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https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states th

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

screenoridesagb 3y ago
[dead]
kaycebasques 3y ago
Another great related insight from Systemantics (see other thread below) > For Every Human System, There Is A Type Of Person Adapted To Thrive On It. There are some attributes that are probably necessary for survival in any system, but each system has some uniqueness in the sense that it attracts different traits. It’s hard to tell what traits any given system attracts. The traits do not necessarily align with successful operation of the system itself e.g. the qualities for being elected president don’t necessarily align with the ability to run the country effectively. Systems not only attract people who will succeed within the system but also people with parasitic traits that thrive at the expense of the system. “Efforts to remove parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees, review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new job categories for such people to occupy.”
osrec 3y ago
Does the second group also end up skewing remuneration in their favour? For example, a tech company where managers are paid over the odds, while the passionate engineers who do a lot of the technical heavy lifting are paid less.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  If not directly, they skew it by expanding their headcounts by the year
- vrosas 3y ago
  Naturally. I’m being hyperbolic but barely. It’s middle management’s entire job to squeeze as much productivity out of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in the system. And it’s not my belief - I fight it where I can but it’s literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?) and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff flung to prod, quality need not apply). Source: am middle management.
  - mathattack 3y ago
    I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy your organization by promoting mediocre people.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Sounds like you work at a pretty toxic org if this is the case. Even at Amazon a big component of management promotions is how many people did you get promoted this year and what are the highest levels of people reporting to you. The fastest way to go from Senior Manager to Director is to get as many people as possible promoted to Principal Engineer, or hire more PEs. Or better yet get your Principal Engineer promoted so that they have to become your peer.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      And you can guess what shenanigans result from such a strong incentive. People should be promoted when they are ready, not when their manager’s empire-building aspirations will benefit.
u32480932048 3y ago
I've heard this stated in a simpler form: that every institution eventually evolves to serve and protect its own interests first and foremost. My dad always used the term "petty fiefdoms". I like to think it was the awful "Type II" people who insisted that "wasn't a thing", but it was probably the innocence and naiveté of the Type I's.
aeturnum 3y ago
My favorite way of thinking about this is that every undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical demands. The people who do the work ('technicians') are focused on accomplishing the specific goal, they are often poorly suited to secure resources for the entire group. On the flip side, those who focus on logistics ('administrators') are isolated from the underlying goal. They invest their time into work that, by necessity, relies on an abstracted notion about the details of the work. This creates conditions where the administrators are always at risk of self-dealing and of mis-understanding self-dealing as supporting the underlying work. The technicians can self-deal as well, but because they are not in charge of coordinating resources across the org, the impact is smaller. It's easy to accuse any particular technician who disagrees that it's the technician who lacks a sufficiently wide view (and in fact this is always a danger). Selfish people who want to secure resources for themselves thrive in this area - but the situation does not require selfishness to become degenerate.
ericfr11 3y ago
[flagged]
- tarsinge 3y ago
  No this is a more general law applicable to every human organization. The second group can be the party members, shareholders, etc…
- WalterBright 3y ago
  If you hire high cost workers, you go out of business. If you higher too-low cost workers, your competitors hire them away and you go out of business.
derefr 3y ago
Another way to say that is: • The first group sees something in the world as wrong / broken / requiring change, or just "could be better"; they see themselves as a force for that change; and they see any organization they're a part of, as infrastructure to enable/multiply their force. To these people, the organization is only relevant/valuable as long as it is providing leverage for individuals like them "on the front lines" to accomplish change. To these people, "everything staying the way it is" is an awful concept — if they were willing to accept things as they were, they wouldn't have bothered to become $profession! They will consider their life wasted if things don't end up changing for the better! • The second group sees nothing wrong with the world, because (in part) they see those frontline people working toward positive change, to be an inherent part of the equilibrium-state of the world. They do think the problem is a problem worth solving! (That's probably why they gravitated to this industry.) But they think that "things are going great" in addressing the problem, insofar as there are these other people who are willing to "fight the good fight." They don't think it matters much whether any particular individual is involved in that fight, as long as in aggregate "people who are motivated to solve the problem" are minted faster than they burn out. People in this group don't feel motivated to be directly involved in solving the problem; and they also aren't much concerned with "losing" people who are directly involved — since they believe that there will always be new "new blood" coming in with a fresh reserve of morale. The first group ("vocationals") will focus on the work to the exclusion of maintaining the organization. In a crisis, they will let the organization fall apart so that the work can continue happening. The second group ("professionals") knows this, and thinks this is silly — to them, the work will always get done soon enough (because, if vocational A can't do it, vocationals B/C/D will feel compelled to pick up their slack, at their own expense.) But the organization itself might become paralyzed or fall apart — which these people believe would prevent the work from happening for a much longer time. So they dedicate themselves to keeping the organization functioning — which often involves cutting costs (i.e. making the first group's lives harder), imposing regulations (i.e. punishing the first group for the times they go above-and-beyond to get the work done at the organization's expense), etc. These groups are rarely aligned, because their world-views are rarely aligned. It can happen, though. If it becomes clear that the number of people in the first group is declining over time, such that the organization cannot simply rely on "new blood" — then the second group's behavior toward the first group changes dramatically.
dheera 3y ago
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It depends a lot on whether you own the organization in entirety or not. I could have a business that operates for 5 years, own 100% of it, then shut it down because of loss of market interest and not wanting to pivot it to a direction that I personally disagree with just for the sake of keeping the business alive. I could consider it a 5-year success and just be happy with that. If investors are involved it's a totally different story.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > If investors are involved it's a totally different story. Well, when you take their money, they'll want a return on their investment.
  - dheera 3y ago
    Yeah totally. Just saying that TFA's thesis doesn't necessarily apply if the founder is mission-driven and 100% owns the organization. They might actually value the mission over the organization and be content when the mission is fulfilled. As a founder mindset person if I could bootstrap a business that gets me $50 million by curing cancer I'd be MORE THAN HAPPY to just retire on that $50 million, and open source all the IP so that anyone can make the drugs. I don't have a desire to be a billionaire over curing cancer. However, if you give up ownership during the process, things change. You have fiduciary duty to investors that would be violated if you just gave up all future revenue and open sourced everything. It would have to be a bootstrapped business in order to do the above.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      You might change your mind if/when you reach $50m. Whatever one has becomes one's "new normal" and the goal posts just move. BTW, I open sourced my IP :-)
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  What you are describing is not a bureaucracy. The Iron Law is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, not the Iron Law of personal projects.
dv_dt 3y ago
Almost all the examples discussed are government or social institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems". If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. In the primary build phase, growth was huge even though the investments and actual tasks required were huge. But as the 50s/60s US Economy, and the 90s/00s China economy filled in with existing systems there is a phase transition. Productivity slows. Even when you have more resources, and more solved problems, more skills available, productivity slows. And IMHO, it directly relates to this inversion of administration vs actual work.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The most productive eras corresponded to when the economies were most free market.
  - iambateman 3y ago
    This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder if it’s not causal? There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which were marked by almost no growth at all.
    - lazide 3y ago
      There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change. Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology. Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level. If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster. Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> there will be those dedicated to the organization itself The Iron Law holds. The article’s title does not. The way bureaucracies survive is by mutating their goals. The examples are numerous: the March of Dimes [1], every successful referendum movement, every country with clean drinking water. The author’s mistake is in interpreting opposition as preservation. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes
m12k 3y ago
In 2015, Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) talked about the same concept in an interview he gave about the graphic novel he was making as a sequel to Fight Club[1] > my dream, or idea was that Project Mayhem and the whole organization would work to create empowered individuals who would go off to create their own visions. And that the organization itself would disappear. People weren’t meant to stay in it; the organization wasn’t meant to sustain its own power. Which was my experience with doing [Werner H. Erhard’s self-improvement training] EST. A lot of people who had a vision, who were empowered by EST — including myself — then went off to become the person they dreamed of being. That’s how I started writing. But a lot of people who didn’t really have a vision became part of EST. They really couldn’t bridge out of it. They just kind of perpetuated the power of the organization, because they didn’t have their own personal vision. And so what we’re seeing in Fight Club 2 is that Project Mayhem has crossed the line where it’s no longer about empowering people. It’s about maintaining its own power in the world. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8660881/fight-club-sequel-chuck-palahniuk-interview https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8660881/fight-club-sequel...
- pimlottc 3y ago
  To be clear, the Fight Club 2 limited comic series was indeed published in 2015 and concluded in 2016 after 10 issues, which have been collected into a graphic novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_2
- seer 3y ago
  I think the “Mars” books (red mars, blue mars, green mars) proposed an interesting economic idea. In a world where automation and AI allowed physical stuff to be organized and built almost as easy as software, you didn’t really _need_ huge organizations (employee wise) to accomplish goals, so Mars came up with an economic setup that did not allow you to join an organization, unless you got hard equity in it, and the amount of equity you could have had a minimum of 1%. So everyone worked for their own organizations and were incentivized for their success, and organizations couldn’t grow too big (100 people at most). So you had lots of small organizations with well developed interfaces between them, because there were so many of them. And you could still acquire huge wealth, just couldn’t be a monopoly. I mean its just sci-fi thought experiment, but it got me thinking maybe there are better economic systems out there, both equitable and free market based …
pinkmuffinere 3y ago
I don't know if this is really true, but it does feel true. And I worry there are no easy paths for the first kind of person. One option is to persist devoted to the cause, and try to put up with the pain of being in that organization, potentially changing the organization's path after much effort. Another option is to quit and go it alone / start a new organization, but that's quite hard too.
neycoda 3y ago
Also the 2nd group will game the system to funnel a bigger percentage of the income to themselves while raising prices on students.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Corollary: we have to kill these organizations off every now and then so that the herd doesn't get too ossified.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Now define “we” “have to” and “kill.” What mechanism, that is not a system vulnerable to the same ossification but with far more unilateral power, will actually execute such a directive?
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Imagine a union which forms in secret, strikes once, hard enough that the misbehaving institution cannot continue, then disbands. Now imagine a culture which habitually does this. You don't need continuity of leadership if the only reason your organization exists is to rid the world of a problem. Once the problem goes away, so does the organization that solves it. (And if you fail, well, disband anyway and try it again next time as a differently composed group). It would be like agriculture, but instead of selecting plants for drought resistance we're selecting institutions for human-friendliness. Perhaps there's a holiday, and a crypto thingy that handles voting. If there's not sufficient consensus, nothing happens, but if it turns out that a sufficient majority voted to disband the same institution, then on the next such holiday you meet in person with some algorithmically chosen subset of people who voted similarly to you (to verify that they're real people and not sybil accounts). If validation succeeds, then we generate proofs that indicate that yes, there are enough of us--this isn't radicalism--this is the will of the people. Then you spend the next such holiday orchestrating the demise of your target. Then you disband, problem presumably solved. If not, you'll have to try it again with a new union on the next cycle. It would create incentives for the bureaucrats to not let their organization be chosen. It's more or less what labor day should have been. Let's do it quarterly. As for "have to", you don't "have to" breathe, but you "have to" breathe in order to stay alive. It's a conditional, not an imperative. So I mean that if we want our institutions to be continually useful to us, then we have to practice some kind of hygiene of this sort. Evolution does not act on organisms or organizations which don't occasionally die. Perhaps this too would ossify and eventually have to take itself out of the meme pool, but I think it could do us some good along the way.
marmaduke 3y ago
This seems like a great argument that bureaucracy is a just another kind of biological organization. It follows from Maturana's theory of autopoeisis, any version of homeostasis, or more recent ideas from Friston on self-evidencing.
airejtlij 3y ago
I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow that project when it got separated and sold off to some contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level managers up through department heads appeared to be people who started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the second group.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bee_rider 3y ago
The second group is just impossible to beat: people interested in playing office politics, unburdened by objectives like “achieving anything great as an institution,” and motivated by a need to find a niche to survive. Always seemed like an argument for Basic Income to me; at least rob them of some of their motivation, and remove some of the incentive for others to ally up with them.

screenoridesagb 3y ago

[dead]

kaycebasques 3y ago

Another great related insight from Systemantics (see other thread below) > For Every Human System, There Is A Type Of Person Adapted To Thrive On It. There are some attributes that are probably necessary for survival in any system, but each system has some uniqueness in the sense that it attracts different traits. It’s hard to tell what traits any given system attracts. The traits do not necessarily align with successful operation of the system itself e.g. the qualities for being elected president don’t necessarily align with the ability to run the country effectively. Systems not only attract people who will succeed within the system but also people with parasitic traits that thrive at the expense of the system. “Efforts to remove parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees, review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new job categories for such people to occupy.”

osrec 3y ago

Does the second group also end up skewing remuneration in their favour? For example, a tech company where managers are paid over the odds, while the passionate engineers who do a lot of the technical heavy lifting are paid less.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
If not directly, they skew it by expanding their headcounts by the year
vrosas 3y ago
Naturally. I’m being hyperbolic but barely. It’s middle management’s entire job to squeeze as much productivity out of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in the system. And it’s not my belief - I fight it where I can but it’s literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?) and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff flung to prod, quality need not apply). Source: am middle management.
- mathattack 3y ago
  I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy your organization by promoting mediocre people.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Sounds like you work at a pretty toxic org if this is the case. Even at Amazon a big component of management promotions is how many people did you get promoted this year and what are the highest levels of people reporting to you. The fastest way to go from Senior Manager to Director is to get as many people as possible promoted to Principal Engineer, or hire more PEs. Or better yet get your Principal Engineer promoted so that they have to become your peer.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    And you can guess what shenanigans result from such a strong incentive. People should be promoted when they are ready, not when their manager’s empire-building aspirations will benefit.

u32480932048 3y ago

I've heard this stated in a simpler form: that every institution eventually evolves to serve and protect its own interests first and foremost. My dad always used the term "petty fiefdoms". I like to think it was the awful "Type II" people who insisted that "wasn't a thing", but it was probably the innocence and naiveté of the Type I's.

aeturnum 3y ago

My favorite way of thinking about this is that every undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical demands. The people who do the work ('technicians') are focused on accomplishing the specific goal, they are often poorly suited to secure resources for the entire group. On the flip side, those who focus on logistics ('administrators') are isolated from the underlying goal. They invest their time into work that, by necessity, relies on an abstracted notion about the details of the work. This creates conditions where the administrators are always at risk of self-dealing and of mis-understanding self-dealing as supporting the underlying work. The technicians can self-deal as well, but because they are not in charge of coordinating resources across the org, the impact is smaller. It's easy to accuse any particular technician who disagrees that it's the technician who lacks a sufficiently wide view (and in fact this is always a danger). Selfish people who want to secure resources for themselves thrive in this area - but the situation does not require selfishness to become degenerate.

ericfr11 3y ago

[flagged]

tarsinge 3y ago
No this is a more general law applicable to every human organization. The second group can be the party members, shareholders, etc…
WalterBright 3y ago
If you hire high cost workers, you go out of business. If you higher too-low cost workers, your competitors hire them away and you go out of business.

derefr 3y ago

Another way to say that is: • The first group sees something in the world as wrong / broken / requiring change, or just "could be better"; they see themselves as a force for that change; and they see any organization they're a part of, as infrastructure to enable/multiply their force. To these people, the organization is only relevant/valuable as long as it is providing leverage for individuals like them "on the front lines" to accomplish change. To these people, "everything staying the way it is" is an awful concept — if they were willing to accept things as they were, they wouldn't have bothered to become $profession! They will consider their life wasted if things don't end up changing for the better! • The second group sees nothing wrong with the world, because (in part) they see those frontline people working toward positive change, to be an inherent part of the equilibrium-state of the world. They do think the problem is a problem worth solving! (That's probably why they gravitated to this industry.) But they think that "things are going great" in addressing the problem, insofar as there are these other people who are willing to "fight the good fight." They don't think it matters much whether any particular individual is involved in that fight, as long as in aggregate "people who are motivated to solve the problem" are minted faster than they burn out. People in this group don't feel motivated to be directly involved in solving the problem; and they also aren't much concerned with "losing" people who are directly involved — since they believe that there will always be new "new blood" coming in with a fresh reserve of morale. The first group ("vocationals") will focus on the work to the exclusion of maintaining the organization. In a crisis, they will let the organization fall apart so that the work can continue happening. The second group ("professionals") knows this, and thinks this is silly — to them, the work will always get done soon enough (because, if vocational A can't do it, vocationals B/C/D will feel compelled to pick up their slack, at their own expense.) But the organization itself might become paralyzed or fall apart — which these people believe would prevent the work from happening for a much longer time. So they dedicate themselves to keeping the organization functioning — which often involves cutting costs (i.e. making the first group's lives harder), imposing regulations (i.e. punishing the first group for the times they go above-and-beyond to get the work done at the organization's expense), etc. These groups are rarely aligned, because their world-views are rarely aligned. It can happen, though. If it becomes clear that the number of people in the first group is declining over time, such that the organization cannot simply rely on "new blood" — then the second group's behavior toward the first group changes dramatically.

dheera 3y ago

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It depends a lot on whether you own the organization in entirety or not. I could have a business that operates for 5 years, own 100% of it, then shut it down because of loss of market interest and not wanting to pivot it to a direction that I personally disagree with just for the sake of keeping the business alive. I could consider it a 5-year success and just be happy with that. If investors are involved it's a totally different story.

WalterBright 3y ago
> If investors are involved it's a totally different story. Well, when you take their money, they'll want a return on their investment.
- dheera 3y ago
  Yeah totally. Just saying that TFA's thesis doesn't necessarily apply if the founder is mission-driven and 100% owns the organization. They might actually value the mission over the organization and be content when the mission is fulfilled. As a founder mindset person if I could bootstrap a business that gets me $50 million by curing cancer I'd be MORE THAN HAPPY to just retire on that $50 million, and open source all the IP so that anyone can make the drugs. I don't have a desire to be a billionaire over curing cancer. However, if you give up ownership during the process, things change. You have fiduciary duty to investors that would be violated if you just gave up all future revenue and open sourced everything. It would have to be a bootstrapped business in order to do the above.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    You might change your mind if/when you reach $50m. Whatever one has becomes one's "new normal" and the goal posts just move. BTW, I open sourced my IP :-)
georgeecollins 3y ago
What you are describing is not a bureaucracy. The Iron Law is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, not the Iron Law of personal projects.

dv_dt 3y ago

Almost all the examples discussed are government or social institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems". If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. In the primary build phase, growth was huge even though the investments and actual tasks required were huge. But as the 50s/60s US Economy, and the 90s/00s China economy filled in with existing systems there is a phase transition. Productivity slows. Even when you have more resources, and more solved problems, more skills available, productivity slows. And IMHO, it directly relates to this inversion of administration vs actual work.

WalterBright 3y ago
The most productive eras corresponded to when the economies were most free market.
- iambateman 3y ago
  This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder if it’s not causal? There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which were marked by almost no growth at all.
  - lazide 3y ago
    There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change. Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology. Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level. If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster. Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> there will be those dedicated to the organization itself The Iron Law holds. The article’s title does not. The way bureaucracies survive is by mutating their goals. The examples are numerous: the March of Dimes [1], every successful referendum movement, every country with clean drinking water. The author’s mistake is in interpreting opposition as preservation. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes

m12k 3y ago

In 2015, Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) talked about the same concept in an interview he gave about the graphic novel he was making as a sequel to Fight Club[1] > my dream, or idea was that Project Mayhem and the whole organization would work to create empowered individuals who would go off to create their own visions. And that the organization itself would disappear. People weren’t meant to stay in it; the organization wasn’t meant to sustain its own power. Which was my experience with doing [Werner H. Erhard’s self-improvement training] EST. A lot of people who had a vision, who were empowered by EST — including myself — then went off to become the person they dreamed of being. That’s how I started writing. But a lot of people who didn’t really have a vision became part of EST. They really couldn’t bridge out of it. They just kind of perpetuated the power of the organization, because they didn’t have their own personal vision. And so what we’re seeing in Fight Club 2 is that Project Mayhem has crossed the line where it’s no longer about empowering people. It’s about maintaining its own power in the world. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8660881/fight-club-sequel-chuck-palahniuk-interview https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8660881/fight-club-sequel...

pimlottc 3y ago
To be clear, the Fight Club 2 limited comic series was indeed published in 2015 and concluded in 2016 after 10 issues, which have been collected into a graphic novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_2
seer 3y ago
I think the “Mars” books (red mars, blue mars, green mars) proposed an interesting economic idea. In a world where automation and AI allowed physical stuff to be organized and built almost as easy as software, you didn’t really _need_ huge organizations (employee wise) to accomplish goals, so Mars came up with an economic setup that did not allow you to join an organization, unless you got hard equity in it, and the amount of equity you could have had a minimum of 1%. So everyone worked for their own organizations and were incentivized for their success, and organizations couldn’t grow too big (100 people at most). So you had lots of small organizations with well developed interfaces between them, because there were so many of them. And you could still acquire huge wealth, just couldn’t be a monopoly. I mean its just sci-fi thought experiment, but it got me thinking maybe there are better economic systems out there, both equitable and free market based …

pinkmuffinere 3y ago

I don't know if this is really true, but it does feel true. And I worry there are no easy paths for the first kind of person. One option is to persist devoted to the cause, and try to put up with the pain of being in that organization, potentially changing the organization's path after much effort. Another option is to quit and go it alone / start a new organization, but that's quite hard too.

neycoda 3y ago

Also the 2nd group will game the system to funnel a bigger percentage of the income to themselves while raising prices on students.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Corollary: we have to kill these organizations off every now and then so that the herd doesn't get too ossified.

ethanbond 3y ago
Now define “we” “have to” and “kill.” What mechanism, that is not a system vulnerable to the same ossification but with far more unilateral power, will actually execute such a directive?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Imagine a union which forms in secret, strikes once, hard enough that the misbehaving institution cannot continue, then disbands. Now imagine a culture which habitually does this. You don't need continuity of leadership if the only reason your organization exists is to rid the world of a problem. Once the problem goes away, so does the organization that solves it. (And if you fail, well, disband anyway and try it again next time as a differently composed group). It would be like agriculture, but instead of selecting plants for drought resistance we're selecting institutions for human-friendliness. Perhaps there's a holiday, and a crypto thingy that handles voting. If there's not sufficient consensus, nothing happens, but if it turns out that a sufficient majority voted to disband the same institution, then on the next such holiday you meet in person with some algorithmically chosen subset of people who voted similarly to you (to verify that they're real people and not sybil accounts). If validation succeeds, then we generate proofs that indicate that yes, there are enough of us--this isn't radicalism--this is the will of the people. Then you spend the next such holiday orchestrating the demise of your target. Then you disband, problem presumably solved. If not, you'll have to try it again with a new union on the next cycle. It would create incentives for the bureaucrats to not let their organization be chosen. It's more or less what labor day should have been. Let's do it quarterly. As for "have to", you don't "have to" breathe, but you "have to" breathe in order to stay alive. It's a conditional, not an imperative. So I mean that if we want our institutions to be continually useful to us, then we have to practice some kind of hygiene of this sort. Evolution does not act on organisms or organizations which don't occasionally die. Perhaps this too would ossify and eventually have to take itself out of the meme pool, but I think it could do us some good along the way.

marmaduke 3y ago

This seems like a great argument that bureaucracy is a just another kind of biological organization. It follows from Maturana's theory of autopoeisis, any version of homeostasis, or more recent ideas from Friston on self-evidencing.

airejtlij 3y ago

I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow that project when it got separated and sold off to some contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level managers up through department heads appeared to be people who started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the second group.

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bee_rider 3y ago

The second group is just impossible to beat: people interested in playing office politics, unburdened by objectives like “achieving anything great as an institution,” and motivated by a need to find a niche to survive. Always seemed like an argument for Basic Income to me; at least rob them of some of their motivation, and remove some of the incentive for others to ally up with them.