Template:M intro systems financialisation

Definitions: let us call “financialisation” the goal of reducing things to their most calculable, and manipulable values. So: David Graeber’s social debt versus monetary debt.

The most manipulable, fungible, calculable, aggregatable articulation of value known to western society is cash — degenerate fiat cash, sorry crypto bros— and it is what we describe our relationships in. Hence “financialisation”, but it needs not involve money. Reviews, five point performance appraisals, RAG statuses, star ratings, measurable criteria — anything which can be ordered, pivoted, Pareto ratioed, and put into

Distils down to a worldview that analogue, informal, requiring judgment, requiring metis is expensive, slow and unscalable and therefore bad.

The desire for digital certainty

James C. Scott’s observation that a top-down organisation can only operate by what it sees, which necessarily misses nuance.

Robert Michels’ iron law of oligopoly, that at all organisations concentrate “power” and become top-down

The madness of crowds and our interconnectedness: if it was hard to be exceptional before the internet, it is so much harder now. Yet we kid ourselves that we are all exceptional. If we are all competing at the same thing, we have almost no chance of excelling. These are the Bayesian priors. But everyone of us is different.

Averagarianism

Outsourcing and offshoring as the relentless financialisation of the internal firm.

The Peter Principle that we rise to our own level of incompetence so will be dispositionally bad at the hard parts of our job. The basic narcissism or Dunning Krugerism of those prepared to do what it takes to climb the greasy pole required to want to be a chief executive officer or politician - those who want the job enough to get it

Data modernism and the conviction that everything now can be solved, and mankind is something to be overcome.

Fundamental ineffability

Stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.

—Anon.

It is there but we really have to want it - and stand up for it.

James C Scott: Metis.

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand: there really is a long tail out there — proverbial doom metal merchants lecturing insightfully on Nietzsche — but we are allowing it to wither on the vine. Our moral responsibility, if we want to keep it, is to support it. But are they dying out like local bookstores? We need to nurture them.

The informal and formal lines of information in any organisation - in this take Jane Jacobs, desire lines