Modernity, shaped by Enlightenment ideals, sought to order and standardize the world, leading to disciplined bodies and uniform individuals. Recent societal reactions to intensified migration exemplify this homogenizing tendency. Authors like Nietzsche and Heidegger criticized modernity's emphasis on a unified truth and rationality. Foucault and Derrida, in their critique of modernity, highlighted the hidden and unacceptable aspects of homogenization and the reduction of politics to policy. Langdon Winner demonstrated how political ideology is embedded in technological artifacts, and Andrew Feenberg explored the intricate relationship between technology, modernity, and democracy. The digital computer, originating in military applications, is presented as a manifestation of modern thought, its design influenced by military interests and the dominance of northwestern cultures. Heidegger's concept of enframing (Gestell) emphasizes the constraints shaping technological design, highlighting the exclusion of alternative human-technology relations. This paper uses Foucault's framework of disciplines and political anatomy to establish an epistemological link between social systems and computer architectures. The aim is to broaden the understanding of politics from social and socio-technical systems to purely technical systems and to generalize from the observed similarities between social and technical systems to a more abstract notion of system organization.

The paper draws extensively on the works of Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish), Jacques Derrida (Rogues, Democracy to Come), Martin Heidegger (The Question Concerning Technology), and Langdon Winner (Do Artifacts Have Politics?). It also references works by Andrew Feenberg, Michel Angenot, and others exploring the relationship between technology, modernity, democracy, and power dynamics. The authors synthesize these philosophical and sociological perspectives to analyze the underlying principles of organization in both social and technical systems. The literature review highlights the existing scholarship on the embedded political dimensions of technology and the critiques of modernity's homogenizing tendencies, setting the stage for the authors' comparative analysis of computer architecture and social organization.

The paper employs a comparative analysis, drawing parallels between Foucault's concepts of disciplines and political anatomy and the design principles of computer architecture. It reinterprets Foucault's work, substituting elements like 'individual/body' with 'transistor' to demonstrate the similarities in the organizational principles of seemingly disparate systems. The authors meticulously map Foucault's descriptions of surveillance, normalization, and synchronization onto the processes of designing and operating computer systems, showcasing how homogenization and control are implemented at both the social and technical levels. A key aspect of the methodology is the genealogical approach, tracing the historical development and underlying assumptions of computer architecture, revealing its alignment with the principles of modernity. The analysis further delves into the technical aspects of computer architecture, explaining the homogenization of transistors and the central role of the clock signal in controlling activity, highlighting the energy costs associated with these design choices. The paper then moves towards a more abstract framework of Large-Scale Systems Composed of Homogeneous Individuals (LSSCHI), integrating insights from Heidegger and Derrida to analyze the shared enframing and the potential for alternative organizations.

The core finding is the striking similarity in the organizational structures and power dynamics between computer architecture and modern social systems. The authors demonstrate that both systems employ homogenization and control mechanisms to achieve system-level objectives, despite the significant differences in their components (transistors vs. humans). Specifically, they highlight three key aspects of Foucault's 'disciplines' – individual control, shift towards an economic focus on efficiency, and process-oriented modality – and show how these are mirrored in computer architecture's design and operation. The functional reduction of transistors to binary states (ON/OFF) eliminates the complexities of their analog nature and allows for easier control and large-scale integration. The central clock signal synchronizes the activity of billions of transistors, although this incurs significant energy costs. The spatial arrangement of transistors reflects a political anatomy, with distinct functional units interacting through internal communication infrastructure, akin to the fragmented production and mobility of global capitalism. The paper contrasts the homogenizing principles of contemporary computer architecture with emerging alternatives such as neural and asynchronous architectures, which suggest possibilities for different modes of organization. The LSSCHI framework is introduced as a tool to understand this shared organizational principle across seemingly disparate systems, implying that modern organization is not an inevitable outcome but a product of specific design choices or enframing.

The findings challenge the assumption that politics is solely a social phenomenon. The authors demonstrate that politics, understood as power relations and mechanisms of control, is also embedded within purely technical systems. The similarities in organizational principles across social and technical systems suggest a deeper, underlying enframing, a set of constraints that shape our conceptions of organization and limit our awareness of alternatives. Heidegger's concept of enframing is used to explore this underlying structure, arguing that the similarities are not coincidental but reflect a shared ideological framework. Derrida's concept of 'democracy to come' is reinterpreted as 'organizations to come,' proposing that by understanding the shared enframing, we can imagine and work towards alternative forms of organization that embrace heterogeneity and reduce homogenization and control. The discussion emphasizes the need to move beyond the utilitarian view of politics as problem-solving and consider alternative approaches that prioritize plurality and individual agency.

This paper advances a novel framework – Large-Scale Systems Composed of Homogeneous Individuals (LSSCHI) – to analyze the organizational principles shared by complex social and technical systems. The authors demonstrate that the homogenizing tendencies observed in modern social systems are also present in computer architecture, highlighting the inherent power dynamics embedded in these systems. By drawing on Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, the paper challenges the perceived inevitability of modern organizational structures, suggesting a path toward alternative ‘organizations to come’ that prioritize plurality and individual agency over homogenization and control. Future research could explore other examples of LSSCHI in various domains and further investigate the implications of alternative architectural designs in both technical and social contexts.

The paper's comparative analysis relies on analogies and interpretations, and while the authors provide a compelling argument, the direct transferability of concepts from social theory to computer engineering remains open to debate. The focus on the homogenization of individual components may overlook other aspects of system complexity and interaction. The LSSCHI framework, while providing a valuable lens for analysis, may need further refinement and empirical testing to fully capture the nuances of diverse large-scale systems. The discussion of 'organizations to come' remains largely conceptual, and the paper does not offer concrete examples of how such organizations might be achieved.