Mon 19 Apr. Decommissioning. by Dian Bling
This is the end of lifecycle message for the Chosun Excelsion Refrigerator, model JDTH#5738124.
Chosun takes its responsibilities to the social ecology seriously. That’s why you can return any product to us for refurbishment, recycling, or retirement. No matter what the condition. No matter where you bought it. We’ll take it back.
Architecture can be like a conversation. A very slow, expensive conversation. The centre of cities like New York or Hong Kong are like bustling parties full of people angling for attention but not wanting to veer too far from convention. Some cities like Singapore or Barcelona have made grand fashion catwalks at their centre, so pretty buildings can preen to the appreciative, slightly bewildered, self-congratulatory applause of people with money.
Temple cities are theological arguments, sermons and counter-sermons, schism and revival, self-conscious reinventions of grand traditions. In Angkor, the serene omnipresent faces of Bayon are a Buddhist reply to the Hindu temple mountain of Angkor Wat up the road, punctuated in symbolism and stone. And so too it is in Washington, D.C.
When I visited the Jefferson memorial, an enthusiastic young woman came up to me on the steps to politely and arbitrarily testify her Christian faith. It’s an appropriately argumentative way to exit the monument to a man suspicious enough of religion he edited his own version of the gospels to take out all the miracles. (I doubt she saw a contradiction, and perhaps she should not: American civic experience is a broad church). The monument itself was actually only dedicated in 1943, two hundred years or so after the birth of the figure at its centre. It’s neoclassical, or in other words, pretends to be two thousand years older than it is.
The monument was suggested and dedicated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was an admirer of Jefferson, and also presided over a massive international war, and an expansion of federal government quite opposite to Jefferson’s white-knuckled anti-federalism. Both of them were rather aristocratic and patrician, and both found themselves with the financier class as political enemies; like many farmers, Jefferson was heavily indebted, and hated bankers. FDR could use the monument as a tribute to an American and Southern genius while also getting political cover for his now-established constitutional upheaval of shooting fascists and stopping people starving. FDR’s own memorial is a bit of a disorganized liberal wishlist elsewhere on the pond. It speaks well of the man that his own wish was for no more than a simple plaque.
Jefferson’s statue looks straight at the Whitehouse, the doorway framing his view to see little else. It’s a little unfair. Tommo’s restless mind rarely settled on one thing that long, and he was far from that breed of singleminded politician who only cares for power. Still, if the statue were true to life, under the well armed kindergarten teacher of the modern US state, Jefferson would more likely be furiously scribbling letters calling for blood to run in the streets rather than gazing with sphinx-like detachment across the water at the house of America’s monarch.
While Jefferson watches the Whitehouse, Martin Luther King watches Jefferson. Dr King’s statue is a new addition, but I was in Washington for the first time, so I had the privilege of seeing it as part of the existing landscape, rather than an afterthought. It leaps forward out of a mountain ridge of white marble with the metaphorical literalness of a comic book superhero, or Sun Wukong 孙悟空 bursting out of a stone egg.
Dr King’s statue stands near the water’s edge, letting him keep an eye on a brace of Virginians on the east shore – the Washington monument, George Mason, and then the Capitol itself further in the distance. But it is the small temple housing the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence that falls squarely in the middle of his gaze. Thomas Jefferson’s statue is not hewn from stone, but cast in neoclassical bronze. So the republic’s third President sails forth in memory clad in black, while his watcher stands in the sun and the snow, in seraphic white.
This T-intersection is near my local metro station. I use it all the time.
It has a full set of traffic lights, and a signaled pedestrian crossing with a backwards counter displaying how many seconds left before the green WALK signal switches to STOP. The timer is thirty seconds, which is sufficient for a fully mobile adult, but doesn’t leave much time for dilly-dallying for children or anyone less sprightly, for whichever reason.
The main road is three busy lanes in each direction. The side roads are single lane. Traffic turning right from the single lane has a green light and has to give way to pedestrians. The timers on the north and south lanes’ traffic lights are offset, such that the south lane red light signals a good ten seconds before the north lane. Logically enough, the pedestrian crossing only signals when red lights stop car traffic in both lanes of the main road.
The upshot of all this is that when crossing from north to south, you might want to walk briskly, but there is no particular overlap between cars and people. However, when crossing from south to north, the timing is such that cars and trucks always have to stop a second time for pedestrians. The drivers are, in the most part, polite, but you depend to an uncomfortable extent on their knowing the give way rule. There is no continuous line of sight from pedestrian to car, as the car comes from the back left. There is no continuous line of sight from driver to pedestrian, as it is coming around a corner.
There is a pedestrian bridge, but it is a hundred metres away and adds a few minutes to the journey. Without arguing the psychology of it in detail, people will prefer the fastest way. The bridge is also only accessible by stairs.
The safest way to cross this road from the south is to jaywalk to the traffic island after the southern lane traffic light has turned red, then cross the north lane under the green man signal, before the cars have reached the pedestrian crossing.
This is not a problem that enrages me, but it does scare me, just a little, and it nags at the design-aware part of my brain. Breaking a good, established, law, like the traffic code, bugs me. How do I teach that rule to little people? Surely it’s not right that strangers to the area are put at more risk. Etc. The solution I’d suggest would be to block the right turn for the side street entirely.
There is a U-turn lane near lights a few hundred metres along the main road. The trucks may have to go further up. Another solution would be to extend the timer for the side road red light without changing any other timings, meaning pedestrians have a better chance of crossing before competing directly with traffic.
Now, there are mechanisms for changing this, but they are pretty crude and imprecise. I’m sure there’s a smart civil engineer working for the roads department who could tweak this design to make it better, and maybe point out where my suggestions make well-meaning amateurish errors. I could write a letter to the department, or to an MP, but that is the prioritisation and lobbying end of the problem. There are probably more obviously urgent things to deal with, though this one does have a safety aspect, and a subtle one to explain. It also ends up in a big slush pile of email feedback. Imprecise.
One of the things that makes me sympathetic to the Tim O’Reilly – Daniel Lathrop government as a platform approach is moments like this. If this intersection were a piece of open source software, I could lodge a detailed, public bug report, have it commented on by other users, or even contribute a patch. Some local governments have started to take a genuine crack at this – eg you can raise a pothole bug in Cambridgeshire and at another level of openness and sophistication, the GOV.UK project so embraced an innovative, collaborative spirit, they put all the code on GitHub. This still falls short of what feels right here – a patch for the Civic Infranet of Things.
That is the spirit I think small scale, town hall democracy can have, but for it to scale to a metropolis, some different techs and processes are needed. (Contrary to some critics, this is not inherently an agenda for defunding government or “depoliticising” policy.) Bug reports, their priorities and solutions can be intensely political, and that is a good, human thing. Its localness and specifity keeps a human scale; it changes the texture of civic engagement. Maybe that doesn’t address grand national problems directly. It doesn’t fix collapsed party memberships or dismantle the security-panic-apathy complex. Yet wanting to collaborate in a focused, open way, with the guidance of domain experts: that is a model of responsible, informed self-government.
When I run home I take the bridge.
The city and the city only, owing to these refinements, can never be served openly and without disguise; he who does serve it openly being always suspected of serving himself in some secret way in return.
— Diodotus, in Thuycidides History of the Peloponnesian War, Crawley trans.
It was ’97. We were out east near the Cambodian border, knee deep in melting baht and desperation. Every morning we dug the mindworms out of our imported Canadian breakfast cereal and threw them in the camp recycling bucket, and we thought we were doing it pretty tough. We were a bunch of chump accounting grads, Asian studies majors and rag-tag thaumaturgists. The IMF sent us, though they hid our budget under a line item for car parking or reports on stochastic models of dam finance costs adjusting for GDP on normalized time scales, or some such thing. We were their economic psychics, the frontline team sent in when things got rough.
The people out there had it pretty bad that summer. They were copping a heck of a psychic backlash, all those loans and deals and pacts broken, all those prayers gone awry and financial gearboxes thrown into reverse. The folks out east are serious Buddhists so their karmic buffers were usually strong, but too many surprises and a massive currency devaluation take their toll on anyone.
We’d been going hard at it for a few weeks, trying to balance ledgers and keep the local monks onside. What we called the camp was really a sprawling two storey Thai hotel on the outskirts of town, depressingly cheap to book out in its entirety for as long as the team was there. That afternoon I had gone up the small mountain nearby with the diviners. It was a national park, and approaching the peak was a mix of temple ruins from the many Siamese wars, topped by two or three more contemporary TV broadcast towers. The ley lines were fantastic up there, and we were picking up a lot of crisis metrics that way. When I got back in the evening Dave threw the paper down in front of me while I was spooning up Pad Thai. We’d usually read the FT – great horoscopes – but this was one of the many local papers, tabloid headlines and lurid photographs of car accidents and celebrities. There on page five was an unfortunate woman impaled on a kind of spear. She was a shopkeeper from a nearby town.
“Not really the local gangster style,” I said.
“Look closer,” said Dave. “Look close at the shaft.”
After a while I saw something. There were a series of fine decorations all along the shaft, like small strands of rope, or thick hair.
I looked at Dave expectantly until it was clear to him I had no idea.
“Fucking manticores,” he said.
—
Our agreement with the local monks, combined with our own internal regulations, meant our rules of engagement allowed for the following equipment: 1 notebook, 2 blue pens and 2 red pens, 1 pocket calculator, 1 large bottle of water, 1 copy of the Diamond Sutra and 1 personally significant religious symbol, politely displayed or concealed. Our early research had indicated ghosts as a big risk. All the sources still say it is a major ectoplasmic hotspot, but I only saw one ghost the whole time I was there. He was an eight foot tall purple man with a machete stuck through his chest. He gave me a sheepish wave and that was the last I saw of him.
I was working with a farmer, Mr Koichai Rattanathunat, who lived on the edge of town. He ran a pretty big operation, and was pretty rich for the area, or he had been. He had taken out some commercial loans with a local bank that got most of its funding from the international bond market. It had been a bad season, and a couple of weasel clauses and a few mills of rat’s blood in the contracts meant he was effectively USD funded. Suddenly one morning he went from profitable to six feet underwater.
The first sign I had of the repo man was the ceiling of the house imploding inwards. It was a twelve foot manticore, with black Oakley sunglasses stretched across its broad, garbage can lid face, and built like a brick shithouse with wings. It strolled across the open living / office area, reaching out casually with its front left paw to slap me in the chest and send me flying across the room into the wall. It walked on up to Mr Rattanathunat and fired seven short spines, hand length, into his face and chest. He was meat at that point. Poisoned meat, what’s more.
The manticore strolled over to the back door and muttered something in guttural accented Thai my way. I didn’t catch anything except “foreigner” and that he’d dropped the polite “khap” at the end of the sentence. Then the manticore smashed through the door and flew off.
—
We had some paladins in the department, but they were all being seconded to Interkarmapol in Bangkok. They were dealing with the vampire problems that always come with any big global turnout, be it crisis, G7 meeting, or whatever. I’m sure it all seemed pretty serious from their side, but I read the reports later and it was mostly anticoagulant and mood lighting. Meanwhile we were getting the shit kicked out of us and small businesses were dropping like flies.
Now I don’t rightly know that Dan Cobb was the one solved our manticore problem. I did get to see him in action once, though, right about that time.
Sammy Chan was actually from Laos, but had stuck with his Han-derived surname when he migrated around the time of the Indochina war. He ran one of those Thai cowboy ranches, where businessmen who’ve watched too many dubbed John Wayne movies come up from Bangkok to ride horses and chew tobacco for a week. It had done a good trade for a few years but now all the bookings had dried up and cancelled overnight. The saddles, bridles and hats were all imported from the US as well. Sam was at a point where it was not so much deciding whether to shut up shop as when, and how much of a mess it would make. I had gone out there for a few days, and over the course of it Sam confided in me that some of his less savvy ancestors had run up heck of a credit card debt on the gold Visa cards he’d burnt for them during the boom. Dan turned up around lunchtime on the second day, asking if he could help out.
We sat out on the verandah of the otherwise empty saloon bar Sammy had set up there, bringing Dan up to speed on the situation, but also running off on a few conversational tangents, grim and resigned by turns. The bar overlooked the ring where chubby rice salesmen had so recently taken turns on patient, but not too patient, imported horses. In some ways the tangents were the most important part of the conversation for Sammy. He knew this business was gone, at least for a while. He needed new ideas most of all, and while Dan didn’t have any business plans to hand over, he always had interesting angles on events.
We were pretty deep in this conversation when I saw the bat-winged shadow flit across the rodeo ring. I tackled Sammy to the floor as a four foot spine thudded into the wooden post behind us. I looked back to check if Dan was ok, and he had already taken cover at the edge of the bar. He moved fast for such a big man and must have seen the monster before I did.
Sammy groaned and clutched at his chest. I was thinking I’d cracked his rib or given him a heart attack or something when he rolled over cleanly and pulled a god-damned 13 inch silver plated Colt revolver out of his jacket. He started to wave it towards me, still confused by what was going on, though I noticed he hadn’t cocked it yet. I looked pointedly out over the ring where the manticore was swooping by for another pass, and another spine shot just over my head, like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud.
She had streaming blonde-brown hair, this manticore, and she grinned the beautiful smile of the predator pouncing on its prey. I dived behind a hastily upended table. It was a difficult angle, with the long awnings of the verandah, but she was happy to toy with us from an unreachable distance, as she fired some short spines into the table, splintering half of it into uselessness. Sammy let off a shot. It zinged into the sky without even touching her leather and Kevlar vest. Nevertheless, a new look of seriousness fixed itself on her face and she flew up out of visibility as Sammy let off another shot. Damn it Sammy, I thought, if you were packing, couldn’t you have carried an Uzi?
I ran to a new position behind another table while wondering if I could be any more useless. Sammy also shifted around, then went back to stillness. I’d lost track of Dan. I wondered if he’d gone for help. I breathed. We waited.
The manticore, when she came back it was in a screaming dive bomb where she pulled up just enough to skim off the table we were originally at, crash through the tables in the centre and land at the open space near the entrance, slowly spinning and firing hand-length spines all the way. Just before landing, though, where she would have been facing us, ready, she somehow crumpled. She landed on her right legs and they rolled underneath her, and instead of stopping in an alert crouch, she slid through like a motorbike accident and her neck hit the doorway with a sickening crack. She didn’t move after that.
We walked up, on guard, but she was dead. A pen had stuck deep into her left nostril, all the way into her brain. Dan must have thrown it somehow as she made her charge.
The pen was green. Dan Cobb never was much of one for following the rules.
Soon after that, the manticores stopped hassling people. I figure Dan did more than his share.
—
You know I heard Dan Cobb once beat Tim Geithner at tennis left handed. They played at one of those hotel courts in Hong Kong, twelve stories up, on a bad smog day. Geithner broke back a few times, but he went down in straight sets.
Comparisons of the US Constitution to software design are fairly commonplace. A pattern-focused one by Howard Dierking appears in a recent book on Open Government, but it goes back at least to the dot-com era and probably before. The analogies have their limitations, such as a tendency to foreground the machinery of government and background the people in politics, and the reasons they might push a given position. That said, I certainly dabbled in it myself during the wild analogy-soaked amusements of my youth; and as a system which is human centric, statically defined and with key properties only obvious at runtime, thinking about government is not such a bad training for software design.
Whatever the merits of the full metaphor, I don’t think it’s a stretch to describe the Philadelphia convention itself as a design process. I was struck by Hamilton’s role as described by Ron Chernow. The design meeting was a bit thinly attended. Of the fifty-five on the invite list, only thirty were actually there most of the time, with people drifting in and out, and a number of invitees considering it not particularly important in their busy working lives. The discussion itself happened behind closed doors, with an agreement for the debate to stay between delegates, to allow the sharing of different design ideas.
At the time of the convention, as Americans who stayed awake in civics class probably already know, the United States was organized on the basis of the Articles of Confederation, which loosely grouped the former colonies together on terms weaker in some ways than the current European Union. The US government was unable to reliably raise tax revenue, for example, and as a result still held massive debts from the Revolutionary War, including soldiers’ pay.
The convention had so far been dominated by a proposal from Madison and the Virginia delegation for a much stronger national government, of two legislative houses, proportional to population, a President and a Supreme Court. William Paterson of New Jersey argued for revisions to the Articles that fixed some problems in the confederation but retained its minimalist character. Three weeks in, constructive discussion had begun to stall, with delegates forming factions around the two plans. Hamilton, relatively young but hardly unknown, had uncharacteristically spoken little during the convention so far, and didn’t favour either plan. Chernow relates:
It was predictable than when the wordy Hamilton broke silence, he would do so at epic length. Faced with a deadlock between large and small states, he decided to broach a more radical plan.On Monday morning, June 18, the thirty-two-year-old prodigy rose first on the convention floor and in the stifling, poorly ventilated room he spoke and spoke and spoke. Before the day was through, he had given a six-hour speech (no break for lunch) that was brilliant, courageous, and, in retrospect, completely daft. He admitted to the assembly that he would adumbrate a plan that did not reflect popular opinion.
[…]
His mind had minted an entire program for a new government, not just scattered aspects of it.
[…]
He now suggested a president and Senate that would be elected but would serve for life “on good behaviour”. Hamilton’s chief executive differed from a monarch in that he would be elected and, if he misbehaved, subject to recall. […] While Hamilton’s Senate would be chosen for life by electors [ie like the historical Electoral College -CA], his House of Representatives, by contrast, was exceedingly democratic, chosen directly by universal male suffrage every three years. Thus, the aristocratic element would be represented by the Senate, the common folk by the House. As prosperity widened income differentials in future years, Hamilton feared that the Senate and House might try to impose their wills on each other: “Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”
[…]
To curb further abuse, Hamilton recommended a Supreme Court that would consist of twelve judges holding lifetime offices on good behaviour. In this manner, each branch would maintain a salutary distance from popular passions. The House of Representatives would be the striking exception. Hamilton concluded, “The principle chiefly intended to be established is this – that there must be a permanent will.”
— Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
There is no definitive record of the plan, but some describe it as abolishing the states, with state governors appointed by the central government. It owed much to the structure of 18th century British government, to the point where it is sometimes called the British Plan.
Chernow goes on to ask “How had Hamilton blundered into this speech?”
Oh Ron, you’re a great biographer, but you’re so wrong about this. Yes, it caused him a great deal of political grief later on. Yes, it didn’t get many votes at the convention. Maybe you could even blame it for derailing his run at the Presidency. But I’ve been in that sort of design meeting. And it needed Hamilton’s crazy design sketch like a thirsty runner needs water.
Hamilton was a designer of systems, and as a system it made sense. William Samuel Johnson said it was “praised by everybody [but] … supported by none”. The debate was becoming entrenched, after which problem solving stops. The size of the meeting would have already been awkward for genuine design conversation. (Its notable that the full convention basically did little but choose among solutions proposed by smaller groups). The Hamilton plan showed some of the dimensions along which the design could meaningfully vary, without simply being an attempt to average the two major proposals on the table. Whenever he incorporates a controversial ingredient of the rival plans, he turns the dial to 11: not just a democratic lower house, a lower house elected every year by every man! Not just an executive: a President-for-life, who he even calls a monarch! Not just a Supreme Court: a dozen Supreme justices! For life!
Often there is a dialectical dynamic in problem solving. I doubt it is as universal as Soviet systems of dialectical materialism for engineers would have it, but the mental procession of thesis, antithesis and synthesis happens often enough to be useful. You can even see it expressed in code sometimes, as two theories of how core concepts in a system should be expressed, fighting it out in marching ranks of source source control commits.
Hamilton showed one synthesis: a way the plans could be modified and still work as systems. Chernow mentions some scholars argue it also worked politically, by being a more radically central government than the Virginia Plan, making it seem moderate by comparison. The eventual solution, the Connecticut Compromise from Roger Sherman, varied along similar axes as Hamilton’s plan, of the composition of the two houses and the nature of the Presidency.
It’s also nice that once the ultimate plan was adopted, Hamilton sent a number of meaty patches in the first milestone of the new system, and didn’t go off and fork the codebase. The merge conflicts from that can be hell.
Conflated Automatons 