[feoren]

Management Theory Null: All management is fundamentally parasitic and only exists to perpetuate the organizational structure designed to extract as much wealth as possible from both the Actual Contributors (preferred over "Individual Contributors") and the investors, into the pockets of management. Climbing the org chart means having more opportunity to bleed the company dry for one's own benefit. Understanding modern capitalism requires realizing that corporations aren't really profit-seeking entities trying to maximize revenue and minimize costs, but rather the livestock upon which the Business Caste tries to sate their insatiable hunger. Sometimes the parasites are so brazen as to kill the company they're feasting on (at which point they all call up their buddies and get jobs at their next host), and sometimes they're conservative enough to keep the beast alive while continually harvesting from it.

I don't believe that the next great leap in human rights will come from more unions and worker's rights (although those are important right-now steps too). I believe it will come from democratizing ownership -- giving everyone their own piece of the pie that they can cultivate. One way to do that is to use AI and automation to replace not the low-level workers, but the towering edifice of bullshit management jobs. Can we get automation and AI to the point where everyone can use it to enjoy self-proprietorship of whatever their labor is? Can we extend the "gig economy" so far that every tradesman out there is running his own company, with almost all the meta-work of running the company outsourced to an AI? Not centralized like Uber, but decentralized; democratized? That (plus a healthy dose of basic income) feels like the only escape from this hellscape of cancerous capitalism where the Business Caste who already own everything just continue to feast upon the blood of workers and investors alike in a global Tragedy of the Commons until nothing is left but the fetid husks of once-productive corporations.