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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

It's lovely that everyone commenting here read the title, has skimmed, found things they like and move on. The prescription Joreen gives at the end is still a very democratic system, much more democratic than the hierarchies that exist in corporate businesses. She specifically does not want to repeat the hierarchies that are pretty problematic, along with the structurelessness she discusses at length.

As ismail points out, people always conflate "flatness" with "structurelessness" or essentially some version of the wild west or a slumber party. This conflation is unfortunately too common and misses the point and reasons for more horizontal organization.

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Furthermore... the author describes how lack of structure is not even a partial solution, in that it simply fails to solve the problem it's reacting to. An org with no formal organization can still have the same unhealthy power dynamics as a traditional hierarchical org.

> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group.

> This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.

Wow, what a money line. It's like a Rosetta Stone for a whole family of naive political ideas.

From ancap and the more extreme forms of libertarian thinking on the right, thru "flat organization" in the startup world, to explicitly leaderless leftist groups like Occupy Wall Street.

What they have in common is the fantasy that large human organizations can work without defined leadership.

> Wow, what a money line. It's like a Rosetta Stone for a whole family of naive political ideas.

I would rather say that it is extremely naive to believe that the systems we have inherited are optimal in any way.

Nobody's saying the systems we've inherited are optimal.

What we (all four--me, the comment I'm replying to, the Tyranny of Structureless essay, and the article about Valve) -- what we're saying is that "no system" is not an improvement.

Systems, institutions, and cultures evolve to fit their environments better than alternatives.

That's not to say any are perfect or fully optimized. There is room for innovation. As problems are solved, remining problems start getting more attention. And environments change over time. But established approaches are more optimal in at least some respects than failed experiments of the past.

I think it goes both ways. You cannot develop new systems by designing them around fantasy psychology that you implicitly presume will take over everyone in the new scheme.

New schemes are certainly a good idea if they actually improve on the current models and are based on reality and not fantasy or malfeasant popularism.

That's a false dichotomy. There's enough naivety out there to fuel both pro- and anti-status-quo positions.

> It's like a Rosetta Stone for a whole family of naive political ideas. From ancap and the more extreme forms of libertarian thinking on the right, thru "flat organization" in the startup world, to explicitly leaderless leftist groups like Occupy Wall Street.

You just earned enemies and downvotes from the entire political spectrum. I'm onboard, let the martyrdom commence.

I think this fantasy persists because it is sometimes true, for a short period of time or for small groups of people. However, such a state is like a body without an immune system: it will happily continue along its path until it encounters a disease and then it gets ill.

Likewise, a leaderless group can work very well for a while until someone joins the group who will put their own interests before that of the group. Then the group has much less capable defenses than a traditional hierarchy since by definition there is no leader to expel the new person. The chance a group meets such a person is clearly dependent on both the size of the group and the lifetime of the group.

In physical terms you might say that such groups are in an unstable equilibrium: any pertubation away from perfect harmony leads to a total collapse because there is no more benefit to cooperating if there are non-cooperators present.

>the prescription Joreen gives at the end is still a very democratic system, much more democratic than the hierarchies that exist in corporate businesses.

yes, but these are measures designed to prevent an accumulation of power and information so that leaders remain interchangeable (like rotation); this does work against building individual competence. These are hard to maintain as a movement/organization gets bigger - for example the green party in Germany abandoned rotation and direct democracy at some stage.

I think that creating an organization that works well (any form of organization) is really a form of art - there seems to be some secret sauce not described in any books that makes it all tick. (for example even a dysfunctional system like this one somehow works for Valve, they seem to be doing fine from the business side of things)

Your observation about it being an at form reminds me of a thought I've had periodically. I wonder if or when a human organization system will eventually prescribe genetic testing and genetic engineering to participate in the group.

If we were to make distributed systems more like humans, every 1000 systems would have a greedy psychopath amongst them. Unlike a chaos monkey type system, such bad actors could reprogram and take over the whole system. The chaos monkey is useful in software because they're ultimately controlled and can be shut down. Greedy psychopaths in meat space can pursue high value relationships and weave narratives to shut down systemic protections (I.e. WMDs, too big to fail). Why not perform some group screening to filter out excess greed, assuming it's a trait visible at the genetic level?

Disclaimer: these are my wandering thoughts likely more appropriate for sci fi that any society in my lifetime.

i don't think you will have a purely 'objective' system while people are running the show; Now if we have robot managers then i don't see why they would need us too much (except for debugging them ;-)

I have made this mistake of assuming the following: flat = structurelessness = freedom

I think the terminology we use may be letting us down.

Rather than talk about flat or horizontal organization, think it would be more useful to think in terms of encouraging freedom, autonomy and reducing bureaucracy while achieving {x} purpose.

How can one design for this?

Read the essay in the GP and get all the way to the end.

To summarize, diffuse authority, have authority be ultimately responsible to the group (aka the employees as a whole), and avoid informal networks and concentration of resources by rotating responsibilities and equal access to equipment.

An employee-owned co-op with some or all of these systems in place could achieve the freedom and autonomy you seek. It has to be proved in practice, however. Many co-ops have more traditional authority structures still. Some bureaucracy is inevitable when designing a decision-making process for a large group.

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