Time for another project snapshot. There were earlier snapshots in Jul 2020, Oct 2020, Feb 2021, and Nov 2021.
Summary
Some Big Tech companies and other modern organizations act like intelligent, purposeful beings. They are powerful, pervasive, and mysterious, like the ancient gods. To fully understand them we need both reason and intuition. While there are plenty of academic studies, they—like the rest of us—tend to focus on the people that make up these organizations rather than the entity as such. Anthropomorphism is ill-advised since these organizations, while having intentions, do not have emotions like we do. They are aliens. Mythic stories could awaken and inform our stunted intuition.
The Problem
Organizations like Big Tech companies and government agencies gain incredible power by combining people, rules, and technology. Yet, we often talk about them only in terms of individual people, like celebrity CEOs or politicians. To deal with these entities effectively, we need to see them as intentional, collective forces.
These organizations have an enormous impact on our lives, but they’re hard to understand. They can cover the globe or live for centuries. Unlike living organisms, organizations do not have clear boundaries, and their parts can blend together. Their inner workings are usually hidden and hard to grasp even when visible. This is especially true for Big Tech companies, whose products and processes are mostly intangible and hard to grasp—even for the people who write the code.
When we think about organizations, we tend to take one of two approaches: rational/analytical or intuitive/experiential. The first, objective approach is used by scholars, who create detailed, evidence-based descriptions and technical models. These models typically explain organizational behavior in terms of the people within them. The second, subjective approach, preferred by everyday people, focuses on things like famous leaders and emotive predictions of success or disaster. This approach often imagines that organizations are like humans, with our emotions and motivations.
Both approaches have their strengths. Scholars can create useful models, and everyday people can have accurate intuitions. However, logical models can fail to capture how organizations truly behave. Emotional thinking is often wrong too—celebrity leaders, for example, do not have as much control as they want us to believe, and imagining companies as people is misleading. For instance, the Progressive insurance company is nothing like its cheerful spokesperson, Flo.
We need a third approach that combines logic and storytelling to understand these powerful organizations. These entities are so big, ubiquitous, and enigmatic that they are almost like gods. To truly understand them, we need myths—stories that help us make sense of the world. Even in our modern, data-driven society, we still rely on myths like “Progress through Innovation” or “Corporations are Evil” to explain the technological world. By blending science and storytelling, we can better understand these larger-than-human systems and their collective actions.
Ogregores: Organizations with Agency
Let us focus on a specific type of organization: those that act with intentional agency. I will call them ogregores, a term inspired by the esoteric concept of egregores: non-physical entities that arise from the shared thoughts and emotions of a group of people.
An agent acts in the world based on internal representations of the world and motivations. Agency can take many forms, from a bacterium seeking food to a human driving a car, a self-driving car navigating traffic, or a shipping company delivering packages around the world. Organizations can act both as group agents, expressing the collective will of their members, and at the behest of leaders. However, media coverage often focuses on leaders, ignoring the organization acting as a whole.
Mythology
To better understand ogregores, we can borrow ideas from biology, sociology, and organizational studies. The concept of umwelt, which refers to how an organism perceives its environment, can be applied to organizations. Organizational ecology, which studies how organizations grow, adapt, and die, can also provide insights. However, analysis needs to be complemented with experiential knowledge.
Myths—by which I mean widely known stories that help groups of people make sense of, and act in, the world—are a powerful way to encode intuition. While science has replaced many myths (we no longer think gods control the weather), there are still powerful forces that feel mythical. For example, believers and skeptics often frame climate change in mythic terms, treating it as a matter of faith rather than science.
Traditional myths often feature human-like beings who represent abstract ideas or give people a way to understand their world. For example, the Greeks used the Furies to represent justice. The Norse god Odin was the epitome of a warlord, and Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and war, symbolizes society’s reliance on industrial and martial forces.
However, ogregores are neither human-like nor broad societal forces. We do not yet have myths to explain them. While ancient figures like the fallen angels in Jewish apocalyptic (egregoroi in Greek), Loki, or Prometheus speak about technology’s role in society, they were not invented to represent modern organizations. A few mythological figures—like Mars, who symbolized the disciplined and institutionalized Roman military—offer some parallels, but they do not fully capture the essence of ogregores.
We have many modern myths about technology and the people behind it. These include hero myths (Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs), origin myths (garages and dorm rooms), tricksters (Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried), and scapegoats (TikTok). However, these myths focus on individual technologists or our attitudes toward technology. They do not capture the essence of tech ogregores—organizations that act like intentional, non-human entities.
Looking Ahead
We need to create new myths to help us understand modern ogregores, but we must be careful not to portray them as people. It is tempting to do this when telling stories, but ogregores are not human. While they have goals and intentions like we do, the way they are structured and how they perceive the world are vastly different from us.
To avoid confusion, we need to keep two things in mind. First, an ogregore’s traits represent the whole organization, not the individual people or even their shared culture. Second, ogregores are not human, just as the Olympians gods were outside the bounds of human morality and gods in other traditions took animal shape or had many limbs.
Stay tuned for stories about a new pantheon: Feed, War, Hymn, Reg, Wis, Tek, and Merc. These myths will help us make sense of the powerful organizations that shape our world.
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