Culture

The Unaccountability Machine: Political Madness By The Numbers

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I just read “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davies. If you know me and when I get obsessed, be aware I’m about to become insufferable for awhile.

The core of the book is that our institutions have seemed to go mad, and the author finds explanations in the oft-ignored realm of business cybernetics. This isn’t science fiction, it’s cybernetics in the feedbacks/system sense, and how it relates to organizations. A core element is that members and parts of organizations become unaccountable in ways that lead to bad and mad decisions.

The financial crash of 2008. Any number of organizational meltdown. And of course, politics.

One of his points – and believe me, I’ll be dissecting this book on and off for a time – is that when your goal is a single measurement, an organization will go insane. When “line go up” is your only goal, problems occur – if not for you, everyone in your path. People are held unaccountabile for bad choices when “line go up.”

You may be thinking about any number of corporations and stock prices. But also I thought about American politics in light of (checks his calendar) about seventy percent of my life. Now I have my own quite pronounced political beliefs, but I’m going to set them aside to discuss a number.

The amount of votes.

Votes are the goal of democratic politics. It elects people. It gets people power and benefits and determines policy. Everything is about getting someone, often anyone, into office. Politics is a team thing, so as long as one of “Your Team” is in office, you can reach your goals.

This means politics in modern times isn’t just the old repression/gotv routines and campaigning and winning people. It means calculations and triangulations, test-marketing, lawsuits, etc. Anything to Just Get Enough Votes.

Anything for Line Goes Up, sometimes just a bit. Even if it makes you do some crazy things.

I remarked once about a certain political activist organization that it was a “winning machine” – and that wasn’t a compliment. Said organization later got itself entangled almost suicidally in various legal troubles and scandals. I wasn’t sure that they didn’t get the mission, but that they got it too well.

Their goal was Line Goes Up, vote-wise, and they’d do anything.

But also let’s say that you’ve made certain decisions to get votes that, perhaps like this organization, aren’t legal or ethical. Then you want to win no matter what to cover your backside or to soothe your conscience or whatever. Line goes up becomes an imperative, and you’ll deal with the bad things later or maybe you just ignore them or hand-wave them away.

Or maybe your opponent(s) are bad people – or you’re told they are. You want to win to protect yourself! Also anyway telling people those folks are threats makes the voting Line Go Up. Keep telling, keep talking, keep escalating, what’ll go wrong.

Kinda seems like politics, if you’re not careful, doesn’t become about helpful results. It takes a lot of effort to make it meaningful not “what three things can I say to get 0.5% more votes?” It’s so much easier to find what buttons to push – and hey, you’re a good person, right? What could go wrong.

Lots of things. Like many of my columns I want to mention the Latest Thing, but each week is a new Latest Thing. All in the name of Line Go Up.

So as we look at the 2024 election where my prediction is that I don’t know what the hell is going on anymore (look at France and the UK in 2024), I wonder if we’re in the political equivalent of a financial meltdown like 2008. My own (obviously correct) political views aside, it seems like Line Go Up is so important, any and all fallout is ignored, and the most batshit things are tried – and sometimes work.

But the batshittery, the triangulation, all of that might be hitting a breaking point. I’m certainly seeing that as I write this in July 2024.

As for a solution, well we’d have to step back from Line Go Up and ask what we want as society, as people. We’d have to make the Line a tool, one of many. But in this current state, I’m not holding my breath.

Well managed to do that without leaning into my own beliefs. Perhaps those will come later, maybe in the rebuilding.

Steven Savage

The Bullshit Waste Cascade

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Watching once sort-of-reputable Rasmussen fall into the fever swamps of anti-vax bullshit is sad, but not surprising. I understand from some people I know that they’ve had weird biases for some time, if only for “marketing” purposes. Still, now their once good-ish name is now pretty much going to be used for whatever fantasies or con-jobs their leadership wants.

This has made me reflect on the damaging nature of Bullshit writ broad (in which I include disinformation and propaganda for “writ large.”). See, when we have people spewing things with no concern – or outright enmity towards – truth, it cascades downward. Having worked in many an organization as a Project Manager, you get very familiar with “cascade” effects of bad things, where one pebble starts an avalanche.

We’ve got a pretty bad Bullshit cascade going on in the world.

The basic Bullshit machine we see in assorted PR firms, hack pollsters, and what seems to be over half of political consultants is damaging enough. We have people buying dangerous products, getting wrong information, voting for grifters, authoritarian government manipulation, and more. But that’s the initial damage from Bullshit – the start of even worse.

As Bullshit spreads (and it certainly seems we’re good at spreading it these days) it worms it’s way into peoples minds. Truth fractures, lies become regarded as sacred, and people believe. The damage of Bullshit is long-term, and that may or may not be intentional, but it has to be kept in mind. In fact the unintentional Enduring Bullshit is probably even more damaging as we might not notice it – as I often see in various medical scams.

(For that matter, think of Bullshit as a kind of cultural equivalent of long COVID, if you want to get more depressed.)

Bullshit that endures seems to mate with other Bullshit. When you’re busy avoiding facts and truth after all, why not double up – weather you’re a propagandist or someone trying not to admit they’re wrong. Bullshit is used to justify or cross-fertilize Bullshit, like viruses combining. Soon you’re wondering how people merged 5G conspiracy theories with anti-vax conspiracy theories and aliens (something I’ve seen myself).

The systemic damage is bad, but remember that Bullshit consumes resources. The people who are busy creating Bullshit could be doing something more productive. The people fighting Bullshit would probably like to not have to, thank you. People bamboozled by Bullshit proceed to do bad things, wasting their time, hurting others, and creating more work for cleanup. The damage spreads throughout societies – and the planet.

Finally there is something that I think gets ignored about Bullshit but really needs our attention in these times – that Bullshit machines get people interested in doing more Bullshit. The people who pivot from Yoga to conspiracy theories to sell supplements. The folks who yes-and conspiracy theorists to sell their books or just get clicks (who are also crossbreeding Bullshit). It seems the more Bullshitters out there the more people see it as a life and career option.

If you ever felt like the age of the internet crossed with mass media is a lot of people lying to themselves and each other, yeah, you understand what I mean. Some bad things and bad people cascade throughout media, culture, and keep setting off more and more problems. Plenty of people look at them and think “I want a piece of that.”

Meanwhile humanity has a lot of crises to deal with, and the Great Bullshit Engine keeps going and maybe even expanding. Things are indeed more messed up than we may think because of these Bullshit effects.

If we’re going to try to dig out from the world’s problems, we’ll have to confront Bullshit, correct the damage, prevent Bullshit, and discourage it. It may help to realize just how bad the damage it causes is.

Steven Savage

Living In The Future We Were Sold

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

We’re living in the future, and it’s lousy.

So-called AI is just Ultra-Clippy being shoehorned into everything that will temporarily goose stock prices. We’ve got computerized cars that allow us to bluescreen while driving, and universal automated cars are many dreams and lawsuits away. Phones gave us something like Star Trek gadgets, but we’re using them to become depressed by doomscrolling. I could make a comment on the Cybertruck, but honestly, that seems pointless.

We’ve got a lot of things that we think are futuristic, and a lot of them are lame, terrible, pointless, or have side effects. Plus you know, we’ve got climate change, Nazis, and pandemics as well.

The future isn’t what it used to be? No, the problem is we’re living in the future we were sold.

A lot of our futuristic ideas derive from popular culture, but that popular culture has nothing to do with what we can, should, or even may want to do. A lot of or popular culture is what people could sell us or what worked in media of the time. It has nothing to do with the possible or the necessary.

AI? It’s easier to just have Hunky Space Captain talk to the computer, because no one wants to watch someone scroll on a monitor. Besides, it sounds cool. Also if you’re bored eventually the computer can try to murder people as part of the plot, a real horror film twist. But do we need it?

Automated cars are a dream, especially if you’ve ever driven . . . well, anywhere. It’s a dream that’s cool and convenient and doesn’t have messy people, and looks awesome in films. It doesn’t deal with the reality that driving needs a moral actor to make decisions, even if you’re paying them by the mile. Also it doesn’t deal with outages, software updates, and crashes.

Then there’s our phones, our pocket computers. This is a totally understandable dream of course, going back to hand-held sci-fi gizmos and communicators. It’s just we never asked how we’d misuse them, as if people won’t find some weird use for technology five seconds after inventing it.

All of these are things we’ve seen in pop culture media since the 60’s (and I’d argue a lot of what we’re living in is very 80’s). But it’s not stuff from speculative fiction or deep analysis or asking hard questions of what we want and need in the future. It’s stuff that was fun to put into movies, tv, and comics.

That’s it. For many of us, the future we envision is something that was marketable.

So of course all the backfire we’re experiencing is a surprise. We weren’t buying a warning, we were buying a cool experience.

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” said Fredrick Pohl. Indeed it should. It’s just sometimes the warnings don’t sell – and other times people think the warning is cool (see many a stylish dystopia with lots of leather for no reason).

So much of the future that people want – or are trying to sell us at least – seems to just be whatever was laying around in pop culture for a while. It doesn’t have anything to do with speculation, or possibility, or what we need. It’s what many of us assume the future is supposed to be because we bought it.

But what is the future we really want and need? The struggle is to find that, and perhaps in this time where the future we bought is failing us, we have a chance to find it.

Steven Savage