From 8563e4cf7b44b49ae8b42bd0f783266ebf6a1437 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Flancian <0@flancia.org> Date: Sat, 4 May 2024 00:47:51 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] autopushed --- Open Letter to Google.md | 8 ++++++-- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/Open Letter to Google.md b/Open Letter to Google.md index bc93e7347..f72af7795 100644 --- a/Open Letter to Google.md +++ b/Open Letter to Google.md @@ -49,9 +49,13 @@ Most corporations have historically not been democratic at all; governance wise Google toyed with a form of anti-hierarchy early in its lifetime, way before I joined in 2012. The story goes that Larry and Sergey thought that they could do away (relatively still few but ever growing) layers of management, and decided that everyone would report directly to one of them -- I think it was Sergey (I will, of course, check). The experiment was cancelled after a few months due to the resulting overload and dysfunction. It seems to me that it makes sense it failed, even that early in the lifecycle of the company. Hierarchies seem to have evolved to reduce coordination overhead and they have strong points which yield demonstrable evolutionary fitness. -My proposal here is that Google should experiment again with some of the concepts and strategies it explored around the time the original [[founders letter]] was published, instead of becoming yet another profit-driven not-putting-users-first in [[digital capitalism]]. I am not suggesting it should risk immolation by becoming chaotic or straying away from market expectations altogether -- but rather that it should dare to be one of the first companies of the 21st century to adopt governance and prioritization techniques that have have demonstrably helped other human/silicon groups scale beyond the limits imposed by what -- again, organizationally speaking -- amounts to improving on a very simple early form of monarchy. +My proposal here is that Google should experiment again with some of the concepts and strategies it explored around the time the original [[founders letter]] was published, instead of becoming yet another profit-driven not-putting-users-first in [[digital capitalism]]. I am not suggesting it should risk immolation by becoming chaotic or straying away from market expectations altogether. Rather that it should dare to be one of the first companies of this 21st century to learn from governance tools that have have demonstrably helped other human groups scale beyond the obvious limits imposed by what -- again, organizationally speaking -- amounts to an early form of monarchy. -The answer to the scaling and growing pains that Google started going through in the 10s and early 20s is not, I believe, to double down on hierarchy and limit information flow as pretty much every other Traditional Company has done while facing the same problems; but rather to inch closer to what could be called [[heterarchy]], in my proposal gradually adopting principles of [[liquid democracy]]. +I started the Agora because I believe that the answer to the scaling, growing, aging pains that Google (and other tech corporations) went through in the [[last twenty years]] is *not* to double down on hierarchy, cease to put the user first, focus on maximizing profits while bowing down to market and government pressure and becoming informationally-opaque -- as any "[[traditional company]]" would do. + +I joined Google in [[2012]] thinking the [[founders]] cared about the health of the internet and the good of society ahead of profits, and showed it through their public actions and their treatment of employees and users. + +**Note** but rather to inch closer to what could be called [[heterarchy]], in my proposal gradually adopting principles of [[liquid democracy]]. # Google should be fairer Fairer to all: fairer to employees, fairer to users (a.k.a. [[people]]), fairer to society at large.