I think there’s a possible body of political and social thought that could be convened around organizations, systems and scale that could include poststructuralists like Foucault; environmentalist and anarchists like Edward Abbey or David Graeber; social thinkers like James Scott, Timothy Mitchell, Ivan Illich, William Whyte or Jane Jacobs; classical liberals and libertarians from Smith to Hayek, and many others—thinkers, writers and activists who would normally not be grouped together or understand themselves as aligned.
The thread I see in there is a suspicion that organizations and systems built at mass scales are intrinsically and inevitably flawed, that they require forms of alienation and inhumanity to operate at all, and that they provision infrastructures and tools that are narrated as productive, generative or liberating for human communities but that typically operate as forms of dominating power over human beings, sometimes without any direct human agency or intention. How those authors come by that critique and how specifically they apply it varies meaningfully. Some restrict their animus to the modern state or government; some largely focus on specific institutions or systems. Some include capitalism (or see it as the central cause or example of the problem), some aggressively exclude it.
But I think the problem of scale or scope is important to all of them, that mass society and mass institutions are on some level intrinsically unworkable, intrinsically a problem that both generates and justifies broken, oppressive, or enveloping institutions that strip us of our humanity in order to make us legible to authority, components of vast organizational systems.
If you’d rather think about this point in a less grandiose way, showing good will towards organizations that claim to be preserving or upholding the public good, consider that virtually all organizations or institutions that operate above the scale of a single small human community share a common structural dilemma. To operate coherently at scale (whether regional, national, international or global), almost all of them turn to some form of hierarchical structure and to some form of role specialization. They have leaders and boards, executives and councils; middle management or regional executives; rank-and-file, local representatives, implementation teams. They distinguish between tasks, missions, responsibilities, compliances, and seek to break those down into areas of specific expertise, experience and focus.
They have to, or at least they think they have to. There are some famous cases of non-hierarchical organizations but they’re all relatively small-scale and physically co-located and generally evanescent or short-term. There are large-scale organizations that still have some form of democratic or participatory governance but nevertheless use hierarchical structures and specialization to organize their work or mission. And at scale, these structures always create a basically insoluable problem. The leadership or office charged with responsibility for the entirety of the institution cannot fully perceive or understand the granularity of circumstances that local organizational actors and specialists witness, understand and experience. That’s not a failure that you can solve with a TED talk, with some fancy bit of organizational design, or by hiring the right leadership. At large scales, the sheer volume of that granularity will overwhelm anybody charged with appreciating all of it. On the flip side, nobody dealing with the specifically lived and human details connected to the institution will be able to fully grasp the entirety of what the central apparatus of the institution has to manage or endure—at the local, they can’t see the resource limitations, the logistical infrastructures, the grand political constraints. And nobody can build a middle layer of an organization that effectively processes signals coming from either end in order to serve as a trusted authenticator of both kinds of information—because the middle layer has its own problems, its own interests, and its own incapacities.
Whether you are skeptical or not of specific claims about what is sometimes called “Dunbar’s Number” , a hypothesized maximum size to human groups or communities beyond which they become cognitively incoherent for their members, there is something to that point. We aren’t able to make sense of mass society. Ten, thirty, a hundred people dead in a disaster or a shooting is something most of us can understand viscerally: we can see ten, thirty, a hundred people and remember when we’ve been in the company of that many. An event that leaves ten thousand dead, on the other hand, might as well be a hundred thousand. We are trained in systems that create translations of such numbers into something meaningful, but the equivalencies are arguable and arbitrary. The emotional currencies involved float against one another, buffeted by partisan politics and social mobilizations: this ten thousand down in value and import because no one feels connected to them or because we’re inclined to see their fate as inconsequential or incidential; this ten thousand enshrined in our hearts as if they were fathers and mothers, children and friends.
We can’t really understand what it means that the World Wide Web holds 40 zettabytes of data. We can’t begin to really comprehend the scale of our global communications and financial infrastructure, and we’re forced as a result to blend or submit ourselves with a vast algorithmic network that shapes, confines, coordinates or pre-empts our intentions and behaviors. We drive by people every day that we’ll never meet or know; when people living near to us do things we’d never do that we don’t understand, we have to either revise our self-understanding or create a containment framework that preserves that distance.
We live in built landscapes—even rural ones—that contain structures whose interior we’ll never be allowed to witness directly and whose purpose may be completely unknown (by accident or design). We accept that because of the scale and scope of these landscapes. It would be sheer madness to take on a project of understanding the human specifics of what is happening inside each and every structure we see, to understand the purpose and provenance of every object or device that we can witness (let alone those that are hidden from view). We at best generalize: that is a factory, that is a store, that is a warehouse, that is a junkyard, that is a refinery, that is a mine, that is a storage facility—but every generalization is the visible tip of a hidden iceberg of specifics.
A good enough future is going to have to retain some sense of global scope and mass scales. We’ve made this a world: it can only be unmade entirely through catastrophe beyond anything human beings have known since they became sapient. But some kinds of aspiration for better possible worlds insist on holding on to that scale as a fundamental instrument of improvement, insist that we have to find a way to use huge organizations and massive structures to deliver the same salvations to everyone, to deploy the better world everywhere always.
We’ll need some kind of system that doesn’t require direct intentional control by people to route resources, accept local inputs, and deal with global-scale environmental problems. I think this is why James Livingston’s point about the potential compatibility of “markets” and “socialism” is still worth thinking about.
But I’m convinced that our better possible worlds have to be rescoped to a dramatic extent, that we have to live in the local far more than we do. It may turn out to be a moot observation in that this is something that climate change is likely going to do to us whether we want it or not. If so, that at least is not a sentence to future suffering in and of itself. We need to live in social and economic worlds where our agency is matched to the scales of our everyday life, where we understand and know the stakes, where the material world around us is known and knowable in the main, where we are far more transparent to one another while not being exposed and vulnerable to a vast world of malign spirits and forces that we can never grasp or control. What that might be as a better future after modernity as opposed to before it is also a world where free passage from one locality to the next is assured, where belonging and safety are on offer in any locality, and where autonomy and freedom are everywhere the baseline of human life. We don’t need chain stores that provide the same product over vast distances; we need local communities that everywhere offer the same quality and foundation of human life while remaining indelibly local, scaled to what we can feel and know in a single finite existence.
Image credit: Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash