My entry point centers on an exchange of letters between critic, Edmund Wilson, and novelist, John Dos Passos, during the first half of the 1930s. Their interchange focused on the need for radical structural change in the US government and Constitution.

One of Edmund Wilson’s biographers calls the Wilson/Dos Passos correspondence “in its scope and dramatic interest second in American letters only to that of Jefferson and John Adams”. The picture I seek to recast with this interchange from the Republic of Letters is the entrenched institution of this US republic and its fifty states.

A start

The correspondence was provoked by Edmund Wilson’s 1931 Appeal to Progressives in the New Republic [NR], parts of which read:

Not only are the people in a capitalist society very often completely ignorant as to what their incomes come from; it is actually sometimes impossible or very difficult for them to find this out. And as long as a fair proportion of the bankers, the manufacturers, the middle men, the merchants and the workers whom their capital and machines keep busy are able to make a little more money than before, no matter how unscrupulously or short-sightedly, we are able, as a nation, to maintain our belief in our prosperity and even in our happiness….

Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history—a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once….

1931 and outdated? Hardly, when the bankers have metastasized into global finance, when our public utilities have been sold off to corporate risk-takers, and when the best news we have is that the rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, wearying of empire, try to make good in the happy-talk of philanthropy what we once demanded and expected of government.

The interchange

“Just read your battlecry,” Dos Passos writes a few weeks after Wilson’s 1931 piece appears,

Of course all the [New Republic] can do is stir things up and try to smoke out a few honest men who do know something about industrial life as she is lived…If you can keep up a series like this you really will have started something—though I’m beginning to think that every publication ought to be required by law to print at the bottom of each page:

NB. THIS IS BULLSHIT

. . . .[T]he trouble with all our political economic writing and the reason maybe why it doesnt interest the ordinary guy who hasn’t joined the fraternity of word-addicts is that it is made up right in the office and springs from neither experience nor observation…

True enough, and Wilson eventually circulates a more urgent manifesto. “The present crisis of the world—and specifically the United States—is something more than a mere crisis of politics or economics; and it will not pass with the depression. It is crisis of human culture. What faces us today is the imperative need for new social forms, new values, a new human order.”

What is needed, Wilson feels, has moved beyond experiment to revolution. “Sure I’ll subscribe to it,” Dos Passos writes Wilson in reply to the new battle cry,

—but I don’t think it’ll cause any bankers to jump out of fiftieth story windows—what are you going to do with it?—post it up on billboards? it might go well on toilet paper like [a laxative] advertizing—or is it going to be laid on [President] Hoover’s breakfast table?….Where is it going to be used—?

Wilson ends up forwarding material to Dos Passos from another periodical, New Masses, and Dos Passos writes back in March 1934,

I think it’s very important not to add to this mass of inept rubbish on this subject—what is happening is that the whole Marxian radical movement is in a moment of intense disintegration—all people like us, who have no taste for political leadership or chewing the rag, can do, is to sit on the sidelines and try to put a word in now and then for the underdog or for the cooperative commonwealth or whatever….

The only alternative is passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy or an industrial crisis helped by a collapse in the director’s offices—That would be different from nazi socialism only in this way: that it would be a reaction towards old time Fourth of July democracy….How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.

Late 1934, Dos Passos writes to Wilson about recent events in the Soviet Union, including the murder of Stalin’s intelligence chief,

This business about Kirov looks very very bad to me. In fact it has completely destroyed my benefit-of-the-doubt attitude towards the Stalinists—It seems to be another convolution of the self-destructive tendency that began with the Trotski-Stalin row. From now on events in Russian have no more interest—except as a terrible example—for world socialism—if you take socialism to mean the educative or constructive tendency rather than politics. The thing has gone into its Napoleonic stage and the progressive tendencies in the Soviet Government have definitely gone under before the self-protective tendencies….Meanwhile I think we should be very careful not to damage any latent spores of democracy that there still may be in the local American soil.

These remarks provoke Wilson to respond in early January 1935:

…I don’t think you ought to say, as you do, that a country which is still trying to put socialism into practice has ceased to be politically interesting…One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to people who have hopped on the shootings in Russia as a means of discrediting socialism. Aside from this, you are right, of course, in saying that Americans who are in favor of socialism oughtn’t to try to import the methods of the Russians….

Dos Passos fires back,

[N]o government is in good shape that has to keep on massacring its people. Suppose, when that curious little [Italian] Zangara took a potshot a Franklin D. [Roosevelt], the U.S. Secret Service had massacred a hundred miscellaneous people, some because they were [Italians], others because they were anarchists and others because they had stomach trouble, what would all us reds be saying…What’s the use of losing your “chains” if you get a firing squad instead…Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out—if the coming period of wars and dictatorships give anybody a chance to work anything out….

About Russia I should have said not politically useful rather than politically interesting….By Anglo Saxon Institutions I mean the almost obliterated traditions of trial by jury common law etc—they don’t count for much all the time but they do constitute a habit more or less implanted in Western Europeans outside of Russians….

Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do—and I cant see any reason for giving the impression of trying to induce others to engage in forlorn hopes one wouldn’t go in for oneself.

“Don’t agitate me, comrade, I’m with you,” Wilson countered at the end of that January,

Surely it’s entirely unnecessary to worry about the possibility of a Stalin regime in America. I can’t imagine an American Stalin. You talk as if there were a real choice between Henry Ford on the one hand and [American Communists] on the other; but who outside the Communists themselves has ever seriously entertained the idea that these individuals would every lead a national movement?

“But” responds Dos Passos in February 1935,

it’s not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that’s worrying me, it’s the fact that the Stalinist [Communist Party] seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in—all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made—and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism’s weakness and not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx’s work—but it certainly does influence one’s attitude towards a given political party. I’ve felt all along that the Communists were valuable as agitators as the abolitionist were before the Civil War—but now I ‘m not so happy about it.

Dos Passos then shifts his letter to a point Wilson had made to the effect that Marx belonged to a group of romantics that “came out of a world (before 1848) that was less sick, had much more spirit.” “By the way,” Dos Passos continues,

I don’t agree with you that a hundred years ago was a better time than now—they had a great advantage that everything was technically less cluttered and simpler—but dont you think perhaps in every time the landscape seems somewhat obstructed by human lice for those who view it? We have more information to go on, more technical ability to carry ideas out and ought to produce a whale of a lot of stuff—if I was a European I wouldn’t think so, but here we still have a margin to operate on—

Later that February Wilson writes Dos Passos another letter, the parting shot of which is its own “By the way,”

it is being rumored that you are “rubbing your belly” and saying that “the good old Republican party is good enough for you.” Maybe you ought to make a statement of your present position.

. . .which Dos Passos does. The month after, he writes Wilson,

I finally consented, against my better judgement, to put my name down on the [leftist] Writers Congress roster. I’m going to try to write them a little preachment about liberty of conscience or freedom of inwit or something of the sort that I hope will queer me with the world savers so thoroughly that they’ll leave me alone for a while. I frankly cant see anything in this middleclass communism of the literati but a racket….People haven’t any right to make a living out of politics—It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.

“It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.” “Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out.” “Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do.” “How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.” That said, at least here in the US, according to Dos Passos, “we still have margin to operate on”.

What margin do we have today?

My proposal

Start with the margin that the framers of the US Constitution saw fit to endorse in Article 5—a new constitutional convention. Oh no, no that won’t work, you say. How would most of our state legislatures or Congressmembers ever agree to hold a Constitutional Convention?

Answer: We hold it for them. We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.

The idea here is this: We have 465 congressional districts, and 465 delegates to a Peoples’ Constitutional Convention sounds about right. Anyone on the voter rolls or adult able to show district residency would be eligible to vote and any voter from the district could run as a convention delegate. Party affiliation or endorsement would, of course, not be required. The candidate with the greatest vote plurality would be the district’s delegate. The cost of this nationwide election and delegate process would be, say, US$1-2 per person, or some $600 million, with another $50 million to hold the actual convention.

The US government won’t finance this, and corporate funding would for obvious reasons be ruled out. One can imagine a consortium of individuals, foundations and overseas governments willing to defray what we can’t pay ourselves. (To put these numbers in some kind of perspective, Forbes estimated in 2017 that the net worth of author and large charity giver, J.K. Rowling, was roughly $650 million.)

The charge of the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention: To redraft the US Constitution, e.g., through a series of amendments.

What a waste of time and money, you interject, since the real government—the states and feds—would just ignore the work of any Peoples’ Constitutional Convention.

Let them. Let them say the peoples’ mandate is illegitimate. Let them ignore a convention that represents no government, no court, no army, and none of the techno-managerial elites, just those elected to come together to hold our government, our courts, our military, and our techno-managerial elites to account. Let them ignore the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention and if they do, we’ll hold a different-premised one, and if that also does not work, we’ll go global and elect a World Parliament and then let them ignore that too.

Principal sources

The letters are in: Edmund Wilson (1977), Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY and John Dos Passos (1973) The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, Gambit, Inc., Boston, MA. I’ve followed their spelling and grammar throughout, while editing in one case still-offensive ethnic expletives.

Other key sources are: (1) L. Dabney (2005), Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY; and (2) G. Monbiot (2003), The Age of Consent, Flamingo, London: Chapter 4. (As some readers may have twigged, I am adapting and paraphrasing George Monbiot’s proposal in The Age of Consent.)

–In a 2002 interview, painter Gerhard Richter was asked if he would paint the 9/11 aircraft terrorists (as he’d done earlier with Baader-Meinhof members): “Definitely not. This horrific form of global terror is something I cannot fathom”.

“September 11 bothered me more than I expected,” Richter admitted later. By 2005, when an interviewer asked about a small painting appearing to show the World Trade Center’s towers, Richter said: “These here are only failed attempts. I couldn’t get this stereotypical image of the two towers, with the some billowing out of them across the deep blue sky, out of my mind.” He went on to say that the painting in question “couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen”.

–Below is his September, a 2005 photo-painting of the event and relatively small at approximately 28” x 20”:

The image you are seeing was rendered from a photograph showing the south tower of the World Trade Center as it was hit. As to the specific photo, it was, in Richter’s words, “very typical. . .Colorful—red, yellow, fire” “I painted it first in full colour, and then I had to slowly destroy it. . . ”

–“I failed,” he told a friend; the painting “shows my helplessness. In German, my scheitern, failure.”

A failure? Really? What do you think? Is the painting in a failed state?

Look at September again. Do you see the active, living absence of the deep red and yellow that initially tripped Richter up? By extension, do you see the active, living absence of the new democracies to come into being this century from presently failing states, including—dare we say—parts of the US?

Principal sources

https://www.thebambamblog.com/2012/01/gerhard-richters-september/

Storr, R. (2010). September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. Tate Publishing, London

I

“We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us.” Truth told, I’m a bit sour hearing public health experts continue to say this.

So I relish this opportunity to register my own “I told you so!” back at them. “I’m now telling you you’ve been talking to the wrong people all along!”

II

It’s clear that the people who should have been informed about the dangers of a pandemic were not among the people addressed by experts. I have in mind the professionals who operate our real-time critical infrastructures, like water, electricity, telecommunications and transportation. No one told those men and women in the control rooms and out in the field that Covid would wreak such havoc as it did in systems mandated to be so reliable.

From our interviews in Oregon and Washington State, it’s obvious no one predicted the actual, mega-impacts and interruptions that Covid has had on the real-time operations of essential infrastructures, there or beyond. You probably already know essential workers were sent home to work offsite. Arguably less known is the fact that those on-site had to get vaccinated, and some very experienced personnel left as a result. Far less appreciated, Covid put a brake on major infrastructure investment, improvement and management activities. Said one logistic manager of his state’s response, “All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this.”

“Covid was a wake-up call,” we were told again and again by our interviewees, not something you’d expect to hear had the case actually been: “We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us!”

III

So what? We wouldn’t have an economy, we wouldn’t have markets, if it weren’t for electricity, water, telecoms and transportation being reliable. Yet to my knowledge the professionals responsible for real-time operations in the infrastructures were never specifically warned and were never specifically talked to by the pandemic experts.

So: Pandemic experts, the next time around–and yes I agree there will be a next time–it’s you who are going to fail because those who didn’t hear were those you didn’t care to know, let alone talk to.

I

Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, writes the “problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word [happiness] to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based”. He adds: “If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the world ought to be used to indicate this or that. . . “.

Let’s think more of happiness as a mess. “How can that mess be managed better?” is an important policy question then, if only because public policy has something to do with making people happy.

II

Start with the macro-design node for happiness. For years, we have been told that it is a right, or at least the pursuit of happiness is self-evident truth. We’ve also been told that the more income—purchasing power—we have, the happier we will be.

Yet the systemwide patterns recognized, our second node of analysis, consistently fall short of these macro-principles. Vast swathes of the world don’t agree on what that right to happiness means. Data showed that, after a point, more income does not mean we become happier. “People in rich countries are generally happier than people in poor countries. But once basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter are more or less universally met—high gross domestic product does not seem to make societies happier,” John Kay, Financial Times economist, once put it. When a country passes a threshold level of income, the correlation between the happiness of its people and the nation’s aggregate wealth has been weak, studies found. Worse, affluence can make people unhappier. It was reported that in the US as income doubled or more, yet the percentage of people saying they were very happy remained by and large constant.

Nor do localized scenarios of design principles, our third node of analysis, conform to their originating macro-design assumptions. Specific regions of the world are happy in unprincipled ways, it seems, with (1) Latin American countries registering far more subjective happiness than one would have predicted from their economic status and (2) Africans optimistic in the face of documented travails.

This takes us to the last node, the level of individual micro-operator. We were told for years that happiness, like personal utility, was next to impossible to compare with others. Even as social-psychological measures improved for the comparison of interpersonal happiness, strong evidence remained that individuals often are not very good at predicting what will make them happy, or unhappy for that matter.

III

Almost just as worrisome, the temptation has been to jump from pattern recognition to macro-design bypassing all the mess in between.

Since the marginal utility of a dollar is higher from poorer people that for richer, since the gains in happiness are palpably greater among poorer people than losses are among richer people, since more affluence above a point can make people unhappy and since people care a great deal about their relative income, therefore it is better to tax the rich (if simply to contain their unhappy rat race), transfer that money to the poor, and make incomes overall more equal. Many still believe these syllogisms.

IV

I’d rather first know just what those in the middle of these four nodes are doing about sorting out this happiness mess. Who reliably translates the systemwide patterns and localized scenarios into what we can call happiness or provide those services that lead to that happiness?

Typically, the initial answer is our network of family, friends, partners—those immediate social relationships that matter for personal happiness.

Less typically mentioned is the networked wraparound of large infrastructures for water, electricity, transportation and telecommunications, without which society-wide happiness would be even more of a gamble.

Who would have thought that, as these wraparound services wither in the name of hollowing out the state, individual happiness reduces to the techno-speak of being one’s own full-time “infrastructure” manager!

The term, “ecosystem,” comes to us through A.G. Tansley’s 1935 article, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms.” He has been criticized for his role in colonial British ecology, but here Tansley has salience for two other reasons.

–First, ecosystems for Tansley make no sense without taking humans and their interactions with the landscape into account. “We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called ‘natural’ entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided us by the activities of man. Such a course is not scientifically sound, because scientific analysis must penetrate beneath the forms of the ‘natural’ entities, and it is not practically useful because ecology must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity,” he wrote.

This might seem to be pushing at an open door today, but Tansley deployed a discourse quite different than his contemporaries, the U.S. ecologists. Theirs were just-so stories about “climax communities” evolving on their own—if and only if devoid of human beings mucking things up. Two commentators on Tansley’s work (Laura Cameron and John Forrester) argue that his “principal contributions were, in contradistinction to American ecology, to emphasize the systemic interrelations of human activity and botanical phenomena—he sees no real difference between those ecosystems which are natural and those which are ‘anthropogenic’ (nature ‘produced by man’, as he glossed in 1923).”

–Tansley is, however, important to us for another reason. Not only was he a founder of the British Ecological Society (precursor to ecological societies in many countries) and the Nature Conservancy, he was also well-known and respected member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, having been analyzed by Freud for nine months in 1922 and 1924. For Tansley, humans and their desires (“energy”) were and are never far away from ecosystems in a profound way.

We see few if any ecologists today take human desires as nothing less than The Enemy. Such, I’d like to think, would have appalled a Tansley who took desire and ecosystem to be inseparable. He’d be the last person, I suspect, surprised or shocked by large critical infrastructures, created to satisfy desires and wants, as having environmental impacts, bad and good.

Principal source

John Forrester and Laura Cameron (2017). Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. This is a massively informative volume and its footnotes alone are an entire education.

I dislike being herded into certainty.
                  Louise Glück, Nobel poet

My argument is that if disasters averted by pastoralists (and farmers, for that matter) were more identified and differentiated, we’d better understand how short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.

To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Instead, we are repeatedly told that what matters more are the disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.

Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster-averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.

The implications for pastoralist development end up being major—not least when it comes to “pastoralist elites.” But let’s start closer to the beginning.

***

–A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation practices in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and being excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed was a country-wide land reform.

Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!

–Reference to the pernicious, when not totalizing effects of marketization, privatization, commodification, financialization, globalization, and like (e.g., monetization, mechanization, marginalization. . .racism, colonialism, militarism, imperialism. . .) appear from beginning to end in development publications, and never more so—it seems to me—than in paragraphs that detail case-specific complexities one would have thought worked against generalizing processes across cases.

Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other such processes matter. The same for modernization, late capitalism and global environmental destruction.

BUT they matter when detailed and differentiated in terms of their being “with respect to.”

Just what is marketization with respect to in your case at hand? Smallstock? Mechanized deliveries? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or environmental conditions? Where so, the under-acknowledged methodological issue moves center-stage: How do the broader processes summarized as “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?

Or back to where I was that day: “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?,” I should have asked.

***

–This leads to my main speculation: Claiming that over-arching explanations are empirical generalizations made across complex cases too often voids the case-specific diversity of responses and emerging practices of importance for policy and management.

Why? Because appeals to processes or state conditions generalized as “marketization,” “commodification,” “precarity” and the like run the risk of diminishing the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.

But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios show how these broad processes are chronic and how they preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.

–Here’s an example of what I am trying to get at. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” a research finding from his work in Georgia:

A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.

Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that

my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .

I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core of my argument here.

***

–But, so what?

I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. I confess, this made me smile. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”

So my question: What happens when some of the poor pastoralists of then are better off now? Is there a point at which better-off pastoralists are no longer poor enough for the researcher’s concern?

More formally as above: “Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to criticism of elites?” This is important because an over-arching development aim of the first-generation ASAL programs was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.

My answer now would focus on the disasters averted over time by the now-elites compared to those who remained poor in the same period. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they (and others with them) averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed or coped the ways they did. Practices underlying their intentions, choices and actions are what interest me.

Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, my focus on disasters-averted holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.

Principal source

Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.

When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.

When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.

What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.

When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.

When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer, Arnold Schoenberg.)

Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.

While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.

“Reset” is a popular word for our “starting over” (as if from a clean slate) or “starting again” (as if restarting from where we are). But there are other ways to think about “reset” as it applies to societal issues.

One is unfamiliar to readers of this blog: the recent response to a Thai BL (Boys’ Love), “Bad Buddy.” It’s a twelve episode series, now moving to the 11th “cursed” episode. BLs, like other Asian dramas, are full of tropes, one of which is: Things must get worse in the next to the last episode (just) in order to get better at last.

–I’m not going to describe the history of BL series (they’re not, e.g., Greek boy’s love), nor how Thai series differ from BLs in Japan, Taiwan, or more recently South Korea, which themselves differ. For those interested, the sinkhole of web-links awaits you (by the time you get to the history of China’s censorship of BLs and their current wink-wink, nudge-nudge “bromances,” you’ve learned a great deal).

What I want to focus on here is one major response of YouTube viewers to “Bad Buddy” (with its millions and millions of episode views and tens and tens of thousand episode comments): This series represents, right now, a “reset” of Thai BLs.

I want to argue that the “reset” talked about in YouTube comments (at least those in English) is an optic through which to think about calls to reset specific contemporary politics and society.

–One of the first things “Bad Buddy” viewers comment about is the great acting and chemistry of the two male leads, Ohm and Nanon. Just say it’s astrophysical. The higher-quality of storyline, filming and direction, original sound track, and pacing are also singled out for note. All and more are clear in Episode 5’s lead-up to the roof-top scene, where in the language of Asian dramas Ohm confesses his feelings and they kiss.

–That last sentence in no way conveys the intensity of what we viewers actually saw and what that embrace conveyed. There is something very fitting in the reset being triggered the moment Ohm utters a mai (“no”) unlike any before.

One convention of many BLs has been that these be straight actors kissing according to a storyline written by a female author for a largely female audience–where the kiss would more often be two sets of closed lips compressed together. Not so in “Bad Buddy”!

Other BL conventions have been bumped out of the way by “Bad Buddy.” Most invidious to international viewers has been the question of “who’s the top, who’s the bottom?” or “who’s wifey” in the relationship. “Bad Buddy” makes it clear the protagonists see themselves as boyfriends. Nor is there the usual, “He’s the only guy I’d ever love.” Nor are the females cyphers funny or incidental as has so often been the case.

I could go on about why I’m such a fan, but suffice it to say: At the time of writing, many of the viewers of this series agree they are witnessing what they take to be a bigger reset of cultural conventions at least in the BL industry.

–Now I shift the register and talk about my views of their views.

It seems to me that this type of “reset” is not one of resetting Thai society views of LGBTQ+ communities there or elsewhere (watch the Thai Channel 3 BL series, “Miracle of Teddy Bear,” to get some comparison). Nor is the reset one of setting a gold standard or benchmark for future BL series.

The reset I take away from the comments–that is, the reset I believe I’m witnessing through to Episode 10–is more akin to shaking the kaleidoscope of BL conventions and then making a new twist. The different colored shards—those conventions and tropes—don’t disappear but are being reconfigure anew. YouTube viewers of “Bad Buddy” are recording, participating in and energizing just such a reset. In more conventional terms, expectations are changing and viewers are managing the changes and those expectations.

–So what?

For someone living in the United States at the start of 2022, the economy is narrativized almost always into top and bottom. The top shafts the bottom; rich and poor are all having to take it up the ass. A lifelong Democrat or Republican says this is the first time ever voting for someone like Trump or Obama. This US drama of ours is cursed to end early. The notion that top and bottom could be “friends,” that the other half aren’t funny or incidental, that even when we’re fucked up and down, it’s complicated, and that even if society can’t be reconfigured as a whole, some major representations and conventions can be so as to make them work better–well, that’s one imaginary too far in the US, it seems to me.

If so, then I take the positive upshot of–let’s call it “a Bad Buddy reset”–to be: Focus on kaleidoscopes that can be twisted.

Two examples as far away from BLs but ready, I believe, for “Bad Buddy” resets will have to be illustrative.

(1) Once you refocus, philanthropy needn’t be viewed as the city’s rich helping the city’s poor; urban-generated remittances needn’t be seen as one set of family members helping other family members elsewhere. Both philanthropy and remittances twist into something else when it’s “urban citizenship”–its duties and responsibilities–that come into better view through these very transactions.

(2) Another example. A more traditional configuration of dryland herds as assets is being twisted into a newer configuration of herds as global environmental liabilities. One consequence of the latest twist is to exclude pastoralists from being considered part of the near-global asset boom in rising prices of stock, bonds and real-estate.

At some point in the twisting ahead of what patently is a kaleidoscope of very different configurations of herd assets and liabilities, it will be clear that a big question was missed in the earlier twist: Who benefited when public attention was distracted by reclassifying cattle as global environmental liabilities from recognizing instead that their owners/managers were and continue to be entrapped in capitalist asset bubbles, and on a global scale?

–Developments under the rubric of AI (artificial intelligence), including machine learning, Big Data, and algorithmic management/decisionmaking, are often deployed to reinforce a longstanding narrative: Important forms of technological change are labor-substituting by displacing workers and their livelihoods. Given the issue has always been complex, evidence continues to be provided both in favor of or against the narrative. In fact, new articles on “the impact of automation” repeatedly rehearse the same arguments for and against.

What is less recognized, I believe, is that specifics are often erased or palimpsested over by continuing to maintain versions of the generalized narrative. This matters when the specifics of earlier debates—particularly, options and insights offered but not followed up–can, if resurfaced, question and recast in useful ways the current debate.

–Here’s one illustration. Schlögl, Weiss and Prainsack (2021) undertook a review of relevant literature from 2013 – 2018 on the policy topic, “Future of Work,” concluding in part:

Our findings show the dominance of a specific narrative within the grey policy literature on [Future of Work]. It starts with the assumption of unprecedented, rapid technological advance that, embedded in demographic and ecological transformations as well as globalisation, creates opportunities and risks. The main opportunities are gains in productivity, new jobs and higher living standards. The risks are new inequalities, pressures on social security systems, and the costs of transition and disruption for various groups. The answer to these challenges lies in the re- or upskilling of the workforce and adjustments to social and labour market policies [according to the document review].

Assume this storyline is correct as far as it goes.

The problem is that narrative discrepancy, “unprecedented,” in the preceding quote. This technological change is not unprecedented. The unprecedented is happening all the time when it comes to this narrative. The authors themselves point out that “U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson even set up, in 1964, a ‘National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress’. Transformations and crises of work as a result of technological progress are a recurring theme throughout modernity.”

Therein, I submit, lies one clue to rethinking the policy narrative of unprecedented change and recurring impacts on labor.

–If you actually go to the referenced final report of that National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, Technology and the American Economy, you’ll find the labor-substituting narrative in terms that still resonate even when in outdated terms, e.g., “technological change would in the near future not only cause increasing unemployment, but that eventually it would eliminate all but a few jobs, with the major portion of what we now call work being performed automatically by machine.” (If in doubt about the continuing salience of the latter, search the web for today’s “fully automated luxury communism”.)

It’s not however the report’s resonances, but specifics that are striking. On the downside, the report is full of terms and references to no longer existing programs. On the upside—and this is what I want to emphasize—it offers up specific proposals that read more like “lost modernities,” i.e., pathways to addressing the narrative in ways that we no longer think about today:

We recommend that each Federal Reserve bank provide the leadership for economic development activities in its region.  The development program in each Federal Reserve District should include: (1) A regular program of economic analysis; (2) an advisory council for economic growth composed of representatives from each of the major interested groups within the district; (3) a capital bank to provide venture capital and long-term financing for new and growing companies; (4) regional technical institutes to serve as centers for disseminating scientific and technical knowledge relevant to the region’s development; and  (5) a Federal executive in each district to provide regional coordination of the various Federal programs related to economic development.

Nothing came of this recommendation as far as I can determine (a few commission members, from the then right and left, objected to it). But just think about the “what if’s”!

What if the recommendation had been adopted and implemented then? What if it were enacted today, in light of the Fed’s now longstanding mandate for promoting price stability and maximum employment? (The US Fed was legislated to promote maximum employment in 1977.) Even with inevitable caveats about politics, dollars and jerks, the question still compels: What if, indeed!

–The point is that one consequence of keeping the dominant policy narrative in general terms is to willfully avoid specifics where counternarratives, if they exist, are to be found. The starting assumption must be: For any complex policy and management issue, counterexamples are to be expected. The duty of care is to read closely and find them.

Principal sources

Schlögl, L., E. Weiss, and B. Prainsack (2021). “Constructing the ‘Future of Work’: An analysis of the policy discourse:. New Technology, Work and Employment: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12202

U.S. National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress (1966). Technology and the American Economy, Vol 1. Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. (Accessed online on July 17 2021 at: https://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/ourwork/blockchain/Equitable_Futures_Lab/National_Commission_on_Technology__Automation_and_Economic_Progress_1965.pdf)

When Louis XIV saw the new maps of France he sponsored in 1693 he supposedly complained that his cartographers had cost his kingdom more land in a year than foreign armies had done in a century.

(From Paul Slack’s The Invention of Improvement)

–Long-held heuristics, like routines and standard operating procedures, are shorthand ways of doing things without all the uncertainty of reinventing the wheel. Newer heuristics include big data algorithms we don’t understand and policy narratives we think we do, both of which enable making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Both shorthands are treated as good-enough, like a new atlas of maps.

The older heuristics are relied upon because they are said to reduce uncertainty; more recent ones are used to better manage (in the face of) uncertainty that hasn’t been/cannot be reduced, at least for the moment.

One major commonality between both the old and new needs to be highlighted. While typically not taken as such, both are less a shorthand than clues for what to do ahead.

–By way of example, handbooks detailing how to respond to unpredictable floods and famines were written by and for administrators in Imperial China. Over the course of some thousand years, handbooks started to group together what had been learned into tables of maxims (sometime cast in rhyme) for ease of reference by users.

Handbooks “are quick to insist, however, that using the tables is not sufficient in the long run: for the professional administrator they are rather a ‘clue’. . .that indicates where to go in the more complete texts,” writes Pierre-Étienne Will, the most recent and comprehensive bibliographer of handbooks (2020, XLIV). This status of heuristic-as-clue is to alert us to important omissions that require reference beyond any shorthand exposition (Ibid, 568). Occasions when a map proves imperfect and misleading are all too familiar.

Professor Will elaborates in an email: “’clue’ (yinxian 引線. . .) literally means ‘a thread that leads to…’, ‘that can be pulled to get…, or something of the sort. The same character yin is part of the words suoyin and yinde, meaning ‘index’, in modern Chinese. The tables or rhymes are like indexes to the complete texts.”

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–I want to apply this notion of heuristic-as-clue more speculatively to the newer algorithms derived from big data. We’re told that, even though the algorithms are not based on models of known cause and effect, they identify complex, albeit opaque, correlations said to be worth relying upon.

But that stops short of the needful. The status of a heuristic as clue underscores that, just as with causal models, there’s also a great deal yet to puzzle out with correlations before going forward. Correlations are not just the start of an analysis. They also are in context and those contexts start the analysis as well. Correlations index spatial-temporal references to be pursued.

–There is no obvious point of entry when it comes to revealing the wider references. For purposes of illustration, start with the canonical index of fire, smoke. In the same way, the heat from server centers (some indeed call it “data exhaust”) indexes the large electricity usage in generating and updating algorithms. But context doesn’t stop there. Other clues are less spatial-temporal and more social for the heuristic inseparable from wider referential meanings.

Again, by way of example, the status of the algorithm-as-heuristic clues you into the underlying assumptions for using big dataset algorithms, not least of exemplify “trust.” Some say, e.g.:

• algorithms deliver the best result among the other methods and heuristics available;
• while not free of bias, they do a better job than others by virtue of the huge run of cases and calculations;
• some kind of result at the scale of big data is better than no result, plus the algorithmic result is often more timely; and
• anyway, there’s always a danger that the critics of big data algorithms take them more seriously than the users, like consumers who comparison-shop and then make their own decisions.

The wider point here is that the methodological duty of care in using heuristics means treating them as indexes of that which cannot be omitted, yet could have already been omitted, from analysis and practice when usefulness is the question.

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Principal sources

Pierre-Étienne Will (2020). “Introduction,” in: Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A descriptive and critical bibliography. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

The notion of index in the sense of smoke and fire follows that of C.S. Pierce (“purse”), a founder of American pragmatism.

R. Machen and E. Nost (2021). “Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: 1-15.

Julia Velkova (2021). “Thermopolitics of data: Cloud infrastructures and energy futures.” Cultural Studies.