1. economist.com/christmas-spec… This essay by @EconoScribe on technology, planned economies, markets and democracy is really very important. Instead of simply summarizing an existing debate, it organizes and pulls together the threads of a debate that urgently needs to get going.
2. This thread provides a modest follow-up, in the form of a linked bibliography to the various pieces mentioned in passing in the essay, for people who have an interest in these questions - this could also serve as the beginnings of a very interesting seminar course.
3. The article begins with a summary of Stafford Beer's Project Cybersyn, which sought to use cybernetics in Allende's Chile. It later cites @edenmedina book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries - amzn.to/2SEBE1C. See also Raul Espejo's essay - link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…
4. Jack Ma says “Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is the best system …the planned economy will become increasingly big ... with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market.” globaltimes.cn/content/105171…
5. Fritz Scharpf's classic essay on the difference between input and output legitimacy (in the context of the vast beast of bureaucratic pen-and-paper algorithms that is the EU) is available here - apps.eui.eu/Personal/Resea…
6. @harari_yuval Atlantic article arguing that technology may render democracy obsolete is available at theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… .
7. The literature on the socialist calculation debate is big and unsurprisingly heated. Here is one summary by John O'Neill - jstor.org/stable/2621710…. Hayek's classic article on the uses of knowledge in society is available at mx.nthu.edu.tw/~cshwang/cs-co…
8. Francis Spufford's book Red Plenty is as good a starting point as any for the current debate - amzn.to/2QaFCO7 . He describes what he was setting out to do here - crookedtimber.org/2012/06/11/res…. His essay Idols of the Marketplace is also worth reading- amzn.to/2MIo2yR
9. My and Cosma's chapter on democracy as a process of information processing is here - henryfarrell.net/wp/wp-content/…. A paper in progress with @dsallentess - henryfarrell.net/wp/wp-content/… - tries to build on the agenda with more specific ways of modeling institutional problem solving.
10. Herbert Simon's classic essay on organizations and markets, which sets out the metaphor of the telescope revealing social structures, and how much depends on organizations, is available at digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/knowvation/app….
11. @Leigh_Phillips and @michalrozworski book is The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism - it's at amzn.to/2rEMKZw. For a YouTube interview with @AaronBastani, also mentioned,
12. Rogier Creemers' essay on Cyberleninism in China is at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…. Cosma's classic essay on Red Plenty and the computational problems of socialist planning is at bactra.org/weblog/918.html. If @snaidunl has written up his more optimistic take, I'm not sure where.
13. But I'll take the opportunity to link to his piece with Hwang and Bowles on power and dynamics of institutional change, which complements the approach in the paper with Cosma and Danielle. And my short post on Seeing Like a Finite State Machine - crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/see….
14. @shoshanazuboff book on surveillance capitalism is at amzn.to/39zQ9tU. See also her shorter essay - newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2019/01/22/sur…. @evgenymorozov essay on Digital Socialism is at newleftreview.org/issues/II116/a…, and @TreborS lays out some of his ideas at rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/fil…
15. Also, very important and worth mentioning as an early take on these questions is @astradisastra The People's Platform - amzn.to/2ZzSmke and her more recent book on democracy - amzn.to/2F8htBr.
16. These three essays by @glenweyl radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/201… and radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/201… and radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/201… lay out where he is not (and to some extent where he is, or at least where he thinks he might be going).
17. Finally, Ludwig's essay refers to the need for a more pluralistic system that allows the discussion of whys and to what ends, rather than mere efficiency. This short piece by Cosma grimly and briefly speaks to the alternative - bactra.org/weblog/699.html
18. "vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies" (public or private)"
19. And this for coda, by Francis Spufford - crookedtimber.org/2012/06/14/res… "It’s a lot easier to build a radical movement on a story of tranformation, on the idea of the plan that makes another world possible, than it is on a story of finding out the partial good and building upon it."
20. " The legitimacy of the Soviet experiment, and of the ecosystem of less barbarous ideas that turned out to tacitly depend upon it, lay in the perception of a big, bright, adjacent, obtainable, obvious, morally-compelling other way of doing things. "
21. "Will people march if society inscribes upon its banners, ‘Watch out for the convexity constraints’? Will we gather in crowds if a speaker offers us all the utopia that isn’t NP-complete? Good luck with that. Good luck to all of us."
Addendum - a new piece by @glenweyl explaining the Radical Exchange approach - radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/201….
