The Unaccountability Machine— Dan Davies

Part 1: The Nature of the Crisis

1.Something’s Up

““Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.”

George Orwell, ‘James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution’,1946

This sort of decision is fundamental to the cybernetic analysis of systems; you are always attenuating variety in some way or other unless you are describing a system that consists of everything in the universe.

The ability to translate information into action is the last piece of the puzzle, but it might have been the first piece because it’s so crucial.

Micheal Jackson’s Creative Problem Solving (John Wiley, 1991) is probably the one read if you really fancy having a go at applying management cybernetics to a real-world consulting assignment, although many friends swear by The Fractal Organization by Patrick Hoverstadt (John Wiley, 2011). Of course, Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT Press, 2011) is the definitive account of what really happened in Chile.

If you’re only familiar with the modern form of capitalism and management, it’s very worth reading As I See It (Prentice-Hall, 1976), the autobiography of J. Paul Getty, to see that things really did used to be different.