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CENTRAL_CONTROL

                                             June 5, 2008


Jane Jacobs, "The Economy of Cities" (1969):

   "National currencies, then, are potent feedback but impotent
   at triggering appropriate corrections.  To picture how such
   a thing can be, imagine a group of people who are all
   properly equipped with diaphragms and lungs but who share
   only one single brain-stem breathing center.  In this goofy
   arrangement, the breathing center would receive consolidated
   feedback on the carbon-dioxide level of the whole group
   without discriminating among the individuals producing it.
   Everybody's diaphragm would thus be triggered to contract at
   the same time.  But suppose some of those people were
   sleeping, while others were playing tennis.  Suppose some
   were reading about feedback controls, while others were
   chopping wood.  Some would have to halt what they were doing
   and subdivide into a lower common denominator of activity.
   Worse yet, suppose some were swimming and diving, and for
   some reason, such as the breaking of the surf, had no
   control over the timing of their submersions.  Imagine what
   would happen to them.  In such an arrangement, feedback
   control would be working perfectly on its own terms but the
   results would be devastating because of a flaw designed
   right into the system.

   "I have had to propose a preposterous situation because
   systems as structurally flawed as this don't exist in
   nature; they wouldn't last.  Nor do they exist in the
   machines we deliberately design to incorporate
   mechanical, chemical or electronic feedback controls;
   machines this badly conceived wouldn't work.  Nations,
   from this point of view, don't work either, yet do exist."

Chapter 11, "Faulty Feedback to Cities", p. 161, Vintage paperback

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