Hello first-timers
We're ankle deep into the live serialization of a book called DEEP SOCKS. It will entertain and exhilarate you as you learn about the world from angles and layers you may not have considered before. The social and political world are afflicted with a heartbreaking shallowness that affects our eros and thymos and we are left with only one option, we must dive, deep deep deep into reality.
It is structured into seasons, and while it is currently summer in the Northern hemisphere, the first is SHALLOW WINTER, since it is our goal to begin at the beginning and talk about the world today—a brutal and cold time where no roots grow deep and no thoughts penetrate the permafrost. In the first week we tracked the origins, history, and imagined destiny of the elusive core of modern political economy: the Managerial Fractal. Last week, we focused on the conflictual aspects of managerworld—the lines of conflict, the personal shortcomings, and their fantastical narratives.
These conflicts are arriving because we are visibly at the cusp of a great change in society, which we examine in this week's chapter, Three Postmanagerial Futures. The first section, Computergod and the Escape from Reality talked about the amazing future awaiting us all, should we be lucky, the world of the Singularity, where total management intersects with superhuman intelligence redeeming the failures and externalities of the present. Its follow-up looked at the character and nature of 'dystopia' and the nature of our present and its likely outcomes as things continue to get worse.
TODAY
We conclude our scrying into the future with a look at the hopeful plans of two rival ideologies to managerworld, both vying for succession to the old and bloated Managerworld. These are sociopolitical plans, not necessarily reliant on a revolution in production technique, but instead in the relationship of people to production. We will approach the deep left and deep right's hopeful plans for us all.
The Erasure of Life
The greatest flaw in managerial society is the fact that it is far better at capitalism than capitalism ever could have been. In the same way that Christianity was so much better at Platonic philosophy than the original, we have found ourselves in a society that seems capitalist, but this does not describe the power center or priorities of the rulers of this world. In a world so maniacally focused on increase, we are trapped in a world production machine that has no inherent need for us and can only service our needs that are specifically human.
This is the erasure and diminution of life and freedom in managerial society. Everyone living under it senses or can acknowledge that something is off about the order of things, and while some like to blame the profit system or oligarchs or whatever local minority is causing trouble lately, it is clear that something has to change. And it's quite likely that a superficial change, such as changing who allocates resources or what ethnic groups have what rights is
What are the proposed alternatives for a future after managers from the deep left and the deep right?
The Deep Left's gameplan
The Deep Left is a term you may or may not be familiar with. It is a nascent political economy that we are dedicated to exploring. It is inspired heavily by the book bolo'bolo, a utopian communist book that proposes a heady world of micronational production and cultural units, about 300 to 500 souls to a bolo, and these bolos working together in an interdependent federation where each has its own community and culture. It's a world of free association and production, where people live and work within and for their communities.
The pathway to this, we propose, is quite simple. If enough bolos are successful, they will be imitated. Bolos are a form of social organization comparable to the startup, but without its cancerous growth impulse toward monopoly. The way to create a bolo inside the current world system is to make a worker-owned business that focuses on both its business and developing an actual culture, not just an 'office culture' but a place for people to live and own.
Focus only on success
Collectivism's reputation is no good. This is certainly a branding problem, and has less to do with a history of atrocities than you may think. Atrocities have hardly affected the popularity or enduring power of any particular ideology. Stalinism didn't do the Soviet Union in, and the conquest of the Americas has hardly had any impact on Americanism's popularity. Politics is not a sentimental space, and the successful are neither principled or filled with a love of humanity.
Again: collectivism's reputation is no good. This is because of the fact that it has not produced all that much success! Sharing produces a ready steady state of low innovation and material sufficiency. Many hands do make light work. But light work never inspired anyone to do more.
A bolo, in order to overcome this stigma, must focus single-mindedly on success, and pursue it without principle. The basic organizational form of the bolo is geared towards highly autonomous workers with a real stake in the future of their organization. It is in many ways like a startup, but it is not there to 'go public' it is there to enrich the owner-workers.
How is this not just managerworld
Valve must be a bolo then, right? It's not far off. Horizontal organization, a product people love, developed quite freely. But not everyone working there owns it, and Valve is not also a city and a way of life, it is not also schools, it is not a tribe and it is not a country. A bolo is an organization that works as a business and lives occupying all roles available for it to fill as a nation.
Everyone has a boss in managerworld, and this is the most degrading relationship possible for many. It is an unnatural form of subjection, the partial and highly differentiated sort of management. People resist it naturally—'soldiering' it's called when a worker is simply doing the least possible to avoid censure and punishment. When management works, it produces astonishing results. When it does not work, it produces bizarrely disproportionate misery.
In boloworld, everyone is the boss, to the limit of ability and preference.
Free making, maximal complexity
Managerworld comes with maps. Easy to read ones. Org charts show you where power comes from, and how it flows, and what it does at each stop. This betrays their principles of clear organization and minimally efficient complexity.
The goal of minimally efficient organization—the most done with the least is a goal because the heuristic of management is always the increase in profit, power, or prestige for the organization under management. This is contrary to the purpose of the bolo, which desires and embraces complexity as a new form of efficiency at generating high quality and unique culture and work.
Bolos are intentionally complex and difficult to map. The principles of managerworld have to be replaced at some point with a system that generates wealth out of complexity rather than reducing human life to the most routine and predictable and optimizable routines.
Outcompeting startups
The experimental nature of bolos does not make them ideally suited for some kinds of production without significant investment of time and energy to tailor them for new tasks. Factory work, extractive work, some forms of manual labor, utilities—worker ownership is perhaps underdeveloped as a conceptual space. The space where bolos can compete most effectively is against startups in tech and media. In these spaces, experimental ways of working and living are attractive to talent and capable of producing competitive advantages. Any form of organization that produces competitive advantages will be imitated quickly and without regard for some commitment to the past—the desire for optimization and success in managerworld are gameable qualities.
Ownership is a relationship of deep and profound attachment definitionally, but it is an extensive and powerful idea, and in a competitive market space collective ownership it is the core of discovering and building a collectivism that is vital, workable, and functional. It will inevitably produce tribalism, but bolos are limited at a basic level in size and scale. The goal is in fact a benign tribalism, where each tribe has a formal and practical equality with others, and loses both aesthetic and competitive advantages should they exceed the SME size and scale.
Here's the pitch
Life as we know it now cannot all be pleasurable. It would be empty and hollow were this to not be true. Nor is life conflict-free. But the structure and organization of how we live our lives is suboptimal. A world where you own your stake in your community, work, and culture and your life's work is freely making these things better is one where structurally-induced displeasure is minimized.
The Deep Right's gameplan
The Deep Right is a novel political framework developed and expounded mostly by Curtis Yarvin, though he has many fellow travellers, ourselves included in a way. At its core it's a neomonarchical framework of ideas built around a deep spiritual and political 'neutrality' and the use of inspirational and healing hierarchical relations to restore glory and peace to the American Empire.
This is envisioned, as most right wing politics are, with the lens of struggle for the Throne of the World. This is a contest for the single-point control of the American Empire and the dissolution of the bureaucratic and diffuse managerial state that has sprouted up like a mushroom following the Second World War that killed Kennedy, ousted Nixon, and gave us the stagehand president Reagan and his many succeeding clones. The victory of a charismatic and sufficiently glorious and effective neoKing, a change in the phase and nature of rule will initiate a global transformation.
Victory, not Collaboration
Victory is the point, not collaboration. Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. So many winner-takes-all kinds of ideas that sound right wing when you say them, because they are conflict oriented. And conflict is contrary to management.
The deep right often makes its analogy to a superficial and bureaucratic left that has captured the institutions and norms of political life in America, which is the single point of control for the developed world. They're not entirely wrong, but they mistake their enemy, and consider the problem to be one of management quality. But management is a field of collaboration and process. Management is a hierarchical organization that is meant to organize multiple functional groups of talent rationally and in a way that places them in continuous contact and iteration of products and services. Conflict is always avoided, it serves no clear or real purpose in management.
The language of management has to be discarded, then, if the deep right is to really see the nature of the problem—the erasure of life stems from a totalizing culture of rule that is uniformly distributed across the ruling class. It's an enemy to be defeated, not a superficial leftist politics that is currently in vogue amongst intellectuals and career bureaucrats.
Heroism and redemption
Why is the deep right obsessed with heroism? Because their political ontology is that order is generated by heroic action. This is among the fundamental differences between managerworld and the deep right. The deep right does venerate particular oligarchs and powerful monopolist CEO manager types—but not because they are effective managers, rather because they live as kings, who build empires.
Chaos is the default state of life in managerworld. It is an organized sort of chaos, but people live in a world of evaporating tradition and and the weakening of supervening identities like nationality. Tradition and nationality are hard to manage, as they are grounded in relatively concrete history and facts about the nation. The identities that are easily managed—consumer preference, sexuality, race, which are grounded in behavior and easily manipulated current event narratives, are most important. This is hateful to the deep right, because there is nothing worthy or aspirational about living in a world where narcissism is central to everything. Transcending this is the priority of the deep right postmanagerial metasystem.
Glory and romance are the heuristics of the deep right, the standard by which effective is separated from an ineffective. This separation from managerworld, though the deep right’s idealized modern corporation is managerial in technique, shows its purpose is greater. It is a difference of principle. This is why the heroic emperor is a central figure who can redeem the state and save us from our torpor and decay, because the figure of the emperor is someone who forges a national identity that replaces other, 'manageable' ones. They will bring clarity to the morass, order to chaos, and citizenship to consumers.
Worthy Empires for worthy citizens
Why is the world of the deep right not managerworld? It might be managerial if the conceptualization of the CEO as King is not revised. But if the goal of the successor system is, in the deep right, to reconceptualize empire as a life-affirming, clear, and purposeful way of life, then the analogy has a clear function. The analogy of the CEO to King is because this goal requires a new sort of king, a hero that is suited to the modern times, and his ancestor will likely be the modern CEO.
The purpose of the CEO is kingly in many senses, he is the manager most likely to create a sense of purpose and identity for the world of the corporation. While, again, he is subject to the fractal world of the manager concept, his primary managerial function is to create purpose and goals for a firm that are evaluated based on the heuristics of management.
The redemption of the empire through heroic action and unquestionable success is what will make the empire desirable and livable in a way that it is not currently. The failures, multiple, successive, bizarrely catastrophic failures of the American Empire have been the most galling thing for both patriots and lukewarm citizens, and the disillusionment in the real American Dream of perpetual, global empire has been the driving force of the spiritual and physical decay of Americans. The empire must be recreated anew in order for its subjects to become better—its order must be clear, its purpose intelligible, and its achievements unquestionable.
A way forward without violence
Again, most Americans have never been in a fight. Most Americans have never met a soldier, nor do they know one. The army, while being vitally important to power and the economy, is a stranger of an institution.
The deep right holds no illusions about elections as a pathway to political power. Instead, it bets on the fact that organizational capacity is slipping away from the government and toward private business. If someone like Trump could, seemingly without a coherent plan, discipline, or even a simple majority of votes win the presidency, then the grip of managerworld is not so iron.
The right is invariably associated with violence, this much is so. The bizarrely exaggerated violence of the riot on January 6 is part of this memetic identification. But the fact is that political violence has decreased significantly. For such a dangerous attack, no one died. The bombs didn't go off, if the FBI can be trusted as to their origins. While the cretins in government were terrified, they did not meet the fate they surely earned after careers in public corruption and warmongering.
But the path forward for the world-making visionary genius is one of great accomplishment and success. The kind and quality of violence in the world has changed dramatically and become extremely depersonalized since the last period of political terrorism in America, the tumultuous twenty years of the 1960s and 1970s. The consequences of depersonalized violence are predictable and manageable—and if you subscribe to the notion that the apparatuses of the national security state have produced most terrorism and political violence in America since WW2, then the trend toward depersonalized violence that acts as an empty, manageable symbolic vessel is inescapable. 9/11 has a very different emotional valence from 11/22/63.
Should the victory of the deep right require violence, it will be quite different from the Night of the Long Knives and the Reichstag Fire. The CEO-as-king is a world-making leader and visionary genius, and his excellence is marked and visible. They are pacific, because the people the Americans have lost much of their warlike character. Most Americans are complete strangers to real violence, and live in a world of irony and detachment. The CEO-as-king is not an authoritarian order bringer, or a harsh lawgiver. Instead, they are a figure of aspiration and endless success.
Here's the pitch
Right now, your culture has no place for you, it is centered around a mindless pursuit of increase. But, what if there was a way for society to be reorganized without a fundamental change to your normal rhythm of life? Instead, you would know that you are a part of a great empire. You would know what purpose your life held. Your identity would be you, the citizen. Being an American would be something to be proud of; crimes or no, the sheer and staggering incompetence of the current government is what chafes most. You could have a government that brings you glory, and makes you believe in heroism and human potential once again, instead of this gray and decaying world.