(2023-09-26) Munger The Tragedy Of Stafford Beer

Kevin Munger: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer. There has been growing interest in cybernetic socialism over the past decade, starting with Eden Medina’s history Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Evgeny Morozov’s article on Cybersyn in the New Yorker, and a chapter on the enterprise in Leigh Phillips’ and Michal Rozworski’s book The People’s Republic of Walmart.

Like many of the postwar behavioral scientists, World War II was a major shock to Beer’s understanding of the tradeoffs between efficiency and command

After the war, Beer became one of the leading practitioners of operations research.

He saw huge success working with United Steel in the 1950s

In Morozov’s telling, Beer’s decision to take time away from this successful career is puzzling; the Stafford Beer of The Santiago Boys is motivated to come to Chile by a combination of professional curiosity at being given the reins of an entire country to test out his theories and some vague lefty sympathies developed as a result of his time stationed in the British Raj. This is narratively convenient, but my read of Beer’s project is significantly more radical—and the result all the more tragic.

I only just got around to Beer’s 1975 book Platform for Change. This is one of the strangest and most gut-wrenching books I’ve ever encountered.

I occasionally experience an odd emotion when I read something that’s decades old that condenses some thought I’ve been grasping towards... despair that someone else, someone more famous and smarter and older than me already wrote this idea down and yet it didn’t matter.

Cashed out this reputation and connections in a series of increasingly transgressive attacks on what he saw as a complacent and unscientific establishment. (His inaugural address, upon being elected president of the Operational Research Society, is particularly spicy.)

Actually had the chance to implement his radical ideas at the level of a medium-sized country

Platform for Change is the culmination of Beer’s project, a manifesto over which he insisted on having total creative control.

Once you start thinking hard and pushing up against the limits of the tools you have been given to think with, it becomes clear that you need to fashion some new tools. This, of course, is a blog about meta-science, where I have frequently argued that the media technologies of linear natural language text and in-line citation are incompatible with a subject as fast-moving as social media.

Platform for Change was a commercial disaster (obviously), and his serious scholarly output fell off sharply. He was only in his late 40s

the experience seemed to break him; the willfulness that had been necessary to go against the grain won out against the negative feedback he was getting from his increasingly outré efforts.

There is a deep, cybernetic irony in this story. Beer’s entire approach to “viable systems” is that they need to adapt to shocks without becoming in some way denatured

Once he had settled on the belief system articulated in Platform for Change, there was no shaking it—his refusal to compromise led him down the path from mainstream management consultant to renegade intellectual activist, all the way down to lonely poet-mystic drinking himself to death in the Welsh countryside.

I’ve written about Beer’s concrete proposals for cybernetic government before, and I expand on them below. But the main point of this post is to reflect on the intersection between meta-scientific reform, the history of thought and the sociology of intellectual work inside and outside the academy

walk downstairs and talk to someone about Operations Research

But one of the grad students told me that actually the name is somewhat anachronistic—no one really does Operations Research anymore, it’s all just financial engineering aka math and stats. Indeed, it looks as though 1970, the year Stafford Beer was elected president of the Operational Research Society in the UK, was the peak of the intellectual movement.

Can you recognize an Angel?

Designing Freedom, Beer’s 1974 book, is far more accessible than Platform for Change, and indeed should be required reading for students of economics, political science and the history of science.

The book outlines the way that we can (and must) use new information technology to design freedom. Beer conceives of a network economy and cultural sphere that enhances human capacities without warping human desires.

Beer thus follows the humanist tradition established by Norbert Wiener.

Weiner’s second book is called The Human Use of Human Beings, an even broader attempt at outlining a society built on cybernetic principles: the most effective society, he argued, would be able to make full use of each human’s capacities

Designing Freedom continues along these lines, a crucial intervention in the tired 20th century debate between government control and “liberty.” Beer talks about a Liberty Machine that is used to create liberty. That is, we should understand that our society is “not an entity characterized by more or less constraint, but a dynamic viable system that has liberty as its output.” (freedom)

If we want to both radically restructure society and avoid billions of deaths, we have to center concerns about scale.

“Recognize ecological systems” and “Undertake world government” strike me as more immediately relevant, but Beer’s transcendent weirdness peeks through with the phrase “recognize an angel.”

But the individual human brain remains a crucial bottleneck for the flow of information.

Complete decentralization limits the capacity of the organization to pursue strategic objectives, generally collapsing into autarky and self-interest. Designing freedom, in Beer’s view, means designing institutions that allow humans to use their full capacities as humans to regulate society, collectively and at scale.

There is a branch of the anti-tech left that rejects this conception of control-as-regulation, in the naive view that these forces can be contained

“What is to be done with cybernetics, the science of effective organization? Should we all stand by complaining, and wait for someone malevolent to take it over and enslave us? An electronic mafia lurks around that corner.”

This is the same kind of insight that I described as “the cybernetic event horizon” in Flusser’s work, and in the same spirit that Deleuze discusses “control” and Foucault “governmentality” (though Beer and Flusser both got there before these canonized wordcels).

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t wake up one day and decide to cause teenage girls to have panic attacks about not getting enough Likes on their Instagram posts; he and the other electric dons designed and piloted these systems whose output was human anxiety rather than human freedom.

AND DON’T TELL ANYONE ELSE UNLESS I SAY SO

One of Beer’s crucial insights is that increasing the total number of channels of communication only tends to produce confusion and give private actors more leverage.

Concerns about privacy are misplaced; at present, the only entities who are cross-walking all of the information about individual people are corporate data brokers and the big companies that pay them; doing all of the relevant data collection and synthesis up front would both empower government action and undercut the corporations’ advantage.

My normative commitment is to human freedom, human agency.

The radical rejection of technology is simply not an option on a planet of 8 billion.

“We allow publishers to file away electronically masses of information about ourselves—who we are, what are our interests—and to tie that in with mail order schemes, credit systems, and advertising campaigns that line us all up like a row of ducks to be picked off in the interests of conspicuous consumption.”

The best path I see requires something like his approach to effective communication and governance, to think of engineering a society which produces human freedom while ensuring homeostatic stability.