Appendix:

Grove’s 1983 book High Output Management deserves the cult status it achieved in Silicon Valley.

Mayer, C., Capitalism and Crises

Stafford Beer takes an approach to this problem that helps to mark the distinction between information theory and cybernetics. That solution is to say that information and action are one and the same; variety coming in from the environment, or being transferred from one system to another, only counts as ‘information’ if it has a causal role in decision-making. Otherwise it’s just ‘data’ — collections of facts that hang around on disk drives, waiting to be erased* or for the format to become obsolete.

*There are a lot of people is Silicon Valley who might do well to consider how much money they have invested in ‘data’ without bearing this distinction in mind.

Intermission

Meanwhile, in Chile

The great misconception about the Chilean experiment is that it was an attempt to apply computer technology to the task of organizing a command economy. This is a handy myth for those who want to use it as an example for whatever argument they’re trying to make. Neoliberals and apologists for Pinochet and Friedman can pretend that it was a quixotic project with no more hope of working than the Soviet system; socialists and other apologists can pretend that it nearly worked. Neither is the case, and by now it ought to be obvious why — management cybernetics demonstrates quite clearly why a centrally planned economy doesn’t respect the law of requisite variety and can’t get the information it needs to function.

*The publication of Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, a very good history of the project, has helped in recent years.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robinson (Penguin Business, 2021) is also an enthralling history of a massive accountability sink. I learned a huge amount from Gill Kernick’s Catastrophe and Systematic Change: Learning from Grenfell (London Publishing Partnership, 2021) about another case study in which interlocking systems combined to create a tragedy that couldn’t systematically be pinned on any single organisation, let alone an individual.