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by kristopolous 1113 days ago
They replace C-level people often and the relationship isn't what you imply.

There's a structural power relationship in play. Monarchs play a fairly unimportant role these days but many countries still have them and compensate them handsomely.

CEOs are structurally capitalist monarchs. Sometimes it's even a hereditary position. They even do the corporate equivalent of court and heraldry stuff.

They're compensated not based on competency but instead, like every other job, via social arrangement.

If you don't think that's how salaries work, you're getting underpaid.

3 comments

Most corporate structures are feudal. Folks should refer to their VPs as the Duke/Duchess of Engineering.
The modern corporation is literally a dictatorship:

"form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations."

Companies are *governed* by unimpeachable, unelected, all powerful groups that in practice treat employees like literal slaves (you don't have to be chattel or physically abused to be a slave). However because almost all employment agreements are exactly the same, it's the same law firms and laws that these orgs use over and over, essentially all corporations have colluded for this structure and type of employment power dynamic.

After all why wouldn't they, the "American dream" is to become a dictator in the capital class, free from exposure to dirty labor.

How do I know this?

I've been a CEO dictator for a company before and hated the structure. Now I'm trying to create a non-stock cooperative and all I get is head scratching from banks, lawyers etc... who have NO CONCEPT how to organize something that isn't in the boilerplate Delaware equity dictatorship construct.

Oof, that is so cynical, yet I cannot help but agree with everything you said. I'm often reminded of how far we have come as a society, and how primitive we still are.
I'd love to hear more about your non-stock cooperative. How is it structured? I'm genuinely fascinated.
Thanks! See my reply above, I don’t want to repost cause it looks spammy.
It's an interesting structure! A couple of thoughts popped out as I read your articles of incorporation.

(1) Instead of saying a representative can't represent more than 10-100 people, have you considered making it a percentage of the membership? Making it a hard number seems potentially inflexible as the organization grows.

(2) Making it a requirement that the CEO be a part of the organization for 4 years before running would imply that either the first CEO didn't have to meet such criteria, or that there is no CEO for the first 4 years.

Very curious to follow your journey!

The challenge with any constitution is figuring out where to be inconsistent or not free from vulnerability and unfortunately there’s no right answer to how.

In both of those cases the spirit it to build structural breakpoints in such that it’s harder to accelerate than it is to stop. In my experience speed is what kills ethics.

So my guess is that we’ll be without a CEO for a while so our annual plan etc processes won’t really start in earnest until we’re at a certain size.

echoing nickelcitymario, would love to hear what you're working on
https://seegull.org/

You can read our “Constitution” / Articles in the link

We’re “fundraising” now which is basically just issuing debt based on a negotiated interest rate and due date, so if you know anyone with 5k or more to spare that would be great. Obviously regular capitalist investors want nothing to do with us, which just makes it harder/slower and that’s ok.

I hope this isn’t a hot take, but after seeing the apparent endgame of “democracy” play out over the last 10 years or so, I’m fine with business being done using a completely contrasting system.
You should consider all possible systems then and include the possibility that the system your criticizing isn't a very good democracy or maybe is democratic in ineffectual ways.
shrug Maybe you know some good governments that I don’t. It’s just that all democracies I know about are in various stages of being hacked by bad actors in bad faith. I think it’s because none of them were developed in an environment that had the tools being used now to convince people of lies that are profitable for those doing the convincing. So they’re not particularly resilient to this stuff.

I don’t want to see any company that I want to succeed making decisions like a democracy does today.

Concentrating power in an even smaller group of narcissists who got there by bravado and charisma doesn't sound like it's a set up for success.

Obviously some deep reconsideration has to be done

Is it the endgame of X if X is losing the fight? This has been the endgame of marketing.
As a marketer, I'm curious about what you mean by this. What are you saying is marketing's endgame? (I'm not sure if I'll agree or disagree yet.)
You probably won't agree, because it's not a very charitable thing to say about marketers, sorry.

My position is that democracy works well when the will of the people gets translated into action in a way that still resembles what those people organically need.

Marketing is the process of tampering with that translation such that what actually happens benefits the marketers' customers, typically at the expense of the people.

Presumably there are practices and technologies that we could invest in which preserve this translation, but we haven't been investing in those. Instead we've been investing in marketing. We're building a world where you can spend money to shape public opinion, and that's a world that's toxic to democracy.

Perhaps there was a time when information about available goods and services was hard to come by. Maybe you legitimately needed somebody to get the word out. But I don't think we live in that world anymore.

In case you're not familliar with "the shoe event horizon":

> As a society sinks into depression, the people of the society need to cheer themselves up by buying themselves gifts, often shoes. It is also linked to the fact that when you are depressed you look down at your shoes and decide they aren't good enough quality so buy more expensive replacements. As more money is spent on shoes, more shoe shops are built, and the quality of the shoes begins to diminish as the demand for different types of shoes increases. This makes people buy more shoes.

> The above turns into a vicious cycle, causing other industries to decline.

> Eventually the titular Shoe Event Horizon is reached, where the only type of store economically viable to build is a shoe shop. At this point, society ceases to function, and the economy collapses, sending a world spiralling into ruin. In the case of Brontitall and Frogstar World B, the population forsook shoes and evolved into birds.

That's what is happening to us, except instead of shoes, it's ads. We're diminishing the legitimacy of making a good product or being a good leader, because an easier way to win is just pay to shape public opinion.

What you win isn't as good as it would have been if you competed on merit, but that doesn't matter because competing on merit is hard and your opposition isn't doing it.

So I'm saying that it's Marketing vs Democracy and Marketing is winning. Thus we're living in Marketing's endgame and not Democracy's endgame.

Would it surprise you that I largely agree with you? Or that I'm at least sympathetic?

For context, I just published a book called Insurgent Marketing. The central thesis is that the world is being shaped by propagandists, has been for a long time, and that the best (and most pragmatic) way to combat their influence is to play their game better than they do.

All businesses market themselves. Try running a business without doing anything remotely resembling marketing, and let me know how that goes. But that doesn't mean marketing (and marketers) should get a free pass for the damage many of us cause.

I think of marketing as neither positive nor negative in it itself, much like speaking or any form of communication. Some of us speak love. Some of us speak hate. Most of us spew garbage.

The problem isn't marketing, per se, but human greed. Both are as old as written history, and probably older. By blaming marketing, we excuse ourselves from taking responsibility of our role in shaping the world around us. The problem is "other people", those evil marketers. (Or politicians. Or bankers. Or the alt-right. Pick your bogeyman.)

Regarding this "Shoe Event Horizon", I hadn't heard of it before. My initial take is that as long as businesses keep getting bigger, quality will suffer. But we live in a time when it's easier (not easy, just easier) to launch a business of your own and produce shoes (or any product) of the quality you're looking for. Yes, most people will shop at Wal-Mart for the cheapest thing. Again, human greed, on behalf of both the corporation and the customers.

But thanks to technological advances, we're at a turning point where anyone with a smartphone can effectively market their goods. It's not the sole domain of corporations and governments anymore.

My hope, and my personal belief, is that more people will seize this opportunity so that we start to see an explosion of independent entrepreneurs producing products they're proud to stamp their names on.

Personally I think merges and acquisitions should require a marriage between the CEOs and thereafter, they must sleep together just like it worked with kingdoms.

If you acquire multiple companies well then, fun times for you.

Well that's a shockingly fitting. You've got the king or several dukes who own all the land/assets, the middle management barons and the serfs who do the actual work and get a small share as payment.
C level meritocracy mythmaking is today's answer to the divine right of monarchs.

Court politics and C level politics are functionally very similar too.

> Monarchs play a fairly unimportant rol

It may look like that, but it's not true. You know how a good system administrator doesn't seem that important because he prevents all the fires that a bad one would heroically put out? The mere presence of a monarch, not even his actions, acts in a similar fashion. They don't have to actively govern the country, but they have emergency powers that would allow them to prevent a wanna be populist dictator. And because of obvious game theory implications, these powers never have to be used — their mere existence, and everybody bring aware of their existence, is enough for deterrence.

Spain had a monarchy And a populist dictator, Franco. Japan had an emperor during WW2 and the Nazis caucused with the Monarchist party DNVP when they were forming a coalition government. Some of the Monarchists even went on to occupy Hitler's cabinet. King Victor Emmanuel III also ruled Italy during the reign of Mussolini.

So I'll have to toss a citation needed on this one. I think history demonstrates a pretty strong overlap between those who support monarchs and populist dictators because in practice, they are structurally pretty similar.