A philosophical essay responding to pieces by Jimmy Miller and Sean Goedecke about legibility in software companies. Drawing on anarchist thinkers like Colin Ward, Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, the author argues that the informal backchannels, favors, and tacit relationships in software organizations aren't workarounds — they're the primary social fabric. Individual resistance to legibility (OKRs, metrics, process) isn't enough; mutual aid and protecting those informal networks is the real work. The analogy extends to historical Yiddish immigrant mutual aid societies (landsmanshaftn) as a model for how people self-organize outside official structures.
Sort: