Poets and Managers

Oleg Batygin: In the early days, when I'd only just begun thinking about all this, I overestimated — or so it seems to me now — the significance of the economic toy the company had bought from me for such a disproportionate price. I was certain that the secret I'd been paid so generously to keep hidden was the "Hunter."

I mean the program module that exterminated "dangerous connections" inside the spherical construct I'd built. I thought I'd stumbled onto some entity that performed the very same function in actual reality. My model hinted at the existence of this entity in the real world, and the entity destroyed my model as one of the "dangerous connections."

Stas Rybkin: That was the first hypothesis that came to my humanities-trained head too.

Oleg Batygin: That version surfaces first for obvious reasons. Before I wrote my "little sphere," nothing unusual was happening in my life. More than that — while I was building the sphere itself, everything was banal and dull too. But the moment I added the "Hunter" to the sphere, everything started spinning.

I sat with the Hunter hypothesis as my baseline for quite a long time, without even trying to consider anything else. I was literally obsessed with that version. I couldn't read, couldn't watch films. I kept catching myself thinking about the true nature of the "Hunter."

Stas Rybkin: And to me this question seems exceptionally exciting too. Your "Hunter," if it exists in the actual world, is a genuine otherworldly entity. Powerful and invulnerable.

Oleg Batygin: Exactly right. The hypothesis that the "Hunter" exists in brute reality bears directly on unbridled new-age mystagogy. The "Hunter" is a genuine "daemon," in the strict engineering sense of the word. Do you know how server daemons are made?

Stas Rybkin: I'd never even heard the term "server daemon" before…

Oleg Batygin: Server daemons are programs with no interface. That is, ones the user shouldn't be allowed to control, for one reason or another. Daemons usually control access to data. What matters for a daemon is "inexorability." That's why it must have no interface through which it could be "entreated." If you don't have the password, the daemon simply won't let you through the gate it guards. That's all.

However, to create a daemon you need some kind of interface. That's why, the moment it's born, a daemon's first act is to kill the "parent program" that spawned it.

Stas Rybkin: Wow, what luxury.

Oleg Batygin: That's exactly why I love IT. It's the last field of human endeavor that still has room for a warlock.

Stas Rybkin: And you think the "Hunter" is the same kind of uncontrollable daemon, only not in an operating environment, but in the real world?

Oleg Batygin: I don't think it's that simple. It's very easy to cheapen this subject, which is the last thing I want. So let's approach the phenomenon we're discussing from another angle — one that doesn't reek quite so much of mystagogy.

Do you have a sense of what "social intuition" is? Of course you do. You run a very popular channel. Which means you somehow sense exactly what you need to do to please your audience.

Stas Rybkin: That's exactly right. People are constantly asking me about my "secret" — about how I manage to hit the viewer's curiosity "dead center" every single time.

In reality, I don't do anything special to achieve that. I just film whatever seems curious to me personally.

Oleg Batygin: That's usually how it works. You film what seems curious to you, and any talented, successful manager makes the business decision that seems right to him.

The key word here is "seems." Nobody actually "calculates" anything. Or rather, students calculate. Professionals operate differently.

Boris Grebenshchikov once said that his songs arise "out of a cloud." There's some billowing cloud of meanings, emotions, sensations, out of which a great master's creation seems to appear all on its own.

That's how every one of your next videos is born, how a fresh Zhadan poem is born, how a hit song by Rome is born, or how a manager's decision — crooked, lopsided, and by every appearance a total failure — is born, one that nevertheless brings him a promotion and riches.

Stas Rybkin: So you see a similarity between how a poet behaves and how a manager behaves?

Oleg Batygin: In a certain sense, yes. A poet simply sits down and writes a popular poem, and a manager, in exactly the same way, simply goes ahead and makes the decision that's personally advantageous to him.

There's no miracle in this. It's all the result of an enormous accumulated experience. Before writing his first popular poem, a poet usually writes a ferocious mountain of unpopular texts. Something similar happens with managers.

Many poets first manage to interest the public at a fairly young age. It should be noted, though, that the more complex a society becomes, the older the poet capable of writing a long, consistent string of popular texts.

Many people write some text or other that gains popularity for a while, longer or shorter. But only a handful manage to establish themselves as a known producer of popular content.

As we approach the fragility threshold, as the complexity of civilization grows, the age of these producers of popular content keeps rising, while their percentage of the total mass of content creators keeps falling.

At the same time, as we draw closer to the fragility threshold, the quality of popular texts falls too. Up to a certain point, the complexity of content grew together with the complexity of the civilizational machine. But the moment the "fragility threshold" appears on the horizon, popular content suddenly starts to simplify.

The quality of winning decisions made by managers falls the same way. Why winning decisions — in the sense of the managers' own prosperity — get worse every year (in the sense of the well-being of the enterprises they manage) is something we've already discussed.

Stas Rybkin: Are you saying that officials and poets act, to an equal degree, without fully understanding their own actions?

Oleg Batygin: Have you ever thrown knives at a target?

Stas Rybkin: You know, actually, yes… I spent my entire adolescence at it. And I still practice from time to time.

Oleg Batygin: Well, I've been practicing that craft my whole life too.

Since you have that kind of experience, you should understand that throwing technique, precision of movement, and plenty of other things that can be explained to a student and drilled while learning to throw a knife, are all fairly important. And yet a successful knife-thrower has no idea what exactly he's doing to make the knife end up sticking point-first into the target.

We've simply learned to do it. In exactly the same way, nobody knows how they ride a bicycle without falling. How they pick the right fishing spots, or buy and sell exactly the stock-market shares they need to.

Specialized knowledge in all these matters is nothing more than tuning. There are traders who understand economics perfectly well, and there are ones who have no idea at all what exactly they're buying and selling. Both kinds can be successful, or not.

Today, though, we won't be concerned with the behavior of a successful trader or fisherman. Today we're going to take a closer look at the behavior of a successful modern-day manager.

Stas Rybkin: That'll be interesting to me for another reason too — I don't know a single genuinely successful manager among my acquaintances.