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Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that allow formal influence to be wielded with

Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that allow formal influence to be wielded within organizations through informal means that are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors. We have adversarially evolved organizational behaviors that are possibly not solvable through purely legal means applied to post facto acts deliberately obscured through nerfed information retention policies, and the very structuring of responsibility, accountability, processes, policies, influence and so on might be fair game for some manner of more formal scrutiny.

tivert 2y ago
> Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that ... are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors. It's not just at the organizational level, it's at the societal level in democratic politics, too. Just take deregulated modern capitalism, broadly. It has all kinds of clearly-observed bad or unfair outcomes for lots of groups (to various degrees, pretty much anyone not in the ownership class), but its structure is so slippery that the ownership class and its lackeys have been able to use the characteristics you outlined stymie positive change. For instance, there is market incentive for corporations to behave badly, but then that bad behavior is defended by pointing to those market incentives and making the bad-faith argument that, due the markets decentralization, the complainer is complicit unless they took the impossible action of being totally independent from the market we've used to organize our economy. That confuses the situation so much that a lot of people just tune out.

tivert 2y ago

> Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that ... are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors. It's not just at the organizational level, it's at the societal level in democratic politics, too. Just take deregulated modern capitalism, broadly. It has all kinds of clearly-observed bad or unfair outcomes for lots of groups (to various degrees, pretty much anyone not in the ownership class), but its structure is so slippery that the ownership class and its lackeys have been able to use the characteristics you outlined stymie positive change. For instance, there is market incentive for corporations to behave badly, but then that bad behavior is defended by pointing to those market incentives and making the bad-faith argument that, due the markets decentralization, the complainer is complicit unless they took the impossible action of being totally independent from the market we've used to organize our economy. That confuses the situation so much that a lot of people just tune out.