6 ms·

If you're referring to corporations like Google, where employees (until recently at least) were able to form groups and informal committees and have (sometimes)

If you're referring to corporations like Google, where employees (until recently at least) were able to form groups and informal committees and have (sometimes) interminable debates, I think you're missing the important point that Google is not a democratic institution -- it has a strict hierarchy decided from the top, so it's pretty resistant to these tactics. It's the powerless, free-association, relatively democratic groups that are antagonistic to the hierarchy that are vulnerable to these tactics, and that are neutralized by them. I agree that representative democracies are definitely easy prey to these tactics though. I think this manual is most appropriately understood as an early reference for the operations of the FBI in COINTELPRO, etc. State employed agents-provocateur and saboteurs were some of the first to literally use these exact reference manuals domestically, and their targets were the various social and labor movements of the day.

rvnx 5y ago
Like Wikipedia you mean ? The processes in this document sound utterly familiar.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Google is not a democratic institution -- it has a strict hierarchy decided from the top, so it's pretty resistant to these tactics. Dictatorial control only prevents this for institutions small enough for the dictator to fully understand every part of the organization. Without that, you get middle managers jockeying for position and playing CYA and the people at the top are too far away from it to put a stop to it.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things. There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry. You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for. If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        "Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage. Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through. Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit. Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
        dundarious 5y ago
        OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  How do companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Jobs era Apple perform so well then? These companies are thousands of employees, multiple departments. Everything I have heard seems to indicate that amazing execution ability of these places. Either Elon knows everything that is going on top to bottom or he must be instilling some fear in managers that keeps them in line. I think its the latter. I hear if your name crosses his desk that means you screwed up/underperformed and that you will have severe punishment. I think this method is not performed as seriously in other organizations and it leads to middle management jockeying for power instead and slowly introducing bloat.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    There may be things government bureaucracies can learn from industry. It’s a different problem domain though. Government institutions are large. Like DoD is 2.68 million employees and that’s only one branch of the federal executive branch. You’ve still got the judicial, legislative branches and all the hierarchies down to the municipal level. Then there’s the fact that many things a single person might try to do have laws around them. Also the leadership changes every 4 or 8 years and when that happens there usually a drastic idealogical shift in the direction to take the organization. Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well. Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    When Apple was designing the original iPhone, they had about 10% as many employees as they do now. And this cruft accumulates over time and with size; there is less of it in smaller and younger organizations. Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line. Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss. This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jt2190 5y ago
> It's the powerless, free-association, relatively democratic groups that are antagonistic to the hierarchy that are vulnerable to these tactics, and that are neutralized by them. For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- Animats 5y ago
  "The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks." That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage. If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
  - culi 5y ago
    Occupy Wall Street was the birth of the left in the US. The US hasn't really had a leftwing since the 1920s. It created a whole class of activists that went around couch-surfing and protesting at major events. A few years later #NoDAPL happened and a huge chunk of the people involved in that were also involved in Occupy. As someone who was really involved in union organizing all the way on the opposite side of the country, I can tell you how much these organizers had an influence. We saw a huge shift in attitudes towards labor organizing after that and a huge influx of energy from people who first got into organizing through Occupy. Occupy also gave us Graeber and so many strains of leftist theory related to eco-socialism, communalism, and many other "hot" leftist theories today. I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing
mcguire 5y ago
Psst! This document was created by the OSS to train saboteurs in Nazi Germany as part of the economic war. If you can find a stricter hierarchy than that, I'd like to hear of it.
nebula8804 5y ago
You know sometimes I think that its amazing we have made any progress at all in this country. I think about the Civil Rights movement and how much resistance it got from both the population as well as internal government sabotage. So many people (including me) are so lucky that the movement managed to overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress. I hate to bring this up but just think how differently things would have played out if the JFK assassination did not happen. I don't believe the conspiracy theories and so I consider it a black swan event. Where are we suffering from government sabotage today? Would BLM have turned out differently? Would we have even needed it in the first place if prior sabotage events didn't happen? Anyway this is leading into conspiracy territory but I just was wondering out loud.
- culi 5y ago
  > overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress Well it certainly didn't overcome all events. The FBI violently executed the leadership of the Black Panthers through local police that had 0 repercussions for their (very illegal) actions. Cultural groups in the south like the Daughters of the Confederacy really ramped up their culture war and made sure to filter all history textbooks, put up monuments, etc. Cops have been able to kill black folks and totally get away with it for decades now Imagine where we could be if Huey Newton did actually get elected to local politics. Or if the South didn't ramp up their culture war
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Oh yea absolutely. A lot of these things you describe have direct consequences that affect us today. I guess I was mistaken by using the word 'all' as we are still fighting for this cause today.

rvnx 5y ago

Like Wikipedia you mean ? The processes in this document sound utterly familiar.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Google is not a democratic institution -- it has a strict hierarchy decided from the top, so it's pretty resistant to these tactics. Dictatorial control only prevents this for institutions small enough for the dictator to fully understand every part of the organization. Without that, you get middle managers jockeying for position and playing CYA and the people at the top are too far away from it to put a stop to it.

dundarious 5y ago
Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things. There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry. You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for. If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      "Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage. Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through. Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit. Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
      - dundarious 5y ago
        OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
nebula8804 5y ago
How do companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Jobs era Apple perform so well then? These companies are thousands of employees, multiple departments. Everything I have heard seems to indicate that amazing execution ability of these places. Either Elon knows everything that is going on top to bottom or he must be instilling some fear in managers that keeps them in line. I think its the latter. I hear if your name crosses his desk that means you screwed up/underperformed and that you will have severe punishment. I think this method is not performed as seriously in other organizations and it leads to middle management jockeying for power instead and slowly introducing bloat.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  There may be things government bureaucracies can learn from industry. It’s a different problem domain though. Government institutions are large. Like DoD is 2.68 million employees and that’s only one branch of the federal executive branch. You’ve still got the judicial, legislative branches and all the hierarchies down to the municipal level. Then there’s the fact that many things a single person might try to do have laws around them. Also the leadership changes every 4 or 8 years and when that happens there usually a drastic idealogical shift in the direction to take the organization. Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well. Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  When Apple was designing the original iPhone, they had about 10% as many employees as they do now. And this cruft accumulates over time and with size; there is less of it in smaller and younger organizations. Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line. Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss. This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jt2190 5y ago

> It's the powerless, free-association, relatively democratic groups that are antagonistic to the hierarchy that are vulnerable to these tactics, and that are neutralized by them. For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Animats 5y ago
"The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks." That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage. If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
- culi 5y ago
  Occupy Wall Street was the birth of the left in the US. The US hasn't really had a leftwing since the 1920s. It created a whole class of activists that went around couch-surfing and protesting at major events. A few years later #NoDAPL happened and a huge chunk of the people involved in that were also involved in Occupy. As someone who was really involved in union organizing all the way on the opposite side of the country, I can tell you how much these organizers had an influence. We saw a huge shift in attitudes towards labor organizing after that and a huge influx of energy from people who first got into organizing through Occupy. Occupy also gave us Graeber and so many strains of leftist theory related to eco-socialism, communalism, and many other "hot" leftist theories today. I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing

mcguire 5y ago

Psst! This document was created by the OSS to train saboteurs in Nazi Germany as part of the economic war. If you can find a stricter hierarchy than that, I'd like to hear of it.

nebula8804 5y ago

You know sometimes I think that its amazing we have made any progress at all in this country. I think about the Civil Rights movement and how much resistance it got from both the population as well as internal government sabotage. So many people (including me) are so lucky that the movement managed to overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress. I hate to bring this up but just think how differently things would have played out if the JFK assassination did not happen. I don't believe the conspiracy theories and so I consider it a black swan event. Where are we suffering from government sabotage today? Would BLM have turned out differently? Would we have even needed it in the first place if prior sabotage events didn't happen? Anyway this is leading into conspiracy territory but I just was wondering out loud.

culi 5y ago
> overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress Well it certainly didn't overcome all events. The FBI violently executed the leadership of the Black Panthers through local police that had 0 repercussions for their (very illegal) actions. Cultural groups in the south like the Daughters of the Confederacy really ramped up their culture war and made sure to filter all history textbooks, put up monuments, etc. Cops have been able to kill black folks and totally get away with it for decades now Imagine where we could be if Huey Newton did actually get elected to local politics. Or if the South didn't ramp up their culture war
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Oh yea absolutely. A lot of these things you describe have direct consequences that affect us today. I guess I was mistaken by using the word 'all' as we are still fighting for this cause today.