The problem with solving problems

Anyone who has watched an Adam Curtis documentary — those who haven’t, fill your boots, they’re great — will be familiar with the idea that the Western world has moved from theocracy to ideocracy to bureaucracy over the last century.

Into the religious vacuum created by Darwin and Nietzsche came the disastrous utopian ideologies of the left and right, which failed pretty catastrophically (Fascism in 1945 and Communism by 1990) leaving only management of the polity as a meaningful model of governance model, and this is more or less how government has worked since the 1970s, aided immeasurably by the emergence of technology as a neutral, sterile means tool of organisation.

Economies that embraced this technologisation — specifically the US, Japan, East Asia and Western Europe — generally did a lot better than those that stuck with utopian models of centralised control, to the point where by 1990 political scientist Francis Fukuyama was confident to declare the end of history itself:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

History, it turned out, had other ideas. Confidence in data turned out to be its own kind of utopianism. It led naturally to cybernetics, which is a kind of systems thinking that presumes a complex system can be effectively managed and controlled from the centre as long as it is well enough understood, and also to a culture of homogenisation, whereby peripheral differences between people, groups, opinions and values were trimmed from models to make the computer models at all meaningful and manageable. Diverse perspectives were “bucketed”, that is to say: and this led to the unintended consequence that, for reasons of ease and convenience, people were happy enough to eschew these peripheral differences and gravitate towards the nearest convenient bucket.

But — and this is how the laws of unintended consequences work — that leads, for matters of convenience and ease of technical management, to a further consolidation of available models, with the smaller ones being consolidated into the bigger ones. This ease of convergence works both ways: just as technology better manages fewer categories, so do we: we can struggle to have our peripheral interests and requirements catered for, but they are peripheral: if no-one caters for them, we just let them go. Hence, the falsification of the Long Tail: Even though the internet networked information revolution Has made it possible to cater for every possible variation and interest, in practise it has done the opposite. The long tail has evolved into a fat head.