The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies: an excellent diagnosis but a depressing prognosis

Irish Times

29-05-2025

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost its Mind.
Author
:
Dan Davies
ISBN-13
:
978-1788169547
Publisher
:
Profile Books
Guideline Price
:
£22
In this informative and ambitious book, Dan Davies looks at contemporary systems. He looks at economics, airlines, banks and corporations and posits that recent fiascos (the 2008 financial crash; Brexit; the rise of populism) are not the result of 'conspiracy or cock-up' but of the growing complexity of these systems.
Within these systems the idea of individual decision-making is redundant because the decisions are inscribed within the system itself, which produces its own results, independent of the individuals within the systems.
This may initially seem like a plea bargain and excuse for those involved in nefarious activities, but ultimately the book is an indictment of the organisation and management of these systems within a neo-liberal environment.
He introduces the term 'accountability sinks' where no person has agency therefore no one is responsible. He examines specific examples: Fox News reporting of voter fraud; airline flight experiences; squirrels getting shredded at Schiphol airport.
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We all know the
Ryanair
experience where we have a problem but the person we engage with offers the interaction of a recorded message machine. For the system to function, 'it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.'
This last point he sees as a primary reason why many have abandoned mainstream politics and embraced Trump and populist politics.
He identifies three main revolutions that have got us here: the managerial revolution, where control was passed over from owners and capitalists to professional administrators; the 1970s neo-liberal revolution which has shaped our current society; and the aborted cybernetic revolution.
[
The Irish Times view on the Ryanair wheelie case controversy: making a bags of it
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He explores cybernetics ('the study of decision-making systems') through the eccentric, leftist Stafford Beer. Beer held meetings that were 'unstructured, informal connections between staff at different levels and performing different functions'. He wanted to create systems that were open, as opposed to closed systems – such as banking, where a limited focus on profit ended up with an implosion that led to them being bailed out by governments: the socialisation of private debt.
Cybernetically speaking, there was not enough variety in the controlling system that would have provided feedback that the system was unstable and needed readjustment. There was no feedback channel beyond the closed system with regard to wider society. This is in keeping with Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics (the home of neo-liberal economics), which rejected a consideration of society. This was best expressed in
Margaret Thatcher
's famous claim that there is no such thing as society. She, along with
Ronald Reagan
, was one of the two main political enforcers of this ideology.
The closed neo-liberal system has led to the insanity where people still chase profit at the expense of planetary destruction. In cybernetic terms, it's the problem of emphasising one outcome of maximisation to the detriment of others. 'Every decision-making system set up as a maximiser needs to have a higher-level system watching over it.'
Davis looks at the technical aspects and details of cybernetics, which are well explained yet require an extra level of concentration if, like me, you are not familiar with it. He claims that cybernetics could have changed the way economics developed in the 1950s and 1960s, instead of creating a system that supported the neo-liberal agenda. This agenda produced models of the world which neglected so many variables that they became self-fulfilling prophecies in their results: they were models of wish fulfilment posing as science. As Stafford Beer has it: 'Where analysis fails, ideology steps in.' That ideology was neo-liberalism.
The strength of this book is its ability to provide an overarching theory of why the world is in crisis and how economic and societal development has lead to this.
The book wraps up by reiterating that nobody in a corporation was or is responsible.
This seems to me to let too many people off the hook. What about whistleblowers? There are always people doing the right thing. Davis, though, would argue that the systems were set up without the channels for this information to reach the ears of those in power. The profit motive is amplified as information within the system to the detriment of all other information/inputs.
He ends by saying that, as systems get more complicated, we need to become use to more accountability sinks: '...we cannot afford the luxury of explainability; we can't keep on demanding that an identifiable human being is available to blame when things go wrong.'
So morality is out the window. Our human status declines as he sees 'the death of responsibility' coming, and that 'I blame the system is something we will have to get used to saying, and meaning it literally'.
An excellent diagnosis but a depressing prognosis. Highly recommended.