James C. Scott

Metis and General Intellect

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“The general intellect” can be interpreted as tacit craft knowledge embedded in individual cunning and social relations. This definition sets general intellect in contrast and opposition to formal information systems. Framing it this way may not be completely true to historic usage, but has some revealing consequences. It applies to either abstract information machines like traditional bureaucracies, or concretized ones, like specific computer programs. Craft and process arguments in software development are also a lens on this transformation of skills in cognitive capitalism, information valorization and their relationship with bureaucracy and flows of stupidity. To expand the general intellect is to accelerate.

The term the general intellect (sometimes general social knowledge) originates from Marx and was used by operaismo thinkers to grapple with the emergence of cognitive capitalism. Virno states:

Whereas money, the “universal equivalent” itself, incarnates in its independent existence the commensurability of products, jobs, and subjects, the general intellect instead stabilizes the analytic premises of every type of practice. Models of social knowledge do not equate the various activities of labor, but rather present themselves as the “immediate forces of production.”

They are not units of measure, but they constitute the immeasurability presupposed by heterogeneous operative possibilities.

They are not “species” existing outside of the “individuals” who belong to them, but axiomatic rules whose validity does not depend on what they represent. Measuring and representing nothing, these technico-scientific codes and paradigms manifest themselves as constructive principles.

From here I suggest general intellect as a form of tacit and social knowledge, of metis, defined in contrast to formal knowledge, numeric or systematic knowledge. The general intellect is cognition but it is not data. It is highly contextualized, by experience, locality and specific social relations. James C. Scott offers the knowledge embodied by a soccer team or a ship’s pilot as good examples of metis. He also uses it in contrast to systematic forms of knowledge used in high modernist, often Fordist projects of top-down political control, state or corporate.

At the economy scale, the general intellect also seems to have an intersection with the idea of “institutions” in economic development. Institutions established ongoing government policies but also more abstract things like property rights and the rule of law; they are not primarily buildings, but persistent social relations, not commoditized or readily transferable between nations. Acemoglu and colleagues found significant correlation between historic settler mortality and modern economic success, putting forward the type of colonial institutions as the causative link.

Though this is oppositional with computation as a form of knowledge, the two are complementary in production. Operators draw on the general intellect to make machines work and produce things. This is true of concrete machines, like a coffee maker, or abstract machines in the Simondon / Deleuze / Guattari sense. And machines, especially large abstract machines, make use of operator black boxes to be effective. Traditional bureaucracy before the advent of modern computers and networks is an example of an abstract information machine which uses human operators as black box components – for instance to persist information to longer term storage, by writing on paper.

If we look at the skilled cognition involved in designing complex machinery, such as computer programming, we find the general intellect in the sense of individual and organizational craft knowledge. The rise of agile software development techniques, emphasising teamwork and craft skills over Fordist or high modernist planning, is one example of this over the last fifteen years. Yet the act of programming depends very much on an individual mental model, as pointed out by Naur. Programming is not typing; the main productive activity in programming is building a coherent mental model, the actual executable code produced is a side-effect. “Programming in this sense must be the programmers’ building up knowledge of a certain kind, knowledge taken to be basically the programmers’ immediate possession” (Naur). The spread of algorithms and software throughout society would then suggest a shattering of the general intellect into millions of shards of specific intellects. The general intellect – the entirety of system relations – could decay even as systemic shards expand in sophistication.

None of this is deny a certain translatability from metis to formalized knowledge. It can all be boiled down to bits in the end. Translation for functional use is costly and lossy, though. The mechanics of deep learning parallel this metic transformation from formal data structures into occluded knowledge. To understand how a deep learning system internally navigates a problem space requires a separate systematic analysis alien to the learning mechanism of the algorithm. Deep learning is a localized preview of machinic metis.

A countertrend to the fragmentation of general intellect might be the success of open source, but the point of open source is precisely to make the executable details of machines more readily available through social processes. It is a common platform rather than a general intellect, where evolution of the platform happens through patches (explicit formal communication) rather than primarily through evolved social understanding, though those dynamics still exist. It is striking that open source communities are organized primarily around a specific machine or platform rather than user products. This is true from the GNU C compiler through to the Apache web server and git source control. They echo Simondon’s critique of objects made in capitalism not evolving but merely accumulating features. Simondon’s comments on technical culture also parallel general social knowledge:

Now that he is a technical being no longer, man is forced to find for himself a position in the technical ensemble that is something other than the position of individual.

The trend for computer programming to promote skilling up for designers but sometimes exporting deskilling elsewhere was noted by Mackenzie in 1984; it’s because capitalism is a valorizing process rather than a deskilling process per se. Likewise there are deskilling trends in the software industry around outsourcing highly specific work to remote or offshore teams, so long as it promotes valorization (increases shareholder value).

The frustrations of working in or with a bureaucracy are often those of being a black box cog in a larger abstract machine, either through alienation from the meaning of the work, or because the work actually causes an undesirable effect which conflicts with personal goals, or even the stated goal of the organization itself. That is a form of stupidity but relates to all bureaucracy. Deleuze and Guattari say in capitalism:

The apparatus of antiproduction is no longer a transcendent instance that opposes production, limits it, or checks it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine and becomes firmly wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize surplus value which explains, for example, the difference between the despotic bureaucracy and the capitalist bureaucracy.

eg in a despotic state the army may come and confiscate food and labour from a subsistence farmer when fighting a war, but in capitalism this military anti-production is in the form of a military-industrial complex, production interleaved with anti-production. Yet those critiques could apply to Soviet socialism too; only capitalism manages to create demand and ensure lack in the midst of overabundance.

Deleuze takes stupidity as an inability to dissociate from presuppositions, sense rather than common sense. Contemplating flows of stupidity, I am reminded of the slogan of engineer Jesse Robbins for making useful things in corporate bureaucracies: “Don’t fight stupid, make more awesome”. This could also serve as an accelerationist slogan, and can be critiqued the same way. Are you pushing forward as an elite ignoring politically hard problems, or are you building a concrete alternative solution that will attract change? Are you wasting time trying to change a system accelerated beyond human comprehension, or are you using accelerated human components to build a new system?

References

Acemoglu et al – The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development
Beck et al – Agile Software Development Manifesto
Deleuze and Guattari – The Anti-Oedipus
Garton – Excavating the Origins of Accelerationism
Land – A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism
Mackenzie – Marx and the Machine
Naur – Programming As Theory Building
Scott – Seeing Like A State
Simondon – On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Virno – Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus, in Radical Thought In Italy
Williams / Srnicek – #accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics

Lanfang as Frontier

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The Lanfang Republic 兰芳公司 illustrates non-European, early modern, self-organizing, frontier settlement. Many of the self-reinforcing dynamics of the American West described by Frederick Turner can be sketched at work there, as can other geographic and historical contingencies that ultimately limited its expansion and led to its fall.

The Elegant Republic

The Lanfang Republic was a Chinese settlement in Borneo from 1777 to 1884. As described in Yuan Bingling’s study, Chinese settlers were originally invited by the Malay sultans of Borneo for their mining expertise. The multiple settlements founded in Borneo, of which Lanfang is the best documented, were organized politically around kongsi 公司, literally “common management”, today used as the Chinese word for corporation. The historical usage was broader and this usage survives in, eg, the organization for temple societies in Taiwan and clan associations throughout SE Asia (eg Khoo Kongsi in Penang). The translation of “republic” comes from 19th century Dutch orientalists who visited and studied these specific kongsi in Borneo.

The Chinese settlers in Borneo innovated on these existing civic institutions to construct the state infrastructure they required, around the council of the zongting 总厅.

The zongting had their own courts of law, their own financial systems, minted their own money, levied their own taxes, and maintained a number of treaties with the neighbouring Malay sultanates and Dayak tribes.
— Yuan Bingling, Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo

Lanfang acknowledged and paid tribute to the Qing emperor as part of the foreign policy conventions of the region, but did not depend on the Qing state in a colonial relationship. They had a similar relationship with the Dutch, before falling more directly under Dutch control later on. In this sense they arguably exercised more sovereignty than early American or Australian colonies.

Much of the immigration was Hakka or Hokkien, more historically mobile ethno-linguistic groups within the Han Chinese ethnicity. Hakka 客家 literally means “guest families”. Chinese communities as part of existing polities in SE Asia go back at least to the 13th century Yuan dynasty and trade links between SE Asia and China are a historic feature of the region, waxing and waning over time. 18th century immigration built on these existing trade links.

Turner, in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, describes the trader as “the pathfinder of civilization”, though in SE Asia it is the geographic interface of multiple civilizations as well as indigenous and non-state tribes. The traders were then followed by “sudden tides of adventurous miners” (reapplying Turner), followed finally by farmers. Turner is criticized as culturally imperialistic and nation-centric, and he tends to be a cheerleader for the advancing state. In this sketch we take “civilization” as just a synonym for “state-connected people”, without particularly seeing state or non-state non-state societies as better, hopefully without interfering particularly with the rest of the comparison.

Yuan Bingling, from whose book much of this detail on Lanfang is taken, does explicitly address the question of whether Turner’s frontier theory applies to the Chinese settlements in Borneo, but only to put it aside without conclusion. She is a meticulously detailed historian, and doesn’t commit to a theory where there are still many gaps in the available evidence. Yuan also points out Borneo had a complex social context where the frontier was not simply an open space sparsely peopled by Dayak populations. Yuan doesn’t explode the theory, either, or dismiss its relevance, so there is still some room to sketch how it would apply, even if what we are doing may no longer be strictly history.

James C Scott describes that in pre-modern SE Asian states, “oceans connect, mountains divide”. The frontier was not so much the ocean itself, as the more ambiguous barrier between accessible coastal settlement and mountain or jungle interiors. As in Turner’s America, “the frontier […] is not the European frontier — a fortified boundary line running through dense populations.” Scholars like Anthony Reid and William Skinner describe SE Asia generally as a place of creolization and hybridization. This creation of a new mixed culture in the new environment is a focus of Turner, for whom “the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization”. In Lanfang specifically there was linguistic creolization and intermarriage between Chinese settlers and Dayak tribes.

Stack Trace

In Lanfang and the other kongsi of Borneo, you have a Chinese maritime culture, self-reinforcing, individually-directed settler dynamics with autonomous government and innovation in civic institutions. These all parallel the American frontier experience. It is also history that the Borneo kongsi had less extent in space and time than the American frontier experience and the subsequent American nation states.

This note doesn’t rigorously address why those differences exist, but we can sketch possible answers within the framework of recurrent reinforcing processes. The arguments fall roughly into whether the settlement process lacked strength in each iteration, or whether the environment was less conducive to the process. In the Lanfang Kongsi case, the process specifically stopped when the Dutch colonial state chose to destroy the kongsi militarily, as threats to their regional interests.

Borneo is the world’s third largest island, bigger than Great Britain and Honshu combined, but it is still much smaller than continental North America. The frontier of state settlement in SE Asia generally was not exhausted in the 19th century – arguably it exists in Myanmar and Laos today – but the opportunities were not so abundant and geographically contiguous as in the enormous American Midwest. The frontier process was not so extensive in time, lasting a century instead of several centuries, so there was less recurrence, and less reinforcing feedback.

The archipelagos of SE Asia made the naval power projection of European empires more crucial. Simply being attached to a power was hardly enough to ensure success, and other centres like Melaka flipped control between Malay sultans and various European empires. It is still notable that the kongsis existed outside support by great or regional powers. They didn’t benefit from nearby similar state-sponsored immigration or colonies, the way, eg, independently founded Plymouth did from state-founded Jamestown being in the same region. The kongsis also couldn’t benefit from imperial military support, either active or reluctant entanglement. After the state sponsored voyages of Zheng He 郑和, a kind of Ming Dynasty Apollo Program of superior technological achievement for reasons of political prestige, the Chinese state gave up on naval power, and the embattled 19th century Qing was in no condition to help mining colonies on the other side of the South China Sea.

Turner describes attempts by established states to establish a defined border being undermined by the self-settling frontier process, and those empires being drawn reluctantly forward, into yet further wars, by yet further waves of pioneers. Compared with America, the missing figure in Chinese maritime settlement in SE Asia is perhaps not the settler but the privateer.

—
Louise Levathes – When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433
Anthony Reid – Hybrid Identities in the 15th-century Straits in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor
G William Skinner – Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese
James C Scott – The Art of Not Being Governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia
Frederick Jackson Turner – The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Yuan Bingling – Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo

The Bureaucracy of Automatons

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An introduction to the notes on Confucian Software.

Software and the Sage

Among the many dissimilarities between software and gentlemen of the classical Chinese Spring and Autumn Period, two in particular stand out. One existed in a pre-scientific feudal society on an agricultural technological and economic base, and the other presupposes the scientific method and a modern (or post-modern) industrial base. Secondly, the concept of virtue or potency (德) is central to The Analects, but software artifacts are, in our day and age, non-sentient. Morality requires some degree of self-awareness – of consciousness – and so software does not itself practice virtue any more than a spoon or a lawnmower.

The immediate relevance, for a developer, of the Analects, are the two other grand concerns of Confucius, which are existential fundaments of software. These are names (名), and the rites (礼).

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Where In The Hyperreal Is Carmen Sandiego?

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Capital In The Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty
Kentucky Route Zero – Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, Ben Babbitt
Manakamana – Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like To Be A Thing – Ian Bogost

Unlike redwoods and lichen and salamanders, computers don’t carry the baggage of vivacity. – Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology

There is a dog, wearing a straw hat, riding through the night in a delivery truck.

It’s Hamlet’s dog.

They are driving through Kentucky with a TV repairwoman, trying to deliver a package to a lost mathematician.

This Hamlet doesn't talk so much. He likes to talk to his dog, sometimes. He has a lot on his mind. He has his ghosts. He has his debts to pay.

You can control Hamlet, but only in the following way: you can control how he moves and where he turns, but not his destination. You can drive right or left, but he will end up on a boat to England. You can't change the future but you can change the past. When you are playing Hamlet, you can't change the story, but you can say what it means.

There is something astounding in Kentucky Route Zero, the magic realist adventure game from Cardboard Computer. It is not perhaps a masterpiece. It still feels just a little rough. But it is very good, and sometimes like a secret door opening.

There is a very specific mechanic behind this effect, combined with the redneck leprechaun setting. In the usual ludic meter of an adventure game you navigate a graph. At each node you are given a menu of choices. And so it is here, yet your choices include how to explain yourself to other people and the audience. You can drive around exploring the map, but new places only exist when the story needs them. This is your direction, your interpretation of the role. It impacts your backstory, fleshing out the shape of your tragedy. You get different choices for how to explain yourself depending on what you answered before. But the seams are hidden behind the form of a puzzle. The pinnacle of this technique, three acts in, is the song It’s Too Late To Love You Now, where you choose the lyrics sung to a suddenly open star-filled sky. It is a sublime moment of shifted perspective; I don’t think I have ever felt it so intensely in a game before.

“Master, does Emacs have the Buddha nature?” the novice asked.

The Master Programmer thought for several minutes before replying: “I don’t see why not. It’s bloody well got everything else.” – archaic computing koan

There’s an impromptu jam session in the middle of the movie Manakamana, high above the earth, suspended in a Nepalese cable car. By this time, the setting is not such a surprise, because every scene is set on a Nepalese cable car. A scene is simply the ten minutes it takes to ride the car up or down the mountain, of two seats on the cable car, from a single fixed camera on the opposite seat. These scenes have the quality of both a scientific sample and a stanza: it is a cinematic documentary-poem. The filmmakers are anthropologists.

It’s hard work watching real people this way, especially today; the urge to check smartphones and slip into continuous partial attention is strong, and most of the small and presumably sympathetic audience I saw it with succumbed at one time or another. What I found, when trying to stick with it, is a small sense of what it feels like to be that person, at that time, in that place. To be a grandmother with ice cream dripping down your fingers, or a musician having an impromptu airborne jam for the camera; but at the same time to be aware of not being that person, of not having your second ice cream at age seventy, of not having a clue how to play the sarangi, of not being a goat.

In the famous Thomas Nagel essay What Is It Like To Be A Bat? he teases out the unknowability of another creature’s internal experience, by using the alienness of a bat’s sonar as his key example. We are doomed to incomplete knowledge because we must anthropomorphise things, simply by being a human, thinking. Ian Bogost, in Alien Phenomenology, acknowledges this, but argues it’s not a bug but a feature: you can sidle up to alien experience by analogy.

In a literal sense, the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy: the bat, for example, operates like a submarine. – Ian Bogost, ibid

For Bogost and the other proponents of Object Oriented Ontology, this analogical understanding is imperfect but valuable. It can even be generalized: that this is how every thing relates to every other thing, sapient, material, or conceptual. Bats, submarines, the planet Venus, forced labour, the theory of phlogiston, roti prata, breathing. This knowledge by layers of imperfect storytelling has been put under the banner of Speculative Realism, but professional philosophers, well trained in defense against irony, cannot agree on whether it exists.

When, about halfway through Manakamana, the light fades in from the dark of the cable car station, as it has half a dozen times before, but now revealing a car full of tied-down goats, my first reaction was laughter. It was funny due to raw absurdity, and then it was funny because the filmmakers really were asking you to watch a goat’s arse for the next ten minutes, barefacedly indifferent to your comfort as a viewer. Yet there is method in it; you see the nervous bleating give way to more relaxed sightseeing. You wonder if they are going up the mountain as potential milk or potential meat. In one sense the goats are a mental palette cleanser for the humans in the later scenes, but in another sense I could identify with them. The fixed viewpoint and the familiarity of the repeated cable car setting lulled me into unconscious sympathy. It is a sympathy that can be found in computer games. Play Frogger intensely and you start to see the world as a digital frog dodging traffic. Play Tetris intensely and tile floors become suddenly filled with intuitive meaning.

What is it like to be a bat? I don’t know. What is it like to be a goat riding the Manakamana cable car? I feel I know, but I can’t truthfully say.

((If the car had been empty, would it have cleared my head in the same way? Would I have identified with the cable car itself? Is the player of a train simulator playing the driver or the train?))

It wouldn’t be surprising to see a cable car in the forthcoming Act IV of Kentucky Route Zero. It shows its nostalgia for the vacuum tubes, filing cabinets and combustion engines of last century in every scene. It is about giant machines that smash your leg when they fail. It’s about old trucks, and whiskey, mechanical men, and people entangled in debt to drug companies. It’s built on a Shakespearean frame – players, dog-soliloquies, mini-game, boat trip and all – but that frame is well hidden. Technology, repair and debt are in the foreground. Above all it is about decay. It is a tragedy of depreciation.

Piketty is well aware that the model he proposes would only work if enforced globally, beyond the confines of nation-states (otherwise capital would flee to the states with lower taxes); such a global measure requires an already existing global power with the strength and authority to enforce it. However, such a global power is unimaginable within the confines of today’s global capitalism and the political mechanisms it implies. – Slavoj Zizek

Thomas Piketty has run a decade-long research program on wealth and capital, a ruthlessly empirical effort which uncovered masses of new data. This feeds into a model for the behaviour of large pools of wealth over time: that in the absence of massive shocks like world wars, private wealth accumulates at a rate greater than background economic growth (r>g), tending to increasing inequality without limit. Then he wrote an introduction for the technical layman, dense enough to be serious about the topic, light enough to be illustrated with cultural examples.

Like many histories, Capital In The Twenty-First Century ends up spending more time on the preceding era than its ostensible topic. To make his projections and suggestions on the 21st century he needs to explore the 19th and 20th. This is where the literary examples come in, particularly those nineteenth century ones where the definition of rich is very numerically precise. It’s possible that Piketty intended those much discussed literary diversions as nothing more than a hook to make the book more accessible. After all, he includes examples from not just Balzac and Austen but also Disney’s The Aristocats. Yet they serve two deeper purposes. Firstly they are qualitative data supplementing his systemic data from national accounts, building his historical case from a second point of view. Secondly, they are fragments of the capitalist imaginary, answering questions of partially alien experience. What is it like to live in Belle Époque capitalism? What is it like to live in capitalism today? Eventually, we come to questions unanswerable directly: What is it like to be capital? What is it like to be a capitalism?

Piketty advocates tilting policy back to 20th century welfare capitalism, by means of a small wealth tax on the rich, arguing extreme inequality creates a power disparity that undermines democracy. Such an effort would be an extension of the state project of legibility and control that James C Scott has shown extends back to their formation. One of Scott’s books even has the Nagelian title Seeing Like A State, though Piketty’s readership may be dismayed by its subtitle, How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed.

Piketty is a social democrat as well as a bourgeois capitalist economist, and at this point in history there is really no contradiction in that. We are not choosing between capitalism and Something Else; capitalism is the situation of a society with industrial capital and market pricing. Ultimately he’s saying that key aspects of 20th century capitalism were pretty good, and certainly better than what we’ll get in the 21st without political action.

This utopian conservatism is closer to Nicholas Stern, Francis Fukuyama or Paul Krugman than a revolutionary like Marx, though the shrill response to Piketty’s proposed wealth tax shows it hit a nerve. Indeed Piketty’s polite impatience towards Marx’s verbosity and looseness with data is another amusing Easter egg in the book, though it doesn’t stop him analyzing by class and superstructure elsewhere.

Piketty seems to have spawned two serious technical arguments among economists, one existential, revisiting the Cambridge Capital Controversy, one science fictional, on elasticity of capital-labour substitution. The existential question on whether the rate of profit is a price or a systemic effect in time is the sleepy feeling of drifting off while two people riding the Manakamana cable car describe how this ten minute ride used to be a two day hike through the Nepalese foothills. The science fiction is Piketty’s measurements saying in the twenty-first century, robots are a somewhat better investment than employees; the sinister mechanical men in the caves of Kentucky Route Zero come to clean the black grime again, scaring another batch of terrified researchers away.

Industrializing The Noosphere

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Control Environment

We are not practicing Continuous Delivery. I know this because Jez Humble has given a very clear test. If you are not checking your code into trunk at least once every day, says Jez, you are not doing Continuous Integration, and that is a prerequisite for Continuous Delivery. I don’t do this; no one on my team does it; no one is likely to do it any time soon, except by an accident of fortuitous timing. Nevertheless, his book is one of the most useful books on software development I have read. We have used it as a playbook for improvement, with the result being highly effective software delivery. Our experience is one small example of an interesting historical process, which I’d like to sketch in somewhat theoretical terms. Software is a psychologically intimate technology. Much as described by Gilbert Simondon’s work on technical objects, building software has evolved from a distractingly abstract high modernist endeavour to something more dynamic, concrete and useful.

The term software was co-opted, in a computing context, around 1953, and had time to grow only into an awkward adolescence before being declared, fifteen years later, as in crisis. Barely had we become aware of software’s existence before we found it to be a frightening, unmanageable thing, upsetting our expected future of faster rockets and neatly ordered suburbs. Many have noted that informational artifacts have storage and manufacturing costs approaching zero. I remember David Carrington, in one of my first university classes on computing, noting that as a consequence of this, software maintenance is fundamentally a misnomer. What we speak of as maintenance in physical artifacts, the replacement of entropy-afflicted parts with equivalents within the same design, is a nonsense in software. The closest analogue might be system administrative activities like bouncing processes and archiving logfiles. What we call (or once called) maintenance is revising our understanding of the problem space.

Software has an elastic fragility to it, pliable, yet prone to the discontinuities and unsympathetic precision of logic. Lacking an intuition of digital inertia, we want to change programs about as often as we change our minds, and get frustrated when we cannot. In their book Continuous Delivery, Humble and Farley say we can change programs like that, or at least be changing live software very many times a day, such that software development is not the bottleneck in product development.

With this approach, we see a rotation and miniaturisation of mid-twentieth century models of software development. The waterfall is turned on its side.

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