Kinda want to launch an unironic, on-the-nose pro-bureaucracy discourse. Not even an apologia or defense, just straight up “bureaucracy is actually good and you morons trying to tear it down have no idea what you’re talking about or doing”

My longer-term agenda is to re-imagine and refactor bureaucratic functions and patterns into decentralized protocols but an important preliminary step is to recognize that what we have now is an archetype of organizational capacity that perfectly balances missionary zeal. Zealots think destroying bureaucracy creates a culture of pure missionary zeal. Nope. It destroys all capacity to do anything at all.

Bureaucracy is our current solution to scaling intelligence beyond median individual human brains and lifespans.

Bureaucracy is how an org can be smarter and longer-lived than its median member.

In the short term bureaucracy can be outperformed by a spasm of above-median-intelligence reformist action, but in the long-term such spasms will regress to sub-median and become dumber than the average member. This is particularly obvious in the wake of the death or exit of charismatic leaders pushing termporarybacceleration.

Bureaucracies are a technology that have improved slowly over 200-1000 years of the modern kind (depending on whether you start counting from Venice or Germany), but are nearing paradigm exhaustion. The replacement is obvious if you stop to think about it: sufficiently decentralized protocols.

Modern charismatic “great man” leadership models are approximately 700 years old probably, counting from Philip IV’s destruction of the Templar bureaucracy. They too are nearing paradigm exhaustion. But unlike bureaucracies, which can evolve into modern protocols, Great Man models are a pure dead end. The world is too complex and there’s nowhere for Great Man mythologies to go except towards tragedies repeating as farces, burning libraries along the way, imagining they’re combating ossification and sclerosis but really just destroying accumulations of knowledge. Caricatures and larps marching under silly slogans.

Fortunately we’re getting systematically better at defending institutional memories and accumulated knowledge from the library-burning missionaries, while also keeping the future free from capture by the past. This is why asymmetric cryptography is the most important “weapon of the weak” ever invented, and the beginning of the end of civilization evolving within the delusions of great man mythologies.

Very loosely, this is the editorial posture I’m advocating for Protocolized, the rebooted magazine of the Summer of Protocols. My peers helping shape the mission loosely agree with me. We’ll be broadening the conversation gradually over the next year.