TRASHFUTURE - Fire Sale at the Accountability Store feat. Dan Davies

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

For this week’s free episode, we’re joined by returning guest and author Dan Davies, whose recent book “The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind” inspired a discussion of bad AI getting used at the DWP, the post-1970s shareholder revolution, and an incident involving Dutch airport cargo handlers managing to somehow deliver a horrible fate to a box full of squirrels. We very much hope you enjoy.   Check out Dan’s book here: https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   *EDINBURGH LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're going to be live at Monkey Barrel comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 14, and you can get tickets here:  https://www.wegottickets.com/event/621432   *MILO ALERT* Buy Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ here! https://pensight.com/x/miloedwards/digital-item-5a616491-a89c-4ed2-a257-0adc30eedd6d   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome back to TF. It is your... It's the free one. ...free episode this week. It is Riley, it is November, it is Milo, it is Hussein for the first approximately half hour and we are rejoined by returning guest. It is former Bank of England economist turned noticer of things. Racheal Reeves, hi, welcome to the show. I've actually so tried to stop people saying former Bank of England economist. It was 30 years ago and my career was, I'll tell you how badly my career was doing, I was very nearly the regulator for prepaid

funerals in the UK. Oh man. I love the ads for prepaid funerals. I get them at the gym all the time because they have daytime TV on. What gym are you going to? The gym where you're making yourself more unhealthy. And I remember seeing these as a kid or like whatever, but they seem to be more of them now. And they now they they strike me more now because it's like, this is the cheapest cremation you can get. And then like suddenly you're looking at it and you're like, hang on, is that one of the spice

girls they've got doing this? I will tell you, I don't know whether this is like a prepaid funeral thing, but it was like related to like death. But my first crush when I was younger was the woman who did the girls have got doing this!" I'll tell you, I don't know whether this is a prepaid funeral thing, but it was related to like, death. But my first crush when I was younger was the woman who did the Scottish Widows ad. With the capes. With the capes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, in that vibe, you know. Dan, you should have been the regulator for the Scottish Widows lady. Which lady they can make the Scottish Widow. You folks will not know this, but that widow has got successively hotter with every single ad campaign they have done for the last... When I was the Sains age, she actually looked like a widow, but then she kind of started looking a bit Nigella, then she started looking a bit hotter than that, and now she's absolutely smoking widow.

Inflation comes for us all. They're gonna change the name to Scottish MILFS. We need, like, sort of quantitative easing of MILFs is the thing. Otherwise, I'm not competitive in this market unless we like have some kind of state intervention. You want a protectionist MILF. Yeah, absolutely. I want MILF tariffs, urgently. I would love it though to have understood like the marketing process.

What would that marketing presentation have been? It would have just been like Don Draperper comes in, writing down, hotter widow. Me in front of a whiteboard, yeah. Hotter milf. Listen, what if the Scottish widow was Lucy Pinder? Has anyone considered this? Kelly Brooke tragically widowed in like, Gretna. What if we got some of the Love Island bimbos involved with our insurance system... Bro, don't call them bimbos! This discussion is set in the 90s.

Yeah, I see, I see. A comic character of you in the 90s, yeah. It's funny also, every year the Hiscox cock gets much much longer. Yeah, and the fuckin' Lloyd's TSB horse gets like way hotter too. Huge naturals on the Lloyd's TSB horse. Churchill the dog is an XL boy. It is my pleasure to welcome Dan back to the show. We are not just here to talk to him about what's the sexiest insurance company, although

I'm sure we could fill an hour with that. Instead we are here to talk to him a little bit about his book, The Unaccountability Machine. ALICE But before we do that, the new, like, Women and the Admiral adverts in the Admiral's uniform, like, pretty good idea, I thought. Like, y'know? Maybe they're onto something with that. RILEY So we are gonna be talking about Dan's book, The Unaccountability Machine, which I think is a good history of how to think of the systems of government that everyone

seems to be clamoring to operate and give to their friends and how those are set up to, let's say, deflect a demand to ever do anything for anybody. Also, there's a story about how Schiphol airport fed about 600 or so imported squirrels into an industrial shredder and it was nobody's fault. ALICE Sometimes it happens! ALICE The fact that you specified imported squirrels, I know to justify their presence in the airport, but that made it sound like a much more valuable commodity. My, like,

prestige-imported squirrels. D.R. Time was. The squirrel on the ING insurance ad was not so sexy, but then they started importing these squirrels from overseas. L. Only Schiphol Airport can reduce 500 imported squirrels to a supe-like homogenate in under 30 seconds. D. That's right. But more importantly, only that airport was able to so brilliantly do a kind of cognitive dance that it was nobody's fault, but it was entirely inevitable that the squirrels were reduced to the same thing they make chicken nuggets out of.

Their press release is actually studied in business schools as a masterpiece of crisis PR. Jason and Jason Vickery laugh Yeah. Because it was just one of these things, like, nobody really goes into the airline business because they want to shred squirrels. You would presume not. Yeah. And what had happened is that the Dutch government had said all imported squirrels have to comply with biosecurity and have their paperwork, or they

will be sent back or euthanized at the expense of the imports. ALICE So, little squirrel fingerprints, or squirrel retinal scans. JUSTIN Yeah, and everyone thought, well, this is never actually gonna happen, it's more of a kind of threat to make sure everyone complies. But KLM, before it was then, thought, well, we'd better be able to buy some kind of animal, small animal disposal system. That went online.

ALICE We bought this from the most sinister man on the internet. RILEY We bought it from Jamie Oliver? ALICE Pretty much, yes, because they bought it from the poultry industry. The industry which destroys, you know, male chicks in... well, there's no other word for it, shredders. And so, this was put in there and no one really paid attention to it. Everyone thought, well, you know, we've complied with the regulations,

we can go about our business. And without knowing it, they had set up a system whereby, as happened, 400 and odd squirrels were imported from China without the proper paperwork. Couldn't send them back. The exporter wasn't taking calls, couldn't send them back, the exporter wasn't taking calls, couldn't send them there, couldn't keep them in shiphold. And so, at this point, in the press release they say, someone should have thought, you can't shred 400 squirrels, that's repulsive. But if you work in a shed, you're not usually allowed to question the government. And so they got shredded. The Van Damien Foundation

for the Shelter of Squirrels, which is the Netherlands' only specialist squirrel rescue shelter, were really pissed off. They weren't even consulted and said so. Will That was their 9-11. That was the worst thing they could think of. In squirrel terms, that was the worst thing that could happen to them relative to a passenger jetliner. ALICE They got a specific apology in the press release. There were questions asked in the Dutch parliament, but everyone just concluded no one had intended to do this. Everyone had constructed a system under which it was inevitable that at some point 400 squirrels were going to get shredded because everyone

had constructed a system in which everyone thought it was everyone else's job to not shred the squirrels. And when you actually start looking at these sorts of systems more generally, things like this happen all the time. You know, the National Health Service doesn't actually literally shred squirrels. Mason- That we know of. There's a six month waiting list to get squirrels shredded. Al- Yeah. But it's got loads of systems where everyone says that it's someone else's responsibility

for bad things not to happen, and consequently bad things do happen. Like thousands of people getting transfused with HIV positive blood. Mason- I think sort of bringing that from the very fun, well fun unless you're a squirrel, worked squirrel example over to things like the NHS is Joe's that's like many of the systems that administer very important parts of our lives like will we be paid if we're not working? Will we be taken care of if we're sick? are constructed in such a way as to make bad things happen to us that aren't our fault. I mean, November, you mentioned to me, right, that I believe the NHS is now taking up some of the recommendations of the CAS

report. ALICE Oh, this isn't exactly on the NHS, so this is the Secretary for Health Victoria Atkins using emergency powers as a pure act of spite on the way out to ban the prescription of puberty blockers to under-18s, specifically for the treatment of gender dysphoria. Something which we're streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary has been like, yeah this is cool, I would probably keep doing this. Which is repulsive and which will feed many trans children into the industrial poultry shredder.

And that's something which is very attributed, is the thing. I think that's a different kind of evil shit, right? The disattributability there, if you like, is in the kind of... No one is actually telling trans children to kill themselves, right? They're just making the conditions for them to live impossible. LH- They're inviting them to go through puberty after the age of 18. Yeah, exactly. Just hold it, y'know? Just, like, really, like, knuckle down.

Do you like Wim Hof breathing on your, kind of, on your puberty? That meme of the kid in the classroom holding in a fart, just, like, desperately trying not to pubesce. Yeah. Just, like, trying to stop your voice from breaking. Yeah. So, slightly different thing, but also an extremely depressing thing that has happened in British politics today. MULLER Slightly different, but I would say not completely different. Because she's not

actually saying that she's doing this just simply to grab votes and attack a vulnerable group of people, even though that's what's actually happening. She's saying she's implementing the CAS report. ALICE That's true, and the CAS report does not say this, yeah. Yeah, the CAS report is not actually saying this itself, but also the CAS report is blaming that it's just summarising the objective science. So if you're looking at who we should actually blame for this, everyone's trying to point to 100 and odd authors of medical research papers in Canadian universities who didn't even say that.

And so everyone's passing the responsibility and the accountability down the line in exactly the same way. ALICE It's kind of, who will rid me of these turbulent squirrels, y'know? NARES There was one Canadian academic who did say that! And no one ever remembers him! We are kind of vindicated too, because I remember saying about the review when it came out that what it actually says didn't matter, right, because it was what it was going to be used

to justify, and this is a good example I think. Yeah, I remember that. And that's how you can tell also that like, something is, let's say known to be, if not popular with your base, then at least something that you can be proud of as a human is if you're doing it, and you're trying to say, well, I'm not doing it, of course. I'm just implementing the recommendations of what everyone sort of has agreed is in this report. Who agreed? Oh, you know, everyone. And I think really what we get down to,

one of the themes that runs through the book that you've written is this sort of naked exercise of power. And it's where the... so almost like logic puzzles that power puts around itself to entangle you before you are able to tangle with it. I can't get hormones anymore because West Street thing is playing missed. It's like turning a big crank. If these things had been marketed differently and been around in the 1990s, then someone would have said, there's a pill you can give

your kids to delay puberty until they're emotionally ready for the consequences, and I would definitely have been on them. And so would everyone in my class. And indeed, I would be kind of filing a prescription as soon as you meet your daughter's first boyfriend. They should actually put them in Coco Pops, is my view. Mason- They could have done fucking product placement on Kevin and Perry. Jason- Yeah. No, but they should be like included as an ingredient in Coco Pops, because if

you're still eating Coco Pops for breakfast, you're probably not ready to go through puberty yet. That we're actually advocating, we're taking it one step further. Not just puberty blockers for those that want them, puberty blockers universally and mandatorily. No more puberty. Yeah, that's right. No one ever. We just keep everyone on them. We're all just like little hairless boys. That would be popular with the conservative electoral base. Mason- You have to stop eating Coco Pops when you develop the desire to fuck the Coco Pops monkey.

Luke- The Coco Pops monkey keeps getting hotter every year. Yeah, the huge tits on the Coco Pops monkey were a bit too far. So I want to talk a little bit of news before we carry on though, which is election update, because we've been doing some pre-recorded episodes. Everything that we thought would happen would happen, which is of course the Conservatives... Starmer is becoming a little bit like... the purges are happening, you know? Like, earlier than we thought. It feels like the purges come earlier every year, y'know?

LARSON Yeah, so what happened with this, with the purges that November is referencing, is a number of people in the socialist campaign group are aligned with the socialist campaign group wing of the party. Like the people who have just been living with a piece of dental tape holding up a sword of Damocles above their heads. Oh my god, it finally snapped! What? Faiza Shaheen wasn't allowed to stand for election in Chingford and Wood Green?

Because of some fucking Twitter likes, from like, years ago. ALICE Yeah, it's like, transparently a purge, but these are all like, the squishes. The soft left. The people who are like, you know, we kind of like Corbyn, but like, you know, we'll compromise, we'll work with anyone, we'll stay and fight, but not fight really, we'll just stay and kind of stay. We're gonna stay and get our shit rocked, basically. We'll stay and shake our heads so people know we disagree with it.

Yeah. And it's sort of, to me it seems like a kind of criminal lack of situational awareness, politically. Like, with the sole exception for that being Diane Abbott, who could not really have done otherwise. But for people like Faiza Shaheen, or like, oh god, what's his name, the Brighton one. Russell Moyle. Moyle, yeah. Like, it feels like having seen what Team Starmer did to Rebecca Long-Bailey, and then

having seen everything that followed subsequently to that with Corbin and with Abbott, it just seems like at some point you had to have noticed and then made the decision, I will probably be fine. RIP to those guys, but I'm different. And no, not sufficiently, it turns out. Faisal Shaheen, who has been tactfully silent about Gaza, like, notably so, had said next to nothing, but the next two was not enough, you know? What happened was she liked a tweet which linked to a Jon Stewart sketch.

The Daily Show was unacceptably Stalinist for these people. Interesting. Name and CLP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Noted anti-Semite Jon Stewart. Well that's the thing, right? In a clip he did about how, hey, we need to talk about Israel. Things seem kind of fucked up when you talk about Israel, because the consequences of

talking about Israel seem to be enormous, and it seems as though there are professional organizations of people who, when you talk about Israel, will try and destroy your character. And then she liked a tweet that said that, and then Luke Eggherst, newly selected for the Labour Party, and someone- Professional vampire, and at one point, like, organizer of one of those organizations? Not at one point, currently! That's his job! Oh, still?

Okay, perfect. His job is to yell at Gary Lineker when Gary Lineker is not such a fan of what's going on in Gaza. His job is for an organization called We Believe in Israel to start a petition to like get Gary Lineker fired from the BBC. What's like Canary Mission other than that? What's like fucking Kevin O'Leary doing when he's saying, oh yeah, if you, if you go to a Palestine solidarity protest,

we're going to use AI to make sure we like we and my buddies never hire you. Like just going back to it, to then say, oh yeah, sorry, you can't notice that. It's not allowed for you to notice that. And fucking Akerst gets selected for a safe seat. It's not suggesting, oh, how unfair is it, but it is quite galling that this level of agreement, I mean if you wanna talk about- ALICE If you want an example of hypocrisy, like,

all of the same people who are like, yes, you know, purge the traitors or whatever, and have been any time this has happened, were all, like, crying constantly any time Corbin did anything, and if there's one lesson to take from this, it's that, like, if you ever get the opportunity, if you ever get the, like, brief kind of Corbin window again, you have to give John MacDonaldbyn window again, you have to give John McDonnell a gun. LORENZO You have to let him garrot people. ALICE Yeah, you can make no apologies for the terror,

right? Because all of the people who are complaining about it will do much, much worse to you if they seize power again. LORENZO It also just seems like we're getting to increasing levels of abstraction, like, Labour MP liked a video from years ago by a Jewish comedian talking about how if you criticize Israel you just get yelled at from all sides not even making a specific criticism of Israel but just pointing out that Israel has a very aggressive PR wing and like that's that's too much apparently yeah don't notice that anymore all of this it's it's not in the name of doing anything.

For A. Chris, it is. He really believes in Israel. But as a party organisation, we talk about the purposes of systems are what they do. This is all in the name of jobs for Starmer's friends and the friends of his close advisors, who are basically just being scattered out of London like dandelion seeds. I can't wait until these fuckers turn the knives on each other. I really can't. JUSTIN Of course they will.

I mean, the alternative is that the purpose of it is purging. As a hobby. ALICE Oh, like me as a fifteen year old. JUSTIN I was gonna say, yeah, believe mixed armor. ALICE Please come ahead, Dan. JUSTIN They will turn the knives on each other, and then they will turn the knives eventually on themselves. The end game of this is one guy, alone in a room, with no arms, holding

a pen in his mouth so he can tap out an expulsion letter to his legs. It's Judge Dredd and the Jigsaw Disease is how this ends up. RILEY It's the one guy with no arms and legs, writing with his mouth on a piece of paper the words, total expulsion. ALICE Will the last one expelled from the Labour Party turn off the lights? DARREN Confidentially leaking to the Times about his liver. ALICE Very hard to be Bileema with no arms as well,

you're really gonna be committed. DARREN I always wonder, you know, if we want to talk about things as being like, shielding themselves from accountability. I always thought like, the way that you talk about accountability in the book, Dan, right? It's about people being able to exercise some meaningful control over how they are themselves controlled, whether that's through companies, whether that's government departments,

or even like whether that's the guys who work in airport hangars having to shred a bunch of squirrels that they're not really keen on doing. Right. Yeah. But a bunch of squirrels doing Tony Ben's kind of like test of like, how, who are you? How can we get rid of you kind of thing? Yeah. And you know, so much of this is about raking that link between like what people want for their lives and what they as politicians have to deliver. And I mean,

what I always remember about the Corbin Project is what that threatened them with was we might have to do something for someone that isn't just playing thick of it with our friends basically. The whole point of the Starboard Project is essentially armor. It is armoring an elite group so it never has to cycle and can just stay elite forever. The jobs for the boys, they get to stay in them for life, and what's gonna happen to poli- I mean, we already know what's gonna happen to politics when it's shielded from accountability in that way, which is that the things that happened over the last twelve years happened.

ALICE The things that happened over the last twelve hours, yeah. Like, as you see by Streeting's kind of thing of being like, I will double down on this kind of like, emergency punitive measure that's gonna kill a bunch of children. Where Streeting never went through puberty, he never did him any harm. Giving Westreeting puberty unblockers. He does look kind of like a sort of a hot dog that's been squeezed into a suit, doesn't he? Extrusive about him, yes.

Yeah, he looks like one of those inflatable men you get outside a used car dealership. I'll tell you what it is. West Streeting is not actually a person. He is 400 squirrels that have been reconstituted into a man. Like Terminator 2. You know what West Streeting looks like? He looks like they put the Megabus Man on Ozen Pick. Anyway, those are my West Street thoughts.

Apart from anything else, it's humiliating to have your rights taken away from you by these fucking people, you know? Yeah, it is unfortunate. But the worst thing I think in deselecting Faizah Shaheen is that the Labour Party has now effectively robbed us of the possibility of Ian Duncan Smith writing The Devil's Tune 2, say hello to his new uncle. ALICE AND That company is called Future Fit AI. Now I know that Dan has read the notes, however I don't know if the rest of you have. I've never read anything in my life and I especially don't prepare for it. What do you think Future Fit AI is?

It's like police photo fits, except it makes them way worse. Like, any time Kent police or whatever posts a photo fit of a guy who looks like they've drawn a face onto a mango. Yeah, like a character from Wii Sports that they're searching in connection with Arm Drop Roo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gonna be like that, but it's gonna be like way worse. Yeah.

Is it like an AI that spots you at the gym, you know? It's coming over and saying like, those are nice gains, brother. My personal trainer says easy money and it makes me feel so good about myself. Because training you is so easy. Is that this guy's a real mod? I've got him running laps and I'm just on my phone. Easy money Riley! Okay alright alright.

No, it's not that. Futurefit AI is empowering workers with a GPS for your career. A what? What? Sorry that you have to ask. Take your career down this side street to avoid traffic. Recalculating. Yeah.

I followed the GPS without looking and now my career is sinking in a lake. We partner, they say, with Fortune 500 companies, workforce development organizations, and governments to provide workers with an AI powered tool to help them navigate their careers. We use advanced labor market data and ethical machine learning algorithms. That's like my favorite, one of my favorite things that was ethical machine learning algorithms. There was this idea in Canada in the 2000s that came out of Alberta called ethical oil. It was like, oh, like clean coal. Canadian tar sands oil doesn't come from human rights

abusing countries. And you know, you could ask a lot of first nations people about that and they would wonder. But so this is actually much more ethical. So it doesn't matter that you're putting CO2 in the atmosphere because it's like, it's like a sort of morality offset. But this is my second favorite use of ethical with ethical machine learning algorithms. What the fuck does that mean? We have no idea. It's ethical machine learning because like, obviously the machines are learning, they're doing lessons, but the lessons that they're doing is citizenship and PSHE. So they're like, we've got Catherine Burbleson teaching the machine learning algorithm. The miss snuff

the AI. Yeah. The machine learning algorithms are going to be wearing are like very rigid uniform. Ethical machine learning algorithms learning algorithms to identify an individual's starting point in the labor market recommend best fit career path destinations and build a personalized roadmap of learning resources and work opportunities to successfully guide them from point A to point B in their career.'" Oh motherfuck, they're automating your like, job coach. Job center like work advisor guy. I've often thought that this like, lackadaisical but also punitive area of the state could

be really enhanced by adding this air of nonsense to it. You're all too young to remember a program called JigCal, which they had in the 1980s. It ran on a BBC Micro, and everyone had to fill in a little form, and at my school you got something mailed back to you from Strathclyde University saying that you should be a farmer. The only thing I've ever had mailed back to me from Strathclyde University was you should not study at Strathclyde University. Have you considered farming? Yeah.

That's when the farmers, you go suspiciously at the same time, get a prospectus from an agricultural college. Chances of any actual artificial intelligence involved in this product, I would say very low. Chances of it being the same basic thing that they were doing in the literal 1980s, of a small questionnaire matched up to a small, very small list of jobs, I would say pretty high. Chances of it doing anything other than just typing in the name of a job to Google, and

getting the same job listings that you get from Google, very very low. ALICE That's a shame, because I don't like it, but I appreciate the kind of element of chaos you get out of large language models, and so I think it's the same thing as with anything we've talked about before, I want my job coach to be like, have you considered covering your CV in glue? You know, or something like that. Yeah, then they can't put it down. Yeah. It will make you a memorable candidate when they're doing the sift.

Yeah, the boffins at Strathclyde University have come up with a novel way to solve our farmer shortage. These children think they're getting careers advice but no, they're just being pushed into labouring. I like the idea also that it's like suggesting you go to an agricultural college and it's like, oh yeah, what happened? Why does it think I should go to an agricultural college? And it looks at the answer where you're like, I can drink four bottles of vodka in one sitting and I don't mind drinking this.

I love g-langs. If the data set just sucks in that viral list of funny jobs from the 19th century census and says you should become a proprietor of midgets. Oh, so it says, you get a personalised assessment to identify your starting point. It's not though, because you've dis-personalised it. Like, you get a computerised assessment. You get something that looks like a personalized assessment. You get something that looks like a personalized assessment. You get career path recommendations, learning programs to help you bridge your skill gap, resources to enhance your job readiness, and opportunities to max- live work opportunities to maximize placement.

As Dan says, this is Googling things. Yeah. If you remember the AI that became fixated on the Golden Gate Bridge, this is like one that's become fixated on farming, y'know. Just like, pick strawberries. Just diverges every conversation back to picking strawberries. Pick strawberries and then participate in an elaborate and dangerous hazing ritual. Yeah, this AI is actually a small language model, and its entire codebase was based off

of PipGoes Strawberry Picking. So it has quite a narrow range of suggestions that it tends to make. language model and its entire code base was based off of PipGoes strawberry picking. It has quite a narrow range of suggestions that it tends to make. We made a computer watch three seasons of Clarkson's farm and it's now going to give you career advice. Like, this is the best job in the world. So, here's why that matters for what we're talking about though, right? This isn't just like a thing you could sign up to to get a better job, the Department for Work and Pensions is currently as we speak trialling this technology to connect job seekers

with new roles. ALICE See, this is the thing as well, is that like, because the government is insisting that it's out of money and it can't print more, it's like we're gonna make savings by using innovative technology, but the way they do that is by spaffing a bunch of money up the wall on this. Shit like this that is not gonna work. Like no return. Meaningfully. So basically, this is the press release, it says the technology works, being used, works

by asking people looking for work a series of questions, building an online profile. Do you like farming? Can you see yourself farming? Do you know what a strawberry is? Have you tried picking one? Have you ever driven a combine harvester? What do you think of Jeremy Clarkson? Who's the hottest insurance mascot?

What do you think of Jeremy Clarkson? And it's like, rank the races. And it's like, what? What's that? Which race is number one wacky? Which race is funniest? Yeah. Oh, the steeplechase.

Monaco Grand Prix. According to the DWP, the software from these firms, this is Futurefit AI, another company called Bayes Impact, which is a French organisation, and a UK jobs board called Adzuna. Wait, isn't that French for fucking BAAAACKT? I was going with the thing covering snooker tables, but yeah, sure, fuck Impact also. It refers to Thomas Bayes, but it is very funny that they're so Anglo that they didn't think that their name in French would be. Bayes Impact, wir suchen dich.

Yeah, exactly. Well there's Bayes Impact, there's Bayes Sensation, there's Bayes Shibari. According to the DWP, a software from these firms makes intelligent suggestions based on live data about the local jobs market. It searches Google. Some great live data on there. It searches Google or it uses a pre-existing source of information, Adzuna. it searches Google or it uses a pre-existing source of information, AdZuna. All it's doing is it is trying to like help you search that jobs board.

But what I always think about this and why I think about this in terms of accountability, or at least like the ability of a powerful organization with the power to change something using sort of deception, essentially to not do that, is we've all been living with the lie. Most people on benefits in Britain just need to be like, pushed into a job, despite the fact that a lot of those people would be living in places where the only industry packed up and moved out like two generations ago and nothing came back to replace it. People just don't want to farm anymore. Well, this is basically the idea, is that like, I mean, there was an interview in the FT with the insane former head

of the National Farmers Union the other week, along those lines of like, oh, we can't get like, It's weird, because I thought all those guys were really normal. Yeah. Well, this one was like, yeah, we can't get British people to farm anymore, which listened to some of our episodes

with Emiliano Molino to find out why, because it's fucking miserable work. But like, yeah, listen to some of our episodes with Emiliano Molino to find out why, because it's fucking miserable work. But like, yeah, it's part of the reason, but part of the reason is also that like, a bunch of people can't work because they're disabled, or because there are no jobs that they can get to, or things of this nature, but no. Instead what we need to do is we need to hand them a kind of Google printout that just says farming is a sphere of human activity first begun in the Fertile Crescent region of Mesopotamia, or whatever the fuck.

You have to commute to the Fertile Crescent region of Mesopotamia from where you live out in like, in gluten. Get on your ox cart and look for work. Yeah, no one was fucking signing on in ancient Mesopotamia, were they? I tell you what, Amarabi wasn't handing out handouts, benefits! Cause if you had to sign on in ancient Mesopotamia you had to do it in like a clay tablet, you know, it's very inconvenient. Yeah that's right, I had to do it in cuneiform.

Most of the temples literally were actually handing stuff, everyone was signed on. I am unable, I am long term sick and unable to work in the sesame fields, and it's just like scratch, scratch, scratch. Guy who's like a return with a V guy but for ancient Mesopotamia. That was the last time that stuff wasn't woke actually. That's just Sargon of Akkad I think. But we talk about this in terms of like, of accountability. You know, we talk about the continuing pursuit of like the job seekers model.

Of trying to sort of, forcing people to serve capital in places where capital has no interest in being served, basically. ALICE PAYNE Poking the sick, aging, disabled, humiliated population and being like, why don't you wanna pick strawberries? RILEY Yeah, I mean, accountability is agency. The extent to which you can be accountable for something is the extent to which you can change it so it wasn't so and vice versa. If you're in one of these organizations, what you need to do is create the impression that

the person without a job has agency and can change their status, but you have no ability to change what's being offered to them or do anything because you've pushed everything onto the computer. And the computer is just science. It's like physics and there's no way you can change it. And so you create this reverse accountability where the department of work and pensions has no responsibility to provide anything. But then the individual person has all of the accountability and gets blamed for not fitting into the box that they want to put them in.

And things like future fit AI or whatever, or job centers or anything you want to talk about it, it's essentially trying to lubricate a passage to nowhere. It's like, oh, you're not going to be able to get through this like... Didn't I have you, right? It's trying to make it much easier to sort of walk down a hallway that doesn't fucking lead anywhere. Didn't I had you, right? I can't get down this hallway. There is no door on the other end. And the response from government is just a don't worry, we'll make it slippery. It's going to be so easy to walk to nowhere,

to walk up this staircase that just has a sheer drop on the end of it. As terrible of a show as Little Britain was, and as odious of a man in particular as David Williams was, I have to say the Computer Says No sketch has got to be one of the most prescient ones of the 2000s. But I think they just didn't predict the extent to which it would be just like the government looking at their own computer and being like, nah, says we can't do that. They say future fit provides AI powered tools that act as GPS's for careers designed to support individuals from career path exploration to reskilling to job placement.

Yeah. It's like fucking Uber for getting off benefits. Fine. Whatever. AI career coach Bob will provide personalized action plans. So again, it's like we've invented a fake person to pretend to try to help you have Which, Bob, will provide personalized action plans. Oh, Bob. Bob. So again, it's like we've invented a fake person to pretend to try to help you have not agency, so the people with agency don't have to do anything.

Yeah, Bob is there to keep telling you to stop being disabled, or whatever. Yeah, but hey, you know what? If you have a long term back injury, maybe picking strawberries will help. You can limber up that way. It's gentle exercise. Well, I mean, but also, we are actually pretty close to full employment. The people who are claiming benefits or the people who are not part of the labor force are for the most part

either long-term sick or retired early. So you've got someone who's nominally claiming out of work benefits but actually has no intention of working because they're close to retirement, they can see the pension age around the corner and they're living off their savings. You can put Bob in there as much as you like. It's not going to change the outcome, which is that we fundamentally created a system that destroys people's health and that people don't want to participate in. And you can say now Bob tells you that you used to be an electrical engineer, so you should now be an electrician on a farm. The only reason possibly why the department

of work and pensions would buy this is that someone was selling it to them on commission. Oh, that was almost certainly the case. I mean, if we've learned anything about British procurement, there will be someone's uncle has developed this computer system. Someone's pub landlord has built an AI. I want to move sort of on to the actual book, right? This book, The Unaccountability Machine, basically investigates this trend where bad things are happening and they don't seem to be anybody's fault. And I see a lot of what you describe as ways to,

in one sense, deflect individual responsibility for bad, but quote unquote necessary decisions off of named individuals. You can always, in circular loops, that you can never find the end of, but also a kind of advertising to people that it must be thus, or it's your fault or a kind of like ideological activity. So why don't you just like tell us a little bit about how we should understand decision-making as industrialized and when decision-making is industrialized, it

diffuses and becomes very difficult to control. Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, the fundamental kind of definition here is if you can change something, then you can be accountable for it. And being accountable is psychologically horrible, it's financially risky because you could get sued and it's just not consistent with being a manager. The big privilege of being a manager is that you should not be one of the people who's having to be managed and having to respond to other people telling you what to do. And so if you want to avoid that, you have to create a sort of accountability sink into which you can redirect all of the unwanted consequences, negative emotion and accountability that's coming your way. And

the way you do that is by creating the impression that the decision is not yours, that it's the result of some objective kind of process. So you say, well, I've commissioned this report, which summarises a load of medical science, and that's the decision. It's not me making the decision. It's all of these scientists that you're never going to look up. Or you can say, well, this is the Office of Budget Responsibility, and they've got a spreadsheet and you can see that this line is heading upward rather than downward. So that means we've got to cancel 10 billion pounds worth of youth clubs. Or you just do the ultimate accountability sink and say, well, the markets won't stand this. And so anyone who feels like they don't like the

consequences of a policy decision you've made, you say, well, don't ask me, ask the market. I say, can I have the phone number for the market? And you go, well, sadly there is no phone number. This thing that looks like it might be a decision I took and looks like it might be a thing I'm doing to you is in fact just the weather. No point complaining about it. That's the way it's going to be. Remember to turn out and vote in five years time. Mason- Me painted blue at the top of a step pyramid. The priest holding a knife over me just says, look, it's not my fault. This is the sun's decision. Mason- Economic decision.

Jason- Step pyramid, no. I'm stuck in the ziggurat. One of the things you also talk about is the emergence of different kinds of management science that also talk about is the talk about sort of the emergence of different kinds of management science that pervade both like the private and public sector. And you draw a difference between two ways of trying to manage complex systems. This is the cybernetic approach versus the straightforward computing approach. And while that seems a little bit abstract, I think it's worth just quickly getting into the distinction between a cybernetic approach to managing a complex system versus what you might call a computing approach.

Will Barron Yeah, yeah. I mean, and this kind of came out from kind of trying to ask why are people creating accountability sinks? And the reason is that they didn't feel in control of the decisions. They didn't feel like they should be accountable because everything was so complex that everyone literally felt that they were just buffeted by social forces they couldn't understand. And this was what led me back to looking at random old 1970s hippie management science. There was such a thing.

Books. By a guy called Stafford Beer, who people might have heard about because he was involved with the IND government in Chile for a very short period of time. Exactly, side to side. And what this was, was saying, well look, if you're going to manage something, you can either be going, number go up, and we're optimising this, and we're going to pick some measure of the output and we're always going to say that's got to go up. Or you can think, well, we don't necessarily know that that number that's going up is summarizing everything we should know about this system.

It probably isn't because we've only got partial information. So let's think about this in terms of what do we have to do to keep control of that number? What do we have to do about this system to keep it regulated? And that lets you use a load of the old mathematics and physics of information theory to say, very fundamental theorem, you want to regulate and manage something, you have to match the amount of chaos and variety and information that the system can generate with the capacity to manage it. So you effectively have to say the system that's controlling this has to be capable of dealing with what's going to be thrown at it. And if you think about that, kind of to make it a bit more objective in a corporate situation, that means you need this big buffer of middle management, because you need this big buffer

of capacity to be sure that when something odd happens or when the world changes, you're going to know about it and you're going to be able to deal with it. But then the 1970s happened, Milton Friedman and Shareholder Value came along, and you've got a whole load of private equity goons coming around doing leverage buyouts, looking at all these middle managers and saying, don't know what this is for, I never use it, and effectively just kind of cutting out the cerebellum of these organizations. And so the organizations get stupider and stupider and more and more focused on number go up kind of thinking. After a while, it's like, I seem to be

doomed to only use really, really tasteless veterinary analogies. It's like the patient in a horrible neuroscience experiment. You've cut out so much of its cerebellum that it's only able to deal with the situation exactly in front of it. And if anything unexpected happens, it doesn't know how to react. And that's my kind of brief history of the last 50 years. Gradually, the governments, corporations, and other systems have got more fixated on computing optimization and single value maximization, and they've lost the ability to manage information coming in from the environment. Mason- That's fine.

Didn't need that anyway. If you wanted to map that onto our understanding of the history of the 20th century, as we talked about it on this podcast, you'd see the kind of late 1970s and 1980s as the kind of decision that capital made that it would no longer concern itself with social reproduction. It would enter its sort of vampire vandal phase of destroying the many complex systems that it created to sustain itself. If you wanted to think about something like Boeing as well, for example, you'd think of that as a company that was evil, but basically functional, that was taken over by people who didn't really care

about trivialities, like how the airframes worked, or do we have enough bolts in this door? And would be sort of very happy to say like, oh yeah, that's fine, we can accept a certain number of crashes because they have that very sort of, you might call short-termist thinking. You'd see it's like, it is the vandalism of evil, but at least functional organizations. Right? Will Barron Well, evil but functional was too expensive

is the thing. Jason Vale Well, and it's something they didn't even necessarily know they were doing to themselves because all of the problem was in their information processing infrastructure. The way that you calculate to see if you're matching the information of the system to the handling capacity is through the accounting system. And the one job of an accounting system, the you-had-one-job of an accounting system, is to tell you how much extractable surplus there is, how much extractable rent you can take out. And the accounting system breaks down when it tells you there's a load of rent here,

you can extract a load of surplus here, and it's wrong and the system isn't actually producing the conditions of its own reproduction anymore. And that's what happened because these things were all geared towards short-term financial reporting. They were all loaded up with a huge amount of debt. And if you're loaded up with a huge amount of debt as a company, then the only thing you can think about is how am I going to pay the debt? You can't spare any capacity for thinking about anything else because if you don't solve that problem of how am I going to pay the debt, you're not going to get a chance to address any of your longer term problems. For example, Tams Water is just a perfect example of that.

It's going fine over there. It was an organization that basically worked that changed its outlook from a company that had lots and lots of employees, many of whom like worked on water mains that where its goal wasn't number maximization, but its goal was make sure there is water, keep poo in water to acceptable minimum. And when, when it gets privatized, it get that same thing happens. It gets very smart at doing the thing that the people who own it want.

It gets very stupid at making water go into people's homes. Well, they hired the Coco Pops monkey and he kept putting in the water and he had huge tits. It gets loaded with gigantic amounts of debt. That debt creates further incentives for it to continue that kind of maximizing. With the government, the DWP, for example, same thing. The whole point of the DWP, so to speak, is get people off benefits. That's like what they want to be. That's what their mission is. And again, that's not a good mission to have, but that is a mission.

And you can see again how like carrying out that mission in the way that they are doing it is perpetuating the kind of like, I know you'd call it very enervating work environment that most people seem to find themselves in. It makes people more sick, and it makes people less likely to be able to do the kind of thing that they would want to do with their lives. But the thing is, if you imagined a version of the Department of Work and Pensions that worked in a more cybernetic way, that was, let's say, that was accountable, that could do things, that acknowledged that it could do things to make people's working

lives better. Imagine that would have to be a very large department. It would have a lot of resources. As you say, Dan, it would need a lot of variety, which is how you describe a complex system in cybernetic terms. Nobody really wanted to do that because of that great act of vandalism that occurred in the 1970s and 80s. Yeah, and crucially, it would consume a huge amount of resources that appeared on a budget

while producing benefits that didn't appear on the same budget. And so, unless you've got someone in the centre who's able to understand what the costs and benefits are, you're just going to get treasury brain 28-year-olds with PPE degrees from Oxford looking at the costs and saying, my God, this thing's expensive. We clearly better shut it down. Same with Thames Water. How do you go bust selling water? It's a popular product.

It doesn't need advertising. Will Barron People don't want water anymore. They want Monster Energy and LucasAfe. It's a tough market. Mason- And the answer is that you can go bust selling water if you borrow enough debt. If you borrow enough debt, you can turn a literal water and sewage monopoly into something that's riskier than dot com AI stocks. Mason- I should have put some limes or something in it, you know. Jason- Yeah, there you go. Thames Water's best hope... getting your water from one of those little things they have on the bar at the pub. Thameswater's

best hope is that Boeing accidentally 9-11 their biggest creditor. So, you write in your book, whether it's in the guise of the baud market, which necessitates austerity, tax cuts and deregulation, or as a generalized amorphous maker of decisions that can't be blamed on any individual, the market, which you referenced earlier, has encroached on areas that were previously considered the normal business of government. Nationalized industries are privatized and often sold overseas. And even some fundamental functions that older political scientists might have seen as core to the nature of government, like the power to set the level of taxes or control the money supply, have to a greater or lesser extent been removed from the public sphere, Which essentially, and I'm adding this on here as well, makes the whole idea that an apolitical central bank with a 2% inflation target is a kind of accountability sink because everyone gets to point to reasons beyond their control as to why life in Britain has to be

made markedly worse. Yeah. With the woke bankers who did for Liz Truss. Steele- Yeah, that's right. Mason- Yeah. And the thing is, when you push these things outside the government, it's just permanent vandalism. Because it's permanent cerebral vandalism. As you move the function out of the government, you also move the capacity to tell whether the function is being abused out of the government.

So not only is Thames Water itself unable to do anything other than pay dividends outside, but you also lose the capacity to understand that your water company has been under-investing for 10 or 15 years, until someone at Ofwat comes around, kind of looks at a few spreadsheets and says, this is the sort of thing that people go for prison for in other industries. There's another thing that I often think of, right? Which is, if you want to start making these organizations accountable again, there have been some fantastic rearguard actions taken to prevent that from happening. Simply because the transformation of the British state,

but this is not just true for Britain, it's true for a lot of European and American states and the sort of departments within them, has become an organization that primarily contracts things out to arms length bodies. So all of a sudden, if you nationalize Thames Water, well, Thames Water contracted most of their operations out to like third party, like service providers. So if you were to try to nationalize Thames Water, what would you nationalize?

What kind of expertise would you run it with? It's not saying it's not worth doing. It's absolutely worth doing, but rather recognizing that this sort of denuding of the state of these kinds of expertise has been a fantastic way to prevent accountability from being added back in because you prevent yourself from being able to competently administer, in ways that are democratically accountable, crucial services. LARSON Absolutely, yeah. ALICE That phrase, permanent cerebral vandalism, has stuck with me. Both because I think it's a very apt description and also because I think it's a very disco Elysium phrase.

GARETH I was going to say, Apex Twin Album title. ALICE But more than just the state as well, you give a lot of examples in the book of companies, and you talk about how organizations can become criminogenic. Oh, good criminology term there. Love a bit of criminogenesis. Without anyone ever actually breaking a law who is important, they can make it so that you have to pretty much constantly break the law. The example that you give is Fox News, specifically with regard to like, everybody

at Fox News knew that Dominion voting machines were like, fine, but they all just were like, well, I guess we just have to libel them all the time. Yeah. British tabloid press, exactly the same, becoming dependent on phone hacking. Yeah. It's not so much that anyone told anyone to go out and hack phones, although some people did that, but not necessarily the ones you want to see in prison for it. They just set up a system in which you'd probably get fired if you didn't hack phones, and omitted

to set up any system that would not hack phones or not libel companies. I mean, I wrote my previous book about financial fraud and this was the libel conspiracy. No one ever made a conspiracy. No one just ever kind of set things up so that there wouldn't be one. You just sat back and said, you know, here's your target, make me $100 million, lads. I'm not checking up on how you do it. And then came back in 10 years time going, we're shocked and appalled that anything like this could have happened in our bank. We're shocked and appalled that the Atreides were actually killed and not given the honor

of exile. And this is something I think also gets to the heart of the book as well, right? Which is whether you're talking about criminogenic organizations, whether you're talking about government departments sort of finding ways to make everyone else accountable. I mean, sorry, before I go on as well, I mean, you can just, this is mostly in like, like labor and the Democrats are constantly saying, oh, we have no agency to win. All of our people who hate us have to, they are the only ones with the agency. Like, you know, like left-wingers who live in like, see a London safe seats, they actually are controlling whether or not we get a labor government.

But I digress, at the heart of the book, whether you're talking about like criminogenic companies, whether you're talking about government departments that are sort of handing off agency left and right or utility providers, whatever, ultimately you say that ignorance is a kind of information processing system in itself. And the professionals who tend to run these systems

in that sort of maximizing or minimizing sense, they very, very deliberately have to remain ignorant of how the insides of firms and institutions work, how the insides of particular like labor markets might work. It's our friend, intellectual Lacunae again. Will Barron Yeah, yeah. And in many ways, it's frightening but also hopeful. Because it does mean that there's an inbuilt certainty of collapse. If you are going to avoid accountability, you have to make yourself ignorant of certain things. You have to cut those information links. If you cut off part of the information, then sooner or later your accounting system is gonna tell you that there's an extractable rent, when in fact the system is not reproducing

itself. If that happens, sooner or later, the system will walk into something it can't handle, and fall apart. ALICE The Tsar is convinced everything is going very well. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN know, the ideas that replace it are going to be the ones that were lying around in the street in exactly the same way as when in the 1970s, the capitalist class got very worried about the managerial class taking all of their perks, goodies and treats. It was Milton Friedman's ideas that were lying around in the street and those were ones that were picked up. Will Barron And we can even see that a lot of the, let's

say frictionless trade maximizing, a lot of the neoliberal sort of ideas that fell apart, they picked up new ideas of that sort of kind of came what are called secureonomics. I mean, we're sort of in the process of seeing one of those information processing systems having broken down enough that it had to become at least recognizably a bit different. That's why I'm printing off thousands of copies of my manifesto for more and sexier milfs and just leaving them lying around the street. Thank you for giving me the co-author credit on that. I thought it was spiritually correct. Also, I note that we are beginning to run to time,

so I just want to say, Dan, as always a delight to talk to you, thank you very much for coming on the show. Oh thank you very much, it's always fun, great show. It was enlightening as always. You can of course check out The Unaccountability Machine anywhere fine books are sold. You can also check out Trash Future the podcast in Edinburgh on August 14th. You could listen to it on a podcast like Ab. Yeah but you can also like come to Edinburgh and like see us with your your human eyes Yeah, tickets to that are selling very fast indeed. So start getting bigger venues, right? So Edinburgh August 14th come to see us us us if you can't do that go to see Milo Milo Milo

He will be variously around the country country country Yeah, like there are many dates, look on my website. Also Bristol on the 21st of June, please get tickets to that, always fun to do Bristol, that's new material. I'm also doing, I think, Edinburgh on the 2nd of July and Manchester at some points, keeping up for those. But most importantly, my special voicemail is available to purchase online now. It will eventually be available free on YouTube but if you buy it you will a offset the horrendous

costs of making it and b get special bonus content that no one else gets and also early access by a few weeks. So if you feel like supporting that then please go to the link in the description. Milo will also be playing a surprise show in Amsterdam with his new prop act where he works with 400 squirrels. That's right. And one severely overworked Nutribullet. Making the world's worst smoothie guys. I think on that it's time to end.

Dan, thank you very much again. 15,000 calories. Thank you very much for listening. But it's all protein. The gains! The gains! Don't forget, there's a Patreon you can subscribe to it. That's my pre-workout, I have a tail coming out of it. It's $5 a month, there's also a $10 tier for extra Britnology, extra Left On Red. November and I had Covid this month, but we promise we're gonna get the next Aubrey Maturin book

out in the $10 tier soon. I think that's all the plugs and all the end matter. So we will see you in a few days in the bonus episode. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. you