
Big Data and the Soviet Ghosts - mempko
http://mempko.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/big-data-and-the-soviet-ghosts/
======
mjn
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](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483)

~~~
rdtsc
> 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.,

I've always pointed this out in relation to large companies. They are not much
different than a dictatorship or a single party totalitarian system. It comes
full on with indoctrination into company culture, team building events.

Especially small towns where big factories used to pretty much own the towns,
provide trash collection services, etc. If the company fired you, you had to
pack up and leave. With countries, if you break rules they send you to a labor
camp (prison in US). You criticize the company on Twitter you get punished.

In theory one could say well if you don't like the company you just move. In
current economy not many have the option of giving their company the finger
and saying "fuck you" and I switching jobs. People are desperate are willing
to put up with extra hours without overtime, abuse and just to have a job.

~~~
bane
> Especially small towns where big factories used to pretty much own the towns

Don't forget the practice of providing pay in company scrip that could only be
spent in company provided stores.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip)

In countries with very wide reaching conglomerates, like Japan and South
Korea, I can almost predict a cyberpunk like future where you become a citizen
of a company and cradle to grave live out your life in that company. Eat feed
grown on company farms (farmed with company equipment), live in a company
apartment, drive company cars, wear company clothes, watch entertainment on
company TVs etc.

Samsung is an example of a company that I think has almost that kind of reach.
And to put it into perspective, Samsung has revenue about the same as the GDP
of Finland, Israel or Chile. And exceeds countries like Egypt, Pakistan, the
Philippines, and Vietnam.

~~~
guard-of-terra
You're too late to predict that. Employment is on the downslide, companies
care less about securing workforce supply and more about attracting talent and
cross-pollinating.

You could expect that 20 years ago, and to some extent it happened, but I
doubt it's the future.

------
Houshalter
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.

~~~
Spooky23
I think there's a valid comparison there, although I'm not sure the author
captured it. We're being collectively manipulated by all sorts of marketing
and propaganda campaigns.

Those manipulations cause us to make decisions not necessarily in our long-
term interest.

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rdtsc
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...](http://blog.fabric.ch/index.php?/archives/1886-Cybersyn-a-real-time-
computer-controlled-economy.html)

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.

~~~
bcoates
> would it be possible

Apparently computer controlled central planning is performed by linear
programming, so if you fix the information problem of knowing exactly what
products there are, and the inputs and outputs of all practical ways of making
them, the complexity is O(n^3.5) where n is the number of distinct goods.

I don't know if the economy is creating goods faster or slower than society's
capability to solve LP problems is increasing.

[http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-
optimiza...](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-
problem-solves-you/)

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MichaelMoser123
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](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.

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

------
Zigurd
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.

~~~
guard-of-terra
(Automated) Gosplan was after Stalinism actually.

