Centralized power is violent

Note: This isn’t a fully fleshed-out argument, but a provocation- I’d love to hear what you think.

As we ‘evolved’ (or devolved?) from hunter-gatherers into agrarians, humans became ‘owners’ of property. I imagine that the first owners were also workers of the land, but it didn’t take long in most cultures for there to be people who owned land and then hired other people to work that land, and then enslaved other people to work that land and build palaces and such, and then began developing ways to go out and get more land, leading to systems of speculative investments and colonialism and eventually, Facebook (or whatever the best symbol of global tech imperialism might be – Palantir?).

David Graeber and many other authors I’ve read recently propose that violence underlies all systems of bureaucracy, and I suspect, all centralized systems. Humans are more rhizomatic than programmatic and self-organize in unorderly ways. To achieve ‘efficiency’ in a way that might directly serve one aim (or capital returns) requires hierarchy, and to do so at scale requires that hierarchy to be backed by violence. Maybe to have organizations with more than a marginal amount of inequality also takes violence.

The violence is often invisible to many in these systems, particularly people who have power. It’s only been in the last few years, for example, to have widespread dominant culture awareness of the frequency of examples of white people summoning armed men when they encounter Black folks performing such activities as barbecuing, jogging, or bird watching. But there are more subtle examples, like what might happen if you have medical bills or even parking tickets you can’t pay, or choose to walk around in a park at an hour in which the park “is not open,” or publish academic articles to a website without permission. In all of these cases, people with guns may be summoned with the force of law justifying their presence.

This is important because there are counter-examples in which people figure out how to handle almost all situations without needing strongmen, who can handle non-normative behaviour that is not violent without resorting to dominance. These happen in community settings, where people build trust among one another.

There’s a bit of a truism in the startup world about “flat” companies not being very successful (or being covertly hierarchical). If you want to get things done as a business that ‘can scale,’ you require forms of dominance. People will roll their eyes at more creative or esoteric Lalouxian structures. Part of the reason for this may be that it is, as I’ve noted before, simply easier to rule with dominance than to lead with a collectivist mindset, but that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately sustainable. It may work in the time horizon of most startups (fail fast!) but at least some of the hundred thousand tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past few months were the casualties of hierarchy and power structure that made no sense. (I want to connect those dots more explicitly- but for now I’ll just point out that in the US, at-will employment itself is a system backed by violence).

I’m not a communist. I’m not sure it’s possible to live in a world as ‘connected’ as we’ve become without forms of centralized power. But I do think we will be much better off if we can learn to live within additional systems that work differently, without the threat of physical danger or incarceration for non-violent actions. We can actually figure out how to work things out together, in spaces that orient around accepting difference and minding our own practice. We can come to see that when the trappings of the centralized systems are stripped away, we’re pretty good at finding common ground.

The spaces that contain this kind of shared power, self-empowered spaces, are small. We can develop decentralized autonomous groups that work when they operate at the speed of trust and don’t scale rapidly.

But they can proliferate rapidly. It’s really about shifting the ideas of dominance, monopoly, and scale into pollination, pullulation, and emergence. Interconnection within and among but not as a monolithic network.