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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies: an excellent diagnosis but a depressing prognosis
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. READ MORE 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 Opens in new window ] 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.
WIRED
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
This Weird, Fleshy Novel Is Exactly What You Need Right Now
Feb 5, 2025 1:12 PM Dengue Boy , a book about a humanoid mosquito taking his revenge in the dying years of planet Earth is unsettling and essential. Photo-Illustration:If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Evolution, ethnography, epidemics—this is the soup from which Dengue Boy , a brilliantly strange new novel by the Argentine author Michel Nieva, emerges. The eponymous Dengue Boy is a mosquito–human hybrid who might be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the result of some terrible corporate crime. He might be all three at once. In any case, it doesn't matter much to the monstrous creature, whom we find living in 2272 in what remains of Argentina after the melting of the Antarctic ice cap has rendered most of the world either underwater or uninhabitably hot. Hot enough to roast a turkey in 20 minutes flat at what passes for room temperature in California. The 'Argentine Caribbean,' meanwhile, remains a comparatively balmy year-round average of 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). It is little surprise, then, that developers have been busy terraforming the Antarctic Caribbean, engineering whole biomes to recreate little slices of Earth on, uh, Earth. For a flat fee, clients can choose packages of five, 10, or 20 species to populate their biome en masse. Who cares about one Amazon rainforest when you can make 30? Courtesy of Profile Books Buy this book at: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Humanity is hanging on, more or less, like a bug on the underside of rock. On the other side of the rock are the privileged children of the viroeconomy (more on that later). These kids plug themselves into virtual headsets and immerse themselves in conquest fantasies like the game Christians v Indians 2. One character fantasizes about getting hold of sheepies: near-sentient fleshlights with endless orifices to explore. Some have whole cupboards full of the things. I mention the sheepies not to be prurient, but because they get something across about the strangeness of Dengue Boy . It's all very fleshy. Heads splitting, tentacles plunging, innards becoming outards—the book is a riot of bodily sensations. One might call the book 'climate fiction,' in that it is set in a world clearly in the death spiral of climate catastrophe, but this would undersell the novel's heady weirdness, which skips across economics, sexuality, biology, and temporality without ever really drawing breath. Any novel in which the protagonist finds themselves in an insect body draws the inevitable comparison to The Metamorphosis . The book's inside flap describes Dengue Boy as an 'extraordinary, Kafkaesque portrait of a demented future.' But in Kafka's novella, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug; his immense pain comes from his knowledge of what he once was, and the life he would like to crawl back to. Dengue Boy was always Dengue Boy. He has no transformation with which he must come to terms. It is the outside world that must be brought to know him. 'Where his mother would have liked to see pudgy arms, his wings sprouted out, their nerve endings like the varicose veins of a disgusting old man, and where his mother would have liked to hear chuckles and adorable yelps, there was only a constant, maddening buzz that would drive even the most tranquil soul to despair.' In The Metamorphosis , Gregor Samsa's transformation is a one-way street. But Dengue Boy will go through a whirlwind of changes, like evolution working in fastforward, until it's not clear exactly where time or fact or fiction begin or end. In Dengue Boy the billionaire class are not tech bros, but speculators on the so-called viroeconomy, who bet on which disease is about to take off and make a killing stockpiling would-be cures. Along with the developers who build resorts on the ground ceded by retreating ice caps, they are the only real winners in the disaster economy. It takes a certain kind of person to see a landscape riven by destruction and see an opportunity for luxury condos. Which all sounds a bit depressing, except Nieva's visceral, surreal prose—translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery—is anything but. This is a book that takes the awful strangeness of the world and it explodes it into something that is both terrible and impossible to look away from. It reminded me of the final scene of the movie Pearl , in which Mia Goth faces the camera with a rictus grin that drags on and on, until she is sobbing, slowly unravelling into a grimace of deep despair while the end credits play out. Dengue Boy plays this trick in reverse. It is a grimace that turns into a grin. It is a camera shot that spins around so many times that you're not sure if it's the director or the actor you're looking at, and in any case you feel queasy or are you just giddy with excitement? It is weirdness sliced up, spun in a salad spinner and served with some indescribable gunk on top. It's delicious, if you can stomach it.
