diff --git a/Open Letter to Google.md b/Open Letter to Google.md index 074efb81a..0178dc440 100644 --- a/Open Letter to Google.md +++ b/Open Letter to Google.md @@ -49,13 +49,13 @@ The [[Agora]], in summary, is what I call my umbrella proposal, presented as a [ As you read these proposals, keep in mind: if not these proposals, which? This, in a nutshell, is if nothing else the spirit of the [[Agora]] I am proposing and have been trying to build: it is a [[commons]] focused on finding [[rational]] [[incremental improvements]] achievable by its community. Put another way: if you share proposals for the betterment of society, our endeavors together, or any interesting subset of them, an Agora can be defined that will be interested by default. -## Google should be fairer +## Google could be fairer Google is a corporation and a community of employees (traditionally "Googlers", assumed to be practicing "Googlyness" :) In this letter, we will comment on how Google was and how Google is, and what Google could be (again?). Being mostly profit driven as of the time of writing, Google need not be free at all times; but in this letter I make the argument that, given its position of relevance and control at this stage of the evolution of the [[first known internet]], it *should* try to become increasingly fair ("democratic") within available market-reality-bound possibilities. -## Google should experiment with being more democratic +## Google could experiment with being more democratic Most corporations have historically not been democratic at all; governance wise they tend to be (or become) highly hierarchical, in particular as they age and emergent hierarchies solidify and negotiate market pressures. As far as governmental structures go, companies are stuck in the time of [[kings]] and [[feudalism]]. 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.