Worse than AI? OI. Too Big NOT to Fail 2
I’m going to preface this post with some personal provenance, to show that its subject is nothing new but an idea I have held for decades. Back in 1993, I received a call from my client at Whirlpool Corporation wanting an overnight rewrite of an article slated for publication in the Harvard Business Review, which was not acceptable in its current form to the executive committee. It was Christmas Eve. I was given a phone number for the HBR editor, who gave the go-ahead after informing me that it was expressly contrary for HBR to accept ghost submissions from consultants to Fortune executives. I told him I was intimately involved in Whirlpool global initiatives and could meet the 24-hour deadline. The latter commitment carried the day. On schedule I emailed him the rewritten copy and within hours received an unexpected encomium from the editor. He said he couldn’t believe what I had done within the permitted timeframe and allowed that he would be open to other submissions by me. I proposed an essay about a concept I was calling “Corporate DNA,” which indicated that corporations could not advance beyond their initial founding conditions but could recover them if they had been lost. He was willing to consider it. Then he got fired. The way things go. My thinking since then has evolved (pun intended).
Artificial Intelligence is a joke, an oxymoron, a confidence game. It’s also a product of the truly sinister and unrecognized predator on moral humanity, Organizational Intelligence. Unlike AI, OI is not a digital imitation of conscious thought, it is organic, consisting of real human brain matter, endowed with its own kind of consciousness and possessed of drives that are fundamentally opposed to God-given human rights.
It has been described, even defined, but never fully understood.
There is part of one wealthy, successful species that agrees with me – because they know…. They know they didn’t – look, if life on earth, if the human race has been successful, it didn’t get there on its own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. I think we can all recognise that. (Applause.)
The point is, is that when we succeed as people, we succeed not primarily because of our individual initiative, but because we have most of the genetically determined tools and drives that resemble initiative to ordinary people. Most things, like fighting fires or running governments, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be an impossible way of organizing fighting fires. Yet large organizations do exist to fight fires and do it quite effectively. They didn’t build themselves either. Some Thing, long long ago set it all in motion.
I like to use the comparison of the blind watchmaker, who slowly puts things together, one cog and one gear at a time, not actually knowing what cigs and gears even do, but the watch gets built all the same. Why? Because what this particular watchmaker has is time. Incredibly, unbelievably large amounts of time.
You can see it works, right? Now, all we have to do to make the comparison work is subtract the watchmaker. Who doesn’t exist.>>
This is the current state of what is called Neo-Darwinian Evolution. We are given an absurd, impossible premise for visualizing how species evolved from one-celled microscopic creatures to human beings who have produced magnificent future fossils of their own brief period in the journey of time. Then the premise is subtracted and we are left with pure randomness, whose seemingly ingenious and remarkably swift progress to the thing called civilization is explained away by the usual reduction of time to a strictly linear dimension unlike every dimension it comprises, and the sheer amount of that linear countdown is used to camouflage all the obvious signs that it reeks of intelligent design.
Why is this important? Because this ridiculous model of evolution has been imposed on every other science and philosophy since Darwin first proposed it in 1849. Even geology, the science which has been used to date all earth events, has been recast in Darwinian terms. We can determine years, eons, in terms of layers of earth, and we are asked to see everything as a gradual, random transition from one state to another, mountain ranges like the Himalayas slowly pushed up by the movement of tectonic plates and volcanic forces that have nothing to do with consciousness or intelligence. The slow drift of continents from Pangea to the map we all regard as the accidental but inevitable result. And yet, when we go micro, we discover that those layers of earth we rely on are not at all equal. Periods of drenching wetness are far larger (i.e., deeper in terms of feet in the earth) in the geologic record than the relatively immanent years before and after them. The dating process is inexact at best. We don’t actually know what happened in what specific chronology in terms of the years we measure things by. We cover it up with fancy names for ages — Jurassic, Triassic, Cambrian Explosion. What? Cambrian Explosion? Oh yeah. That’s a time Stephen Jay Gould had to work overtime to explain away, because way back when there was a period in which new species appeared at a stupefyingly rapid rate. Not intentional, of course. Just a cyclical acceleration of change rates in accordance with this or that principle of evolutionary math. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Civilizational orthodoxies are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and should be. These stories are not really told by individuals but by the organizations that build the societal frameworks governing us.
Before Darwin, the accepted model of 2,000 years duration or so was that a single creator brought all this universe into being. The purpose was a moral one. Life was a test of the individual’s response to the eternal battle of good vs evil. After Darwin, life became a test of answering the question, ‘why is life worth living at all in a world where evil resides in all human beings and looks doomed in the scientific diagnosis that afterlife and divine judgment are exploded myths.’
How do I know that The Blind Watchmaker is a scam? Multiple reasons. First and foremost, because it doesn’t work. It does not contribute to the survival of the species. ‘Survival of the fittest’? In the 20th Century, we became unfit to survive. Amputating God from the civilization model proved disastrous in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, and Communist China, all expressly atheistic regimes. Hundreds of millions died. Now these perversions of anthropology have metastasized into huge populations who are fleeing not only historical civilization but consciousness itself.
Secondarily, science has become its own irrational cult. You all know the grinning ones:
They’re especially fond of beating up on the people who pursue paranormal research. They use playing cards to prove psychics are all fakes. I’ve got news for them. Ghosts exist. There are haunted places. Even the amateurish ghost hunters are experiencing something real. Time is not a line. It is a dimension, the only one we know of that encompasses all others. Yes, the evidence is anecdotal and criticizeable, but the weight of it in aggregate is undeniable except to grinners who hide in their labs naysaying what ordinary people experience as a matter of course.
Organizational Intelligence. No, I haven’t forgotten my topic. The social contract has changed in the last hundred years or so. Human beings, en masse, have surrendered to Organizational Intelligence. But what is that exactly in contemporaneous terms?
The old social contract admitted of the testing principle in human life. Parents had maybe as much as 18 years to prepare their children for the confrontation with organizations. To teach them right from wrong, how to defend against the temptations of money and titles on the door, which would come invariably to the most talented first and then everyone else.
It was always, has always been, a David v. Goliath combat.
Here’s what happens. In your whole life, you have only a few years in which your parents, mother and father in different roles, have the opportunity to prepare you for what you will face when you encounter the commanding consciousness of organizations. Your mother teaches you civility, sharing, tolerance, cooperation with others who may be differently minded, and a lot of other behaviors that could be lumped together as good manners. Your father teaches you fair play (through sports and games and other means), that there are rules not to be broken, challenges not to be cowed by, consequences when you don’t obey maternal or paternal tutelage, and what to do when a bully tries to humiliate or dominate you. Between them, both parents are teaching you character, the differences between right and wrong, and the ability to recognize when your character is under assault.
All too soon, organizations come into play. School. Where the world assaults your sense of right and wrong, monkeys with your sense of justice and fairness. Cuts and bruises mostly. Then comes the world of grownups, financial obligations, employment, meaning companies and other institutions where there is hierarchy, rank, rules, opportunity for advancement and authority over others, and a “culture” you are expected to accept.
Which is when the character war begins in earnest. Now you have an identity in addition to what mom and dad instilled in you. You are part of an organization, be it school, business, profession, or other institution. At first you are just a cog, a unit that has to show up here and there at specific times, do what you’re told, when you’re told. Then, as you rise through the ranks, you are responsible for things, attending meetings where decisions will be made, holding up your end of the organizational ideals and principles. Mostly, this isn’t so hard. You say what is said, repeat the verities, and if some people give you a hard time, you don’t even tell your parents about it, because they wouldn’t understand why you accept what you accept they wouldn’t approve of. This is the first level of separation.
Which means what exactly? The organization you’re a part of now owns a part of you, your brain, and by this is meant a physical part of your brain which no longer belongs entirely to you. Other separations await.
In school this doesn’t usually mean much unless your parents flopped completely at their job. Later on, it means a hell of a lot. If you work for a big corporation, for example, it can mean accepting an alternative reality to the one you used to believe in when you left the office for the parking lot. Even when you’re resisting such an alternate reality, you are still governed by it, ultimately to the point of acceptance. Which is the sign that the organization actually controls a significant chunk of your conscious brain.
I know. I know. What the hell is he talking about? All of you who think this is nonsense, remember this. The time when you wanted to make a stand at a meeting where an important decision was going to be made and you feared what the management would want to do. You lined up your allies ahead of time, and they swore they would back you up, and then when the time came, they went silent, caved, agreed with management. And then had no recollection afterward that they had betrayed their promise.
That experience is the proof of organizational consciousness. It’s not AI. Nothing artificial about it. It’s the spoor of a mind more powerful than any individual because it consists of innumerable parts of individual brains working in unison under the direction of an organization. Transparent to the victims. Completely physical in its organic manifestations.
Worse, the organizations that control decision making in this way are not driven strictly by current events. They have their own roots, biases, proclivities, delusions, sins.
EXAMPLE: I worked for NCR Corporation in the mid-1980s. The initials used to stand for National Cash Register. The company never stopped being exactly that, and it never stopped manifesting the character of its founder, John Patterson. Yes, I’m talking about corporate DNA. Which tried to capture the mind of every employee forever after. Cash registers are hardware. NCR kept making cash registers bigger and bigger until they weighed 600 pounds and got obsolete. About which time NCR decided that retail transactions could be a computer market and therefore declared itself a computer company, one of eight major corporations under the market thumb of IBM. In the early 1980s, 493 of the Fortune 500 had IBM mainframes; the 7 who didn’t were computer companies. I attended pricing meetings at NCR in which the organizational consciousness decided to price competing products against IBM just marginally higher, based on the baseless ahistorical assumption that customers would prefer to buy from NCR. And everyone who had agreed ahead of time to fight for buying market share by loss-leader pricing evaporated in the meeting and had no recollection of ever having committed to a fight.
The DNA part of the equation? Getting a reputation for fighting the management line was a career killer. There was an NCR reality that was never to be questioned. Why? A story still current in the 1980s was the day John Patterson made a tour of his assembly line in Dayton. He stopped at the workstation of a man who was proud to meet the founder. He stood up and said, “I’ve been running this machine for 30 years, sir, and I’m happy to tell you so.” To which Patterson replied, “30 years on one machine is enough for any man. You’re fired.”
It was a nasty place. And it never stopped being in the cash register business. They were never in any other business. When the Patterson-clone owners sold the business to AT&T they pretended they had a breakthrough next generation computer. They didn’t. They had never recognized the moment when the computer industry became a software business and hardware was a giveaway. They had a pretty box with some circuit boards in it. But everybody has that, right? What they had that Ma Bell wanted was a stock price pumped up by corporate buybacks. Why AT&T — so ‘too big to fail’ they didn’t bother doing the barely due diligence of looking inside the 8100 to observe an empty box — dumped them at a huge loss very shortly thereafter. The only real business NCR had had before was obsolete retail transaction-accounting systems and ATMs (i.e., even heavier cash registers), and all the castaway company has now is ATMs. 140 years with one machine is enough any for any organization. You’re fired.
But NCR is no anomaly. There’s good and bad news in this regard. The bad news is that every organization can become hostage to a fantasy version of reality. NCR thought it was a computer company and wasn’t. Worse are the organizations that forget what they were originally. Computer companies that decide they’re social engineering experts. Movie studios that think they’re cultural reform agents. Government agencies that presume to be rulers of a democratic republic. The power of organizations is such that organizations can twist and warp the behavior of people who learn to accept an artificial reality even if it’s actually insane. The bigger the organization and the richer its bosses the more likely it is that fantasy reality replaces business/ethical/professional/legal reality without anyone’s blowing the whistle. That’s how we get to the insanity of the Biden Administration. Nobody remembers right from wrong, up from down, good from evil. There’s just the Company Line we’re promising next quarter.
Why there’s such a thing as too big NOT to fail. We’re there. Have been for a long long time. I worked with General Motors when it was determined to learn how to manufacture good products again. They couldn’t do it. The United States government can’t do any of the things they’re supposed to do well. They’re just too fucking big, too many layers, too many mediocre bosses making too much money being no good at anything but writing next year’s budget request. Too much money floating around to pay off the even slightly smart ones for not doing their jobs. Too easy to be a senile corruptocrat passing gas in the White House while the too big national electorate doesn’t even pay attention because are too many fucking smartphones telling them what to think in the part of their brains that belongs physically to a geek pervert who billionaired his way into supreme power.
Did I say there was good news? It is possible to remember and rediscover the original DNA. it would be possible to remember and restore the Constitution of the United States. That’s our organizational DNA. It’s just not likely we have the brains and guts and character to get back there.
Sorry
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