and his colleagues not only showed that reward impaired performance, they also discovered how it impaired performance: essentially by causing ‘a primitivization of psychological functioning’. The subjects regressed in effect to childhood, and performed below their mental age.38
After the 2007/8 financial crisis, the Nobel economics laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote a global bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which explained exactly why performance bonuses do not and cannot work – and why the decisions of even the brightest corporate leaders are generally governed more by luck and delusion than by genius.39
Hierarchy invokes a different mindset from the one we enjoy among equals, and in which we are most productive and creative. In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist has shown how this ties in with the human brain’s well-known (but subtle) ‘lateralization’. The brain’s two halves have somewhat different functions but the most important difference is one of style. In simple terms: ‘The right hemisphere has an affinity for whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical’.40 The two halves need to work in tandem but the peculiar dynamics of Western society create over-reliance on the left hemisphere, with its more intense, focused approach, resulting in:
a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations. For example, having found an approach that works for one problem, subjects [who have suffered damage to the right side of the brain] seem to get stuck, and will inappropriately apply it to a second problem that requires a different approach – or even, having answered one question right, will give the same answer to the next and the next.41
In his concluding chapter, McGilchrist imagines what the world would look like to a brain consisting of nothing but its left hemisphere, and it looks a lot like the world where so many of us have to live and work: it recognizes skill only in terms of what can be codified, is obsessed with details at the expense of the broader picture, has little empathy. In this not-entirely-hypothetical world:
Fewer people would find themselves doing work involving contact with anything in the real, ‘lived’ world. Technology would flourish, as an expression of the left hemisphere’s desire to manipulate and control the world for its own pleasure, but it would be accompanied by a vast expansion of bureaucracy, systems of abstraction and control. The essential elements of bureaucracy, as described by Peter Berger and his colleagues [in the book The Homeless Mind, 1974], show that they would thrive in a world dominated by the left hemisphere.42
Capitalist industry is aware something is amiss, but cannot contemplate the obvious solution (stop being capitalist) and it is not in the creativity consultant’s interest to point it out either.
CAPITALISM DIDN’T MAKE COMPUTERS…
The notion that computers demonstrate capitalism’s creativity is finally belied by the computer’s history. Capitalism ignored computers for more than a century, and we might still be waiting for them now, had it not been for brief moments of egalitarian collaboration, grudgingly or accidentally tolerated by the elites, during the worst crises of the Second World War. And even then, capitalism had to be laboriously spoon-fed the idea for a further decade and more, before it would invest its own money in it. Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State reveals the enormous scale of capitalist industry’s dependence on publicly funded research. One of her case studies is Apple’s iPhone, which would amount to nothing very much without the billions of dollars’ worth of research effort that produced everything from its fundamentals (the microprocessors, computer science itself) to its most modern-looking features: the touch screen, the Global Positioning System (GPS), its voice-activated SIRI ‘digital assistant’, and the internet itself: all the ‘features that make the iPhone a smartphone rather than a stupid phone’.43
Programmable, digital computers in the modern sense (but using mechanical gears rather than electronic valves) had been possible since the 1830s, when the British mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were developing the science behind them. Babbage even developed much of the necessary hardware which, when partially completed (using 1830s tools and methods) in the 1980s, worked perfectly well. By most logical considerations, there was abundant need for Babbage’s machines in Britain’s burgeoning commercial empire – but human labor was dirt cheap and British commerce simply wasn’t interested in them.44
Computer scientist and historian Brian Randell, founder of the IEEE’s Annals of the History of Computing, found other perfectly viable ideas for computers that should have been snapped up by a capitalist system that actually did what it claimed to do, namely foster innovation and drive technological progress. One of his discoveries was Dublin accountant Percy Ludgate’s 1907 proposal for a portable computer that could have multiplied two 20-digit numbers in less than ten seconds, using electric motor power. Its specification included the ability to set up sub-routines. Ludgate’s work attracted great interest in the learned societies in Dublin, London and internationally, and the British Army eventually hired him to help plan logistics during the First World War, but he drew a complete blank with the businesses that would have benefited most from his invention.45
The Smithsonian Institution’s computer historian, Henry Tropp, has written:
We had the technical capability to build relay, electromechanical, and even electronic calculating devices long before they came into being. I think one can conjecture when looking through Babbage’s papers, or even at the Jacquard loom, that we had the technical ability to do calculations with some motive power like steam. The realization of this capability was not dependent on technology as much as it was on the existing pressures (or lack of them), and an environment in which these needs could be sympathetically brought to some level of realization.46
It took the exceptional circumstances of a second global war, topped by the threat of a nuclear one, to nudge governments and managements in the advanced nations into providing or at least tolerating briefly the kinds of environments where ‘these needs could be sympathetically brought to some level of realization’: highly informal settings where machines like the Colossus were built (by Post Office engineers for the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, to break German high-command codes – but scrapped and erased from the official record immediately afterwards47), and the ‘Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer’ (ENIAC), designed in Philadelphia for calculating gunnery tables, and completed in 1946.
Colossus was the world’s first true, programmable, digital electronic computer, and it owed its existence to suspension of ‘business as usual’ by the threat of military defeat, which also briefly overshadowed the normal regime of homophobia and snobbery. Bletchley Park’s codebreaking genius, the mathematician Alan Turing, was tolerated while hostilities lasted despite his homosexuality and awkwardness. Colossus was built by a team of five working-class General Post Office (GPO) engineers who would never have been allowed near such an important project in normal times (they very nearly weren’t anyway, and certainly weren’t as soon as the War ended).
The GPO team was led by TH (Tommy) Flowers, a bricklayer’s son from the east end of London. While in his teens, Flowers had earned an electrical engineering degree by night while serving a tough engineering apprenticeship during the day. By 1942 he was one of the few people in the world with a practical and theoretical knowledge of electronics, and an imaginative grasp of its possibilities. Management referred to Flowers as ‘the clever cockney’, and tried to get him off the project, but he and Turing got on well from the first, and Turing made sure the project went ahead despite the opposition and sneers. One of Flowers’ team, SW Broadhurst (a radar expert who had originally joined the GPO as a laborer) took it all without complaint. Computer scientist Brian Randell recorded this impression from him in 1975:
The
