DAOs have reached a Zeitgeist moment on Twitter. DAOs' ambition, to displace the traditional corporation, has right received much controversy and attention. What is less discussed, however, is the impact that DAOs will have on culture and how we socially orient ourselves. I learned early in my career that the corporation, or any human organization for that matter, is much more than discerning the correct course of action and executing on it. For example, telling one’s co-workers that they’re wrong is rarely as simple as telling them that they’re wrong. I tried exactly that and ended up leaving the company within three months as a result.
There’s a multitude of social games that take we have to be cognizant of as we go about our daily work and socialize with our co-workers outside of it. What’s clear is that the modern corporation requires a lot of 'fuzzy' decision-making and internal politics that cannot be easily reflected in a programmable contract. The success of DAOs will depend on rethinking the social games we play today and providing a meaningful context for new ones to be created. That, however, is a big topic for another today. For now, let us dive deep into the modern workplace so that we may better understand what may change, and what may stay the same, as the world shifts increasingly online.
Let us level-set on the social impact of corporations today and understand the role they play in our social life. To do that I’ve provided eight links (hover of the headers of each section) to books and articles that build off of each other and show the evolution of class and culture over the past fifty years. The story starts with the collapsing influence of the Church and Protestant Ethic and ends with the social impact of everyone being driven online by the COVID pandemic.
The Organization Man
This seminal piece on workplace culture was originally written as a management book. He cites the change from the "Protestant Ethic", the idea that salvation is sought through rugged individualism, to the "Social Ethic", where organization men submit to a collectivist ethos of the company.
The Rise of the Creative Class
Written more than 40-years after "The Organization Man", the victory of the Social Ethic morphed into rise of a new class of workers: the Creative Class. In the knowledge economy, successful companies were built on meritocracy and intellectual capital rather than tradition and family names. The necessity of attracting intelligent workers led to the adoption of more Bohemian values in the workplace.
Bobos in Paradise
David Brooks playfully documents how the culture of the elite changed during the rise of the Creative Class. Brooks calls this class the 'Bourgeoise Bohemians', or BoBos. The BoBos became the politically dominant establishment but still possess anxiety about their success that the Protestant elites of the past never did. They engage in complex signaling, indicating that they're successful but also socially conscious and non-materialistic. The social games they play have permeated companies built on their labor and altered how we measure each other.
Gervais Principle Series
A series of six articles written by Venkatesh Rao explaining the social dynamics of the modern workplace through the lens of The Office. He asserts that the workplace can be broken down into three groups: the Losers, the Clueless, and the Sociopaths. The Losers are people who show up to work for the salary and find their meaning elsewhere. The Clueless are the Bobos whose identity is tied to their employer and others' view of their importance. And the Sociopaths are shrewd, intelligent power-seekers. How you communicate with each class of workers determines who far you will go and how successful your career will be.
Theory of 3 Class Ladders
Blogger Michael Church's Theory is that there is not one American social hierarchy, but three. Each is a distinct ladder with four rungs in each. Church expands David Brooks’ theory that class is not defined by income, but by culture. You're either part of the Labor, the Gentry, or the Elite. It’s rare for workers to transition from one ladder to the next. Success is defined by one’s ability to climb the rungs of the ladder they were born on.
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class
Alex Danco combines the Gervais Principle with the Theory of 3 Class to further breakdown what social behavior you’d expect to find in each Ladder.
Michael, Dwight and Andy: The Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class
The important portion of this article is its end, where Alex Danco alludes to the decline of the BoBos, the Gervais Principle, and maybe even the 3 Class Ladders. He speculates the BoBos peaked around 2005 and are in decline. Now, as the Bourgeois once merged with Bohemians, the BoBos are beginning to merge with Online Culture, forming a new class of “Very Online People”. As this group matures, we can expect a new aesthetic to emerge and new social behaviors with it.
How Bobos Broke America
Just last month, David Brooks published a new article in The Atlantic lamenting that the BoBo establishment ended up “breaking America”. He suggests that the pretentiousness of the Creative Class is largely responsible for the growth in political polarization. Brooks says he underestimated how aggressively the BoBos would enforce thought and speech codes, alienating the right. For all of its talk of openness, the BoBos turned out to be incredibly closed. He concludes the only path forward is to dismantle the BoBo class altogether.