Jo Freeman

Humans have a natural tendency towards social hierarchies. If you don't provide structure people will instinctively create it; so attempting to entirely remove structure from an organization is idealistic and inevitably fails. This usually leads to hidden power structures and counter-productive popularity dynamics. A great classic read about this topic is essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The simplest way to encode a structure is with a basic hierarchal structure where power gets delegated and directions flow down from a single individual at the top, and information gets filtered and flows up to enable decision making. This is one of the most simplest and common structures you see across society. It is a structure great at quick, efficient decision making, but has numerous flaws that make it suboptimal in many cases. Notably, the single-directional flows means it's particularly bad at self-regulating, and therefore it's susceptible to corruption without a significant outside influence.

However you can leverage systems and technology to engineer and enable novel and durable alternative structures and power dynamics. On a societal level, democracy is a hugely successful example of a system like this. Elections create a loop from the bottom to enable accountability for the person at the top, helping solve a number of failure states. You also have techniques like creating multiple structures that operate in…

The Tyranny of Structureless that Graydon recommends is well worth a read [0]. It's changed my mind on the question of the anonymity of the bad actors in the repeated dramas in Rust.

What struck me as odd about JT's resignation was that they were nominally in the group that was in charge of everything. They were even primarily responsible for drafting the new organizational structure. Why, then, did they feel the need to resign when they had so much influence?

Having read Tyranny I think I understand. JT resigned because the recent episode revealed just how little influence they actually had and how little the supposed structure of the project mattered. What structure was there was a smokescreen for the actual informal power structures in the project.

Fasterthanli.me called out these informal networks and promised to stop participating in them in order to try to minimize their legitimacy [1], but I don't think that is going to be enough. The problem is the anonymity of the elite that is actually governing the project—we don't know who they are, so we don't know the informal structure through which decisions are actually made. Those who do know insist on keeping quiet, which does prevent an internet mob but also preserves those informal structures from scrutiny and dismantling. We need the people in the know to come clean not so that we can unleash an internet mob but to lay bare the actual power dynamics. Until that's done it won't matter how much the formal structure…

ALittleLight gives a good general answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533866

Building and departing on that somewhat:

Do study what has worked, and what hasn't. Keep in mind that success may be based on chance, and negative examples also teach.

Keep in mind that there are many ways in which political movements fail (and a few that help them succeed). The study of failed utopian projects is highly illuminating. My view is that creating a self-perpetuating "intentional community" is a possible approach. For these to work, the community itself must be practically viable, and address basic levels of human needs: shelter (obviously), food, work, society, etc. In my view the college town is amongst the more successful of these in the past century or two, though that itself may be based on conditions no longer broadly present.

I strongly recommend Jo Freeman's "Tyranny of Structurelessness".
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I'd strongly recommend going to the communities most affected by the problem at hand and getting their perspective. I don't believe that those oppressed by a system always fully understand the nature of that system or the solution. I do feel that they can offer highly useful insights, and that if you hope to enlist their support they will want to be participants and not mere passengers.

The general problem is one called "politics". It turns out there's a literature on this stretching back millennia. Old dead men…

Sure. It's not a problem that people who want a casual chat with friends or interest groups use a platform for casual chatting. I say that even though I prefer the earlier world where everything was indexed and people liked to overshare on Facebook.

The problem is when you use Discord (or Slack, or IRC - yes, IRC is just as bad in this context) to run a community that's outward-facing. For example, when a large OSS project, or a foundation, decides to use Discord as its main support/hanging out channel. Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. Again, this is not about causal chats - your "offtopic" forum thread probably is better off being a Discord channel. The problem is when contributing to, or receiving support from, such community requires being active on a chat group.

Remember "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[0]? That seminal article from 1970s that, for some reason, just doesn't want to die? It was posted here just three days ago[1]. It actually talks about this. What it calls "elites" that naturally grow as an informal hierarchy in a group without a strong formal hierarchy - Discord, et al. are pretty much designed to create those. The people who are able and willing to keep up with the chat flow, following it all day every day, are the ones that become those "elite", and end up running the community.

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a classic essay discussing the real ground truth problems of decentralized anything is by Jo Freeman, called the tyranny of structurelessness [0].

though most of the punches land toward the end, it is a fascinating and short read, in which she dissects, with the sober disappointment of a former optimistic evangelist, exactly why structureless ("decentralized" before that term became vogue) movements are never what they claim to be, and indeed cannot be.

why? because structureless coordination of groups above a handful members doesn't scale beyond the achievement of the simplest kinds of goals, such as consciousness-raising (or, in crypto-promoter terms, spreading "adoption").

any group objective requiring specialization of labor, coordination of resources and responsibility inevitably succumbs to the insidious creep of informal, but officially disavaowed structural networks of insiders.

it is especially pernicious for newcomers, who have been heavily messaged about "decentralization" or "structurelessness" and engage themselves with the groups identity without any awareness of these cryptic back channel networks that actually govern its operation. only after they are committed do they slowly find out there really is a hierarchy and a command structure.

i highly recommend a quick read for anyone considering the merits of a given groups' claims of being decentralized.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

> But the stateless form of man is that of small networks of aligned people, and therein lies the check and balance.

I don't think that will work, either. A company like Intel couldn't exist based on small networks. It requires massive scale.

Back in the 70's the car manufacturers British Leyland was handed over to the unions. They abolished management and made decisions collectively. In the end, they realised that that kind of system couldn't work, and brought in management.

Checks and balances may work to some extent. Power structures usually emerge. There's always going to be an elite class.

A great essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was written by Jo Freeman, a feminist no less.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
I urge everyone to read it. It will really shape your perspective.

It seems to me that pure anarchist societies are inherently fragile and that power structures will inevitably emerge.