Oddly Influenced

Welcome to oddly influenced, a podcast about how people have applied ideas from *outside* software *to* software. Bonus episode: Lord, preserve us from totalizing systems.

I’m going to finish up my discussion of David Graeber’s work with something of a rant. What I want to think about is why are software teams so often stuck in the logic of commercial exchange and hierarchy when most of us would be happier and just as productive working under the logic of continued exchange. (My terminology was defined in the previous episode.)

In addition to the books used in the last two episodes – /Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value/ and /Debt: the First 5000 years/, I’ll refer to Graeber’s final book (with David Wengrow), /The Dawn of Everything/.

Being social animals, cows are status-conscious – they tend to line up to be milked in status order, higher status cows tend to get the best grazing spots, and high status cows push lower-status cows around. Sometimes that’s literal, in that shoving or leaning is a way of reinforcing dominance, but a simple toss of the head is usually enough to remind another cow of who’s boss.

Much cow behavior can be explained by status. For example, cows have amazingly bendy necks and can almost look completely backwards. But only almost. They do have a blind spot, and if you approach a cow in her blind spot, she may lash out and put you in the hospital. (A cow’s kick is amazingly fast and powerful.) She kicks because she interprets you as a rival cow trying to sneak up and shove her before she’s set, thus stealing her status.

Uh, what? Really?

No, not really. It’s way more likely to have something to do with predators attacking the end of the cow that doesn’t have the horns. So, to let a cow know that she’s safe, you start where she can see you, put your hand on her, and slide on backwards into her blind spot, keeping your hand on her so she knows where you are.

Let’s replay that discussion with a different animal, humans. People, like cows, are status-conscious and therefore status-seeking. They prefer to be higher in the hierarchy. That explains a lot about human behavior:

* Why do people work hard? Because money is convertible into status.

* Why do rich people endow wings in art museums? Because it increases their status among their rich peers.

* Why do I listen to jazz even though the rest of my family can, at the very best, take it or leave it? (They only let me listen to the squeaky-squawky sort of jazz I like when they’re out of earshot.) I like jazz because I have twitter followers who also like jazz. If I tweet a link to a special performance, my status with them goes up. They see how cool I am.

* Why have I given money anonymously to charity for many years? Because I knew I could mention it someday in a podcast and thus gain status in my listeners’ eyes.

Uh, what? Really?

I think the charity-as-status-seeking and kicking-as-status-protecting hypotheses are equally ridiculous. And yet *lots* of people will accept that charity is not *really* altruistic, that it’s somehow about status or gaining quote “utility”. Utility is a quote “measure” of the pleasure we get from… having stuff, eating stuff, giving to charity. Pretty much anything we do voluntarily, some people will say we do it to gain utility.

What’s going on? Why are we more sensible about cattle than about people? Why do we give cattle more credit for complex motivations?

I’m going to answer with the idea of a “totalizing system”, which Ian Welsh has nicely described as quote “[a system] that reduces every part of society to one value or relationship”. I believe it’s a bug in human wetware that we seize on totalizing systems. Essentially, we insist that abstractions *are* reality.

We *say*, following George Box, that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” and then go right back to pretending that our dominant models are in fact not just useful but *correct*. I hope someday to talk about this more, following Paul Feyerabend’s book, /Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being/. For the moment, I’m just going to assume it.

I said in the last episode that the dominant economies in our society, and especially in business society, are commercial exchange and hierarchy. The latter is driven by status. The former is driven by the notion of humans as individualistic utility maximizers. Economics is the most influential social science – maybe the *only* influential social science. Graeber, who’s fond of taking potshots at it, describes its axiom as quote “We are unique individuals who have unlimited desires: since there is no natural cutoff point at which anyone will have enough power, or money, or pleasure, or material possessions, and since resources are scarce, this means we will always be in at least tacit competition.”

A fair-minded person might point to behavioral economics to say that mainstream economics is not so crudely reductionist. Since this is a rant, I’m not going to be fair-minded. Instead I’ll point to two things:

First, that people intellectually defending totalizing systems will always claim subtlety. But when they actually *use* the systems, the subtlety tends to drop away.

Second, whatever economists might say, the crude assumptions are what move into larger society, especially business society. As Keynes said, quote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

So, we’ve built a society around two totalizing systems: utility and status.

Now, that seems absurd: how can you have two *different* totalizing systems active at the same time? You can’t have two ideas, *each* of which explains everything.

That would be true if totalizing systems were systems of facts, either true or false, to be used in reasoning. But they’re not. They’re tools, applied whenever appropriate. If you need an explanation, whichever is most relevant is right there, ready to offer itself as the obvious and unassailable reason why whatever’s bugging you is *inevitable*, the way things are. No sense in fussing about it, kid, grow up.

And all of us, to some extent, are eager to “grow up” and defend any system we’re within as natural and even good, even if that system harms us. Psychologist John Jost calls this “system justification” and argues that, at root, it happens because of needs people have, like:

*certainty*: Accepting the enclosing system reduces uncertainty, and most people don’t like uncertainty. They often prefer an unpleasant answer to an open question. With an unpleasant answer, you get closure and can move on to dealing with “the devil you know.”

*safety*: it’s safer to go along with the enclosing system. As the saying goes, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. You may be a Black man unhappy with the system, but it’s certainly safer to stay home than to go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

*community*: the stories a system tells you let you know how you relate to other people, what the rules are. Not knowing is uncomfortable.

Different people differ in how eagerly they justify systems, but it’s probably useful to know that all of us lean toward justifying them, more than we would if we were arguing purely rationally.

At the end of last episode, I said the topic of this rant would be why what seems to happen so naturally in human societies – continued exchange – seems not to take hold at all strongly in our team’s mini-societies. What you just heard is my explanation. The system (or pair of totalizing systems) exists, partly because of human nature, but also partly through historical accident. System justification makes us reluctant to think about changing it, even at the level of the product team.

I could – maybe should – stop there. But I’m afflicted with that characteristically male disease of being unable to see a problem without offering a solution. So here goes.

It’s easy to find examples in the anthropological literature of societies that take specific actions – rituals, habits, customs, what have you – to counter problems that would otherwise result from dominance hierarchies or economic calculation.

Let’s look at status first.

The Ju/’hoansi (zhut-wasi) people have a practice of “insulting the meat”, in which a hunter who had a spectacular kill would find everyone insulting it: it was too scrawny, was barely worth the trouble of carrying back to camp, and so on. This was explained as follows to one anthropologist:

“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man – and thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this ... so we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

Although the quote mentions the role of chief, the Ju/’hoansi quite often don’t have anyone in that position. When they do, the role is fairly nominal. They’re just big on pushing back against the status instinct. In addition to insulting the meat, they have a number of other habits that act to keep hierarchy flat.

They, by the way, may be the longest continuously existing human culture.

In contrast, North American indigenous cultures did have the chief role, but in a way that most of us would consider odd. A chief had no power to compel anyone to do anything, so one achieved that high status through skill at oratory and persuasion. Graeber doesn’t say it explicitly, but part of that persuasion seems to have been through giving gifts. As a result, a village chief was often the poorest man in the village.

In other times, status was attached to power, but in peculiar ways. Among hunters of bison in North America, it was common for a particular group to have virtually dictatorial power during the planning and execution of the hunt. But, during the rest of the year, that power evaporated. (And the people made sure that next season’s power went to a different group. So if a group were unfair one year, they might be in trouble the next year.) In fact, it seems to have been *common* for societies to have completely different social structures at different times of the year. More about that later.

So much for status. Societies also deliberately pushed against utility maximization and economic calculation. Here’s an example, from Graeber’s description of Peter Freuchen’s /Book of the Eskimos/:

“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

“ ‘Up in our country we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.’

“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom.”

All of that is a bit inspiring. Humans have historically found workarounds for problems that we moderns tend to flail ineffectually against or numbly accept. The hopeful message of /The Dawn of Everything/ is that there are many, many examples of cultures that seem to have reduced the power of some people to make their fellow society members miserable. The book pushes back against the simplistic notion that hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, then we invented agriculture, and *boom* things went to hell and we got kings and states and mass warfare and oppression and all that, and that’s just the way it had to be from then on, everywhere, at every scale.

Note: Please don’t think I’m promoting the “noble savage” myth. Probably all societies have nasty parts. For example, the Natchez seem like fine people. But their Great Sun had absolute power over anyone near him, up to and including deciding he just didn’t like someone’s looks and so having him executed on the spot. (Unsurprisingly, not that many of his people were willing to be near him. Most made a point of living in rather distant villages.) And while the Wendat were famous for not spanking children, settling matters by calm, reasoned debate, and sometimes adopting captured warriors into their own tribe, they might also kill a captured warrior through slow, public, and highly theatrical torture where everyone – women and children included – would participate. While I grant that French executions at the same time were also horrific – I’ll be covering Foucault’s /Discipline and Punish/ someday – I just don’t think torture is a good look for any society, no matter what its other virtues.

Nor do I want to claim that human societies are *infinitely* malleable. I don’t know about other countries, but the USA has a *long* historical tradition of mini-societies being set up under the assumption that we’ll just decide that status or economic calculation or sexual competition shouldn’t influence human behavior – and then it won’t. They failed. The examples I gave above are not that. They are examples of hardnosed people *pushing back* against human nature, not assuming good intentions will make it go away.

My claim is that your team actually probably has more innate *ability* to change its social structure than you believe. But. Can /The Dawn of Everything/ say anything about the *mechanism*?

I read the book when it came out, but fortunately I highlighted it. Skimming those highlights, I get these ideas:

* A key point in the book is that a lot of pre-agricultural and semi-agricultural societies were cultures of abundance rather than scarcity. Nowadays, hunter-gatherer societies are relegated to fringe areas where agriculture can’t penetrate. Graeber and Wengrow claim that the opposite was true historically.

That is, hunter-gatherers lived in places where there was *lots* to hunt and lots to gather. (Wouldn’t you, back in the day when human population was light?) That’s why it took a long time - 3000 years in the Middle East – to get from the cultivation of wild cereals to their domestication. It wasn’t worth the bother. That is, 3000 years is way longer than it could have taken. Modern experiments suggest that you can domesticate cereals in a few decades, 200 years at the most. But domesticated cereals are a lot more work than their wild cousins. Suppose you live in a flood zone. You can do flood-retreat farming where you just scatter seed when the floodwaters recede, ignore the weeds, and harvest grain at the end. Easy peasy.

Alternately, you might establish what are essentially gardens with a mixture of plants, all jumbled up together. Grains likely wouldn’t be the most important of those plants. The most important might be spices or medicinal plants. And, given that calories from hunting and gathering were abundant, the grain part of cereals might be less important than the straw and chaff part: useful for making bricks, thatched roofs, and many other around-the-house purposes.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that agriculture took off when peoples were pushed into ecosystems that couldn’t support hunter-gatherers. They had no choice but to bet on agriculture and domestication.

* A second key point is the emphasis on seasonal variation in culture. I mentioned the two societies of Bison hunters. The same cultural split happened seemingly wherever parts of the year were radically more productive than others. Examples:

The Kwakiutl people of episode 12 broke apart into smaller clan formations during fishing season. And people took on different *names* during the different seasons. This is speculation on my part, but names were *really* important to the Kwakiutl. The famous potlatches were largely about fastening traditional names onto people. So changing your name for part of the year must have been a big deal.

The Inuit also behaved very differently in the winter and summer seasons. According to Graeber and Wengrow, they even had different laws and religions in the two different seasons.

This extended into Medieval Europe. About half of the Saints Days were all about turning the world upside down. For brief periods, servants could demand work from their masters, children bossed around adults, and so on. Moreover, such days could easily lead to peasant revolts. “Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside down’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.”

Their point is that people had the opportunity to *experience* different ways of “doing society.” That made it easier to conceive of change and to change. Which apparently people did a fair amount. There are examples of societies building what we might call cities, then seemingly deciding “screw this” and abandoning them. There are also examples of people deciding, “Naw, domestication isn’t for us.” For example, the people who built Stonehenge apparently gave up cultivation of cereals around that time, without any indication anything was forcing them to do that. Plausibly, they just preferred not to do the work.

* A third point is that peoples used to think culture belonged to them, not the reverse. They could consciously shape their culture. Graeber and Wengrow use the example of the Inuit, who encountered the technically superior snowshoes of the Athabascans and chose not to adopt them. “Inuit did not simply react with instinctual revulsion when they first encountered someone wearing snowshoes [...]. They reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be." The Amish near my home do the same thing today: they actively think about what a new technology would do to their society. So they allow telephones, but only in a “phone booth” outside the house. They travel on trains, but not in cars. These are conscious choices, arrived at by discussion, and not in any great hurry.

This seems depressing for team-led change. While we have way more stuff than our ancestors did, we live in a culture of scarcity, not abundance. We don’t practice social change, so we have trouble envisioning it. And we’re raised to believe culture controls us, not the reverse.

But at least Graeber and Wengrow do record that change is easier than we think, so there’s that. And I had one idea that might be feasible: travel.

Apparently, prior to the rise of the state, people travelled a lot more than they did afterwards. For example, when talking about how Native Americans generally belonged to particular clans, our authors say:

“The same basic repertoire of clan names could be found distributed more or less everywhere across [North America]. There were endless local differences, but there were also consistent alliances, so that it was possible for a traveller hailing from a Bear, or Wolf, or Hawk clan in what’s now Georgia to travel all the way to Ontario or Arizona and find someone obliged to host them at almost any point in between.”

Even today, some cultures are not parochial in the way we assume is natural.

“While modern Martu, for instance, might speak of themselves as if they were all descended from some common totemic ancestor, it turns out that primary biological kin actually make up less than 10 per cent of the total membership of any given residential group. Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool who do not share close genetic relationships, whose origins are scattered over very large territories, and who may not even have grown up speaking the same languages.”

They go on to say:

“It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. […] [Everywhere], humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150 odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by millions or perhaps billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties, sometimes they are not.”

I know that I’m like a broken record about Agile, but in the earlier days, there was an “imaginary structure” where a variety of teams mutually recognized themselves as all doing kind of the same thing. As Agile became domesticated by corporations and consultants, I remember some of us explicitly limited our ambitions to there just being enough actual Agile teams that we could work in the way we wanted, with people who thought and acted in ways congruent with us. It was like we were the Agile clan, where we could travel and “find someone obliged to host [us].”

It seems to me and some of the twitter people I asked that such travel is less possible than it used to be, *but* I have a cunning plan.

There used to be a tradition, maybe mostly in the Chicago USA area, of what were called “craftsmen swaps”. Two different teams, in two different companies, would swap one member for a week or so. Each would continue to be paid by their “home” company, but they would work in the other company’s team, picking up their ideas and practices. (To have a hope of working, this probably depends on collective code ownership and pair programming.)

In terms of /The Dawn of Everything/, this was like Saints’ Day festivals or the shift to fishing season society: a chance to actually try out something new. A way to experience – and thus imagine – change.

I think you all should revive this practice.

The explicit purpose of Graeber and Wengrow’s book is to break down our feeling of being trapped, by showing how many cultures lived differently than what we think is inevitable, and, arguably, with more *actual* freedom than we have. (They’re anarchists, remember.) And showing how societal change is actually something humans seem to be built to do, that change is not as daunting as it seems, that it can even be done in a playful, experimental way.

That said, it’s only fair for me to warn you that they’ve been accused of letting their goals run ahead of their scholarship. A lot of their reasoning is based on interpretations of archeological ruins (Wengrow is, by profession, an archeologist), and a lot of that evidence is disputed. (They acknowledge that but write that if they addressed all the arguments, their book would be three times as long and have little hope of influencing the discourse – this is very much a book targeted to a lay audience.)

And chapter 2 is a bizarre way to start the book. It’s a claim about the nature of the European Enlightenment that, at least by my reading, is not central to their argument. It’s the sort of extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence *and* they are not scholars of European history. Were I their editor, I would have advised them that they would be leading off with a likely bad first impression, and would be getting a lot of harsh reviews from historians rightly or wrongly upset about outsiders horning in on their turf.

That said, remember this podcast is about getting ideas, and /The Dawn of Everything/ is full of ideas. If you’re the sort of person who, like me, thrills to Heinz von Foerster’s motto, “Act always so as to increase the number of choices”, you’ll probably find the book rewarding.

Thank you for listening.