The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
jofreeman.com
jofreeman.com
Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include:
- "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/)
- "On Photography" by Susan Sontag (https://www.amazon.com/Photography-Susan-Sontag/dp/031242009...)
- "Black Souls in White Skins?" by Steve Biko (as far as I can see only widely available as part of the Collection "I write what I like")
- "The Two Cultures" by CP Snow (https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1...) (This one is a lot like Freeman's in that many summaries seem to completely misunderstand the argument it is making, and many people assume it says something it doesn't).
- "Ironies of Automation" by Lisanne Bainbridge (https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...)
- "Risk Management in a Dynamic Society" by Jens Rasmussen (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.863/rasmussen-safetyscience.pdf). If you read nothing else, check out Figure 3.
- Erich Fromm, The Art Of Loving. It's about how love (romantic, interpersonal) is not rosy but hard, hard work. All of Fromm's writing is amazing, but this one (for me) had the most personal impact. Another great one is Fromm's The Sane Society.
- Kishimi/Koga's The Courage To Be Disliked. It's classified as self-help, but it's more a pop-psychology summary of Adlerian Psychotherapy. We can choose not to be the product of trauma, or our surroundings. We may get pushed into negative corners by our upbringing, but then we get too comfortable in those negative corners to push ourselves out. The title alludes to a person who has no friends and has a negative image of himself, maybe he's that lonely because he is afraid of being rejected/disliked. He is lonely and miserable, but he is comfortable in the loneliness. It takes courage and hard work on yourself to move out of those holes.
- Hillman/Ventura's We've had a Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse. In a nutshell, the problem is not always with the individual, often it's just the environment; mindfulness will only get you so far if the house is on fire.
- Becker's The Denial Of Death. We know we die but we don't realise that. How do we generate meaning in the presence of death? There are 'good' (a life project, pushing societies' boundaries) and 'bad' ways (hedonism, drugs etc.). What are the necessary illusions we should create for ourselves to keep pushing?
Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.
We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.
I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.
Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.
This scratches a proximate itch [5].
I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Reader-Charles-Lemert/dp/1557...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive...
[5] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/alien-phenome...
Another rec: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, on how we can't imagine alternatives to capitalism any more.
Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, on how modern neoliberalism turned us into self-exploiters. There's no 'upper class' suppressing the 'lower classes' anymore, we've moved to self-exploit, to push ourselves as our own horrible boss, without a structure to rebel against, with no chance of escape.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
CS Lewis predicted the impact of social media 50 years prior to its existence:
> And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.
Wisdom truly does transcend time and generations.
Then as a young adult, I happened across abolition of man by accident (honestly, it might even have been HN where I first came across the link). This is one of the most fantastic things that I've read. And this was the start of my discovery of cs lewis' serious writings.
It's been a while since I read them, but I would put forward: the abolition of man, screwtape letters, the great divorce, and the problem of pain.
As a christian, I don't really buy all of lewis' arguments. And he even goes on record in one of his essays about how you shouldn't read too deeply into what his actual beliefs are based off his essays (which feels kind of like a cop out, but whatever). However, he was able to take a line of reasoning and then build a compelling body of text around it. The experience is impressive.
Even if you have very little sympathy towards christianity, I would suggest at least giving abolition of man and screwtape letters a shot. Abolition is all about the possibility of society becoming a machine to destroy humanity, and screwtape letters spends a lot of time trying to convince you that a non-human intelligence is going to be non-human.
[1] - I think the idea was that this was christian fiction that children should be happy to read. No necessarily that anyone was excited per se. But more like, youngish christian families wanted to build up a wholesome peer environment for their children and this was a christiany media that they didn't have to worry about.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...
Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone. As a result, it cultivates empathy for those who fail to transcend their circumstances. It then implies that the solution is changing the environment, not the individual.
But this is circular reasoning. It assumes that it's all the environment, and concludes with it being all the environment.
What the authors is doing is pointing out is that assuming you would act different is unhelpful. It is far more helpful and interesting to look at a situation, and examine what are all the things that would cause you to to end up in those circumstances despite your best effort. What this does is forces you to overcome the human minds tendencies towards lazy evaluation, to really break down all the forces acting upon the situation these individuals encounter.
This is actually very similar to a technique useful for startups. Assume you have failed some number of years from now. What are some of the reasons you might have failed?
I would concur. Three ways out of poverty would be sports, art/music and crime (bad idea). Knowledge, luck and the right mindset and are important too. There is the book Rich Dad Poor Dad about the mindset part.
It's something I think about often: what does it take to convince millions of people to walk into a graveyard? It just completely flies in the face of self preservation, kind of like the Aztec sacrifices
It's hard to think about this and not turn into a cynic
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Past discussions:
- 9 years ago, 120 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611>
- 5 years ago, 20 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104>
- 3 years ago, 19 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477>
- 7 years ago, 54 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406>
- 9 years ago, 15 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486>
- 6 years ago, 2 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834>
Jo Freeman's the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Recommended by Mark Andreesen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 - Oct 2020 (19 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 - July 2018 (20 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 - Oct 2017 (2 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 - May 2016 (54 comments)
“Meritocracy” and the Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 - Oct 2014 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 - May 2014 (15 comments)
RE: The “Tyranny of Structurelessness” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 - April 2014 (7 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 - March 2014 (120 comments)
This fundamentally changed my view on flat organizations, realizing they were vulnerable to predators with such simple tactics.
This has been noted as a failure mode of democracy — as people won’t risk their individual reputations to challenge radicals garbed in “noble” causes, until the situation is already dire.
Flat and structureless are not necessarily synonymous. It's certainly possible to have a highly structured yet flat organization with clear roles and non-hierarchical decision-making.
When there is no authority, predators become the authority.
Flat structures may, or may not, have a head.
What they don't have is deep hierarchy.
Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles.
An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course, as the individual workers don't take orders from the queen (or anyone else), but instead respond largely based on instinctual behaviours and pheremone signalling (in the case of ants at least, I'm not certain of bees).
Flat structures may lack any leadership, or have various rotating or ad hoc leaderships. These are more akin to the structureless organisations Freeman writes of.
An example is the UK political system, where it's clear who has "say", but the structure for dealing with quite serious misbehaviour is very outdated. Only today there was an article in the BBC about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65856484
Countries without a robust consensus-based governing process and an established process for removing someone from power - and that's most of them - are susceptible to strongman politics. Think Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Saddam, Gaddafi, Tito, Kagame, Mugabe, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
Outside of politics, wealth and celebrity are the obvious paths to unaccountable power. Jeffrey Epstein is an example of how a predator can get away with despicable behaviour without comeuppance for decades. Rupert Murdoch has frequently been at the centre of various scandals and serious controversies, and seems to have escaped pretty much unscathed by treating it as all part of the business.
The venture capital environment in silicon valley seems to have some of the hallmarks; we can see people like Holmes or Bankman-Fried trying to exploit the system to gain power.
Academia also springs to mind. It's surprisingly easy to get into powerful positions with very little skill/knowledge besides networking. I believe there's a real issue with toxic, abusive PhD supervisors in the UK and potentially the US, which is a classic consequence of heirarchies with little accountability.
But this doesn't feel too relevent to the discussion of whether an organisation can operate effectively with a flat structure.
Having structure and roles is OK in a grassroot, horizontal movement.
> inserting a crazy and letting it go from there
A professional agitator with a covert political agenda is hardly a "crazy".
In the 50s, John Boyd did a lot of really interesting work on the idea of "mission command" and the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop. Although he did his work for the US military, I think his ideas are broadly applicable to social movements as well, as they describe how "swarms" of autonomous actors can easily overwhelm hierarchical organizations due to their ability to make decisions faster.
[1] https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sab...
Power structures tend to form either where a single individual can bring things about, or where they can prevent their occurrence.
In a consensus organisation (either intentionally so or de facto), the individual or faction which can prevent business from transacting has effective control. If there are multiple such entities, what results is gridlock. This is unfortunately one potential failure mode of democratic or representational government.
Sabotage is one means of accomplishing that goal.
But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.
As far as I read the essay, Jo Freeman advocates both equality and transparency. In particular, she makes strong points that equality is impossible without transparency.
> "it's like no one even read 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness,'" said an engineer who had recently read The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
https://without.boats/blog/if-you-can-keep-it/ https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307105.html
Negations are really hard. I'm sure the above sentence has one too few or one too many.
I did enjoy this [1] refutation of the article though.
I agree with the article I linked in that people who think The Tyranny of Structurelessness is insightful are mostly bookish socially-incompetent people who want to force the rest of us to live sterile rule-bound "lives" (if you can even call that life).
- [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-mcquinn-a-revi...
> You don't have permission to access this resource.
- Internet Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20020309071211/https://www.jofre...>
- Archive.Today: <https://archive.is/M3teQ>
> Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.
> While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;
1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.
3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.
4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.
> While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones.
I wonder if the originators of Agile were familiar with this work? At any rate I think it explains that dichotomy between the early developer push for agile - “we found this awesome thing that works!” - contrasted with the later wide-spread industry adoption and general hatred. I.e, the small group only works based on specific, unlikely, circumstance, and the concepts do not scale.
Also for those people who are in a flat/no-structure and looking for something that puts words to why things feel wrong.