Red Plenty

Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 245-48  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:37 AM

At eighteen, presenting original work at the All-Union Mathematical Congress, he measured his success by his ability to get the yellow-fingered, chainsmoking geniuses to stop being kind. When they gave up being encouraging, when they made their first sarcastic remark, when they started to sneer and to try to shred his theorems, he knew they had ceased seeing a kid and started to see a mathematician.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 261-69  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:39 AM

He had been doing a bit of consultancy. It went with being attached to the Institute of Industrial Construction; you had to sing for your supper every so often. And he didn’t really mind. It was a pleasure to put the lucid order in his head to use. More than a pleasure, a relief almost, because every time the pure pattern of mathematics turned out to have a purchase on the way the world worked, turned out to provide the secret thread controlling something loud and various and apparently arbitrary, it provided one more quantum of confirmation for what Leonid Vitalevich wanted to believe, needed to believe, did believe when he was happy: that all of this, this swirl of phenomena lurching on through time, this mess of interlocked systems, some filigree-fine, some huge and simple, this tram full of strangers and smoky air, this city of Peter built on human bones, all ultimately made sense, were all intricately generated by some intelligible principle or set of principles working themselves out on many levels at once, even if the expressions didn’t exist yet which could capture much of the process.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 272-74  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:40 AM

He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 274-81  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:40 AM

He might have been born in Germany, and then this tram ride tonight would have been full of fear. On his professor suit would have been a cotton star, and dark things would have looked out of people’s faces at him, just because his grandfather had worn earlocks, had subscribed to a slightly different unverifiable fairytale about the world. He would have been hated there, for no reason at all. Or he might have been born in America, and then who could say if he would even have had the two kopecks for the tram at all? Would a twenty-six-year-old Jew be a professor there? He might be a beggar, he might be playing a violin on the street in the rain, the thoughts in his head of no concern to anyone because nobody could make money out of them. Cruelty, waste, fictions allowed to buffet real men and women to and fro: only here had people escaped this black nonsense, and made themselves reality’s deliberate designers rather than its playthings. True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got glimpses, partial truths; but the glimpses were always worth having.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 302-4  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:42 AM

He had thought about ways to distinguish between better answers and worse answers to questions which had no right answer. He had seen a method which could do what the detective work of conventional algebra could not, in situations like the one the Plywood Trust described,
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 324-31  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:45 AM

It was 3% of extra order snatched out of the grasp of entropy. In the face of the patched and mended cosmos, always crumbling of its own accord, always trying to fall down, it built; it gained 3% more of what humanity wanted, free and clear, just as a reward for thought. Moreover, he thought, its applications did not stop with individual factories, with getting 3% more plywood, or 3% more gun barrels, or 3% more wardrobes. If you could maximise, minimise, optimise the collection of machines at the Plywood Trust, why couldn’t you optimise a collection of factories, treating each of them, one level further up, as an equation? You could tune a factory, then tune a group of factories, till they hummed, till they purred. And that meant – ‘Watch what you’re doing!’ cried the short woman. ‘Take your head out of your arse and watch what you’re doing, why don’t you?’
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 339-41  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:46 AM

But here it was possible to plan for the whole system at once. The economy was a clean sheet of paper on which reason was writing. So why not optimise it? All he would have to do was to persuade the appropriate authorities to listen.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 353-54  | Added on Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 09:47 AM

though he already understood that it would take a huge quantity of work to compose the necessary dynamic models.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 556-57  | Added on Thursday, August 15, 2013, 08:28 PM

America was a torrent of clever anticipations. Soviet industries would have to learn to anticipate as cleverly, more cleverly, if they were to overtake America in satisfying wants as well as needs.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 582-85  | Added on Thursday, August 15, 2013, 08:32 PM

Whether or not they wanted him there, the force and capacity of the Soviet state had obliged them to let him in. Think of it! Miners had gouged at the stubborn earth, railroadmen had blown on their hands at dawns colder than rigor mortis, machinists had skinned off bright curls of swarf, soldiers had died in the shit and the mud, so that one of their own could demand to be received in this quiet, rich room as an equal. Here he was. They had to deal with him.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1032-36  | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:24 AM

Here he was, plodding along in the heat, and all his education and all his good prospects didn’t make him any less a human speck, inching across the wide, flat floor of Russia. After another while, he started to laugh. Let this be a lesson to you, Mr Economist, he told himself. Any time you get imperious, any time you start to mistake the big enclosing terms you use for the actions and things they represent, just you remember this. Just you remember that the world is really sweat and dirt. But the descriptions of the world in economics were powerful.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1069-77  | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:29 AM

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1257-68  | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:54 AM

In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganised liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d'état – and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime. Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country that least resembled Marx’s description of a place ready for socialist revolution. Not only had capitalist development not reached its climax of perfection and desperation in Russia; it had barely even begun. Russia had fewer railroads, fewer roads and less electricity than any other European power. Its towns were stunted little venues for the gentry to buy riding boots. Most people were illiterate. Within living memory, the large majority of the population had been slaves. Despite this absence of all Marx’s preconditions, the Bolsheviks tried anyway to get to paradise by the quick route, abolishing money and seizing food for the cities directly at gunpoint. The only results were to erase the little bit of industrial development that had taken place in Russia just before the First World War, and to create the first of many bouts of mass starvation. It became inescapably clear that, in Russia, socialism was going to have to do what Marx had never expected, and to carry out the task of development he’d seen as belonging strictly to capitalism. Socialism would have to mimic capitalism’s ability to run an industrial revolution, to marshal investment, to build modern life. Socialism would have to compete with capitalism at doing the same things as capitalism.
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Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1648-58  | Added on Friday, August 16, 2013, 10:43 PM

A pentode is plugged together with a signal inverter, so that the current switches off if it was on, and on if it was off. This is NOT. And that’s all it takes. Wired together in the right order, these are the only moves required to mechanise the whole panoply of reasoning; to set the yes–no picture growing towards the complexity of a Rembrandt in the Hermitage. Sixteen of AND, six of OR and three of NOT, arranged in a branching tree, make this board capable of adding. It can add the 1 in our first pentode to a zero in another pentode, and produce (of course) 1; then add that 1 to another 1 carried over from a previous addition, and produce 0, with an extra 1 to be carried over in turn, down a wire to the circuit board next in the stack, where the next addition is about to commence. 1 plus 0 plus 1 equals 0, carry 1. Of course, Sergei Alexeievich, sitting up late in 1943 manipulating 1s and 0s with a pencil, could do this himself, and operations so much more demanding that the comparison is ridiculous. But he couldn’t do it in one ten-thousandth of a second, and do it again ad infinitum every ten-thousandth of a second. Here’s the power of the machine: that having broken arithmetic down into tiny idiot steps, it can then execute those steps at inhuman speed, forever. Or until a vacuum tube blows. And in fact ten thousand operations per second is no longer so very fast, as these things go.