Steve Klabnik — Philosophy & Politics

An introduction to economics under capitalism

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The dismal science a difficult one. Many people have strong opinions about economics, and it determines many of their other political beliefs. As someone who has significantly different thoughts on this topic than many of my peers, I’m writing this post out to give a basic explanation as I see it. That doesn’t mean I’m inventing something here, just explaining the model that I currently prefer. I’ll give sources at the end, if you want to dig deeper. Speaking of ‘deeper,’ this is also an introduction, one could easily write a book or three on this topic. I’ll try to be clear where I’m making an assumption, and why I’m making it.

Finally, this is very much a draft, I may make small, or even maybe major errors. Nobody’s perfect. My spelling is terrible, and there’s a bug where my browser spellcheck isn’t working… anyway.

Let’s start from the beginning. And that beginning starts with stuff. People trade things between them. Let’s be a bit more precise: people trade commodities. They trade commodities becuase they want something they do not currently have. In other words, if I’m hungry, and you have some $FOOD, and you’re cold, and see I have a coat, you might trade me your food for my coat and we’d both be better off. This ‘commodity’ is distinct from any useful thing because we trade for it, and because it satisfies some sort of need.

But how do we know how much food we should trade for a coat? What does that even mean? To make this trade equal, we need to settle on a value for food, and a value for coats. That value has two different parts to it. The first: that value represents how much something satisfies our needs. Something that’s really useful will have a lot of value to us. Something that’s not may have less value. We call this component of value ‘use value.’

The second component is more complicated. It’s called ‘exchange value,’ and it’s called that becuase this is the actual value that we trade each other for. These two kinds of value are distinct, but the distinction is important. While I may find a coat midly useful, and therefore, its use value is low to me, that doesn’t mean that if I trade it to someone else, they will agree in how useful it is. We might have to sell this coat for more or less than we expected to. While the usefulness affects the exchange value in a sense, it doesn’t mandate it.

Let’s give a more concrete example of this. If I can trade my single coat for four $UNITs of $FOOD, then the exchange value of one coat is four $FOODs, and the exchange value of a $FOOD is one quarter of a coat.

So if the exchange value of a commodity determines how we trade, and that’s based on a subjective preference for usefulness. So if I told you there was some underlying constant that did determine exchange value, you probably wouldn’t believe me. This is, in fact, one of the root areas in which economists disagree with me. Their first mistake. They claim that this exchange is entirely based on preference, with no underlying reasoning. I (and others) disagree. Consider the equation,

4 * c = 1 * f

where c is coats and f is food. If we wanted to reduce these equations, we could end up with two variants:

(4 * c) / 1 = f

c = (1 * f) / 4

Because c and f are defined in terms of each other, it’s hard to get at an underlying property of both things.

Now, remember why we’re trading food for coats: they satisfy some sort of need. Therefore, these equations make sense only in a certian scope, if you will: when we’re considering how to turn some sort of commodity into the satisfaction of our need. This is what produces this relationship between food and coats. But we have a layer of abstraction here: as we said, the exchange value isn’t the actual, underlying use values. Like all abstractions, this one leaks. We’ll get to the leak later.

But in order to turn some food into a satisfied need, you need to do some kind of labor. First of all, this food had to actually be produced by someone. We’re not ordering raw materials, we’re ordering a finished product. Someone, somewhere, had to obtain these raw materials, and then apply themselves. And if you’re buying raw materials, someone had to do the labor to cut down the trees, or mine the ore.

This is an area where I’m going to make a slight hand-wave for now, and argue that this aspect, the labor that’s needed to make and consume a commodity, is the underlying aspect missing from the equation. It might be a little bit of labor, it might be a lot of labor, but somewhere, someone is doing some kind of labor. We can make a better argument here, but for now, I’m just going to leave it as is, because I think it makes intutive sense. Many, many people go to work, and labor to produce things that get exchanged for many other things. The common thread is that we all work. We can dig into a more rigorous argument over this point later.

In other words, we’re trading an abstraction over people’s labor. When I say “I’ll trade you a coat for four food,” I’m making that estimate on how much labor I would need to aquire a coat, and estimating how much to get four food, and deeming them equal. But we’re not trading the hours directly: we’re trading objects. We objectify our labor, and then trade that.

Now, you might have a problem with this. And many economists do. However, their arguments are usually based on a misunderstanding of this point, which is a very important one: If value is based on how many hours of labor someone puts into something, than isn’t a slow worker making more valuable stuff than a fast worker? How does that make any sense? And if I were to do some labor that’s useless, like for example, I dig around in my backyard and make a bunch of pies out of the mud, I did some labor, and therefore, shouldn’t I get paid?

Early economists such as Adam Smith often had this problem with their models. And it’s indeed a problem. But there’s a solution: we’re not talking about just any old labor. We’re only talking about labor that produces something useful. “Useful” in this case is decided by the particular society in which this person is doing this labor. A carriage maker in 1890 does a lot of productive labor, but a carriage maker in 2015 does significantly less.

Our revised statement: the common thread between all of the commodities that get exchanged is that somewhere, sometime, someone had to do some sort of labor that was socially useful to produce that commodity. We exchange commodities so that we can gain the commodities we need to fulfill our desires. We exchange them at a ratio where they’re equal in terms of how much labor went into making them, a fair trade.

This leads to another problem: how do we qualify ‘how much labor’? What is this unit and magnitude? Well, many people have a 40 hour week, so naturally, we gravitate towards ‘hours’ as an answer for this question. Hours are a unit of time, so we can quantify our exchange values as ‘socially neccesary labor time.’ Time, becuse we work in hours. Labor, because that’s what we’re doing. “Socially neccesary” to explain the context of only labor that’s doing something society deems useful.

But back to one of the original problems: If I’m bad at making coats, and I take a hundred hours to make a coat, and you’re good at making coats, so it takes you an hour, is my coat worth one hundred times yours? That doesn’t make any sense. So we’re going to make an assumption. When we use ‘socially neccesary labor time’ in this way, we mean that it’s an average hour, by an average skilled worker, across all of society. Because averages are all you can really reason about here, it’s impossible to compare each individual worker. It’s an approximation. And understanding that it’s just an approximation has led to many successful businesses, as they’re more efficient than the average, and therefore, make more money. For now, we’re going to set that aside, however. We’ll get there.

So! To recap, we have needs and desires, and to fulfill those, we need certain commodities, which we can aquire through exchanging commodities we have with others in our society who have the commodities we want. We make equal trades, in a ratio roughly determined by the average amount of time it would take an average worker in our society to make the thing.

Exchange values are a bit unweildy, though. For one thing, there’s a ton of them: they explode in a O(n^2) fashion. If we have coats and food, each commodity has a single exchange value, but if we add just one more item, each commodity can be traded for two others, and therefore has two exchange values, times the three commoddities, meaning our system has six exchange values, five more than before. Adding a fourth means each of our four commodities has three possible trades, meaning twelve exchange values, six more than before. So what’s a society that’s trying to produce use-value to do?

We can add more things to our equation. We have coats and food in our economy, let’s add a third, and call it ‘coins.’ We’ve established that one coat is worth four food, and let’s say that one coin is worth two food. This means that four food is worth two coins is worth one coat:

4 * food = 2 * coins = 1 * coat

In another sense, one coat is worth two coins is worth four food:

1 * coat = 2 * coins = 4 * food

We have coins in the middle of both of these equations, which means that we can express the two halves in one system:

1 * coat = 2 * coins
4 * food = 2 * coins

And when we add another commodity to our equation, we can just say what it’s worth in coins, rather than what it’s worth in both coats and food. This makes it significantly easier to conduct trade, as we only have to know what our commodities are worth in terms of this particular commodity. This commodity plays a special role in our little society: it’s the commodity that we use to determine the rates of all the other commodities. The vocabulary term for this is ‘the money commodity.’ And we call the exchange value of a commodity to the money commodity a ‘price.’

At this point, we’re going to take a small detour. Because our commodity is an abstraction of socially neccsary abstract labor time, I want to talk for a moment about how that abstraction leaks. Becuase objects fulfill our needs, and trading them is such an important part of society, we place a ton of emphasis on this abstraction. In other words, we love to buy things. Why does this happen? What’s the weird obsession, or some might say, fetish, with commodities?

Let’s say you’re a cobbler, and you make shoes. Hopefully, you’re proud of the shoes you make, and so, to some degree, because you’ve put hard labor into those shoes, you see them as a reflection of your own self. And when every commodity is priced equivalant to the money commodity, it’s really easy to see that your shoes trade at $50, but mine may trade at $45. This means you make better shoes, and so you have a higher social standing than I do. Your labor is more socially useful. This sort of collective desire we all have that sets the price of commodities, and can make us quite obsessed. And not just in the classical materialist way, but in a way that shapes our worldview.

You can’t take a microscope to a coat and observe that the coat costs $2. There’s no ‘money atom.’ It’s not some inherent property of coats. It’s something that our society has created as a basic assumption. But it doesn’t have to be that way, we’ve just chosen it.

Let’s talk a bit more about exchanging stuff. Let’s use the previous exchange as an example, I have a coat, you have four food. But now, we don’t know each other. What do we do? Well, I can take my coat to a market, and sell it for two money. You can take your food to market, and sell it for two money. I can then buy your food for two money, and you can buy my coat for two money. We’ve exchanged our food and coats succesfully. We both completed a trade in the same way:

commodity -> money -> commodity

C -> M -> C'

We both had a commodity, we traded it for the money commodity, and then we traded that money commodity for a different commodity. There’s two sides to these trades: a commodity for the money commodity, and then money commodity for the commodity.

It’s important we’re making an assumption here, but it’s one that virtually all economists make: we’re assuming that both of us know the value, and that the intermediary who is holding the money agrees. This simplifying assumption is also a place where many business opportunities are formed, charging a fee to facilitate transactions like this. See the pattern yet?

That’s also something new: there’s an intermediate here, ‘the market.’ We don’t have to know each other, we just have to know the market exists. Software engineers would say that by lowering coupling, we enable scale. When everyone doesn’t need to know each other, we can trade a lot more things. This is another reason why the money commodity is so damn useful.

Anyway, it’s important to recognize that this is four total exchanges, which form two little circuts, which form our overall economy here. It’s a system, like any other. And so we can model it like a system. This is something that we virtually all agree upon. But this assumption is treacherous too: we assume that both ends of the trade always happen. But there are four trades here, and only some of them may occur. This causes disruption in the system, which throws it into crisis. We’ll talk about this case more later.

A moment ago, I mentioned a business model for charging for transactions. This is a very natural reaction to systems like these: by intervening in each trade, by being the mediator, you can argue that you are doing socially neccesary work, and therefore, should be paid in compensation.

Furthermore, since the money commodity mediates all exchange, there’s lots of good reasons to control said mediation. This is why states print currency and then ensure that transactions occur in said currency, as it gives them control over all exchange, and therefore, of what is ‘socially neccesary.’

To summarize up to this point: people have needs. To satisfy those needs, some people do labor to make commodities, which have the ability to satisfy those needs. We call one of these commodities ‘money’, and people trade commodities for it, and it for other commodities. This gets them the things they want. The rate that all of this is exchanged at is based in how much time it takes to make, and how important it is to the society overall.

I have yet to say what any of this has to do with capitalism, however. This is just people trading things. Money, and exchange, have been around longer than capitalism. It’s something a bit different. Before we can get into that, though, we have to define the ‘capital’ in ‘capitalism.’

There is a distinction between ‘money’ and ‘capital.’ Capital is a special kind of money. In other words, it holds a special, social distinction about how it’s used. Let’s examine our little trade again:

commodity -> money -> commodity

Someone has to actually have that money in the middle. To simplify our story, let’s say this shop both buys and sells various commodities. I sell my coat to the shopkeeper, you sell your food to the shopkeeper, then I buy food from the shopkeeper, and you buy a coat from the shopkeeper. From the shopkeeper’s perspective, these trades are backwards:

money -> commodity -> money

The keeper has four dollars. They give two to me in exchange for the coat, and then they sell the coat for two dollars on the other side. Their circut here is the opposite of yours and mine: they start and end with money, rather than with another kind of commodity.

It’s important to note that this difference is significant. While you are attempting to exchange a commodity for another to gain some kind of use, with the M -> C -> M variant, you’re attempting to gain more exchange value. This underlying need is at odds with yours and mine. No concern is given for use here, just how much something can be exchanged for.

However, as we know, a shopkeeper isn’t exactly happy when they start off with four dollars and end up with four dollars. While this system is balanced, they’re not being compensated for this social function, one of shopkeeper. And in the real world, shopkeers do make money, so something is missing from our model of equal exchanges. But before we get into that, consider the implications of this point: the shopkeeper has no concern for what is useful, just for what can be exchanged. If we optimize for the needs of shopkeepers, we may not be optimizing for the usefullness of society, but instead for the pursuit of exchanging the money commodity.

So, if we can engineer a situation in which we have some money, we exchange it for a commodity, and then we exchange that commodity for money, and we get more money out of it in the end, that extra money is called ‘capital’. In line with our earlier equations:

M -> C -> M'

The difference between M' and M is how much money we’re making. This is very close to our M -> C -> M circut, and very different than our C -> M -> C circut. Only shopkeepers produce capital, not those who are simply exchanging a commodity in the hopes of attaining another.

But we’ve already established that all trades here are equal. So how can we get M'? Shoudn’t that be impossible?

This is where the mistake we mentioned before rears its ugly head. If all value is subjective, and exchanges are between equals, where can this extra money come from? And if all of these exchanges are equal, then why do both people feel like they’ve won?

In order to make this happen, our prospective capitalist shopkeeper needs to find a commodity whose use-value, the act of consuming the commodity, produces value. If they can, they can purchase that commodity, and then use it to get more value than it was exchanged for, due to the extra production. In other words, they don’t need to purchase an object, but something more abstract: a potential source of value.

Previously, we mentioned that the common thread behind exchanges was labor, and so, that labor was the common element of value. Labor, when placed on a market, is called ‘labor power,’ and is a commodity that produces value. We call someone who possesses labor power a worker. They enter into the market, selling their labor power. This is colloquially known as ‘getting a job.’ In order to be willing to sell your labor on the market, though, you need to have some sort of need that is fulfilled. If you don’t need anything, there’s no reason to get a job. Furthermore, you can’t just do work yourself, you need objects to do your work, that will allow you to produce something. We call these objects the ‘means of production.’ A worker also needs enough commodities to keep themselves alive, to work another day. We call this the ‘means of subsistence.’ It’s also important to note that if a worker has other commodities, they could sell those to fulfill their needs, rather than selling their labor power. So someone selling their labor-power in the market needs something, but doesn’t have anything. The only thing they have is the labor-power their body possesses.

It’s important to note that “person with a pile of money” and “person possessing nothing but their ability to work” is not the state of nature. In other words, this stuation arises due to the way we’ve organized society. We like to think that this existance is somehow ‘natural’ or inevitable, but that’s not true. This doesn’t mean older forms of organization are better than what we have now, but the possiblity for change exists. Some people try to paint a picture that those who have the piles of money are virtuous, and those who have only their labor are at fault for their predicament. But the predicament wouldn’t even exist in the first place if not for certian historical developments.

So, if you’re trading labor-power in a market, how do you determine how much to sell it for? Like any other commodity, its value comes down to a socially neccesary labor time. In this case, it’s the amount of money you need for subsistence, the money to pay your rent, to eat food, to stay alive. Having some more is nice, but if you don’t go to work, you can’t pay your bills, and then bad things happen.

One odd thing about labor-power as a commodity is that you don’t just hand it over in the way that you hand over a coat. You put the work in first, and then, eventually, the thing you made gets sold at a totally different time. There’s a gap. Often, you don’t actually get to see the fruits of your labor, as someone else is actually doing the sales. This can lead to some angst, but I just want to make mention of this, we’ll talk more about it later.

This commodity, labor-power, allows us to create the trick. Here’s how the story goes:

Let’s change our example slightly: a coat costs two coins, and four spindles of thread costs two coins:

1 * coat = 2 * coin
4 * thread = 2 * coin

It takes two spindles of thread and an hour to make a coat. By this measure, given that a coat costs two coins, you’d imagine that cost of materials is a coin, so labor must be a coin. Which means an hour of work is worth a coin. if this is true, then the exchange looks like this:

Someone wants a coat. They’re willing to pay two coins. A prospective capitalist sees that the cost of materials is a coin, so they set the price of labor-power to one hour per coin:

1 * coat = 2 * coin
2 * thread = 1 * coin
1 * hour of work = 1 * coin

I spend my one hour of labor and two threads to make a coat, which costs two coins and is sold for two coins. We’re back at an equilibrium. There’s still no capital being created here.

Now the capitalist is upset. “I provided the job, I provided the thread, yet I made no money. This worker couldn’t have made that coat without me. I deserve to be paid for having the initial capital to set up this business. That’s work!”

But here’s the thing: if I worked for half a coin instead of a full coin for an hour, and I worked eight of those hours a day, I’m still making more than enough money to pay my bills. Because that’s the outcome I’m shooting for, I’m happy to exchange my labor on the market for less than the labor time would be: I’m making a good salary, I can live a good life. So the exchange value of my labor-power is less than the value I create from it. It’s not that I’m being cheated with my wages, it’s just that the exchange value of my labor is worth less than the labor I create. With this set of equations:

1 * coat = 2 * coin
2 * thread = 1 * coin
2 * hour of work = 1 * coin

the capitalist can extract that difference. He takes his initial four coins, invests two of them in four threads. He then invests a coin in two hours of a worker’s labor. That worker then uses the threads and their labor-power to make two coats. The capitalist then sells the two coats for four dollars. Looking back, he’s seemingly played a trick: he invested three coins, two in threads and one in labor, but gained four coins at the end, for the two coats.

We haven’t broken any rules of exchange here. The capitalist has paid full market price for all commodities, there’s no inherent need to pay less. Each exchange is between understanding, consenting parties. There’s no trickery. Yet an extra coin has moved from one party to another, the worker to the capitalist, just by following the rules.

Once you have a machine that you can put three dollars in and get four dollars out, you can live off of this extra, rather than doing labor yourself. By having the initial capital of three dollars, and by using it in this way, a capitalist can just make money out of thin air. As they say, it takes money to make money. This is why every worker isn’t a capitalist, you need to create this capital somehow, to be able to afford to use the machine. A machine that makes four dollars out of three isn’t much use if you dont have the inital three dollars.

In summary: people come together at a market to exchange commodities to fulfill their needs. They exchange these commodities with each other in equal values. One of the commodities which can be exchanged is labor-power, which is a special commodity, because it creates more value. Capitalists purchase this commodity, and then use it to create capital, which they can re-invest to continue to accumulate money. Those who sell their labor-power on the market must because they don’t have the capital to do this themselves.

Now that we’ve established that this system is off-balance, we can figure out how that will eventually become its undoing.

Anyway, this is the beginning. There’s obviously much more detail to go into here. If you’d like to read more, this post is basically my own little summary of Capital, Volume I, chapters 1-7, by Karl Marx. These basic building blocks of understanding are not without their own problems, but hopefully, I’ve given you a foothold into the topic. I may or may not do this for additional chapters, we’ll see….

On leftist infighting

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There used to be a post here: https://web.archive.org/web/20131118145002/http://words.steveklabnik.com/on-leftist-infighting

After having some conversations on Twitter, I was made aware of some context around ‘infighting’ that made it problematic. I decided that the post was unworkable, as I certainly didn’t mean some of the things it implied, and so decided it was better to simply delete it.

I’ve been told that some people have been trying to cite this post as me saying that I believe any and all dissent should not be public, or that I believe in covering up incidents of wrongdoing because they may ‘harm the movement’ or something. This is wrong. I wrote this post after trying a number of different tactics to get other men to stop tone policing several women, specifically Shanley. “If you don’t like the way she says things, why not distract from the issue at hand and instead say nothing, and focus on the misogyny instead” was one strategy that actually worked. Hence the post. But since I didn’t just straight-up come out and say that, it failed.

Wrongdoing should be called out as wrong, and tone policing is bad. End of story.

Deleuze for Developers: will smooth space/open source suffice to save us?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Deleuze and Guattari employ the notion of ‘smooth space’ quite a bit in A Thousand Plateaus. I saw this quote about it the other day:

never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us

I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to ‘cultural hegemony’ and its applicability to the web, specifically along the lines of Google. Basically, cultural hegemony is the idea that you don’t just have dominance through laws or economics, but through culture. So, for example, Google submitted SPDY to become HTTP 2.0: it’s going through the standards process, it’s ‘open,’ but it also gives Google a lot of cultural leverage.

So there’s this connection there between smooth space and open source, and the battle between the Nomads and the State Apparatus. We’ll cover that second bit in a while, but for now: what is ‘smooth space’?

The spatial metaphor

The first thing to understand about these concepts is that Deleuze and Guattari is (I think of them as a singular entity…) a big fan of spatial metaphors. Essentially, we can project our problem domain onto a 2 or 3 (or more) dimensional space, and then use tools to analyze that space. I was first introduced to this technique by Manuel de Landa, who has a great lecture called “Deleuze and the use of the genetic algorithm in archetecture” (video)(text). A quick rundown:

So, let’s talk about the N queens problem. We have a chess board with one space, and we place one queen on it:

(warning, lots of ASCII (+ unicode) art to follow)

.-.
|♕|
.-.

This board is legal. It’s a solution to the ‘1 queen problem’: one queen, a 1x1 board. What about 2 queens? We have no solutions. (2 and 3 don’t. :/ All other natural numbers do.) First we place a queen:

.---.
|♕| |
-----
| | |
.---.

… but there’s no legal place for the second one. Bummer. We can determine that there’s no solution by using a simple brute force with backtracking: place the queen in the upper right, then try to place the second below it. That’s not legal, so we backtrack and place it on the right. That’s not legal, so we backtrack and put it in the bottom corner. Oh no! That didn’t work, so let’s move our first queen: now it’s in the bottom right, and we try to place the second in the upper right: fail! So we backtrack….

As you can see, this is a lot of steps for a small board. Once you get up to a ‘real’ chess board, there are 4,426,165,368 possible placements, but only 92 solutions. A needle in a haystack! And we’re using a lot of steps to determine if there’s even one possible placement. We need something better.

One answer is genetic algorithms. So we can take our board’s current state and assign it a score. When we place a new queen, if it makes our score better, we keep it, and if it doesn’t, we lose it. Now we’ve taken our 2x2 board and projected it onto a 2-axis linear space. Imagine a plot where queens are on the x axis and score is on the y axis:

                      .dAHAd.
                    .adAHHHAbn.
      .dAHAd.     .adAHHHHHHAbn.
    .adAHHHAbn.  .adAHHHHHHHHAbn.
   dHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHb
  dHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHb

So we want to keep going with our solution as long as it slopes up: we’ve found that our answers are at the maximum of each curve. Yay calculus! But here’s the thing: this curve only has two possible maxima: we will have more. And it might not be in 2-d space, it might be in 5-d space. And we can only ‘use math’ to find the maximum if we generate the entire curve, which seems computationally out of our reach. So how do we find the maximum without generating the whole curve? Genetic algorithms!

One such is ‘simulated annealing.’ Without getting too into it, let’s just say that there’s a ‘cooling factor’ that controls how tolerant we are of going back down a slope. So at first, we wildly go all over the search space, but then, as we progress, we tighten up our cooling factor, and we stop being so wild. Eventually, we’ll arrive at a solution that’s very likely to be the true global maxima/minima. Neat!

Discrete vs. Continuous

If we know that the enemy is open to attack, and also know that our men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the nature of the ground makes fighting impracticable, we have still gone only halfway towards victory.Sun Tzu, “the Art of War”

Another interesting feature of this particular projection is that it transforms our problem from a discrete problem into a continuous one. One great tactic for when you’re losing: change the battlefield. Our genetic algorithm tool needs a continuous space to operate, but our problem is that our chess board is discrete. What do I mean by this?

“discrete space” is one in which the points are separated from one another in some way. As an example, ‘integers’ form a discrete topology: there’s a ‘gap’ between 1, 2, 3, and 4. You can see this by drawing a number line:

<--(-2)--(-1)--(0)--(1)--(2)-->

The real numbers form a continuous topology rather than a discrete one, there is no space between them. A ‘real line’:

<------------------------->

Our ‘scoring’ mechanism allows us to change the battlefield, it forms a function (isomorphism) to convert our discrete topology into a continuous one. We can now bring our continuous tooling to bear on a problem that was previously inaccessible.

Striated vs Smooth Space

Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. Like water, taking the line of least resistance. Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.Sun Tzu, “the Art of War”

Okay. NOW we’re ready to talk about smooth and striated space. They have a number of names for this concept, and the one that’s most direct from where we currently are is ‘Riemann space / Euclidean space’. Smooth -> Riemann, Euclidean -> Striated. Another isomorphism. ;)

Euclidean geometry is pretty much the foundation of a metric ton of our math. It’s what’s now known as algebra and geometry: lots of integers, discrete spaces. This cube starts at (1,2,4) and has a side length of 5. Cartesian coordinates.

Along comes Gauss, who was incredibly intelligent. He had this student named Riemann, who ran with the ideas Gauss had and started Riemannian Geometry. Riemann’s geometry is non-Euclidean: if Euclid described lines, Riemann described curves. Einstein would later base the theory of relativity on Riemannian geometry.

So, who cares? Well, think about it this way: You’re in a car, driving down a straight road. It goes for miles, with no turns or other streets. You’re operating in a smooth space: you can easily go from one place to another. Now, someone comes along and puts up stop signs every block. You must (for now) stop at these signs. Now you’re operating in a striated space: your movement is restricted. Now you’re moving from point to point on a line. It’s a very different experience, and you also didn’t have anything to do with the stop signs….

According to D&G, ‘the state machine’ (one instance of which is the State) attempts to take space that is smooth and striate it. This is often a means towards imperialism, as the striation happens through quantification. Take, for example, the sea: a smooth space, you can impose latitude and longitude on top of it, simultaneously quantifying and striating it. This allows you to navigate the waters, and conquer the sea.

This is also the position that many web startups take: ‘friendship’ was a smooth space before social networks came along. They quantified and striated that space, turning “I have many friends” into “I have 200 friends and you have 100 friends.” This quantification allows for commodification: now Facebook can sell ads. It’s also why startups don’t often have a ‘business model’ at first: they first need to conquer and striate their space before they find the commodity. Sometimes you just hit dirt and go bust, sometimes you find a more precious commodity, then refine and sell it.

‘nomads’ are entities which navigate and live in smooth spaces. Maybe my twitter bio makes a bit more sense now. ;)

How do you create a smooth space?

You might remember Riemann from the ‘Riemann sum’ in Calc I. The brilliance of the Riemann sum is that it first striates, then re-smooths the space. You start off first with a curve, and then approximate the area under it by dividing it into a number of evenly-sized bits. This first bit was necessary in a world without calculus: we didn’t have the tooling or concepts to actually tackle the real area, so we mapped that problem to one we did know how to solve. As the number of bits goes up, and their width goes down, more and more of the space under the curve is captured by our algorithm. Finally, once we’re able to take that first step away from (striated) algebra and move into (smooth) calculus, we’re able to move about on the curve for reals. We’re back to smooth space again.

This interplay between smooth and striated spaces often happens, and there’s really no part of our world today that’s completely smooth or entirely striated. D&G posit that the left should be attempting to create as much smooth space as possible, and that capitalism is constantly attempting to striate space. That said, smooth space is necessary, but not sufficient: capitalism, in its hunger and lust for acquisition and totalitization, has managed to navigate some smooth spaces. I’ll just quote straight from ‘a thousand plateaus’, 492. It’s a little hard, but this is getting long enough as is. ;)

Not only does the user as such tend to be an employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling – every semiotic system. It is though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital necessarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooths pace in which the destiny of human beings is recast. … at the level of world capitalism, a new smooth space is produced in which capital reaches its ‘absolute’ speed, based on machinic components rather than the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a kind of deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths to striation. .. the essential thing is instead the distinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different types of States.

The first part about ‘users’ is very much drawing a parallel to “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” When they talk about the ‘speed’ of capital, think of HFT. Multinational corporations have managed to overcome the striation that a State has imposed. McDonalds is only partially affected by US laws. They operate ‘outside’ of states.

In this way, simply being smooth will not suffice to save us.

If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy “Philosophy in a time of software, a moderated Google Group to discuss the intersection of philosophy and technology. This post started out as an email to that list.

Deleuze for developers: deterritorialization

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Let’s re-examine this diagram of the assemblage:

What’s up with this line?

Well, just because assemblages are amorphous doesn’t mean that there’s no way to demarcate what’s in the assemblage and what is not. This particular assemblage has a ‘territory,’ of sorts: everything that’s inside the line is part of the territory, and everything that’s not is outside. Think of a fort, or a castle:

Or, since we’re not just talking about physical spaces, a social circle or group:

Of course, this would extend around all the members of Rails Core, hence it being cut off at the bottom. But the pink line would designate the boundaries of the assemblage that makes up Rails Core.

Deterritorialization

So what happens when these boundaries get crossed? Well, your castle gets invaded. A new member joins the team. New servers are brought online. This process is called ‘deterritorialization.’ Healing the lines, repairing them, and re-containing the boundary is called ‘reterritorialization.’ I recently came across a really interesting symbol of deterritorialization: the Open Source logo:

Check it out: visually, this logo communicates the deterritorializing effect of opening up your source code: the private internals have now been exposed internally. The walls have been breeched!

Another example, from building a web service: we start off with just our service:

We have here an application server, a database, and our user’s identity. They form the assemblage of our system. Remember, abstract concepts are objects just as code and servers are! Our identity notion is stored within the database, therefore, they’re connected.

Next, we decide to implement a ‘log in with Twitter’ feature.

It’s the primary way that our users sign up and use our site. Now, Twitter’s assemblage has deterritorialized ours:

We can minimize the effects (or reterritorialize our service) by making sure to have our own concept of identity within the system, and making sure that we have our own notion of identity within the system, and just connecting Twitter’s notion of identity to our own:

Now, by containing the Twitter-assemblage entirely within our service, I don’t mean that it actually is. Obviously, the Twitter-assemblage is interconnected with a ton of other assemblages that represent other services. But from our perspective, they are now a part of our assemblage. The decisions they make affect us. While our code is separated, we’re not totally separate anymore: updates and policies of Twitter have a direct effect on us.

There’s also a more sublte, secondary re/de-territorialization going on here: our code from our service. These used to be isomorphic, but now our code has claimed a territory of its own, and is now just one assemblage within our system-assemblage, instead of being our system-assemblage.

A git example

The previous notion of deterritorialization largely relied on the notion of dependencies as the mechanism which we drew our diagrams. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s take another example: git.

Every GitHub pull request is an act of deterritorialization, and every merge is one of re-territorialization. Consider this small repository, with three commits:

You do a git clone:

Make a new commit, adding a new object into your repo-assemblage:

Then you send me an email, asking me to pull from your repository:

You like the change, so you do a git fetch:

de-territorialized!

Now it makes the local copy:

and your repository has been re-territorialized. These steps happen so quickly that you probably don’t even think about them, but conceptually, this is what’s happening.

One last example that’s even less related to code: entering a new social group. You’re at a conference, and there are four people standing around talking:

They form an assemblage we call a ‘conversation.’ It’s in relation with an object known as “refinements” from Ruby 2.0, which means this assemblage is likely to be particularly vibrant. Heh. Anyway, you decide that your opinion matters, so you de-territorialize the assemblage, and (assuming they don’t ignore you) it re-territorializes around you:

Even the language we use here implies something similar: you ‘enter the conversation.’ Like entering a door, into a space you previously were not.

Conclusion: Diagrams

We can call these drawings ‘diagrams’ or ‘abstract machines.’ They can represent these kinds of conceptual relationships in a visual way, which I find really useful for understanding. Programmers call abstract machines ‘design patterns.’

Now that you’ve seen this process that assemblages use to relate to one another, I hope that you find this particular diagram useful. Because of its level of abstraction, it’s applicable in a wide variety of situations.

Deleuze for developers: assemblages

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The ancient Greeks thought that atoms were it. ἄτομος, Wikipedia will tell you, comes from ‘ἀ’- meaning “not” and ‘τέμνω’, meaning ‘I cut.’ Cells are the smallest thing that there is. You can’t cut them in half. Everything is composed of a bunch of atoms.

Well, guess what? Modern science has found things smaller than atoms. Dammit! What we do know for sure, though, is that some things are made up of composites of other things. That’s for sure. We’re still not clear on what that fundamental stuff is, but composites are a pretty safe bet. Even if atoms are made up of other things, we know that other things are made up of a bunch of atoms.

So how can we talk about composites? Well, a programmer’s fundamental tool is abstraction. So we can black-box any particular composite and treat it as a whole entity, without worrying about what we’ve encapsulated inside. That’s good, and that’s useful, but there’s a problem: when you start thinking of a collection of things as just one thing, you miss out on a lot of important details. As we know, all abstractions are leaky, so how does a black box leak?

Let’s think about your body: it’s a composite, you’re made up of (among other things) a whole pile of organs, and one (skin) wrapping the rest of them up in a nice black box. If we had lived a few hundred years ago, thinking of the body as a black box would be a pretty fair metaphor: after all, if you take out someone’s heart, they die. The box needs all of its parts inside. Today, though, that’s not true: we can do heart transplants. Further, we have artificial hearts. A person with an artificial heart is not the exact same as a person without one, yet they are both still people. Thinking of a body as a totality leaks as an abstraction in modern times.

Let’s move away from biology for a bit and into web applications instead. Here’s an architecture diagram of a typical web service:

Looks pretty normal, right? Let’s modify it a bit:

This is the same web service, right? We’ve introduced a few database slaves and a reverse proxy, which allowed us to knock out one of our application servers. In a certain sense, this service is equivalent; in another, it’s different: It’s got another extra component, and one component has developed more complexity. We might need to hire a DBA and someone who’s good at writing Varnish configs. Different skills are needed.

So what do we call this thing? An ‘assemblage.’ It’s made up of smaller assemblages as well; after all, our application servers may use the Reactor pattern, the worker model of Unicorn, or the threaded model of the JVM. To quote Levi Bryant, “Assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements or objects that enter into relations with one another.” In the body metaphor, these are organs, and in the systems diagram, they’re the application servers, databases, and job queues. Assemblages are also ‘objects’ in this context, so you can think of any of those objects as being made up of other ones. But to think of the formations of objects as a total whole or black box is incorrect, or at best, a leaky abstraction.

Let’s get at one other excellent example of an assemblage: the internet. Computers connect, disconnect, reconnect. They may be here one moment, gone the next, or stay for an extended period of time. The internet isn’t any less an internet when you close your laptop and remove it, nor when you add a new server onto your rack. Yet we still talk about it as though it were a whole. It’s not, exactly: it’s an assemblage.

Furthermore, there’s a reason that Bryant uses the generic ‘objects’ or ‘elements’ when talking about assemblages: objects can be ‘people’ or ‘ideas’ as well as physical parts. This is where the ‘systems’ idea of computer science diverges from ‘assemblage’: depending on how you want to analyze things, your users may be part of an assemblage diagram as well.

So what’s the point? Well, this is a basic term that can be used to think about problems. A design pattern of thought. A diagram. In future posts, I’ll actually use this pattern to address a particular problem, but you need to understand the pattern before you can understand how it’s used.

(and to give you a comparison of complexity of explanation, here’s the blog post by Levi Bryant on assemblages where I got that quote from. He quotes Deleuze directly and extensively: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/deleuze-on-assemblages/ )

The next article in the series is on ‘deterritorialization’.

Protological Control: an introduction

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

“I finished by pointing out that, like scientists, people in the web development community had to be ethically and morally aware of what they were doing. I thought this might be construed as a bit out of line by the geek side, but the people present were the ones now creating the Web, and therefore were the only ones who could be sure that what the systems produced would be appropriate to a reasonable and fair society.”Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web,” p86.

Humans are social creatures. Regardless of your position on how human society should be, we all acknowledge that it does exist. While there may be some who live a lonely life in the wilderness, they still live within the larger social organization of a state. And even though those few people do exist, they are a tiny, tiny portion of the overall population. For the vast majority of humanity, society is a reality.

What do I mean when I say ‘society?’ For this, I turn to Marx:

“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie

Regardless of your opinions of Marx, I also don’t think this is a particularly controversial opinion: society is made up of our relationships with each other. A single person does not a society make, but our connections to each other. These connections are the foundational aspect of society; they are atomic.

Society is a fractal, rhizomatic object: there is not only the broader ‘society,’ but many smaller, overlapping, societies. These societies are a set of these relations within a given context. These contexts provide us with guidelines of what sorts of qualities these relations possess. For example, when amongst friends at home, a person will act differently than when around those same set of friends in a public place. Often, “social awkwardness” is a transgression of one of these boundaries; someone assumes that they exist in a different social space than those they’re interacting with.

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web,” p12

As it turns out, Tim isn’t the only person to find this line of thinking interesting. Ferdinand de Saussure was a linguist in the early 1900s who developed the idea of “structural linguistics,” and in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a French anthropologist named Claude Lévi-Strauss took his concepts and applied them to anthropology, birthing Structuralism. Others followed his lead and used this mode to develop an analysis of psychology, sociology, and more.

Societies exist naturally, but can also be man-made. Any opening of a new avenue for interpersonal relationships creates a new society amongst the multitude. The web is an example of this, and websites are a second, inner socius. The major difference between artificial and natural societies is not one of effect, but of cause. The end result is the same, but the initial conditions for the formation of the society determine the acceptable rules for the given relations that exist within it. Therefore, potential creators of said social enclosures should understand the power that they wield, and use said power to create the exact form of society they wish it make, with deliberate strokes.

Society has a very clean mirror

When people create, they end up creating something that reflects themselves and the societies that they live in. Linguistic relativity in even its weak form implies that language shapes who we are, and it is such with our creations. Many ex nihilo creation myths touch upon this property, like Adam’s receipt of God’s breath, or Atum from ancient Egypt, who not only created himself (?!?) but then other gods (first from his own shadow) and then man from his tears.

Here’s a fun, terrible example of this happening:

Amusingly, even though the tone is wrong, this YouTube user nails it:

(image lost to time)

Exactly. They didn’t test it on darker skinned folks. Of course, it may not be malicious, but this certainly meant that no dark-skinned people were involved in the production of this device, the whole way up to shipping it. If they were, it would have been caught early on before it was even beginning manufacture.

Because we grow up in a society, and we create new societies through technology, it stands to reason that society and our own biases influence the societies that we create. Even beyond that, if we create societies, we should be able to use the same tools that we use to analyze naturally occurring ones on artificial ones.

So how do we analyze societies?

It’s all about power and control

Remember Structuralism? Well, it has some issues, and not just the opposition that Saussure faced from Chomsky. Along comes a bunch of French philosophers, and they have beef. I won’t get into it, except to mention the name of one: Michel Foucault. He wrote this book titled “Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison,” which has some awkward title translation issues, and so ends up as “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” in English. Long time readers of my blog will remember my notes on this book, but the basics are as such:

Foucault

Feudal society was predicated on divine right. The body of a sovereign is literally the body of God, and since God also created everything, the sovereign is everything. Therefore, if you commit a crime, you commit it against the body of the sovereign, and therefore, he must exact punishment against your body in kind. Hence torture.

Eventually, though, torture became socially inconvenient, and people started challenging the very idea of divine right, and wanted democracy in some form. Therefore, the power to punish would need to take on a new form to survive in this new society. That mechanism is called “discipline.” Discipline (specifically of the body) is how control manifests itself in society. One of the great advances of Taylorism, for example, was studying how the bodies of assembly line workers operated and streamlining their motions.

Foucault also illustrates that control and power in modern society mirror Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the ‘Panopticon,’ which is a prison in a circular shape by which the rooms can all observe each other. The observation would help to keep them all in line, since the all-seeing tower in the middle would be able to observe everyone at all times.

I found this concept amusing, here are the dorms I stayed in during my time at the University of Pittsburgh.

Those in charge get to make the rules?

Anyway, all of that implies this: the people who are ‘in charge’ are so because they get to define the rules. Most people would say this the other way around, but that’s wrong: You don’t get to make the rules because you’re in charge, you’re in charge because you get to make the rules. Regardless, what does it mean to make the rules?

In a simple sense, discipline is pretty easy to grasp: there’s a king (or boss). He makes the rules. Done. And it’s the same with our ‘creation of societies’ from above. When you make a society, you make it, so you get to make the rules! This ‘rule-making’ property is everywhere in software: operating systems are absolutely about creating a society of software programs on your computer. APIs are all about the connections between various systems, and the web, with its hyperlinks, even more explicitly so.

That’s why this stuff matters to programmers. We create societies all the time, and need to be careful of the kinds of societies that we create. We also participate in many, and need to be sure that we participate in the kinds of societies that we agree with.

One problem: we’ve already moved beyond discipline society, twice.

Deleuze and Guattari

Oh these two! What a pair! If you picked up a random copy of either volume of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” without knowing what it was, you would be oh so confused. I mean, I vaguely knew what I was getting into, and I was still confused.

Deleuze specifically wrote an essay called “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. You can find it online here.

These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future.

He also discusses it in Negotiations.

Control societies are different from disciplinary societies because discipline is all about confinement. Control is a slippery beast compared to discipline:

Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

Discipline is direct, while control is indirect. I won’t get into control too much more here, because we’re past that too; control’s time on this earth was fleeting. Now we live in the era of protocol.

Galloway

Alexander Galloway is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, and every programmer should read him. Specifically, his book Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Galloway takes Deleuze’s work and applies it to our modern computer systems, and terms that ‘protocol.’

Protocol is a system of distributed management.Protocol facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities.Protocol is anti-hierarchy and anti-authority.Protocol engenders localized decision making, not centralized.Protocol is robust, flexible, and universal.Protocol can accommodate massive contingency.Protocol is the outcome (not the antecedent) of distributed power.Galloway, “Protocol”, p82

Sounds awesome, right? Sounds like the web.

I saw one [advocate of informational organization systems] after the next shot down because the developers were forcing them to reorganize their work to fit the system. I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all.This notion seemed impossible until I realized that the diversity of different computer systems could be a rich resource– something to be represented, not a problem to be eradicated. The model I chose for my minimalist system was hypertext.Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web,” p15.

Tim recognized that centralization was the root of exploitation:

It also shows how a technical decision to make a single point of reliance can be exploited politically for power and commercially for profit, breaking the technology’s independence from those things, and weakening the web as a universal space.Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web,” p129.

Tim saw that control was an issue:

Whether inspired by free-market desires or humanistic ideals, we all felt that control was the wrong perspective. … Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the web’s growth, and the web would never scale up. Its being ‘out of control’ was very important.Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web,” p99

Galloway, however, contends something else, and this is the crux of it:

Thus it is an oversight for theorists like Lawrence Lessig (despite his strengths) to suggest that the origin of Internet communication was one of total freedom and lack of control. Instead, it is clear to me that the exact opposite of freedom – that is, control – has been the outcome of the last forty years of developments in networked communications. The founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom. Control has existed from the beginning.Perhaps it is a different type of control than we are used to seeing. It is control borne from high degrees of technical organization (protocol) not this or that limitation on individual freedom or decision making (fascism).To put it another way, in order for protocol to enable radically distributed communications between autonomous entities, it must employ a strategy of universalization, and of homogeneity. It must be anti-diversity. It must promote standardization in order to enable openness. It must organize peer groups into bureaucracies like the IETF in order to create free technologies.In short, control in distributed networks is not monolithic. It proceeds in multiple, parallel, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways. It is a complex of interrelated currents and counter-currents.Galloway, “Protocol”, p141-143.

This is the kind of control that startups exert on the rest of the world. This is the kind of control that’s hard to see coming, because it’s inexact. This is the kind of control that lets you feel like you have freedom, even when you don’t. This is the kind of control that likes open standards, and uses them against you.

Discipline is Microsoft. Protocol is Google. Protocol is Facebook. Protocol is Twitter.

It’s in this tradition that I critique App.net and GitHub.

Show solidarity to all who resist

Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I found this on a flyer in my neighborhood.

On may 19th, three people associated with the Occupy movement were arrested in Chicago, just before the anti-NATO protest. Two infiltrators had been working with them for months, trying to persuade them to escalate their tactics – just as in the recent Cleveland bomb scare. Whether the infiltrators would have succeeded in pushing them further than they wanted to go, we’ll never know. Desperate to make an arrest that would intimidate the NATO protesters, divide the Occupy movement from its most radical members, and create an impressive spectacle, the police attacked. Their most substantial evidence is beer-making supplies at the house the NATO 3 were arrested in, which they ridiculously claim are bomb materials.

While we are confident that the NATO 3 will beat these ludicrous charges, they are being held in solitary confinement on 1.5 million dollars bond each. It often comforts prisoners to know that people on the outside love them and are thinking about them, so a solidarity demonstration was called for May 24th, in St Louis, MO. It was noissy, vibrant, nighttime march, enjoyed by the people it passed. “Solidarity with all who resist!” was painted on a business window, and, of course, a businessman got angry, and, of course, there was an altercation; the cops showed up, hit people, were allegedly hit in return, and so on. By the end of the night, ten people were in jail – one charged with five felony counts of assault, property damage and riot, as well as two misdemeanors. Others are charged with felony resisting, interference, and misdemeanor riot. Upon their release, we learned that while being interrogated one prisoner had a knife held to their throat, that they were choked and lifted off the ground and punched in the chest for non-compliance. One comrade, who is facing the most serious charges, was brought to the interrogation room where a detective repeatedly struck him in the face, breaking his nose while he was shackled to the floor. They continued to make threats of violence if he continued to “not comply.”

Fuck.

This.

Shit.

As a wise woman once said, “If you hit me and I hit back, we still ain’t even.” There is no way in society as it exists today to have a fair fight with the police; they have vast, systemic power, and will always be better equipped and better financed than we are. Nor can we let them hurt anyone, particularly those close to us, with complete impunity, without a response from us. We must fight, but we must fight asymmetrically. If we must respond, we are forced into reaction instead of attack, let it be waves of reaction – if strange and inadequate, funny and off putting – that build off each other to create an ocean of solidarity. Solidarity actions in response to the repression of solidarity actions with people we’ve never met accused of crimes that never occurred – this is utterly bizarre, but this is our life.

You should care about this. You should care that the government is making tactical strikes against its enemies. Maybe you don’t think of yourself as an enemy of the government or capitalism; maybe you would never consider it publicly, in a quiet, accepted way or otherwise. Still, think about your life: do you feel safer, happier, more fulfilled because of your job, the police, the taxes you pay? Even if you feel those things on a surface level, do you feel like something is missing, that you could be living in a way that is more glorious and beautiful? Do you see people around you who suffer, or read books about terrible things in America’s past, or hear of people in far-off lands whose lives seem impossibly hard, and wish that you could do something about it – something more meaningful than giving to a charity or voting in the election? We suggest a first step:

Show solidarity to all who resist.

Anti-capitalism 101

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

People are often surprised to find out that I identify as an anti-capitalist. At least in America, many people see capitalism as inevitable, or even as the way things always were. Unfortunately, there’s so much rhetoric and confusion around this topic that it always takes a long time to break it down. I’d been meaning to write something about this topic, but then I found this really great work called Capitalism, Class, and Class Struggle for (ex) Dummies. I’ve adapted it with my own thoughts and edits below. It in turn is adapted from this essay and this essay from LibCom.org, so if you’d like to see the history, you can read those versions as well.

I plan on refining this as things go along, as it’s still a bit jargony in places. Any suggestions are very welcome!

Capitalism: an introduction

At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.

While some people own means of production, or capital, most of us don’t and so to survive we need to sell our ability to work in return for a wage, or else scrape by on benefits. This first group of people is the capitalist class or “bourgeoisie” in Marxist jargon, and the second group is the working class or “proletariat”. This jargon is only included so that you can make connections to other literature, we’ll stick away from such things later in this text.

Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money. When money functions like this, it functions as capital. For instance, when a company uses its profits to hire more staff or open new premises, and so make more profit, the money here is functioning as capital. As capital increases (or the economy expands), this is called ‘capital accumulation’, and it’s the driving force of the economy.

Those accumulating capital do so better when they can shift costs onto others. If companies can cut costs by not protecting the environment, or by paying sweatshop wages, they will. So catastrophic climate change and widespread poverty are signs of the normal functioning of the system. Furthermore, for money to make more money, more and more things have to be exchangeable for money. Thus the tendency is for everything from everyday items to DNA sequences to carbon dioxide emissions—and, crucially, our ability to work—to become commodified.

And it is this last point—the commodification of our creative and productive capacities, our ability to work—which holds the secret to capital accumulation. Money does not turn into more money by magic, but by the work we do every day.

In a world where everything is for sale, we all need something to sell in order to buy the things we need. Those of us with nothing to sell except our ability to work have to sell this ability to those who own the factories, offices, etc. And of course, the things we produce at work aren’t ours, they belong to our bosses.

Furthermore, because of long hours, productivity improvements etc, we produce much more than necessary to keep us going as workers. The wages we get roughly match the cost of the products necessary to keep us alive and able to work each day (which is why, at the end of each month, our bank balance rarely looks that different to the month before). The difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is how capital is accumulated, or profit is made.

This difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is called “surplus value”. The extraction of surplus value by employers is the reason we view capitalism as a system based on exploitation—the exploitation of the working class. This process is essentially the same for all wage labour, not just that in private companies. Public sector workers also face constant attacks on their wages and conditions in order to reduce costs and maximise profits across the economy as a whole.

Unwaged labour

The accumulation of capital also relies on unwaged work, such as housework or domestic labour. This includes the reproduction of labour power in the form of producing and raising children—the next generation of workers—and servicing the current workforce—physically, emotionally, and sexually. This unpaid labour is predominantely carried out by women.

Servicing men and children at home serves capital: by making housework and reproduction a women’s ‘natural and feminine’ process rather than work, capitalism benefits in the form of free labour. When capital pays husbands they get two workers, not one. Denying domestic labour a wage makes this work invisible, and divides the working class into waged and unwaged at the expense of both.

Competition

In order to accumulate capital, our boss must compete in the market with bosses ofother companies. They cannot afford to ignore market forces, or they will lose ground to their rivals, lose money, go bust, get taken over, and ultimately cease to be our boss. Therefore even the bosses aren’t really in control of capitalism, capital itself is. It’s because of this that we can talk about capital as if it has agency or interests of its own, and so often talking about ‘capital’ is more precise than talking about bosses.

Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways. While from the workers’ perspective, our alienation is experienced through being controlled by our boss, the boss experiences it through impersonal market forces and competition with other bosses.

Because of this, bosses and politicians are powerless in the face of ‘market forces,’ each needing to act in a way conducive to continued accumulation (and in any case they do quite well out of it!). They cannot act in our interests, since any concessions they grant us will help their competitors on a national or international level.

So, for example, if a manufacturer develops new technology for making cars which doubles productivity it can lay off half its workers, increase its profits and reduce the price of its cars in order to undercut its competition. If another company wants to be nice to its employees and not sack people, eventually it will be driven out of business or taken over by its more ruthless competitor—so it will also have to bring in the new machinery and make the layoffs to stay competitive.

Of course, if businesses were given a completely free hand to do as they please, monopolies would soon develop and stifle competition which would lead to the system grinding to a halt. The state intervenes, therefore to act on behalf of the long-term interests of capital as a whole. We observed this happen in America back in the Robber Baron days.

The State

The primary function of the state in capitalist society is to maintain the capitalist system and aid the accumulation of capital. As such, the state uses repressive laws and violence against the working class when we try to further our interests against capital. For example, bringing in anti-strike laws, or sending in police or soldiers to break up strikes and demonstrations.

The “ideal” type of state under capitalism at the present time is liberal democratic, however in order to continue capital accumulation at times different political systems are used by capital to do this. State capitalism in the USSR, and fascism in Italy and Germany are two such models, which were necessary for the authorities at the time in order to co-opt and crush powerful working-class movements which threatened the very continuation of capitalism.

When the excesses of bosses cause workers to fight back, alongside repression the state occasionally intervenes to make sure business as usual resumes without disruption. For this reason national and international laws protecting workers’ rights and the environment exist. Generally the strength and enforcement of these laws ebbs and flows in relation to the balance of power between employers and employees in any given time and place. For example, in France where workers are more well-organised and militant, there is a maximum working week of 35 hours. In the UK, where workers are less militant the maximum is 48 hours, and in the US where workers are even less likely to strike there is no maximum at all.

History

Capitalism is presented as a ‘natural’ system, formed a bit like mountains or land masses by forces beyond human control, that it is an economic system ultimately resulting from human nature. However it was not established by ‘natural forces’ but by intense and massive violence across the globe. First in the ‘advanced’ countries, enclosures drove self-sufficient peasants from communal land into the cities to work in factories. Any resistance was crushed. People who resisted the imposition of wage labour were subjected to vagabond laws and imprisonment, torture, deportation or execution. In England under the reign of Henry VIII alone 72,000 people were executed for vagabondage.

Later capitalism was spread by invasion and conquest by Western imperialist powers around the globe. Whole civilisations were brutally destroyed with communities driven from their land into waged work. The only countries that avoided conquest were those—like Japan—which adopted capitalism on their own in order to compete with the other imperial powers. Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.

Capitalism did not arise by a set of natural laws which stem from human nature: it was spread by the organised violence of the elite. The concept of private property of land and means of production might seem now like the natural state of things, however we should remember it is a man-made concept enforced by conquest. Similarly, the existence of a class of people with nothing to sell but their labour power is not something which has always been the case—common land shared by all was seized by force, and the dispossessed forced to work for a wage under the threat of starvation or even execution. As capital expanded, it created a global working class consisting of the majority of the world’s population whom it exploits but also depends on.

The Future

Capitalism has only existed as the dominant economic system on the planet for a little over 200 years. Compared to the half a million years of human existence it is a momentary blip, and therefore it would be naive to assume that it will last for ever. It is entirely reliant on us, the working class, and our labour which it must exploit, and so it will only survive as long as we let it.

Class & Class Struggle: an introduction

The first thing to say is that there are various ways of referring to class. Often, when people talk about class, they talk in terms of cultural/sociological labels. For example, middleclass people like foreign films, working class people like football, upper-class people like top hats and so on.

Another way to talk about class, however, is based on classes’ economic positions. We talk about class like this because we see it as essential for understanding how capitalist society works, and consequently how we can change it.

It is important to stress that our definition of class is not for classifying individuals or putting them in boxes, but in order to understand the forces which shape our world, why our bosses and politicians act the way they do, and how we can act to improve our conditions.

Class and Capitalism

The economic system which dominates the world at present is called capitalism. As mentioned earlier, capitalism is essentially a system based on the self-expansion of capital—commodities and money making more commodities and more money.

This doesn’t happen by magic, but by human labour. For the work we do, we’re paid for only a fraction of what we produce. The difference between the value we produce and the amount we’re paid in wages is the “surplus value” we’ve produced. This is kept by our boss as profit and either reinvested to make more money or used to buy swimming pools or fur coats or whatever.

In order for this to take place, a class of people must be created who don’t own anything they can use to make money i.e. offices, factories, farmland or other means of production. This class must then sell their ability to work in order to purchase essential goods and services in order to survive. This class is the working class.

So at one end of the spectrum is this class, with nothing to sell but their ability to work. At the other, those who do own capital to hire workers to expand their capital. Individuals in society will fall at some point between these two poles, but what is important from a political point of view is not the positions of individuals but the social relationship between classes.

The Working Class

The working class then, or ‘proletariat’ as it is sometimes called, the class who is forced to work for wages, or claim benefits if we cannot find work or are too sick or elderly to work, to survive. We sell our time and energy to a boss for their benefit.

Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.

Class Struggle

When we are at work, our time and activity is not our own. We have to obey the alarm clock, the time card, the managers, the deadlines and the targets.

Work takes up the majority of our lives. We may see our managers more than we see our friends and partners. Even if we enjoy parts of our job we experience it as something alien to us, over which we have very little control. This is true whether we’re talking about the nuts and bolts of the actual work itself or the amount of hours, breaks, time off etc.

Work being forced on us like this compels us to resist.

Employers and bosses want to get the maximum amount of work from us, from the longest hours, for the least pay. We, on the other hand, want to be able to enjoy our lives: we don’t want to be over-worked, and we want shorter hours and more pay.

This antagonism is central to capitalism. Between these two sides is a push and pull: employers cut pay, increase hours, speed up the pace of work. But we attempt to resist: either covertly and individually by taking it easy, grabbing moments to take a break and chat to colleagues, calling in sick, leaving early. Or we can resist overtly and collectively with strikes, slow-downs, occupations etc.

This is class struggle. The conflict between those of us who have to work for a wage and our employers and governments, who are the capitalist class, or ‘bourgeoisie’. By resisting the imposition of work, we say that our lives are more important than our boss’s profits. This attacks the very nature of capitalism, where profit is the most important reason for doing anything, and points to the possibility of a world without classes and privately owned means of production. We are the working class resisting our own existence. We are the working class struggling against work and class.

Beyond the Workplace

Class struggle does not only take place in the workplace. Class conflict reveals itself in many aspects of life. For example, affordable housing is something that concerns all working class people. However, affordable for us means unprofitable for them. In a capitalist economy, it often makes more sense to build luxury apartment blocks, even while tens of thousands are homeless, than to build housing which we can afford to live in. So struggles to defend social housing, or occupying empty properties to live in are part of the class struggle.

Similarly, healthcare provision can be a site of class conflict. Governments or companies attempt to reduce spending on healthcare by cutting budgets and introducing charges for services to shift the burden of costs onto the working class, whereas we want the best healthcare possible for as little cost as possible.

The ‘Middle Class’

While the economic interests of capitalists are directly opposed to those of workers, a minority of the working class will be better off than others, or have some level of power over others. When talking about history and social change it can be useful to refer to this part of the proletariat as a “middle class”, despite the fact that it is not a distinct economic class, in order to understand the behaviour of different groups.

Class struggle can sometimes be derailed by allowing the creation or expansion of the middle class—Margaret Thatcher encouraged home ownership by cheaply selling off social housing in the UK during the big struggles of the 1980s, knowing that workers are less likely to strike if they have a mortgage, and allowing some workers to become better off on individual levels, rather than as a collective. And in South Africa the creation of a black middle class helped derail workers’ struggles when apartheid was overturned, by allowing limited social mobility and giving some black workers a stake in the system.

Bosses try to find all sorts of ways to materially and psychologically divide the working class, including by salary differentials, professional status, race and by gender. It should be pointed out again that we use these class definitions in order to understand social forces at work, and not to label individuals or determine how individuals will act in given situations.

Conclusion

Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you have but the basic conflict which defines capitalism—those of us who must work for a living vs. those who profit from the work that we do. By fighting for our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the market we lay the basis for a new type of society—a society without money, class, or capitalism, organised for the direct fulfilment of our needs: a Libertarian Communist society.

Transmuting Philosophy into Machinery

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’m so very close to releasing the beta of Get Some REST. However, I’m about to get on a plane to Poland, and that’s a bad time to launch things. ;) wroc_love.rb, here I come!

Anyway, I figured I’d give you a preview of some of the content that I’ve been working on. This particular article is short, but it’s also a public response to something, and so, to whet your appetite, I figured I’d give you a little taste of what’s to come. It’s out of context, so I’m a little light on explaining why you’d do each step of the process; there is much more on that elsewhere in the book! Rather than explaing all the why, I just actually do it. This is one of the last articles, and it’s a fairly simple example once you’ve grokked all the fundamentals, so it’s a bit small, lengthwise.

If all goes well, I’ll be releasing at wroc_love.rb. So keep your eyes peeled.

Without further ado, the article.

Kessler’s idea was, that besides the law of mutual struggle there is in nature the law of mutual aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion - which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man, seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became aquainted with it I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”, p21

Rob Conery is a pretty cool guy. While I always enjoy reading his blog, he’s been at battle with the Hypermedia crowd recently. It’s always good natured, though, and he means well.

He recently posed an interesting question to his blog:

I would like to invite the good people who have engaged with me over the last few days to jump in and write me up an API – and by way of explanation – show how their ideas can be translated into reality.

Great! After all, social exchange is one of the building blocks of society:

In so far as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism.Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume 1”, p198

Let’s apply what we’ve learned about the basics of designing hypermedia APIs. Here are his requirements:

Use Cases

This is step one: simple authentication and then consumption of basic data. The client will be HTML, JS, and Mobile.

Logging In

Customer comes to the app and logs in with email and password. A token is returned by the server upon successful authentication and a message is also received (like “thanks for logging in”).

Productions

Joe User is logged in and wants to see what he can watch. He chooses to browse all productions and can see in[sic] the app which ones he is allowed to watch and which ones he isn’t. He then chooses to narrow his selection by category: Microsoft, Ruby, Javascript, Mobile. Once a production is selected, a list of Episodes is displayed with summary information. Joe wants to view Episode 2 of Real World ASP.NET MVC3 – so he selects it. The video starts.

Episodes.

Kelly User watches our stuff on her way to work every day, and when she gets on the train [sic] will check and see if we’ve pushed any new episodes recently. A list of 5 episodes comes up – she chooses one, and watches it on her commute.

The design process

Step 1: Evaluate Process

Fortunately, this has been done for us, in the Use Cases above. Sweet!

Step 2: Create state machine

Taking all of this into account, I drew out this state machine:

Basically, you start at a root. Two options: see the newest list of productions, or see them all. You can filter all of them by a category. Eventually, you end up picking one. This workflow should be enough to support all of our use cases.

Step 3: Evaluate Media Type

Okay, so, he mentions this in use cases:

The client will be HTML, JS, and Mobile.

I’m not 100% sure what he means here: I think it’s that we’ll be building a site on this API (html), it’ll have heavy JS usage (js), and probably a mobile version or possibly a native client (mobile).

Given this information, I’m going to choose JSON as a base format. Besides, our developers tend to like it. ;)

After that choice is made, we also need these things:

Filtering things means a templated query of some kind, so we’ll need some kind of templating syntax.
We need lists of things as well as singular things. I like to simply this by representing singular things as a list of one item. So, lists and individual items.
We also have a few attributes we need to infer from these loose requirements. No biggie. :)

Step 4: Create Media Types

Based on this, I’ve made up the application/vnd.tekpub.productions+json media type. Key features, based on our evaluation:

Each transition in our state machine has a relation attribute
Each transition that needs to be parameterized has some sort of template syntax
Each attribute that we need someone to know about has a definition
Everything is always a list. It may contain just one item. Our client’s interface can detect this special case and display something different if it wants.

Step 5: Implementation!

That’s for Rob! ahaha!

However, you might want a sample implementation. I’m willing to make one if there’s confusion about it, but I figured I’d put the article out and see if that’s interesting to people before I went through the effort.

What about auth?

Oh, I didn’t handle the auth case. That’s because auth happens at the HTTP level, not at the application level. HTTP BASIC + SSL or Digest should be just fine.

But, but, but… I didn’t get any verbs! Or URLS!

I know. Fielding:

A REST API should spend almost all of its descriptive effort in defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types. Any effort spent describing what methods to use on what URIs of interest should be entirely defined within the scope of the processing rules for a media type (and, in most cases, already defined by existing media types). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]

As well as

A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. [Failure here implies that clients are assuming a resource structure due to out-of band information, such as a domain-specific standard, which is the data-oriented equivalent to RPC’s functional coupling].

And

A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]

Soooooooooo yeah.

Further Exploration

Sources Cited

For more on why media types are awesome, check Programming the Media Type.

Terms Used

None really at the moment! This article stands alone.

Marx, anarchism, and web standards

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

An aside for software devs

You might not care about anarchism, and I can almost guarantee that you don’t care about Marx, but please bear with me. I think my point is best made by putting the web stuff at the end, so please, just read it. ;) It’ll be good for you, I swear. I’ll explain better at the end.

Domain Specific Languages and information density

I’ve been noticing an effect lately that’s certainly not new; it’s just come up frequently. When working within a domain that’s new to them, most people tend to not respect the density of the information being given to them, and it causes them to draw incorrect inferences.

For example, this tweet earlier:

Does anybody else’s head explode when they read an “unless” statement? What good is readability if comprehension goes out the window?

— Christopher Deutsch (@cdeutsch) December 15, 2011

And this response:

@cdeutsch There are weirder idioms. @users.collect{|u| u.email} vs @users.collect(&:email) :) That should weird you out more.

— Brian P. Hogan (@bphogan) December 15, 2011

Now, I’m not saying that Christopher is in the wrong here, in fact, he agrees with what I’m about to say:

@philcrissman @bphogan I’m sure I’ll get used to the “unless” pattern someday. But from a Ruby outsiders perspective it’s hard to comprehend

— Christopher Deutsch (@cdeutsch) December 15, 2011

From someone new to Ruby, Symbol#to_proc or unless are hard to understand initially, and that’s because they’ve increased the density of information being conveyed. unless is the same as if not and &:foo is the same as {|a| a.foo }. Both of these constructs condense something more complicated into something that is simpler, but denser.

You’ll note that I said ‘simpler,’ but by a certain measure, &:foo is actually more complex. When I say &:foo is simpler, I’m meaning for someone who’s well versed in Ruby, functional programming, or first-class functions. I have this exact background, and so for me, collection.map &:foo is simpler and more readable than collection.map {|a| a.foo }. When I read the first example, I say in my head “Map foo over the collection.” You have to grok what map really is to get that sentence or the corresponding code. Whereas what (I imagine) someone who does not have this kind of background thinks when they see the second example is “Okay, so map is like an each, and for each thing in the collection, we’re going to call foo on it.” This is a totally valid interpretation, but notice how much longer it is, and how much more involved in the details it is. That’s cool, but to someone who groks map, it has a much larger amount of mental overhead, in the same way that my concise explanation causes much more thinking for someone who doesn’t grok it.

This happens often in education. DHH made a comment about this recently that illustrates this principle, and he couches it in terms of “learnability” vs. “readability”:

If you optimize a framework for beginners, you’re optimizing for learnability. That’s great for the first few days or even weeks of learning. But once you’re past that, it’s not so great. What you care more about is the usability of the thing once you know it. There are plenty of cases where learnability and usability are in conflict. Letting learnability win is a short-term relief.If you on the other hand optimize for usability, for making things simple and easy to use for someone who understands the basics, you’ll often end up with something that has great learnability as well. Maybe not as much as could be achieved as if that was your only goal, but plenty still.

I think that ‘learnability’ is a pretty good shortening for ‘light density’ and ‘usability’ is decent for ‘heavy density.’ It’s the same effect, though. For the rest of this essay, I’ll be using ‘learnable’ and ‘usable’ to mean this particular usage.

Any time you encounter experts in a particular domain, they’ll often have fairly specific language that corresponds to that domain. This language is usually designed to be usable, not learnable. This is because they’ve already done the learning; learnability holds no utility for them. However, usability is incredibly… useful. To them. They’re working at a higher level of abstraction, and don’t want to get bogged down in details they already know well. Using learnable language would cause them to take twice as long to say things; to return to the density analogy, dense information is transferred from one person to another more quickly. If you can read a sentence a second, but that sentence is dense, you acquire much more information per second than if it was lighter.

This tendency means that most language that’s specific to a domain will generally trend towards the usable at the expense of the learnable. The impact this has on individuals new to the domain, however, is that of a wall. An impediment. Overcoming this obstacle requires a bit of good faith on the part of the beginner; to cross quickly over the chasm between beginner and expert, they must recognize and respect this aspect of the conversations they will invariably become a part of. When faced with a term that is used in a strange way, beginners should ask for clarification, and not start arguments over semantics they don’t yet even understand. Experts will recognize these arguments as coming from a place where concepts are not yet fully understood, and while they may recognize the need to help educate, if the newbie is being belligerent, they may just ignore them instead. Nobody wins; the signal/noise ratio has been decreased, the beginner doesn’t learn, and everyone’s time is wasted.

Here’s three other situations where I’ve seen this happen lately:

Marx and the labor theory of value

Philosophy writing is generally a great example of text that is very much usable, and not at all learnable. Some writers can still be learnable, but most are not, in my experience. One of the reasons this happens is that they introduce concepts early in a text and then utilize them later without referring back to the earlier definition. This isn’t a problem for anyone who’s thinking about taking off the training wheels or anyone who reads the entire text. The danger comes in when someone not versed in the entire text attempts to take portions of it out of its context.

Consider Marx, and Capital. The meaning of ‘value’ is a central concern of his writing, and indeed, entire critique of the political economy. It’s so important that the first few chapters are devoted to an (excruciatingly, frankly) detailed explanation of his thoughts on the true meaning of value. The rest of Capital is built on top of this: at least in my understanding of Marx, it all boils back down to that one question. And when having discussions between people who are devotees of Marx and those who come from other schools of economics, this kind of language gets in the way.

It also causes ideas to be misrepresented: the first time I was ever introduced to the labor theory of value, it was by a close friend who’s very libertarian. This was a few years ago, so it’s an obvious paraphrase, but he summarized it thusly: “Yeah, I mean, the labor theory of value basically says that people should be paid for however much work they put into things, so if I take six hours to make a widget and you take four, the price of a widget from you should be six yet mine should only be four, and ideas like ‘market value’ should be disregarded. It’s totally irrelevant if I suck at making widgets, I should get paid more than you anyway.” Which, to put it lightly, is a misrepresentation. While explaining the labor theory of value is outside of the scope of this post, what I will say is that to Marx, ‘value’ is something intrinsic to an object; it’s the ‘socially necessary abstract labor’ inherent to it. Talk about dense language! What a capitalist would call ‘value,’ a Marxist would call ‘price.’

As you can see, even just one little word, ‘value,’ can be quite dense! Can you imagine a discussion intended to be ‘learnable’ to outsiders about what’s meant? Imagine the expansion: ‘value’ -> ‘socially necessary abstract labor’ -> … Marx is already long enough; Capital would be thousands of pages! Yet to a beginner who flips to Chapter 12, they’ll read a sentence that contains ‘value’ and draw poor conclusions! They wouldn’t even realize they’re making a mistake, I mean, how could five letters be misinterpreted?

Furthermore, people who haven’t read Marx don’t generally draw distinctions between his critique of capitalism and his solution: communism. This is annoying when trying to explain to people that I love his critique, but am critical of his answers to its problems; they perceive this weakness in his answer as a weakness in his description of the problem. Furthermore, they then say “but I thought you call yourself a communist?” and I respond with “sure; the issues I have are with the dictatorship of the proletariat, not with the general idea of communism” and then their eyes glaze over and they change the subject. Information density claims another victim…

Oh, and a great example of Marxist economics in a usable form is here.

Anarchism and ‘anarcho’-capitalists

Arguments often boil down to these kinds of questions of definition, but one place where I see it happen almost constantly is amongst anarchists. I mean, from the outset, anarchists have to battle against the general definition of ‘chaos and disorder’ versus the domain-specific ‘without rulers.’ Within that, ‘rulers’ in anarchism is fraught with the same sort of questions that ‘value’ has for Marx. The prime example of this are the terribly misguided ‘anarcho’-capitalists, better described as ‘voluntaryists.’

Here’s the deal: ancaps lack an understanding of the vast majority of historical anarchist thought, and so try to appropriate the term ‘anarchism’ to describe their philosophy which is decidedly not anarchist. The ones who do have started using ‘voluntaryist’ to describe themselves, which is a great example of using information density to mislead, but that’s a whole separate rant. Here’s the 411, from the Anarchist FAQ, which has its own things to say about density when it comes to the language specific to political theory discussions:

“Anarcho”-capitalists claim to be anarchists because they say that they oppose government. As noted in the last section, they use a dictionary definition of anarchism. However, this fails to appreciate that anarchism is a political theory. As dictionaries are rarely politically sophisticated things, this means that they fail to recognise that anarchism is more than just opposition to government, it is also marked a opposition to capitalism (i.e. exploitation and private property). Thus, opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist – you also need to be opposed to exploitation and capitalist private property. As “anarcho”-capitalists do not consider interest, rent and profits (i.e. capitalism) to be exploitative nor oppose capitalist property rights, they are not anarchists.Part of the problem is that Marxists, like many academics, also tend to assert that anarchists are simply against the state. It is significant that both Marxists and “anarcho”-capitalists tend to define anarchism as purely opposition to government. This is no co-incidence, as both seek to exclude anarchism from its place in the wider socialist movement. This makes perfect sense from the Marxist perspective as it allows them to present their ideology as the only serious anti-capitalist one around (not to mention associating anarchism with “anarcho”-capitalism is an excellent way of discrediting our ideas in the wider radical movement). It should go without saying that this is an obvious and serious misrepresentation of the anarchist position as even a superficial glance at anarchist theory and history shows that no anarchist limited their critique of society simply at the state. So while academics and Marxists seem aware of the anarchist opposition to the state, they usually fail to grasp the anarchist critique applies to all other authoritarian social institutions and how it fits into the overall anarchist analysis and struggle. They seem to think the anarchist condemnation of capitalist private property, patriarchy and so forth are somehow superfluous additions rather than a logical position which reflects the core of anarchism.

Part of the problem with the second half of this quote is that I’m such an ‘expert’ on this kind of language that I don’t even know if it’ll make sense to you; without the kind of background reading in socialist political philosophies, it might just be gibberish. At least, the first paragraph should be pretty straightforward, and you can take the second as an example of this kind of language.

Giving you a short explanation of why anarchists are against Capitalism is a great example in and of itself of domain specific language and density. Here:

Property is theft.

This is a quote by Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist. Let’s unpack the first few layers of this statement:

Property. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by individuals or a business entity. Private property emerged as the dominant form of property in the means of production and land during the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century, displacing feudal property, guilds, cottage industry and craft production, which were based on ownership of the tools for production by individual laborers or guilds of craftspeople.Marxists and socialists distinguish between “private property” and “personal property”, defining the former as the means of production in reference to private enterprise based on socialized production and wage labor; and the latter as consumer goods or goods produced by an individual.

Whew! There’s a few things to note here: Captialists like to pretend that capitalism is synonymous with ‘trade,’ and not something that started in the 1800s. Likewise, that private property rights are something that has always existed. However, as this alludes to, there are many different kinds of property rights that have existed at different places and times.

So in ‘property is theft,’ Proudhon is referring to private ownership of the ‘means of production.’ Let’s expand that. Again, Wikipedia:

Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour (tools, factories, infrastructure, etc.) and subjects of labour (natural resources and raw materials). People operate on the subjects of labour, using the instruments of labour, to create a product; or, stated another way, labour acting on the means of production creates a product. When used in the broad sense, the “means of production” includes the “means of distribution” which includes stores, banks, and railroads. The term can be simply and picturesquely described in an agrarian society as the soil and the shovel; in an industrial society, the mines and the factories.

We could continue to discuss how to distinguish between this ‘private property’ and ‘possessions,’ which anarchists are not against, but I’m just trying to demonstrate that this word ‘property’ is incredibly complex.

Okay, so Proudhon claims that ‘owning the physical inputs used in factories used to produce wealth is theft.’ I could expand on ‘theft,’ but really, I think my point about density is made. For more on this, see Why are anarchists against private property?.

Web standards

Web standards are another great example of a domain that has a lot of very specific language. And one that people often think they can grab random chunks out of and quote without fully understanding the rest of the context.

This is going on right now with Rails. There’s a discussion about if the PATCH HTTP verb should get support, and if it should be the verb that matches to the update action or not. It’s ended up in a discussion about the semantics of PUT, which has resulted in a lot of random quoting of standards documents by myself and others. Here’s some running commentary on some of the comments. It’s impossible to do this without it becoming semi-personal, so let me just say upfront that I think everyone is participating honestly in this discussion, but I think it’s a great example of people who aren’t familiar with a domain jumping in and drawing incorrect conclusions.

First up, benatkin comments:

I googled for HTTP verbs and clicked the first result and PATCH isn’t listed.http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.htmlWhere is it?

Anyone participating in a discussion about PATCH should be reasonably familiar with PATCH. Learning where PATCH is defined is as simple as Googling HTTP PATCH, which shows it being defined in RFC 5879. With that said, this is a good example of asking for clarification, and not immediately progressing into an argumentatitive “It’s not in HTTP 1.1, so it’s bullshit!” style of learning where PATCH is being defined.

Of course, the thread starts to dissolve later, when @stevegraham mentions:

i must be the only person in the world that disagrees with “PUT requires a complete replacement”, as per RFC2616 “HTTP/1.1 does not define how a PUT method affects the state of an origin server”

Now, Steve is an awesome guy, but he’s a bit misguided in this case. This is a great example of drawing an incorrect conclusion based on one sentence out of context. He’s not wrong in a strict sense, RFC2616 does contain that line. However, this is because HTTP defines the semantics of communication, and the semantics are ‘idempotent creation or replacement.’ The fact that HTTP does not define how PUT affects state is irrelevant, an entire representation is needed for idempotency reasons. PUT’s definition also says pretty clearly:

The PUT method requests that the enclosed entity be stored under the supplied Request-URI. If the Request-URI refers to an already existing resource, the enclosed entity SHOULD be considered as a modified version of the one residing on the origin server. If the Request-URI does not point to an existing resource, and that URI is capable of being defined as a new resource by the requesting user agent, the origin server can create the resource with that URI.

“The enclosed entity be stored” is pretty straightforward: it needs an entity, not a portion of an entity. Furthermore, how is a server going to create a resource without a complete representation if the resource didn’t already exist?

In this case, the standard’s organization also doesn’t help: if you just read the section titled PUT, you wouldn’t get the full understanding, since the fact that it’s safe and idempotent is mentioned above in the section regarding those two things. I’m not sure why those aspects aren’t in each definition, and are in a different section above, but the point is that you need to consider the full document in its entirety to understand the semantics of PUT. Steve is only reading one section and then extrapolating from there.

There’s a lot more in that pull request, but one more example: Konstantin points out that Rails supports a lot of things that aren’t standards:

You mean Rails should not support proposed standards like, say, Cookies?

Yep. Did you know that? Cookies aren’t actually a standard, just a proposed one.

Anyway, I also want to say this: I am not a perfect interpreter of these things either. I often change my opinions after learning more things, and I think this is a good thing. There’s nothing the matter with being wrong; it’s how you handle it that matters. The discussion in this thread continues. RFCs are also not perfect, and do have wiggle-room; but it’s important that agreements are followed. Amongst people who discuss REST and HTTP, the fact that PUT requires a full representation is not controversial; it’s simply understood as true.

It’s good for you!

I don’t want to turn anyone off from learning new things; exploring new domains is a great path towards personal growth. I’ve said a few times that I think more programmers should read Marx, and it’s because I think this experience of jumping into the deep end of a new set of language that you don’t fully understand is a tremendous educational experience. But to truly learn, an open mind and open ears are crucial. Making arguments on semantics doesn’t work if you don’t understand the context and semantics of words, as words change significantly when placed in different surroundings.

A few notes on Foucault

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve almost always been in a habit of reading. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time in the library. I’d just grab an entire series of novels, and read them all, right in a row. Sometimes I’d end up reading non-fiction too. I ended up with a lot of books on software.

Then my local library got Internet access. Slowly, I started to spend less time in the stacks and more in front of a terminal. This wasn’t a bad thing; I still kept reading. What’s more, what was previously a one way street turned into two: I didn’t just read the Internet, I wrote it. I spent hours and hours discussing the things I’d read with others.

In any case, as the years flew by, the things that I’ve been reading have become less and less substantial. Current events are fine and all, and pictures of cute cats are nice, but I feel like the volume of what I’ve been reading has gone up, but the quality has gone down. It happens. I can’t really be snide about not owning a TV while being subscribed to /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu. Reddit somehow has morphed into a place where you can feel superior, but it’s really just the same exact thing in different clothing. Combine this general unease with my aspirations for grad school in the fall, as well as my renewed interest in political philosophy, and my need to hit the books has become readily apparent.

Luckily, I have an ally in this quest, and Jamie has given me a reading list. Since reading and writing are two sides of a single coin, I’ll be writing about the things that I read here. Like many other things I’ve written about in the past, I’m sure that putting my thoughts down on paper (?) will help to gel my understanding and thoughts. First up: Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish.”

I’ll get right to it: I really enjoyed reading this book. It’s partially because it took a lot of random things that I kind of knew and tied them to some experiences that I’ve had in a meaningful way. It’s also partially because I have a substantial infatuation with the conspiratorial; I re-read “1984” every year, and I often think about its all-knowing, all-seeing telescreen imagery when discussing anything vaguely political. “Discipline and Punish” gave me the same sort of images, but they were fewer, and more firmly rooted in history and reality. The book opens with a section named “Torture,” and the scene of Robert-François Damiens’ punishments for attempted regicide. I’m sure that before the release of “Saw,” these images were even more shocking:

… he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burningwax weighing two pounds’; then, ’in the said cart, to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax, and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, and his ashes thrown to the winds.

Let it never be said that the people of 1757 were not thorough. Regardless, by January of 1840, we’d transitioned to a prison system that looks pretty much the same as it does now. The book’s primary theme is discussing how we got from point A to point B, and then examining the ‘why’ to explain how modern society has a new sovereign institution: the ‘carceral system.’

Before we can examine that question, though, we need to ask why we used torture as a form of punishment in the first place. The reasoning is actually straightforward: during the period of monarchy, everything revolves around the monarch. He is sovereign in a more absolute way than we even initially think of; the pop-culture image of a king has more to do with something of a popularity contest or that he’s simply the guy on the top of the pyramid, but the nature of a monarch’s power runs more deeply than that. It was called ‘divine right’ for a reason, the physical body of the sovereign was the representation of God himself, and since the entire world belongs to God, thus it belongs to and is a part of the monarch. It reminds me of the kind of doublethink necessary to grasp the Catholic conception of the Holy Trinity, in this case God the Father, the king his son, and the world rather than a Holy Ghost. All one, yet three at the same time. In any case, if the land itself is the literal body of the king, then any transgression is an act of defiance not only of the rule of the monarch, but is making war upon God himself. And since damage has been done to the body of God, so must an equivalent exchange be made with the body of the aggressor. Torture also has an element of the theatrical to it, and therefore demonstrates to all of those watching that they must also comply with the rule of law or face the consequences.

However, eventually, torture became socially inconvenient. Basically, it was a case of the Streisand Effect: when you place that much attention on someone, you create a forum for sympathizers to create romantic images of their fallen hero. There’s a great historical example of this in the Christian mythos: consider the polarizing effect that Christ’s torture on the cross maintains to this day. History is littered with the songs of fallen heros, and a call to follow in their stead. Eventually, whenever a new convict was to be strung up at a gallows, there’d be a state of disarray. Foucault describes several images of rioters throwing stones and even in some cases killing the executioner.

As a result of this, the nature of punishment slowly changed. Reformists argued that punishment was metered out unevenly, and inconsistently. Thus in the same way that monarchy gave way to democracy, the absolute right of the king to punish became distributed as well. However, centralized and distributed systems are quite different, and require different constructs to operate properly. Therefore, a distributed form of the right to punish would need some mechanism by which to operate. This mechanism is termed “discipline” by Foucault. Discipline creates a certain order all by itself, and he uses a great example of monks and monasteries to illustrate the concept of discipline. Think about all of these things that we consider virtuous:

Studying is a disciplined form of reading
Dieting is discipline applied to eating
The image of a soldier is almost entirely one of discipline
Morality is discipline applied to all of life
Exercise is disciplined form of the body

But discipline has even greater roots in our society. Think about Taylor’s Scientific Management, for example: it’s a means of imposing discipline on workers to maximize their production. Schooling is a way of giving children a ‘structured environment’ (structure seems to be synonymous with discipline in many cases) to develop in. Churches are places for the soul to become disciplined.

Submitting to discipline has deeper psychological effects as well. It creates the idea of a division: there’s those who follow the rules, and those that disregard them. And since we’ve established that those who follow the rules are virtuous, those who don’t must not be. Since those that don’t follow the rules are doing bad things, they should be subject to punishment, so that they can remain disciplined. And thus the system of rules can be used as the distributed form of this right to punish, replacing the absolute right of the monarch. Submitting to this mentality makes people into ‘docile bodies’ that perfectly fit into this worldview.

As an example of how far this disciplinary approach has gone, Foucault presents the Panopticon, which was a prison shaped like a pie, with a tower in the middle. Prisoners would be able to observe others directly across from themselves, and the guard who may or may not be in the tower would be able to watch all of the prisoners at once. Since you couldn’t tell if the guard was in the tower or not, discipline would become internalized, since you always had to assume that Big Brother is watching you… This way of thinking about society ends up creating an all-encompassing ‘carceral system’ that we now live in.

It’s also important to note that this carceral system is total and absolutely permeating every aspect of society, yet they aren’t presented as such. Foucault specifically mentions that it’s important to consider that the delinquent are still a part of the system, and not outside of it. Yet we’re constantly presented with images that serve to present the idea that there’s a ‘criminal underworld,’ that those who lead a life of crime are part of a shadowy alternate universe. Foucault refers to this idea as ‘enclosure’: “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected space of disciplinary monotony.” The enclosure embodies this separation, since there’s a space both within and outside of the enclosure. A self and an Other.

… so yeah. That’s my summary. I’m still digesting a lot of this stuff, and so I may have more to say about it later.