The Company as a Typewriter
A chapter from Codex of Actors by Alexander Vityaz
All books on management, careers, and business are suddenly past their sell-by date (which hasn't stopped them from selling well). They teach us how to manage people, communicate with people, and compete with people and companies made up of people.
Most of them read suspiciously like Jerry Toner's How to Manage Your Slaves. Its slave-owning narrator would feel right at home with a modern manager's to-do list: find the right people, divvy up the work, get results, and stay in control.
At the root of this resemblance is an anthropocentric—and already archaic—view of companies and work. AI is beginning to change the cast of characters, creating a new class of nonbiological workers: semi-autonomous today, autonomous soon.
"The Company as a Typewriter," a chapter from Codex of Actors, sees the company as a text-producing machine. It reads and writes around the clock: emails, contracts, documents, programs, messages, logs…
How many of these texts can a company simultaneously see, take into account, and—above all—understand?
