Friday, January 12, 2024

Memoranda of the Boulder Ogregore Observatory

When the University of Colorado Boulder’s quantum computer came online recently, a diagnostic core dump revealed unexpected data. It seems to be fragments from the 2028 annual report of the so-called Boulder Ogregore Observatory (BOO), an institution that does not (yet?) exist.

Parts of the corpus are unintelligible and reconstruction is ongoing. Physicists speculate that the Observatory stored its data on a successor to the recently inaugurated Boulder quantum computer. Time-entangled qubits allowed the archives to worm their way back to the present. 


The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.

Jose Luis Borges, Prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths,
in Ficciones, edited and with an introduction by
Anthony Kerrigan, Grove Press (New York), (1941, 1962:15)


There are indications that plans were afoot in 2028 to create other Ogregore Observatories, including in Tokyo, New York, and perhaps Frankfurt.

Here is the BOO corpus reconstructed so far. It appears to be a list of  papers published by institution researchers. Reconstruction of another text that appears to be their resumes is under way. 


Abbasov, Y. S., Antonescu, G. , Galli, F., & Kumar, T. (2026). “Ogregore appeasement rituals in popular culture: Placating and cajoling social media applications.”

Abbasov, Y. S., Galli, F., Heijman, A., & Beauchêne, C. (2027). “From ‘They’ to ‘It’ and back: Ambiguity in the perception of corporate agency in the public mind.”

Abbasov, Y. S., Kumar, T., & Antonescu, G. (2027). “Stockholm Blindsight: Why consumers underestimate the impact of social media platforms.”

Barwegen, M., & Lefèvre, L. (2026). “Facebook’s nervous breakdown: Corporate dysfunction and crisis in the face of internal research and external political pressure.”

Barwegen, M., Lefèvre, L., & Nikolić, V. M. (2027). “The incredible disappearing CEO: How corporate crises reveal collective decision making.”

Barwegen, M., Schnur, E., Beauchêne, C., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2028). Great founders vs. Ogregores: The role of leadership and collective agency in large corporations.”

Barwegen, M., Xanthopoulos, C., Patel, J. A., & Sundström, V. (2027). “Taxonomic metrics for corporate and government ogregores.”

Beauchêne, C., Abbasov, Y. S., & Lefèvre, L. (2026). “Stroke the CEO, blame the bureaucracy: Methods for discerning organizational agency through press coverage of government and commercial institutions.”

Beauchêne, C., Lefèvre, L., Chambers, S. A., & Heijman, A. (2026). “The bloating of the Pentagon: How collective dynamics fed an ogregore.”

Ekmekçi, E. K., Patel, J. A., & Barwegen, M. (2028). “Ogregore communication: Using data analytics and market signals to trace and reconstruct communication between corporate collectives.”

Haraguchi, S. T., & Pinto, R. O. (2028). “A natural history of ogregores.”

Haraguchi, S. T., Pinto, R. O., & Heijman, A. (2027). “The impact of GDPR on European ogregore metabolism and umwelt.”

Haraguchi, S. T., Pinto, R. O., Lefèvre, L., & Beauchêne, C. (2028). “An Ogregore Field Guide: How to identify, classify, and observe large collective agents.”

Hüber, U. E., Lefèvre, L., Nikolić, V. M., & McKenzie, A. S.. (2027). “A comparison of the Apple ogregore in the Jobs and Cook eras.”

Hüber, U. E., Patel, J. A., & Lefèvre, L. (2028). “Scale dependence of the emergence of collective agency in technology businesses.”

Kumar, T., Beauchêne, C., & Chambers, S. A. (2028). “The ogregore pushes back: Resistance and countermeasures by corporations to research into collective organizational agency.”

Kumar, T., Heijman, A., & Chambers, S. A. (2027). “Tracing collective communication between government and commercial ogregores.”

Kumar, T., Lefèvre, L., & Haraguchi, S. T. (2026). “Kami Chameleon: How ogregores hide in plain sight.”

McKenzie, A. S., & Beauchêne, C. (2027). “Kings and Bureaucracies: The deep archaeological history of ogregores.”

McKenzie, A. S., Kumar, T., & Beauchêne, C. (2026). “Capitalism isn’t an ogregore: Distinguishing agents, ideologies, institutions, and social imaginaries.”

Meztli, H., Antonescu, G., Galli, F., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2028). “An animist analysis of ogregore phenomenology.”

Meztli, H., Galli, F., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2027). “Gods, archetypes, and ogregores: Human-centric perceptions as clues to the nature of meta-human agency.”

Nikolić, V. M., Haraguchi, S. T., & Pinto, R. O. (2027). “Collective perception of the business environment in social media corporations.”

Novelist, & Schnur, E. (2028). “Inventing new deities: Fictive biographies of digital media ogregores.”

Patel, J. A., Zhao, J. L., Barwegen, M., & Heijman, A. (2026). “Talking to ogregores: Large language models trained on corporate corpora as organizational oracles.”

Sundström, V, Patel, J. A., & Okafor, O. C. (2027). “Using agent-based modeling to simulate emergent agency in large organizations.”

Pinto, R. O., Barwegen, M., & Ekmekçi, E. K. (2028). “Data appetites and money metabolism: The biology of social media companies.”

Sharma, R. D., Ekmekçi, E. K., & Patel, J. A. (2028). “Human consciousness metrics applied to corporations.”

Xanthopoulos, C., Barwegen, M., & Chambers, S. A. (2026). “Degrees of agency in corporate ogregores: First steps towards a taxonomy.”

Xanthopoulos, C., Pinto, R. O., & Sharma, R. D. (2028). “If agency is sufficient, why worry about ogregore sentience?

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