The OSS Sabotage Manual Became Corporate Best Practice

cyb0rg0

The most effective way to destroy an organization is to make it more bureaucratic.

theologan

Matches my experience at megacorps.

stirfish

>What if AI could fill all those gaps, handling mechanical compliance while we focus on the human work? Idk boss, the perceptron said there weren't any bugs so I shipped it

andrewflnr

Lede buried, naturally. > AI is unlike any technology we've built before. Every previous tool required us to conform to its specifications, to translate our messy human processes into rigid machine logic. AI does the opposite. It adapts to us. It becomes what I call a "fuzzy interface"—capable of understanding intent rather than requiring perfect syntax, of bridging incompatible systems without forcing standardization. > Think about what this means. All those bureaucratic layers, those translation tasks, those forms and processes, and approval chains—they exist because humans needed interfaces between other humans and systems. What if we didn't? What if AI could fill all those gaps, handling mechanical compliance while we focus on the human work? Somehow I don't see this working out. The problem is communication between humans. AI "communication" makes a mockery of this process.

7e

If anything AI requires more bureaucracy because it’s more unreliable than humans are. Overall, this post makes very little sense.

roenxi

I've never seen any evidence that the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is actually effective as opposed to just propaganda and an effort to try something. > During the Nazi occupation, Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the vice president of French automaker Citroën, understood this perfectly. He instructed his foremen... You can see a huge gap in the one example and the "refer things to committees" approach that often gets quoted. Power sits with management, and if management want the job done badly they just tell their people to muck the job up. I doubt this fellow needed a guidebook or that its advice would be useful to him.

tananaev

Excellent article. I agree with a lot of points. One think that wasn't mentioned is globalization and bailouts. Companies are getting bigger and more concentrated than ever before. And we bail them out when they fail due inefficiencies. There's no purge in the cycle. And all technological gains are eaten by bureaucratic inefficiencies. I want to believe AI is the solution, but it's far from certain.