Re: <nettime> Managing complexity?

This is a brilliant thread, with fundamental interventions from everyone who has posted. I'm also told the Technopolitics group is meeting in Vienna, which is something like serendipity. I'm gonna throw in my two bits here as well.

Felix's idea of "managing complexity" suggests a way of coping with an unruly situation, and (one place where I slightly disagree with Prem) this needn't be limited to the strategy of a single actor, not at all. Instead, think patterned convergence, where multiple actors take up similar approaches yielding more-or-less predictable results: a kind of systemic regularity whose benefits for some mean that it is deliberately promoted. We can see this kind of regularity consolidating in the global marketplace from 1980 to 2008, with some significant perturbations around 2001. There wasn't any steady state, nor even a dynamic oscillation around a single attractor (homeostasis), but instead a periodic return to the same trajectory or the same pattern of change (homeorhesis, as the evolutionary biologists say). The pattern in question was a transition from primarily national, Keynesian economies toward an increasingly integrated global marketplace, knitted together logistically by computer networks. Networks were the coordinating device, the principle products being sold (telco infrastructure, software, online services) and also the indispensable technique for raising capital (computerized finance) - so we really could think of networked computational devices as a "leading technology." This growth pattern was prone to financial crises on the usual ten-year cycle, but the most powerful actors made systematic use of the crises to fuel concentration, rationalization and fresh expansion. They managed the complexity, in short. But the question is how.

In discussions years back, some of us on nettime referred to Philip Mirowski's book Cyborg Economics, which Keith Hart just mentioned again. So what does Mirowski say? Basically this: If economic planning could be carried out perfectly well by the self-interested interpretation of "price signals," as Friedrich von Hayek claimed, it meant that libertarian and neo-classical economists could construct the theory of a legitimate global system where strategic actors use mathematical models to infer significant trends from the fluctuation of marketplace signals, and then intervene for their own advantage, whether commercially or financially. This modeling activity carries out the reduction of complexity that Felix talks about. We know that such a theory was built out into practice from the 80s onward, following the pragmatist thrust of operations theory. In cybernetic terms, this is not a simple command-and-control scenario, but a second-order regime, where "observing systems observe other observing systems" (Heinz von Foerster).

Whenever you get close to the granularity of the system you see the dynamic interplay of competing strategies: a whirlwind, a vortex, like the turbulent phenomena that fascinated Leonardo da Vinci. But when you draw back to look at how the whole thing evolves, then the ever-fluctuating pattern of results can be described with something like Prem's vocabulary of complexity theory: emergence, strange attractors, tipping points, bifurcations, phase changes etc. A kind of pattern emerges. It's worth noting that all that can also be done by a logistics planner or a financial trader looking at the output of a computer, and indeed that seemed to be the dominant form of management, at least during the neoliberal period.

The above is a strong approach to what you might as well call the neoliberal paradigm, but still I find it incomplete. It was natural to discuss it that way on nettime, because it was within the remit: "an immanent critique of the networks." Some of us also did STS-type technical analyses of, say, extreme extraction or just-in-time production, in relation to equally technical discussions of finance, which rounded out the discussion. However, I want to follow Joe Rabie's idea that complex systems are made up of heterogenous elements, whose inputs can't all be calculated in the terms provided by a single integrating signal. The image of a broken sidewalk revealing multiple disconnected pipes and cables from gas and sewer and electricity to telephone and internet, plus stray roots and tunneling rodents I would add, is just too brilliant. To grasp what happens during the breakdown of a formerly coherent system, or better, of the economic subsystem that previously seemed to integrate everything else, I think you'd have to track how a wider range of inputs collide within a more expansive boundary. This totally follows from Felix's idea that "dimensions we deemed irrelevant in the process of abstraction" have now come back in to jostle the system.

Here's my pitch. To analyze the present, and to decide whether the political economy actually "steers" or manages itself at all, it's necessary at a minimum to consider democratic capitalist societies engaged both with their own internal contradictions, and with the contradictions of all the others, within a global monetary-military framework that's now coextensive with the planetary ecology. That entails four basic ingredients: demos, corporations, capitalist world-economy, earth system. Making the first two terms work in any tangible way means that in any given country you have to track the expressions and actions of the people, on the one hand, and of the corporate hierarchy with all its disruptive technologies, on the other. Both these spheres intersect partially with each other and also, to varying degrees, with the global interaction space of the world-economy. At the intersection of all three, and under increasing pressure from the fourth overarching sphere (the earth system), you can locate government, or the steering function. However, every national government is traversed by impulses from all the other realms, and also spills over into the world space, so there's no single actor at the tiller, as there would be in so-called "realist" state-theory. In fact, I'd go with International relations theory and identify systemic rule-sets that mediate some of the more destabilizing global trends at the world level. These rule-sets are always partially technological, therefore built out as infrastructure, and they usually also have some _expression_ in international institutions - or otherwise they are established by some powerful actor able to impose them on everyone else. So in addition to the pattern of national governance, there are also some observable regularities at the monetary-military levels of global interaction.

To organize all this into a set of structural categories, I sketched out a provisional diagram. It shows the demos/corporate interaction spilling over into the world-economy and the earth-system. This means that to use the diagram to it full potential, you would have to suss out the democratic/corporate interaction for each globally significant national society. Obviously that gets truly complex, but anyway, here it is:

https://ecotopia.today/Democratic_Capitalism.png

Crucial to this view is the idea that the demos, the people, is not just passive but has significant effects on the corporate order as well as the steering function, not only through votes but also through modes of consumption, expressions of values, visions and aspirations, social movements etc. You can see this with your eyes, it's national politics. Scale and viewpoint are also crucial: in each society you have to follow the demo-corporate tango to see how it's expressed at higher levels of synthesis (or potentially of chaos) in politics and in government, up to the point where it sometimes generates a patterned regularity. Then when the significant trends and compromises have become clear, you have to take those national-scale interactions between civil societies, corporate alliances and governments, and see what they produce at the global scale in terms of systemic rule-sets. These often have a feedback effect that serves to consolidate or break down patterns in a single society or region. Finally, I guess you have to make a judicious use of the concept of hegemony, or the preponderance of a certain actor or group of actors at the global level - which in practice usually comes down to dealing with the EU, North America and China (or better, the East Asian Productive Network). If you do all that, you'll get a sense that there really was a more-or-less coherent period of neoliberalism - and that there is no more such coherence at present.

Is it possible that this interpretative structure - which I'd call technopolitics - could be used to get a grasp of how the neoliberal world has twisted away from its characteristic trajectory in the period 1980-2008? And maybe even to get a sense of why it has changed and where it's now going? Is it possible to integrate the great mysterious "X," the earth system, into such an analysis? Well, I think it is, to some degree at least, though it will probably always be a bit short of the famous GST or General Systems Theory that Orsan mentions.

However, I am gonna stop right here for the moment. The idea is to take some time out to think about the actual contents of all those abstract categories that are needed to describe the present flux of the earth system.

thanks to all for so many insights, Brian

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 5:25 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

On 30.03.19 21:19, Brian Holmes wrote:
> However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the
> phrase, "managing complexity," declines precipitously when you try to
> define either "management" or "complexity."

Complexity is relatively easy to define. As Jospeh Rabie already did,
the number of actors and the number of ways in which they can interact
with, and adapt to, one another defines the complexity of a "system".

This, of course, leads to the question how to determine the size of the
system. The first generation of cybernetics gave another answer to that
question than the second, as Ted pointed out.

Prem's suggestion that we are dealing with polycentric systems is
certainly right and makes it both easier and harder to define the number
of actors that make them up. Easier in the sense that it puts the focus
on densities and rates of interaction (higher at the center, lower at
the periphery) rather than on precise, yet elusive boundaries. Harder in
the sense that it stresses that each system contains numerous such
centers, shifting the problem from drawing boundaries to deciding the
inclusion/exclusion of centers.

Be that as it may. Let's assume that the number of actors and the ways
of interacting have increased over the last, say, last 70 years. More
important than the simple number of actors (which is hard to ascertain
anyway) is that the ways in which they are interacting has increased,
leading to an exponential, rather than linear rise on complexity.

In my view, there are a number of reasons for this.

* The chains of interactions have grown longer. Many (social and
ecological) systems used to be relatively local phenomena have become
global ones (as a consequence of the expansion of capitalism as
globalization).

* The intensity of interaction has been increasing (as a consequence of
the intensification of capitalism), taking many systems away from
"steady states" closer to the edge of "phase-transitions" (to use the
terminology from complexity theory). In this process, these systems
become more and more non-linear, increasing the need to understand their
internal dynamics (e.g who are the actors and how are they interacting)
while at the same time, making them less predictable.

* The social institutions that have traditionally limited the ways of
interaction by providing and enforcing rules and norms have weakened,
further increasing the leeway for agency (which, of course, not all bad).

Not knowing where to draw boundaries, or which centers are relevant to
the understanding of the system, is a part of the problem of not being
able to "manage" the many actors and their increasing ranges of
interaction and the predictable effects of their interactions. By
"managing" I initially simply meant the ability to track the actors that
make up the system and the ability to intervene in the system to move it
towards desired states. This is a somewhat technocratic view, I admit.

Joseph Weizenbaum argued in the 1970sthat the computer was introduced as
an answer to the social pressures which large corporations and
government agencies faced. Rather than accept social change, the new
computing infrastructure was putting central management on a new
footing. It could now keep track of many more elements and react much
faster to changes in the environment by reorganizing quickly the
relation of the elements to one another. This was, basically, the shift
from Fordism to Post-Fordism and by definition an increase in complexity
that came, as it always comes, at the price of an higher rate of
abstraction as a way of limiting that increase of complexity (a lower
number of variables per element are taken into account).

For similar reasons, I think, the shift towards markets and quantitative
signals (prices, ranking, indices etc) was so successful. It allowed to
manage the increase in social complexity by abstracting it away.

I think both systems (computers and markets) as ways of managing
complexity are reaching an upper limit, mainly because an ever
increasing number of actors are no longer conforming to their
abstractions (by exhibiting dimensions that we deemed irrelevant in the
process of abstraction, or by not behaving according to the models etc.).

These are not problems of implementation for technical limits to be
overcome by progress, but fundamental limitation of the these two
systems of abstraction/management.

Not everything can be expressed as a price. Even economists are now
arguing again about the difference between value and price. For
neo-liberals, is the same: the value of a thing is whatever somebody is
willing to pay for it, and therefor it cannot be too high or too low.

On 31.03.19 15:50, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> AI systems do not sit well with consciousness, for AI makes its
> decisions on the basis of statistical correlations derived from
> computing power, and not on the basis of consciousness. AI systems run
> into problems difficult to foresee or comprehend once the decision
> process gets detached from sentient consciousness, especially when the
> AI system encounters non-linear contexts.

Exactly! And this is a good indicator as to way the systemic crisis is now.

Which leads back to the "management" question. Management, with its
bureaucratic/cybernetic control approach is probably the wrong way to
think this anyway.

Because this is already getting way too long, I simply paste more of
Prem's excellent bullets here, not the least as a reminder to myself to
think more in this direction.

On 31.03.19 15:50, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> ‘Management’ and ‘complexity’ do not fit well in a polycentric system,
> for management is an activity where one intervenes in order to control
> output, and in a polycentric system, it is almost impossible to
> ascertain with precision the impact of any intervention.

> To live with complex systems we must allow them to be
> self-organising. This is the argument used in the argument for free
> markets, falling back on Adam Smith’s metaphor of the ‘invisible
> hand’.

> However, self-organising systems are emergent - they can
> exhibit fundamental properties that did not exist at all in an
> earlier state of the system. As humans, we cannot be blind to what
> properties may emerge, unless we say we have no ethical concerns at
> all if the system throws up properties such as unfair and degrading
> exploitation of others or ecological imbalances.

All the best. Felix

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