Substance and form

The existential dilemma — the paradox — of form and substance was first adverted to in Puttanesca Rigatoni’s now largely forgotten tragicomic opera La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza (often performed, if performed at all, in German, as Die Eroberung der Form durch Substanz).

In Rigatoni's exquisite libretto, argumentative Venetian merchant Don Iolio Contrario is employed as an operations manager in his father Don Figaro Contrario's struggling spice brokerage, where he meets, falls in love with an enchanting and gifted young brokeress Iolande Impulsivia . His father is obsessed with cost control, and has invested in a homunculus, a steam-powered computation machine which will take over the role of the brokers.

Don Figaro, a vain and stupid man who cares mainly about his legacy and reputation, is anxious to be seen as a great financial innovator. He is exasperated at his son for his errant, romantic, impractical ways.

Despite his Iolio's (accurate) warnings that the machine will be hopeless, devious rival Don Inago Montega tricks Don Figaro into a buying his machine, for which Don Figaro takes out a long-term loan from Don Inago at usurious prices.

In actual fact, Don Inago couldn't wait to get rid of the machine, as it was a colossal liability, and he has configured it to perform badly and to cripple Don Figaro's business.

With great fanfare Don Figaro takes delivery of the machine, which to everyone's surprise, works - but only because Iolande and Don Iolio are standing behind the machine ensuring it works and checking everything. It is her brilliant accounting which the machine produces.

Iolio and Iolande quickly fall in love, despite his controlling father's best intentions.

Don Figaro orders another machine, but to pay for it, must make Don Iolio and Iolande redundant. I have solved the problem of employees. Little does Don Figaro know!

In wrenching aria Sono condannato a essere un esperto in materia , Iolande drifts aimlessly around the canals of Venice with her Iron Mountain box, pondering whether there is any future to her life at all.

At the same time Don Iolio ineffectually rails against the stupidity of voguish fashionable ideas (his song is Il mondo ha una merda per i cervelli)

the modern world is blighted by the comforting embrace of tickable boxes, checkable checklists, and auditable trails, all of which give their comfort by the easy road: rather than evaluate the qualities of your organisation, tally up its countable dimensions, however superficial they are.

There is a logic to this: the power of big data is their emergent properties: you can extract from a mass of data qualities you can’t see from individual instances. That one kettle goes on at 4:30 in the afternoon signifies nothing in particular; that fourteen million do tells you it’s half time in the football.

This is a correlation, though, not causation, and it won’t flow the other way. Just because you put the kettle on at 4:30 doesn't mean you were watching the football, however likely it might seem. Probability is an is, not an ought.

See also

• Closely related to the technology paradox