Karl Marx correctly identified the root problem of production (and invented the concept of tech-debt) and the world has hated him ever since.
Karl Marx correctly identified the root problem of production (and invented the concept of tech-debt) and the world has hated him ever since.
First two paragraphs of 18th of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of the most if not the most insightful works of sociology.
Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
Here Karl Marx also humanistically describes the root problem of production of processes in general. The problem of the cumulative error. While Marx is describing the production of history that is a productive force, it is also in a class of meta-productive forces. These are productive forces that do not directly produce material goods but affect the productive forces that do create physical goods and services.
This is literally the same metaphor as tech-debt. Software has many parallels because the production of software is also a meta-productive force. It produces an immaterial good that is productive force in itself and produces other immaterial and material goods. Tech-debt is the effect of inefficient cycles, that weighs on future cycles.
This is similar to the educational concept of Wittigenstien's ladder or lying to children, because learning itself is a meta productive force. In essence as a productive force, learning is cyclical. In order to understand how atoms function, we teach children models that are technically incorrect such as the Bohr model so they can understand approximations closer and closer to the truth. These are all productive cycles that compound on each-other.
In all these cycles the most important thing is that each future cycle must trend more strongly in the positive direction (a better understanding, better materialist outcomes, software that is cheaper to build maintain and is more resilient), rather than accumulating errors, which will eventually self-reinforce to middling and negative results and eventually collapse.
These cycles represent real risk in the real world. For example one of the most difficult things about the way we develop technology is that its not deterministic. The classic black swan scenario of solar flares causing a strong EMP would result in chaos. This is not just because would have to rebuild everything. The simple reason fact is we cannot "rebuild" the world ex nihilio because we don't have clear knowledge of certain steps along the way. Sure we could figure it out, but that's a different process. That's the process of technological discovery, not the process of applying technology.
You can think of it as rebuilding a neighborhood being hit by a bomb. The neighborhood is gone and we don't have floor plans of some of the key buildings. But it's actually worse than that. We don't have plans to the buildings that lead to the creation of those buildings. We don't have a university, but to build a university we need a foundry, we need a printing press, we need a quarry, we need a brick yard, etc. We don't have some of those, or some of the inputs to some of those. It's actually more complex than that because each of these "functions" also scales and has dependencies at different levels of scale. So we might be able to build a brick yard, but that brick yard won't be able to produce bricks that meet modern specifications until we build a smaller university to research brick making.
I literally think about these daily during the course of my software job:
- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
- Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please
- The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
There was a period of time where I played nothing but Dark Souls 1 and 3 (same theme) and thought about these.