Doom & Boom in the Board Room
DEEP SOCKS, the book / Shallow Winter / Chapter 2: Invisible War in Managerland / Section 1
Last week, we followed the historical emergence, development, and metastasis of a social pattern: “the manager fractal.” This fractal has created a world called managerland. We are somewhat lucky to live in managerworld. Compared with many prior human societies, it is peaceful. Yet managerworld believes itself to be a much more peaceful place than it actually is. In truth civil war reigns, invisibly, over much of manager world. How can civil war be secret? When it takes the form of ordinary life, of arguments on the internet, in bizarre partisan grotesques. Civil war is everywhere, and its omnipresence renders it as transparent as the air, impossible to see because it is in all we see. This week we will devise three conceptual filters to let us see what is going on.
This first Doom & Boom in the Board Room, considers the situation via the metaphor of “social tectonic plates.” Imagine that human collective life, or what could be called “the metasystem” is made up of enormous colliding megaforms, on a globe of these. In the second episode, Self Rulers at the Water Cooler, we’ll consider how social conflict gets gamified into self-care, self-cultivation, and self-branding. The final episode: The C-Suite’s Mercy Seat analyzes the civil war from the perspective of the endgame. What are the different kind of world or worlds or world systems that could come to replace managerworld? Who wants which one and why? These questions lead into next week’s chapter: Three Postmanagerial Futures.
DOOM: Gazing into the fault lines of the world production machine.
To look at the imagined globe, the globe of the global economy, is to look at the world production machine. Talking about “global society qua global society” and the other megamacro formations and pleasant fictions of the world like, “the global south”, the “world citizen”, this is a way of swatting at smoke with your words.
The world production machine is like a geological globe. It is a better metaphor than you might suspect. It has a crust broken into plates. A cavernous, magma filled mantle, teeming with a soup of activities, venting upward through the plates. And a solid iron core that aligns compasses, and gives us a glimpse at a new kind of energy.
Metaphors help us understand complex problems with the power of linguistic-rational computation, and apply lateral thinking to their solution.
Let's look at the current world production system and its attendant social relationships, as if it were a big, hot, shifting ball of rock and metal, much like our home, Earth.
The crust's self-understanding
Nations fight for resources, which they use to create wealth and military power. There aren't enough resources locally at any arbitrary level of locality. Obviously, conflict is inevitable. Oligarchies form to rule those who prefer to be ruled.
Very few practicing politicians and bureaucrats are openly of this stripe of thought. It is cynical, conservative, anachronistic, and does not suit their beliefs about human freedom and progress.
Perhaps a cynical politburo of war controls the world, steering the hapless bureaucrats and well-meaning politicos of the world into the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps they lose their wars on purpose, conduct the business of international relations in childish and self-destructive ways, also on purpose. Perhaps they are part of the lizard death cult.
Let's look deeper and see if we can go further for an explanation for the mounting tension of global political and economic relations that is more satisfying than 'a group of evil men are in a pissing contest for no good reason.'
The crusty, boulder filled world of the political nation state
This is the lithosphere we know and love for its temperate air, clear waters, and beautiful trees. It is the world of the political nation state and the world production machine. The layer of social relations where aggregate bodies of economic and organizational power collide with each other.
Looking at this formation as a tectonic one affords us a reasonable and powerful setup for examining the apparent contradiction of the nation state--the mere existence of war amongst great powers.
After all, plates themselves, they do not conflict with each other naturally. There is no antagonism nor is there friendship amongst the Arabian plate, the Indian plate, the African or European tectonic plates.
Rather, they bump. They bump because they move. They move because there is a roiling, too-hot substrate. Some are subjugated, and pushed under the other, boiling with conflict and teeming with energy. The friction and uneven fit between them creates tremors, earthquakes along lines of contact.
Depersonalizing the social world until it is a bunch of rocks moving because of thermal energy and the inherent motion of celestial bodies is quite appealing, because it does absolve our political systems of responsibility, and the semblance of control they temporarily assume is, from this vantage, a charming joke. And it also sounds very clear-headed and rational, very realpolitik.
Deeper, hotter, cavernous
The roiling magma we mentioned is the basis of interpersonal and social conflict that is fundamentally the driver of the changes in the plate layer, the world of the nation state and bloc formation. The coursing magma of race relations, gender, production relations, managers against owners, alliance and fracture, they all here animate the movement and create risk at the fault lines. Their energy and heat and fluidity generates endless motion putting blocs into conflict with others.
This endless motion is likely the original source of dynamism in the world production machine. The world production machine, like a geothermal power station, draws and redirects the energy of social conflict, harnessing people’s discontent with their lot in life, and steering it to the various facets of the functional world we know—the world of production, the world of the military, the world of the nation state, the world of science, the world of discourses, humanities, and the social sciences. If people were freed of conflict, would we be disputing in universities, or fighting for more territory, trying to sublate some part of someone else’s plates?
The roiling magma of interpersonal and social level conflicts
The core crisis of today, from the perspective of the world production machine, is the exhaustion of management's efficacy. Objectively, the world has enough resources currently, though they are distributed inefficiently and suboptimally and without human survival and betterment as the guiding principle. Equally objectively, the current system of world production, guided by management, guided by principles of profit, rationality, and cooperation of teams for higher purposes, is coming up short in terms of human welfare. Developed countries suffer from social crisis and degradation of material conditions. Developing ones suffer from material and social crisis. The managerworld is not meeting KPIs.
Developing countries are projected by firms like McKinsey to have long-term deficiencies in the supply of high-skill (that is, college educated) labor. They are projected to have an oversupply of low-skill labor. Why should accreditation through universities be necessary in the professional world? It is perhaps because the managerworld, like any occult existence, requires induction and initiation, which takes time and a particular, managed environment that is separated from the natural and obvious imperatives of life, development, and business.
The machine isn’t scalable or efficient
Managerworld is not scalable to the world’s current scale of problems. Industry 4.0’s plan is to create superhuman manager capacities in the form of general purpose AI. Perhaps when journalists, pundits, symbolic labor, and relatively simple managerial positions are all replaced by AI, the complex tasks of strategic guidance will become a new frontier of competition and development. Or maybe, they’ll all learn to code. At present, the failure of AI to manifest the capacity to solve this problem points to a misallocation of technical resources, and does not bode well for the ultimate resolution of the developing world’s material problems, nor the developed world’s spiritual and social ones.
Managerworld sits atop these conflicts. They are interlocking, interlinked, and mutually miscible. Dissolved, mixed, and fluid in nature. They are interlinked, interlocking conflict patterns that exist under the nation-state/bloc level. The conflict between managers and owners. The conflict between strata of managers. The conflict between professionalized, relatively safe labor and the precarious, automatable labor. The conflict of gender and labor. The conflict of races and ethnicities in pluralistic or confederation societies. The conflict to create races and nationalities out of ethnicities and foreign nationals. Idpol. Disability. Political parties. Trump Enslavement and Trump Derangement Syndromes.
Eruptions, earthquakes—states and boundaries against each other
Looking at the fluid, interdependent relationship of these subterranean social conflicts, we can examine the strange case of Alexander Vindman. You can say that someone like Alexander Vindman arose to prominence because of the powerful force of ethnic grievance. His status as a Ukrainian with some ethnic resentment to their cousins the Russian Slavs, his status as a committed Democrat, his commitment to the anti-Russian propaganda of the military bureaucracy and its close affiliate the corporate press, these all are conflated as causes for his cretinous mutiny. His actions, arising from these fluid conflict dynamics within him--all made sure the brick was on the accelerator on the road to conflict with Russia over the fate of Donbas and Lugansk.
This is a crude example. His ridiculous baby face, his heritage, his politics, even his station and characterization by allied media), and his ethnic origin do not indicate much about him with regard to the social dynamics of America. Precisely the point is that no one element can be isolated to portray his full self.
Identity as hot lava, the conflict on the surface
The contemporary triumph of identity politics in generating people who are, definitionally, in constant conflict with one another shows the vitality of its model for generating conflict where there need be little if any. Many people can remember a period that was less visibly tumultuous in civic life. The vitality stems from life being a fundamentally universal experience. You are the whole world at the subjective level. Your identity then, who you feel you are, is projected endlessly outward, a signal looking for response. And hostile responses--attacks. Harm. Violence.
This is not to follow the issue of 'identity' into the weeds. Identity is in fact a heightening, rigidification, codification of a very real and persistent fact of life, that you are somebody, from a long line of somebodies. ‘Identity’ as the political concept makes clear that each of the factors of an individual's life are in fact profound points of conflict, for which the appearance of manifestly negative signals are treated as hostile, pretexts for extending, prolonging, creating, renewing conflict. At a macro level, you watch the drumbeats for war. At the micro level, you watch as people spend their days yelling at each other when they're not slaving away for things they care little for.
But the lava won’t cool
The heat can't subside within the mantle. It's simply not set up that way. Resolving problems will often as not create new ones. But the fact is the space of society is fluid and dynamic, being linked to a very vital and shifting biosphere. Even if society were to answer every question and put everyone in a satisfactory station, resource, talent, spiritual inequality are always and forever real.
The managerial society is, here, a machine that harnesses and directs the energies of social conflict to the betterment and enlargement of the surface layer. It is not sufficient to resolve modern social crisis, and its moment of triumph has passed.
The risks and tensions generated are constantly growing
The motion has created sublation events all over the world. The nation-states, the crust, are currently fighting over resources. For their ideologies, such as they are, for their identities.
The longer without an earthquake, the longer without a volcanic eruption, the longer the mechanism is building up potential energy. Any given social system, any given iteration of the world production machine, is only so efficient at conversion of the energies of discontent, social conflict, the need to survive. Currently, it’s quite clear that a great many earthquakes and eruptions are coming. Is the true desirable situation one of constant magma dribbling up? Or for periodic eruption? Should we hope for a constantly vibrating world?
The core
What is the purpose of the material world?
It is to be transcended. Not to die. To become as the social world is--relentlessly dynamic and responsive to human whim and will. To transform physics into a language game is the telos of the economy and the technosphere.
This is the fundamental force of the core. This is the understanding that underlies all existing social conflict and plans. We see dreams of the technogod emerging in the Singularity. Of millenarian redemption, from Christ, from Allah, or Marx, or the End of History, all pathways to the deliverance from the flesh and its hungers and pains. All planning for prosperity is us hoping for permanent prosperity, from the escape of the material world. When people first saw steamboats travelling against the Mississippi, onlookers (literally) marveled in a way that you and I could not ever marvel. They were staring at a miracle. The greatest triumph of will they had ever seen—the overcoming of the most basic fact imaginable, the flow of a river, with genius.
They’re not just rocks, they’re thinking
The metaphor is coming apart at the seams now. Because the plates, they're self aware. They’re made of people, organizing and creating conceptual territory. They know, feel, see. They should be a bit more than rocks in our thinking. They are aware of the mantle. What is the project of government after all, if not to better society through ordered resolution of conflict? They are aware of the core. Aren’t industrial planners concerned with efficiency, innovation, the creation of wealth and ease in perpetuity? Though they are aware of their situation as a globe, of the undesirability of earthquakes and volcanos, and have set up ways to vent the potential energy to a certain level. There is a complicated interrelationship between the plate, the mantle substrate, and the core. They know and inform each other, though dimly and incompletely.
The tangle of dyadic communication
Crust-Mantle
Social conflict drives nation-states and blocs into conflict, and alliance. This is to see the social world in an unconscious driver-seat, animating but not ensoulling history.
Crust-Core
The dim understanding of the crust that they must escape the world of rock and metal. They know that the key to escaping from a world of catastrophic dynamism and heat is to overcome and transcend, but do not know that this drives them. Instead, policy becomes increasingly quixotic, filled with desire that is incomprehensible to the mind except as escalating fantasy. This is the source of the dream of the simulation world, the Singularity, the eternal global prosperity, Marx's final true communism of perfection.
Mantle-Core
For their proximity, they have precious little understanding of each other. Nation states can certainly conceive of a destiny. A rock can conceive of stasis, it dreams of little else! Magma, until it is not magma, exists only in a world of dynamic, endless change. The crust is moving. The mantle relates to it--two dynamic systems understanding each other, mutually affecting each other.
The mantle does not relate effectively to the nearly monolithic and quite solid core.
The eruptions and tremors
The struggles today are volcanic. They are magma, boiling and shifting under our feet. They exist, submerged, waiting for a catastrophic, unmanaged release. The fact is the nation states of the world have found precious little to occupy themselves besides attempting to perfect their current potential-energy release machine, the world production machine, the global economy.
There is a sneaking suspicion, growing inside of us all, that this machine we say vents the energy by occupying our time, giving us platforms and reasons for cooperation, is in fact only generating more and more energy. Some unaddressed flaw in the system is animating activity at the fault lines of society.
BOOM: Waiting for the crisis
The fault lines for the crusty world of the nation state are clear enough. Look at a map. Look at the map of who votes with the US at the UN. Look at the client states, colonies, or allies, whatever you’d like to talk about. Look at trade agreement maps. You’ll get a rough and general picture.
The plates overlap, they may not be contiguous. It’s an imaginary globe, it’s as flexible as your imagination lets it be.
If you look at the fault lines at these different plates, you’re going to see the front lines of cold and hot wars. If you look deep, deep into the faults, you’ll see the shifting chunks of molten conflict that undergird the bloc-bloc and nation-nation and intranational explosions and earthquakes.
The Natostan bloc
The Americans are a proud, dumb, and warlike people. Intellectualism fits unnaturally on a nation of immigrant farmers who didn’t quite make it in Europe, and those imported from the rest of the world for low-wage labor. Intellectualism is an aspiration, and it met its greatest success in American public life following the greatest success of its proud, dumb, warlike military in 1945, when succeeding in the next war would require mastery of certain domains like art, culture, and media, thus prompting a nationalist drive to become the cultural warriors of freedom.
This has, ultimately, led us to a culture war—fought in terms of culture. Culture is war, to Americans. It is a constant, seeping volcano, oozing like Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Magma that won’t cool, and is continually renewed, because the social production machine of the Americans is profoundly geared toward conflict as a model of resolution and activity.
The greatest irony of the ascendant leftwing in American culture is that they are crusaders at heart. They seek moral guardianship over the world, as a way to justify and as a sphere of activity that lets them ignore the real military force that supports guardianship of any kind.
The American way of life is certainly in jeopardy. In the long run, China will successfully develop a high-end, high-quality manufacturing sector comparable to America’s, Japan’s, Korea’s, Germany’s, and it will either consume or destroy Taiwan’s. This challenge by China is producing sublation! The process of part of the existing plate getting turned into magma, submerged under heat and pressure—here the dead corpse of mighty, high employment, high output American industry.
This is far from the entire picture, but the liberal crusade, the woke/redpill culture war, animate American political life and create a sense of American cultural norms being the only ones, and the only ones that get exported. This is a model that causes the Natostan bloc, which America leads and dominates, to constantly up the ante and provide justifications internally for its leaders for conflict. How often do we see crowing about human rights and rules when the leaders of Natostan are explaining why, yet again, they have failed to even stall the seismic political events that anyone with a brain can see?
The Sinobloc
China is animated very much by a series of deep, disfiguring cultural and national wounds. The disappearance of linguistic diversity, of local autonomy, the wounds of the GPCR and the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War. The wounds of 89, of Reform and Opening Up. The wounds of a constrictive, grinding lifestyle in the cities, poverty and lack of access in the countryside. The wounds of being the world’s factory.
The promise of the party is that the first, most well-known wound will be healed, and the Chinese world’s power and prestige at its record height will be reached and improved upon. Eurasian trade routes will be restored. Naval trade routes will be created, and mastered. China will not fall behind again in social or technical development in production. They will, by hook or crook, by effort or cunning, achieve this, and gain control of vital, high tech production stacks. Obviously, this is putting them into conflicts with the Natostan bloc controlling these currently.
This is all grounded in a brutalist economic materialism that attempts to, through active intervention, defuse every little eruption and tremor with feverish activity. They lack the crass, dumb, energetic spirituality of America. Perhaps active intervention on society might produce fewer eruptions of long term consequence. Or perhaps they’re simply forestalling an inevitability.
Its exterior-facing fault lines lie right along the island chains of the Pacific, its border with India, another country suffering from a similar ‘Become rich, powerful, and consequences be damned’ mentality. It is pushing against the US. It is attempting to weld its plate to Russia to avoid potential eruptions there. Positive sublation! Wow, find a geologist who can think of that.
The Slavbloc
Russia has missed decades of economic and population growth following its defeat by Yeltsin in the Cold War. The wounds are deep. The adjustment to liberal oligarchy has produced numerous, too numerous to really count, social conflicts. Underneath the ground there, is an endless volcano that is seemingly, to outsiders, mostly managed through relentless patriotic propaganda and a very active police force. Maybe the ruralness of the population is preventing the high intensity development of this magma.
Russia, beyond that, held and aspires to be again, an empire. Russia, with its ethnic and historically simmering Transcarpathian ethnic and linguistic conflicts, faces an uphill battle to get legitimacy as the leader of what it once was the leader of. Natostan butts up against their historic plate, and is piece by piece taking it away while cutting every link with the Russians.
Their solution has been to find a cooperative form of integration with China and Central Asian states, being the Euro part of a Eurasian push. Russia’s historic relationship with Central Asia has typically been one of conflict and war, in spite of their affinities for oligarchy and shared history under the boot of the steppe peoples. Indeed, they’re facing conflict driven from a new experience of pluralism in a society with a leading, dominant, irreplaceable ethnic cohort that's broadly 'European.'
Its fault lines lie on each of its borders. The eruptions lie in the constant threat of state change—the Russian Federation is the youngest of great powers, with the least stable and least functioning production machine and bureaucratic mechanisms.
Keeping the big boom at bay
So yes, constant teeming threats of eruptions that shatter a given plate, of earthquakes and sublation events that destroy frontiers and doom millions. It has been controlled to some extent by the current venting system for potential eruptive energy, the managerial society. The managerial society has, to its credit, successfully created patterns of cooperation amongst most parties that have proven durable until the 2007 crash. It prevented earthquakes and eruptions.
But now, each plate seems to be pushing on the others, at every line. There is no sufficient mechanism to vent the potential energy.
The managerial society has successfully managed to recruit, distract, entertain, and educate potential leaders and direct them away from ideologies that are conflict oriented, make nationalism a bad word, make conflict appear to be unimaginable.
The other side of running from the eruption
It’s done well at distraction and diversion of conflict energy. It has resolved many, more people are rich, fewer are starving, than at any point in history. It’s also, on the other end, discouraged war by making the military at once frighteningly destructive and bizarrely incompetent. The organization of the military into what is essentially a hydra of well-managed, high tech corporations and bureaucracies has produced fantastic breakthroughs in aviation, missile technology, explosives, fuels, even in guns, armor, and conventional vehicles. It has also produced a profit driven, corruption prone procurement sector and confused, unachievable, politically driven military objectives. It has eschewed long-understood strategic goals such as: victory, pacification of neocolonies, direct control of particular resources, integration of new subject populations.
For the US, decades of costly and failed war are not yet an instructive lesson—because the machine has been succeeding by the standards of a profit driven, well managed corporation—products get delivered more or less, research and development continue apace, and the customers for some reason aren’t complaining enough to change behavior or alter their demand. Perhaps other nations have taken the lesson of avoiding wars of choice until they are wars of necessity. Eight years of stalling over the Ukrainian Civil War certainly don’t make the current military conflict in Ukraine seem like a true war of choice.
What eruptions should I expect?
Functional and political ones first. Collapses of the production machine and the state formations. The magma isn’t controlled, the energy is not working properly.
But you can prepare. You can build your own production machines. You can start finding a way to form your own relationship and self-government by making your own, successful companies that exist as an alternative to the managerworld ones, worker-owned, with successful governance structures that transcend the norms of limitless growth and absorption of rivals.
Interbloc ones?
If there’s no way to break up the crust into a bunch of smaller chunks that aren’t big enough to rub, sublate, and destroy each other? If there’s really, really, full scale war between states? You’ll need to be a prepper. Get in the woods. Get big bags of beans and iodine tablets and guns and food buckets. We don’t have a great answer for that kind of eruption.