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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

by 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 …
- manoDev 3y ago
  > 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%. Wow… we’re so deep into capitalism that worker cooperatives is a sci-fi concept now.
  - seer 3y ago
    I think what the author was trying to explore is a society where _all_ the workers are forced to be in cooperatives, I guess kinda like Sweden with its mandated unions, but even more sharply defined. And what the downstream effects of it would be.

by m12k 3y ago

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 …

manoDev 3y ago
> 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%. Wow… we’re so deep into capitalism that worker cooperatives is a sci-fi concept now.
- seer 3y ago
  I think what the author was trying to explore is a society where _all_ the workers are forced to be in cooperatives, I guess kinda like Sweden with its mandated unions, but even more sharply defined. And what the downstream effects of it would be.