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2026-08-07 15:06:19 +00:00 · 2024-05-04 00:36:35 +02:00
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@@ -45,9 +45,11 @@ Google is a corporation and a community of employees (traditionally "Googlers",
 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 again 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.
+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 with (nascent but ever growing) layers of management, and decided that everyone would report directly to them. The experiment was cancelled after a few months due to the resulting overload. It made sense it would fail, even early in the lifetime of the company, as hierarchies have evolved to reduce coordination overhead and have strong points that have demonstrable evolutionary fitness in the market. My proposal here is, therefore, not that Google should immolate by becoming purely chaotic -- but rather that it should be one of the first companies in the 21st century to adopt techniques that have have demonstrably helped human groups scale beyond the limits imposed by what, organizationally speaking, amounts to a form of monarchy.
+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.
 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]].