The Economy

Communication Structures

Governing Funnel | Hopeless Architecture | Organization Shape | Purposeful Architecture

Governing Funnel

a. two-way bottleneck

Powerful actors can come with good intentions, but do not have to.
Most predictably, at least one shortcoming is inevitable.
Power contradicts with the very nature of information: its distribution.
Archilocus recognized the poor enlightenment of despotism in the foreword.
Such things are far beyond anyone's ken.
No matter the technocratic ability of central bankers, they hit ken limit.
They cannot contribute to financial stability as much as:
the structurally superior adaptability of horizontal liquidity.
The deep pocket skew imposes diffusion bottlenecks to monetary policy.
One-size-fits-all rates cannot embrace the complexity of people realities.
Microeconomic ups and downs ask for personalized measures.
They aim to revive joy in the amusement park but they stop in the queue.
Right when we want it most, direct access is only given with a paid pass.
Financial relief blockages reflect the inversion of centralized knowledge.
Accumulated information given to large institutions drops many details.
It does not take into account localized concerns until they become big.
It is too late to avoid congestion when they cut through numbers.
Information reach is covering the globe.
But financial spread is stuck in the corners.

Hopeless Architecture

b. communication spell

We need to understand how financial markets came to be.
Their shape, epitomized by skyscrapers, might not have been intentional.
They have grown during the radio and TV era of unfettered broadcasting.
Mass communication was the norm in the exercise of a given power.
Peer telecommunication did not exist.
Bond and stock markets channeled investments to make the future possible.
But the woman and the man in the street remained out of touch.
The people in their home remained outsiders.

Conway's law broadcasted centralizing financial systems over society:
systems are copies of communication structures from design organizations.
It is not too far-fetched, messages market and channel economic exchanges.
A minority of integrated and capitalized social circles spread like media.
The best of smart, courageous and lucky entrepreneurs built behemoths.
Let alone the rich who ticked all boxes and could afford prime time on TV.
Consequential firms dealing with financials became a backbone of society.
We shake when they shiver.
The news of a bank run is the trembling voice of a dictator on the radio.

In the meantime, the digital economy has grown and developed.
Offshoots branched out into networks to conquer neglected prospects.
Centralized structures cannot price everything we value as a society.
Alternative schemes could buy out a war with a population's peace shares.
Priceless things and ideas are not worthless.
They can be so unique or precious that they’re not fungible;
there is no market, and there shouldn't always be.
They are cases where a shared desire to acquire a dream deserves a market.
Networks unite across previous disparities and under a common purpose.

Organization Shape

c. communication frame

In 1968, civil protests were decrying governmental systems;
which did not work for all.
Conway popularized a timely integration in April of that year.
He formalized communication paths against segregation in system design.

His demonstration in "How do committees invent?" leads to this conclusion:

organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of communication structures

Imbalanced communication produces unstable systems.
Unfairness could stem from such systems in a social setting.
The conclusion now known as Conway's law was not mere coincidence.
Four years earlier, a book by Marshall McLuhan had coined a principle.
The 1964 "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" was riding a wave.

Its tagline was explaining what was about to happen:

the medium is the message

Baby boomers took over the streets.
They united for the cause of a world seen on TV.

McLuhan states in the first chapter:

it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action

Scale and form echo the height and shape of a distribution;
which allocates knowledge, then wealth and subsequently power.
Human association and action echo an organization and its protocol.
They snowball in the quote order from a controlling communication medium.
Polarization between control and actions caused uprisings.
Social movements could be reduced to a scary and mechanical adjustment.
Mass communication drives mass dissent and consent.

The following corollary expressed by McLuhan:

The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

stresses that people agglutinate whatever TV is saying.
Profits agglutinated, too.
The message was always designed to be broadcasted.
The rich and the poor have been segregated by communication structures.

The medium is the message is Conway's law in computer science.
Both theorists were observing the same phenomenon:
outward in McLuhan case with the medium as an extension of ourselves;
inward, as a communication constraint, in Conway case.
They both reckon the structured message and its structuring causality.
Dynamics seem to diverge from the same impulse and eventually agree.
McLuhan is observing the conquering effect of mass media.
Conway sees the forces of communication at play in delimited committees.
They are protected from overwhelming influence contrary to an audience.
McLuhan sees communication's effect on organization, Conway on systems.
Organizations and systems are not different from rules defining them.
Communication determines an influential protocol's shape in any context.
Messages carry power, payloads and resources scaled by the medium.
Distribution channels depend on communication design.

Purposeful Architecture

d. power of a medium

McLuhan attributes a power to the medium throughout History:

Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.

He is implicitly referencing a breakthrough invention a century earlier.
The democratization of the printing press is indeed an inflection point.
People could start to pick books and think for themselves.
The diffusion of print within a language borders homogenized thinking.
Shared mentalities created a national unity felt deep within individuals.
It was the beginning of the end for split provinces of the feudal system.
The concept of a nation was born within a language; borders came second.
Latin kept the Roman Empire together.
The medium is the message; content does not matter to social patterns.
Society is framed as an organization by communication structures.
Design teams had been tasked to architect the formal financial system.

Let us apply to this task the practical stance of Conway in the same paper:

Given any design team organization, there is a class of design alternatives which cannot be effectively pursued by such an organization because the necessary communication paths do not exist.

Votes are framed for consent rather than input.
A society's calls for change do not drive organizational evolution.
Typically, feedback emerges in an independent medium.
It is structurally opposed to the communication direction of management.
Constructive public opinions are even counterproductive.
The formal decision making process opposes interference.
Leaders tend to turn a deaf ear by design.
Consultations can be initiated.
But the need for that consultation occurs elsewhere.
Protocols do not integrate outsiders.
A central governance acting in good faith;
a wise business run by strong people;
a teal organization without servant leaders;
or a foundation delegating decisions in a hierarchy:
rule over the same type of inefficiency.
They reproduce biased patterns in a vision impacting choiceless subjects.

Decentralization left outside management is a carnival parade:
like democracy in an authoritarian regime.
Abominable or inactive voting alternatives impose the instigator's choice.
Exclusive power forges consent in impotence.
You cannot offer your own power unless you cut heads and pooled profits.
Needless to say that this is not going to happen.
Power structures get both the first and the last word.
We find greater abundance where power would be distributed by design.
Adaptive resource management cultivates sources of wealth.
Decentralized ledgers are a good example.
A blockchain is a common pool resource of computing power.
Anyone can own a part, and so, increase its power and improve management.
We can achieve more, together.
To this end, the peer-to-peer network appears as a liberating structure.
Distributed information shapes a new form of power and human association.

We will dig deeper after we review internal change in the next chapter.
We will see how power separation can achieve decentralized management.