The Information Revolution
Power is a funny thing. History teaches that it’s best when it is unexercised, even while it’s impossible to hold in silence (thus the seeming paradox of money as speech). And maybe this why the evolution of human societies has seemed such an agonizingly slow one. For the most part, little changes, and whatever counts as sudden movement has typically been spurred by other accidents: a draught that forces the relocation of a tribe; the subsequent adaptation of certain tools to new circumstances.
Language is perhaps the most interesting of these adaptive tools. Whatever else it is, it is first and foremost the primary means by which our species become capable of such complex organization. We would seem to learn its sounds, pattens, and associations automatically and continuously. So changes to those signals, whether in kind or frequency, force us to respond in profound ways. It gives a kind of shape to the world by providing a means to organize our passions.
When Milton’s Lucifer declares, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”, he is speaking to the shaping power of language. Language and of communication are the means by which self-consciousness can impose itself on expectations; the evolution of language represents a series of profoundly influential changes in how information can be recorded, transcribed, and distributed. The way in which our ideas have moved from local representation into portable writing, into printing, onto radio, onto computers. More simply, how we disseminate information is a central component to the machine of social organization, and changes to that machinery have always carried profound implications for our experience of ourselves and our institutions.
The journey into institutional language begins with the evolution of writing, which marks the transition from what they call prehistory — the dark age before fixed writing systems. Most of the human story is found here, and it’s mostly mute. Modern archeologists can only speak for the artifacts they find, and the words they use to describe the experience are, at best, their own. Our evolution came to embrace us, after all — humanity didn’t spring into existence knowing how to put pen to paper. That part we had to figure out on our own. And for those consumed by the past, the smallest confirmation of an oral history can reveal whole galaxies.
Once writing started working on the human animal, the rest became a question of distribution and reception. The coming of the printing press might have put the a whole class of scribes and stenographers out of work, but it also helped ensure that what was copied didn’t get changed to suite the needs of the moment. It follows that, as the royal courts and the churches lost control over their archives, the end descended on the ancien regime. I wouldn’t be the first to say that Gutenberg’s invention belongs in the same category as the guillotine. Once we had printing, reliable copies (usually in triplicate) made it possible for the rule of law to rest on more than penmanship and a good librarian.
The next wave is the one we’re still living though. Radio, the electrification of communication and basis for our present, speeds things up again. If the written word can transcend space, time, and one’s native tongue, radio allowed us to run from that patient practice like a bolt of lightning, replacing contemplation with the shock of the moment. By providing an immediate answer to any given problem, radio burned away (is burning?) those empires still built on books or custom. Radio ruined the national market because it started us broadcasting our secrets to the world, leading to the rise of the television, wireless internet, and the Cloud.
This negative origin story suggests something else: in the long run, it’s almost impossible to hold on to power (outside of the short term) when the only tool you have is thuggery. Abuse is provocative, after all: it’s only really sustainable when the victim thinks they want it. The moment they realize they don’t have to, is the moment they can take action: the moment they can hold to account. Like any other economy, successful information management is concerned with the structure of incentives. Perhaps the QAnon movement is a perfect avatar for the lingering effects such a model for power has on us: government and its agencies as both savior and monster. It eats babies with one hand, and saves them with the other.
Which goes to the central paradox of power — the ebb and flow of fear and adulation that it requires to operate. Within an institution, the tug-of-war is between ceremony and expression. Is a given office a person or that office’s function on the organizational chart? Only in a perfect world is it ever both. We’re all human first, after all. Even the greatest among us are ultimately subject to powers beyond their control. This is the terrifying thought experiment that Orwell runs in 1984: totalitarianism is something we all must want…just a little.
Be that as it may, changes in the way we organize are almost always driven processes. Organizations seldom shift as a matter of pure will on the part of leadership. Instead, they shift because something forces a reconfiguration of the information flows within them (sometimes to do with the will of leadership). This is why information technology has such a profound effect on civilization. How we organize any activity depends directly on how information reaches us, and where it goes from there.
As information moves through through networks of employees, it creates its own sort of economy — an economy that will be characterized by both rising internal efficiency and risks a trend towards even greater informational inequality between actors: it will always be those on top who, while hungering the most for information, are most incentivised to secrecy and the temporary advantages it can bring. Not because of what they can know relative to other people, simply because they enjoy access to a range of combinations unavailable to others within their immediate network (consider the relationship between the node and the edge of a network graph). And depending on your position, you could see this as a symptom of narcissistic leadership or simply as the mechanism by which shit rolls downhill.
To point back to a modern trend, when organizations speak of “flattening”, what they really mean is that they’re trying to break up silos previously thought of as strategic infrastructure. Fresh eyes and fresh shovels make for an easier cleanup job. But this is a dangerous undertaking: as anyone who has ever died heroically can tell you, we’re at our most nimble when we’re confident, and we’re at our most confident when we think we know what we’re doing.
The computer marks the perfect synthesis between the immediacy of the radio and the frustrating eternity of books. The shift it engendered has been unfolding for a while. When everyone has access to the latest version of the same copy, the knowledge economy starts to suffer from a kind of inflation — those silos start to explode. The current pandemic has hyper-accelerated this trend. Millions of workers have traded water coolers for Slack channels, and suddenly the boss in always a text message away.
For people accustomed hiding behind architecture, this must be jarring — to suddenly be on the same basic level as the people that supposed to be outside must feel a bit like losing one’s pants. It also risks exposing more the degree to which corporate hierarchies are infested with ceremonial or totemic offices — reconfiguring our workspaces ultimately begs us to ask how much top-down management is really needed when people have immediate unfettered access to one another? Why do we worry when that shark with his Six-Sigma blackbelt starts sniffing around our factory floors? Because mentors will always be preferred to tyrants.
In all likelyhood, this also has something to do with the structural requirements of the knowledge economy: what the information we have access to, our ability to find its limits, and our capacity to organize and distribute it effectively (thus the expression, “secrets don’t make friends”). We look to structural inequities (ceremonial and otherwise) to contain the number of people who act on any strange impulses that “knowing” might give them. Or perhaps, a good leader knows how to keep people from asking the wrong questions even when they don’t know the right ones.
This leads to a kind of knowledge inflation, which leads to the same problem that regular inflation does — what I had before is becoming less relatively valuable. This is an admixture of problems, that while not wholly new, wasn’t actually possible at such scale before. The computer makes it impossible to maintain power in the old way, and whispers death to traditional hierarchies built on such silos. Thus why repeated studies suggest that companies built strictly on information and task control can become more agile by focusing instead on informational distribution in order to remain maximally responsive.
Trust is key, and trust must can only be built on shared understanding. The organizations that get this are the ones that will thrive.
