Map this to COVID imbroglio … or the dotcom bust followed by housing bubble bust followed by BREXIT followed by Trump 2016 followed by 2020 followed by… 2025 …
And my point; Dashboard supervision of what’s under the hood is a black box upon many other black boxes… fails.
This fails over and over.
The technocrats of Galbraith’s time were actually engineers who understood what the machines were yet it broke down over and over. It would be difficult to appreciate the system engineering genius of Robert McNamara who was the systems engineer for the ultimate platform of the USAAF (Air Force) of WW2 the B29 bomber- yet it failed as they did not know about the Jet Stream.
They also didn’t know apparently that Japan’s economy was very much distributed unlike Germany. Curtis LeMay figured it out as low level incendiaries dropped all over and burnt the opponent out.
The USSR GOSPLAN failed, despite having the best minds of never mind Russia but American acolytes of Taylor.
We come to three problems; one the need for humans to see order and patterns … where the pattern may be sadly closer to Hayek and worse Homo Economus than we can accept.
There own participation in market exchanges may be worked out daily, hourly by the moment and small decisions at the point of transaction or intercourse sum however awkwardly to a functional flow.
In functional societies and organizations.
(Walk outside the tourist zones in the 3d world and this will be clear, do go armed).
Two; we in the network business technical side (myself) have come to realize that any summary of information of necessity must OMIT a great deal of information to get to the summary;
The lights on the dashboard Green or Red or Amber… are a Summary.
The summary means Gaps. It must.
For example ;
E=mc^2
Ok- Energy = mass x velocity of light squared.
How did we arrive at that conclusion? I have no idea. It’s a summary.
Kind of like 🚨 🚦🚥
It took no time at all for that 🚨💡🏮🚦🚥to take over management, and less time to fail because the TTY Command Line Interface CLI is still under the hood.
AI will fail to replace management that came from technical expertise in that field, in fact we’re blessed it’s hyping and failing so fast.
Another contrary example is BTC. Wow, it’s great until you look under the hood… and there’s nothing there.
Three; Human nature. Now very alerted to the peril of the managerial culture these perceptions of systems in control breakdown in reality… the people rebel. And they’re winning this rebellion in America.
Perhaps a review and contrast of Ernst Junger’s “The Glass Bees” (what happened) and what is happening “The Worker; Form and Dominion” are in order.
(Upon detection of the situation you describe we humans are rebelling in every way all over).
Author thank you very much for these most excellent and informative descriptions of our situation. Blessed 26.
I will reply soon to your longer comments, I deeply appreciate the engagement with my work! This is an easy one though: I believe the system interfaces very poorly with human nature, generally. Much of my writing project is based on the idea that that large scale technology (especially since industrialization) is deeply anti-human by its very nature, and that tendency increases as technology becomes more advanced and essential to sustaining human life, replacing older organic forms of existence. Although technology brings obvious benefits, the psychological toll is quite steep and I am deeply uneasy about it, even though I am not racing out to live in the woods at this moment. (In fact, the great irony is that I am deeply embedded in a high tech field myself)! A blessed 2026 to you as well.
This piece really made me think; you've so clearly articulated the profound structural shift represented by 'supercorporations' and Project Stargate. What do you believe is the most urgent step in creating new governance models for these increasingly detached technical systems?
I don't know that I have the expertise to suggest the right governing model for this new type of society; and actually I think that this is not even entirely new, although the 21st century has massively intensified the kinds of concentrations and network effects that make old ideas like markets and sovereignty even more obsolete. The works I cited in the intro had already recognized the beginnings of this in the 60s and 70s of the last century.
What I do think is important is that a new language needs to be adopted to understand this order, an order that none of the old models we're stuck on seem to speak to. We're constantly sleep walking into and out of crises where we end up doing a kind of post-facto reconstruction of what happened through some tortured version the old models from law, markets and sovereignty, because they are all we have. But no one ever addresses the giant elephant in the room hovering over all of those institutions and influencing them decisively: the platform hegemons, the automated systems, the technostructure. People treat these as subordinate to states and markets, but they're clearly much more powerful.
I think the first step is recognizing this, which is difficult because its a very complex system and there are entrenched interests whose power relies on keeping this obscured. I have tried to elaborate in this article what the current system is NOT, but creating a detailed, accurate mapping of what it IS, is more difficult.
There are some good works that approach pieces of the puzzle, like Shoshanna Zuboffs "The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism" and Adam Greenfield's "Radical Technologies", or the older works from Galbraith and Andreano that I cited in the article. Benjamin Bratton's "The Stack" also looks promising, although I haven't read it yet. Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society" remains the indispensable work on this subject, although its a bit dated (1954).
Map this to COVID imbroglio … or the dotcom bust followed by housing bubble bust followed by BREXIT followed by Trump 2016 followed by 2020 followed by… 2025 …
And my point; Dashboard supervision of what’s under the hood is a black box upon many other black boxes… fails.
This fails over and over.
The technocrats of Galbraith’s time were actually engineers who understood what the machines were yet it broke down over and over. It would be difficult to appreciate the system engineering genius of Robert McNamara who was the systems engineer for the ultimate platform of the USAAF (Air Force) of WW2 the B29 bomber- yet it failed as they did not know about the Jet Stream.
They also didn’t know apparently that Japan’s economy was very much distributed unlike Germany. Curtis LeMay figured it out as low level incendiaries dropped all over and burnt the opponent out.
The USSR GOSPLAN failed, despite having the best minds of never mind Russia but American acolytes of Taylor.
We come to three problems; one the need for humans to see order and patterns … where the pattern may be sadly closer to Hayek and worse Homo Economus than we can accept.
There own participation in market exchanges may be worked out daily, hourly by the moment and small decisions at the point of transaction or intercourse sum however awkwardly to a functional flow.
In functional societies and organizations.
(Walk outside the tourist zones in the 3d world and this will be clear, do go armed).
Two; we in the network business technical side (myself) have come to realize that any summary of information of necessity must OMIT a great deal of information to get to the summary;
The lights on the dashboard Green or Red or Amber… are a Summary.
The summary means Gaps. It must.
For example ;
E=mc^2
Ok- Energy = mass x velocity of light squared.
How did we arrive at that conclusion? I have no idea. It’s a summary.
Kind of like 🚨 🚦🚥
It took no time at all for that 🚨💡🏮🚦🚥to take over management, and less time to fail because the TTY Command Line Interface CLI is still under the hood.
AI will fail to replace management that came from technical expertise in that field, in fact we’re blessed it’s hyping and failing so fast.
Another contrary example is BTC. Wow, it’s great until you look under the hood… and there’s nothing there.
Three; Human nature. Now very alerted to the peril of the managerial culture these perceptions of systems in control breakdown in reality… the people rebel. And they’re winning this rebellion in America.
Perhaps a review and contrast of Ernst Junger’s “The Glass Bees” (what happened) and what is happening “The Worker; Form and Dominion” are in order.
(Upon detection of the situation you describe we humans are rebelling in every way all over).
Author thank you very much for these most excellent and informative descriptions of our situation. Blessed 26.
Thank you.
How does this interface with human nature?
I will reply soon to your longer comments, I deeply appreciate the engagement with my work! This is an easy one though: I believe the system interfaces very poorly with human nature, generally. Much of my writing project is based on the idea that that large scale technology (especially since industrialization) is deeply anti-human by its very nature, and that tendency increases as technology becomes more advanced and essential to sustaining human life, replacing older organic forms of existence. Although technology brings obvious benefits, the psychological toll is quite steep and I am deeply uneasy about it, even though I am not racing out to live in the woods at this moment. (In fact, the great irony is that I am deeply embedded in a high tech field myself)! A blessed 2026 to you as well.
I’m a network tech 26 years. It’s the managerial mindset of being promoted without competency that’s the literal killer.
However on the woods…
I’m in the country and definitely have woods…
WFH … it’s the best!
This piece really made me think; you've so clearly articulated the profound structural shift represented by 'supercorporations' and Project Stargate. What do you believe is the most urgent step in creating new governance models for these increasingly detached technical systems?
I don't know that I have the expertise to suggest the right governing model for this new type of society; and actually I think that this is not even entirely new, although the 21st century has massively intensified the kinds of concentrations and network effects that make old ideas like markets and sovereignty even more obsolete. The works I cited in the intro had already recognized the beginnings of this in the 60s and 70s of the last century.
What I do think is important is that a new language needs to be adopted to understand this order, an order that none of the old models we're stuck on seem to speak to. We're constantly sleep walking into and out of crises where we end up doing a kind of post-facto reconstruction of what happened through some tortured version the old models from law, markets and sovereignty, because they are all we have. But no one ever addresses the giant elephant in the room hovering over all of those institutions and influencing them decisively: the platform hegemons, the automated systems, the technostructure. People treat these as subordinate to states and markets, but they're clearly much more powerful.
I think the first step is recognizing this, which is difficult because its a very complex system and there are entrenched interests whose power relies on keeping this obscured. I have tried to elaborate in this article what the current system is NOT, but creating a detailed, accurate mapping of what it IS, is more difficult.
There are some good works that approach pieces of the puzzle, like Shoshanna Zuboffs "The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism" and Adam Greenfield's "Radical Technologies", or the older works from Galbraith and Andreano that I cited in the article. Benjamin Bratton's "The Stack" also looks promising, although I haven't read it yet. Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society" remains the indispensable work on this subject, although its a bit dated (1954).
Love your writing. So insightful. My feed was blessed today