[ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of capitalism

[Bob Hughes]

Dear listmembers,

Linear programming (and other mathematical/cybernetic planning 
techniques) were seen by many people in the 1940s and 1950s as 
heralding the end of markets, as they offered radically more 
efficient means of distribution.

Instead, I get the impression these techniques ended up helping Big 
Capital to push markets to new limits, via Enterprise Resource 
Planning (ERP) apps like SAP.

Certainly, I understand that people trained in cybernetics and OR 
during the 1960s increasingly found they could only get work in 
corporate situations, where it was impossible to work on 'whole 
systems' in the proper, cybernetic sense.

And linear programming seems to be the basis of the 'combinatorial 
auction' systems that have been so very profitably developed for 
handling sell-offs of public assets (UK buses in 1995, followed by 
the auctions for 3G and now 4G bandwidth, and I guess auctions for 
airline routes ... and maybe finding further, similar markets in 
countries that come under IMF privatisation-orders).

If this is the case then there's a ginormously bitter irony here: 
what should have led to an age of low-impact abundance ended up being 
a power-tool for the manufacture of high-impact scarcity.

Has anyone researched this, or can anyone point me in the direction 
of someone who has? Do you think the above is broadly correct?

Best regards,

Bob Hughes
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