I don’t have the time or space to fully develop this argument, but here it is:
Greed is a lousy design agent.
People who support capitalism and free markets state axiomatically that a profit motive is a good way to develop new technologies and markets. And that statement and sentiment are repeated without inspection by the popular press.
What they are saying is that exercising greed is a great way to design things. Because that is what gets done: things are designed. Like computer networks.
Computer networks have grown around us with very little thought to sound design principles. Most effort has gone into just getting one network to communicate with another. There are computer networking standards, lots of them.
The sound design principle I have in mind is the desire to reduce the amount of asynchronicity in a system design. Digital designers reduce asychronous events from designs so that data flows in predictable, synchronous fashion. Most computer networks use an interface method that is asynchronous. The core of the network does not remove the asynchronicity, it merely tries to make is work smoothly.
U.S. Customs officials said Tuesday that they had traced the source of last weekend’s system outage that left 17,000 international passengers stranded in airplanes to a malfunctioning network interface card on a single desktop computer in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX.
The problem is that we have an entire national infrastructure that was designed only to maximize the return on investment dollars in a particular term. It was not designed to be robust for sake of robustness.
Design by and for greed has been with us since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The pattern of speculative capital chasing expansionist opportunities extended into the design and manufacture of things. The result was a profusion of incompatible methods, each of which sought to gain monopoly status in a particular market segment. This has happened with each new technology. Witness the profusion of networking methods and standards and intellectual property in the early 1980’s, the conflicting cellular networking types, etc.
We have a system designed by greed that is running our societal infrastructure. How smart is that?
On the other hand, I have participated in the design process of a networking standard, what is said about sausage and politics applies to that effort.