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0 pointsjauntywundrkind6mo ago0 comments

I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.

What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.

We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.

MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.

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masfuerte6mo ago

I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.

jauntywundrkindOP6mo ago

Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not).

I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize.

More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.