Starfish Is/Are Singular and Plural, Part 2

Decentralization alone is not enough. Here's what else we need.

This essay is a continuation of Part 1, which was published on February 5, 2023, and introduced the premise of The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, a book written by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom in 2006. As I point out in that essay, some of its examples have not withstood the test of time. I wonder: what really makes an organization “unstoppable”?

Decentralization is a hot topic these days, understandably so. The centralized organizations that have been the “bedrock of our democracy” — to use a phrase that reeks of propaganda — are now riddled with corruption, and those who are fighting for less corruptible systems believe that decentralization is the answer.

So far, the score is tied 1 to 1, Starfish vs. Spiders. Let’s take a look at a few more examples, to identify what an organization’s survival and integrity really depend on.

Brafman and Beckstrom spend quite a bit of time gushing over Wikipedia, which in 2006 was gush-worthy. They see it as a shining example of a starfish organization — non-local, collaborative, maintained and “policed” by “ordinary users just like us.”

They write:

“Like concerned and thoughtful neighbors, members of the Wikipedia community care enough to contribute regularly and are mindful to keep the content accurate.”

In 2000, Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, was working as the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that used laborious methods of peer review to publish articles, when he came across a new technology called a “wiki” (derived from the Hawaiian word for “quick”).

Using that technology, the process of creating articles accelerated and took off. Within five years, Wikipedia had more than a million entries in English — one of the 200 languages available — and had become a trusted source of information on just about everything. It’s no wonder Brafman and Beckstrom were in awe of it in 2006 — it was at its apex. Or so says Sanger.

According to an interview Sanger gave in 2022, Wikipedia in 2006 was just starting to drift from its fundamental principles, which state: “[It is] an encyclopedia… not a soap box… written from a neutral point of view (NPOV).” Its neutrality has been gradually, inexorably eroded, such that Sanger wrote an article in 2021 blasting his creation, entitled, “Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever.”

His explanation for the NPOV drift is telling. At its inception, Wikipedia was a bottom-up, open source, wisdom-of-the-crowd sort of place, where individual entries didn’t really gain the attention of the masses. Most people didn’t care what was written about them. But as it quickly grew into the largest, most read reference source in history, entries suddenly mattered. A lot.

Individuals and organizations with the means to do so paid others to figure out how to play the Wikipedia game, spawning an entire sub-category of PR businesses that specialized in sanitizing entries. Corporations, public figures, and governments, as well as criminal operations and spies, all quietly made sure that Wikipedia said what they wanted it to say. According to Sanger, a number of edits were tracked to Langley, VA. Is anyone surprised?

By 2015, the establishment had taken over. What started as a free-moving starfish was co-opted and paralyzed, no longer an expression of the wisdom of the crowd but rather the opinions of the elite.

Sadly, Wikipedia is yet another example that flouts the book’s premise that decentralized organizations are harder to take down or control than centralized, hierarchical ones.

I’m not thrilled to post the score here, folks:

Spiders = 2
Starfish = 1

But before I speculate or draw conclusions, let’s look at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

AA is an organization I’m guessing needs very little introduction. Bill Wilson (Bill W.) started it with the help of Robert Smith in 1935, and it now has over two million estimated members worldwide.

One piece of AA’s history bears mentioning. The organization grew steadily but slowly until March 1, 1941, when The Saturday Evening Post published an article about the movement; after that article, AA took off. I’ll return to this nugget later.

AA is a starfish poster child: no one is in charge and no one owns it; there’s no application; anyone can join or lead; sponsors lead by example, not coercion (like the Apache Nant’ans I mention in Part 1); if you relapse you’re always welcome back; information is freely shared; the organization is self-funded (it is a non-profit that depends on donations and on the revenue from books and literature Bill W. and others have written); and groups come and go without affecting the whole.

Throughout the past 88 years, AA has chugged along beautifully. Would it still be, if Bill W. had made a different choice? When AA started to succeed, and people clamored to start their own chapters, he had to decide whether to retain control of the brand and manage it, spider-like, or allow each chapter to “govern” itself. It’s highly likely that his decision to decentralize AA has been critical to its longevity.

So AA ties it up:

Spiders = 2
Starfish = 2

I know that drawing conclusions on such a puny sample cannot be definitive in any way, and I’m not hatin’ on decentralization — far from it. I actually think it’s the path we desperately need to take as a human species.

However, I think the example of Wikipedia alone demonstrates that decentralization is not the singular, quintessential recipe for resilience Brafman and Beckstrom believed it would be, as they looked forward from 2006. Time has proven that decentralization and organizational resilience are more complicated and nuanced than that.

Now seems a good time to pause and speculate: what do the Apaches and AA have in common? What do Napster and Wikipedia have in common? (See Part 1 for Napster and the Apaches.)

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All four started out with starfish dreams, did they not? All decentralized, all open-sourced, all amorphous and flexible. Each one checks almost all of the criteria boxes listed in Part 1 for a starfish organization.

In my early thinking on all this, I thought that what sets the Apaches and AA apart from the other two is a deeply held, shared commitment to a moral or spiritual purpose. I still believe that’s true. Both of them share that common denominator.

And it’s true that the other two, Napster and Wikipedia, while based on fine, democratic ideals — making music or information freely available to all — aren’t rooted in a belief in a higher power.

But is that really the defining difference? In writing this second part, I wanted to find out… so I went back and looked at two other examples in the book, Burning Man and Craigslist, to understand what else is at work. It was then that something started to click.

Burning Man, the annual, participative, temporary event held in the Nevada desert, is classically decentralized and has always been so. It may not be rooted in an overtly spiritual or moral purpose, but it IS passionately committed to its “10 Principles,” two of which are “gifting” and “decommodification.”

Having grown in popularity every year since its inception in 1986, Burning Man has also become something of a status symbol — which is why savvy cottage industries have glommed on to the event, by creating uber-expensive housing options: “‘turnkey’ or ‘plug-and-play’ camps offering luxury and glamour for the super-rich or Insta-famous has become a source of tension at Black Rock City,” wrote the BBC in 2019.

According to organizers of the event, wealthy participants have, in the past few years, attempted to exploit the core experience of the event with “commercial photo shoots, product placements, or Instagram posts thanking ‘friends’ for a useful item.”

Burning Man is actively resisting these encroachments of commodification, all of which go against its 10 Principles, but it’s not easy when your product attracts the “in” crowd.

Which brings me to its polar opposite: Craigslist.

Part starfish, part spider, Craigslist is a sort of hybrid. Here’s the spider part: it’s centrally owned by two guys, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, neither of whom seems profit-motivated, an attitude borne out by their relative indifference to a 27% drop in revenue in 2019. (Keep in mind it dropped from $1B to an estimated $600M, so no tears are warranted.)

Now here’s the starfish part: Craig and Jim created the business to be a public service. “Some things should be about money, some shouldn't,” says Craig, supporting the company’s mission. The lack of any updating on the website is further evidence; Craigslist looks permanently, frumpily frozen in 1999, the year of its launch.

I believe a few tenets of its mission provide a clue to its longevity:

“Craigslist is about: a humane, non-commercial environment; keeping things simple, common-sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real; giving a voice to the disenfranchised; and being a collection of communities with similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity.”

Let’s just say it: Craigslist is not sexy. People don’t use the site to get rich, powerful, or famous. They don’t post on Insta about buying a couch on Craigslist. In fact, Craigslist is viewed as “part of the poor people’s Internet.”

And therein lies the key.

Burning Man is far more prey to corruption than Craigslist, even though Burning Man arguably has a more defined moral code, because Craigslist is seen as downscale, while Burning Man has unintentionally become synonymous with influence, success, and prestige.

Power, money, and fame, oh my! These three sirens, the “Triumvirate of Corruption” I’ll call them, are the ultimate influencers. Any organization that pursues or peddles power, money, or fame — even tangentially — is highly susceptible to corruption… no matter whether it’s decentralized or not.

This is why, I think, writing a business book about starfish is inherently problematic. Starfish themselves aren’t out to turn a profit or gain followers, yet how many companies are ho-hum about profit, other than Craigslist? Perhaps few may start out that way, but few are willing to make decisions that adhere to principle at the risk of financial loss — especially when there are boards of directors and/or shareholders involved.

Which are the two most resilient organizations profiled in the book? The Apaches (who didn’t seek to amass wealth, control the world, or be famous) and Alcoholics Anonymous (ditto — it’s even got “anonymous” in the title, for crying out loud.)

And as for power… Remember the factoid I mentioned earlier, that AA didn’t really take off until The Saturday Evening Post published an article about the movement? This is why people want to influence the press; it wields enormous power.

Here’s a handy infographic of the six companies who now own almost all of the media outlets in the U.S. If you’ve never seen this before, please, take a look. It’s astonishing.

Even something as benign as Wikipedia has become corrupted. Sanger said this about Wikipedia,

“the site has betrayed its original intention — to give free access to the sum total of human knowledge.”

Wow. Chew on that for a moment… “the sum total of human knowledge.” Well, if knowledge = power, then is it any wonder that the power-hungry would want to control Wikipedia?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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Recently, some devious insurance agent made approximately $7 in commission by switching my family to a different carrier, then multiplied it a hundred times by pulling the same fraudulent stunt with a hundred other unsuspecting people.

How was she able to do that? Yes, she was cunning and figured out a way to access our personal information. But insurance is also a colossal, centralized business, focused on amassing gobs of money — and thereby ripe for malfeasance.

Ditto: Wall Street and the entire financial industry, as well as Hollywood, the U.S. government, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag… hell, Big ANYthing, the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization… hell, the World ANYthing. They’re all ginormous enterprises, as centralized as they come, and they’re running the show right now.

Clearly, size matters. I’m not going to sit here and say it doesn’t.

The monolith of the music recording industry ultimately did stop Napster and all the other P2P companies that sprang up to replace it. The U.S. government eventually killed Geronimo and the last of the Apaches. Walmart crushed small-town America. Factory farming put thousands upon thousands of family farms out of business. Amazon ruined countless mom-and-pops.

And somehow, the anti-trust laws that were put in place to safeguard us from the destructive power of monopolies just aren’t relevant, folks!

That’s the bad news.

No, wait… there’s just a wee bit more bad news.

Apparently, Rod Beckstrom, half of the team that wrote The Starfish and the Spider, is now the Founder and CEO of BECKSTROM, a consulting company that works with centralized organizations like Morgan Stanley and the World Economic Forum… which is probably why the book proudly displays such a glowing endorsement from Klaus Schwab.

And Ori Brafman, the other half of the authorship team, writes on his website that The Starfish and the Spider influenced “the Pentagon, Cisco Systems, Google, NASA, the Tea Party, and UC Berkeley.” We don’t know how it influenced those organizations, just that it did.

Who knows… perhaps Beckstrom and Brafman have recognized that decentralization alone is not the answer, and decided that GO BIG OR GO HOME is the new business solution du jour. “The Elephant and the Dung Beetle; The Unstoppable Power of Juggernauts” might be their next book, for all I know.

Sorry, I’m just cranky. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not just the Lilliputians who are attempting to learn and deploy the lessons of decentralization; it’s the Gullivers, too.

Okay, now for the good news. Let’s go to the scoreboard.

Starfish gain a full point for Burning Man, and half a point for Craigslist; Spiders get half a point for Craigslist, which puts us at:

Spiders = 2.5
Starfish = 3.5

And it’s Starfish for the highly subjective win!

I understand that may not have cheered you up, so here’s even better news.

As these institutions and corporations grow in power, their potential for depravity also multiplies — there’s a reason the “power corrupts” adage has been around for 150 years. And once corruption riddles an organization, it weakens it exponentially and dooms it to failure. Witness the Catholic Church in “terminal decline” after 2000 years of domination.

I know, I know, 2000 years is a long time to wait. But don’t worry, it’s not going to take that long. There’s a reason the Catholic Church is imploding now, and didn’t 50 years ago. Technology — our relatively recent ability to share information with one another, directly, without intermediaries — is amplifying the truth, brought forth courageously by individual after individual.

There are other brave souls who are working to make sure that truth flows freely, too; after watching what happened to Wikipedia, Sanger is now a champion of decentralization and free speech. He said this in a recent interview:

“The internet used to be built on decentralized networks, where there was no oligarchy in control of everything; there were literally thousands or millions of different servers that were connected together. It was a great flowering of freedom in the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s. And then it started getting locked down.

So what we need to go back to is decentralized networks, where people own their own domains, they own their own data, they own their own social media feeds and they publish their data according to common, shared standards.”

For more of Sanger’s thoughts on decentralization of the Internet, here’s an essay on his website: What Decentralization is Going to Require.

Look, Brafman and Beckstrom were correct — leaderless organizations are more nimble and resilient, especially the ones that have some spiritual DNA. I defy you to name one large institution or corporation from that list up above that fits that description — or is willing to transform itself into something that does. Can you imagine Bezos or Gates or Schwab stepping down to make way for a flat, leaderless model? Or turning their organizations into non-profits, designed only to serve the public?

This is where we have the advantage. We’ve seen what inspires true resilience, and we can ensure that whatever we create has all the qualities of the most enduring decentralized systems from its inception.

The Quakers are a marvelous example. They are very much a starfish of decentralization, coupled with moral intention, shared principles, and a focus on serving humanity. There are only 380,000 Quakers in the world, yet their network is strong and has lasted since 1650s.

Another starfish is the Amish. Since the early 1700s, they have continued to thrive not just through decentralization, but by living their core beliefs: humility, family, community, respect for tradition, and separation from worldly “advancement.”

I don’t think I’m cut out to be Amish, but I admire them deeply. They are independent, committed to their faith, and they have chosen to live in accordance with their principles rather than in service of their comfort. It’s a far cry from the cushy-but-controlled world most of us inhabit.

I’m fed up with this world. I’ve had it with “experts” telling me what to think, or what’s okay to say and what isn’t, or what’s safe and what isn’t; I’m weary of billionaires thinking that because they figured out how to game the system they now are “qualified” to make up new rules.

I don’t want CBDCs or social credit or chatGPT or AI, or “content moderation” that is really just censorship, or drug “solutions” that cause hideous side effects like suicidal ideation, or tech “solutions” that are going to make a mega-multi-gajillionaires out of more pimply-faced 19-year-olds.

I want simplicity. I want integrity. I want freedom. Do you, too?

The beauty of all this is, none of us has to wait for the current system to collapse under the weight of its own corruption to begin experiencing all of those things. Plenty of smart people are providing roadmaps: Catherine Austin Fitts is a great resource, as is Paul Kingsnorth and his

The Abbey of Misrule

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Rev Katie Grace

, a proponent of decentralization who writes Solace for Sensitive Souls, and who returned my attention to the Amish with her lovely essay, Frolic Like the Amish; offers a beautiful vision for the task ahead. She wrote in the comments of Part 1:

“I’ve been thinking and writing about parallel societies a lot lately, pondering personal sovereignty and learning practical ways to decouple from corrupt systemic entanglements.

I envision faith based parallel societies proliferating and prospering. One by one, as we exit the matrix and build our own society, we render the broken down system obsolete.”

I think that’s what the Gullivers are most afraid of: irrelevance. Yuval Harari said it himself, “in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.”

Like the starfish, each of us has access to a regenerative power to bounce back from anything and make ourselves whole again. It is that divinely-originated power that makes every human being eternally relevant, a power that is amplified when we join with others to act as one community.

In that way, we are both individuals and a collective — just as the starfish is singular and the starfish are plural.

Imagine what we could accomplish if everyone on this planet knew that? Really knew it? Now that’s unstoppable.

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Thank you for joining with me and The Art of Freedom.

A special shout-out to subscriber “sojourner” for her helpful comment about the Quakers. Thanks!

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As always, keep your light shining bright.

xox
Mary

P.S. I’ll leave you with a minute of magical baby starfish miracles: