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Quelle discours alternatif peut-on avoir face à la méritocratie ?

# Quelle discours alternatif peut-on avoir face à la méritocratie ? À l'instar du développement social face au développement personnel. N'y aurait-il pas une histoire à raconter à réussir ensemble et mériter ensemble ? Qu'est-ce que le mérite ? Souhaitons-nous le mérite ? ## Comment va réagir le capitalisme quand les bullshit jobs seront faits par de l'IA ? Faisons ensemble une expérience de pensée qui n'est vraiment plus très loin de la réalité. L'IA est désormais autonome dans la réalisation des livrables que demandent des personnes à d'autres qui se disent faire un travail à la con : proposer des slides d'un audit, le présenter et envoyer le compte-rendu en pièce jointe. Et imaginons que le client réagissent de la même manière, voire pire, demande à Claude de lui résumer l'ensemble et de le conseiller dans la prise de décision. Je vois deux possibilités, la stagnation du nombre de bullshit jobs ne me convainc pas. ### Il y a moins de bullshit jobs Au pire, les bullshit LLMs se répondent entre eux dans un univers parallèle, au mieux, on se rend compte de la mascarade. Mais la conclusion, c'est qu'on licencie les personnes qui devaient proposer ce genre de travail inutile. ### Il y a plus de bullshit jobs Dans la société capitaliste, la raison sociale de ces boulots est plus forte que leur réalisation et nous gardons ces personnes aux même moments, ce qui fait qu'avec l'effet amplificateur des LLMs, nous avons encore plus besoin de personnes qui répondent à d'autres personnes. En cloisonnant les personnes avec des droits pour rendre l'efficience la plus faible possible. --- ## Références - Bullshit jobs - Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does is bad for you

Quelle discours alternatif peut-on avoir face à la méritocratie ?

Où sont les applications pour les minorités ?

# Où sont les applications pour les minorités ? Cher lecteur, ça y est nous avons des supers pouvoirs. Alors, nous en avions déjà mais l'apparition des LLM nous permet d'avoir de l'intelligence à porter de main. Nous pouvons les faire tourner toute la nuit si nous le souhaitons. Cela permet à chacun d'entre nous de contribuer à une mission en enlevant certaines barrières cognitives, intellectuelles ou financières. > Claude, solve climate change. Alors, où sont-elles ces applications ? Que font les personnes qui y ont maintenant accès ? Prenons mon cas : je n'aime pas l'IA, cela fait bien longtemps que je ne code plus régulièrement mais l'IA me remplace là où j'aurais voulu continuer à être meilleur, à suer, même si de prime abord, je n'en ai pas envie. Cette IA m'enferme dans ma languissante vie. Prenons mon cas donc : j'ai accès à Opus, Fable avec une limite bien au-delà de mon utilisation. J'ai donc des employés à la demande. Que leur faire fais-je ? Une machine à écrire avec un écran de liseuse, un site pour générer des mots de passe, un site pour transformer des svg en png. Ce ne sont que mes besoins que je remplis. À aucun moment, alors que je me vois comme une personne qui a de l'empathie, je n'ai réfléchi à ce que je pourrais proposer comme travail à ces LLMs qui aiderait une plus grande communauté que l'appartement au 6ème étage dans un quartier parisien. Je suis égoiste et je ne pense même pas être le pire. C'est la conclusion que j'en fais. Je pense qu'elle s'explique d'une manière plus systémique qu'individuelle. La capacité maintenant à avoir l'IA ne change finalement pas grand chose, L'accès à l'immense stock d'énergie aurait pu être un changement majeur dans l'équité des besoins. Mais le LLM permet de rendre compte d'un point de vue individuel : maintenant, d'une certaine manière, l'acte altruiste est à un prompt. Et pourtant nous ne resolvons pas les problèmes les plus b importants.

Accounting for Slavery - Masters and Management

# Accounting for Slavery - Masters and Management ## Caitlin Rosenthal - 2018 ## :book-2: What the book is about The accounting of slavery. The book discusses the forgotten influence of the slave trade on business management and on today's management practices. Rosenthal pushes back against the collective forgetting of slavery's impact on modern capitalism. By recovering year-by-year accounting records from bookkeepers, she chronicles the actions taken against enslaved people in the pursuit of maximum profit, with no regard for human life. ## Introduction Slaveholders — the "book farmers" — relied heavily on data and analysis to improve productivity, using rigorous methods grounded in a genuine scientific approach. Spreadsheets amplified the dehumanization of the enslaved. Their power was immense and their violence had no limit. People, counted in numbers of "hands," were worth as much as machines. Sugar was made of blood. With no way to resign, the enslaved would take their own lives in order to "steal" a piece of property from their master. But even in death, owners would show everyone — by mutilating the corpses of the deceased — who was in charge… ## Slavery and management Innovation and entrepreneurship are what we like to reflect about modern capitalist life, and yet the roots of capitalism draw heavily on the production methods of plantation owners. A handful (sometimes as few as 1 white person for every 10 Black enslaved people) controlled the overwhelming majority. Through horses, weapons, the whip, and blood. ### The separation of powers between owners and accountants The owner stepped away from his fields and left their management to "attorneys" (procurators / lawyers). The owner could focus on lobbying parliaments and meeting clients easily thanks to his proximity to England. This separation is the precursor to Taylorist business management: the thinking forces kept far from the manual forces. ### Distance: a constraint turned into an opportunity The distance to the Caribbean led to improvements in the paper communication channels between owner and manager. Monthly, semi-annually, or annually, the owner stayed informed and proposed standards for how reports should be delivered. Distance enabled the mass reification of the enslaved. It allowed abstraction, and allowed men, women, and children to be seen in their barest state — as data points and production inputs. Interchangeable parts inside the smoothly running machinery of cotton plantations. :::reification::: | Miles | What reaches the owner | | ----- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 0 | Mary. Fourteen, sized rather than aged so she cannot dispute it. She sings on the third row, beside her mother, and her hands are cracked open at the knuckle. | | 1 | Mary — third row, picking. | | 40 | Hand, rated ¾. | | 600 | Return for June, line 14: ¾ hand, 148 lb. | | 3000 | 312 hands. | ### Siloing or making things flexible One of the great strengths of the people who had been enslaved was their mobility: both physical and across the tasks they could perform. An owner could have them do any task he wanted: he standardized them like blueprints and arranged the skills of the enslaved as he pleased. ## The forms of labor > Birth, death, output, and consumption were diligently noted, but the details of so many human lives are **lost** between the lines. Data itself creates distance. That distance can allow for stepping back, but it completely neglects the human cost because it is reductive. Our desire to simplify, to create causal links that reassure us, produces an abominable evil. The evil of no longer seeing the subtleties of reality. Of the difficulties. Of the hard confrontation. > [!NOTE] > My role as a manager, if it too had to be summed up, is to bring reality back to the center of people's concerns. To see the long term. To sincerely understand the inner life of the people I work with. ### Subtle rebellion "Sogering": pretending to work, and accomplishing as little as possible. The enslaved would not openly refuse to work. They would subtly do as little as possible. ## The hierarchies between life and death Reward or violence are the two tools used to extract what one wants from an enslaved person: getting them to pick as many kilos of cotton as possible in a single day. The reward is not what one might think. It is often "rights" that have been taken away and then reoffered: restoring social ties with other enslaved people, getting food again, and so on. ### How could a minority of free white people maintain domination over a majority of enslaved Black people? Their strategies were varied. But the most important thing was keeping control of weapons and horses. A missing axe used for work would be enough to suspect a rebellion. Violence was systematic, varying only in intensity. It served to terrorize the other enslaved people. - Cutting off the nose, - cutting off the ears, - castration, - whipping, - "decaping": rubbing salt into the wounds. Doing this even after the person's death kept control intact: "see what I do to dead bodies — even suicide is not an option." Violence was the cement that held the plantation system in place. > [!NOTE] > This extreme of carrot and stick makes me deeply uncomfortable. Only the acknowledgment of an inner life in others can make collaborative work possible. By controlling the information that connected people beyond the plantation, owners could extend their influence. Controlling access to religion or to literacy was an effective strategy. The complementary use of violence and terror created a network of control over each individual plantation as well as across the entire island. When escapes did happen, they often ended with the person being returned to the fields. ## Human capital Thomas Affleck even proposed standards for optimizing enslaved lives: 9 months of breastfeeding was the perfect duration so the mother could quickly become fertile again. ### The prices of "rejects" Often noted as `00,00`, elderly people ended up being worth less than _$0_ because they cost more money than they could work for. To get rid of them — emancipation not being legally possible — they were offered in a lot at a discount. That way, the connection with the other enslaved people being sold was preserved. ### The "one-quarter, one-half, three-quarters of a prime hand" notation — the horror of the rating > When planters rated the enslaved as one-quarter, one-half, or three-quarters of a prime hand, they were in some ways attempting to benchmark their output—to figure out how much work each man or woman ought to be able to perform if he or she could be spurred to maximum efficiency. But rating people as fractional hands was also a tool for commodifying and capitalizing lives, if not in the unit of dollars. By rating the enslaved as fractions of a person, slave owners translated the infinite diversity of humanity into a parade of prime hands. Through calculation, they rendered the incommensurable abstract and equivalent—as a unit of labor that could be compared to other units of labor **without reference** to individuals. This is the whole vicious act. Abstract in order to compare, abstract in order to strip away the human and calculate the dividends. :::prime-hand::: | Person | Between the lines | Picked | | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------ | | Mary | Fourteen. Sized rather than aged, so she cannot dispute the figure. Sings on the third row beside her mother. | 148 lb | | Isaac | Forty. Cut his own hand open last spring to slow the row down. Knows how to read, and hides it. | 96 lb | | Hannah | Nursing, nine months in — the duration Affleck's standard allows before she is fertile again. | 71 lb | | Peter | Nineteen. Fastest hands on the place. Was sold away from his sister in March. | 214 lb | ## The management of freedom After emancipation, cotton planters found themselves managing in roughly the same way, but with one new dimension: _negotiation_ with their employees — often former enslaved people. These employees could not read and so did not know what contracts they had agreed to. The more they worked, the more they fell into debt — a sick day cost them two days of work. Looking for work elsewhere then became impossible. > Production could only be expanded by reorganizing labor. If hands rather than machines were to be decisive, the great innovations had to be introduced into the work itself. A phrase from the period captures the new attitude well: "Sugar is made of blood." The cruel meaning of the machine's failure now becomes clear: the _hacendado_ (landowner) introduced into his mill the rigid disciplines of large-scale industry. Together with the European bourgeoisie, he realized that seconds are pieces of capital, and he began a special Creole system of accelerated production — a "Taylorism" — that consumed Negroes the way the grinders consumed the sugarcane. ## Interoperability — precursor to the ills Counting in numbers of "hands" to find analogies and then compare across fields added up. An enslaved person then becomes a unit of labor ("unit of labor") and stops being seen as human. ## The value of an enslaved person Children were sized rather than aged, to silence them so they could not dispute the truthfulness of the data such as their age. ## The business of slavery (podcast) ### The power of standardization A medium-sized cotton planter adopted it. He was using old records full of logs like the total amount of picked cotton, but he had a lot of trouble doing this. He tried to capture a lot of data and it kept spilling into the margins. With a new standardized logbook, he now had a column for each enslaved person — he collected the same data but in a neat grid, and he could see how much each person picked each day and how much to expect each week. Now, he could know how much money he would make, since cotton picking was the bottleneck. ### How logging affected the work The enslaved were afraid of doing too much and of doing too little. If they did too much, that became the new target for the days ahead; if they did too little, they would be denied rations or whipped for each missing pound. It was an immense source of anxiety for the enslaved. :::quota-ratchet target=150 days=7::: --- ## References - Les 3 violences --- ## Ideas for permanent notes - The right tools but the wrong intentions

Ishikawa Diagram

# Ishikawa Diagram The ishikawa diagram looks at the first causes of an effect or problem. It frames it so it's easy to widden the thinking about 4M: Man, Machine, Method, Material.

Les zones d'influence

# Les zones d'influence | Niveau | Motivation (en a-t-il envie ?) | Capacité (peut-il le faire ?) | | ---------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Personnel** (individuel / soi) | Est-ce que la personne trouve l'action agréable ou pénible ? Ses motivations internes. | A-t-elle les compétences et la force personnelle pour le faire ? | | **Social** (le groupe / les autres) | Est-ce que les autres l'encouragent ou la découragent ? Pression et normes du groupe. | Est-ce que les autres l'aident concrètement (coopération, ressources partagées) ? | | **Structurel** (les choses / le système) | Est-ce que les récompenses, primes ou sanctions poussent dans le bon sens ? | Est-ce que l'environnement — outils, espace, processus — facilite ou empêche l'action ? | --- ## Références - Conversations cruciales

Le management ne gère que des quantités

# Le management ne gère que des quantités Le management et la gestion, d'un point de vue du langage, sont des termes qui s'appliquent à des quantités et non à des qualités. On gère un stock. Le terme est devenu tellement utilisé que la notion de gestion des ressources humaines est employé aujourd'hui sans critique. --- ## Références - @youtube - COMMENT LES NAZIS ONT VOULU FAIRE DISPARAÎTRE LES PREUVES DE LA SHOAH - M-N-O-P-Q | BLAST, Le souffle de l'info - Accounting for slavery | Caitlin Rosenthal

🖋️ Caitlin Rosenthal

# 🖋️ Caitlin Rosenthal ## Contact Son site web et son historique à Berkeley ## À propos /i/https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5MtuWrk6Cn0yK1GeJ3btAT - Why management history needs to reckon with slavery? /i/https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6T8mrQQzfVPvUd9QjGgSZ0 - The business of slavery