‘THE SEVEN BRIDGES OF Königsberg’, as well-educated readers of this blog will know, is a famously unsolveable problem in mathematics and the basis of graph theory. It’s not possible to design a walk over the seven bridges (as they were in the 18thC) in such a way as to cross each one only once. It’s lucky I’d never heard of the problem before I spent a wonderful Saturday making a round trip of the six vehicle ferries of Greater Sydney, challenging myself to see if I could cross them all without ever retracing my path. Four ferries cross the Hawkesbury River, one crosses Berowra Creek, and the other crosses the Parramatta River.

You have to go a surprisingly long way to catch them all. It was mostly a pretext to run any gremlins out of the motorbike I have spent hours repairing back into rideable condition, and to ride in some stunningly beautiful parts of Sydney, but it seems to me a pointlessly satisfying navigation exercise—you can work it out as a problem of nodes like Euler did, by trial and error with google maps like I did, or any other way. Cross every ferry once, no u-turns or retracing your path. There’s a large, but finite, number of ways you can do it.

The vehicle ferries, for the record, are:

• Berowra Waters
• Mortlake Ferry (AKA Putney Punt)
• Lower Portland
• Sackville
• Webbs Creek
• Wisemans Ferry

I did it in ~280km, taking a bit over 7.5 hours. Beware: some of the ferries run 24/7, while others have limited hours. There is some unpaved road north of the Hawkesbury River. None of the ferries have a toll; you do not need to pay the ferryman.

BOTH THE SCIENCES AND political conservatism tend towards interpreting the world in terms of iron law, and the principle that there is a way things naturally are that can be discovered through inquiry. That's in contrast to the alternative, more humanistic tradition, in which theoretical models have utility for explaining things, until they don't, at which point the honest thinker throws it away and makes a new model. Neither are intrinsically good or bad; the first tends towards stubborn stuffiness, the second towards fashion and cliques, but they're just approaches. Let me propose, in the first tradition, an Iron Natural Law of my own: given enough time, any previously radical left-of-centre writer, who prioritises 'merit', will tend inexorably towards reactionary, and hierarchical, ideas about how society should be ordered, and then, when presented with inequality, will use their skills to justify it. I am thinking in particular of Freddie de Boer, who is tracing his own intellectual Bell Curve towards elitism.

We should strive for a world in which all seeds grow in healthy, well-tendered soil, out of a fundamental commitment to the equal moral value of all. But just as no plant can grow in full from poor soil, no amount of tending to the soil can make some seeds taller than some others. Some seeds are meant to spawn taller plants. That is the way of things. All plants have their own beauty, and all human beings have something of value to contribute to society. But to act as though every human being has the same potential in academic life is no more sensible than expecting every sapling to grow to the same height.

This starts with the obvious point that some students do better at university than others—of course, or else why have gradated exams? What's implicit here is that these obvious differences in ability to study at university, to pass tests, to succeed in the sorting mechanism, are natural proxies for human 'merit'—and therefore, because Western societies are ostensibly meritocracies, to justifying the holding and the exercise of power. If what you prioritise is the kind of society where inequality is justified by ideas of 'merit', and you justify existing patterns of exam-passing (who is practiced in schools to get the best marks, who has the money to stay at uni, who has onerous caring responsibilities, who has the support of well-read parents and peers?) as politically natural, then you couch it in scientifically natural frameworks like the above.

The concept of human 'merit' leads to ever-more abstruse ways to measure and assess aptitude, and stress on individual performance over group context. It's why football managers and recruiters, despite all the evidence that teams playing together for longer tend to perform better, go immediately to recruiting 'stars'. 'Merit' creates its own frameworks in increasing complexity, as any Australian public servant will be able to explain, in the STAR format for job application criteria response. Even Donald Trump, one of the most aggressively anti-intellectual people in American political history, justifies his success not on having lots of money (which would have been more than enough justification in another age), but on his own cleverness, his 'stable genius', and intrinsic merit.

But back to de Boer, who bells the cat:

It’s been argued that the value of college stems largely from its function as a screening mechanism. By instituting admissions criteria like standardized tests, grade requirements, and the ability to pay, the thinking goes, college acts as a sieve, allowing employers to pick through those who have the underlying academic talent and soft skills, like time management, needed to succeed at work. This is particularly useful because in many states, employers are barred from using certain criteria, like intelligence testing, to judge applicants. I certainly don’t think that college’s value is only screening. But I do think that making college less exclusive necessarily means making its signaling value to employers much less useful and thus undercuts the economic value of the degree.

As a companion piece, read instead My Eighty-Six Jobs, an autobiography of the way our society actually relates atomistic human 'merit' to economic and political success: not at all.

those simple rules of work hard, don’t be late, you earn what you deserve mean little today, if they ever meant anything at all. It turns out our dreams were filled with booby traps, ladders with busted rungs, and required money to achieve...

IN MY WORK AND in the life I enjoy outside of work, I am constantly and relentlessly confronted with strategies, plans, frameworks, units of competency, planning policies, control plans, standard instruments, codes, validation matrices, key indicator lists, and an infinite variety of other written documents by which people attempt to guarantee particular aspects of human activity. They have a particular language, such as that a document like the Australian Core Skills Framework, for use in vocational training, bears a lot of similarity to NSW strategic planning documents, setting out land use parameters. They're boring and they're annoying and they're all very much the same. It's not what they, on their faces, are for, the sameness is part of what they are: a technology of public and private government. They all share other characteristics: they're all exercises in categorisation ('Domains of Communication'! Zone Objectives!), they all exist as part of an interlocking and linked library of policies, referring to other policies endlessly, and they are all written with the objective of compliance—they try to achieve what ought to be, rather than what is. Neither are they the product of the dull libertarian imagination's concept of bureaucracy ('Red Tape!'), a dead hand of government spending, holding back vigorous Reaganite market activity; the mentality is just as pronounced in the private sector, and its happiest environment are, like adult education and training, and urban planning, the ambiguous sectors which are neither public nor private. On one hand, it serves me right for pursuing white-collar work in a regulatory industry, on the other, all of these are just part of Australia's rigid, rule-bound culture. None of us can expect anything else: this is not a planning policy pity party.

What strikes me is that what these documents—let's call them in general Frameworks—are reaching for, is a sense of fairness that we all know is denied in practice by institutions. We all know that actually, the skills of urban planners, adult trainers, teachers, and every other kind of worker, are developed over time through experience, and we can see that the world that these skills and practices exist in is unjust and unfair. We know that the most skilled workers spend most of their days applying rules-of-thumb, and following processes that constantly change, because they have to, arbitrarily. Enter the urge to build theoretical Frameworks for compliance, an understandable desire that people's work should come from some consistent and comprehensible system. How terrifying it is, to a society that makes a priority of perceived fairness over any actual equity or quality (which is to say: Australia), to acknowledge that in fact, what most people do to work is fit any available theory to the immediate demands of what-needs-doing. No wonder that the economists' joke at their own expense ('ah, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?') works so well as a general observation about how this society works!

IN A DECISION OF the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the senior member was asked to rule—amongst other things—on whether a particular kind of rifle, that the applicant wanted to import into Australia and own, was 'of a kind that is designed or adapted for military purposes'. Unless you're particularly interested in the arcane details of specific 20thC weapons, which I'm not,¹ it's an interesting judgement for the sheer taxonomic argument that must have gone on between the two parties, discussing what particularly about this object set it in either a prohibited or a permissible category.

No, said the Commissioner of Police, you may not import it, it's obviously a military weapon, since it's a derivative of a design original to the Soviet Army. But wait, said the applicant, this one's a product for the commercial market, specifically the pre-1996 Australian market, stripped of its most gruesome military bits, and deliberately altered in appearance so that no military buyer would want it. No, said the Commissioner of Police's witness, that's not how it works; it's the function of the thing, its 'ability to discharge ammunition' that counts, and this is clearly able to kill a lot of people. But, continued the applicant, 'disturbing' the Senior Member of the Tribunal, the same is true of all centre-fire rifles, having been originally designed for military purposes—and that point was where the ontology kicked in. Platonists may kindly exit the room now, leave your essentialism on the table.

We are all of us surrounded by such objects, originally designed or brought into being for military purposes, commercialised. Some of them are incredibly useful, and our society wouldn't work without them: communications satellites, jet engines, encryption. Others, like synthetic textiles, are byproducts of war economies, with an original military purpose now completely illegible in the commodity—you wouldn't know that Nylon was so important to the Second World War just by wearing clothes. Wars tend to have been times when advances in medical science, including psychology, have taken place. Even games: every nerd lining up to role-play their warrior or sorcerer against monsters in a dungeon owes their rulebook to 19thC Prussian officers who wanted to engage bloodlessly in war-games, theorising the whole field of human conflict down to dice rolls and rules on maps. The distinction between things for 'military purposes' and for 'non-military purposes' is always arbitrary and, because it's in the nature of war itself to engage technologies adaptively, in a competitive cycle, it's always changing, bringing existing and new kinds of things into its category—the violent purpose makes the definition. As Manuel de Landa wrote, 'when synthetic intelligence does make its appearance on the planet, there will already be a predatory role awaiting it'.² But purpose is so slippery, and so socially constructed!

Computers and computer networks are the most obvious example. You are reading this on a device with an incredibly sophisticated processor, the information delivered to you electronically on a network spanning the globe. The first owes its lineage to machines meant to do to the calculus for bombs' and shells' trajectories, and later, to calculate theoretical atomic explosions. The second, the internet, is a technology original to the United States' military-industrial complex's desire to resiliently communicate during a nuclear war. Both have outgrown their original 'military purposes', you think, or have they? My own country is part of the Five Eyes alliance of intelligence sharing, a sovereignty-busting agreement for mutual spying, which adapts completely civilian functions—social networks, phone conversations—for security and surveillance ends. The technologies of networked computing seem to lend themselves to aggressive adaptation, used by bad-faith actors to recruit, disinform, confuse, incite. Nobody in 2020 can still maintain that technologies like Facebook and Twitter have entirely civilian, benign functions. At the time of writing, most bafflingly of all, the Tik Tok video app used by teenagers seems to be under a cloud of suspicion as a vector for Chinese spying.

As a citizen, I'm glad that Mr Bankowski wasn't allowed to import his KS-30; those kinds of so-obviously destructive machines have no place in any kind of society I'd want to live in. That's a political consensus in Australia, though, not a functional one, inherent to the device; it was confirmed in 1996. We mitigate the violent purpose, by restricting and regulating its potential machines, whatever they are. And if we can do that for the most grossly offensive and dangerous machines, like self-loading rifles, the possibility exists that we can do it to other machines, and other systems: the Americans right now are looking at their militarised, hypermacho Police forces in exactly this way. What other machines might we decide, as a community, to turn into ploughshares?

Alice Spawls, LRB, At The Type Archive:

Part of what makes the Type Archive unusual is that it has machines and tools from every stage of the process: those that were owned by Monotype and those owned by the printers who used its system. One room contains the original patterns (metal templates) for different typefaces, the giant machines used for pressing the punches and the pantographs that reduce the size of the template to the desired point or pica. (The floors were long ago reinforced for the animals the building once accommodated, so can bear these many-tonned iron beasts.)

Matt Castle, Damn Interesting, Chronicles of Charnia:

Like Mason, Tina realised the frond’s potential significance, and decided she should ask someone in authority. Her parents were supportive, but lacked geological expertise or convenient contacts at local proto-universities. So she mentioned the strange “fern” to her geography teacher at school the next day.

“There are no fossils in Precambrian rocks!” was the teacher’s reply. Tina said she was aware of this; indeed, that was why the find was so perplexing. “Then they are not Precambrian rocks,” her teacher shot back, closing down the discussion.