(Roughly) Daily

Via Patrick Tanguay and his wonderful newsletter, Sentiers. Tanguay observes, “diagnosing what’s going on in society right now, how our multiple systems function and the issues that emerge from that, is not an easy task. It’s probably unfair then to also expect solutions from one article, but that’s what I was hoping for by the end of this one,” by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier…

Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now.

We tell ourselves stories about technology and society every day. Those stories shape how we use and develop new technologies as well as the new stories and uses that will come with it. They determine who’s in charge, who benefits, who’s to blame, and what it all means.

Some people are excited about the emerging technologies poised to remake society. Others are hoping for us to see this as folly and adopt simpler, less tech-centric ways of living. And many feel that they have little understanding of what is happening and even less say in the matter.

But we never had total control of technology in the first place, nor is there a pretechnological golden age to which we can return. The truth is that our data-centric way of seeing the world isn’t serving us well. We need to tease out a third option. To do so, we first need to understand how we got here.

When we describe something as being abstract, we mean it is removed from reality: conceptual and not material, distant and not close-up. What happens when we live in a world built entirely of the abstract? A world in which we no longer care for the messy, contingent, nebulous, raw, and ambiguous reality that has defined humanity for most of our species’ existence? We are about to find out, as we begin to see the world through the lens of data structures.

Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.

This kind of abstraction was seemingly necessary to create the world around us today. It is difficult to manage a large organization, let alone an interconnected global society of eight billion people, without some sort of structure and means to abstract away details. Facility with abstraction, and abstract reasoning, has enabled all sorts of advancements in science, technology, engineering, and math—the very fields we are constantly being told are in highest demand.

The map is not the territory [quoth Alfred Korzybski], and no amount of intellectualization will make it so. Creating abstract representations by necessity leaves out important detail and context. Inevitably, as Scott cataloged, the use of large-scale abstractions fails, leaving leadership bewildered at the failure and ordinary people worse off. 

But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity. Now, we manifest this abstraction with software. Computing supercharges the creative and practical use of abstraction. This is what life is like when we see the world the way a data structure sees the world. These are the same tricks Scott documented. What has changed is their speed and their ubiquity…

… Data structures dominate our world and are a byproduct of the rational, modern era, but they are ushering in an age of chaos. We need to embrace and tame, but not extinguish, this chaos for a better world…

…

As [Lewis] Mumford wrote in his classic history of technology, “The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator.” A tool is controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial, contextual sense of the online and physical world around them. As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.

Seeing like a data structure has been both a blessing and a curse. Increasingly, it feels like it is an avalanche, an out-of-control force that will reshape everything in its path. But it’s also a choice, and there is a different path we can take. The job of enabling a new society, one that accepts the complexity and messiness of our current world without being overwhelmed by it, is one all of us can take part it. There is a different future we can build, together…

A fascinating and important piece: “Seeing Like a Data Structure,” @schneierblog @BelferCenter. Eminently worth reading in full.

See also: “Empty Innovation“

* Stafford Beer

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As we reframe, we might send free birthday greetings to Matthias Ettrich; he was born on this date in 1972. A computer scientist interested in Linux and open source software, he Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 to create (as he put it on Usenet) “consistent, nice looking free desktop environment” for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit– to which end, he has developed LyX. A German, operating in Berlin, Ettrich was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to free software.

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