The American TV Show the Office

Listen to the Infinite Loops podcast: https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/alex-danco-everyones-job-is-world-building-ep53/ (40mins in)

Read the full essay: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/

See tweet reactions: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1424953927426928646

Transcript 
 

[00:00:00] Hey everyone today, I'm about to break one of the core rules of this mixed tape, which is that episode should come in at around 10 minutes. Uh, this is a 25 minute rant from Alex Danco, which is still one of the best essays I've read of the year. He posted it on January 22nd, and I think it's still resonating.  

It basically is a theory of social class that is both entertaining and actually strangely true. Just don't think too hard about it because if you do you will realize how true it is. 

Maybe this is a good segue into the other thing that I feel like we were theoretically supposed to talk about this podcast episode,  

which was the Michael Scott theory of social class, which again is like another example of the power of world-building in this  

case, it's the power of  

world-building as applied to the phenomenon of middleman. 

Right, right. Like, what is middle management? If not world built real, because that's all you've got right. Is this  

world you've constructed. So originally a missile, who's  

going to fill the forms out. I mean, come on.  

It's not, it's not anything who's going to fill the firms out. It's like, who's going to create the meaning. 

It's like I forgot who described middle  

management as the control rods and a nuclear reactor. It's like, but the point of them is to slow things down so that it doesn't run out of your control and blow up. So,  

okay. So I wrote this piece, the Michael Scott theory of social class,  

which is basically a re skinning of Venkatesh Rouse article that your base principle, which itself was a re-skinning of Holly White's book, the organization, man. 

Oh, so that's the actual source material is the organization, man. Have you read the organization, man? Do you know that book?  

I don't have notes on it. So that means I didn't take it seriously. It's so good. It's so  

good. It's in the list of  

books that I recommend to everybody. So I'm going to have, I'm going to have to read it again. 

What's remarkable about the organization, man is  

simultaneously how in a literal sense. It did not get the future. Right.  

But at a second  

order sense, it just nailed the future so hard. They got it. So, so, so right, just at a slightly different abstraction layer than people realize. So the general thesis of the organization, man,  

is that all organizations  

that survive have stratified into three layers. 

You have the bottom layer, the middle layer and the top layer. The bottom layer is the people who do the actual work. This is the majority of people. Their lives are spent doing literal things. So these are line workers, frontline people,  

anybody who is  

actually producing something. Literally there are the people at the bottom there, the majority of  

people at the top, you have the exact. 

They actually have a lot in common  

with the people at the bottom  

in the sense that they have very  

literal roles and responsibilities and very real stakes involved. And they see the world very clearly as it is, but the people at the bottom and the people at the top see the world through clear eyes with clear actions and consequences, but there's this group of people in the middle called middle-management that is really, really different than either of those groups. 

And their job is to intermediate between  

the people at the top and the people at the bottom by basically constructing this reality called middle management that does not literally produce anything nor have any literal  

stakes or consequences, but whose job is  

effectively to mediate like the control rods in the reactor to say like, look,  

the goal here is to create a stable system  

that perpetuate. 

Regardless of how efficient it is or how complicated it is or anything just like, can you get something to persist? This group of people will always emerge in one form or another. So in the 1950, in the early  

fifties, when Holly white wrote this book, this was in the era  

of these mega mega conglomerates, like Dow DuPont, us steel, general motors, like this was the field. 

Like the current mindset was that. The frontier of progress was mega organizational dynamics. It was scaled to get scaled, to get scaled. This is how everything works. Eventually everything will be run by four corporations because we figured out the science of how management works. And specifically we figured out what middle-management. 

We created this whole world  

of middle management that has sense of purpose and a sense  

of identity. And it was fed through these institutions called business schools and the NBA. And this whole  

idea that like middle manager was actually this craft more or less independent of the  

industry. It's like, what do you do? 

Oh, you're a manager. Oh, like what kind of industry do you manage? It doesn't matter. Like I do manage. Right. That was the thing that you can learn. Do you go to management school and learn management regardless of where you were from? You remember in the office?  

I'm just sitting here because I love that movie. 

There was one particular episode of the office  

where David Wallace, a CFO brings in a new boss for Michael. Who is Idris Elba who comes in as like the professional manager. And Michael's like, where are you from? He's like, oh, steel.[00:05:00]  

Um, but anyway, so this is idea. It's like, like as Holly white describes  

it, William H. White, he went by Holly white as  

he describes it. Right? So the whole book is about this three layer system. And this three  

layer construct where you have the people at the bar. Who again are doing all the actual work and have no path to leverage. 

And the people at the top  

who have all the leverage, but  

are very deeply suspicious of everything and are perpetually trying to acquire and keep control over this huge sprawling.  

Basically those two sides in order  

to not fly apart at a hundred miles an hour, need this mediating influence in the middle called the middle management. 

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