Chaos
Quid ex Machina, Section 5 of Act II Scene 3. Theme song by Joseph Haydn
Welcome! 😄Helen here. I write about the fortunes that come from the Earth: geography, medieval farming, music, time, and the Unseen.
This is a new essay in the series Quid ex Machina, about the Unseen impact of AI (and more broadly, technology) on our societies. Here’s the rest of the series.
Today’s theme song is Die Vorstellung des Chaos (The Representation of Chaos), composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797, performed in 1969 by the Berlin Philharmonic, at the direction of Herbert von Karajan.
[The joke is on me: before I was about to uninstall Windows, it forced an update and it’s still running. And because I forgot to back up, I wrote this essay on another computer from scratch, which was different from my original one. Such is the chaos of life! I’ll probably share the originally planned essay at the end of the series.]
The existing man cannot be assimilated by a system of ideas.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for Method, 1960)
This is the concluding essay of Act II of the Quid ex Machina series, so I’ll make it short and quick. In the last essay, we saw that although Napoleon died in 1821, through today’ software makers, he still runs over lives and governs our society. By the lineage of industrial revolutions, the formal rules, orders, roles, and hierarchy that Napoleon had set for the military and civil services, were adopted and developed by today’s software makers — who create products that expose us to their internal rules and structures, and compel us to follow them. Put it another way: we are dealing with a software bureaucracy.
To our 21st century minds, “bureaucracy” is a trigger word for nightmares. But to Max Weber, a key witness to 19th-century industrial expansions, the ideal bureaucracy was a daydream, an axe to hack away thorny problems in large and complex industrial organizations. In those situations, you have to impose rules, define roles, remove personal emotions, streamline repetitive work, and get things done with rigor, formality, and speed by the right people with the right specialty. Bureaucracy, as Weber envisioned, is a collection of rational and formal practices that ensure things are done the right way, with as little human emotions and errors as possible.
In other words: bureaucracy is a tool, it solves problems where problems have clean-cut, rational solutions. It is not a way of life, because life is infinitely more chaotic and complex than rational and formal rules. Lots of times, there are no set procedures or guidebooks to follow; only rules-of-thumb, improvisations, approximations, and practical workarounds — which can’t be abstracted into the neat org charts, reporting chains, workflows, formal logic, and lines of code.
But software makers have to abstract our lives into concepts, user stories, code, and algorithms. Because only then, could they understand the complex world they are handling, and manage it at a large scale with high efficiency. Ironically, in their attempt to understand complexity, the full complexity of life often evade their grasp; just as when the Sheriff of Nottingham goes to look for Robin Hood, Robin Hood and all his Merry Men disappear. Trying to get names right? Hyphens and even numbers can pop up. Promoting Canadian music? The most popular ones seems like a safe starter, but the starter turned out to be Justin Bieber and Nickelback. Mapping driving routes along coasts? Sometimes the roads go straight into the sea.
Abstract ideas cannot fully capture life’s reality. This is precisely what Sartre – a compatriot of Napoleon — was getting at. And just how French was Napoleon, if we used formal rules to categorize him? Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica in 1769, the very same year that Corsica was official ceded to France after 500 years of rule by Genoa, an Italian maritime republic. The future emperor of the French grew up speaking Corsican and Italian, and only learned French later in life with a distinct accent1. His chaotic origin story always gives me a chuckle: of all people, it was him who started it all, and still lives on through the highly organized software bureaucracy.
And the highly organized software bureaucracy is everywhere in our lives, all the time: we are entangled into it, whenever we use our smart phones or computers. So instead of staying as a tool for specific problems, bureaucracy — promulgated by software — has become a way of life. Perhaps that’s why so much shade has been thrown at the B-word: because ideal abstractions fail to deal with the many chaos in life.
Chaos in life – that’s where we are sailing into, for Act III of the Quid ex Machina series. I want to explore, interrogate, and speculate on what AI — and other technology – can bring to the chaotic, messy, yet still cherished parts of our very human lives.
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Do you love to hate bureaucracy, or hate to love it? I want to hear your thoughts! Comment below, DM me on Twitter or Instagram, or reply to the email! Anything you send, I’ll read 😄
Even today, popular French TV series still crack jokes about Corsica. Case in point, a scene from season 3 of Le Bureau des Légendes:
- Aren’t you French? Asks the dealer.
- I’m not French. I’m Corsican! Replies the undercover agent.
"Aren’t you French? Asks the dealer. I’m not French. I’m Corsican! Replies the undercover agent." -- Love this. And that's so true: they still don't really consider themselves French.
Another great issue, Helen.
[PS: I haven't seen you around much. Hope all is well.]