Personally I'd really like to be a part of less hierarchical, flatter, more democratic organizations with more organic means of steering. Even amid systems like

Personally I'd really like to be a part of less hierarchical, flatter, more democratic organizations with more organic means of steering. Even amid systems like coops, there's usually some kind of recognizable body of power, rather than having control fully dispersed. Collecting, assessing, distilling, resyndicating,& consuming meaning isnt something we can do individually right now (but holy shit am I ever interested in trying to build better tools to start to do these sorts of things). If you're in a 500 person company, how do 500 people provide feedback? How do you assess performance? There just has to be some kind of corporate management chart, of who reports to who. Getting the right information going up and down the chain, trying to work through mis-understandings across factions or up & down, is intensely hard work. Running large scale organizations is just hard. It's enormously sad how little experimentation & exploration there has been of how else we might try to organize things, other than tight lines of narrow authority. Employees are almost always tighly pegged into little holes, there's huge dissonance between the on-the-ground view of how things are versus what the corporate body seems to see or recognize, there's enormous blindness to who is performing what tasks at what level. We've tried so little. But I still have a hard time imagining. I see why we have what we have. Middle management exists because one person can only fan-out to adequately manage so many other people. Corporations live and die by how effective that deeply nesting management is, live and die by how well they can funnel up the situation accurately (always ever polluted by management's own pressure to spin the situation), and how well they can manage down (itself a function of whether or not the company appears to be run by real humans getting the obvious messages or delusional aliens from another planet). Management is so hard. I have huge respect especially in hybrid world for middle management, who have to be cyphers in both directions. It's a hard job.