The Manager Fractal

the pattern of the tundra.

A fractal is a shape that repeats itself at arbitrary levels of zoom, that is at the micro, submicro, macro, meso, exo layers, the shape repeats. Each cell is the whole, the whole is a cell.

There are many fractals in nature, and society, which often crudely and unintentionally apes nature, has many as well.

THE MANAGER FRACTAL IS NESTED INSIDE OF ITSELF

At every level, you find another demand of management, nestled deeper, until you reach the true spirit of management.

From the origins of the manager in the foreman, the boss, the chief, the overseer, the scientific management schools of Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth all the way to scrum, nudge management, and the manager par excellence, the data-driven AI assistant, the manager is a fractal, spiritual being that grows in history, stretching from within the consumer all the way to the management of the largest firms and institutions.

THE LIMITS OF THE MANAGER FRACTAL

The crisis within the fractal is because its limitation is in sight.

We have indeed exhausted our supplies of problems that are easily solved by management. We have made managers of all who are currently fit to be managers. We have professionalized a great deal of common labor and we have rationalized and optimized as much of society as is possible currently. Going further risks a fundamental breach of faith with the power groups that undergird this world.

WHAT DO MANAGERS EVEN DO?

Boss, chief, leader, president, executive officer, supervisor. They manage people, resources, capital, all under a common set of goals and standards that are pretty clear, if you think about it, and to deviate from them is to simply be bad at the role, whatever the specific title. That rubric is overall rationalization, systemic accountability, made orderly and fair through mutual, harmonious, impersonal handling of the interpersonal business activities and processes.

It is a highly portable attitude that inspires the state of being controlled, subordinate, literally under orders.

MANAGERS ARE NOT CAPITALISTS

The standard is not profit. Though they love it, though they need it, though it justifies the pursuit, it is not the telos of the manager. They love the process, they love the product. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. What the fuck does that mean again? Businesses do not, and cannot, operate at true efficiency, it is an asymptotic goal, and investment, capital, forex, commodities markets, the whole financial edifice of the world in short, they don’t give you rationality about profit maximization or even physical reality (ask Elon Musk, or a day trader).

THE MANAGER BRINGS LIFE TO OBJECTS AND ORGANIZATIONS

The manager sets this world of dead matter, that is to say, business and production, to order, and casts light into the darkness. It’s all very holy, very priestly. It is a world of fixed interactions. Professional ones.

Some kinds of managers even listen to the complaints—wow!—what kind of factory owner does that? Did you read North and South? The cotton mills sure didn’t have an HR department. A manager would have put in ventilation. What if OSHA came? And that filthy woman dying of cotton lung? Lawsuit. Not worth the risk. This is why the center and the left love the manager.

MANAGERS ARE NOT BUREAUCRATS.

Of course the manager is not a capitalist! He is a bureaucrat, a process fetishist, growing like weeds wherever power has not been fully subdivided to the point of irrationality. But you’re wrong. It’s not bureaucracy, that’s the domain of the eunuch. Bureaucrats snipe, sit at their desk, they’re the thieves of time and good sense. Rationality is not their imprimatur. They lack all virtue. The Castle is a bureaucracy. A good manager would have had the land surveyor on his way in a couple of hours. The manager is an enemy of the bureaucrat.

THE EVOLUTION OF PRODUCTION-CONTROL TECHNE

Taking techne from the bureaucrat, from the capitalist, management is a process that transforms production into an endless and inescapable cycle. In the same way that the burgher harnessed the ideal of the guildmaster and the noble, the acumen of the banker and merchant—once paired with the appropriate technology, they became something more than nobility. The manager takes the core innovations of technique, domain knowledge, and savvy of the late 19th and early 20th century, and has become his own creature.

Evolution does not afford us clean breaks, it offers us lineage, continuity, but at a certain point, you’ll see chickens coming out of eggs, homo sapiens filling up continent after continent, forgetting the graves of homo erectus.

QUESTION: Does your manager have a manager?

Yes. Look up. He’s got a boss. Look down. She’s got a boss. Look way up. Why wouldn’t they have a boss? Someone somehow is telling all of you what to do—and they’re doing it as the manager. They’re not your king or president.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO LIVE.

Going up the scale, obviously for a normal person, with no ownership of anything, no particular career goal besides some dignity they’ve got a manager. Would you believe that your manager is just like you? Probably just a couple of years older than you, or one degree up on the rung of education? You could be them. Assuming they promote internally of course. You could of course jump over and up on the ladder of… well it’s not success, is it, it’s the ladder of managers.

Keep repeating that last paragraph in your head until you get up to the C Suite, the Board of Trustees, the Head of Department, that jackass with tenure whom you hate.

THE GOOD JOBS DON’T ANSWER TO JUST ANYONE

The good jobs. You wouldn’t know much about them. You’re just some pleb sweating it out on that damn ladder. Keep thinking though. Does climbing up and up give you free hand to do as you will?

The costs become tremendous.

REN ZHENGFEI SLAPS THE TASTE OUT OF YOUR MOUTH

The CEO-Founder of Huawei, a billionaire tech mogul whose company makes core infrastructure for the Internet, he comes to your desk, slaps you, and tells you to work harder, because he can make you rich or he can make you a Shenzhen Dalit, so you sure as hell will. His will is iron, his slap oddly hard for a man pushing 80, and above all else, he is unfirable.

If you never want to get fired and abuse people regularly, join the civil service. Be a prison guard. BUT. Ren Zhengfei, he’s answering to a lot of people, constantly, and the reason he’s not showing up at your desk? It’s because there is no constraint on his action. His life itself, his decisions about using his time, this is his greatest single resource, and it requires a certain kind of DISCIPLINE.

REN ZHENGFEI LOST 70 MILLION RMB SLAPPING YOU.

What a waste it was, telling someone to do something unimportant. You’re a cog. He is way, way too busy to do that. Now Uganda is using Ericsson 5G. Heavy is the head and all that. In fact, it’s heavy because it’s so full of the airy and ascetic ideal of management.

SUCCESS = SOPHISTICATED, GLOBAL CONTROL WITH VISION

Management, in a word, management commanding enormous resources and human skill through the abstract legal and social form of the corporation. A company relies on its managers! They are less and less replaceable the further you go up.

Managers of a certain stripe may be interchangeable. It might not matter who the CEO is. It only matters that they come from the existing pool, and that randos don’t try to fondle the mysteries and the icons.

ASCETIC DISCIPLINE IS DISTRIBUTED UNEVENLY.

You, probably, cannot be a CEO. Seriously. What would you do if, tomorrow, you were in Yes World? People only agree with you, and not just because they have to. You’d go mad. You’d go power mad, pleasure mad, you’d feel vertigo at the sheer weight of possibility, and the last thing you’d be thinking about is work.

Managers, the good ones, the best ones, they are spiritually quite a different animal than the archetypal fatcat. They’re nothing like the nobility of the ancien regime. The world’s best managers are the product of selection for a particular, highly ascetic discipline. None of them fail to work hard, even if it doesn’t seem like hard work. They sweat stress, they shit blood, they chew up hard decisions, they chug adrenochrome.

CLIMB TO THE TOP; YOU’RE STILL ON THE MOUNTAIN.

The guy at the top, he serves the spirit of management. He is his own manager, first and foremost? Above him, there’s accountability still—it’s part of the system. For many companies—but not Huawei, which is technically worker-owned, there is a corporate structure where a board of directors alongside major shareholders and financiers all work in tandem as a diffuse network of managers, each producing expectations and plans that the CEO must conform to.

BREATHE THAT RARE AIR

The ‘good’ CEO is a monk of management. They live lives with unbounded potential for luxurious leisure. Some of them are hedonists, and live lives of pleasure and abandon. They are demanded of in equal measure to produce, to be accountable. And even crazier, it’s rarely an exclusive relationship. The CEO of one firm may sit on the board of another. It may become an emeritus position when they retire.

THE FRACTAL SEEN FROM THE MACRO END

Managers are managed by themselves. They are managed by the apparatus they manage. They are managed by their social strata, the circles in which they travel. The manager-employee relationship is recreated endlessly, in redundant, frizzy, interlocking loops when you get up to the top.

QUESTION: Are you the manager?

Take me to your manager, she says, where is the manager.

Why does this work? Because the manager has to make a choice and fix the problem, there’s not too much else they can do. They are exception handlers at this low level, and their power extends approximately over this conflict and nowhere else. Why not placate?

WHAT IF YOU HAVE A JOB?

There is no position on this rapidly browning Earth that is free from managers now. Well, the parts you want to live in, at least. That is because the globe is teeming with people, all tasked with a very simple job after completing basic education: you’re now managing yourself.

CONTROL GROWS OUT OF DISCIPLINE

In the conception of discipline that Foucault developed—to live under the law is to have the police officer in your mind, telling you to obey the law. People do not fear punishment for rational reasons—we are indeed truly phobic of it. Instead, it is because of the height of irrationality, a little phantom cop lives in your ear, whispering, I will shoot you if you do this. I will arrest you if you do that. This is why we do not all steal, why we do not all jaywalk, why murder isn’t all that common even when police are clearly no good at catching murderers.

Discipline’s vestiges are just the foundation on which Control acts.  Control is the other end of dominion, it is the tasty orange stick, the carrot, where discipline is the other kind. Control is achieved through the careful, rationalized regulation of incentive and disincentive—the withholding of incentive. Management, in a word.

MANAGEMENT IMPLIES THAT IT GETS BETTER

Some incentives, like, say, stock options, will make people overthrow the government of Bolivia to get at all the lithium. Some incentives, like health insurance and overtime, will get people to live in Detroit. Like Archimedes only dreamed, we have found the lever that can move the world. Some incentives, like a raise, or keeping your job for more than 6 months, or even earning the favor of your manager, will get you to work unpaid overtime to deliver a deck pitching a Moet-Hennessey-Diageo CSR party to impress Southern Chinese party officials.

THE MEMORY OF DISCIPLINE CONDITIONS THE RESPONSE

There is no obligation in management. It’s hardly ever personal, right? It’s unprofessional for it to be personal. No, the money’s not there. The resources are missing. Your KPIs didn’t come up enough. The client didn’t buy. The party ended with a terror attack, and now Shenzhen is gone. Who knows. Keep pressing, you’ll find in the end that you’re unreasonable to need incentive, you’ll summon up the self-control to forget, the team spirit to contribute, and the drive to succeed, you just have to manage your expectations. You know, somehow, things could be worse.

YOU ARE NOW A NEET

Oh, no. First Ren Zhengfei, now this. Next this article will turn you into an incel. Seriously though, imagine, Not in Employment, Education, or Training.

If you’re unlucky, and have no passive income from the government or your family, then time is LIMITED. You’ve found yourself in Ren Zhengfei’s predicament. Time is your only truly useful resource. You’re going to manage yourself or starve.

NOW YOU ARE GETTING NEETBUX

Back to being lucky though—it’s happier to think about. Time is meaningless to you now, literally any hobby could become a career, any fancy a skill, any interest an obsession. Why is there no NEET army of hidden artisans and hypercultivated cognoscenti?

Most of them, not all of them, mind you, are sucked into the powerful funnel of consumer behavior. It is many people’s full time job, or their second. The vortex of fandom, the grind of an MMO-job, some form of obsessive engagement with a community or forum or Discord channel. Parasocial relationships with streamers.

THEY DO IT FOR FREE

The NEET, and their close cousin, the low-end wagie, are victims to the passive management of life that has taken over and introduced the non-professional strata of labor to the rigors of management and corporate intrigue. They are now, in effect, product testers.

CONSUMPTION IS PERPETUAL BETA TESTING

They live in a perpetual beta, the good ones find bugs, report feedback, give answers to surveys and carefully consider their opinions about what to buy, how to use what is bought, and when to buy what they need to buy. They carefully manage themselves as consumers, because they are in fact part of a product lifecycle, the cycle of iterative improvement whereby users take on important roles as the managers of a feedback loop. The industrious ones, they create fan campaigns. They mail Fox a bunch of tchotchkes to try and save a genre TV show like Firefly. They create campaigns or anti campaigns to dissuade creative properties from moving on to other, unexplored markets, or to keep their privileged role in their market.

The consumer-as-product-feedback-manager and consumer-as-community-manager is a volunteer role, an unpaid internship that is taken on unconsciously. It’s probably not all that likely to turn NEETs into professionals, but it locks them into a life of managing and being managed. Why in the world would the janitors of the internet do it for free?

Because the only thing you can be as a self-respecting person, with no desire to cut your own way, is to be a manager.

DOING NOTHING TRAPS YOU IN AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF MANAGEMENT

A product lifecycle chart is, in the abstract, an Ouroboros. The world serpent, eating itself. Requirements->Design->Test->Build->Deploy->Evaluate->Requirements et cetera et cetera. When you build it out, new legs and arms start to emerge. It’s a Gordian Knot, suddenly, with tendrils reaching over each other to find cross-disciplinary linkages.

Rationalization of processes ironically often creates a spaghetti org chart, where feedbacks, inputs, and responsibilities ultimately resolve into cycles and epicycles, but this is a Ptolemaic Universe, isn’t it? And the Ptolemaic Universe was one that always saw itself in the old terms, as above, so below.

THE FRACTAL REFLECTIONS IN MANAGEMENT ACROSS STRATA

Here it is now. The unemployed, dole-less sub-NEET is struck with the same problem as the world’s richest men. The underemployed, deeply miserable, and the unprofessionalized, are all reporting (same as the gainfully employed product teams) to the requirements phase of the commodity production hamster wheel. You know where you are, you know where your boss is, and if you don’t see an underling, find a mirror and discover yourself.

MANAGERIAL WINTER HOLDS US TIGHTLY

We are all frozen in an essentially unchanging and spiritually dead metastatic social relationship of manager to employee. When you look within, you will find yourself confined to this internal dynamic to justify your work as a professional, your leisure as a consumer, your power as a leader.

This dynamic is repeated at each layer of every organization. You think it’s not there in the government? What do you think everyone is talking about with the Deep State? Shadow bureaucrats runs the world, but they doesn’t keep the faith with their neighbors in the DMV about the unshakeable sanctity of HR, process efficiency, and ‘running this place like a business?’  

Metastasis is the process that distinguishes cancer from a tumor, a terminal illness from dead weight. And now, all societies that have been touched by the managerial revolution find themselves trapped, frozen, in dysfunctional patterns of behavior. Management crawls like a glacier over the Earth, crushing what is underneath it, thawing a bit and refreezing, making it amorphous and impossible to truly describe. You only feel the weight, the cold, the sterile oppression of ice.

QUESTION: What cracks the ice?