[bell-cot]

> ...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business.

Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.

[the_only_law]

> Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems.

How come our societies haven’t reverted to a feudal structure then. I’m sure most countries are organizing people at a much larger scale than most businesses

[WalterBright]

I suspect it's because democracy is one local maxima and feudalism is another local maxima. There's no good path from one to the other.

[pjmlp]

Only a few countries around the world have proper democracies at all levels, same applies to most companies.

Boss says jump, employee asks how high.

[eternalban]

This empirical data was gathered in context of poor connectivity in society. So the 'default' that you propose, I assert, is a default for a specific societal regime.

As an abstract model, I propose hierarchies of patronage & loyalties, capital & force, and service as the fundamental organizing principle of 'feudal' systems.

We assume that there is -- it's an implicit in your stated view -- a natural system level emergent order that defaults to 'feudalism'. Looked at another way, we could ask the question as to why the substantial majority of people put up with crap all these centuries and in all these different places?

I think PL-CF-S order optimizes for (information/)control in the 'super-organism' for long term viability. (This is simply focusing on society as a system, disregarding the subjective experience of individual members.)

Why was hierarchical 'control' (think command and control) so fundamentally important to human societies (to date)? Per above sketch, I assert it has to do with marshalling of resources in a 'poor' energy, tech and i/o environments.

You need a hierarchy if any significant action requires high level control of a huge mass of people. You need a huge mass of people if your making and killing tech requires 'hordes' of peasants, workers, and soldiers.

You do -not- need a strict (and non-delegating) control hierarchy if significant societal action requires minimal human resources (the 'S' in PL-CF-S model), and operates in an environment of 'abundant' energy and amplifying technology.

Two trends are now opposing each other in that model. Certain technologies seem to require centralization (thus the 'old' model will apply) and other tech is getting in the hand of the plebes (aka the people history ignores or forgets that is almost all of us). Now the 'old' order is resisting getting tech to the 'edge' of society. It is deemed "dangerous" and it fairly is that.

IFF we assume that the hierarchical model is in fact a relic of a capability poor past of humanity, and that a new sort of 'human history' should begin, then we need to address the issue of technologies that tend to centralization. Possibly a combination of socialist ownership of those sectors and market enterprise at the 'distributed edge' could work.