(wanted to post this on the website, but the comments system is off)
I've found this article both entertaining and insightful; there's one big hypothesis in it which I find unnecessary, though: the conspiracy theory, making it a fight between dominant classes and actual wealth producers.
If we call "bureaucracies" the collectives which consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth out of it, then those bureaucracies are best understood as a life form, distinct from the homo sapiens individuals which serve it. You need to see them as a whole, for the same reason as why you can't make sense out of an animal if you mainly see it as the sum of its individual cells.
From a biologist's point of view, they need to compete for resources, they show some adaptability, they reproduce themselves with some amount of mutation: they have everything needed to benefit from Darwinian selection, and they do.
The resulting current generation of bureaucracies has evolved a very good effectiveness at diverting resources, from other consumers including humans, towards themselves (that is, maintaining and growing the bureaucracy itself).
As a result, they exhibit many "intelligent" traits, including some selfish sense of purpose. Conspiracy theorists wrongly look for The Man, the mastermind driving bureaucracies. There's none, no more than there's a single neuron nor small group thereof which drives your brains: a complex enough bureaucracy has a non-human mind of its own.
Keynes was right about the amount of work we'd need, what he failed to predict is a phenomenon very similar to eutrophisation: we dream of full employment when we don't need to, so we produce much more "nutrients" (people willing to offer their workforce) than we can use for survival and human enjoyment. So instead of being consumed by/for homo sapiens, this energy is consumed by that competing life form that are bureaucracies.
I think he uses institutional analysis, and rejects conspiracy theory. So even if you replace everyone in them, institutions should pretty much function the same as before.
Whereas conspiracy theorists focus more on individuals with black mustaches, and advocate toppling them. They don't go deep into institutional change.
So, for example from this article: "if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else." This institutional reality occurs even if you and I are in that 1%.
Even when Adam Smith uses the term "conspiracy", it can still really be institutional analysis: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Here, he just means normal planning which people are institutionally incentivized to do. We don't call it a "conspiracy" when a corporation's executives plan how to increase profits.
It's stronger than a Nash equilibrium. It's not even an equilibrium actually, because we keep improving humans' productivity, and bureaucracies keep eating the freed workforce.
It's really easier to make sense out of it from an ecologist's PoV than from an economist's or a game theoretician's, because the two competing agents (humans and bureaucracies) are hard to formally separate.
This kind of discussion always reminds me of the movie Cube[1]. Since watching it years ago, I have often found it to be a fantastical and exaggerated but useful metaphor related to this topic.
> "inverted totalitarianism" describes this phenomenon.
I believe it doesn't. Inverted totalitarianism supposes that a master class keeps the plebeian one controlled through apathy and deception, rather than open brute force as in classical totalitarian states. But it fundamentally frames the struggle as one group of humans against another.
My point is that it's not humans versus humans, it's humans versus bureaucracies, a bureaucracy being an autonomous agent without any human mastermind thinking on its behalf, i.e. much more than the sum of its employees, the way a human being is much more than the sum of its cells.
We're treating bureaucracies (as per the definition above, "entities that consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth") as allies helping us producing wealth, because we think salaries still are a good way to create and distribute wealth. Even entrepreneurs are often primarily incensed as "job creators", although when you think about it, it would be better for them to create wealth out of thin air rather than out of sweat and tears. We ought to treat them (bureaucracies, not entrepreneurs!) as a parasitic species instead.
The idea of IT is that there's no "Big Boss Man" at the top of the pyramid pulling the strings. It's the distributed system and choices made by individuals that leads to a similar outcome as more typical centralized totalitarian government.
Yes, there are wealthy people, privileged people, and powerful people, but they are all kept in check by the system and by pursuing their own interests, just like everyone else.
I've found this article both entertaining and insightful; there's one big hypothesis in it which I find unnecessary, though: the conspiracy theory, making it a fight between dominant classes and actual wealth producers.
If we call "bureaucracies" the collectives which consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth out of it, then those bureaucracies are best understood as a life form, distinct from the homo sapiens individuals which serve it. You need to see them as a whole, for the same reason as why you can't make sense out of an animal if you mainly see it as the sum of its individual cells.
From a biologist's point of view, they need to compete for resources, they show some adaptability, they reproduce themselves with some amount of mutation: they have everything needed to benefit from Darwinian selection, and they do.
The resulting current generation of bureaucracies has evolved a very good effectiveness at diverting resources, from other consumers including humans, towards themselves (that is, maintaining and growing the bureaucracy itself).
As a result, they exhibit many "intelligent" traits, including some selfish sense of purpose. Conspiracy theorists wrongly look for The Man, the mastermind driving bureaucracies. There's none, no more than there's a single neuron nor small group thereof which drives your brains: a complex enough bureaucracy has a non-human mind of its own.
Keynes was right about the amount of work we'd need, what he failed to predict is a phenomenon very similar to eutrophisation: we dream of full employment when we don't need to, so we produce much more "nutrients" (people willing to offer their workforce) than we can use for survival and human enjoyment. So instead of being consumed by/for homo sapiens, this energy is consumed by that competing life form that are bureaucracies.