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After Hierarchy

· 6 min read
Dreamineering
Dreamineering
Engineer the Dream, Dream the Engineering

Hierarchy was never about organising people. It was always about routing information. That problem just got solved.

The Router Problem​

Think about what a middle manager actually does. They take information from the people below them and pass it up. They take decisions from above and pass them down. They schedule meetings so information can move sideways. They write status reports. They manage inboxes so nothing falls through.

That is not leadership. That is routing.

In the 20th century, humans were the cheapest available routers. So organisations were built around them. The org chart is a routing map — who handles information from whom. Hierarchy was not a statement about human worth or ability. It was an engineering solution to a communications problem.

The cost was real. Every message that passed through a human layer also passed through human attention, human mood, human politics. The signal degraded. Decision fatigue accumulated at every node. The further from the source, the more noise.

Nobody complained too loudly. There was no better option.

The Unix Lesson​

In 1969, a small team at Bell Labs built something that would quietly change the world. Their operating system had one unusual rule: programs should do one thing and do it well. Not one program that does everything. Many small programs, each with one clear job, connected by clean interfaces.

A pipe let you feed the output of one program directly into another. A dozen small tools could combine into a system that none of them could build alone.

The Art of Unix Programming calls it: "Rule of Modularity — Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces."

This principle — call it unixification — became the standard beneath the internet. Email servers, web browsers, payment gateways, search engines. All of them: small parts, stable interfaces, composable into larger systems. No single company owns the whole stack. Anyone can build a piece. If the interface is standard, the piece fits.

The reason the internet compounded into something nobody planned: open standards. Nobody owns the rules. Everyone builds on the same floor.

Gall's Law explains why this works: a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Complexity built on messy foundations collapses under its own weight. Complexity built from composable parts survives.

The Phygital Leap​

That principle is now escaping software into the physical world.

Your thermostat reports temperature. Your car reports its location. A solar panel on a rooftop reports how much it generated, at what time, for whom. A robot arm on a factory floor reports the torque it applied. A sensor on a shipping container reports whether it was dropped.

Everything physical is becoming legible to software. Not someday. Now.

When these devices talk through open protocols, coordination scales. Energy grids route power to where it is cheapest. Supply chains reroute automatically when a port delays. Ambulances move faster because traffic lights have already cleared the path.

This is the phygital world: physical infrastructure made digital, digital intelligence made physical.

The hardware layer that makes this possible — communities deploying sensors, routers, energy nodes — runs on protocols that verify output and distribute value back to contributors. This is DePIN in practice. The same principle that let Linux eat proprietary operating systems is now running on physical infrastructure.

The question is not whether this world will arrive. It is who owns the interfaces when it does.

Open standard: any device that meets the spec participates. The value flows to the network.

Proprietary standard: every device must be certified, licensed, and taxed. The value flows to the platform owner.

History shows which one compounds.

Hierarchy to Meaning​

When machines handle information routing better than humans, something shifts.

The manager who spent their day forwarding emails, summarising reports, and translating strategy into tasks — that role was mostly routing. When the routing layer becomes software, the question is not "what do we do with all these managers?" The question is: what were those people actually capable of that the routing was hiding?

Judgment. Relationships. Values. The ability to sense that something is wrong before the data confirms it. The ability to hold two people in conflict and find the third path. The ability to ask — why are we doing this at all?

None of that routes through email.

Agency is not something you train for. It is something you develop by having to exercise it. Hierarchy outsourced too many decisions upward and left too many people moving information through their hands without ever being asked what they thought about it.

When the routing is automated, the question opens: what is your actual contribution?

The Coordination Game​

Life has always been a coordination game. The industrial era's answer was hierarchy. Assign someone to route the information. Call them a manager. Build the org chart. Run the reports.

That answer worked at a specific scale, in a specific information environment. It made coordination possible when the alternative was chaos.

But it confused the routing mechanism with the purpose. The purpose was never to route information. The purpose was always to do something meaningful together.

The question the industrial era could not quite ask — because the coordination costs were too high — opens up now: who are the right people to coordinate with, and around what?

Not "who is in my department." Not "who is on my floor." Who shares your values, your judgment, your sense of what matters? Who has the complementary capability that makes the work possible?

The tight crew built around meaningful endeavour has always been the unit of real work. The hierarchy was the scaffolding. The scaffolding is coming down.

When loops compound around a shared purpose — try, fail, learn, improve, belong — the output is not just work. It is identity. People who know what they are doing and why, and can teach it to the next person.

The decision maze does not get simpler. It gets navigable when you have the right instruments and the right crew.

Build or Rent​

The phygital world is being built right now. The interfaces are being set. The standards are being chosen.

Two paths.

One: a small number of companies own the interfaces between your devices and the world. Your car talks to their cloud. Your home talks to their platform. Your health data moves through their API. You pay rent on every transaction. You cannot inspect the routing table. You cannot change the rules. You participate on their terms.

Two: open standards define the interfaces. Any device that meets the standard participates. Any developer can build on the protocol. The value flows to the network. The invisible layer — shared protocols, shared verification, shared composability — connects everything without anyone owning it.

The Mycelium describes this underground: the mushroom caps are visible, the ventures and services and applications. What connects them is infrastructure nobody owns. That is the model.

The history of standards is simple. Open compounds. Proprietary extracts. The question is whether you are building the rails or paying rent on someone else's.

That is not a technical question. It is a values question.

The game has always been about who you are and what you are trying to do together. The Greatest Game asks what kind of game is worth playing.

Context​

Questions​

If routing becomes automatic, what is your actual contribution?

  • Which interfaces in your work are still proprietary — and who benefits from keeping them closed?
  • If you stopped managing information and started coordinating around meaning, what would change first?
  • What would a unix layer look like for the most important coordination problem in your life?
  • When the scaffolding comes down, what was the building actually for?