I’ve some mixed feelings about writing on this topic. The reason is that it’s so ordinary to solve problems that it’s almost not worth talking about. What is life, after all, if not the continual creating and solving of problems? And death simply what one calls a problem that one couldn’t solve? But a theory of problem-solving may itself be useful for solving some problems, so here we are.

Where does data come from and what does it mean?

There’s obviously a story to tell here about the construction of sophisticated storage methods, from old clay tablets in Mesopotamia to S3 buckets in AWS. That story is bound to include the history of writing techniques. A section of it would focus on cybernetics and information theory; perhaps it would cite Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book Code. That might be because the 20th century was obsessed with language. That obsession remains with us today in a now-passé term “big data,” and the technology referred to as “Artificial Intelligence.”

This is what I’m getting at when I talk about noology as central to economic life today. I hold that we are called to attend to many more things than previously due to certain changes in our lifestyles, and those calls to attention effect continual learning and thinking. We’re continually forced to change against our will and to our detriment.

My basic premise is this: software works in a capitalist economy because it’s fundamentally a commodity. The code or “IP” isn’t the commodity, though; it’s the experience that code produces for customers and users. The business that owns the software uses it to provide its service.

In this post I want to focus on the book’s third chapter, Figures in the Soil. It is here that Harvey and Knox dwell on the topic of mathematics and data in the work of producing a road. I think this is important because it says something about how agents and institutions use math, and numbers more generally, and thus reveal something about their cultural values. It serves as a great touchstone, for me, as I consider how software engineers and their organizations use numbers.

The idea of a second victim, as far as I can tell, comes from the field of medicine when an MD named Albert W Wu wrote about it in Medical Error: The Second Victim. Over time the concept has come to mean that when an “error” occurs which induces harm, the person or people who serve as proximate cause of that harm are themselves victimized when they feel bad about having done so. They are themselves a victim because that behavior which was deemed an error is understood to be, in the greater theoretic framework, a result of several contributing factors.

What got me so angry is that this business saw fit to exclude people from the space, probably specifically targeting people living on the street who have used it as shelter at night (i.e. outside business hours). This sucks.

Nietzsche’s model was a Classical idea: the agon, a competition with a determinate winner or loser. For him a win or a loss is fine, so long as one wins or loses well. But what happens when one loses and then loses again? What about when one keeps on losing? Can’t that wear a person down? Even the strongest are only so strong.

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.