Of Napoleon and Kafka: A (Brief) Genealogy of Power, Part Three

Quid ex Machina, Section 4 of Act II Scene 3. Theme song by Radiohead

Welcome! 😄I’m Helen and here I write about the fortunes that come from the Earth: geography, medieval farming, music, time, and the Unseen.

This is a new essay of 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 Bloom, by Radiohead.

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The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus - more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, sine ira et studio (without hatred or passion), from any motives to which I am far removed.

(Tacitus, Annals 1.1. Emphasis added)

In the last essay, we saw the power of law-giving and governance changed hands, from the church to civil services. The change took form in Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution: gone was the pre-industrial time, when every town and village had its own laws, made up by the local clergy and elites. Now, in record time, steam and electric motors brought two things to every corner of the nation. The first is uniform laws of the land; the second is civil servants who enforce these laws, with their specialist, technical knowledge.

And it foretells how software became our invisible law-makers, and governs our lives.

What Napoleon Did to the Modern World

Napoleon, but aged 24, before he did anything to the modern world. Bonaparte au siège de Toulon, by Édouard Detaille, 1793, public domain.

If you worked for any employer of decent size, you know about performance reviews. They are truly performative acts: your managers give free-range opinions on how you have been doing on your job, and the two of you dance about having a raise or promotion.

And then, your managers, their managers, and their managers’ managers – like turtles all the way down – will also receive opinions on how they did on their jobs. The bigger your employer, the more turtles there are, and it doesn’t matter who you work for: performance reviews are always there.

But things are not always this way.

There was a time, when very few turtles and managers existed.

There was a time, when no performance reviews existed.

There was a time, when big organizations with formal structures (“reporting chains”), rules (“employee handbooks”), and hierarchy (“org charts”) did not exist.¹

If that time sounds like a worker’s utopia, allow me to elaborate: it was also the time, when indoor plumbing, electricity, trains, planes, washing machines, air conditioning, hospitals, your daily bread, and synthetic fabric – every comfort and convenience you enjoy in modern life, little or big — did not exist.

I’m speaking of the times before the mid-18th century. Before the Industrial Revolutions. Before Napoleon took advantage of the industrial revolution in France, to reboot and reform the French civil service (that many countries’ modern civil services copied), produce the Napoleonic Code (which many countries’ modern civil laws borrowed from. It’s still in force in France and often amended.), and fight his Napoleonic wars against many coalitions.

Marked by a zeal for rational organization and desire for large scale operations, Napoleon was the perfect commander at the bloom of the industrial age. Even his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was the grandest affair in centuries. The emperor of the French commanded more than 200,000 soldiers (that would be 3 full NFL or soccer stadiums) against half a million troops from the coalition forces. The order of battle was four times larger than the Battle of Vienna 132 years earlier, where the Ottomans, known for their military power, piled main forces at the gates of the Austrian capital.

Bonaparte at the Pont d'Arcole, by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, 1796. Public domain. The painting shows Napoleon in his Italian campaigns during the French Revolutionary Wars.

How was Napoleon able to run campaigns at such giant scales? Because he already molded the army into an organization of professional soldiers, commanded by a hierarchy clearly defined and enforced in ranks, rules, and specialist roles. You came from the provinces, without a royal appointment or a personal favor? No problem, by rules of the army, you’d be treated equally as everyone else, sine ira et studio.

Napoleon was also able to govern his vast empire (while it lasted) with his civil code, because he morphed the French civil service into a system of professionals and specialists. They were selected by competitive exams, trained in niche knowledge, and followed a chain of command, sine ira et studio. Citizen, it doesn’t matter who you are: rules were followed, things were done, and no personal bitterness or favoritism was involved.

He could equip his army, because industrial productions spread in France, and factories began pumping out the things he needed. As factories expanded, they started adopting the rules, orders, ranks, and specialist roles of the military and civil service. Because larger factories employ more people, and more people are harder to manage, and to be counted on to do the things they are supposed to do, while the military and civil service seem to have solved these problems already.

France was not an isolated case. Since the first steam engine and electric motor started spinning, industrial firms have copied the military and civil service left and right: from the ranks and structures, to specialist roles and performance reviews, and the sine ira et studio attitude. Engineers and accountants² further developed these copies, which later became “scientific management theory”: collections of standardized methods, procedures, rules, and roles that run big industrial firms at high efficiency.

Unsurprisingly, gigantic industrial firms emerged from the copy-and-develop. Ford, GE, Standard Oil, AT&T, Krupp, IBM, and Alstom — to name a few — each employs more than an army on its staff.

Industrial firms made such complete copies of civil services, that by the mid-1950s, they became look-alikes on org charts, procedures, and specialist roles. The year was 1955. IBM’s business was booming with mainframes and 57,000 employees. William “Bill” Henry Gates III was born. Computer Usage Company was founded, and started selling software independent of computers. In another 14 years, a software as powerful as a calculator landed the first man on the moon.

Margaret Hamilton, lead Apollo flight software engineer, standing next to listings of the software she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project. 1969, NASA Draper lab image, public domain.

The entire Apollo Project employed 400,000 people, cost 164 billion USD (in 2021 terms), was run by an organization of professionals (NASA), staffed with science and engineering specialists, and ordered into structures and layers of hierarchy. In other words, Napoleon’s old tricks helped Apollo 11 land on the moon.

In an alternative universe, Napoleon might have fought two battles at Waterloo with 400,000 people and reversed his fate. But I’d imagine that old Bonaparte, in the year of his 200th birth anniversary, would be more delighted to see a human take a small step on the moon.

Josef K. Files a Ticket

Organizations will design systems that copy their communication structure.

(Conway’s Law of software engineering)

I’ll spare you of the all-too-familiar stories of software post-1969:

1971, first microprocessor came out and made personal computers a reality.

1972, SAP was founded, and made the first sale in “enterprise” software.

1975, Microsoft formed.

Then Apple, Oracle, Linux, Salesforce, Google, and the ongoing boom of venture capital money poured into software start-ups happened.

Some say this software bloom is another Industrial Revolution. They are right: because like industrial firms back then, software companies now have even more zeal for rational organizations, more desire for large-scale operations, and bigger appetite for “scientific management”. There are 433 choices of project/task/program management software and likely a lot more; and not a week goes by, without a new software ad in my Twitter doom-scroll to promise smooth-ever-after management of teams, projects, and programs — if only I sign up today.

A partial list of rules and structures on software development process. Wikipedia has a template to write about it.

Strong supply points to an even stronger demand. At every level, software makers are obsessive of putting people and things into well-defined hierarchy, structures, rules, and timelines. In projects, Agile is The One Philosophy, and Scrum is its True Messenger:

Thou shall write feature requests as user stories. Thou must put stories into backlogs.
The backlog shall be sorted by the product owner. Thou shall only act on what the product owner says. Thou must stand together everyday to count story points, report the progress and blockers, and repent for incomplete stories. And thou shall not change Scrum because it exists only in its entirety.

On the organization level, reorgs happen all the time, everywhere. At Microsoft, depending on where you are among the 221,000 people, you’d be shuffled to a different team every month or every 2 years. At start-ups, reorg-ing every 6 months is common. On a job at a public company that makes project management software, I was reorged 4 times in 11 months. At another software company of ~300 people, I witnessed 5 or 6 reorgs in 8 months, then I stopped counting.

Such internal obsessions have public consequences. Software companies make software that expose us to their arbitrary rules, and present services to us in ways that mirror its internal hierarchy and roles. To get on with life, we have to submit to their rules, and navigate their hierarchy. You have to update Windows now, or remove hyphens in your name from DMV records– because some product owner decided on auto-update and no-hyphen-in-names, and the software code enforced the decisions for everyone, sine ira et studio.
If you want to get rid of these deficiencies, you’d either find your own workarounds, or are told to file a feature request ticket, and then...your ticket would join the backlog, be tossed from one team to another in each reorg, get assigned random story points, change status in stand-up meetings, and then...nobody knows what happened to it.

Imagine what Kafka would say about this process. Instead of having Josef K. arrested, Kafka would have him banned from all software, due to “criminal and suspicious activities”: Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, online banking, Workday, PornHub, Microsoft Office, any mobile app...you name it. Poor Josef would have to file tickets after tickets on the phone, asking what he was accused of, and how he could be un-banned. He would then get periodic updates by mail: “Your case status is ‘pending.’” or “Your case has been forwarded to the appropriate agent.” or “Your case is still under review. Please fill out the survey and help us improve customer service.” In the end, Josef K. still never finds out what crime he is accused of, how to prove his innocence, and if any justice will be ever rendered.

A doodle by Franz Kafka. Undated before 1924. Public domain.

I know what you are thinking now: the B-word, Bureaucracy. Indeed, software makers, as the heir of industrial firms that copied liberally from civil services, are the most eager and energetic bureaucracies of our age. In the eyes of Max Weber, software makers fit squarely into the ideal form of bureaucracy, which is a rational and scientific way to understand and manage a complex world.

1. Specialization: at least 5 different kinds of software engineers exist in any decently sized software company.

2. Hierarchy: 59 to 80 (Microsoft) or L3 to L10 (Google)? There is active, specialized research into how career ladders in different companies map to each other. And every software company has an org chart and reporting chain.

3. Rules: Scrum has a lot of rules, and you have to follow all of them to be real Agile.

4. Technical competence: software makers have to be able to make software, after all.

5. Impersonal: sine ira et studio, the same rules apply to you. Be you prince or peasant, the software code still executes.

6. Formal and documented communications: tickets, user stories, stand-up notes, how-to-use-our-API…all things must be written down.

A software bureaucracy is extremely powerful. Because software reaches us at a depth and breadth that neither the church nor the civil service would be capable of. We use Windows, mobile apps, and solve CAPTCHAs every hour for things big and small, public and private, but we don’t pay taxes or visit the city hall every month. By exposing rules and hierarchy in their products, software makers bend us to follow their rules and structures – which makes everything easier to manage at a massive scale.

Max Weber, one of the granddaddies of sociology.

To paraphrase Weber again: it takes rational and scientific ways to make sense of, and then manage an ever complex world at a huge scale. During Industrial Revolutions, civil services took the governing power from local churches, because civil services are bureaucracies that understand a more complex world. They are organized with specialist knowledge, and have professionals to execute them, while the church was anything but.

Now, software makers, being the most eager and technical bureaucracies in our even more complex world, are the new sheriffs in town to take the governing power of our society.

In the next essay, we will conclude this brief genealogy of governing power and how it shifted. It will also be the final essay for Act II of Quid ex Machina. Act III will be the final segment of the Quid series.

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1. Even in the military, the rank-and-file and commanders were royal or personal appointees, instead of career professionals. And there was no reason that a royally-appointed captain, would bow to the orders of a colonel who rose through the provincial ranks and trenches.

2. It’s no surprise that Arthur D. Little and McKinsey, the godfathers of contract specialist services (fancifully known as “management consulting”), were founded by chemists and accountants at the heights of industrial expansion in the US.