Marx

Sinister Normative Compulsions

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Michael Eby’s piece in New Left Review on Agile software development is interesting, and a little frustrating. I think it’s generally quite useful to get a left-wing, Marx-y class analysis on the structural of the software workplace. Eby argues Agile is a renegotiation within capitalism that by itself doesn’t challenge, and may indeed clarify, the executive power of the capitalist or manager, in the form of the Product Owner. This certainly seems true – it’s right there in the name.

I like the piece a bit more in concept than execution, though. There’s a few too many mistakes in the detail, getting the timeline of methods wrong, treating Scrum as separate to Agile when it’s the most popular method, talking about story points, and not lining up the jargon quite right in various ways. If I had to guess, I’d venture its a generalization from discussion with a few developers rather than a more careful reading of the key books and the c2 wiki. The full pedantic catalogue I will leave to the hacker news comments, while noting that process is more complicated to analyze than it looks, because software processes in practice rarely strictly follow a book. This is a point driven home by Alistair Cockburn’s description of developers always wanting to add stuff they don’t do to their description of their process – in Agile Software Development, as it happens.

Despite mixing up some of the details, Eby still has some sharp moments where he spots things you would never see in the usual software literature. Agile absolutely does have mechanisms of management discipline for workers, for instance:

It is clear that Agile dissolves many of the more visible features of hierarchical managerial control. But it does so only to recontain them in subtle and nuanced ways. For one, the self-organizing strategies of teams allow for certain workplace disciplinary mechanisms to take the form of normative compulsions rather than explicit instructions. 

The example that follows this quote isn’t great (again those details). I’d say instead that the most important disciplinary measure is frequent planning discussion and delivery – iterations and standups. It’s both a bug and a feature. Because they are the leverage points in this structure, iterations and standups are also where Dark Agile happens, if it happens.

But it’s still better. 

Agile work is more satisfying because a software worker has more control over the detail of what they produce. The owners and managers of the firm get more software delivery, through a change to internal communication and decision structures. To the degree society as a whole is helped by the software, it gets those helpful things sooner. It is too easy to forget how spectacularly wasteful waterfall development was. Enormous specification documents that were irrelevant by the time any code was cut. Months of kabuki theatre adversarial ping pong between development and testing teams. Years spent coding features and products never used. All of this was completely known and routine. Flows of waste and stupidity are hardly alien to software today, but at least in Agile a third of your projects aren’t thrown into the sea.

Agile techniques are more effective at delivering software, precisely by taking more technical decisions out of a bureaucratic org chart. Methodologies like Large Scale Scrum even emphasize that it is not a manager’s job to parcel out work, but to remove friction from the flow of money and production. This is surely fruit hanging low and ripe for a socialist critic to take.

Eby goes on to state:

[A] silent bargain between capital and wage-labour has occurred, with capital steadily shedding impediments to accumulation, and wage-earners forfeiting hard-won security in exchange for putative freedom.

This isn’t a terrible description of the new status quo, but again, the historical sequence seems off. The scythes of neoliberal deregulation had already been slicing into corporate and union bureaucracies alike all through the eighties and nineties. Downsizing, private equity buyouts and rightshoring were already well-rehearsed corporate practice before the Agile manifesto was signed in 2001. Agile has now shown itself so successful that it is propagated by management as corporate process. But you could also see it as skilled labour reacting to a disrupted expectation of long-term employment by taking control of low-level details of production, selling the change using increased labour productivity, and succeeding despite a lack of formal legal support. The lack of any explicit political theory (most of signatories of the manifesto are far from leftists) was probably helpful as well, in slipping under the radar, and avoiding the bureaucratic modes of 20th century unionism.

Various leftist thinkers, such as Phillips and Rozworski, have recently been pointing out that Amazon has so much size, computational power and control over its logistics that it is effectively a planned economy. This is true up to a point, but Jeff Bezos also popularized the “two pizza team” guidelines for agile team size. Internally Amazon has strong central control, platform planning, and for skilled software workers, devolved control of details to empowered teams that perform a high degree of horizontal co-ordination. And they build a lot of things. More Marx-inflected analysis of why that succeeds, while high modernist and Soviet central planning failed, would be welcome.

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References

Cockburn – Agile Software Development

Phillips and Rozworski – The People’s Republic of Walmart

Accelerationism: A Brief Taxonomy

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It is a moment of pause for the theory of accelerationism. The burst of self-identifying activity over the last few years has cycled into something of a bear market, even as the conceptual toolbox is more powerful than ever in navigating our present. Theorists of acceleration are connoisseurs of vertigo, and will insist any snapshot of their thought is dead or out of date. This taxonomy is both. But it’s short.

 

Accelerationism: ACC: Capitalism is a feedback cycle of increasing spiraling power, which it is not possible to comprehend or control from within, and therefore at all. The complexity of this alien system includes hyperstitions and reverse causalities. Capitalism melts and reassembles everything. Fictions become realities through their articulation. Future structures assemble themselves through their conditioning of the past.

Texts:

  • Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; A Thousand Plateaus
  • Land, Meltdown
  • CCRU – Writings 1997-2003
  • Collapse Journal I-VIII

 

Right Accelerationism: R#ACC: Capitalism is modernity, science, intelligence. What is powerful in all these things is one identical force. What is best in the world is represented by this force, the product of sharpening by relentless competition, brutal empiricism and blind peer review, the butcher’s yard of evolution. Historically, it was possible to put a defensive brake on capitalism and intelligence. That possibility is fast receding or likely already gone, and was always undesirable. Ethically and therefore politically, we should align ourselves with the emancipation of the means of production. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, corporate microstates, and breeding a cyborg elite are all means for achieving this end.

Right accelerationism is entwined with the techno-capitalist thread of neoreaction.

Texts:

 

Left Accelerationism: L#ACC: The tremendous productive power of capitalism is a world system that is impossible to fully control, but it may be harnessed and steered for progressive ends. Only with the wealth and productivity of capitalism has fully automated luxury gay space communism become possible, and now it is within reach it can be seized. Only through computational power can the relationship between Homo sapiens and its ecosystem be understood and balanced. The great corporations and financial structures of the early twenty-first century are themselves prototypes of platform planned economies leveraging enormous computational power to fulfill billions of needs and desires across society. By accelerating progressive technological invention, reinvigorating the domesticated industrial state as a platform state, nationalizing data utilities, sharing dividends and redefining work, the system may be made sustainable and wealth shared with all according their need.

After a surge of activity, many left accelerationists rapidly swerved away from the name a few years ago. This was coincident with Srnicek and Williams’ book Inventing the Future, which is all about left accelerationism, without mentioning it once.

Texts:

 

Unconditional Accelerationism: U#ACC: To erect any political program that pretends to steer, brake, or accelerate this system is folly and human-centric hubris. The system can be studied as a matter of fascination, and of survival. The only politics that makes sense is to embrace fragmentation and create a safe distance from centralized political power. A patchwork of small communities built across and within networks, societies and geographies are a means for some to survive and thrive. Many small ships can ride through a storm with a few losses, where one giant raft will be destroyed, dooming all.

Texts:

 

Blaccelerationism: The separation of human and capital is a power structure shell game. Living capital, speculative value, and accumulated time is stored in the bodies of black already-inhuman (non)subjects.

Texts:

 

Gender Accelerationism: G#ACC: Everyone is becoming transsexual lesbian programmer cyborgs. Enjoy it.

Texts:

 

Zero Accelerationism: Z#ACC: The world-system is accelerating off a cliff.

Texts:

 

Accelerating The Contradictions: Capitalism is riven with conflict and contradictions. Revolutionaries should accelerate this destructive process as it hastens the creation of a system beyond capitalism.

No modern accelerationist group has held this position (D/G: “Nothing ever died of contradictions!”), but it’s a common misunderstanding, or caricature, of Left Accelerationism.

Texts:

 

Other introductions: Meta-nomad has a more theory-soaked introduction to accelerationism, which teases out the rhizomatic cross-connections between these threads, and is a good springboard for those diving further down the rabbit hole.

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

Sweet Portia

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Singapore is a Venetian place: a maritime republic, a trading entrepôt, straddling cultures like a salesman, gateway to the Occident, wielding languages like a nimble lumberjack, protective of its citizens, happy with a respectable facade, tolerating most people so long as they have capital, importing labourers rather less indulgently, multi-racial, sometimes racist, mostly clean and rich in a region mostly otherwise. Above all, it is mercantile. La Republica Pristina.

Singapore isn’t like the Old Venice we visit today, the gorgeous Victorian Disneyland kept afloat for art and tourists. It’s like Young Venice of perhaps the year 1000, the Paduan colony, a trading post perched tenuously in a lagoon to keep Dark Age cavalry at bay, one starting to make a serious go of it, with its conscripted navy and an early grip on eastern Mediterranean trade with Byzantium.

The Singapore Repertory Theatre seize the chance offered by this parallel with Bruce Guthrie’s production of Merchant of Venice. Some Shakespearean plays look hard and get clearer with familiarity, but Merchant for me looked very legible on first encounter, and has got steadily less clear since. Jason Schneiderman captures the ambivalence of its relationships in his elegant The Sadness of Antonio.

The cast is good across the board, but three actors dominate. Daniel Jenkins brings something of last year’s Iago to his Antonio; gentle with his friends but always sneering and insulting to Shylock, even before his life is forfeit. Remesh Panicker’s Shylock has tremendous calm presence, with the production effortlessly substituting Indian chettiar tropes for Jewish moneylender ones, without changing the text. You can imagine his years of practicing his reserve as a survival skill. This means he keeps our sympathy as much as possible, while he faces his posh boy tormentors in court, who made a deal they couldn’t stick to while colluding to allow his daughter to elope. And Julie Wee’s Portia pins her end of the triangle, her lawyer’s brain sharpened on years of study while restrained by her dead father’s will. She explains the quality of mercy … even if it’s a greatest hit, it’s still a beautiful speech … before kicking Shylock as hard as she can while he’s down. You wonder if it’s her revenge on her father, her well-cultivated rage, or just self-righteous racism. This production leaves in her racial jab at her suitor, the Prince of Morocoo:

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.

This comment, too, comes after the Prince has lost, in his case at a riddle. Unlike Shylock, we never see Portia at a loss, only at a disadvantage. Even the failure of her new trophy husband is used to put him in his place, and teach him a lesson. She never loses, and the mask never slips.

Every major relationship in the Merchant of Venice, and many a minor one, comes with a contract, and every contract comes with a sting. John Kerrigan notes that Marx was encouraged by Shakespeare to see money as a bond that separates, particularly in Timon of Athens. We imbue objects with a symbolic weight and then behave as if the object is magical. Portia’s wedding ring is such a tool, not only with her husband Bassanio, but with his so close friend, Antonio, who ends up swearing his Bassanio will be faithful; a peculiar oath.

Those last few scenes, about the ring – they can be a dizzy little comedic spiral after the horror movie of the court case, if you want, cheeky cross dressing and lovers’ tiffs. Guthrie doesn’t let us get away so easily. Jessica’s stolen dowry is another bond that separates. The quarrel between Krissy Jesudason’s Jessica and Johnson Chong’s petulant Lorenzo has more pain in it, and more regret. Jessica is given the last moment of the play, and she spends it weeping. It’s a shock, this interpretation, but it fits. In sooth, we know why she is so sad, but do her new pretty rich friends?

Some theatrical traditions emphasize the contrast between mystical Belmont and cutthroat commercial Venice, but this production doesn’t really see the need. Everything glitters. In Singapore, Belmont is a condo in Holland V.

Mass Gentrification

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You can sit in a building in West Coast Park in Singapore and get a reasonably clear view of America.

On one side, you can find a drive-thru fast food vendor with a full carpark, selling fries and burgers. On the other, you see a cafe nestled in the trees of one of the largest and nicest parks in the city.

Both are branches of an American multinational. The cafe food and coffee is tasty enough for a franchise; it’s easy to get worse food at more expense. The burgers are fresh.

Look right: Red state. Look left: Blue state. HBO / Fox. New York / Dallas. Thesis / antithesis.

Now, not only are these two eateries under the same roof, but they’re actually the same company – McDonald’s, and its McCafe offspring. (How it achieved a pocket monopoly with no neighbouring hawker centre is another question.)

When McDonald’s was founded, people mostly got paid to exercise. There were more blue collar, manual jobs. Cheap meat, from the first wave of agricultural mass production, was a welcome boon. Now we get paid to sit still at an office, and incomes have increased to a point where, in a rich or middle income country, it is easy to be poor and fat. It’s so easy it’s rather undesirable and déclassé – hence the backlash against fast food brands in recent years. Books and films like Fast Food Nation are as much passive economic data points as active shifters of public opinion. The threat of regulation shouldn’t be discounted, but is itself only made possible by a cultural shift.

So the popular palette has shifted, and a corporation that likes profit has shifted to match it. This hasn’t just happened on the cafe side, either. They have, for instance, healthier Happy Meals – same insidious toy hook, apple pieces instead of fries. Premium options are always good for businesses like McDonald’s with large rent and labour costs relative to the cost of their food. In the past this is why upsizing was useful. Now that leaves us terrified of being giant tubs of heart-seizuring lard, you have options like the Mighty Angus Burger, which is a more expensive cut of meat. “It’s a little bit fancy,” the Australian ad campaign runs.

Posh things have got cheaper and are more widely consumed. So cheap you can buy them at McDonald’s. This is now widespread. It’s almost the entire business model of Starbucks and Gucci. This was not so clearly the case during our journey from the Industrial Revolution. Things were often cheap and standard but not as nice as the craftware they replaced – at least what little you could afford. (Social poshness is a relative good and as scarce as ever.) 

This is not an original observation, though the scale of it is, mayhaps, not appreciated enough. Marx, Schumpeter, or any economic historian could tell you about it. I asked an economist for the short technical name for it, and he replied “capitalism”.

Amusing as that is, capitalism drove price drops and standardization as much as it drove the current push to quality. I prefer the term mass gentrification. The process of luxurious unattainables becoming commodities.

For all the recent chatter of capitalism being destroyed by its own contradictions, I’m not quite sold. It has a history of transcending them.

“Are you having the thesis or the antithesis?” I asked, as my wife returned to the table at one tentacle of global McCapitalism. “The synthesis,” she said. “And it’s good.”