Infrastructures are only infrastructures so long as they are useful for some other, primary end. Infrastructures are never ends in and of themselves.

I want to consider the idea that automation, specifically so-called “artificial intelligence,” is somehow immune to this and can provide a disinterested, impartial way of interpreting events and evaluating candidates for a “root cause.”

The concept of “root cause” has come under a lot of stress in certain parts of the software industry. For instance, take this blog post by Lorin Hochstein from 2021: Root cause of failure, root cause of success.

An except from Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution

The theory of accidents and their causes and effects is a distinguished subject in the history of Western thought. From the time of Aristotle through to our present day, they fascinate and drive massive expenditures of time and energy in the hopes of understanding what happened and how.

There is no future for the Western world. This is the conclusion reached at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, one part of a duology which was to be its author’s final published work. With its sister narrative, Stella Maris, McCarthy offers a characteristically pessimistic take on the 20th century.

The two novels mirror the central relationship of the prose: the dyadic Alicia and Bobby Western. The former is the younger sister of the latter and together they make a single system which collapses into a miserable sort of dwarf star. To help us understand their unhappy fate we will need to perform an act of schizoanalysis, as introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

Hiemstra et al. have apparently found some make good use of anti-bird spikes when constructing their nests, and that inspired me to title this post in the way I have.

I’m also going to use that act of avian bricolage to explore a concept that at once vexes and delights me: boundaries. More specifically, the ambiguous and equivocal role they play in our lives.

When I work with engineers in my day job, I often find that they struggle with articulating their work in financial terms (or of thinking in financial terms period). So I’m going to consider some of the dynamics at play in businesses from a microeconomic perspective through the example of considering whether to invest in a “Learning from Incidents” program.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

-Brian Massumi, Translator’s Foreword to A Thousand Plateaus

Listening to the latest interview with Dan Smith on the MUHH podcast has rekindled a lot of the feels that led me to read Deleuze with safety science literature. Here I’ll say a little bit about that relationship by way of an example.

What people often forget is that the event of remembering which is the basis of that appraisal, like the event of anticipating or planning, is itself a “situated action,” to use Lucy Suchman’s classic phrase.

The New York Times continued its hit-and-miss coverage of outer space stuff today, with a quick overview highlighting upcoming space launches and events in 2023. The preview focused on splashy tech and science stuff, which is unfortunate.

One thing that people moving from the ‘tech’ sector into others will need to grapple with is learning these new-to-them domains. In order to create and sustain good services (and avoid what happened with Southwest) they’ll need to let go of established knowledges and practices and collaborate with those with long-time domain experience.