A New Cosmology of Organising
Platforms as cosmo-techno-organizing
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“There is growing agreement between economists and scientists that risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human extinction.”
It sounds quite paradoxical to read an IMF working paper using such a professional and economic jargon — infinite cost — to talk about something so crazy as the potential demise of our species.
But as human society bears witness of the material collapse of the complex and interconnected life support systems it’s embedded in — the web of life — we’re failing to understand what’s really happening, and for a good reason.
Despite a feeling of widespread confusion is in the air, we are slowly becoming aware of one thing: having routinely delegated our sense-making to the conformist replication of a mindless industrial bureaucracy — and having accepted its narrow frames of imagination — it’s showing dire consequences. Everything is falling and we can’t think of anything different.
But if we happen to live the age of the collapse can we at least try to figure out what is happening and what is failing? That’s a good place to start from if we are to regain meaning.
New technologies are providing humans ever-greater potential and god-like powers: think about how CRISPR technique is making it relatively cheap and easy to do a rather precise genetic editing. On the other hand, having built a global society based on the idea of competition (in the market, in the office, in the school…), individualism got infused into everything.
As Daniel Schmachtenberger rightly points out, once you have:
- a rivalrous, competitive civilization;
- widespread exponentially growing capacity to cause harm;
- a finite world;
you end up with having an existential risk generator function.
“Rivalrous (win-lose) games multiplied by exponential technology self terminate”
Daniel Schmachtenberger
In a few words, as long as we’re competing with each other, we’ll use our god-like potential (and our not-so-god-like wisdom) to grab as much as possible until everything will be consumed to the bone.
As a consequence of the harm we produce on our own habitat — always considered as a resource up for grabs — among other worrying things, we’re dealing with a massive destabilization of Earth’s climate.
Destabilization means unpredictability. One doesn’t need to go too far to see the signs of an industrial civilization that fails to cope with the loss of predictability. We can just start from the basics: food.
In the US corn belt — where massive food production takes place every year — food commodities like corn are heading towards heavily reduced harvests this year, due to a late planting season linked to unusual spring floodings (welcome climate breakdown). This instability needs to be seen as the cause— and, at the same time, as one of the effects— of a rigid and complicated agro-industrial system that fails to deal with an ever more unpredictable climate.
Besides a destabilized climate, the increasing exponentially pervasive power humans have to destabilize, is growing everywhere, and it’s showing up in the most unpredictable ways. Exponential warfare is another good example: no later than a few weeks ago, half of Saudi’s oil production was brought to a halt for a few days with a drone strike coming out of nowhere.
The industrial machine is not going to cope with such unpredictability: it’s too fragile.
Different levels of collapse will be happening, when unpredictability breaks down the machine agenda.
Cascading effects will most likely, and to some extent, let institutions designed in the XXth century fail and, rather quickly, end up in disastrous massive instabilities.
Business-as-usual is, in any case, no more an option on our table.
“There is no non-extreme future. Extreme 1.5–2°C mitigation or status quo & extreme impacts/adaptation.” Prof. Kevin Anderson
With the demise of predictability, not only Game A (the industrial civilization) is collapsing, but our episteme is failing too. Indeed our rationalist and mechanistic episteme only works in a predictable and thoroughly causal world, where you never need to question the frame.
The bad (or good) news is that our identities, as a consequence of the collapse of the system and the failure of our episteme, are breaking down badly.
We are partners in crime in the destabilization of the world.
We find ourselves not only egocentric, narcissistic and individualists but also… colonialists.
Indeed, now that the day of the concern is eventually upon us, with future menaces of food shortages, impending political and financial instabilities, and xenophobic threats — with the president of the United States menacing a civil war on Twitter — I believe we are due going an extra mile: we need to accept that the collapse hanging on our heads like a sword of Damocles is, in fact, already widespread.
It’s just that is not here, not for us, and therefore we’re not paying attention.
When we buy a new smartphone every year, we never factor in that its key components are mined by the youth in Congo. When we fly twenty times a year we don’t see the carbon emissions that mean genocide for coastal communities, such as those of Bangladesh. We just don’t think about this, or if we do, that’s just a noisy thought, in the background of our productive participation in the mindless industrial machine.
But the question is: when we wearily repeat a conformist routine of self-deception, delegating our sovereignty to the machine, what could be the meaning of our organizing? Participating in the apocalypse?
The gesture that will initiate the apocalypse will not be distinguishable from any other technical gesture and will be accomplished (to the extent that it will not be produced completely automatically, as a simple reaction of an instrument to the action of another instrument) in a listless way by some employee who will innocently follow the instruction of a light signal.
Günther Anders
So we find ourselves here, within a collapsing world, dealing with a failing episteme and with a broken identity, effectively without a functioning sense-making process.
But what could be then the meaning of organizing when the world we used to know is disappearing before our eyes? What is the information and knowledge we’re seeking with organizing, through the collapse of the mechanistic, rationalist, and industrial world?
To answer these central questions, we need a new cosmology of organizing: one that has meaning as humans, in connection with the universe and with history.
In making the first steps to a new cosmology of the organization that brings meaning back, I believe we cannot avoid critical analysis of our cognitive process, and of the ways we know through the eyes of our culture.
This new cosmology needs to take into account that our perception of the world as a complicated machine — to which we relate as individuals separated from it— needs to go. It entails going beyond individuality, accepting interdependence and the embeddedness of humans in the world. It needs us to bear the weight of complexity, the impossibility to know through exact models.
These steps will deeply change the framing of our knowing and, as a consequence, prepare us to relate with our organizing in a very different way.
A key step in the process of realizing interdependence it’s in the understanding that learning, knowing and developing — making sense of the world while participating in it — is something that only happens through the interactions in the contexts of our lives: our landscape and our community: the place where we experience collective co-existence. The idea that the development process of a human is a property of collective interaction (an “organization”), dates back to Buddha’s concept of the Sangha — the community that shares the walk of enlightenment.
Once we comprehend that all this needs to be integrated into our project of organizing we may easily feel shocked — as I did — in realizing how much our idea of modern organization has been completely disconnected from landscape, and community.
Never the idea of interdependence is featured in how we run present organizations: as a consequence, our organizations don’t provide any true sense-making.
In an industrial society one doesn’t really learn: one passively receives an education that is premised on keeping us separated from any profound processes of sense-making that could question the frame.
An education system that is in service of an economic system effectively becomes a self-colonization and the reduction of humans to pieces of a complicated machine: to ensure the flawless progress we are “educated” — as consumers, employees — and just allowed to play a pre-defined role. A thoroughly toxic information ecology, based on algorithms that reinforce our biases, has even grown organically around this model, ensuring that conformism resists the tides of deeper consciousness.
An education in service of the continuation of the economic system — and effectively of the forms of organizing that the system created in its quest for exponential growth — leaves a very marginal space for learning, and never at the core of the organization.
“All the problems of philosophy are encapsulated in the problem of education.”
Zak Stein
So how do we organize in service of learning in interdependence?
If the new story of organizing can only be seen through the fissures and the cracks, this may be a good moment to look.
“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception — his epistemological premises — he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.”
G. Bateson
A crucially important question then is how we do relate to innovation and technology in this process. I’ve been working on the concept of platforms for years now, and I know that most of the attraction that platforms offer to our idea of organizing has been related to the effects of plummeting transaction costs in economic activity.
This transition has been largely due to the manifestation of technologies such as the internet, mobile phones — ad pervasive computing in general — that have, in the last two decades, radically challenged the traditional structure of the industrial firm. Despite we tend to call platforms post-industrial organizations, the premises of the organization-as-a-machine disconnected from the world, and focused on the — often alienated — individual, hasn’t really changed and has, perhaps, even worsened.
“I feel bad, truly, for Amazon and Sprig and their many peers — SpoonRocket, Postmates, Munchery, and the rest. They build these complicated systems and then they have to hide them, because the way they treat humans is at best mildly depressing and at worst burn-it-down dystopian.”
Robin Sloan, on The Atlantic.
But beyond offering a Luddite critique, we need to acknowledge not only that these new technologies exist — as an extension of our human identity — but also that our organizing cannot be separated from them.
These techniques and technologies that we call platforms give us new possibilities in approaching organizing but, somehow, demand form us to go beyond their obvious affordance. Despite platforms present themselves to the designer as tools of domination, monopolization, extraction, and control this shouldn’t impede the mindful designer to seek to use them to create spaces of true learning and pursue a reintegration of the organization in the landscape and the community, by means of them.
Acknowledging that the episteme and the identity that produced such tools and technologies are profoundly colonialist — I made the example of the smartphone earlier on— and still wanting to interact with them in creating a networked, evolutionary, and re-embedded breed of organizations surely manifests itself as a truly deep and uncomfortable paradox, and a somewhat old and burning question, the question concerning technology.
In Heidegger’s take:
“Technology is, therefore, no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth”
At this moment in time and history, we can’t just anymore let our techno-organizing unfold, failing to develop a profound relationship with it. If we continue to do so, everything will be transformed into an object: the natural world, other humans, with unbearable consequences not only for our habitat but also — now that we see — for our conscious self and purpose.
It’s therefore truly needed for us as humans to develop a new relationship with technology — and through it, inevitably with our organizing. Eventually, through our organizations, we’ll need to find a connection with the cosmos — something that Yuk Hui calls cosmotechnics:
Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.
Yuk Hui
Cosmotechnics encompasses our organizing, as organizing and technology are no more separable (they really never were).
This, I believe, is our moment. A moment to become fully aware of our potential and — at the same time — to de-exceptionalize both the human and the techno-organizing.
It’s the moment to acknowledge and frame our relationship with techno-organizing as part of a process of re-embedding ourselves in the landscape and in the community as bridges to the cosmos.
It’s the moment to look at our organizing beyond any simplistic, mechanistic, and Cartesian episteme and to develop such a relationship with our organizing that makes us able to see, through it, the beauty of the universe and — just as a part of it — of all humans. Our organizing needs to become and act of co-existence.
It’s time for a new cosmo-techno-organizing movement.
I’ll be in Madrid on October 18–20 to speak about these and other related ideas and inspirations with giants such as Nora Bateson, Perry Timms, Paul Tolchinsky, Stelio Verzera, Jon Husband, and more. Join us there, there’s still time.
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