I think these consulting firms exist to help the upper/top management to embezzle money and to shield them from personal responsibility (“Deloitte said so, I could only follow this industry standard guidance, don’t ask me why every project has crashed, lol”).
Who said “have to?”
Can.
We can just acquiesce. That’s always an option.
As for coercion, it’s a spectrum. Killing the bags of bones is only one small slice of that spectrum.
Regardless. Conflicts of interests exist. Coercion exists. We can just try to sleep through it all and hope for the best hopium. Or we can do the adult thing. Admit reality. Prosecute our interests vigorously and sophisticatedly.
We have some thinking to do. I prefer there aren’t any simpleminded and naive folks around me. Being honest about what’s happening is better than our usual game of hopium, copium, fig leaves, whitewashing, and sleeping.
Imagine if every muscle cell in my biceps wanted to self-actualize. I want to grab a cup of coffee, but every muscle cell in my arms has their own ideas. Something that normally takes a second, now takes 10 years of negotiations. It would not do me a lick of good if I had the strongest muscle cells in existence if I could not control them.
Of course people should not be regarded as mere muscle cells, but the point here is to show how obviously valuable and vital control can be when you want to serve some ambition.
Should workers be controlled like they are soldiers?
Whose interests does the business prioritize? And how heavily?
In a worker cooperative workers are the owners. Workers hire and fire their managers at every level of management. All power flows are bottom up. The workers are the entourage. In this case workers are better positioned to self-actualize, because there is no capricious, lazy, ignorant, spoiled silky pants tyrant at the top.
But what about a more typical business? Well, there is either one owner or a tiny cabal of owners, and everyone else is just a resource, a means to an end. And you have to exert control over the means of labor to benefit the entourage at the top. If the entourage can figure out how to produce things without workers, they will get rid of them immedeately, why? Because the workers are just a means, they are incidental, they exist because slavery was deemed too toxic, and because no one figured out a way to get rid of the workers yet. That’s the only reason workers exist in capitalism.
Managers want to give orders and see those orders followed immediately. They don’t want debates, challenges, counter proposals, etc. If workers want to self-actualize, that’s a huge problem for a top down power flow. That’s why it is essential to beat the desire to self-actualize out of workers early. That way mindless servility is assured, which is good for control.
Also, if your workers work 80 hour weeks, they won’t start competing ventures in their spare time. Again, control.
I kinda feel sorry for all the workers out there, because self-actualization is a heavenly mandate for every sentient being, and yet they are plugged into and slotted into a structure where worker (out group) self-actualization is a huge obstacle for the (in group) entourage.
Getting everyone happy can be a slow and messy process. What if you make weapons and your workers decide it is unethical to make weapons? You are a manager of youtube and you order workers to censor channels for entourage’s benefit, but they have their own ideas, and they pretend to be censoring while actually not censoring? There is no end to such possibilities. Hence why the soul of many people MUST be crushed if the top down power flow is to be served in full measure.
Every so often there is an oddball manager like Ricardo Semler. But Ricardo Semler is the exception.
Please watch this video, and think about everything.
Don’t do anything stupid and treasure your own life. Thinking has to come first, or there will be regrets later.
Slaves got no pay. They still worked.
You can’t get cash rewards for consuming less. Spending is the least important variable in the accumulation game. All else being equal, spending less means you can spend more at other times. So if I penny pinch all year, I can splurge on New Year’s eve, that sort of thing. That doesn’t make you rich. That doesn’t elevate your status in societies where all the needed and useful resources are paywalled.
Income and time is what matters. And if you can get income while keeping all your time to yourself, that’s what elevates status. In other words you don’t trade your own time for income. That means there must be some slaves or extremely poor people that are constantly exploited to enable the elite living conditions.
A society doesn’t need parasitic elites. But if you want a better society you will have to pry it from the elites’ cold hands, because they won’t go along with a scheme that makes the world a happy and healthy place at their expense.
If I have 400 billion, but in a happy and healthy world I can only have 100mil max, which is 3 orders of magnitude less, I would rather burn down the whole planet than lose 1 cent. My interests are everything to me. My personal condition is what I experience first hand, while the rest of the world is just a theory, a story on a newspaper page, an image on TV, etc. I won’t accept tangible personally felt losses for gains which to me are theoretical.
Of course if I inhabit a worker instead of a billionaire, things are different, the calculus is different, but crumbs are always crumbs. Whether I am a worker or billionaire, man or woman, I refuse to crumb myself. I want a 10 course dinner, with hookers and blow to boot, with every trimming. Always. I’d rather have food I can’t eat than not have enough. No matter who I inhabit, the previous statement is true.
If what you want is in a tree, you have to shake that fucking tree. If you want fish you have to catch it.
Some assholes wanted to exploit people, so they killed, threatened, organized and propagandized and accomplished it. We need to understand this and take notes. Know yourself and know your enemy and you will always win.
If we want something else, if we want a different system, there will always be people that are super happy with how things are now. These folks have done very well under the present system. These folks will block our way. They are the tree, the fish, they are the soil that we have to plow and sometimes pave, to get to where we need to go. It will be ugly. It will not be without struggle.
If we just remain passive, and modestly undemanding, and we just politely wave our slogans on street corners, we know exactly what happens next.
Control your boss before they control you.
The priviledged class will trade among themselves.
You can have a society with 7.5 billion people that are fed, clothed, sheltered enough to stave off early death, and 500 mil people with property rights trading among themselves.
Nothing says economies must collapse if not everyone is enfranchised. There is no such law.
Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
Because job difficulty and job pay aren’t correlated under capitalism.
The easiest job is to own assets. Not manage assets. Own them. Which is to say get your name on a title of a sufficiently large asset, and the money just rolls in while you sleep in bed. You sleep, your asset works. For a large enough asset this also provides the largest pay.
Owners need lieutenants to look after their assets. That’s what a CEO is.
So why are CEOs so highly paid? Because if you do not, they will embezzle (steal) money from your asset since they control every aspect of your asset’s daily functioning! So you need to cut the CEO in on the grift of being a big asset owner.
That’s how meritocracies actually work.
Being responsive and responsible is the merit accumulation stage.
Once you accumulate enough merit, you enter the reward stage.
And what’s the reward?
The reward is that you no longer need to be responsive or responsible.
Lots of companies feel the need to serve their users on their way up.
Once they feel they got much or most of the market on lock, they no longer need to justify themselves to their users, and a cycle of pure valueless exploitation begins, aka enshittification.
You didn’t read my message.
That’s just a longer way to say, yes, the shareholders asked for it.
Just because they didn’t ask it in letter form or explicitely that doesn’t mean much.
Look, if M$ does this ‘agentic’ move and its shares drop 20% overnight, then, and only THEN, you’d be right to say the shareholders did not ask for it.
Are shareholders punishing or rewarding these moves?
Billionaires, looking for more mass control.
It is not for our benefit.
Owners win.
If I have a plot of land with some cherry trees on it, I can get a landless person to pick most of them for free.
I make an offer “for every 100 pounds/kilos of cherries you pick for me, I’ll let you keep 1”. If the person who receives such an offer has no land of their own, they have to agree to avoid starvation.
That’s why our system needs a huge class of the landless, resourceless, and assetless people. Then for the priveledge of touching a privatized resource you have accept the privateer’s conditions.
Fencing off resources and protecting the fence by the threat of death is how this scam works.
And it is impossible to fix this societal problem by simply trading more and better as an individual. The ruleset of the game is tuned for mass free energy extraction from the assetless class at the macro level.
At most only for those that are willing to call him “god emperor”.
Only until he gets bored of it. Once he gets bored of the boot lickers he’ll make soap from them.
There needs to be a hard cap on wealth at around 100 mil, but defined relative some multiple of a median yearly salary.
If the salaries grow, the total wealth cap can grow too. And vice versa.
Large wealth should be about luxury and having lots of toys, and not about being a law-making aristocrat who is themselves outside the reach of the law like now.
People who hit wealth cap should have no privacy, and be banned from any interactions with the government. There should be some trade-offs to huge wealth. A mega wealthy person should lose something for the priviledge of having so much wealth. Also mandatory psychiatric tests, to make sure they are human and not a lizard in a human suit. OK, I am joking about the last part.
In order for me to look left, I must have a spatial concept internally before I fill in my space construct with some samples of information. That spatial concept is impossible to impart or teach. So what I call “the world” is a product of my own discipline, a melding of my imagination and some seemingly external content, more so than a reflection of something genuinely and absolutely external.
Even so, surprises happen, so there is definitely unconscious content. So internal/external framework is not necessarily 100% wrong, but more like 50% wrong, or too naive, oversimplified.
So I see subjectivity as the root context, within which objectivity is a special case partial representation and highlighting of a portion of that context.
But they will kick back to me 30% of a fat contract. And when things go south I will blame Deloitte. So why would I change my highly lucrative for me behavior?
I won’t.