The Edge Assumes a Self
The Block essay that Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha published last week is worth engaging with. The historical arc and the argument that AI can now perform the information-routing function that hierarchy has always performed are real.
There’s a word that appears nowhere in the essay: development. As in human development. As in, the question of whether the people being asked to operate at the edge of a de-layered, AI-coordinated organization are actually capable of doing that.
Hierarchy did two things: the Block piece collapses into one. It routed information — who knows what, who decides what, how context travels up and down the chain. And it routed meaning. It told people what mattered when nothing was clear. It held people inside a legible world.