This is a continuation of a post entitled, Evil as an Emergent Property.

I’m glad Google removed “don’t be evil” from its mantra.

I can only guess as to why it was removed but it was perhaps an admission that they don’t believe in the concept of evil as we tend to define it:

A manifestation of profound immorality and wickedness, especially in people’s actions.

That seems like a pretty low bar to set for behavior.
And who the hell would admit to the above anyway?

No one, which is why it’s more important to look at systemic reasons for evil things happening rather than try to root out evil people.

I’ve assembled some ideas around what could help stifle the emergence of “evil” within an organization. Some require careful analysis, others careful planning, and another requires old-fashioned bravery.

Game Theory

Applying Game Theory principles can be as simple as assuming that every individual in an organization is working to serve their best interest.

Review the incentives in play within your organization. Are employees incentivized to turn a blind eye to corruption(do they receive bonuses)?

Is there a culture in place that discourages people from challenging their superiors?

You can be as morally righteous as you want—in a vacuum—but throw in a second entity and you gotta start acting in response to the other.

Angry Zodd, Danny the Last Earth Man

Flat Structure

Structure your organization to have as flat of a hierarchy as possible – not just in a strict organizational manner but by maintaining a culture that allows people to interact with corners of their organization outside of their own silly little responsibilities.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Stanley Milgram

Holistic Planning

Having a flat structure isn’t enough to stop evil; when planning projects, you need to make sure to involve as many departments as possible such that the project has maximum visibility and transparency. This ensures that evil deeds don’t go unnoticed.

Innovation is the lifeblood of an organization. Knowing how to lead and work with creative people requires knowledge and action that often goes against the typical organizational structure. Protect unusual people from bureaucracy and legalism typical of organizations.

Max De Pree

Civil Disobedience

Don’t just follow orders. You won’t be protected by your employer anyway.

Build a valuable skillset that allows you to live without fear of being unable to feed yourself and your family.

Live minimally so as to not become beholden to a decadent lifestyle and save enough to be able to quit if your conscience demands it.

…but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Anonymous Discussion/Feedback

Provide ways for your employees to deliver feedback anonymously.

One potential model involves 360 degree feedback. So named because of its all-encompassing reach, 360 Degree Feedback is an information gathering method that allows employees of all ranks and titles to receive confidential and anonymous feedback from coworkers. The model is simple enough: workers complete a feedback form that spans several different office competencies in regards to other employees and departments.

Study.com

Provide an anonymous forum for your organization where sensitive topics can be explored without fear of repercussions or revenge. Ensure that the forum users can self-moderate and that topics are relevant to your organization; don’t let your company forum devolve into 4chan.

Conclusion

I stated in the last post that I don’t believe that people are evil. Rather, people will adjust to become what the system allows them to be. They will be as good or as bad as the structure and incentives nudge them to be.

Our current low-attention culture fixates on individuals and applies maximum wrath to destroy those they think are responsible for “evil”.

But perhaps “evil” deeds arise through mismanagement, disorganization and apathy rather than pure individual wickedness.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn believed that all people were capable of taking part in evil actions and that it was pointless to spend our time searching out people we considered to be pure “evil”.

And yet, horrific things happen every day in the world that seem to only be explained by the existence of “evil”. How do we reconcile this with the belief that we are all good people?

It’s my hypothesis that evil people aren’t required for horrific acts to occur. Rather, evil is actually an emergent property, meaning that an evil machine can arise although none of the aggregate parts of the machine are evil. How is this accomplished? Two parts: compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

Compartmentalization

This is both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon.

Top-Down compartmentalization refers to the physical separation of departments and responsibilities.

Bottom-Up compartmentalization refers to the psychological processes individuals themselves employ, generally as a defense mechanism.

Top-Down

The top loves compartmentalization because it’s easier to impose their will upon the organization. This isn’t by itself evil, by the way, it’s just self-serving. If I believe my vision for the organization is what is right for the organization, I want as few barriers as possible to creating my vision. If you love Elon Musk, you want him to be able to impose his vision on the world without much impediment. We want to support our benevolent monarchs but we risk giving a tyrant power once the monarch is gone. The danger is creating a system that has no checks against evil should it eventually present itself.

Bottom-Up

The bottom has incentives to love compartmentalization, namely:

• Intellectual/physical laziness.
• Monetary rewards for keeping their job.
• Cognitive dissonance(refusal to see evil).

The bottom has an incentive to ignore evil and only go about their day-to-day jobs. I’m a truck driver at Auschwitz; my family is starving back in Germany since the fall of the Weimar Republic and driving for the Army pays well. They provide everything I need so I can send my salary back to my family. I don’t want to question what’s happening inside Auschwitz because it threatens my ability to provide for my family. So I purposefully compartmentalize my job and only do what I’m told; I deliver thousands of pounds of cargo but don’t dare to look to see what’s inside of those pallets.

Bureaucracy

The second ingredient is a system that frustrates whistle-blowers and dissidents into giving up their quests for ridding evil. This is done through a web of bureaucracy. A particularly effective version is one that disguises itself as a guardian of security and public health. One could imagine examples of this being three-letter government departments(EPA, FDA, DoE). Simply creating a system that is intentionally difficult to navigate will eventually be sniffed out so it works best by having a system of red tape that’s purpose is to safeguard:

• Fraud(internal and external)
• Public health
• Privacy
• Trade secrets
• Product quality(QA)

The setup of these systems would be questioned if done only to create organizational quicksand so be sure to compartmentalize the decisions and jobs as much as possible.

The Way Forward

So, if the theory holds up that evil can propagate without evil people existing in a system, what do we do with that knowledge? How do we stop its propagation and organize ourselves to limit its emergence?

We’ll explore that in the second part of this blog series. 🙂

Recap

My plan is to progressively enhance the app into a fully complete app, allowing me to step-by-step learn important principles of development without overwhelming myself while at the same time practice my learning by applying them to a real app.

I did it.

I crossed the nebulous divide that separates an amateur from a professional. I finally feel like I can truly hack it as a developer. It came at a very clear moment. How did I know this, and how did I recognize the moment?

Because I, feeling the looming crunch of a deadline, abandoned my strict plan and decided to just publish the app.

Jokes aside, I’m not actually abandoning my plan.

• I will be adding some form of caching to the app. My initial testing shows that the app performs fine even if contacts are fetched new every time the app loads. Perfect? Nope.
  
• I will be learning how to use a profiler and really test performance. The tests I’ve run on by installing the app APK on my phone show no performance issues; it runs quite quickly without any crashes.
  
• I will be ensuring my code is better documented, both through a Readme and within the code itself.

What’s more important than those things, though, is getting quickly to the real feedback cycle. Documenting the code doesn’t help end-users.

So, I’ve decided to publish the app in beta form on Google Play. It already has a bug that should have been spotted earlier(the splash image doesn’t fully cover the screen on all devices) but that’s been corrected and will be in the next version(See? I am a professional).

Put Your Code In the Wild

I’ve also taken the plunge to put the code on GitHub.

If you are still not convinced that I’m on the top of my game, don’t think that I didn’t have to search and remove all of the crappy console.log() statements and @todo comments.

Contribute

Feel free to open up a GitHub issue if the following applies:

• You spot a bug when running/cloning/building the app.
• You have a feature request(Duh, it needs a way to import contacts from the phone. Never thought of that one).
• To point out inefficient functions or lifecycle method usage(React is hard, y’all).
• You feel like nitpicking my indentation, spacing, function naming, or abhorrent use of Typescript.
• You, a headhunter, are so impressed that you want to offer me a developer position(include salary in the description).

Conclusion

I’ll be circling back through the remaining steps and chipping away at the repository, refactoring and cleaning up as I get better and more knowledgeable. I am under no illusions that this is a completed or perfected project but it’s been a wild ride and a great learning experience. In fact, it sounds like a “Lessons Learned” post is needed….