and his cold-blooded insurance company are contesting both their degree of fault in the loss and my culpability; Model Y's corporate counsels, all of them, are pointing to Para. 75, Sec 12 / d of the 'agreement' that's been 'signed' by the driver of the Y that They're not accountable, and I'm all out of attorney money. Unaccountability at the street level, too? Interesting back stories on Beers, and somehow, therein again, are the best intentions of Allende and the worst of Pinochet, (not so) long ago. At least Beers was linked to the more human of the two before the less human scrapped Beers program in Chile.
Davies talks about "red handle" feedback (kind of like an emergency brake or a fire alarm) that is supposed to connect "street level" with the higher scales of decision making, and cutting that feedback out is part of this larger trend he discusses. Towards the end, he talks about our current political moment in the US as a massive red handle "scream." Red handle feedback is not usually good (e.g., the place is on fire!), but designing it away is even worse. I was thinking about talking about this in the context of what's happening across the country on college campuses...
Whoofff. It strikes me that when the system one designs is endeavoring to have the systematic answer to all situations AND dilemmas one might have encountered (or could, with ai enhancement, describe even more that no one's encountered) that such a system would be somewhere between "hard to navigate" and so inexplicably byzantine as to be unentanglible (Again, scenes of the guerilla heating system repairman in Gilliam's "Brazil"). And, gosh: perhaps that's the point.
Like trying to sort out why HP wasn't sending me ink cartridges per the 'schedule' and having to irritate the ai 'solutions help desk' sufficiently that you'd finally get a person on the phone. To a more important level, and perhaps to your point: Here we are, in re college campuses and student efforts to say "We're not OK with dropping hundreds of tons of anti-personnel ordinance on Gazan civilians for a problem Israeli leadership has ignored or aggravated for years WHILE the bad guys actually get away". Or, per Lee Siegal, May 4 New Statesman:
"Protesting students are acting like feckless students; protesting students are the only people in society free enough to protest an ongoing mass slaughter.
The universities have misappropriated Said’s excoriations of scholarly malfeasance as admonitions against politically unacceptable speech altogether; the Republicans are threatening the universities’ independence, which is the lifeblood of a democracy; the universities have to be allowed to handle their own affairs; the universities are incapable of handling their own affairs. In 1968, everything converged. In 2024, nothing is aligned with anything else – even as everything is connected in some way."
PS: The RI Public Library doesn't have "The Unaccountability Machine" yet, but I'm looking.