Hierarchies, Fear and The Impacts of Continuously Accumulating Hyperlinks

I’m currently reading, or re-reading …

Free Culture - The Nature and Culture of Creativity, by Larry lessig

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Dark Fiber - Tracking Critical Internet Culture, by Geert Lovink

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Me, by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, and

The Cluetrain Manifesto, by those guys

When I first re-opened The Cluetrain Manifesto, the copy I am now reading fell open to Page 120. I started reading, and quickly realized that the section in front of me was mirroring some thoughts I had had a couple of hours earlier. Funny how that happens, eh ?

The section is titled “Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy”, which is of course an obsession of mine. Regardless of whether one believes that is actually happening or whether it is important or not, I found the section so clear and compelling that I am moved to type it out here as a blog post.

I thought it cut to the core issues when I first read it 5+ years ago, and I think it still pertains mightily today. And I would suggest that we have seen many examples of the effects of hyperlinks since this section was first written.

Thanks, David.

Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy

Fort Business’s assumptions are being challenged by a meek little thing: a hyperlink.

How could something so small alter the fundamentals of business life? Easy. This wee beastie represents an important change in how pieces are put together - and since all of life is about putting pieces together, this isn’t a wee thing at all.

Sure, businesses are legal entities. But that’s just a piece of paper. In fact, the real business is the set of connections among people.

Modern business almost universally has chosen a particular type of togetherness: a hierarchy. there are two distinguishing marks of a hierarchy: it has a top and a bottom, and the top is narrower than the bottom. Power flows from the top and there are fewer and fewer people as you move up the food chain.

(Note: I spent quite a few years helping big organizations *design* their hierarchies, and so have a reasonably well informed understanding of how they have been blueprinted and bolted together .. if you think that’s worth a blog post or two, let me know).

This not only makes the line of authority crystal clear, it also enhances the allure of success by making it into an exclusive club. As La Rouchefoucauld once said, “It is not enough that I succeed. It is also necessary that my friends fail.”

No wonder so many of us stare at our bare feet in the morning and wonder why we’re putting on our socks.

A couple of other points about business hierarchies:

First, they assume - along with Ayn Rand and poorly socialized adolescents - that the fundamental unit of life is the individual. This is despite the evidence of our senses that individuals only emerge from groups - groups like families and communities. (You know, it really does take a village to raise a child. Just like it takes a corporation to raise an ass kisser.)

But the Web obviously isn’t predicated on individuals. It’s a web. It’s about the connections. And on the World Wide Web, the connections are hyperlinks. It’s not just documents that get hyperlinked in the new world of the Web. People do. Organizations do. The Web, in the form of a corporate intranet, puts everyone in touch with every piece of information and with everyone else inside the organization and beyond.

The potential connections are vast. Hyperlinks are the connections made by real individuals based on what they care about and what they know, the paths that emerge because that’s where the feet are walking, as opposed to the highways bulldozed into existence according to a centralized plan.

Hyperlinks have no symmetry, no plan. They are messy. More can be added, old ones can disappear, and nothing else has to change. Compare this to your latest reorganization where you sat down with the org chart and your straightedge and worried about holes and imbalances and neatness for heavens sake! A messy org chart is the devil’s playground, after all.

Second, business hierarchies are power structures only because fundamentally they are based on fear.

Org charts are pyramids. The ancient pharaohs built their pyramids out of the fear of human mortality. Today’s business pharaohs build their pyramidal organizations out of fear of human fallibility; they’re afraid of being exposed as frightened little boys, fallible and uncertain.

To be human is to be imperfect. We die. We make mistakes.

Sometimes we run from our fallibility by being decisive. But doubt is the natural human state, and decisiveness - more addictive than anything you might shoot into your veins - is often based on a superstitious belief in the magic of action.

Within the pyramid we have defined roles and responsibilities. We tell ourselves that this is so the business will run efficiently, but in fact having a role brings us the great comfort of having a turf whre we’re pretty confident we’re not going to be shown up … except maybe by that ambitious jerk on the fourth floor, but we’ve figured out a way to hook his brains out through his nose, which should delay him for at least a little while.

Of course, dividing the business up into fanatically defended turfs doesn’t really protect anyone from fallibility and uncertainty, the very things that mark us as humans.

So, here’s some news for today’s business pharaohs: your pyramid is being replaced by hyperlinks. It was built on sand anyway.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Pages 120 - 122

Hierarchy (Webster’s)

1. A body of persons having authority.

- Categorization of a group of people according to ability or status.

- The group so categorized.

2. A series in which each element is graded or ranked

3. A body of clergy organized into successive ranks or grades with each level subordinate to the one above.

- Religious rule by a group of ranked clergy.

4. One of the divisions of angels.

Wirearchy (a working definition, created by observing people on the Web using hyperlinks)

1. a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibility, trust and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology

2. other definitions ?

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