taking seriously the idea of corporations as black boxes... the og Stafford Beer idea that they can be organized in such a way as to perform actions that not only do none of their constituent parts (eg people) understand, but none of them even WANT
8 tweets · November 2025 · 12 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
taking seriously the idea of corporations as black boxes... the og Stafford Beer idea that they can be organized in such a way as to perform actions that not only do none of their constituent parts (eg people) understand, but none of them even WANT
it's fairly obvious that it doesn't make sense to try to hold a person's cells or organs responsible for what they do as a whole person… but also in the extreme of death the cells kind of DO reap these consequences whether via malnutrition or revenge or state-sanctioned violence
the fact that key parts of corporations have nearly unbounded upside from their corporation succeeding (profit, founders getting rich) but very bounded downside not only to failure but unethical behavior… means that there's an incentive to set up accountability sinks
(I think? Need to think this through more. It's obviously a source of much innovation that individuals can get rich, and we do also obviously want to limit liability at least somewhat. So maybe part of the issue is just incentivizing the outer structure)
Meanwhile it seems absolutely plausible to me that with enough cybernetics insight, a country could actually come up with laws that would ban the most egregious forms of social organization that cause accountability sinks and other pathological corporate behavior.
Obviously lots of issues to this, from deception (same structures exist but are now illegible) and general draconianism or limits on innovation and play. Clearly we DON'T want to just have all corps have exactly the same structures
@dsquareddigest proposes in The Unaccountability Machine a first step for stopping the leveraged buyout approach: an entity buying out a living company would have to guarantee the latter's debts. it still allows limited liability where it helps, but not this hack
for more bespoke Stafford Beer remixes, check out this thread of mine on POSIWID & exaptation (POSIWID = "the purpose of a system is what it does")