The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson

Author:Niall Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

46

Into the Valley

Why did hierarchical power structures plunge into crisis in the 1970s? It might be assumed that, as Brzezinski believed, the answer to this question is technological. It is certainly true that the seventies were the decade of genesis for both the personal computer and the Internet. However, the crisis of hierarchical power predated the spread of electronic networking in the United States. Indeed, the causation was the other way around: it was precisely the relaxation of central control that made the American information technology revolution possible.

To all the world’s states, it is now clear, the new informational, commercial and social networks of the Internet Age pose a profound challenge, but the scale of that challenge only gradually became apparent. To begin with, the creation of network technologies was intended to enhance the national security state. The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be ‘centralized’, with one central hub and multiple spokes, ‘decentralized’, with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or ‘distributed’, like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was the most resilient, in that it could withstand the destruction of numerous nodes, and that was indeed Baran’s preferred model for what became the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).1 In practice, paradoxically, such a structure could have been maintained only through centralized planning. As Melvin Conway pointed out in 1968 – in a seminal paper entitled ‘How Do Committees Invent?’ – there was a kind of law about the way systems of communication were designed: ‘Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.’2 Just as Kissinger had seen at first hand the dysfunction of the government bureaucracy when confronted with major strategic challenges, Conway – a systems analyst with experience of government defence contracts – had observed that:

The structures of large systems tend to disintegrate during development, qualitatively more so than with small systems. This observation is strikingly evident when applied to the large military information systems of the last dozen years . . . some of the most complex objects devised by the mind of man . . .

Why do large systems disintegrate? The process seems to occur in three steps . . .

– First, the realization by the initial designers that the system will be large, together with certain pressures in their organization, make irresistible the temptation to assign too many people to a design effort.

– Second, application of the conventional wisdom of management to a large design organization causes its communication structure to disintegrate.

– Third, the homomorphism insures that the structure of the system will reflect the disintegration which has occurred in the design organization.3

It therefore mattered greatly that what became the Internet was not designed in that way, but rather

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.