Time to LED
Flashy LED displays on Chinese infrastructure demonstrate state capacity, showing even trivial additions can be implemented quickly.
A common complaint about Chinese demonstrations of infrastructure is that they over-emphasize flashy LEDs over real, hard, infrastructure improvements. I think this is a misunderstanding of what the flashy LEDs show. Similar to the famous brown M&Ms, it's not about the M&Ms themselves. It's about what it means that you can make trivial modifications to complex projects and get them into production.
In software engineering, a common question in the elder days was "How long does it take for you to get a whitespace commit into production?"[1]. The idea being that you could evaluate a software engineering organization's general (dys)function by its ability to deploy changes quickly into production[2]. The LEDs play a similar role. The ability of an organization to apply trivial frivolities to its critical functionality is entirely dependent on its ability to do things quickly. Any organization that finds it costly to do things will resist trivialities since they complicate matters: you need an environmental review, sign-off from all stakeholders, and the colours of the LEDs must be agreed upon by committee.
The existence of such trivialities demonstrates something else: the ability of the Chinese state to do things with such low overhead that even trivialities can be added.
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ The more corporate you were, the more likely you were to promote that to "something useful" like "How long for a copy-edit commit?" and so on.
- ↑ This was particularly good because slow organizations never prioritized deploy-to-prod time because it was a small fraction of their execution time - which was hopelessly long. Fast organizations had removed all other constraints and deploy-to-prod dominated till it didn't.