EIGHT: The Compulsion Loop

“The accounting scandal occurred during one of the worst bear markets in history. Suffering under the simultaneous bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, and the Enron bankruptcy, the S&P 500 lost nearly half its value. Coincident with these misfortunes, Nvidia started squabbling with Microsoft. The dispute was attributed to pricing and intellectual-property issues, but Nvidia’s growing sense of entitlement played a role. Nvidia employees were unabashedly elitist. They considered themselves the best—and they were—but their pride could sometimes sound like narcissism.

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

Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather more uncomfortable statement.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If you consistently demand the impossible, you will inevitably get the unethical.

Management cybernetics doesn’t give any clues as to how such a profound social change might be achieved, unfortunately. I could make something up, but it would feel like a shabby way to treat you after we’ve come so far together.* My only guess is that it might be that what’s really intolerable about unaccountability is the broken feedback link, and that if we can solve the problem of communicating with the system — pay more attention to the ‘red-handle alert’ mechanisms that indicate an unbearable outcome — people might not be so furious about the death of personal responsibility.

*Particularly Chapter 5, which I promise was a lot harder to write than it was to read.