Big Data and the Soviet Ghosts

There's a lot of interesting ping-ponging back and forth in some of these technocratic / data-driven visions. Some parts of Soviet central planning were initially lifted almost directly from Western success stories of massively integrated industrial conglomerates, which had a data-driven central-planning ideology. Some of the late 19th-century / early 20th century American industrialists explicitly thought that the era of markets was over, because the messy, imperfect information transmission of the medieval bazaar would be finally replaced with scientific and statistical optimization of production, management, supply chains, etc., and the more centralized, the more scientific and efficient this process could be. This was a major argument against anti-trust legislation, that by breaking up the large trusts, America was only going to be sending itself backwards into an era of decentralized, uncoordinated, inefficient industrial production.

The Soviets pretty much agreed with the large trust owners on all these points, disagreeing only on some minor details, like ownership. There was even a vision among a certain kind of early 20th century communist (nowadays called "orthodox Marxists", somewhat derisively) that capitalism was a necessary phase whose virtue lay in developing and centralizing industrial production. The communist could just wait until the capitalists have succeeded in unifying the entire industrial sector into one large conglomerate, and then the only thing left to do for a communist revolution is knock off this one remaining capitalist, who at this point owns a giant company controlling all industrial production. Then you install the party at the top of this company, and voila, a socialist, central-planned, scientific industrial sector!

Then from the 1930s American management started looking at Soviet management techniques to see if they could borrow anything back in the other direction. There were even some Soviet experiments in what today we would call "gamification", which were very interesting to Western observers, and copied in various ways [1]. One way of reconciling things was to consider a model of companies being Soviet-style internally but capitalist externally: use hierarchies, internal non-monetary rewards, central optimization, etc., up to the boundaries of the company (which would ideally be very expansive boundaries), then compete past that. And I suppose now we're at the point where using data to optimize society, another old Soviet idea, is seeming intriguing to the West...

[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483

Everything about this is wrong. How can you compare early computer analysis by central planners in the Soviet Union to data mining employed by advertisers?

This paragraph takes the cake:

>Just as the centralized Soviet economy and computer systems produced gross absurdities in Soviet society, the centralization of information has produced vast obscurities in the lives of this generation. As demonstrated by luke warm reaction to the recent revelations about the NSA, to the Great Recession and the computerization of trade, to the perverse incentives Facebook and Twitter provide for exhibitionist behaviours, to the death march of consumerism despite the hard evidence that global warming will lead to a miserable existence for hundreds of millions of people within decades.

None of these sentence fragments have anything to do with each other. The author is so vague a reader can draw pretty much any conclusions they want from this article.

On the side of computer controlled economy, like what GosPlan had, there is also the Chilean computer planned economy system -- Cybersyn

http://blog.fabric.ch/index.php?/archives/1886-Cybersyn-a-re...

In general, assuming we've already given up our privacy and it is gone forever, Google+Government can read our thoughts, email, shopping patterns, knows our positions at all time, would it be possible to even create an optimized planned economy.

The East German dissident Wolf Biermann characterized late Soviet practices as Stalinism with computers - while under Stalin you would get a bullet hole in your head, in later Socialism you would get a hole in your punch card (to mark you as a politically unreliable)

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41843129.html

Now we all have our punch cards back ;-) I still wonder how it all came about: is it just as a preparation for possible future crisis ? are the rulers feeling really that insecure ? is it a real or an imaginary threat ? Isn't it that any power is always trying to extend its reach ? Many questions here.

Here is a British/US conspiracy version from the 1970's: http://www.syti.net/GB/SilentWeaponsGB.html

Caveat: The website in general has pretty "out there" ideas, and that I concluded from just the English versions (it is mostly French).

The author is on to something, but is too pessimistic. Big data is not a reprise of Gosplan. It is much better. It's the difference between Stalinism and the ability to optimize-out both the state and the 0.1%, and use all that capital and productivity in actual production. A kind of modern Bakunin-style economy.