A Scrotum for Eggheads
This hypothesis can either serve as a continuation of the previous one or stand entirely on its own. It all depends on whether we assume “intelligent design” behind the process in question, or not.
If this mechanism arose on its own, out of the evolution of the “corporate spirit,” habitual embezzlement, and herd instinct, then I’m simply continuing to develop the previous hypothesis. But if this scheme was dreamed up by the sharpest minds among the corporation’s top managers, that’s an entirely different hypothesis. Naturally, the more “intelligent design” there is in a hypothesis, the stronger its conspiratorial undertone.
Lately our world has been experiencing quite serious problems with invention and science. These problems are very numerous. To describe them all, I’d have to talk nonstop for at least a week.
All these problems have a single cause — corporate culture, understood as broadly as possible. An inventor suffocates inside a corporation. An inventor wants to invent and develop, not seek the approval of bosses and coworkers.
Every attempt to breed a special, corporate-native inventor has come to nothing. Today it’s standard for the huge, stuffy open-plan offices of the IT giants to handle nothing but routine work. Everything interesting and fresh gets outsourced to small creative groups.
Such groups very often assemble for a single project and scatter once it’s finished. I myself spent almost my entire life serving as the core and seed of exactly this kind of group.
I myself was usually on a company’s payroll, drawing a salary. I’d listen to the managers’ explanations, write the technical specification, and design the product’s architecture. After that, I’d assemble a tiny team to build it.
Every major project I ever delivered was built by a team of two to five people. Meanwhile, for instance, the Seoul office of the last company I worked for permanently housed around a hundred programmers. What exactly they did there, I find hard to say. They were paid very little, and the managers treated them with no respect whatsoever.
The tendency to move creative employees outside the corporate body has existed for a long time, and today it has gone very far indeed. A programmer I know called these remote-working, “outboard departments” of large corporations “scrotums for eggheads.”
The human body’s temperature is too high for sperm. That’s why the testicles are relocated outside the organism, into a special sac dangling between the legs. In the same way, rational companies let the actual product developers live and work outside an office atmosphere that’s toxic to them.
Unfortunately, this arrangement doesn’t solve all the problems. First, in this setup it still falls to the managers to “come up with the product.” Synergistic “angels,” whose creativity doesn’t much exceed that of a cabbage field.
It’s fine if a company has spontaneously produced, out of corridor whispers and corporate drinking, a “dark angel” like my friend, who sells interesting ideas to his synergistic coworkers. But what if that hasn’t happened? What then?
A bright, fresh product can run into trouble not only at the start but also at the end of its development. Remember how many years Xerox kept the components of the modern personal computer sitting in a storeroom before Steve Jobs pulled them out?
Today the situation has only gotten worse. Time and again, a fascinating product that had large sums spent on its development simply never reaches the consumer. Say, of twenty large-scale commercial applications I personally wrote, only seven made it into service. The rest were “swallowed” by the client. That is, the product kept getting planned for launch, planned some more, and never quite got planned into existence.
It’s intuitively clear that any corporation that solves these management problems will gain a colossal competitive advantage. But how do you set that up?
For instance, you could allot a piece of land to a particularly active developer, give him an unconditional income, and keep half an eye on whatever he quietly brings forth on that land by himself. Successful technologies could then be bought from him, as an old acquaintance, at a discount.
As soon as I’d finished my first setup on the island, a wealthy entrepreneur reached out to me anonymously. He asked to be kept informed of my work and made a one-time payment for it in cryptocurrency. Later on, I sold him several of my new technologies at a price well below market.
This entrepreneur’s ties to that same Korean company showed through clearly enough. That, in fact, is precisely why I sold him the technologies so cheaply.
Stas Rybkin: Here’s a question that’s come up for me. As I understand it, the contract included a non-disclosure clause covering everything you’ve just told me?
Oleg Batygin: That’s correct.
Stas Rybkin: Won’t you run into trouble once I publish this?
Oleg Batygin: Legally, I’m within my rights. Two months ago the payments from the Korean company stopped. No explanation followed. My letter to them went unanswered. In other words, they silently tore up the contract unilaterally, which means nothing binds me anymore. Still, I’d recommend that you be careful.
Stas Rybkin: You think the company might come after me?
Oleg Batygin: You see, here’s the thing… It seems to me that any large modern company resembles a kind of slime mold. That is, a mobile, amorphous mass with no central nervous system. And yet, within that mass, quite complex informational signals do propagate, following a fairly peculiar logic.
Tendencies govern the system. And even though the contract has been torn up, and the rational danger of disclosure apparently no longer applies, the tendency toward keeping information contained may well continue to exist and operate.
In your place, I’d edit the video here, post it online straight from our island, and wait it out here for no less than a couple of weeks after publishing.
You need to understand that we’re dealing with a system whose nature we don’t understand. Our corporate hypotheses are only hypotheses. Once I’ve told you more, you’ll see these hypotheses explain far from everything. You-Know-Who protects those who protect themselves.
On the island there’s free housing, food, the sea, the forest. Stay with us a month or so. It’s good here.
Stas Rybkin: Thank you so much for the warning and the invitation, but unfortunately I’m bound by several contracts. I’ll have to sail back to the mainland the day after tomorrow.
Oleg Batygin: Tomorrow morning I promised you a tour of the island, and tomorrow evening we’ll throw you a party with African dancing and other festivities. So you have time to think it over. On this island, you’re perfectly safe.
I’ve coexisted with this system for a long time now, and I’ve learned to sense its movements coming. Right now my instinct tells me you’re safe on the island. Beyond it… I don’t know…
Stas Rybkin: Oh… Is it really right to say things like that to someone who’s stoned?
Oleg Batygin: It’s necessary. Remember the old meme from the days of Upyachka: “Beware the unknown fucking shit!” That’s precisely the phenomenon named in that warning that you’re dealing with right now. I’ve learned to be wary of the thing. I’ve even learned to communicate with it, after a fashion. You and your people are making contact with it for the first time.
This island is, in a sense, enchanted. It holds a special status with the system, or with the Unknown Fucking Shit, if you prefer. Here you’re as if standing at the center of a magic circle, with evil spirits frolicking around its edge. Incidentally, the last of the hypotheses explaining what happened to me — the one I’ll lay out today — has to do with exactly this place’s safety and comfort.
It’s already late. And tomorrow’s a busy day for us. So: a couple more drags, one more monologue, and then, as the well-known Moscow wit and party fixture Nikita Yolkin used to say, “time to hit the sack.”
Stas Rybkin: Did you know Nikita?