Okay so this post will encompass two previous draft posts because I noticed that after I began a third post with a rant about a negative experience I recently had with an app and when I started to write the post, this post, I realized that the other two incomplete posts in my notes were cluttering up my hagenart post notes and interfering with the flow of my diatribe about Linearity, the people who purchased Vectornator, the company that made an app that I purchased but who somehow also owned what I had already purchased and decided that I hadn’t purchased it but I would be able to use it for free if I created a linearity account and used their cloud.
But instead of deleting the other incomplete posts it occurred to me that I didn’t want to delete them and hey they kind of dovetailed with the flow of the diatribe against linearity, which is a German company if you get my drift. So, in a masterstroke of laziness and sloppy writing I have combined all three posts into one post.
part one, the app:
I’ve been using a drawing app on my iPad for a long time, months and years. It was called Vectornator and I did not ever unreservedly love it because they did a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles type updating, possibly because they knew they might be purchased or wanted to get purchased but in any case and but for whatever reasons they did get purchased by Linearity, who originally didn’t do anything with the app but install an orange background on the icon and rename it Linearity.
It’s interesting to note at this point that it is now the nature of software purchases to never be final. I’m saying this because if I had purchased a rake or a TV I could theoretically have just used it and wouldn’t care what the company I bought it from was doing with their time. But when you buy an app you have to keep dealing with all the updates by the publisher. You could be perfectly happy with what you bought, but the company is not happy with the deal, oh no. Because you’re just you, just one consumer, and they don’t want one consumer, they want a lot, so too bad for you, you shouldn’t have bought the app before they improved it.
So I had to keep dealing with Vectornator updates. Then it got worse, and after renaming the app and painting it orange, Linearity made the app free. The app that I bought a copy of for money. Then they forced me to create a linearity account before I could open the app and get to the drawing files that I’d been working on for months and years, and then they forced me to migrate all those files from my device to their cloud- because it’s better for me, right? I can work on multiple devices. But here’s the thing, I don’t want to work on the cloud. The cloud is slow and unresponsive with vector files with lots of shapes and layers. It’s better to work on the device and move files to the cloud sometimes, when I need to move them. The cloud still sucks sometimes.
The real reason Linearity forced the move to the cloud is that they have control over the files that way. My files become their files. Like Amazon and their super creepy kindle business practices. They don’t want to make money by providing value to consumers, they want to make money by controlling consumer choices, a la Microsoft.
At this stage of the post we need to stitch the anti-Linearity material with the corporate organization material. When I say stitch I mean paste into. Stitching implies some kind of effort.
Automation will start from the top
It’s always robots in the movies though, isn’t it?
Don’t believe it, that’s the vision of the future that the studio execs daydream about, along with their CEO friends. They dream about replacing all the weak, irritating, disobedient, complaining and disrespectful human workers with a host of compliant, psychologically healthy robots that will receive orders at light speed and complete any task with perfect execution seconds later, while the human workers nap at their desk.
But it’s turning out that those menial tasks the robots will perform take a lot more mental processing than anybody thought. Programming a robot to clean a bathroom seems to involve hellishly complicated algorithms beyond the capacity of current technology. It’s the simple physical tasks that everyone takes for granted that are turning out to be the toughest to program. Oh we’ve definitely worked out assembly line robotics, where the environment is completely controlled and mechanized and there are no surprises. We can send drones flying in the sky where the environment is basically air. We’ve made some limited advances with self driving cars, on streets and roads, artificial environments that we try to control as much as possible. But to navigate the chaotic human daily environment, sometimes semi-controlled and sometimes not, it seems like you need a human brain, with the underrated ability to navigate around disorganized places and manipulate irregular objects and communicate with irregular and disorganized other humans. The robot worker army is a long ways away.
But the bodiless bots, with no physical senses or mechanisms are a different story. We call them AIs because it sounds cool, and it turns out that they can do accounting, predict stock prices, even diagnose illnesses. They can remember every legal precedent, design optimized computer code, even churn out advertising copy and idiotic news headlines. In other words, they can perform all the tasks that we associate with the educated and higher income echelons of society. White collar jobs and professionals. Jobs with no or little element in physical reality. Maybe that explains the stern warnings about AI that we hear from CEOs, another incredibly replaceable job title. I’ve read some of the more prominent warning messages by the most prominent CEOs and other Rich people, and the text of those public warnings were so vapid and without any identifiable logic that I suspected they’d been composed by AI.
And when I suggest that an AI could do a CEO’s job, I’m being over-polite. A well balanced coin could perform 80 percent of a CEO’s job, and an additional 80 percent of the remainder of the job could be performed by… Air, basically. I mean, seriously, I don’t think we really need CEOs. They’re basically just tournament winners.
That’s right, corporations are a tournament, a competition, not a real “organizational structure.” If you observe the structure of machines or living organisms, you see a structure based on function, not status levels. Status levels are how you organize a tournament. Perhaps that’s the real reason the CEOs fear the AIs. They fear the change to organic, functionally based structures that AIs might cause. The janitors aren’t going anywhere. The bosses don’t want to lose their trophy jobs.
Okay here’s part 3, the original post about Aethelred the Unready
Great name. A real name, actually, of a real person, a King of Wessex who lost his kingdom to Viking invaders. I’ve been reading about Aethelred and feeling his pain and his failure and fear.
Winston Churchill despised him as an idiot, but it seems to me that he might have not been an idiot and just had a lot of strong willed idiots around him who convinced him they knew what they were doing. Or maybe he really believed they knew what they were doing, or maybe he just wanted to keep them happy. He became king of Wessex after some political shenanigans, after some different groups tried to make different sons of the previous king the new king and the people who made him king won because they managed to poison his brother or his brother suddenly died. But they probably poisoned him. Apparently people suddenly dropped dead back then so often that politicians could get away with poisoning their rivals and no one could prove anything. And apparently the Kings, who were just basically gang leaders, had a lot of kids by multiple women and you never knew which kid would end up being the next King because you never knew who might be hanging around the treasury when the incumbent dropped dead for no reason or because of poison or a stab wound or an infection from an old stab wound and when he died from whatever the attendants would loot the corpse and his kids would get on horses and ride to the treasury with their swords drawn, and the earls and counts and barons and bishops would take an inventory of all the poisons in their castles and start sending out dinner invitations to all the old king’s kids and choose sides and send gangs of soldiers on horses to deliver the invites in an unrefusable format and in 978 the earls and bishops holding Aethelred and his brother King Edward decided that Aethelred would be the king now and that King Edward would be Edward the Martyr.
Curiously, Aethelred’s main counselor was a religious reformer named Aethelwold. And at this point, since we’ve referred to two people with an identical first name prefix, we can from now on refer to Aethelred as Ared and Aethelwold as Awold. Awold probably pushed a lot of semi-practical religious policies that might have been a bit of a distraction from the multiple Viking raids and invasions that Ared had to deal with. But Awold and his gang seemed to have pushed the idea that God was using the Viking raids to punish the saxons for being sinful, and so instead of military preparations, Ared needed to prioritize religious reform. This sounds wrong-headed and impractical if not delusional to me and probably you. I don’t believe in a God that encourages murder and plunder in order to get people to go to church. But some people do believe in that sort of God, even nowadays. And Ared lived in a time without airplanes and iPhones and vaccines, when people took religious wackos very seriously. So when Awold said the God sent the Vikings to punish the Saxons for their sins, Ared had no choice but to give him money for churches and celibate priests and dumb processions.
But it sounds like Ared may have welcomed all the silly religious distractions. He did not seem to be particularly keen on physical combat - it was a thing. People talked about it, probably, because there are apparently surviving manuscripts apologizing for Ared because he wouldn’t ride at the front of his armies and fight his enemies. He would try to pay off his enemies, and he would send other people to fight them, but apparently he was a scaredy cat and didn’t want to go fight people himself. I sympathize with him for being a scaredy cat and paying the Viking armies to not invade his kingdom. I think it’s reasonable to want to avoid getting stabbed. But he also sent other people to go fight and possibly get stabbed for him, and it’s difficult to sympathize with him after reading about that. I felt even less sympathy for Ared after reading about the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre. On that day in 1002, Ared ordered the death of all the Danish people in his kingdom, or maybe just the Danish men. It sounds like an awful thing to do, even if the Danes were occupying a lot of England as conquerors at the time. It was a complicated situation where there were Danish kingdoms in England, who were sometimes at war with Wessex, Ared’s kingdom, and sometimes at peace, and Danish people living in English kingdoms who may have been mercenaries and may have been families. And the mercenary Danes may have been working for Ared’s court.
Or maybe all the Danes really were jerks who were going to start attacking the Saxons anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me at all - I knew a lot of Danes, growing up in Utah.
Anyway, some of the massacre victims happened to be related, according to some accounts, to the King of Denmark, Sven Forkbeard. Big mistake on Ared’s part. Sven Forkbeard invaded England and Ared fled to his second wife’s relatives in Normandy, France. Then Sven died and the people of Wessex invited Ared back but in the recorded verbiage of their invitation they chose to include a pretty insulting reference to his previous job performance as a ruler, which Ared may have resented or maybe he promised to do better because he probably desperately wanted to leave Normandy. I like to imagine Ared as a personality like William H Macy’s character in Fargo, Jerry Lundergard, and I like to imagine his father in law, the Duke of Normandy, treated him like the father in law in Fargo treats Jerry; with an insulting lack of respect. I picture Ared pestering the Duke for an army just like Jerry begs Wade Gustafson for a loan, and all the time the Duke and his flunkies are thinking; “Hey, that’s actually a good idea, invading England. Let’s look into that. But not with that guy.” Duke Richard never got around to England, but his great grandson William must have heard about the idea fifty years later.
At this point, or more probably long before this point you have wondered what Aethelred the Unready has to do with automation and terrible apps. So now here’s the stitching together part that I should have done earlier: Aethelred was a terrible king and the people of his kingdom suffered because he was terrible. And there were lots of people who thought some other guy would make a better king. But it didn’t really occur to them that having a king at all was a terrible form of government. There are still people nowadays who really believe a monarchy is a better form of government than democracy. Do they think they’ll get to be the King?
So maybe just like democracy is better than a monarchy for government, there’s a better way to run companies that doesn’t occur to us. Maybe AI will eventually come up with something better than the hierarchy and the CEO.
Part 3, what does Linearity have to do with Aethelred and automation?
With Aethelred, we explored an incompetent king and asked why people thought kings were a good idea, and if maybe management is a bad idea too. With automation, we explored replacing people with AI, and we asked if maybe we should be replacing management with AI would be a good idea. With Linearity, we behold a rotten company, and we might if maybe the management was what made the company so rotten.
Software is a new kind of product- the awful people that run companies have been tolerated when they give us rakes or cars. But with software this kind of behavior will impact our most private lives. Maybe people will stop tolerating these kinds of companies if the products they provide can be jerked out of our hands and messed around with even after we buy them.
