15 posts
A project exploring the complex role that power plays in our lives: how it shapes our interactions, our identities, our institutions, and even our sense of reality. Topics range from the neuroscience of emotion to the legal history of corporations. Originally published at rethinkingpower.info.
"Move fast and break things" was the internal motto of Facebook up until 2014 they realized, a little belatedly, that perhaps a corporation with worldwide reach and hundreds of millions of active users shouldn't make recklessness its motivating principle.
Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they've built with their sandbox toys. Now, imagine a group of eighteen adults, two teams of office co-workers, throwing around a baseball according to very precise rules. Those adults are playing too.
People tend to think of laws as set in stone, but they're very changeable. They're changeable in at least two ways: the laws themselves can be altered, through formal legal mechanisms like passing a bill through Congress, or laws can change through how they're enforced on the ground.
Information naturally flows from those who have more power to those who have less.
As we've discussed previously, all systems are built on abstractions, and all abstractions are at least a little bit wrong. The more complex and important a system is, the more likely it is that a leaky abstraction will gum up the works. So systems need feedback mechanisms to detect when an abstraction is leaking, so they can identify and fix the problem.
Technologies are built with a model of the world in mind. A hammer presumes a nail, a screwdriver a screw, and so on. But there is, necessarily, a gap between the model and the reality, a gap between how a technology is meant to be used and how it actually functions in the world.
In my last post, I talked about how all systems have flaws, and how these flaws require interpretive labor to be patched or worked around so that the system can keep running. These systems become dysfunctional when it is hard or impossible to learn from that interpretive labor what those flaws are. Without good feedback mechanisms, none of the flaws will be fixed, and the system will not adapt to changes.
As I've said a few times now, all models are wrong. That includes laws and norms, employee handbooks and product roadmaps, system diagrams and city plans. If something is abstracting away from reality, it's creating a gap. What happens when that gap causes problems?
I've posted before about why it's important to delegate decisions to the people impacted by them. For example, Toyota put the power to halt production in the hands of factory floor workers who were better able to see problems as they arose, and the German Army pushed local officers to be decisive in the midst of battle. This is such an effective strategy because factory floor workers and army officers tend to have much better knowledge of the local contexts where problems first arise.
All models are wrong. Given this, it should be no surprise that humans are constantly messing things up. But don't worry! That's often a good thing, because messing things up is how we learn.
There's a saying: the map is not the territory. Farnham Street Blog has a pretty good explainer:
My sister is interested in genealogy, and several years ago unearthed a gruesome family story: on June 11th, 1880, my great-great-great-grandfather Anthony was caught between two railroad cars and crushed. The newspaper called it a "horrible death", and added that he left behind a wife and five kids "in destitute circumstances".
Few people are happy with the US government these days. Recent Gallup polls show that 71% of people are somewhat or very dissatisfied by "our system of government and how well it works". Common complaints are that government's too polarized and full of conflict, or that it's bureaucratic and inefficient and can't get things done.
Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you what to do.
"Nothing about us without us!" is a rallying cry, a catch-phrase with a clear moral imperative: that those impacted by a decision should be involved in making the decision.