I only want to share here a couple of segments from this excellent article by Omar Hernandez in the Brooklyn Rail’s Field Notes section:

The article is titled Social Debraining.

Perhaps the reason why Andreessen and his Silicon Valley cohort struggle to imagine a breakthrough in genuinely living intelligence is that they can’t think beyond their wallets. To imagine a thicker intelligence we pay attention to group problem solving that doesn’t center on the thin abstraction of money but something more textured and layered.

The mega-collaborations in high energy physics might provide some hints. Although embedded in our economic system, financial balance sheets made of simple, textureless abstractions are not the central driving force of the enterprise. Instead, the center of attention and decision-making is something far richer: the extraordinary machines at CERN25 used to probe the building blocks of the universe—a massive underground ring seventeen miles in circumference where atomic nuclei are accelerated close to the speed of light with powerful magnets cooled to near absolute zero, and detectors as big as multistory buildings that read the resulting particle showers. Operating these machines and understanding their signals is too big and complex an undertaking to fit inside the few skulls at the top who would then decompose them into tasks for fragmented specialists with no grasp of the whole. Instead of the traditional, fragmented division of labor, the scientists who operate the accelerators and detectors at CERN, while experts in highly specialized tasks like tuning beam optics, calibrating detectors, and reconstructing particle jets, also have deep knowledge of the mathematically sophisticated quantum physics that give the whole enterprise coherence.

Rather than tasks being broken into sets that maximize control and speed by managers, there is a natural division around the proximity of different physicists to “separated” objects such as calorimeters, muon chambers, and codes. Physicists are not only the caretakers and makers of these artifacts, but their lobbyists, accountants, and investors; the objects cannot be decided about or acted upon without “their physicists,” and the expertise developed is rich, combining the conceptual and the practical.

As scientists interact with the machines and each other, a collective sense of design and division of tasks becomes distributed through thousands of skulls. Group self-reflection coheres when the knowledge individuals accrue through machine use or calculation circulates through seminars, workshops, cafeterias, bars, the outdoor vineyards, informal gatherings among friends. Working groups emerge out of individuals who volunteer for tasks based on expertise, honor, curiosity, friendship, career potential, or through baser motivations like ego and power seeking.

Out of this fabric of speech, graphic plots, and machine interactions, the collective brain gains a degree of self-awareness, referring to itself with such names as “The Atlas Collaboration” or “The CMS Collaboration.” This collective consciousness is documented in the authorship of peer-reviewed papers where there are no privileged “first authors”26; instead, the whole Collaboration becomes the published author, the sum of thousands of individual scientists, representing virtually all major languages, national scientific systems, and cultures.

[…]

“The difference between the thick collective intelligence cultivated in CERN and the fragmented cognitive hierarchy that sustains Silicon Valley lies in the artifacts around which decisions are cast. CERN centers the rich machine-human environments bound together by quantum physics, whereas Silicon Valley centers money—the thin abstraction behind their power. Deep probing into nature demands transparency and collective pooling of creativity; money for the sake of money turns mass understanding into a cost. Silicon Valley’s black boxes that degrade nature, intelligence, and work are not accidental. They are artifacts designed to feed Mammon, the concentration of wealth, not the inherent properties of the artifacts themselves, whose usefulness, beauty, and sustainability are secondary—if they matter at all.

When Silicon Valley figures like Andreessen invoke opaque ‘market forces’ as a sort of intelligence standing above living human thought, they echo an economic arrangement that works precisely by veiling the arbitrariness of power relations that favor them. They resist making the social systems people inhabit intelligible in a way that allows ordinary people to shape it.”

This approach to understanding and making sense of society is a cybernetic one - it is concerned with identifying systems rather than individual rational agents, their relationships and feedback mechanisms, and the phenomena resulting from specific arrangements of such parts. Such systems either produce the effects they claim to produce or they don’t - they either have the outputs they claim to have (freedom, human flourishing) or they don’t. One might discover that the arrangement of institutions does not deter either but forces them to compete, or one might discover that a gradual increase in one quantity is destined to cause a sudden, sharp, ruptural decrease in the other. It’s possible to talk about and make sense of social phenomena without complaining solely about politicians, nor by resting one’s hopes naively on the good hearts of powerless, sad, pathetic local politicians or their often equally powerless national counterparts. This cybernetic approach is open to anybody, and is not merely some sort of ideological push and shove that pits freedom (usually, the freedom of markets) against human life on the basis of some principle inherited from one’s high school civics textbook. We need more of such writing!

Hernandez’ article is excellent, and so are his previous pieces in the Rail. Check them out!