Large-Scale Transcontinental Societal Coöperation in the Classical-Age East-African Plains Ape

Trying to arrest people’s attention by making them recognize how strange are the ways that we humans manage to get things done—when, that is, we actually manage to do things, as opposed to fail to do them.
Examples: Fidel Castro tries to get bread baked and beer trucked in Cuba, in the face of “vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness”, & the Council & Assembly of Athens seek to get 50 tons of metal created & then moved up to 2500 miles to the top of the Acropolis…

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I am gearing up to start reviewing Dan Davies’s soon-forthcoming The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How The World Lost its Mind <profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountabil…> for the Times Lit. Supp.

And so I am looking for an angle to help people approach what the book is—which, at the moment, I believe is one of how to do appropriate datacenter networking design for the anthology intelligence that is humanity today. And how unlikely and absurd are the ways we organize ourselves when we do manage to GET THE JOB DONE.

Consider Fidel Castro in his office in Havana in 1987 pushing the paper. Consider Pheidias and his team atop the Acropolis in -450 casting a giant bronze statue…

The one is Fidel Castro’s micromanaging the baking of bread and the distribution of beer (see below). The other, in striking contrast, is the result of the decision by the Council and Assembly of Athens around the year -450 to have Pheidias and his team construct the 30-foot tall bronze statue of Athene Promakhis—Athena Fighting-in-Front—on the Acropolis.

They used unbelievable amounts of metal for the statue: 5 tons of tin (or maybe more), which would mean 45 tons of copper. Tin back then cost 4 drachmas per pound (and copper 2/3 of a drachma per pound), when a single drachma was a good daily wage for an unskilled worker—the equivalent on the labor standard of $120 today. So figure that on the human-labor standard, copper then cost $80 and tin then cost $500 a pound. (Copper costs $4 and tin costs $13 a pound today.)

To get the tin mined and up to the Acropolis required:

  • Laborers, teamsters, donkeys, and wagons to transport the tin from the Peiraiás up onto the Acropolis.

  • Ships, ropes, and sailors to carry the tin from Massilia to the Peiraiás (with, perhaps, a stop in Syrákousai).

  • Dockworkers in Massalia at the mouth of the Rhône to transship the tin from the riverboats coming down the Rhône.

  • Boats, ropes, sailors(, and guards!) for the journey down the Saône-Rhône to Massalia.

  • Laborers, wagons, donkeys, teamsters(, and guards!) for the portage from what is now Auxerre on the Yonne to Chalons-sur-Rhône.

  • Shipos, ropes, and sailors for the journey from Ictis in Cornwall across the English Channel and then up the Seine-Yonne to Auxerre.

  • Ships, ropes, and sailors to carry the tin from Ictis (St Michael’s Mount, perhaps?) in Cornwall to what is now Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine.

  • Dockworkers in Ictis in Cornwall to transship the tin from the riverboats coming down the Rhône.

  • Laborers, donkeys, teamsters, and carts to transport the tin from St. Austell region of Cornwall to Ictis.

  • Woodchoppers to bring the firewood, the ovens, and skilled smelters to transform ten tons of rock into five tons of tin.

  • Miners to dig up ten tons of rock with a high concentration of cassiterite.

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What did the Council and Assembly of Athens have to do in order to get all this to happen, to create more than 10,000 pounds of metal 1,700 miles away in St. Austell and then move it perhaps 2,500 miles given twists and turns across the sea, river, land, river, sea, and then land again to the Acropolis? Consider that the metals expenditure alone was—relative to the unskilled-worker wage today—of the same magnitude as $20 million would be for us.

We are talking 1000 adult person-years of labor here in metal-mining, metal-smelting, and metal-transport.

And this is for a city of 120,000 adults, with a state capacity significantly smaller in its resource-mobilization capabilities than what we take for granted today.

What did the Council and Assembly of Athens have to do?

All they had to do was to put the job of getting the metal to the top of the Acropolis out to bid.

(And they had to collect taxes, and they had to maintain the empire under which the trade of olive oil and wine for grain with what is now Ukraine that kept Athens fed and made Athens rich flourished.)

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Really-Existing Socialism: Really-existing socialist leadership cults had a very different vibe than fascist ones did or that neofascists do. The fascist and neofascist vibe was one of an angry person who shared your enemies and fought them. The really-existing socialist vibe… it was much more that the maximum leader knew everything, outworked everyone, and could outthink anyone—Big Brother is, after all, watching you:

Jacobo Timerman (1990): Reflections: A Summer in the Revolution—1987: ‘I read one of Gabriel García Márquez’s essays on the Comandante…. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep… If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro’s workday as it is described by García Márquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy—someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence…. “He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news… has to read fifty-odd documents [daily]…. No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast…. There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer… <newyorker.com/magazine/1990/08/13/a-sum…>

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But there is the enormous crack in the façade: Fidel Castro has to do all of this because he has no team behind him. Instead of a team, there is only “a vast bureaucratic incompetence” that is the system that Castro had designed over his then thirty years of dictatorial rule—a system that requires him to micromanage where the beer trucks go and how the bakers spend their time.

Would it not have been better for Fidel Castro to have spent less time reading documents and micromanaging consumer goods production and distribution and more time thinking about management cybernetics? The answer is “no”: for Castro, the key was not to assist the people of Cuba in becoming prosperous but rather to make himself indispensable and the possibility of moving him out inconceivable.

Refer a friend

Jacobo Timerman (1990): Reflections: A Summer in the Revolution—1987: ‘Gabriel García Márquez, of course, is uncensored [in Cuba]—except when he refers enthusiastically, as he often does, to [Gorbachev’s] perestroika. The Colombian writer’s famous dialogue with Mikhail Gorbachev during the Moscow Film Festival in 1987, which was transmitted by the Soviet news agency, wasn’t published in the Cuban press. 

García Márquez may be the man who can most influence Fidel Castro. With respect to international opinion, he’s the most important public-relations instrument the Comandante has. His personal intervention with Castro has occasionally helped to gain the freedom of imprisoned intellectuals, though repeated appeals he has made for an improvement in the quality of the Cuban press have failed totally. Anecdotes frequently circulate in Latin America concerning García Márquez’s whispered criticism in endless private conversations with Fidel Castro about the state of affairs in Cuba. But this confidential whispering, accounts of which are passed on to intimates by both men, strikes me as an act more of complicity than of conscience—especially in view of the hyperbole of the eulogies that the writer has publicly lavished on the Comandante.

When I read one of Gabriel García Márquez’s essays on the Comandante, I was reminded of paeans to Stalin—of the whole state of mind described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep after a day’s hard work—the same six hours that were often presented as proof of Josef Stalin’s vitality, extolled in writings that also described his Kremlin window lit until the small hours of night—and praises the wisdom of the Comandante in stating that “learning to rest is as important as learning to work.”

If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro’s workday as it is described by García Márquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy—someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence: “His rarest virtue is the ability to foresee the evolution of an event to its farthest-reaching consequences,” and “He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news from the entire world” (a long breakfast, surely), and “He has to read fifty-odd documents” daily.

And the list goes on: “No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast. A physician friend of his, out of courtesy, sent him his newly published orthopedic treatise, without expecting him, of course, to read it, but one week later he received a letter from Castro with a long list of observations. .. There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer…. He has created a foreign policy of world-power dimensions…”

Fidel Castro, then, has a secret method, unknown to the rest of mankind, for reading quickly, and he knows a lot about orthopedics, and yet, thirty years after the revolution he hasn’t managed to organize a system for baking bread and distributing beer… <newyorker.com/magazine/1990/08/13/a-sum…>

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Muhly, James D. Muhly (1985): Sources of Tin & the Beginnings of Bronze Metallurgy: ‘The tin resources of the Mediterranean world, as known from modern geological survey, are insignificant in terms of modern economic geology…. Keep in mind that, writing in the mid-fifth century B.C., Herodotus summed up his investigations… by stating that: “Of the extreme tracts of Europe towards the west I cannot speak with any certainty; for I do not allow that there is any river to which the barbarians give the name of Eridanus, emptying itself into the northern sea, whence (as the tale goes) amber is procured; nor do I know of any islands called the Tin Islands, whence the tin comes which we use…. Though I have taken great pains, I have never been able to get an eye-witness that there is any sea on the further side of Europe. Nevertheless, tin and amber do certainly come to us from the ends of the earth… (Hdt. 3.115, translation by G. Rawlinson.)”

This passage, one of the most famous for the study of ancient geography, clearly shows that Herodotus, who seems to have devoted some effort to working out the problem, was unable to learn anything regarding the sources of tin being consumed in Periclean Athens. The best he could come up with were vague stories regarding the mysterious Tin Islands (Kassiterides), about whose very existence Herodotus obviously had his doubts.10 The only certainty in the matter was the relationship between tin and amber, both said to come from the “ends of the earth”….

We are dealing here with a period of history—the fifth century B.C.—about which we know a great deal, far more than ever will be known about the Bronze Age world. Periclean Athens was importing large amounts of tin. The inscriptions relating to the casting of the Athena Promachos list single purchases of tin as large as 150 talents or almost 4,000 kg. We also learn from these texts that a talent of tin sold for 233 drachmas while the price of copper was just over 35 drachmas per talent.” These values would give a tin:copper ratio of 1:6.6.

We have, then, considerable evidence regarding trade in, price and use of tin in Classical Athens, but little evidence regarding the actual source of that tin. If Herodotus failed to get beyond the tall stories told by sailors, stories told perhaps more to confuse and to obfuscate than to instruct, we have little chance of doing better for the Bronze Age world… <https://doi.org/10.2307/504330>

Profile Books: The Unaccountability Machine (Hardback): ‘Part-biography, part-political thriller, The Unaccountability Machine is a rousing exposé of how management failures lead organisations to make catastrophic errors. ‘Entertaining, insightful … compelling’ Financial Times. ‘A corporation, or a government department isn’t a conscious being, but it is an artificial intelligence. It has the capability to take decisions which are completely distinct from the intentions of any of the people who compose it. And under stressful conditions, it can go stark raving mad.’

When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.

Management cybernetics was Beer’s science of applying self-regulation in organisational settings, but it was largely ignored - with the result being the political and economic crises that that we see today. With his signature blend of cynicism and journalistic rigour, Davies looks at what’s gone wrong, and what might have been, had the world listened to Stafford Beer when it had the chance… <https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/>

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