[asgard1024]

What a revolutionary idea!

Seriously though, I wonder why humans tolerate the hierarchical structures so much. I am proponent of direct democracy and worker cooperatives but curiously enough, to many people the idea seems wrong.

[jazzyk]

Flat structures work great for smaller organizations, but don't scale up with size.

That said, a bigger organization could still be structured like a federation of relatively independent businesses/departments, with clearly defined interactions (interfaces) between them, rather than a monolith.

Modular design benefits business as much as it does software architecture.

[asgard1024]

Perhaps better would be if I said "authoritarian" rather than "hierarchical". I don't think democracy requires lack of hierarchy. Or take the development of Linux kernel - although hierarchical, everybody has the same power.

And it can scale quite well. Switzerland and Mondragon are good examples.

[Karunamon]

Just about every human endeavor out there tends toward hierarchal structures - ones that do not are statistical outliers, and even then it's questioned whether all that's happened is that the hierarchy is implicit rather than explicit.

[asgard1024]

> Just about every human endeavor out there tends toward hierarchal structures

I agree, but why? It doesn't make much sense to me. Although I should have said "authoritarian" rather than "hierarchical".

> it's questioned whether all that's happened is that the hierarchy is implicit rather than explicit

In democracy, you can have hierarchy but it's not a big deal, because you have a formal rule that everybody has the same power (one vote). It is certainly different (although for some reason many people do not feel that way) than when there is no such rule.