saving democracy from itself

The most intriguing chapter of The Eclipse of the Demos is on cybernetics. David Easton, drawing on the cybernetic systems theories of Norbert Wiener, thought of the polity as an “information processing system,” a kind of prototype of nudge economics in which social control embedded within a system which responds to feedback but only in service of hidden goals ultimately formed by a centralized bureaucratic authority. The problems with this should be obvious. For one, as Son argues, it is meant to “eliminate the independent judgement of members at the lower levels of the system and to concentrate decision-making powers at the top.” So, it kills democracy in order to save it from itself. It also doesn’t really work all that well, as we saw in Vietnam. Son enlists as evidence the example of Robert McNamara, who brought cybernetics to the Department of Defense—and grossly misunderstood the war he was fighting. Cybernetics requires quantifiable data to measure as input, and it can only capture reality in terms of that data. But the number of bridges you destroy don’t matter if troops ford rivers on foot. The number of armored transports destroyed doesn’t matter if people move things on their backs. And body counts don’t matter if your enemy is more existentially invested than you. “The problem of input distortion,” Son writes, “points beyond the problems of centralized decision-making and overblown faith in systems management. It compels us to confront another imperative to which systems science is susceptible: that everything, including human behavior, must be turned into measurable and predictable units of a grand information-processing system. To operate, systems science had to reinvent the human.”

Here.