Recently I’ve been writing about a pragmatic Communism.
Why would I bother with these odd arguments? There is no chance anyone in the world will ever implement a Communist system, so why do I bother writing about it?
What we do for a living influences how we look at the world. I've spent the last 22 years working as a software engineer, typically as CTO or team lead, so I've had to think about high level architecture a lot, and that style of thinking now influences how I think about politics.
Which is better, the architecture that Facebook had in 2004 or the architecture Facebook has in 2022? Well, the architecture in 2004 was simpler, but the architecture in 2022 can handle more people. Architecture lacks cardinality, so in fact there is no way to make a “better / worse” comparison between 2004 and 2022. (To be clear, the output has cardinality, but the architecture itself does not.)
Engineering is a discipline of tradeoffs. Facebook needed a simple architecture in 2004, so simplicity was the right choice in 2004. Facebook needs to handle vast scale in 2022, so the right choice in 2022 accepts much more complexity. Architectures are not good or bad in the abstract; the only relevant question is whether the architecture is correct for a given goal.
In software, I work with technologies that have been around for many years: Ruby, Python, Java, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Reddis, XML, JSON. But the technologies, in their platonic state, are not an architecture. I work to figure out what combinations work for a given goal. Often I advise the most common solution, which any consultant would advise for that client's situation. Occasionally I make an unusual recommendation. I once recommended MongoDB where many others would have recommended Kafka. The situation was unique in that the data was segmented in a way such that background tasks would always re-parse all data from the beginning, and therefore there was no need to track offsets and cursors, tracking where the process was at any given point. In other words, no need for Kafka. And Kafka is a pain to maintain, compared to MongoDB.
This style of thinking has shaped how I think about politics.
These last few years I've been worried about the health of democracy, both in the USA and all around the world. Many people are worried and many have suggestions for making things better. Some think of this mostly as a moral issue, and they rely on moral suasion to win over the authoritarians. That's fine. I'm glad there are activists who are out there, trying that tactic. I hope they succeed.
For my part, I've been thinking a lot about changes in the architecture of government which might make the victory of authoritarianism less likely. All the other essays on this Substack explore architectural tactics for strengthening democracy. If moral suasion is not enough to win over the authoritarians, we should have in mind a broad range of architectures for strengthening democracy.
And again, you might reasonably ask why should we want to do this? Why should we want to go to such extreme efforts merely to re-create much of what we already have? The answer: to eliminate vast concentrations of wealth in private hands. History shows us that a democratic society is typically a middle-class society, without great concentrations of wealth or poverty. So let's imagine a world with no more oligarchs, no more Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, no individual who concentrates in their hands enormous amounts of private property.
But I agree with everything that “formerlyashley” wrote in the tweets above. It’s important to remember the reality that we live in. If I am very lucky, then during my lifetime I might see one or two of these ideas implemented, but that might take 30 years, and sadly, most of the ideas I’ve explored on this Substack will never be implemented. And meanwhile, all of us need to try to find what happiness and comfort we can, living right now, in this world as it exists today.
But I write in the hope that maybe one day there will be a chance to implement one or two of these ideas, and hopefully they will make life better for everyone.
The world could be quite different one several centuries from now. For all we know, a system like this might be implemented even if more people haven't read this particular substack. Almost every website on the internet is devoted to the same capitalist/socialist paradigm, but there's a growing pluralist economic movement trying to integrate different economic theories and combine different perspectives. Complex systems are fragile and can't simply be changed by "burning them to the ground". Otherwise we'll just have another cycle of collapse, tyranny, and then back to capitalism like in the 20th century. That's why I believe that systems theory is a better basis for a new economy than Marxian conflict theory.