mixed initiatives

I’m currently kicking around some ideas about trying to articulate the difference between form, function, and process.¹ I’m using these terms in an idiosyncratic way, but the basic thing I’m trying to convey is:

We have constructed much of our society around particular forms of output; the student’s essay is the form. Often the form is the only thing we formally identify (Seeing-like-a-state metrics: the forest we can measure is the only forest we care about; the student essay we can grade is the form and stands in the place of the learning we can’t measure).

However, the thing we actually want is the function that the output performs; we want the student to learn (or to be more employable) and often the reason a particular form has been settled on is that the form and the process of creating the form happens to bundle together multiple functions in a way that serves many of our needs simultaneously. One particular example: bargains between labor and management hinge on the coincidence of several competing needs in one common process. Another: laws are constructed so that the various side effects that the passage of the law and the enactment of the law bundle together.

Often the thing that actually performs that function is the process by which the form is created. Rather than the fixed artifact (which is easy to view and measure and remember) the thing that gets us what we really want (or think we want, or truly want) is the enactment of creation rather than the result at the end.,

The thing that we’re observing today is that, as the sea-change happens and we have new ways of creating particular forms, the generation of the forms may only serve a subset of the functions that the original form gave us, because the process was the valuable bundling of our negotiated needs. Today, we’re seeing a delamination, as the various substrates that were bundled together peel apart. We’ve unbundled the cable channels, and now what we get and the way that our collective cost works has unraveled.

This affects different people and groups differently, causing skewed outcomes. It advantages the people who are pushing hardest for the delamination, at least at first, because they’re actively choosing which of the side effects to keep while discarding the others. It also means that the bargains struck for prior configurations of functions are no longer balanced. This is a significant thing when the current form+process is the result of negotiation (implicit or explicit). One party can continue to hold up their end of the letter of the law (providing the form), but the functions have changed because it was the process that really dictated what the actual functions were.

This can founder when the reason you believed the form worked turns out to not be related to the actual function you wanted. It also means that you may end up jettisoning side-effects that you actually wanted, or ones that were keeping the status quo in place. Any delamination is going to require a reexamination of prior negotiations.

I feel like I’m repeating some concepts that have other expression elsewhere (alienation? post-commodification as the no-longer-marketable product decomposes?) but this framing has been useful for my thinking, particularly when I have to talk about generative AI and how it is good at reproducing the form of something in exactly the way that elides the function that we actually wanted the process of creating that form to perform.