The Simulated Organization
Selection from: Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of the Modern Organization
The following is an edited selection from my short book Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of the Modern Organization, available through Amazon. It is a continuation of the selection posted as Identity, Culture, and Transition.
A Simulated Consumer World
In another place, Jean Baudrillard writes about this as a world of simulation. Instead of purchasing a real product, like an expresso machine or electric bicycle, we buy into a simulated world of ideas. Today, we consume social expectations. Through social media, we are taught who to believe, who to vote for, and, even more importantly who to hate and resist. We are purchasing a simulated reality. How do we know this?
There is no direct relationship or outcome from our participation. It all remains on the screen and in the cloud as data that defines who we are. These simulations are designed to attract us the same way a sports shirt or the latest craft beer does.
They are representations of persons that we have been led to believe are us.
Baudrillard describes this simulated world this way.
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign (fake) to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."
Baudrillard is not a simple writer. To make sense of this, he is making a distinction about the difference between pretending and simulating. We dress up at Halloween to pretend to be a superhero or some character that we know we are not. To simulate on the other hand is to believe we are something that we are not. The culture of the hegemon is a simulation. It is not a place where we are our real selves. We portray ourselves in a manner that simulates something attractive to us. We are actors where the character we play becomes more real and attractive than we believe ourselves to actually be.
This global monoculture is the culture of our screens. It is a culture of simulated identification. It is a celebrity-influenced culture. Their opinions and endorsements matter because ... because... they are celebrities. They are celebrities because ...they are marketed that way. Their online and onstage persona may or may not be real. We don’t know. I’m not sure we really care. We like the image. This celebrity consumer culture follows the insight that Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist gave that,"...the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake." This world of simulated reality is primarily acquired through images on our screens.
French writer, Guy Debord, writing before the advent of social media, described this culture of simulation as a spectacle. He wrote,
“...all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. ... The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”This is why we may feel at the same time a strong draw to participate in the culture of social media and feel a strange alienation in the connection to all those people and topics.
Welcome to The Borg
A constant process of change has been with us for a long time. We have moved from being industrial producers to purchasers of consumer products. The next stage emerged as social media turned us into brand ambassadors for social media memes which may or may not have any direct connection to our lives.
It is why organizational titles matter so much in the marketing of products and services. A title defines our role in the hegemonic culture. It subjects us to the role we play (simulate) at home and at work. It marginalizes our own distinct voice. We become agents of a hegemonic culture where we are held hostage.
Where we are today in our social media-saturated world reminds me of Alice Krige’s portrayal of the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact. This is a film, produced in the mid-1990s, that illustrates the hegemon that Baudrillard describes. In the film, the purpose of the Borg is to assimilate every being into a collective consciousness. It requires the elimination of individuality. As the dominant personality of the hive, Krige, the Queen, converses with Data, the cyborg from the Enterprise.
The end game is to assimilate Data into the Borg. She tells him, “I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many... I bring order to chaos. I am the Borg. I am the collective.” As she speaks to Data about the importance of evolving, he says, “The Borgdoes not evolve. It conquers.” She responds, “I am assimilating other beings into our collective. We are bringing them closer to perfection.”
She would be the perfect politician for our world today. Our hegemonic consumer culture is very similar. In the chaos and complexity of the world we live in, we long for safety and order. Social media platforms serve to assimilate us into a global collective mind. Free speech is not safe speech, and safe speech is not free speech.
The hegemonic nature of social media provides a simulated order of safety. It only requires our assimilation into its simulated reality. But it is not safe. It requires each of us to constantly self-monitor, self-censor, and self-correct what we think and wish to say. It is not safe because the violence is with us.
We are in conflict between our imitated selves and our real selves. Both want the same thing, an authentic life, but both cannot have it at the same time. As a result, we have to make decisions about whether to accept the simulation or to reject it for a more alienated, yet authentic life, away from the screen. We are not allowed to be honest about this conflict. The pull of social media is to conform, to assimilate, and to become who the culture demands that we become. We must do violence to ourselves in order to assimilate into the hegemon of the consumer society of social media. The choice is to assimilate or be canceled.
Organizations in Transition
This is how we have lost the capacity to see below the surface of things. If we could, we would see that those who lead global organizations are subjects of their own hegemonic reality. They are held hostage to a belief that their world stands apart from time. Yet, time has caught up with them as the capacity for globally centralized institutions to control the course of human history is slipping through their fingers. The world of organizations is in transition. It is being played out in the response to the COVID-19 viral pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide. The inadequacy and inconsistency of their response demonstrate that there is no absolute solution that can be applied to everyone, everywhere, all the time.
It is not a solution at all. Instead, it is a simulated reality. They operate like the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz creating a simulated reality of fear and assimilation. As these events have unfolded, we see that they do not have absolute control over global public health or civic safety. They cannot promise or guarantee safe streets in our cities, or a viral pandemic-free world. They promise, but cannot deliver. We are witnessing the breaking of organizations as indicators of the transitions our world is experiencing.
Paraphrasing the words of Baudrillard, they have created a simulation of control, feigning to be capable of giving us what they cannot provide. How can we know this to be a simulation? There is no accountability for their performance. The simulation remains, just like the hegemonic culture remains. Evidence that the world of organizations is in transition can also be seen in how state and local governments have managed the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, they imposed social orders of sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and the wearing of facemasks. It was a clear statement that they did not trust their constituents to act responsibly.
Second, in many municipalities, local governments treated these social orders as legal prosecutable offenses worthy of heavy fines and imprisonment. A choice was made to exert control rather than collaboration with the effect being the loss of trust and economic hardship or closure to many small businesses. The time when people would automatically trust institutions and their leaders is over. Even cracks in the edifice of social media are showing. For many people, it is not a happy, safe place.
Its hegemonic nature means that it is not an open place for interaction. Rather, it is a Borg-like culture formed to assimilate people into a common mono-culture. Restoring the master/slave relationship is an act of desperation. It tells us that there remains a belief that populations are to be controlled instead of led. It is a troubling realization.
We need to look below the surface, and beyond the horizon of the present time to understand what kind of future we want for ourselves, our families, our businesses, and our communities. Russian novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the foremost chronicler of the master/slave relationship in the 20thcentury, gave voice to what this means through one of his characters.
“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power–he’s free again.”
These leaders, who reflect this master/slave mindset, are mistaken. They believe that they are immune to criticism and are beyond accountability for their actions. When leadership is a titled role in an organizational structure, domination is a logical response in a time of crisis. A crisis is symbolic of a loss of control, a loss of order, and a loss of credibility. If their role is to establish world order, and I’m not convinced that it is, they have failed to do so. If they are truly in control, then they are responsible for creating the chaos which justifies the implementation of social orders. In the end, this old structural design of control has become broken and fragmented.
Eighteen months later, the pandemic is over for the time being, but conditions in the world are worse. If you want to understand the depth of what has transpired, there are many writers on Substack who are focused on presenting this dramatic, multi-faceted story.
My interest is different. I see that once situations deteriorate, we need people who are prepared to step in and take care of their local communities. The chat sessions that I’ll host for paid subscribers will explore this opportunity for us all.