Wystem: A System for Wicked Problems, Part 1
Socrates used to say he was the midwife of wisdom. Talking to him made you wise(r). No wonder he was executed for corrupting the minds of the youth. How exactly did he evoke that latent wisdom? What was so enlightening about the Socratic method?
There are many answers, of which one is the skill with which he used reason and argument. Remember that systematic reasoning was new in his time - very few people were literate and the line between myth and history was not as sharply drawn as it is today. Some of Socrates’ contemporaries - the Sophists, for example - were drawing crowds based on their use of reason for winning debates. Socrates repurposed this newly discovered tool for truth seeking.
What new technology is being used by our contemporaries for spreading rumors and winning debates, that we can repurpose for truth seeking?
Just as reasoning was a new technology in his times, so is computing in our times. Very few people today can ‘think computationally,’ i.e., organize our interventions in the world using the concepts and tools of computing. We think there’s a serious gap in our efforts to address wicked problems as a result. In previous Messengers, we have written that the complexities of modern societies prompt new instruments such as the census, the survey and the registry, i.e., new tools for information gathering and classification. Huge bureaucracies emerge to ‘process’ all this information. Seen from our perspective, these institutions are all computers of some kind. There’s no other way to understand vast systems of human organization - states, markets and cities included - without understanding that they have always been computers. Here’s a relevant quote from from Farrell and Shalizi’s insightful article:
…we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.
Computational concepts are particularly important if we want to think ecologically, understand how everything is connected and how changes in one part of a system can manifest as effects in a totally different part of that system. Reasoning alone - in the traditional Socratic style - isn’t enough: we need systems of thought. And we need platforms where we can work collaboratively on those systems of thought.
That’s what we are attempting with our wisdom system, or as we call it, the Wystem. In this week’s Messenger, we hint at three computational concepts that can help us build more robust social systems: recipes, exchanges and interfaces.
Social Recipes
One way to capture social complexity in a computationally friendly style is through the metaphor of recipes. A good cookbook will tell you how to make tortilla or dal from a certain set of ingredients - whole wheat/corn flour, urad dal, ginger, marinara sauce etc. The recipes in that cookbook work against a functioning infrastructural background. A cookbook author assumes that you have all the ingredients in front of you and it's not their job to teach you how to stock a kitchen with flour or raisins. If that's a reasonable assumption, it's only so because we take food systems for granted; during a pandemic, we can't assume that everyday kitchen items are readily available for re-stocking, just as most children in Bihar can't take electricity supply for granted if they were suddenly required to perform all their schoolwork on computers connected to the internet.
By coupling our desire to make rotis to the availability of flour and the availability of flour to the grain harvest, we can turn infrastructure that's taken for granted into a resource that's explicitly accounted for. Unfortunately, adding this layer of systems representation can also create a new set of problems - we can immediately see the problems that arise from embedding complexity into our supply chains. Let's say you have a smart storage bin that sends a signal to the grocery store to dispatch a bag of flour every time my stock is below some pre-determined amount. In fact, let's assume the houses of the future have chutes for drones to land with supplies and those drones are pre-programmed to supply you with flour.
Awesome? But what happens when the drone is hacked (as it inevitably will) and someone steals your flour supply? The recipe, as you might have guessed, is a metaphor for society. It's all too easy for us to consume individual social meals - one election here, one bus ticket there, one school here and so on - since that's how the media wants us to eat, but we completely miss changes in the social system as a whole. Even as expansive a concept as citizenship has to be embedded in a network of other concepts - which is exactly what a Wystem approach to citizenship will enable.
is hard at work installing climate recipes in various parts of India, but why stop with climate? The recipe metaphor extends beyond climate change.
Interfaces and Exchanges
Money is the most popular medium of exchange. Most people living in modern societies work for money. Steel and bricks and concrete and labour go in and goods come out. Labour is nothing like the goods it produces, but yet there must be a way to turn production numbers into wages for labour, for without that conversion, we have no way of keeping the factory going. It's a real challenge, for strictly speaking, we are trying to compare apples and oranges. We are so used to the apple to orange conversion that we don't realize the magic that goes into the economic system.
But replace the economic system with the social system and you can immediately see the problems. Suppose I run an NGO in a rural part of Uttar Pradesh, and I am funded to reduce maternal mortality at childbirth. My funders might assess my value by looking at mortality statistics before and after my interventions, but there's no way to assess the onward impact of my work. Let's say another organization works on infants and toddlers, helping ensure nutrition during those important years for development. There's no social accounting system that takes children from my audit to yours. Money helps us keep track of accounts while we exchange goods and labour, but there's no such mechanism for broader social goods. Can the language of interfaces and exchanges help bring the social system together?
It's like that old saying about trying to measure the weight of a smile – the things that matter most defy easy quantification. The very things that make our communities thrive – empathy, collaboration, creating spaces for growth – those things often slip through the cracks of our number-crunching systems. We're left with a strange disconnect: social change is fueled by human connection, but we can't seem to account for that connection itself. It's invisible in the balance sheets.
Imagine if we could develop a different kind of "interface" – a way to translate social impact into a language as readily understood as profits and losses. What if that dedicated NGO in Uttar Pradesh could be part of a "social currency" system that gives them credit for each mother's healthy childbirth? And what if that value could flow onward, feeding into the measured success of the child nutrition program, building a visible, traceable thread of positive change? Sounds far-fetched, but just as the inventions of money and accounting revolutionized the exchange of goods, maybe a new way of measuring social good could revolutionize how we build strong societies. It won't be easy, but then again, neither was figuring out how to turn making widgets into a paycheck. We won't know until we try.
And the need for more robust systems of exchange is becoming apparent as technology gets access to our thoughts and feelings.
Technology changing how we talk to each other, how we document our lives, and even how we understand what we want. Think about it: even our most private stuff – how we think, feel, even fall in love – it's all becoming part of the online universe through which you are connected with us. We're swapping bits of our brains with every like, photo, or tweet, feeding this enormous machine. Sometimes it's just for convenience, but often we're trying to mold how the world sees us. That line between who we are inside and how we look outside? It's getting super blurry. We need fresh ways to think about how this new world works.
TLDR;
We now live in a completely different age from Socrates. There are fifty times as many people. Data is cheap. Communication is fast. We can travel from one end of the earth to the other in a few hours. And almost all of this massive human infrastructure - the backbone of the Anthropocene - is built on top of computing. Which is why any antidote to our destructive tendencies must repurpose the same tools. Planetary design and technology can make collective wisdom an achievable goal if midwifed by a self-avowedly Socratic community.
PS: By planetary design/technology, we don't mean the use of the entire planet for human ends (what geoengineering aims to do, for example), but design and technology for the planet. That’s what the Wystem is designed for.