Don't anthropomorphize big tech companies

fwlr

The author cautions against anthropomorphising companies, then immediately admits humans are hardwired to do this, but doesn’t really offer a workaround for the hardwiring. Later on, the author also cautions against not anthropomorphising companies enough , as well. We end up receiving a confusing message: “Avoid this hard-to-avoid mistake, but don’t avoid it too hard”. I think I have a helpful suggestion here. You should think of the company as an egregore, as described in the second half of https://ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/ [Companies] may perhaps be best understood, by our peculiarly constructed human minds, with reference to egregores - autonomous psychic entities made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. [Egregores] are powerful entities, even as they are imaginary - wholly created by and consisting of thoughts, speech, and behaviors. … These entities vary in how demanding they are [of] their component humans. They also vary [in] what they are able to get out of their humans in terms of productivity. A smart entity would keep its component humans in the zone of maximum productivity, not demanding too much from them, nor allowing them to slack off (producing nothing for the glory and amusement of the egregore and anyway perhaps feeling bored and useless). … A smart entity would alter its demands to maximize productivity, just as a smart virus wouldn't kill its host quickly. But many viruses do kill quickly (especially newly-evolved ones) … Just as newly-mutated viruses are not "smart" in the sense of having virulence-moderating features, [egregores] have not all had time to evolve features to moderate their demands. … The concrete and cubicles of [a company] are the physical signs of a powerful entity at work in the human world, but not precisely directed by any coherent, recognizable sort of human agency. If we posit the missing agency as a kind of group-psychological entity, not acting through supernatural processes but wholly through natural ones, composed of but not a simple function of human minds, we might hope to understand some of these entities, our evolutionary partners, in a characteristically human way, one that we are especially good at thinking about. Positing egregoric entities … is a suspicious move that tends to meet with opposition … [talking about companies this way] meets with objections to speak of them as having their own natures and behaviors (and perhaps even agency) separately analyzable from that of their component humans. … [A] reason to project agency onto nonhuman egregoric entities … is that it gives them appropriately creepy connotations, so that we may look at them as alien things, so that we may have fresh eyes and be better anthropologists from Mars. … [It] is an interesting and very human-scale project, to ask what this kind of entity [desires], how it sustains itself, how it dies.