Gruber discovers Systems Theory (and annoys me again)
After not thinking about John Gruber for easily more than two decades, I have been exposed to two of his hot takes grounded in misunderstandings of things I actually understand.
The first was his LLM watermarking "I expect the perfect word" take, where he casts the EU as a villain ruining American tech. His argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs and the proposed watermarking work, which the internet pushed back on. He subsequently doubled down on it, which elicited an annoyed post from me.
But today, I get "POSIWID" in my feed, where Gruber discovers 50 year old systems theory and uses it to tear the EU's DMA a new one. Which I think fails a critical reading for a lot of reasons.
Gruber's naive, positivist reading of the Stafford Beer maxim "the purpose of a system is what it does" (the POSIWID referenced above - here's a wiki link) is that there is one purpose, and if you use your galaxy brain you can uncover it. But no contemporary systems thinker would read it this way. When you define a system's purpose, you are drawing out your worldview in relation to others, to make sense of the situation you find yourself in. The engineering-rooted "hard" systems thinking approach has been eclipsed by more human-centred methods partly through the work of thinkers like Beer.
So if you think, as Gruber evidently does, that the purpose of the DMA is to "impose unnecessary bureaucracy and inconvenience on major markets where it previously had no footprint", I think we learn more about your worldview than about the purpose of the DMA. The idea that bureaucracy is an impediment to technical flourishing is a particular American technical libertarianism, which definitely featured strongly in Gruber's hero Steve Jobs' behaviours.
Yes, the DMA most definitely is imposing something on major markets. That is on purpose, a small wedge into American hegemony that produces opportunities for rebalancing power towards the EU over a time horizon that is likely alien to someone submerged in a Silicon Valley worldview. Complaining about regulations in "major markets" by the very owners of those markets is a signal that Gruber is infused with the same American exceptionalism that the DMA is there to counteract.
I really don't know if the DMA is the right legislation, or even reasonable in a technical sense, but I do know that it is doing what the EU wants it to - evidenced by Gruber's response to it - in pushing back on American technical hegemony. And that is my view of what the purpose is. Unlike Gruber, I don't expect that it is a true reading of reality, but rather, my understanding, seen through my worldview, and thus more useful for me to understand what I think about things than as a true explanation of the external world.