before it meant an answer

Part one of four in “into solution,” on what software does to a problem when you take the word literally. Each part stands alone.

A few weeks ago I said this to someone, about their job:

whatever comes up that you feel is a burden tell me and we can dissolve it with software

software dissolves problems

software is the true universal solvent

I reached for dissolve without choosing it. Then I kept thinking about it, because it turned out to be the most precise word available — and because everything true about software is sitting inside it, including the parts I would rather not have said.

before it meant an answer

Latin solvere: to loosen, to untie, to release. English took the verb and built a family on it. Absolve, release from. Resolve, loosen back into parts. Dissolve, loosen a solid until it stops holding its shape. Solution.

For the verbs, the physical sense came first, and by a long way. Solve entered English meaning to disperse, to dissipate, to loosen. It would not mean “explain, clear up, answer” for another hundred and fifty years, and would not mean “work out the answer to a problem” — the sense a schoolchild would recognize — for another three hundred and fifty. Dissolve entered meaning to break apart and never acquired an answer-sense at all. When a mathematician solves for x, the word underneath is the one a physician used for putting a powder into water.

The noun is stranger than that, and better. Solution did not acquire one of its meanings and then the other. It entered English already meaning both — “explanation, answer” and “the dissolving of a substance in a liquid” — the same word, the same century, the same dictionary entry. There was never a moment when English had one sense and not the other. The word was born double, and we stopped hearing half of it.

The other word in the sentence has a dictionary too. The Greek problēma is a thing thrown in front of you: an obstacle, and an obstacle with a shape. So the original sentence, with both words restored, reads: to solve a problem is to loosen the shape of the thing in your way until it no longer holds.

That is not a flourish. “Software solves problems” and “software dissolves problems” are the same sentence, and the ordinary one has forgotten what it is saying. The engineering sense arrived last, and it arrived with the chemistry still in it — six hundred years of people using the word correctly without hearing it.

The word for the opposite of loosing is binding. A burden is a thing bound.

what a burden is

My line does not start from problem. It starts from burden, and that is the word doing the work.

Clausewitz, writing about war in 1832, named the thing that is never in the plan and always in the day: friction. Everything in war is simple, he says, and the simplest thing is difficult, and the difficulties accumulate into a resistance no one who has not seen it can imagine. Not one obstacle. A thousand, each trivial, each costing something.

A burden is friction that recurs. Not the obstacle you clear once. The one that is back on Tuesday.

Whitehead put the positive version of it in 1911, writing about mathematical notation of all things:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

He was arguing for good notation. He wrote the clearest statement of what software is for. You get a fixed ration of attention per day and the ration does not grow. A burden is an operation that costs a cavalry charge every single time it comes around, forever, for something that should not need one.

There is a third way to say it, and it is the one that matches how a burden feels from the inside. A tool that works disappears into your hand; you do not notice the hammer, you notice the nail. A tool that breaks stops being a tool and becomes an object you have to look at and deal with. A burden is anything stuck in that second state. The monthly export. The “can you pull the numbers.” The reconciliation someone does by eye because the two systems have never agreed. A hammer that stays broken.

For most of history everyone bore their own burden, and that was the whole arrangement.

two ways to make a problem stop existing

redesign the thing that has the problem

Russell Ackoff spent his career inside operations research and then became its sharpest internal critic. In 1981 he laid out four things you can do about a problem, and only the last one is interesting.

Most management resolves. Most engineering solves. Almost nobody dissolves, because dissolving requires rejecting the framing the problem arrived in, and the framing usually belongs to someone with an office.

The oldest version of the move I know predates operations research by about three thousand years. A man sits from morning to evening judging disputes, one at a time, and his father-in-law watches for a day and tells him he will wear away, he and the people with him, because the thing is too heavy to be done alone. The fix is not to judge faster. The fix is to appoint rulers of thousands and hundreds and fifties and tens, and to let only the hard cases come up. The queue is not shortened. A structure stands where the queue was, and only what the structure cannot absorb still reaches him.

Ackoff was writing before software was cheap. His examples are organizational — change the incentive, merge the department, move the decision — and every one of them is expensive, political, and slow. Software is the first medium in which redesigning an environment is something one person does in an afternoon. That is the part of the line he could not have written.

The operational test is clean. A burden you solved with software is one where someone now runs a tool. A burden you dissolved is one where, afterward, nobody does the task. The reconciliation runs at night. The form fills itself from the record. The question stops being asked because the answer is already on the screen when anyone wonders.

the problem was posed by the medium

There is an older use of “dissolve” that means something else, and software does that too.

Wittgenstein’s late position is that philosophical problems are not answered but made to disappear, once you show the question only seemed to make sense because of a confusion in how it was put. Bergson, a generation earlier, had a blunter name for the same thing: false problems. Not hard questions — malformed ones, either about nothing at all or mixing up two kinds of thing. For Bergson a properly stated question is already most of the way solved.

Here is the move nobody makes with it: most workplace burdens are false problems, and the thing that posed them is the medium they live in.

How do we get the reports to the branches by Monday? That is a question posed by paper. Put the data live and the question has no referent — not a hard Monday, no Monday. Who has the master copy? Posed by physical documents; version control makes it unaskable. Which batch window? Posed by scarce compute. Who is on the phone tree? Posed by one-to-one communication. Where is the file? Posed by the assumption that information has a location, which search quietly retired while everyone was arguing about folder structures.

The batch window was made for the mainframe, and not the mainframe for the batch window. None of these burdens were overcome. The condition that made each one a question was removed, and the question evaporated. McLuhan said the medium is the message. The sharper version, for anyone whose job is to make burdens go away: the medium is the problem.

So the line carries both senses at once, and neither of them is a figure of speech. Software redesigns the environment so the problem cannot come back, and while it is doing that it usually also demonstrates that the problem was an artifact of the old environment and never needed answering at all.

That is what dissolve is doing in the sentence. The harder word is universal.

Sources: solution, etymonline ↗ · solve ↗ · dissolve ↗ · problem ↗ · Whitehead’s “operations we can perform without thinking about them,” MacTutor ↗ · Ackoff, “The Art and Science of Mess Management,” Interfaces 11(1), 1981 ↗

Works cited without a link: Clausewitz, On War (1832), Book I ch. 7 · Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) · Bergson, The Creative Mind (1934), and Deleuze, Bergsonism (1966) · McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964). Figures still in copyright are paraphrased, not quoted.