Ogregores—organizations that demonstrate collective agency—are all around us but are hard to grasp because they are not human, even though their most important parts are people. I will explore some analogies to get a handle on them, starting with ancient gods and ending with sci-fi hive minds.
Another ogregore story, this time about a failed romance. Not a trickster story, like MoeV Unmasked or Wezl's Ghosts.
Here’s the second installment of ogregore stories, this one about deception and regulatory capture. It’s another trickster story, just like the first one about Wezl’s Ghosts.
Marissa Grunes has encouraged me to develop mythic stories about ogregores. Here’s my first attempt, about a trickster who used ghosts to fool their ruler.
Agentic AI is a trending term. If the hype comes true, perhaps all that will be left for humans is to buy things. But what if AIs start clicking on ads?
A recent Goldman Sachs reorg demonstrates an exception to my claim that “leaders love to take credit for corporate success, bolstering the impression that CEO's determine corporate action.” There’s no mention in the coverage of the CEO.
Susan Tonkin gave me an intriguing reason why it’s hard to “see” ogregores for what they are, in response to my post Bad Outcomes make it easier to see group agency. She noted that while it’s simple to delimit an organization’s make-up (listing the employees, for example) and easy to see its outputs (like products, jobs, and stock price), we have great trouble thinking through the complexity in the middle.
I've observed that leaders love to take credit for corporate success, bolstering the impression that CEO's determine corporate action, but they disappear when things go wrong. American Airlines failed business travel overhaul offers the latest example.
I’ve come to to doubt the universal description of the Norse god Loki as a trickster. Perhaps “fixer” would fit him just as well, or better.
Some say one can’t ascribe agency to organizations. They argue that group agency is just shorthand when we can’t be bothered to detail the motives and actions of all the individuals involved. Cases where a group acts in a way that most if not all its members would disavow make it easier to see collective agency.
I view technology as know-how that changes our relationship to the world, rather than as merely tools or human-made artefacts. This perspective is influenced by Heidegger, who claimed that modern technology makes us see everything as resources to be optimized and exploited. I’ve been wondering whether other technologies also change our perspectives, but not in that specific way.
Hesiod’s Theogony (pronounced with a hard “g” as in polygon) describes the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. [1] By analogy, I’ll use the term technogonies for stories that describe the origins of technology. In traditional myths, technologies come from the gods, who are usually benefactors. In modern stories, tech comes from inside society, although the stories are complicated and sometimes contested.
Jokes about organizations shed light on how we think of them as entities, so I asked some LLMs. Here are the best. (I occasionally crossed out some LLM verbiage and replaced it with my own.)
I’m intrigued by the relationship between ogregores and individuals, such as between employee groups and leaders. The usual assumption is that the CEO directs employees, but I suspect employees can direct the CEO, too. That is, employees and CEOs can form a principal-agent loop.
