Why the world stopped making sense: How the neoliberal "class war" fueled global chaos

[marmar]

Why the world stopped making sense: How the neoliberal "class war" fueled global chaos
Dan Davies' "Unaccountability Machine" is a highly unusual management book with a revolutionary message

By Paul Rosenberg
Contributing Writer
Published April 26, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) There are many ways to understand the political chaos of our time. Many of those recall the famous folktale of the blind men and the elephant, while a handful offer more comprehensive takes. With its focus on the problem of information overload, Dan Davies' book “The Unaccountability Machine” provides an unexpected example of the latter, with a distinctive twist: Davies is a former banking regulator with a clear sense of what needs to be done to restore a sense of order on more equitable foundations.

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Davies writes that his central subject is “the biggest problem of modern industrial life — the problem of being overloaded with information, of ‘trying to get a drink from a firehose.’” But as he unfolds his explanation, it has much broader application in understanding our current worldwide political situation. He tells the story of three successive intellectual and organizational revolutions: the all-but-forgotten managerial revolution, the promising, but partially derailed cybernetic revolution — which could have made sense of the managerial revolution and built on it constructively — and then the neoliberal revolution that overtook us instead.

....(snip)....

Your book is about information overload, and specifically the problems of unaccountability that come out of that. You start by developing the idea of an “accountability sink.” What does that mean, and how does it work? And how is it sometimes beneficial?

The accountability sink was the original concept that I started thinking about when doing the research for this book. It's just a social, organizational, legal and managerial mechanism whereby a decision is created that has no identifiable human being as its owner. You have a decision that nobody seems to have made, and consequently nobody can be held accountable for it. I wanted to write a book about how terrible this all was and what bad people managers were. Nobody took accountability for anything anymore, and isn't that terrible.

....(snip)....

With that we move from the managerial revolution and the cybernetic revolution — which tried to make sense of the managerial revolution — to the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s onward. Your essential insight about neoliberalism, as I read it, is that it emerged in a time of crisis with a strong identity tied to systematically throwing away, or “attenuating,” an enormous variety of data, basically everything except present-tense costs and prices. That was a way to simplify the world for top decision-makers who faced what Alvin Toffler described as "Future Shock." Is that a fair reading?

..... Around the time of the 1970s when the leveraged buyouts, Milton Friedman, all those people got going, there were still plenty of people like J.K. Galbraith and Herbert Simon who were writing about the world of industry as if we were in a new period where “capitalism versus socialism” was no longer particularly relevant, because the modern industrial world was controlled by a techno-structure, and the people who were now interesting to look at were not the capital owners, the bourgeoisie and the investors, they were the managers, soldiers and civil servants who were the people who actually controlled the means of production in the world. That was something in the air at that time. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/26/why-the-world-stopped-making-sense-how-the-neoliberal-class-war-fueled-global-chaos/

[dchill]

1. "(A) decision is created..."

"that has no identifiable human being as its owner. You have a decision that nobody seems to have made, and consequently nobody can be held accountable for it."

This is DOGE. And many other trumpling efforts - let alone the metaverse of scientologies that basically ARE the business class today.