Friday, May 18, 2012

Brilliant from Kevin Carson's Upcoming Book

Hierarchical institutions, on the other hand, are almost uniformly successful because everyone’s scared to tell the bosses how stupid their policies are and how shitty their products are. Failure is in fact a byproduct of the process by which success is achieved: most products in the corporate economy are only considered “good enough” because customers are powerless.

The problem, to repeat, is that no matter how intelligent the people staffing a large institution are as individuals, hierarchy makes their intelligence unusable. Given that the institution does not exist as a vehicle for the goals of its members, given that there is no intrinsic connection between their personal motivation and their roles in the organization, and given that the information and agency problems of a hierarchy prevent consequences from being fully internalized by actors, individuals simply cannot be trusted with the discretion to act on their own intelligence or common sense. That’s the whole idea behind standardized work-rules, job descriptions, and all the rest of the Weberian model of bureaucratic rationality: because someone, somewhere might use her initiative in ways that produce results that are detrimental to the interests of the organization, you need a set of rules in place that prevent anyone from doing anything at all. - Kevin Carson
This is at the very core of why Norway and the world is going to Hell. Nothing is made out of LOVE and THRUST. Just look at the ongoing destruction of Oslo these days, take especially a good look at the Barcode Wall.

The Desktop Regulatory State Chapt. 2: The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies

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