Guest Post by The Zman
There is a bit of a paradox within all systems in that the point of the system is to regulate human activity, as well as the activity initiated by humans. At the same time, it is just at the point where they reach that goal where they become obsolete. When the humans can no longer change the system or work around it efficiently, the users of the system start to question the system. The end point of all systems is the point at which it reaches its logical conclusion.
The most obvious is business software systems. A company initially buys a software system because it has logic that will implement the business processes the company seeks to implement. Soon, they begin to tinker with it in an effort to wring out more utility from the system. Maybe that is small modifications to parts of the system logic or additional data items to existing data sets. They keep doing this and over time the system does just about everything the business needs.
At some point, they want to make an additional change, but see that the cost of making this change to the nearly finalized software system is higher than the benefit they will receive from the change. At first this is proof that their long work on the system was a success, but in time it is seen as a defect, a shortcoming. They begin to look for a new system that will allow them to begin the process a new, so they can modify it to slowly make it a perfect tool for the business.
This life-cycle of a software system is not unique to technology. It happens in other systems as well. It is not unreasonable to think of revolution as the replacement of a legacy system with a modern one. Politics in this sense is the software of society, purchased by the elite, implemented by the ruling class and administered by the bureaucracy of the state. It is why libertarianism is impossible, by the way. It requires a society to return to pencil and paper on purpose.
Sticking with the software analogy, another thing that is revealed by revolutions and even the successful reform efforts is something you see with software systems, which is the accumulation of cruft. Much of the “improvement” gained by changing systems comes from abandoning old logic and requirements that never made any sense, but took too much time and money to remove. This often means people whose jobs exist because of that cruft in the legacy system.
The same applies in social systems. A genuine reform effort in America, for example, could simply start with firing everyone from the federal system who has an odd number of letters in their last name. Sure, some genuinely essential personnel would be lost, but the thousands of bits of human cruft would make up the difference. Much of what plagues late empire America is the generations of pointless and redundant code along with the associated people that covers the system like plaque.
Revolutions are cast as revolts by commoners over practical issues. The revolt gets out of hand either by circumstance or some failure by the elites. The result is a toppling of the system. To go back to the software analogy, the revolution is a revolt by users that cannot be addressed by the guys in IT. The system cannot be changed to meet the demands of the users, so the system is removed, the IT department is put to the sword and a new software system is purchased and implemented.
That’s true in primitive societies. The Bolshevik revolution could not have happened in an industrial society. Western Europe did not go from feudalism to industrial communism, because it first entered into a period of limited liberal democracy. The Russians were still operating a social system built for the tenth century, but trying to adapt it to technology and thinking from the 19th century. They went from pencil and paper to cybernetics in one big leap forward.
A better way to think of revolution, using the software analogy, is that point in the life-cycle when the cost of change exceeds the perceived benefit. The French Revolution is a good example of this. The aristocracy could not justify to themselves the cost of changing the system they inherited. The bourgeois revolutionary first started as a reformer, like the quality team inside a company. It’s when necessary change appeared to be impossible that they demanded the legacy system be replaced.
We are seeing this with the political class. The first round of efforts to modify the existing system started in 2016 with the election of Trump. We’re seeing a second round now with the apparent nomination of Bernie Sanders as his challenger. Trump was always a reformer who believed in the fundamental integrity of the system. Sanders is a revolutionary who promises to first remove the legacy system. His platform is mostly about removing the old with promises of something better.
In its response to these challenges, the so-called meritocracy is proving the point made by the reformers and the revolutionaries. They could, in theory, easily adjust to co-opt the reformers and delegitimize the revolutionaries. Yet in both cases they assumed the defensive crouch rather than change their behavior. Like the IT guys maintaining the legacy software system, they see change as a threat, so they make change more expensive than the perceived benefits of those changes.
In 2016, the Republican Party could have easily stopped Trump by moving toward him on immigration, trade and endless war. Instead, they advised the other candidates to move the other way, thus paving Trump’s way to the nomination. Something similar has happened with Sanders. Instead of co-opting his bread and butter issues, the party told the candidates to go extra heavy on wokeness, trannies and white privilege. This has made Sanders the default for those who reject that stuff.
If the political class was a business, senior management would be meeting about why the management and administrative layers have been unable to deal with this problem, despite all of the warnings. It would be time for a major shakeup. The trouble is, the so-called meritocracy that controls politics is the senior management. Only a shareholder revolt, to mix metaphors, is going to change things. Perhaps that is what the 2020 election is shaping up to be, a shareholder revolt.
The trouble with these analogies is that when a company buys a new software system or reorganizes its business processes, they don’t execute the people defending the old way or even have them sent to camps. Those people either embrace the new or quietly go away with their severance. In politics, the old people never go away quietly and instead fight to the last man to defend a legacy system that serves them. The last three years of Trump make that abundantly clear.
For those puzzled by the appeal of Sanders, there’s your answer. American politics is controlled by an elite that keeps one large swath of voters in one party and another large swath in another party, then makes them fight one another. In 2016, the voters in one camp revolted against their camp guards. In 2020, the other camp is staging a revolt. In both cases, it is a revolt against legacy code that appears to be beyond reform. We are living in legacy code that must be replaced, if it cannot be patched.
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The third paragraph is outright bullshit.
The last two sentences of the fourth paragraph are an assertion without proof.
The 5th paragraph mentions firing Fed Gov employees with an odd number of letters in their last name. This is insufficient for a successful outcome. The firings must include both odd and even letters in the last name so as not to be discriminatory.
The 7th paragraph claims that if IT can’t help the janitors, for example, the IT staff is fired. Bullshit!
I could go on, but this article is outright crap.
Disagree. I witnessed similar proceedings repeatedly in larger/older business enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. My role as software architect (past career) was to conceive new software to “solve” the enterprises’ problems not addressed efficiently by “legacy” software.
Zman’s analogy matches my experience in large-enterprise software development, to wit:
They begin to look for a new system that will allow them to begin the process a new, so they can modify it to slowly make it a perfect tool for the business.
Nobody, except gov’t, trashes a working system to get a new system so they can start making changes again. This sounds like an organization is looking forward to spending a fortune tinkering with a purchased app.
They spend their time finding the closest match to their current needs and then modify as little as possible to keep vendor maintenance and upgrades for the product.
Anything they modify is usually outside the source code for the purchased app and comprises pre or post processing or modules added to the app via entry points for doing so that the vendor provides as a hook.
I’m a professional software developer and worked as a development manager for several of the mainframe giants.
“Nobody, except gov’t, trashes a working system to get a new system so they can start making changes again.”- SAO
I’m beginning to see you as ‘Shoot from the Lip SAO’.
And I’m beginning to see you as posting words with no intelligible content.
SAO seemingly presumes rational and wise decision-making by senior leaders of large organizations. My experience differs: the Peter principle is pervasive.
SOA.
This is beyond outright crap. It’s Stealth Faux-Con propaganda.
The first four lines of the last paragraph are true. The lies are in 5 and 6. Voters(Sheeple) were allowed to think they were screwing The Man. All the energy and pent up anger of the center right was diffused and now its the left and far lefts turn to vent. Just one example. Another? The phony narrative on the bolshevik revolution.
Meanwhile here’s what’s happening. In Michigan, a Faux-con controled House, Senate, and Governor are completeing a thought crime database using the SPLC’s guidelines complete with plans for preempting legal thought. Yep! And over on the fear porn riddled ZH they are laying the groundwork for putting the blame on Anti-Globalist(Us) for the WHO’s refusal to impose travel restrictions because they fear it would give us too much ammo to use against them. Per Rabobank. Meanwhile amnesties are double that of Obama’s.
Now they have us biting our nails over elections being canceled and feverishly debating all the possible constitutional outcomes. Finally he says we have to replace it. With what? A one wold government I suspect.
The Zman
Instead of using analogies, why don’t you just say what you mean. I have only so much time in my day to read. It would be nice to condense down an article even if it is trivia.
Le Chatelier’s principle, also called Chatelier’s principle or “The Equilibrium Law”, can be used to predict the effect of a change in conditions on some chemical equilibria. The principle is named after Henry Louis Le Chatelier and sometimes Karl Ferdinand Braun who discovered it independently. It can be stated as:
When any system at equilibrium for a long period of time is subjected to change in concentration, temperature, volume, or pressure, (1) the system changes to a new equilibrium and (2) this change partly counteracts the applied change.
It is common to treat the principle as a more general observation,[1] such as
When a settled system is disturbed, it will adjust to diminish the change that has been made to it,
or, “roughly stated”,
Any change in status quo prompts an opposing reaction in the responding system.
Every student of science is required, at some point or other in his/her career, to learn Le Chatelier’s Principle. Simply put, any natural process, whether physical or chemical, tends to set up conditions opposing the further operation of the process. Although the Law has very broad application, it is usually looked upon more as a curiosity than as a profound insight into the nature of the universe.
No one who has had any experience of the operation of large Systems can fail to appreciate its truth and relevance: The System Always Kicks Back. Systems Get In The Way.
—or, in slightly more elegant language:
Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Functions
In the 2016 election we had the public providing the oxidizer, Trump was the fuel and Hillary was water. Thus, there was no ignition, Bernie was my candidate to ignite the debate as he certainly would have brought heat on Trump. What the heck did Hillary do but bring up the flagging feminist formula for failure?
It’s interesting to learn that Blooberg was one of the billionaire forum that decided world population is a problem to be addressed. Stephen King telegraphs their plan to reduce the number in his novel – The Stand.
Fascinating analogy by Zman. He might be on to something. I am commencing quiet reflection.
Cruft
Good analogies therein, Z-man. But one wonders if the “users” are not the elite, and if robotics and digital switches and gates are the new revolutionary software. Because that would make Average Joe and John Q the cruft.
I didn’t bother to look it up as it sounded like crud and leftover.
one thing to add to this. You _seem_ to be supposing that that serior leadership is genuinely interested in the success or profitability or whatever, of the operation. However, look in any real large organizations- corporations or governments both – and you see a dynamic where even senior leadership will trash working systems to replace them with ‘something new’ only to advance their own agendas, careers, interests , egos, or to sink a competitor- fixing something that could be fixed is less glamorous and does not involve the wholesale transfer of ownership and authority, that trashing something and starting anew does. This goes for corporate projects & bureacracies as well as for politics. You have to look a bit bigger to see the rest of the dynamic play out- not just what happens inside companies (or governments) that are still capable of making changes etc, but what happens when that company has been so clogged up with its won BS, sabotaged from within by parasitic interests, sclerotic with incompetence etc, that company, even if senior leadership might try to do something about it, it is likely going to crash and die in bankruptcy. So, i think your analogy for revolution is not so much, some benevolent senior leadership swooping in and changing the system, but rather, the crash of bankruptcy and inability to answer even the simplest crisis. By the time revolution comes the organization is already way down the backside of the slop of diminishing returns. The elites are usually so attached to that system that even if they dally with the idea of reform , they are not the ones sweeping things aside. Aspiring new elites are the ones capitalizing on every new crack in the wall to take over. In modern politics we often have seen external elites financing and driving such ‘revolutions’ which might confuse the analogy somewhat. But really it remains quite clear – those are, from the perspective of the model we’re talking about, external opponents taking over as the organization crashes and dies in a tangle of its own inability to respond effectively. So, yes, you have some elites supporting bernie, others trump (and plenty of others fighting a receeding front to hang on) not because its part of some grant arena set up by elites to replace a system that doesnt work anymore (we know that system has become choked up on its own plaque so much that it largely doesnt work anymore but thats a different matter) … those elites are fighting tooth and nail to hang on to that system because it is what sustains them as well. elites who might be starting to back a new horse are hoping to crash it and take over, and replace the elites attached to the old system . the board of the bankrupt company gets fired and scattered to the winds – if they were smart they skimmed enough and stashed it in the caymans so they can live comfortably, exactly like political elites who hide their rake-off somewhere against the day they get chased out of town..
so, while some of the mechanisms you mention i agree with, i think the conclusion and scope need to be adjusted. the process very very rarely involves a true revolution from indside the same elites. Maybe meiji period japan is one good example of the elites successfully pulling it off. Just like it is extremely rare that leadership inside a company manage to turn it around. Usually it’s bankruptcy , destruction, and conquest by opponents.
Nice article.
Could we say Cruft = the free shit army and useless eaters?
This would be more believable except that corporations/for profit enterprises are no more innovative nor staffed by people willing to give up positions of wealth and power, more than any other institution.
It is libertarian nonsense that the private sector is inherently better.