Really-Existing Socialism: Really-existing socialist leadership cults had a very different vibe than fascist ones did or that neofascists do. The fascist and neofascist vibe was one of an angry person who shared your enemies and fought them. The really-existing socialist vibe… it was much more that the maximum leader knew everything, outworked everyone, and could outthink anyone—Big Brother is, after all, watching you:

Jacobo Timerman (1990): Reflections: A Summer in the Revolution—1987: ‘I read one of Gabriel García Márquez's essays on the Comandante…. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep… If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro's workday as it is described by García Márquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy—someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence…. "He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news… has to read fifty-odd documents [daily]…. No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast…. There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer… <newyorker.com/magazine/…>

But there is the enormous crack in the façade: Fidel Castro has to do all of this because he has no team behind him. Instead of a team, there is only “a vast bureaucratic incompetence” that is the system that Castro had designed over his then thirty years of dictatorial rule—a system that requires him to micromanage where the beer trucks go and how the bakers spend their time.

Would it not have been better for Fidel Castro to have spent less time reading documents and micromanaging consumer goods production and distribution and more time thinking about management cybernetics? The answer is “no”: for Castro, the key was not to assist the people of Cuba in becoming prosperous but rather to make himself indispensable and the possibility of moving him out inconceivable.

I am thinking about this because I am about to start reviewing Dan Davies’s soon-forthcoming “The Unaccountability Machine” for the “Times Lit. Supp.” And so I am looking for an angle to help people approach what the book is—which, at the moment, I believe is one of how to do appropriate datacenter networking design for the anthology intelligence that is humanity today.

• Davies, Dan. 2024. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—& How the World Lost Its Mind. London: Profile Books. <profilebooks.com/work/t…>