💡 The organisations that never sleep

You and I (and the birds and the octopi etc etc) are made of meat. Our minds are finicky machines that run on goop and ancient evolutionary pressures. We need sleep. Food. Water. Shelter and warmth. Pleasure. Company. Care.

Individually, stripped of any social support, basically any given human would be dead pretty quickly. We can’t keep watch forever, we can’t make all the things we need to survive, we can’t find enough food for ourselves, our health suffers from loneliness, and we inevitably go through bouts of needing help and care, which we die if we don’t get.

Luckily for us we’re a social species. I may need to stop the necessary tasks of survival for sleep; but the group as a whole can keep doing things around the clock. I may not be able to do certain things, but the group can make sure they’re done. The group can also balance my eccentricities, check my worst impulses, and enable my best.

This is great! Humans have a built in ability to create things bigger than a single individual that can do things we alone cannot.

Unfortunately for us, this ability is not destined to only produce positive results. Evolutionarily, it produces survival-to-reproductive-age more reliably than it doesn’t. But we have endlessly iterated with this capacity, using it as a tool to produce hundreds of thousands of social constructs, many of which cause extreme and excessive misery.

Today, we talk about corporations or countries or churches or charities or or or, which do a lot of things in ways that are often consciously modelled on our own human activities. There’s a long history of the ‘body politic’ in the strain of Western thought that’s achieved a violent hegemony these days. Organisations have goals, they have resources, they make decisions. They’re comprised of several – or several thousand, or million, etc – individual humans, each of whom does something for the whole.

And they never, ever need to sleep.

In Let artists shrug, I remarked that corporations can use copyright law to go after ordinary people, while ordinary artists will never have the time or the energy to use it in the ways they’re entitled to. Here, I want to broaden it.

An organisation uses individual humans as its neurones and muscle fibres, harnessing them while they’re on the clock, and harnessing others when they clock out. It can devote all of these individual components to defining and achieving goals, and draft in components for upkeep when needed. But all the individuals who make it up, they still have to sleep, and eat, and do all the other things their meat bodies require. They don’t have the luxury of paying someone else to do it – even if I could afford it, paying someone to sleep for me simply would not work.

Obviously, this insight isn’t new – we use the phrase ‘cog in the machine’ for a reason. But I think it and its consequences are underappreciated. In a dispute between organisation and individual, the organisation can incentivise individuals work against their peers; the individual has to carve time and energy out of their life to defend themself.

It’s harder to hire a lawyer than to get arrested; it’s harder to contest discrimination than to commit it; it’s harder to fight workplace abuse than to perpetuate it.

This is why organisations can chew people up the way they do, all the time, in so many ways. ‘The machine’ has, essentially, cops; the individual will have to do a huge amount of work to be able to counter them.

Think about it – you’ll have encountered these situations yourself. (Many of us have been on both sides!) But also, as an antidote to despair, remember – social structures are technology, and technology can be iterated. Plus, of course, ‘the machine’ doesn’t have a monopoly on this social technology…