After the 14 previous essays, we now have a deep understanding of why business organizations degenerate (i.e., why, for most people, work sucks). We’ve got a working taxonomy of the players by rank (MacLeod hierarchy) and moral behavior (alignment). We know about the social substructures that keep corporate hierarchies internally stable, even while enervating them and leaving them exposed to external risks, such as obsolescence. We have an understanding of why MacLeod institutions were successful in the past, but won’t be in the future. We know how (internal) corporate evil works, and why it exists. We have a sense of why previous (financial and social) risk transfers enabled the corporation to exist, and the chaotic, playful force that will undermine a centuries-old way of doing things. We have the language to discuss workplace cultures and organizational health. We’ve even taken a glance at the creative emptiness of chaos (the source of growth and risk) and, with an expanded alignment model, derived the importance of the The Fringe– the barrier between well-adjusted and ill-adjusted alignments that generates a highly ambitious “ring-shaped” space that sets up the eternal struggle between lawful evil (psychopathy) and chaotic good (technocracy). God sent me to kick some philosophical ass. I can’t judge my own work, but I’d like think ‘dem boots got broke in.

Yet before we can solve individual or organizational problems, we have to answer one more question: what the hell do all these players actually want? If you say, “Money”, I’ll put a dunce cap on your head. Money just enables the trade of stuff people want. It must be of low intrinsic utility, so people will happily let it go to get things they actually want, but legibly scarce enough to hold value. People generally get money from corporate institutions and use it to get services from other corporations, so there’s another interesting question: what the hell do corporations want?

First, I’m going to discuss individual material desires and aspirations. Then I’ll get into the concepts of wealth and work and how they’ve evolved from the primal to agricultural to industrial eras and, additionally, how they’ll change again in the (future) technological age. We’ll encounter some surprises there. Then I’ll get into what organizations want (and should want) for themselves.

Individual material aspirations

Why do people want to be rich? What is it about material wealth that drives people? There seems to be a five-tiered hierarchy of material aspiration:

• Survival: Basic, inflexible needs like food, shelter, and health care. 
• Leisure: Freedom-to. Meaningful activities and pursuits such as reading, sports, travel, and social engagement.
• Comfort: Freedom-from. Purity of experiences (e.g. first-class travel). Liberation from time-wasting chores, unpleasant side effects of Leisure, and artifacts of low social or economic status.
• Status: Social resourses to maintain an undeserved income and (for some) extremes of sexual access and libertinism.
• Power: Capacity to raise or lower others’ Status levels, whether through political, business, cultural, or religious dominion.

I might be showing my cynical (in the classical sense) bias here, insofar as this depiction places a virtuous “getting off” point somewhere in the middle of the Comfort tier. The first two levels (Survival, Leisure) have an obvious natural necessity and inclination toward virtue, and the third (Comfort) has clear hedonic value but can tend toward excess. Status and Power, on the other hand, pertain to the raw, zero-sum bickering that often makes people miserable and morally bankrupt. There are moral notions of status and power– rooted in earned elevation and in technical excellence– but those tend to be focused toward progress and health (Technocratic ideals) rather than zero-sum socioeconomic squabbling.

A simplified model would claim that people “max out” one tier and go to the next. That’s about right– one tends to claim primary focus for a given person at a given time– but, of course, it’s not so cleanly delineated. No tier is ever perfectly maxed-out, as made evident by the fact that we die, precluding perfect Survival. There are also trade-offs. A person with moderate means could decide to travel further, to more exotic locations (more Leisure) or, instead, to travel nearer but with better accommodations (more Comfort). That inclination comes down to individual taste.

Let’s look at how these tiers worked at various points in history, and attempt to project them into the technological era.

Material aspiration in history and future

In the primal era, work and play were so intertwined that Survival and Leisure were intimately linked, because the activities people did to survive (hunting, trapping, collecting and gathering) fulfilled most peoples’ primal industrious needs. Comfort, however, was utterly unimaginable. There simply was no such thing. The gods might afflict you with illness, or you might be wiped out by a more fearsome tribe that sweeps into your range. Status pertained to sexual access and reproduction. What was Power? It started when primal people began to speculate on the whims of the gods, and developed protocols for resolving status disputes. Those who managed to win others’ trust in divination became priests and, probably, the first law-makers. One presumes that there was a selection process in humanity’s priesthoods, evolving from random pretense to principles that, in their contexts, worked more often than not. Over time, this favored free-standing logical principles that became the first laws.

As humanity moved toward the agricultural era, ownership (of land, people, and resources) was invented, and that became the new Status. People who controlled and enforced the laws pertaining to ownership had Power. Leisure separated from Survival, because most of the activities people did for their sustenance were no longer fulfilling. The Comfort tier– nonexistent in a primal world– emerged, but in a form that was deeply intertwined with the Leisure and Status tiers below and above. Ownership enabled permanent social classes, and they developed divergent ways of pursuing leisure. Non-owning poor hunted for edible animals on foot, and ate them. Rich owners chased small or inedible animals on horseback, and made them trophies. The stratification of Leisure by Status generated the first notions of Comfort: different modes of doing things, some with obvious hedonic superiority over others.

The five-tiered hierarchy is most prominent in the (current) industrial age, with business sectors and commodity markets pertaining to each category of need. Whole companies are dedicated to peoples’ Leisure, or Comfort, or Status needs. Employed people will generally have their Survival needs met and abundant access to Leisure. Comfort has advanced to levels that would be considered heavenly a hundred years ago, but it’s still somewhat scarce. Most people can’t afford first-class plane tickets at full fare, or to live in the nicest neighborhoods, or even to live less than 30 minutes from work. Status is necessitated by the fact that it’s still impossible for the vast majority of people to fulfill Comfort without a parasitic lifestyle and the social access to enable it. Power pertains to control over such social arrangements and that interpersonally exploitative resource: connections. (I don’t use this view of connections to denigrate genuine relationships; I’m talking about “I’ve got connections, bitch.”) Corruption no longer happens in “smoke-filled rooms”, and bribes to sleazy politicians (almost all of them) are no longer bags of cash, but invitations to important parties. “You have a kid in high school? Every Ivy League admissions dean comes to my winter party. Keep me a friend, Senator.” That’s how Power works.

I contend that we’re not yet in the technological age, but we’re coming to it, and the successful institutions of the 21st century will be those that embrace it. At some point– and this is not a pre-requisite for advancement to a technological state, but a likely byproduct of it– we may reach a point where average people can have Comfort and obviate the nasty, socially destructive competition for Status and Power. We might move toward a world where people focus on the virtuous notions of status (patterns of excellence) and power (expansive, enlightened altruism). That would obviate a host of nasty human problems that seem intractable at our current level of advancement. Or, we might discover that people are boundlessly greedy and competitive, and then see no real progress. I tend to believe it will be a mix of the two– people will still compete over stupid shit, but it will be less harmful to outsiders, as one sees with the ridiculous but externally inconsequential/harmless ego-fest surrounding Manhattan nightclub admissions– but there are too many variables involved to make firm predictions. That world is probably 30 to 150 years out, in any case.

What makes someone rich?

In the primal world, persistent wealth was probably rare, and not universal. A person was rich in his tribe if he had high status. A tribe was rich if it could use and defend a large range for hunting, gathering, and proto-agricultural return-and-forage practices. What wealth existed was probably connected to religion: objects (fetishes in the true sense of the word) believed to convey connection to, or favor from, the gods. Of course, such wealth wasn’t transferrable; it only had value to those who believed in the same gods.

Persistent wealth came into the fore in the agrarian era, as societies invented permanent ownership relations, backed first with claims of divine sanction, and later with social-contract arguments and political force (states). Still, culture and religion only went as far as others bought into them, so there was a need for societies to agree mutually on stores of value that made sense between them. Grain could rot, and land could only be “owned” as far as it was defended, so something else was required. Furthermore, the need to maintain power relationships (land ownership, slavery) necessitated force, and that required hiring soldiers. It was best to pay them with a currency of universally legible value, like gold. Whatever bought the sword became money. Being rich, in the agrarian era, was owning lots of stuff and having the means to defend it and to extract its value.

The industrial era moved away from physical wealth and toward debt currency. While industrial labor is (for most individual workers) concave, industrial processes are (at least as one scales from zero to completion) still convex, due to nonlinear synergies. This meant that an industrialist would have to take control of others’ time and resources (a natural source of debt) for some time, running a loss for a while, before there was any payoff. Finance formalized this, and also enabled risk transfer. People with financial capital could put it at risk (for expected profit) and, thus, enable entrepreneurs to pay workers immediately (removing risk, for them). This allowed macroscopically convex (thus, risky) endeavors to be taken on by large numbers of people, while the risk was passed to those who could afford it. In the industrial era, to be rich is to have access to financial capital.

In the previous eras, but most especially the industrial one, wealth was intimately connected to control of time. What we’re learning in a world of ubiquitous computing and 24/7 connectivity is that time doesn’t have anything close to a uniform value. For me, the 8:00 am hour is much more productive than the 8:00 pm hour; but for many people, it’s the opposite. The semi-bored passive time that advertisers cultivate is of minimal value, but an interesting commodity in its own right because there’s such a massive quantity of it.

More interesting than the static non-uniform value of time, however, is the concept of progressive time, which is compounding interest of skill and knowledge derived from heterogeneous experience. In the late industrial era, time became money; work was all about the trade of one for another. However, with the micro-convexity (as opposed to the macro-convexity of all industrial efforts) of creative endeavors becoming the norm in all important work, we’re finding some extreme nonlinearities. There’s immense value in “10,000 hours” (I won’t debate exact numbers, but it’s the right order of magnitude) of deliberate, focused, and progressive practice. There’s very minimal value in 10,000 hours of non-progressive commodity labor. The programmer who spends 10 years doing difficult, creatively taxing, educational work can justify $500 per hour of economic value to her future time commitments. Yet a programmer (similar on paper) who did the more typical bland corporate drudge work for that same amount of time (i.e., he has the same year of experience, repeated 10 times) is probably worth less per-hour than he was when he started. So time can no longer be valued in isolation (whose time it is, what work will be completed) but it must be connected with both past (previous skill investment) and future (potential long-term yield).

To refine a numerical intuition for this, let’s say that you’re building technical infrastructure that will double the value of your business. If you hire the best specialist you can get, he’ll get it done in 4 months: a doubling in that time is 19% per-month growth. If you hire a 1.8-level (above-average, but not exceptional) programmer like me, outside that specialty, I’ll take 12 months (6% per-month) as I get up to speed and learn from mistakes; unlike the veteran specialist, I’d need to ramp up on the clock. If you hire a 1.1-level (mediocre) “commodity” developer used to curiosity-starving corporate programming, it’ll take 5 years including “rejection cost”– the task may not take that long, but you’ll have failures and restarts. That’s 1.1% per-month growth. If we could project these rates over $1,000 for two years with a compounding-interest model, we’d see that the world-class expert turns it into $64,000; the above-average programmer like me turns into $4,000, and the mediocre delivers only $1,320. That is progressive time in action.

Progressive time is a source of discomfort to corporations as well as the workers who have to deal with them. On one hand, micro-convexity generates the rampant job volatility for which trigger-happy employers and job-hopping employees are known. On the other, such a world creates short-sighted institutions with no desire to invest in talent (taking the risk that it leaves them). Yet competence with progressive time’s nonlinearity has become crucial, because machines are taking over the non-progressive work, and the only thing for humans to do is the progressive, micro-convex stuff.

With industrial macro-convexity, banks could intermediate between (a) those with capital to put at risk and (b) people judged highly competent to use it. Not many “highly competent” people were needed, so one could select them based on career trajectory and personal buy-in: only give money to the well-established guy putting up a substantial amount of his own capital. This excluded some talented people (like me) who could never meet such a bar, but it wasn’t a major loss back then; we didn’t need many convex thinkers. Sparse finance was OK. Society did not need a large number of people with the executive freedom conferred by access to capital. Micro-convexity is different. It creates an intractably self-executive world. Raw talent matters in a way that it never did before. The good ideas need to come from everywhere: not just seasoned, unobjectionable gray-haired men.

In short, being rich in an agrarian world meant that you had the gold to hire soldiers or to pay the government (taxation) to uphold your property rights. Being rich in the industrial era meant having the financial resources to direct others’ time– their commoditized time, presumed not to have progressive nonlinearities to it. In the technological era, progressive time (more concretely realized in access to talent, knowledge, and skill) is king. Most startups are failing in the 21st century not because there is a lack of capital, but because they don’t know how to attract, assess, and develop talent.

What do organizations want?

I think I’ve modeled the material aspirations of people well. What do companies want? The answer is, of course, that they are not living beings. “They” don’t want anything; people within them do. They do seem, however, to develop an emergent character that is some conglomerate of the people within them. When the organization’s small and selective in its people, that tends to amplify group strengths more than it converges to the gray-goo, muddled weakness for which corporate groupthink is known. However, as it grows, the MacLeod process seems to set in, and that group character (derived from its executive nerve center, which is increasingly pathological) evolves into something bland and somewhat psychopathic.

Two people can have a brilliant, interactive conversation, but a hundred people can’t. Either a few will speak, with ninety-some listeners, or they’ll break off into separate cliques. That’s fine. At a dinner party, the subgroup conversations coexist concurrently and don’t conflict. To a very mild extent, they’ll develop their own social languages, but that’s fine. However, what is a corporation? To the eyes of those who interact with it on a regular daily basis, it’s a Giant Fucking Pile of Resources– money, people engaged in a pattern of time-limited subordination, and relationships based on institutional reputation. Naturally, there will be competition as peoples’ visions of what to do with those resources conflict. People might have the best intentions and charitable vision, but to their opponents, they’re “bike shedding”. They clobber each other, and anything with an individual color is washed out, and there’s very little agreement on anything with a creative or socially positive character, which some in the group will view as wasteful. What’s left is the common social language. Profit. The Pe-en-ell. Dominance (of a market sector, or of a relationship). Growth for growth’s sake.

The Corporation is a god for the godless. Ancient people first created fictional psychopaths to justify actions that, while judged to be abstractly beneficial for the group, were dangerous or harmful to some. There was, at least, still some character to that supernatural being. It had a gender. He or she had a face, a body, some scriptures, and probably a cult. Over time, most of us realized that these gods don’t exist. (I’m not saying that a God doesn’t exist; only that concrete, interventionist ones don’t.) Late in the agrarian era, we replaced concrete ethnic deities with abstract ethnic ones called nation-states. Those lost power over time in favor of more universal fictitious psychopaths called corporations, who dropped all pretenses of “godness” and focused full-throttle on fitness as measured by the crass common language of a typical executive suite: revenue growth. So that’s where we are, but it’s not where we have to be.

The large, hierarchical business corporations are going to struggle in the technological era. To be competitive, a company will need to harness self-executivity. But corporations don’t keep small executive suites only because they’re elitist. That’s a part of it (okay, a big part) but it’s also logistically difficult for a company to have a large number of people in its nerve center. Startups struggle with this, and often cease maintaining a self-executive culture, at about 20 people. I think that gigantic, unified conglomerates of people might be on their way out. In 2000, the typical high-impact company had a core of 30 executives and 2,000 human workers. In 2050, such a company might have 30 self-executive humans and 200,000 CPUs. The “big” companies of 2050 might have a couple thousand employees. 

With the increasing importance of progressive time and self-executive behavior, the typical hierarchical goons– and the internal police forces that mandate subordination through laughably ineffective HR policies– are goners. There’s about as much of a place for them in the future as there is for headsmen and alchemists.

What large institutions will surive? Universities (but of a less exclusive sort, enabled by technology) have a good shot, being inherently pushed toward progressive guild culture. Guild culture can’t grow quickly, but it can tolerate scale. A few of these business corporations will reinvent themselves into forms that can coexist with self-executive free agents. For an analogy, medieval Rome was a prosperous city of about 30,000 people– still impressive by the standard of its time, but no longer a belligerent continental empire. Google, for its part, will probably live on into the 22nd century as a prestigious think tank, but the zombie dinosaurs who invented “calibration scores” (a mean-spirited and psychotic performance review process) will be the stuff of history books.

With the large, uninspiring conglomerates headed toward extinction, doesn’t this render growth– the boundless desire to subsume more people and become of those giant corporations– self-defeating? Perhaps. That deserves discussion.

Obscene growth is a drive emerging out of fear. In a zero-sum world, entities are either pressing their borders forward, or something is pressing in on them. Expansion in all dimensions (financial footprint, geographical reach, headcount) is required. The good news is that we don’t live in a zero-sum, Malthusian world anymore. That was the way things worked up until 1800: economic growth was slow (below 1% per year) and lower than the rate of human population increase, but the former is accelerating (almost 5%, globally) while the latter seems to be leveling off. Human potential productivity has grown, thanks to technology. One no longer needs to control a large number of people to do something excellent and sustainable. It can involve a small number of people, and they need not be controlled.

In the zero-sum world, dominance was requisite because it was the only source of stability in a winner-take-all world. Rapid growth in footprint was essential, in order to claim critical corners before a competitor does. This sort of speedy expansion is deeply risky, the result of it being that organizations needed to compensating by annihilating many beneficial (e.g. creative) risks. It’s a good thing that we don’t have to live in such a world anymore. With economic growth strong and accelerating (taking a global perspective) due to technology, we’ll be able to focus on health rather than growth for it’s own sake. And we should.

A brilliant dark age

As I’ve developed the almost metaphysical concept of chaos (creative emptiness) I like it more and more. I could be wrong, but it seems that we are moving toward a “dark age”, with the crumbling of an institutionalized, regimented way of life. Most of our going assumptions about what Work is and how it must be done won’t survive, but creativity will accelerate. It’s a brilliant darkness ahead.