good post. since i’m here, i want to expand on a few things:
But effectively, it boils down to the difference between authority as in power over people, and authority as in knowledge.
i recommend using expertise to refer to authority as in knowledge — like you did later in your comment, as Andrewism does — to avoid confusion.
They don’t have the unilateral ability to fire someone (nor does any individual)
no criticism, just expanding:
i think it’s important that someone who is given by a role or responsibility should have a mandate: the role should be specific, and it should be temporary (for an arbitrary amount of time, or till the end of a project) or recallable by a vote.
Graeber notes in something i’ll link below: ‘If something has to be done, then it’s okay to say all right, for the next three hours she’s in charge. There’s nothing wrong with that if everybody agrees to it. Or you improvise.’
Crowdsourced decision making is meant to be for the bigger aspects, stuff like what the end goal of a project should be. Smaller, extremely specialized aspects should get handled by those best equipped for it, that’s not a hierarchy.
in Kurdistan, this is the difference between technical decisions and the political (‘moral’) decisions[1]. it’s the difference between ‘when should we have our next meeting?’ and ‘should we be nonviolent?’.
technical decisions are low-impact; operational or logistical.
political decisions are high-impact, with broad social implications.
the political decisions are consensus decisions, of at least 1/3 of the group. these are vetoäble by anyone affected who wasn’t present for the vote.
the technical decisions are 2/3 or 3/4 majority votes, of the minimum affected people.
tho, as Graeber notes:
And then of course, obviously the question is who gets to decide what’s a moral question and what’s the technical one? So somebody might say, “Well, the question of [when to meet] bears on disabled people, and that’s a moral question.” So that becomes a little bit of a political football. There’s always things to debate and points of tension.
good post. since i’m here, i want to expand on a few things:
i recommend using expertise to refer to authority as in knowledge — like you did later in your comment, as Andrewism does — to avoid confusion.
no criticism, just expanding:
i think it’s important that someone who is given by a role or responsibility should have a mandate: the role should be specific, and it should be temporary (for an arbitrary amount of time, or till the end of a project) or recallable by a vote.
Graeber notes in something i’ll link below: ‘If something has to be done, then it’s okay to say all right, for the next three hours she’s in charge. There’s nothing wrong with that if everybody agrees to it. Or you improvise.’
in Kurdistan, this is the difference between technical decisions and the political (‘moral’) decisions[1]. it’s the difference between ‘when should we have our next meeting?’ and ‘should we be nonviolent?’.
the political decisions are consensus decisions, of at least 1/3 of the group. these are vetoäble by anyone affected who wasn’t present for the vote.
the technical decisions are 2/3 or 3/4 majority votes, of the minimum affected people.
tho, as Graeber notes:
only partially related, but this discusssion reminded me of an essay on the myth that
management == efficiency: David Harvey, anarchism, and tightly-coupled systems