new and delete

by Aline Normoyle

Someone – an airline gate attendant, for example – tells you some bad news; perhaps you’ve been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you’re brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can’t do anything about it.

It is a familiar, frustrating situation but to yell at the airline attendant is unfair: they had nothing to do with the policy and now agency to help you. Davies continues:

Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

It is easy to see how this situation benefits the corporation. Davies summarizes the situation beautifully:

Meanwhile, the managers who made the decision to prioritise Gold Elite members are able to maximise shareholder value without any distractions from the consequences of their actions. They have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion.

When customers get angry, a low-paid employee absorbs the anger. The connection between the decider and those affected is severed. However, there are risks to willful ignorance: an inability to anticipate problems, respond to
emergencies, or even respond to the normal variability of the real world in ways that make sense. To give an extreme example, Davies described how the Dutch airline, KLM, killed 440 squirrels using a shredder machine because of a policies about importing animals. Even the ideology to maximize profits for shareholders is itself an accountability sink. The brainless pursuit of a reductive objective function at the cost of society and the environment is also madness. As a result, our corporations (as well as the many other institutions that have modeled themselves after corporations) are dysfunctional, inefficient, and routinely surprised by predictable crises. Davies effectively invokes Hanlon’s Razer.

The decline in individual accountability for unpopular decisions is not – or not only – a form of moral decline on the part of our rulers. It’s also a consequence of the fact that there are fewer decision makers than there used to be. Nearly all the commands and constraints which afflict the modern individual, the decisions which used to be made by identifiable rulers and bosses, are now
the result of systems and processes.

On the other hand, it is not correct that a world without policies and rules would be better. Davies acknowledges that policies and rules, like laws, are alternatives to systems in which capricious authorities make all the rules on a case by case basis. Good procedures have the potential to be transparent, fair, and flexible in light of common sense special cases. The problem is that in order to handle special cases, someone must take responsibility for that decision if it goes wrong. Thus, we have accountability sinks, e.g. systems whose decisions are officially made by no one. On this point, Davies includes the following quote from George Orwell’s review of James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946):

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.

Also in this book, Dan Davies also likens corporations to artificial intelligences, describes how the abandoned field of cybernetics theorized about effective management, and how the Friedman doctrine has led to an dysfunctional economy.

If you are interested in talking about books like this one with other interesting people, come to the Neo-Luddite Reading Group at Iffy Books!