We Just Have to Set Up the Planetary Dev Environment

The collective noun for "protocol" is "dev environment"

What’s the collective noun for protocol? I think a partial answer is what programmers call a dev environment (dev is short for development). A collection of protocols is a dev environment. In theory, a harmonious assemblage of near-unconscious codified strata of behaviors that serves as a coherent context for effective accumulating conscious action at multiple levels of abstraction.

Every working dev environment is a collection of protocols, but not every collection of protocols adds up to a dev environment. The ones that aren’t either don’t add up in any meaningful way, or add up to a clusterfuck.

This time last year, I semi-jokingly set myself an actual resolution for 2023: Setting up the dev environment for my life. I regret to report that I have mostly failed to achieve this resolution, and my trajectory through the year has mostly resembled the dramatic arc of the meme comic below that inspired it.

While I didn’t create a clusterfuck, the collection of working/failing protocols that is my life, plus all the random disorganized actions (accounting for the majority of my behaviors frankly) never quite rose to the level of a coherent dev environment.

But reflecting on my failure got me thinking: Is this what’s wrong with the planet? A failure to set up a planetary dev-environment? Is the planet failing in the same ways I am?

If a dev environment is a collection of protocols, you can interrogate how it is working (or not) by looking at individual working/failing protocols. More holistically, you can ask whether as a collection it is closer to a clusterfuck than a dev environment.

Viewed that way, my year was not a complete failure. Some protocols worked. Others failed but I can see how I might redesign them. Others failed in ways that revealed gaps in my knowledge or capabilities. And through the fog of personal protocol jihad, I think I’m beginning to see the contours of a viable 2024 dev environment beginning to take shape in my life after many years of chaos.

You could say the same for the world at large.

***

My 2023 resolution at the personal level was all-encompassing, ranging from setting up a literal dev environment on my computer to do Faster, Higher, Stronger things in the ribbonfarm lab, to setting up a figurative dev environment for my life in general. The wishful hope was that doing so would help me figure out my Act 2 Consulting Mission,™ (got nowhere), buy a house (ditto), make measurable progress on my bigger writing projects (hahahaha!), finally fix my health (lol!), market my catalog of wondrous wares better (lolsob!) and so on.

Every one of these failures was a failure to set up a robustly working dev environment, configured roughly right enough to work in rather than work on. A context within which deliberate actions lead reliably to predictable and determinate outcomes.

It feels like there are eerie parallels to the state of the world. The world failed to rein in one terrible war, and allowed another terrible one get underway. It failed yet again to set up a scaffolding for globally coordinated climate action. There was a time when the UN looked like a dev environment. It even set “development program” goals. Now it looks like a random assortment of hit-or-miss protocols that get ever closer to adding up to a clusterfuck. You don’t even need the cross-fire of security council vetoes to make it a failing institution. The whole extended UN universe seems like a rolling “shambolic debacle” to borrow Bruce Sterling’s evocative phrase.

At the domestic US level, the nation failed to throw up viable and systematic alternatives to the Ancient Political Operating System staffed by geriatrics that currently has us in a chokehold. The two parties that fight for control over the three branches of government currently look like a clusterfuck to me. We still pretend it’s a dev environment for some sort of coherent national mission, but it isn’t. It’s a large ball of sound and fury that increasingly signifies nothing.

Working on protocols through the year really drove home for me the extent to which the world is a collection of protocols that constitute an emergent dev environment for civilization. And this dev environment has all sorts of crippling problems at the moment, ranging from fouled-up configuration files and environment version conflicts to broken package managers and various unpatched vulnerabilities. And it’s way too big and complex for even the most talented system administrators and DevOps types to wrap their minds around. Hell, even the command shell of the planetary OS, Twitter, is now basically defunct.

***

At a personal level, the news wasn’t all bad, and the bad news wasn’t entirely my fault.

We moved back to the Seattle area from LA, a step in the right direction for house-hunting, but we’re in the absolute worst US housing market in decades. I didn’t figure out my Act 2 Consulting Mission, but it evolved in interesting ways on its own with no 5-year-planning from me. Even the derailment on the writing front was good news in a way. Though I made zero progress on my bigger writing projects, all the thinking and writing I did on AI and protocols has caused me to significantly refactor my plans for all of them for the better.

At a global level too, the news wasn’t all bad, and the bad news wasn’t entirely humanity’s fault.

As several economist bloggers have noted, the US economy failed to slip into recession and kept on keeping on despite supply chain snarls and weird weather and growing fragility in the Chinese economy. Inflation didn’t spiral out of control. Though the global climate action scene continued to be a clusterfuck in deep decline on the public front, the wobbly energy transition seems to be muddling through as best as it can in the private sector. And despite the best efforts of a rogues gallery of idiots and theologians to derail it, the AI revolution continued apace. And there are signs of a thaw in the crypto winter.

***

I think it’s fair to say that at all levels from personal to global, we humans are failing to act with planning and foresight on many fronts that call for it, but are sort of doing quite well on many improvised-action fronts. So could we call it a wash? Do the two dynamics roughly cancel out? Do the two sets of fronts overlap in a way that adds up to the world taking care of itself?

Sometimes it does, like when markets solve problems governments fail to, or when, at a personal level, you accidentally hit a goal via serendipity that you fail to hit with your best planned efforts. This is serendipity. The world getting surprisingly lucky and enjoying a charmed existence. Belief in the inevitability of this charmed existence is the central dogma of neoliberalism. It’s the dogma that has been powering the faith that we’re slouching towards utopia.

But a lot of the time, this doesn’t happen. The central dogma fails for long enough, over a wide enough swathe of world affairs, that we start wondering what the hell is going wrong.

Much of the Great Weirding, arguably, can be understood as an extended failure of the central dogma. A failure that was broad and long enough that we couldn’t dismiss it as a blip or expect it be a self-healing ailment of the world.

It felt like the charmed existence of the previous decades unraveling. Random abundance appearing in some places was no longer magically addressing the most critical problems in other places. Some sort of cosmic meta-law of the supply of civilizational generativity matching demand for civilizational crisis-responses was starting to fail. The engines of wealth creation weren’t properly coupled to the zones of acute and chronic crises. The magically effective spillover and surplus flows we’d become accustomed to seemed to be breaking up.

Or to put it another way, the dev environment was collapsing. Hence all the panic around Progress™ and Stagnation™ and the desperate war of competing manifestos, trying to restore a fiat optimism where an organic kind was starting to falter.

We get caught up in ideological debates about optimism vs. pessimism, agile vs. waterfall, free market vs. command economy, and highly designed lifestyles vs. highly improvised lifestyles. But it’s not all about ideology, personality, or temperament.

It’s mostly about insufficient technological leverage running into transient surges of overwhelming historical complexity. Sometimes the immovable object is a little more immovable and the irresistible force is a little less irresistible. And so we run aground, throwing words like “polycrisis” and “omnicrisis” around.

Determinate, predictable threads of development anywhere are not entirely the result of wise planning and stoic discipline. They are the mostly the result of the affordances of temporarily better technology meeting temporarily more tractable historical dynamics. Specifically, better protocols and calmer times that combine to form dev environments. When this works, it’s not that the entire future becomes determinate forever. But the dev environment becomes predictable enough, for long enough, that we can make some plans and stick to them. For a while. We can inject just enough determinacy into the indeterminacy to make the world livably anxiety-free. For a while.

We can’t do much about manufacturing calmer times, but maybe we can make up better protocols that add up to a better dev environment? For a while?

***

It feels like it would be useful to think in terms of a planetary dev environment. That’s how we can engineer hardness into the future in real ways, instead of getting sucked into tedious ideological debates.

Of course, the planet isn’t like a single computer. There is no root account. No sudo. No hypervisor offering a choice of bootable OSes. No systematic memory management. No rebooting. No reformatting and reinstallation. The metaphor is wildly wrong in many significant ways.

But it is right in one very important way: the world is not a random anarchy of shit happening. There is order and structure in our environments, both designed and natural, that allows for a degree of speculative execution, pipelining, and so on. We don’t have to be in 100% improv one-beat-at-a-time mode. If the environment is set up right, we can look ahead more than one step at least in some activities, some of the time, even if we can’t do so in all activities, all the time.

The basic principle of trying to set up a good dev environment that makes some things predictable and determinate, and allows us to gradually “increase the number of operations we can do without thinking about them,” (what I think of as Whitehead advances) seems to apply.

We’ve been in a mode of anarchic improvisation for a decade now. The idea that all foresight and planing is a nefarious communist plot to drown us all in the central-planning bureaucracy of a command economy has become a sort of religious belief. We’ve become so suspicious of determinacy, we don’t even try to set up good dev environments anymore. We think a flat and anarchic world of individual protocols competing aggressively on techno-Darwinian tangled banks is as good as it gets. That any positive vision that proposes to do more than stay away from clusterfuck regimes is creeping autocracy.

I think this is too nihilistic. It is possible to build planetary dev environments that do better than operate as Night Watchmen. They just don’t last for ever. Sometimes they die, and then you have to do some housekeeping and build a new one.

Which is not to say it’s easy.

The comic applies as much to larger worldly matters as it does to individual lives. Getting trapped in an abyss of dev-environment setup at the planetary level is entirely possible. But at least it would be a different kind of hell than the hell of not even trying that we’re in right now.

Maybe 2024 will be the year the planet begins to set up its dev environment.

Or at least the year I finally finish setting up my personal one.