Template:M intro systems financialisation: Difference between revisions

Any [[metrics]], balance sheet, [[org chart]], projection or discounted cashflow analysis — ''any'' [[formal]] accounting for the intensely human activity of doing business jettisons much of what is important about it. The [[map]] can never be more than a schematic. It cannot convey the grandeur — or the ''horror'' — of the [[territory]]. The jettisoning is part of the exercise: it is, itself to make a judgment about what is and is not important. It is to extract a [[signal]] from [[hubbub|noise]]. That signal is ad hoc, imaginary, a creative work, and by no means exclusive to the hubbub: there are ''infinite'' array of signals we could take out of the hubbub; the ones we do are determined by our cultural fabric, which is made of all the decisions, signals, and institutions we have already built. This relativity terrifies “right thinking people”, but there is no way around it: it is best just to [[ignorance|ignore]] it.  

====Sidebar on [[ignore|Ignorance]]====

In a world where every communication is tracked, kept, logged, stored and discoverable, where “[[what you see is all there is]]” we should not underestimate the perfidious power of ignoring things. The {{poh}} refers: the number of smoking gun emails that went unacknowledged, unresponded to, that left their recipient with the plausible deniability — I did not see it, I did not read it that way, ''I just don’t recall'' — could fill volumes.

The culture of fear in organisations leads to two kinds of ignorance: the canny will not respond on the record at all — any pretext for not doing so (an inappropriate tone, hyperbole, anger, however justifiable) — buttresses that decision. In a perfectly  passive aggressive organisation with uneasy peace, the discontented are discouraged, on pain of censure, from even raising objections, whereupon no need for silence as a strategy even arises.

The lesson is this. If we mistake the map for the territory — if we organise our interests and judge our outcomes exclusively by reference to the map, ''we thereby change the territory''. Gradually, by degrees, the territory converges on the map. This is excellent news for the machines and those who employ them, as it makes their job easier, but amongst the rest of us it is only convenient for cartographers. It is bad for the people in the territory whose interests the cartographers supposedly represent. It leads to two kinds of bad outcomes.

{{L1}}It makes life easier for “algorithmic” business units that can only work in terms of numbers — call these “machines”. It enhances financialisation be reducing ineffability. The benefit of network nodes that ''can'' handle ineffability — that tend to be more expensive and less predictable — we call these [[subject matter expert]]s, or even humans — is diminished. Now of course we can assign humans to algorithmic roles — where there is peripheral intractability in a network function, we have no choice — but as the territory redraws itself to the map, we can further marginalise that ineffability, and deploy cheaper humans, and at the limit, replace them altogether. Where intractability is hard, but not important — by interpreting unstructured inputs, as in a consumer helpline and triaging easy/low value queries— then techniques like AI can already handle it. By agreeing to behave like machines, to be categorised according to numerical terms, to be financialised — we ''surrender'' to machines<li>

It leads to actual bad outcomes in the territory. No better example than the [[Post Office Horizon]] scandal.

Things that can’t be ranked and counted — that aren’t “legible” to this great high powered information processing system — have no particular [[value]] ''to the system, in the system’s terms'' — it can't digest them, extract value out of them which it does by processing — this is so whether or not these have any value to ''us''.  

''[[Value]]'' is a function of cultural and linguistic context — the richer the language, the more figurative, the more scope for imagination, the more scope for alternative formulations of ''value''. Conversely, inflexible languages, with little scope for imaginative reapplication have much less scope for articulating values — it is much harder to capture all that richness of meaning. The closer a language is to one-way symbol processing, the more it resembles ''code''. Machine languages cannot handle ineffability. (This is a highly relativistic sense of value by the way. Guilty as charged.)