Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

 

[[Data modernism|This philosophy]] has systematically undermined the organisational importance of ''people with [[ineffable]] expertise''. Over thirty or forty years the poor professional has, by a thousand literal cuts, been denuded of her status. It has been a slow, inevitable descent into the quotidian. First they came for her assistants — typists, receptionists, proof-readers, mail and fax room attendants — then her kit — company cars, laptops, mobile devices — then her space —  that once commodious office became communal, then lost its door, then its walls, diminished to a dedicated space along a row, and most recently has become a conditional promise of a sanitised space at a [[telescreen]] somewhere in the building, assuming you’re quick or enough people are out sick or on holiday.  

[[Data modernism]]’s central [[metaphor]] works by treating humans in the workforce as if they were carbon-based [[Turing machine]]s, and “the firm” a [[distributed network]] of automatons. Such a network is best optimised centrally, from the place with the best view of the big picture: the top.<ref>Curiously, this is not the theory behind distributed computing, which is rather [[end-to-end principle|controlled from the edges]]. But still.</ref>

 

From the top, the only legible information is [[data]], and so all germane information about the organisation must take the form of [[data]] — you know: “[[Signal-to-noise ratio|In God we trust, all others must bring data]]”. With enough data, so the theory goes, everything about the organisation’s ''present'' can be known, and from a more or less complete picture of the present one can extrapolate to the future. This, says [[data modernism]] is the promise of science and technology.<ref>It isn’t. It really, really isn’t. But still.</ref>  

Armed with all the data, the organisation’s permanent infrastructure can be honed down and dedicated to its core business, and peripheral functions — [[operation]]s, [[personnel]], [[legal]] and ''~ cough ~'' strategic [[management consultant|management advice]] — genericised and outsourced to specialist service providers who can be scaled up or down as requirements dictate<ref>“Surge pricing” in times of crisis, though.</ref> or switched out should they malfunction or otherwise be surplus to requirements.<ref>A former general counsel of UBS once had the bright idea of creating a “shared service” out of its legal function that could be contracted out to other banks, like Credit Suisse. He kept bringing the idea up, though it was rapidly pooh-poohed each time. Who knew it would work out so well in practice?</ref>

This philosophy of optimally efficient allocation of resources, espoused as it is by ''~ cough ~'' strategic [[management consultant| management advisors]] — can seem self-serving. It is responsible for a generational drift from inefficient businesses run arbitrarily by unionised humans to enterprises run like unblinking machines: infinitesimally-sliced ''processes'', each [[triage]]d and managed by pre-automated applications, with what minimal human oversight there is provided by external service providers in low-cost locations.  

''Business'' became “business-process-as-a-service”.

We should, by now, feel like we are in a new and better world — right? — yet customer experience feels worse than ever. Just try getting hold of a bank manager now. “BAU-as-a-service” has streamlined and enhanced the great heft what businesses do, at the cost of outlying opportunities for which the model says there is insufficient business case.

It gets worse for the poor old [[subject matter expert]]s. Even though, inevitably, one has less than perfect information, extrapolations, mathematical derivations and [[Large language model|algorithmic pattern matches]] from a large but finite data set will, it is ''deduced'' — have better predictive value than the gut feel of “[[ineffable]] [[expert]]ise”.  

The status we have historically assigned to experienced experts is grounded in folk psychology, lacks analytical rigour and, when compared with sufficient granular data, cannot be borne out: this is the lesson of {{br|Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game}}. Just as Wall Street data crunchers can have no clue about baseball and still outperform veteran talent scouts, so can data models and analysts who know nothing about the technical details of, say, the ''law'' outperform humans who do when optimising business systems. Thus, from a network of programmed but uncomprehending rule-followers, a smooth, steady and stable business revenue stream [[emerge]]s. Strong and stable. Strong and stable. Repeat it enough and it sounds plausible.

All the same, it’s worth asking again: if we’re getting nearer some kind of optimised nirvana, how come everything seems so joyless and glum?

 

{{Singularity and perspective chauvinism}}

There may be fewer [[subject matter expert]]s around, but there seem to be more [[software-as-a-service]] providers, [[Master of Business Administration|MBA]]s,  [[COO]]s, [[workstream lead]]s and [[Proverbial school-leaver from Bucharest|itinerant school-leavers in call-centres on the outskirts of Brașov]].

For the computer code on which [[data modernism]] depends does not do ''[[tense]]'': it is, permanently, in the ''present''. The apparent continuity through time vouchsafed by computers is, like cinematography, a conjuring trick: in fact, there is no continuity: we ascribe our own sense of continuity, from our own language, to what we see. Like all good magic it relies on misdirection. The “magic” is all our own. It is odd we are so willing to ascribe to a box the magic in our heads.

For existential continuity, backwards and forwards in “time”, is precisely the problem that the human brain evolved to solve: this is the thing that demands continuously existing “things” with definitive boundaries, just one of which is “me”, moving through a spatio-temporal universe, interacting with each other. This is a human construction out of whole cloth. None of this continuity is in the data.<ref>{{author|David Hume}} wrestled with this idea of continuity: if I see you, then look away, then look back at you, what ''grounds'' do I have for believing it is still “you”?  Computer code makes no such assumption. It captures property A, timestamp 1; property A timestamp 2, property A timestamp 3: these are discrete objects with common property, in a permanent present — code imputes no necessary link between them, not does it extrapolate intermediate states. It is the human genius to make that logical leap. How we do it, ''when'' we do it — generally, how human consciousness works, defies explanation. {{author|Daniel Dennett}} made a virtuoso attempt to apply this algorithmic [[reductionist]] approach to the problem of mind in {{br|Consciousness Explained}}, but ended up defining away the very thing he claimed to explain, effectively concluding “consciouness is an illusion”. But on whom?</ref>

[[Data modernism]] does away with the need for time and continuity altogether, instead ''simulating'' it through a succession of static slices — but that continuity vanishes when one regards the picture show as a sequence of still frames.  

Imagine a still frame of two pint glasses, A and B, each containing half a pint of beer.<Ref>One that costs more than a fortnight’s subscription to the JC, by the way.</ref> Which is half-full and which is half-empty?  

Now, imagine a short film in which glass A is full and glass B empty, then a little Cartesian imp arrives, picks up glass A and tips half of its contents into glass B. ''Now'' which is half-full and which is half-empty? We can see that glass A is half-empty and glass B is half-full. ''That history makes a difference''.  

The first, static scenario poses an apparently stupid question. The second time-bound scenario tells us something small about the history of the world.

===On the virtue of slack===