The Pirate Code and the Paintbrush
Pirate Code. img from Fandom
How AI Will Finish What Shareholder Primacy Started — And Who Survives It
A Familiar Pattern Moving Fast
Though AI is obviously a ‘bandwagon’, we can all see that companies have not merely jumped on it, but fully rejoiced in their leaping. Instead of a sober appraisal of a new technology, they went full Leaping Lanny Poffo, metaphorically reading bad poems about the jobs they were about to cut before getting into the metaphorical ring. Then the rationales rang out: It was about modernization, Market corrections, redundancies, restructuring, and operational shifts.
Unfortunately, layoffs are not a new thing, and it is to wonder if anyone believes the standard excuses anymore. “Talent Mismatch” is a poor use of jargon when a company simply fails to train who they have for what they need, as is “getting lean” after hiring too many staff or “prioritization of capital” when spending payroll on stock buybacks. Let’s recall that we also have decades of reports of catastrophic management practices burning the economy every year. It is not as though the market has faith in either the Stock Market, or the “C-Suite” in any given sample of it. When companies turn so immediately to layoffs and claim it’s because of AI, it just sounds like nobody knows what they are doing- or they do and it’s worse.
It is equally clear that AI is not a simple or unidirectional catalyst. What imitative executives seem to miss is that AI may offer a distinct competitive advantage to modern labour in this old negotiation. Those employees that lose their jobs may not need to return and, if they choose to, can demand concessions- and the company may have to pay up. Layoffs without a solid business case were always bad policy, and now there’s a tool that helps employees see that in real time. It’s a dynamic that was not created by AI but only exposed by it. This fancy new tool is revealing the weaknesses of the narratives that used to drive major economic shifts.
Layoffs are billed as good business sense,
when the reality is that they often reflect a dialogue with a very specific audience. As such, the headlines we hear about them are moving according to rhetorical dynamics that hide the real transaction to soften a stock market response. It turns out that market reaction is merely another facet of the rhetoric; A major aspect of which is that the shareholders are often institutions such as pension funds, mutual funds and others. Those institutions are responding to measurement profiles of their own, upon which the managers of them depend for their own security. The logic supporting all of that has removed all ownership, leaving a horde of interests who have no real stake and may ‘jump ship’ without penalty.
Profits, in that discussion, are less of a goal than a rhetorical pain-point, a demand that acts as leverage in a negotiation between an employee and investors who may have no vested interest at all.
The addition of Artificial Intelligence into that negotiation may not be a complication so much as an energizer of agents already in play. It may not be the ingredient that cuts jobs but merely the method by which this “Pirate Code”- dialogue “Take what you can- Give Nothing Back!” finally goes off the rails and causes real pain.
The Drift Nobody Voted For
Back in the day, Henry Ford was considered visionary for creating the conditions where his workforce drove his vehicles. It made good business sense to have a prosperous labour force because they could then spend their money on company goods and services. We would wonder, then, what happened because it is to think that business people came around, either suddenly or gradually, to a position of openly viewing labour as expendable goods doesn’t add up. At no point did any cabal of ‘corporate overlords’ convene and decide “what we need is a new sociopathic philosophy of business where we treat employees like cattle.” What happened was more structural and sub-rhetorical. An equilibrium of sorts was established with an antisocial narrative.
First and most importantly, the dialogue about it took on a life of its own among a portion of business leaders who were distinct from Henry Ford in many ways. They were not like him but enjoyed enough similarity to support varying degrees of narrative likeness. They were not ‘movers and shakers’ but could talk a good game. They couldn’t build, but they could invest. Individually they were inconsequential but as a crowd, they could have immense influence.
Secondly, dialogue that began from Henry Ford’s visionary stance of “They can have whatever color they want, as long as it’s black,” degraded both naturally and through the influence of the ‘Leaping Lannies’, those imitative executives who had no such vision. It drifted from a detailed and technical business practice to a general attitude expressed by bumper-sticker logic like, “Gas, Grass or Ass, Nobody rides for Free”. From Ford’s expert business acumen, realizing a return on an investment, the dialogue became a narrative informing this other cohort that they had achieved a special status.
Leaping Lanny Poffo. img from Pro Wrestling
And then, around 1970, someone codified that narrative as faux-economic policy. Milton Friedman’s rather offensive dismissal of obligations to the society one depends on for profit was clearly adopted as a normative attitude without much debate. His argument that “business” as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities set the stage for a dialogue controlled by a crowd of investors who were owed a return but who owed nothing in return. From there it is no mystery at all how the attitude toward employees went from a ‘drift’ to a full ‘plummet’.
You can track that deranged negative progression through the language we used to take for granted. Workers went from being “hands”- actual body parts- to being roles and finally clinical diagnostic terms in a debate about profits and losses. So objective. So clinical. It was dialogue made specifically to inform people of their status: Things that may be of use. No longer sources of immense profits because of the money they spend, employees were now burdens that simply cost money to train and upkeep.
That drift becomes the rationale for rewarding executives for leaning on draconian measures as performance, for being less capable. That drift would also become the 'buy in' for advancement into the C-Suite since those people would choose others most similar to themselves. Once disdain for subordinates becomes the operational culture, the selection pressure inverts. Competence in developing people, building institutional knowledge, retaining talent; those skills become invisible at best, suspicious at worst. The executive who invested in his team looks soft, while the one who cut 15% and hit a quarterly number looks decisive.
So the C-suite gradually fills with people whose primary skill is performing toughness in the language the board already speaks. They’re selected for signaling how unsentimentally they are focused on shareholder value. The morbid part is the competence paradox it creates. Executives may be genuinely skilled in their chosen field, but what they must exhibit to remain in the room is navigating the selection environment that produced them. Reading rooms, managing up, knowing when to cut and who to protect: That's not nothing but, those skills are internal to the system. They produce careers instead of good business.
And because they select for similarity on the way up, the institutional memory of what functional management even looks like gets progressively shorter. By the third generation of this selection cycle, you have C-suites that have never actually seen healthy organizational development modeled. They don’t miss what they’ve never witnessed.
The most dangerous animal in any institution is the man who has read everything and understood nothing, because he will defend his ignorance with popularity and crowd acceptance.
The Intellectual Licensing of Extraction
The most dangerous animal in any institution is the man who has read everything and understood nothing, because he will defend his ignorance with popularity and crowd acceptance. In a functional system, the difference between the task and the purpose of the task is understood, which exposes the fairly harsh irony here: The drift referred to above is based on an intellectual premise from the 1970’s that doesn’t entirely miss the mark. On top of Milton Friedman’s pothole of intellectualism was a piece about Agency theory by Jensen and Meckling in 1976. The paper suggests that the difference between the owner’s interests and that of managers hired to make decisions on their behalf will ultimately incur unacceptable costs. People will take advantage of owners, in other words.
It’s true, obviously, but openly disguises the fact that such an environment was created by the people now complaining about it. They created the environment they are now suggesting is susceptible to corruption. They created the conditions that reward corruption, then cried out that corruption was in the air, making managers out to be the villains. It also disguises the habit of shareholders inflating themselves as “owners”. Company owners, we might observe, can’t jump ship if the CEO doesn’t bow deeply enough to them. Friedman explicitly gave them an ‘out’ by explaining that the ship isn’t a person anyway, and the Captain owes them first.
What has happened then, is that this “Pirate Code” in the form of philosophical premises have become a pivot-point of crowd equilibrium. Accepted as something that is simply understood by all, it is an unconscious influencer across all dialogues that are relevant to economics, work, jobs, politics and more until it is the fabric of our culture. No more debate about it is necessary because anything remotely contrary can be dismissed with single-word slogans, like “socialism”. The singular crowd that could find value in such a watered-down ethic as this “pirate code”, has managed our narratives to one single outcome: extraction.
Take what you can: Give Nothing Back!
As we begin wondering how AI will throw a wrench in that plan, we will stop wondering why we are hearing about “the dangers of AI”.
The Paintbrush Problem
As I’ve said elsewhere, AI is a fancy paintbrush. It’s a chatty word processor. It’s a really great Swiss Army Knife. It’s a tool and, as such, no more useful than the human who uses it. Without a user, AI is inert and of no value. Used properly, it is a powerful multiplier of skills you already have, or a means of growing them. The caveat is that, like knowledge itself, AI requires discipline. Without those skills, AI is just a powerful multiplier of the slop it is given. Which is why some companies who rushed into layoffs are quickly discovering that they needed those employees after all.
It’s the part where Sun Tsu would- Well, according to legend he would cut off people’s heads until they listened to him and did what he instructed. Maybe he’s not the best example, but I think he would remind us that mistaking the map for the terrain is a path to defeat and dishonor. I suggest that knowledge is best described as “holding a sword in stillness”: Knowing what NOT to do with it is sometimes more valuable than using it.
The same can be said for employees. Even those without any investment in training but years within the company have a bank of institutional knowledge that is hard to replace or replicate- something executives are expected to understand. Even ungifted employees, armed with AI and enough experience, will know what questions to ask and what answers to seek; For example, how to translate that institutional knowledge into profits.
AI requires the kind of thinking that is often disruptive, though: Systems thinking, contextual reading, higher-order pattern recognition, personal sovereignty, and integrity. In other words, it needs all the qualities that have been systematically devalued since the 1980’s. That is where AI threatens to become a quasi-revolutionary influence because it offers advantages to users with those natural gifts and skills, without any promise of control. It is a nearly pure disruptor. The question must be asked how that disruption maps on to the accelerating pattern.
Knowing what NOT to do with AI is sometimes more valuable than using it.
The Acceleration
The inflection point where the acceleration really began could be placed at the publication of the Jensen Meckling article in ’76, but I tend to think that was just the announcement that signaled what the game was- and make no mistake: Shareholders were the audience for that article. The point at which the game took on a serious, manic quality was the Dot Com Bubble. That was when real money began to look realistic to this cohort, where before it never was. After Enron, and then the Housing Bubble, the idea that others were making really were cashing in took root. The drift began in earnest. The payoffs became more realistic while threat of consequences faded, even as the potential damage became more severe.
It explains the motives of the ‘pirate code types’ better than simple rapaciousness. They really need to soak up as much raw capital as they can, as much raw power as they can to win at a game that gives them a feeling of exclusivity. The logic is simple crowd dynamics and competitiveness. As the crowd grows, it increases the volume of distinction needed to “win”. That’s the manic boom and bust dynamic at play. The South Sea Bubble, Tech stocks, Mark to Market Accounting, Artificial housing price bubbles, and not finally, the subversion of the White House: These are strategized extraction assaults, when they are not simple theft.
They are following a pattern that is as familiar to the rest of us as it is invisible to them. The change is that AI has reduced the cost of accurate information and increased access, basically disrupting control of the ‘Pirate Code’ narrative. The correction that follows will be faster than the old news cycle.
Who Survives and Why
It makes the predictions about AI easier. The ‘Pirate Code types’ will attempt to use AI to eliminate any dependency on labour, or to enforce a corporate hegemony in which labour is desperate for their benevolence. However, piracy also follows a predictable pattern. In the colonial era it was an expression of competition between very large, very powerful rivals who couldn’t afford an overt conflict, or at the very least found it cheaper to avoid. Once those powers extracted what they could, those pirates were hunted down and hanged to avoid any embarrassing scandals. I expect that pattern to hold firm in our time as well, with the hangings more metaphorical than real.
The shareholder extraction dynamic has the same preconditions for resolution as colonial piracy, and the crowd equilibrium is already shifting in favor of stable nations. China, for example, has demonstrated with finality that innovation, especially in production, makes any narrative of corporate sovereignty sound pretentious. What country can you move your factory to if you are simply unable to compete? In Canada, political parties that were recently touting separatism are back-pedaling fiercely now that financial stability is in the air. What country is going to take in ‘players’ who once so loudly proclaimed themselves pirates?
The swift adoption of AI for antisocial purposes will quickly run its course as companies realize that individuals and labour, through the insightful use of AI, can adapt faster than them. Smart money will follow intelligent use of AI, leading to a re-arrangement of shareholder priorities in the long-term. In the short term, this looks like fewer companies doubling down on extremely high-salary, high value positions for skilled users of AI. The rest of the pirates will settle for shrinking shares of the growing market for undifferentiated creative output.
Financially stable countries are now, or soon to be the currency of success. Two outstanding questions remain: Who among the ‘pirate code’ shareholders is going to turn on the others first? Because that is how the pattern unfolds. Survival will be about having a home in a stable economy somewhere and those places can afford to refuse sociopathic investors. And: Who will be the first brave soul to suggest that Canada and the US can innovate their way into competitive positioning without hysterically sacrificing employees?
img from Fandom
Speaking of Sovereignty: What About Individuals?
Image by Gemini
What is the real choice between China, the EU, the USA and Corporate Hegemony?
The headline that got me wondering
about this was the CBC story about Canada seeking “Sovereign AI Data Centres”. (Kyle Bakx · CBC News · Posted: May 14, 2026). What does it even mean, and where do average users fit in? It turns out there is good and bad news.
It should come as no surprise, first of all, that global corporations have been pursuing “sovereignty” for a long time. This is the idea that they are beholden to no country, nor accountable by their laws, nor owing anything in taxes, even if they reap obscene benefits from operating there. Sovereign; meaning “You’re not the boss of me”, all beginning with the legal standing as a person under the same laws they don’t wish to be accountable to.
We are hardly bewildered,
secondly, that should those corporations gather something valuable from the citizens of a country, their position would be that the citizens ought to have protected themselves better. For example, your online profile is of great value when it comes to sales and marketing, or even politics, and that really blurs the line of a conversation we should have had with them long before the ‘window’ on it closed. Because we don’t own those profiles, those second identities, and the corporate owners of them would argue that your country has no claim on them either.
There’s a bizarre realm in which your online profile has a right to vote and you do not; Or, your online profile has the power of attorney over your actual life.
And all of that is before this discussion takes a nose-dive into an Orwellian sensibility. There’s a bizarre realm in which your online profile has a right to vote and you do not; Or, your online profile has the power of attorney over your actual life. The thing is that those weird scenarios are not “The Slippery Slope.” That part was 20 years ago when Facebook was new. Today, in the here and now, is the part where we have the cold, sinking feeling in our stomach, and we wonder if China knew something we did not.
China has robust personal information protection laws but, of course, “protection” is defined by the state and the individual has no say or recourse. “Freedom” is about the individual’s responsibility to the state, according to the government. Depending on one’s point of view, that may not sound different than a corporate hegemony, except that the Chinese government appears to be invested in protecting its people from them.
The European Union’s “General Data Protection Act” by contrast is founded upon the legal authority regardless of national boundaries. Individuals can enforce laws about the ownership of their personal content no matter where their rights were contravened. That conception is, essentially, what global corporations will try to gain for themselves, and may have secured already in the US.
It’s murky legal territory because the US CLOUD Act, although it compels US companies to disclose private content of customers on demand, no matter where it is physically stored, is reliant upon the state to enforce it. That enforcement has proven to be spotty, happening state by state differently. It also requires reckoning with the laws of the countries where the data is physically stored. The EU may accommodate the needs of individual customers, but will China, or other interests? Probably not. The argument will be that the plaintiff is free to pursue the matter on their own.
The Plaintiff of the future, free to pursue matters on their own. Image by Gemini
Individuals will lean on new AI capabilities to some extent in such battles, but most will have to rely upon the prosocial actors among the big corporations. While some US based global corporations have currently achieved a significant level of sovereignty, they are not yet able to determine our future. Big companies may still have to reckon with states, nations, and perhaps even individuals.
That is the setting for this news article about Canada seeking sovereign AI data centres.
We can feel good suspecting that Canada will lean toward the EU model of border-less legal standing. While there is some attractiveness for the Chinese model, where the physical location of the data is key, it will come down to the language that defines the level of “protection” our government is imbued with. That is where this discussion takes us into dark waters.
The need to resist repetitive incursions by corporate entities may enforce an uncomfortably Chinese measure of control over the data centres.
The question must be asked whether this conflict will impose necessities that would normally be considered draconian. The need to resist repetitive incursions by corporate entities may enforce an uncomfortably Chinese measure of control over the data centres. Our government may end up protecting us from internal agents who also want control of citizens’ data.
Notwithstanding all of that, we also have to wonder how it will protect the ownership of the data of citizens who have already given up so much. I would argue that not all global corporations are villains. I don’t believe they all would overthrow the US government by twisting the laws to their own benefit. They do, after all, still need the people to buy stuff from them. Even so, it’s going to be a weird negotiation.
I see preferred corporate partners migrating to countries like Canada in order to secure stable business environments, while places like the US become ground-zero in an economic war zone. What exactly that looks like is tough to foresee, except for the stability/instability tension. People and companies migrating to Canada is an easy prediction to make in that scenario.
As to the place and/or role of the individual citizen in that future,
there appears to be a very steep learning curve in our future. The youth of today are going to have to come to terms with managing either a presence on a platform like “Google Canada”, which will be protected for them by formal contract with the Canadian government, or a new personal AI persona that behaves online as them- perhaps even in a legal capacity- that has status as a corporation and understands its place in a cut-throat global marketplace.
Those of us who came before them and gave up our rights to those profiles will have to negotiate with the owners for the use of them, and/or create new ones in the new Canadian marketplace. There’s no doubt that such a weird scenario will play out somewhere, but without a commanding presence in the construction of these new Sovereign AI Databases, the owners of those “old” or “market-nascent” profiles will be forced to defend valuations of them that are contingent upon bad-faith terms of service contracts. The investment in them will be threatened by forcing customers to migrate or recreate their online content.
My question at this point is, How many of you reading this have already begun thinking about your AI Corporation/Avatar?
The individual facing off against the global Marketplace. image by Gemini
The Stability Trap
Why a healthy culture score may be the most dangerous number in your company
Imagine a company
that employees genuinely like working at. The people are smart, the mission is real, the product matters. Ask them what it’s like to work there and they’ll tell you- honestly- that the culture is good. They mean it. The score reflects something true.
Now ask them what they think of senior management. Watch the number drop.
Most observers treat this gap as a minor inconsistency, a sign that leadership needs a communications refresh, or a reminder to hold more town halls. The assumption is that the culture is fine and leadership just needs to close the distance. What this reading misses entirely is the mechanism that produced the gap in the first place.
A culture that scores well despite its leadership hasn’t transcended its leadership. It has learned to work around it.
That is not resilience.
That is adaptation, and the difference matters enormously. Resilience implies the system can absorb external pressure and recover. Adaptation implies the system has already reorganized itself around a chronic internal condition. The employees aren’t thriving in spite of bad leadership. They’ve quietly redefined what thriving means, in a world where leadership is something that happens to them rather than something they participate in.
The result is a culture that is, in a very specific sense, self-contained. It functions. People are competent, collegial, even proud of their work but, the connective tissue between what the organization knows and what leadership decides has been severed; not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, through a thousand small corrections where someone with relevant information chose not to escalate it, because experience had taught them it wouldn’t land.
This is the stability trap.
The organization looks healthy by almost every conventional measure. Turnover is manageable. Engagement scores are acceptable. The culture review sites show a company worth working at. What the data cannot show is that the early warning system has been quietly switched off, that the people closest to the product, the customer, the operational reality, have learned that their signal is not received upstream.
The early warning system has been quietly switched off. Not by anyone’s decision. By everyone’s experience.
When leadership then makes a consequential decision- a product pivot, a platform overhaul, a strategic bet- it does so in a kind of informational vacuum that looks nothing like a vacuum from the inside. There are meetings, presentations, and data, but the most important data, the knowledge held by people who understand what the decision will actually do, has already been filtered out by a system that learned not to carry it.
The failure, when it comes, looks sudden.
It wasn’t. It was the culmination of a process that the culture score had been obscuring for years. The organization was stable. The organization was also hollow.
The question worth asking- especially for a leader newly arrived to a company mid-crisis- tasked with restoring trust and reorienting a business, is not how to fix the culture; that may be the best thing in the building. The question is what kind of structural intervention would actually reconnect leadership to the substrate it has been floating above. The answer is not communication or surveys but something more fundamental: A change in who has access, who has standing, and what kinds of knowing are allowed to travel upward.
Most organizations never ask that. They reach for the tools they already have: consultants, offsites, engagement initiatives; and wonder why the gap persists. It persists because it is load-bearing. It was built, over time, by the organization itself, as a coping mechanism. Closing it requires understanding what it was coping with.
The End of the "Guessing Game"
Why Local Networks are the Only Defense Against Neural Manipulation
We are entering the era of Manufactured Consensus.
With the release of trimodal brain-encoding models like TRIBE v2, the "dark arts" of influence have moved from the creative suite to the laboratory. We are no longer just talking about "target demographics"; we are talking about Neural Digital Twins. These models can now predict with staggering accuracy how a specific video, slogan, or "grassroots" letter will resonate vertex-by-vertex in the human cortex.
For those who view the public as a biological system to be hacked- the "Nobodies" seeking status through automated resonanc- the goal is no longer to persuade you, but to resonate you into submission.
The Prescient Vision: The Closed Sub-Internet
When I began developing Kootenay Mall, it wasn't just about a regional directory. It was an act of Cognitive Sovereignty.
The global, open internet has become a "frictionless" environment where AI-optimized swarms can manufacture a "surge" in seconds. By creating a closed sub-internet region, specifically tethered to the physical geography of the West Kootenay, we are re-introducing the one thing that AI cannot simulate: Physical Context.
A regional platform creates a "High-Friction Zone" for manipulators. You cannot "bot" a neighborly handshake in Castlegar or an authentic transaction in Nelson. By narrowing the scope, we increase the security.
The Mathematical Certainty: The Law of Increasing Returns
This isn't just a "nice idea". It is backed by the hard math of network economics. While global platforms are hitting a wall of diminishing returns (more noise, less value), a regional network operates under the Law of Increasing Returns.
As we build this local ecosystem, we trigger Metcalfe’s Law:
V∝ N2 “Value is more or less proportional to the increasing number of members”
The value of our local network doesn't grow linearly; it grows exponentially with every local vendor and resident who joins. This creates a "Gravity Well" of value. For the business owner or the status-seeker, the math eventually becomes undeniable: the return on being a "prosocial" member of a high-trust local network far outweighs the diminishing returns of screaming into the global void.
Proactive Security: The Prosocial Guardrail
The "Executive Function" of our community isn't an algorithm; it's the Prosocial Nature of the platform itself.
In a regional sub-internet, your reputation is your collateral. We are building a system where "doing good" is the most efficient path to "doing well." When status and wealth are tied to verifiable local impact, the incentive to use "manufactured resonance" or "snake oil" tactics vanishes. Why hack a brain when you can simply help a neighbor and see the immediate, increasing return on that investment?
We are moving away from the "Neural Hijack" of global platforms and toward a localized, mathematically grounded, and human-centric future.
The Kootenay Mall is more than a marketplace. It is a bunker for the human mind.
#KootenayMall #DigitalSovereignty #IncreasingReturns #NeuralEthics #WestKootenays #CollectiveIntelligence
Y'Say You Want a Revolution
Well, y'know...
The ads claiming that AI can just build you a website in seconds are now unavoidable. Between them and the news of AI "Experts" claiming that the revolution is here, the average person could be a bit nervous. Since the hype about AI has been overtaken by the hype about the hype, I decided to check in to see what condition our condition was in.
I actually have built a website or two. The first, using a free service, was farcical. I finally learned to write HTML code myself and created my own. So, when I say the claims about AI are hyped, you can take it to the bank.
I've also tried using the AI video programs and found You need a separate AI just to get the instructions right! Most of my efforts were on a spectrum between "not good" and "travesty". Adding in the time you spend doing that, the "math" works out to, "Why the **** did I spend money on this!?" I've had better luck with AI images. Here's another one using HotPot AI that I used for my book, "Nobody Wants Princess to Succeed".
Hot Pot AI: Nobody and Princess at the Prom on Pandora
Mostly, then, AI seems to be useful for avoiding the expense of real human artists, and that places the AI hype in a very stark relief.
The news about AI is both uncompromisingly optimistic and cowardly cynical. It's addiction to hype is really a bad look because it develops a demand for interpretation. Ultimately, Readers will just stop listening because of the unreliable narration. Here's a quote from a website that tries to sound official, optimistic and also business savvy at the same time,
AI innovation is an international race, with regions like Europe and especially China investing heavily to lead in AI deployment and even setting ambitious targets for open-source AI leadership by 2030. The United States’ competitive edge in AI has so far been fueled by a dynamic private sector and open markets.
"It's a huge thing that everybody wants in on and we're in it thick, bitch!!!"
Again with the hype. I almost think they doth signal too much.
The thing is that the actual community of people and companies that can create and improve AI is pretty small. This article may be deliberately understating it by referring to a US/China competition, but also may not be incorrect. However, framing it as if AI is a possible solution to global geopolitical concerns is like putting the cart before the horse, in the Stone Age before we tamed horses, invented the wheel, or had enough shit in a pile to require a cart. Let's put a big exclamation point on this one and declare, It's really bad to suggest that we rely upon something that doesn't think to do our important thinking!
The actual community of AI Experts is way smaller than we are led to believe, and they are all competing within that small community. We are justified in asking, Are they all competing differently? Are they all innovating wildly, Or, are they all running the same race in the same way? Why wouldn't they? Whether you are cynical or optimistic, the goal is the same for all of them, and as far as anyone knows, the means are the same as well.
The community of people making decisions about AI and what to do with it- how to profit from it- is even smaller still, and so the descent into madness- I mean evolution of AI- is concentrated into a small circle of influences that may only be motivated by their immediate competitor. Monkey See, Monkey Do.
I gave Gemini and Meta the following prompt: "Please compare and contrast the factual advancements in AI with the news articles and advertising surrounding it, and estimate how much of what the public knows is hype."
Gemini: "Estimation of Hype: It's difficult to put an exact percentage on "hype," as it's a spectrum, but a reasonable estimate would be that 30-50% of what the public knows about AI is influenced by hype, oversimplification, or outright exaggeration."
The expanded answer is illuminating, giving current AI technology a fair appraisal. Lots of people doing good work out there.
Meta: Hype vs. Reality: Estimating the exact amount of hype surrounding AI is challenging, but it's likely that a significant portion of the public's perception is influenced by exaggerated claims and sensationalized media coverage.
META also went on to add the following. "Key Statistics:
AI Adoption: 88% of marketers report using AI in their daily operations.
Productivity Gains: 83% of marketers report increased efficiency, with nearly 50% saving 1-5 hours weekly.
Job Displacement Concerns: 59.8% of marketers worry that AI may replace their roles.
Data Privacy Concerns: 40% of marketers cite data privacy concerns as the top barrier to adopting AI tools ¹.
Overall, while AI has made significant strides, it's crucial to maintain a nuanced understanding of its capabilities and limitations, separating factual advancements from the hype surrounding it."
Finally, some sound advice!
Hot Pot AI. Princess and Nobody making tough decisions.
None of the AIs will read between the lines for us and, unfortunately, that is exactly what humans need when making decisions. The Hype surrounding AI development is masking something that we know instinctively is either disappointing or dangerous. By the time we figure out that it was all just about making more money, today's perpetrators will be anecdotes of history.
THAT, is a ridiculous paradigm for making business decisions.
Everyone Told You to Get on Social Media. Here's How That's Working Out.
Let's take stock.
You followed the advice. You built a Facebook page, maybe an Instagram. You posted regularly for a while, then irregularly, then you hired someone's nephew to handle it. You boosted a few posts. You watched the impressions climb and the phone stay quiet.
Meanwhile, the platforms quietly changed the rules. Organic reach on Facebook has collapsed to somewhere between 2% and 5% of your followers on a good day. Instagram's engagement rate sits at 0.48% as of 2025 — down from 0.50% the year before, which was already not impressive. You are, in the most literal sense, shouting into a feed that no one asked to see.
None of this is controversial. The marketers selling you social media services know this. The platforms know this. The data has been clear for years. And yet the advice hasn't changed, because the advice has never really been about your ROI.
The Attention Economy Has a New Landlord Every 18 Months
Here's the uncomfortable math. Brands spent close to $234 billion on social media advertising in 2025. That money went somewhere, and it wasn't into small business bank accounts. It went to Meta, to Google, to TikTok — platforms that have no particular interest in whether your hardware store in a mid-sized town survives the next five years.
The social media playbook was written for brands with content teams, advertising budgets, and the patience to A/B test creative at scale. It was then handed to every small business owner in the country and described as essential. The fact that over 20% of small enterprises spend ten or more hours per week on social media marketing suggests the pitch landed. Whether the results justified it is a different question, and one conspicuously absent from most of the enthusiasm.
The platforms are not infrastructure. They are advertising products that allow you to rent access to an audience they own. When the terms change — and they always change — you have nothing. No list. No relationship. No address. Just a page you don't control on a platform that may or may not exist in its current form in three years.
Ask anyone who built their business on organic Facebook reach in 2012 how that investment aged.
What Actually Works for Local Business Visibility
There's a useful distinction between reach and presence. Social media optimizes for reach — broad, shallow, algorithmically mediated. What local businesses actually need is presence: the kind that shows up when someone in your community is looking for exactly what you do.
Website, blog, and SEO efforts remained the number one ROI-generating channel for marketers in 2025 — ahead of paid social, ahead of content marketing, ahead of everything else. This is not a new finding. It has been true for years and continues to be true, which makes the collective fixation on social media all the more peculiar.
Search intent is different from scroll intent. Someone looking for a flooring contractor in their town is not passively consuming content — they are actively trying to find someone. The platform that puts your business in front of that person, at that moment, is doing something categorically different from a boosted post that interrupted someone's lunch.
The business that shows up in local search, in a curated regional directory, in a trusted community resource — that business has presence. Not just reach.
A Case Study Worth Paying Attention To
Kootenay Mall is a regional business directory platform operating across 53+ communities in British Columbia's Kootenay region. It does something structurally simple: it puts local businesses in front of local shoppers who are actively looking for local options, without an algorithm deciding who gets seen this week.
The model is deliberately unglamorous. No viral content strategy. No influencer partnerships. No engagement rate optimization. Just: here are the businesses in your community, here is what they offer, here is how to reach them.
The platform's positioning — anti-algorithmic, month-to-month contracts, locally owned — is not nostalgia. It reflects a genuine market correction. As social media trust declines and algorithmic unpredictability increases, the businesses that established stable, searchable, community-embedded visibility early are the ones that won't be renegotiating their digital presence every time a platform updates its feed logic.
What Kootenay Mall demonstrates is that regional directory infrastructure, done seriously, is not a relic of the Yellow Pages era. It is a direct response to the failure modes of the attention economy — and a practical alternative for business owners who have spent enough time feeding the algorithm with no reliable return.
The Question Worth Asking Your Marketing Advisor
When someone recommends a marketing channel, ask them one question: Who benefits if this doesn't work?
With social media, the answer is the platform. Your ad spend funds their infrastructure regardless of your conversion rate. The incentive structure is not aligned with your success.
With owned visibility — search presence, directory listings, community infrastructure — the calculus is different. If it doesn't work, no one gets paid. That's a different kind of accountability.
Local businesses have spent a decade being told that their survival depends on mastering a set of tools designed for a different scale, a different audience, and a different objective. Some of them have thrived. Most have spent significant time and money on a channel that optimizes for engagement metrics, not revenue.
The regional directory model doesn't promise virality. It promises something more useful: that when someone in your community needs what you provide, they find you. Consistently. Without renegotiating your visibility every quarter.
That is not an exciting pitch. It is, however, the one that holds up.
Dear "The Masses": You're Not Dumb
We Are Not the Problem. Stop Pretending We Are.
There's a particular kind of media story that has been around long enough to have grandchildren by now. It goes like this: A powerful person is doing something alarming to you, the credulous, vulnerable, easily-manipulated public. The storyteller, of course, is here to warn you. They're on your side.
I've been watching one of these stories make the rounds lately, and I want to name what I think is actually happening, not to defend the powerful person being criticized, but because the manipulation in the story itself deserves more attention than the story is getting.
The "Dumb Masses" Myth Has a Long Resume
The idea that ordinary people are uniquely susceptible to exploitation- that we're cognitively outmatched by elites who understand us better than we understand ourselves- is not an observation. It's a strategy.
It has been a strategy for a very long time.
The history of mass education is instructive here. Early public education wasn't primarily designed to liberate the working class. It was, by the accounts of many of its architects, designed to produce a population that was just literate enough to be productive, and just rational enough to not be dangerous. The goal was managed compliance, not genuine empowerment.
Understanding that reframes a lot of what followed. The polarized "intellect versus ignorance" culture that many of us grew up inside, the quiet condescension of credentialed people toward uncredentialed ones, wasn't a natural social dynamic. It was a managed one. It had authors.
And here's what's worth saying clearly: The people enforcing that hierarchy were, largely, its victims too. They received just enough status to become enthusiastic participants in a system that served interests far above their own. That doesn't entirely excuse them. But it does explain them.
Ancient People Were Not Stupid
One of the better arguments against the "dumb masses" narrative is sitting right there in the historical record, largely ignored.
The mythological traditions of ancient cultures, Egyptian, Greek, Mesoamerican, Chinese, are philosophically sophisticated documents. They encode paradox. They hold contradictory truths in productive tension. They process collective trauma through layered symbol and narrative. That is not the output of a population that needed to be protected from complex ideas.
Ordinary people have always been capable of this kind of thinking. The claim that they aren't is not neutral. It is useful to someone.
Ask Who the Story Serves
When someone tells you that a powerful figure is studying you in order to exploit you- pause before you react. Not because the concern is necessarily wrong, but because that particular framing does something specific to you.
It makes you feel vulnerable. It positions the storyteller as your protector. And it redirects your attention toward the named villain, away from the question of what the storyteller might be building on top of your fear.
The architecture of exploitation is not a secret. Behavioral economics, addiction science, marketing psychology, the mechanics of influence have been documented exhaustively for decades. Anyone who claims to be exposing a hidden system of manipulation is unlikely to be discovering something genuinely new, and more likely narrating a story about themselves while pointing at someone else.
It's worth knowing how to tell the difference.
A Practical Note
This is where an AI could be very helpful. You don't need a degree in media literacy. You just need to ask better questions. Try any of the following prompts:
1 Attribution Check "I just watched or read someone criticizing a powerful person. Can you help me figure out whether they're reporting facts about that person, or whether they're actually describing something about themselves or their own motives? Walk me through it like a detective would."
2 Beneficiary Question "Someone just told me something alarming about a public figure. Before I react, help me ask: who benefits if I believe this? Who loses if I don't? And does the person telling me have a stake in my reaction?"
3 Destruction Test "Help me understand this idea: sometimes people build their reputation or business on a problem they helped create, or that someone else made worse on purpose. Can you show me how to spot when that's happening in something I'm reading or watching?"
It's not about "dumb" or "smart", it's just about calibration. Most people, given the right tools, are perfectly capable of this kind of thinking. They always have been.
That, more than anything, is what certain people need to distract you from.
The Real Value of “1”
How to Erode “Toxic Culture”
Let’s just get right to it: Toxic Culture is very much a rhetorical phenomenon. It rests on the unwillingness of passive group members to challenge poor-quality behavior when they are uncertain of their own verbal skills, and also of how the group evaluates their membership. Fortunately, there is relief in the form of logic.
Since much of the "toxicity" relies upon the rhetorical skills of bad actors—who are predictable, if anything—we can approach them with the one thing they do not excel at: Reasoning.
The math only looks complicated,
Vi = ∑(wq* q). This formula says that a value Vi equals the SUM ∑ of a specific quality q times the weight wq ascribed to that quality. It expresses a standard that challenges the common rhetorical ways that we evaluate each other. The body of dialogues surrounding the value of another person is no longer negotiable strictly through one’s ability to talk fast. Being confidently aggressive or even narcissistic in the workplace no longer supports an assumption of credibility, or authority.
Toxic Culture is developed through deconstructing the standards by which we are evaluated or held accountable. This is no longer a mystery. Research by Duffy et al. (2012), "Social Undermining in the Workplace," found that bad actors created moral disengagement as a tactic for granting themselves approval for antisocial conduct. Essentially, creating a "Pavlovian cage" within a work environment bred a widespread tolerance of bad behavior that would otherwise never have been tolerated.
Nor is this a local phenomenon; it has been referred to as a "Moral Maze." Robert Jackall (1988), in his landmark study Moral Mazes, found that in bureaucratic institutions, formal accountability structures are often rendered inert by an informal "shadow institution" where the "moral rules-in-use" depend entirely on authority relationships rather than objective standards.
We barely need mention the numerous famous cases of major corporations that created, or allowed the creation of, a toxic culture—supposedly in the name of "good business practice." Enron comes to mind. Wells Fargo. But just in case history is not persuasive enough, researchers Van Rooij & Fine (2021), "Toxic Corporate Culture," found that a culture of accepting rule-breaking easily morphs into a “Lord of the Flies” scenario in which compliance is corrupted and law-breaking is condoned as normal.
Furthermore, research on "Employee Silence" (Morrison, 2014) confirms that when individuals lack a sense of psychological safety, they withdraw their engagement. This silence is not a lack of opinion; it is a survival mechanism that bad actors then use as a tool to deconstruct standards further.
Erosion of standards is how a toxic culture develops, and the central mechanism, without any doubt, is our habit of rhetorical speech. We have, just for example, the term “failing upward.” We’re just asking ourselves: “How is it even possible that means anything at all? And we all know it!”
Rhetorical speech has long been recognized
as more dangerous than lying, since lying has a strict relationship with truth (hiding it) and rhetoric often deconstructs truth, massaging it as a utility for narratives of persuasion (Frankfurt, H. G., 2005, On Bullshit). It allows for "Strategic Ambiguity" (Eisenberg, 1984) as a tactic for enforcing narratives that would otherwise foster objection. This permits a very specific drift from facts to crowd-influence, and that is where our formula comes into effect as a remedy.
Most people are not trained, or even equipped emotionally or intellectually, to go into work every day and engage in rhetorical battles. The outstanding, extra cognitive load built by constant stress and toxic dialogues is often portrayed as a necessary "dog-eat-dog" reality, but on second glance, it’s not clear that the people saying those things have ever owned a dog, lived in reality, or been to a jungle!
The simple fact is that the rhetorical noise is a distraction that is probably meant to create leverage over others, if only by making them work harder and fostering mistakes. People aren’t bad at their jobs if others are actively sabotaging them with bullshit and harmful gossip. The emotional labor of showing up to a toxic environment is harmful and anything but profitable.
That "Fake Reality," which I have termed a “Biological Hallucination” in other articles, is not a naturally occurring influence, but is purposefully assumed by bad actors to enforce the degradation of standards. One of the most common manipulations is to make individuals justify their supposedly inflated value to the crowd—the good old “Who Do You Think You Are?” gambit.
The idea is to put someone on the defensive by presuming to speak on behalf of the crowd, who have probably endured similar treatment and are afraid to be singled out. In a single, disingenuous question, the individual is placed in a false opposition to the group, with one person demanding a justification- not for anything real- but just for an attitude that is implied to be an affliction on the group.
Well, let’s work through that, because the math is entirely in favor of the individual.
The bad actor doesn’t say it out loud
but implies that it is up to any individual to justify their value, as an employee, as a member of the group; YES, even as a human being. However, that implied devaluation has no basis in reality or even logically, because if our values are not additive, then there is no value in turning the group against anyone.
The individual either has a basic value, or the crowd has no value either. A group’s value is entirely contingent on the base value of individuals! Once that is re-established, the onus to justify any devaluation passes to the person making the accusation.
Logically, if Vi = 0, then 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. The accuser is saying that is exactly the case until they decide on the values. That is now blown wide open to challenge. Either you have value, or no one does, and turning the group against you is futile. In fact, the very act of trying to turn a group against an individual asserts the number of members in that group as the value of the accused. It’s not even a choice, logically, because again, if the accused indeed has no value, then what is the display for? The additive values of the individuals in the group is a measure of how important it is to impose upon the accused.
Rhetorically, your response leads with a solid gut-punch: “Who do I think I am? I’m a member of this group, just like you. Logically, either I have a voice, or no one here does, including you. So, what’s it going to be?”
Follow that with a rhetorical upper-cut: “It sounds to me as if you’re reserving the right to do the valuing for everyone, and I just don’t see how you are getting from A to B on that.”
Then a bit of "ground-and-pound": “Let’s face it: You’re using the group to back you up, so logically their number is the value you are placing on my compliance. You’ve inflated my value to the number of people here today, and I’m not sure how solid that reasoning is. If you devalue everyone in this group to win an argument, you are effectively bankrupting the company’s only real asset. Is that your intention?”
(*Voice of Experience: The accuser is going to argue anyway and talk over you and shout you down, but stick to your guns, because everyone else has heard you, and is now thinking hard about your argument.)
Unless there is a real reason to question your presence- which would be what? You are supposed to be in prison, but crashed a staff meeting at a company you don’t work for??? Without a real, quality rationale for openly devaluing others, the onus is on the accuser to provide the evidence, just like on “Law & Order”.
Let’s talk about Quality, then.
There are 4 actual qualities relevant across all domains:
Integrity (Consistency between word and action).
Competence (The ability to move the "Role" toward the goal).
Foresight (The ability to see outcomes based on data).
Sovereignty (The ability to maintain integrity against influencers).
The value of someone’s voice can be evaluated reasonably on these qualities so that even if you are technically qualified for something, a poor evaluation on them could justify a harsh downgrade in credibility. You still have a basic value of 1, but the added value of your credentials may suffer some real-world strain.
On the other hand, a lack of credentials may not be a solid counter for high evaluations on those 4 qualities. While management can audit a role, they can’t reasonably inflate that to other qualities such as Sovereignty, or your basic value. There is no room for claiming a total, abject failure across the board for that clerical error you made 5 years ago.
Faced with someone demanding an implied devaluation of you as a human, or employee or whatever, you can still take control of that dialogue by insisting on real valuations of those qualities. In fact, it’s a great strategy because it is, as they say on Law & Order “fruit of the poisoned tree, your Honor”. The accuser allows questioning of their own performance on those same qualities if they engage. (They probably won’t).
The Sovereign Value of “1”
The basic value of each person is not something that can be dispensed with rhetorically while retaining any credibility. It is now a signal of poor qualities, or openly toxic behavior, which you don’t need to take responsibility for. By reclaiming the sovereign value of "1," you aren't just defending yourself; you are restoring the math of the entire group.
Inflation Was Never Just Economics
What the data reveals when you track the permission structure, not the price index
The standard story of post-pandemic inflation
is a version of chaos theory: “A butterfly fluttered in China, causing a cascade of market perturbations that resulted in uncontrollable price increases” When consumers are obviously skeptical, it changes to something like this: “supply chains broke, energy prices spiked, demand surged, prices followed. When conditions normalized, prices came down.” The story is tidy, technically defensible, and largely wrong about what actually happened.
The triggers were real but, what the accepted story gets wrong is the mechanism; the process by which individual pricing decisions spread across industries, categories, and countries far beyond what any trigger condition (the butterfly) could justify. That mechanism is not economic. It is behavioral. And once you know what to look for, it is visible in the data.
The analytical framework I apply to organizational behavior- tracking how individuals respond to crowd conditions, and how crowds are shaped by individual actors- turns out to work equally well on markets. What it reveals in the inflation data of 2021 through 2024 is not a story about supply and demand. It is a story about social sanctions.
“The question is not why prices went up. It is why they didn’t come back down when the conditions that justified the increase resolved.”
The asymmetry that standard economics cannot explain
Consider coffee. Arabica commodity prices roughly doubled between 2019 and 2022, driven by genuine supply disruptions including Brazilian drought and shipping cost increases. Retail prices followed. So far, standard economics but, while commodity prices pulled back significantly in 2023, retail prices did not. By early 2026, the average retail price of ground coffee in the United States had reached nearly $9.40 per pound, more than double the 2019 average, while the commodity price had deflated substantially.
Eggs show the same pattern more dramatically. Avian Influenza was real, and the loss of over 127 million egg-laying hens since 2022 was a genuine supply shock. Prices spiked accordingly but, dominated by the price of feed, production costs fell back in 2023 and 2024. Retail prices remained high. The largest US egg producer reported a 247% increase in quarterly net income in early 2025, triggering an investigation by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Shrinkflation tells the same story in a different register. Rather than raising sticker prices, manufacturers reduced package sizes, effectively raising per-unit prices invisibly. A US Government Accountability Office analysis found that per-unit price increases from package downsizing alone ranged from 12% for paper towels to 32% for coffee between 2021 and 2023. This downsizing was heavily concentrated in the period of peak inflation narrative, slowing as that narrative faded, while traditional price increases continued.
The sanction structure
The connection here is not coordination. It’s not a conspiracy. The coffee roasters, egg producers, and cereal manufacturers were not calling each other. What they shared was a permission structure, a social and narrative environment in which raising prices, shrinking packages, and expanding margins had become not only acceptable but expected.
Sanction structures in markets work the same way they work in organizations. One visible actor moves. The consequences are acceptable; consumers complain but keep buying, competitors match rather than hold, regulators investigate slowly. The fog of diffused responsibility lifts for everyone simultaneously. And in that fog, rational actors make individually defensible decisions that produce collectively predatory outcomes. Nobody needed to coordinate. The sanction did the work.
“Nobody needed to coordinate. The sanction did the work. And someone built the sanction.”
Who built the sanction
This is where the analysis becomes uncomfortable for Canadians.
Television news advertising revenue in North America has collapsed structurally over the past decade, declining more than 50% in inflation-adjusted terms between 2014 and 2024. The advertisers who remain on regular television are disproportionately large consumer goods companies: the manufacturers of coffee, cereal, paper towels, household products. They are the companies whose pricing behavior those same networks were covering as an inflation story.
In Canada, the situation is compounded significantly. A disproportionate share of digital advertising revenue flows to foreign platforms; Google, Meta, and their peers, leaving Canadian news organizations even more financially dependent on the large domestic and multinational advertisers who remain. A news organization operating on contracting revenue is not a neutral observer of its main clients. It is an actor with a financial dependency and therefore a structural incentive, not necessarily conscious, to frame corporate pricing behavior as the inevitable consequence of external forces rather than a series of individual decisions made by people.
The inflation narrative; supply chains, COVID, Russia, avian flu, accomplished exactly that framing. It attributed individual pricing decisions to aggregate forces. It made the permission structure invisible by replacing it with a macro story that nobody could be held accountable for. And news organizations, navigating their own precarious financial position, had every reason to maintain that framing and none to challenge it.
What the data actually shows
When you track commodity costs against retail prices across multiple categories, map the timing of price increases against the inflation narrative in broadcast media, and apply a behavioral framework to the sequencing of individual corporate decisions, a different picture emerges. The trigger conditions were real but bounded. The price increases were real but unbounded. The gap between what costs justified and what prices delivered is not noise. It is signal — consistent enough across categories, geographies, and corporate structures to indicate a shared behavioral mechanism rather than independent economic responses.
That mechanism is crowd contagion operating through a sanction that was actively constructed and passively maintained. The construction was not conspiratorial. The maintenance was not coordinated. It was simply a narrative that was commodified by a service; No different than Superbowl commercials. The outcome, however; sustained margin expansion well beyond what trigger conditions justified, was therefore normalized- actively sold to viewers- by a media ecosystem financially dependent on the actors doing the expanding. The relationship is visible, measurable, and consequential.
For Canadian businesses and consumers, the implication is specific: The sanction structure was not local. It was imported, amplified by domestic medias increasingly desperate competition with foreign media platforms, and applied to a market where the analytical tools to identify it have not yet been widely deployed.
Consider those tools deployed.
This article draws on a proprietary behavioral analysis framework developed through APEX Deployment’s organizational and market research practice. Underlying data sources include US Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDA Egg Industry Center, US Government Accountability Office, WARC Media, and GroupM annual forecasts.
Hugh McGillivray · APEX Deployment Business Solutions
BA Psychology (Hons) · Organizational & Market Behavioral Analyst · apexdeployment.com
Princess Wants Something
And Nobody Knows What It Is: How Organizations Maintain Corrupt Equilibrium Without Knowing It
By Hugh McGillivray · APEX Deployment Business Solutions
There is a particular kind of organizational dysfunction that survives every intervention thrown at it. New leadership. Restructuring. Culture initiatives. Team-building retreats. It absorbs all of them and continues unchanged. If you have ever watched this happen and wondered why, the answer is probably not what you think.
The standard diagnosis for chronic workplace dysfunction is some variation of bad leadership, poor communication, or misaligned incentives. Fix the leader, clarify the messaging, restructure the incentives — problem solved. Except it isn’t. Because this diagnosis mistakes the symptom for the system.
What most chronic dysfunction actually represents is a stable equilibrium. Not broken. Stable. The chaos is the point. And once you understand that, the question changes entirely — from “how do we fix this” to “who benefits from it staying exactly as it is.”
“The chaos is not a symptom of failure. In a managed dysfunction environment, the chaos is the product.”
The Corrupt Prisoner’s Dilemma
Most people are familiar with the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma — two rational actors choosing between cooperation and defection, each trying to optimize their own outcome. The elegant cruelty of the dilemma is that individual rationality produces collective failure.
What organizational systems produce, under specific conditions, is a corruption of that mechanism. Call it the Corrupt Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game is no longer about optimizing outcomes. It is about surviving an environment where the rules themselves have been captured.
In a standard dysfunction, people defect from cooperation because it serves their interests. In a Corrupt Prisoner’s Dilemma, people cooperate with a corrupt equilibrium — not because it serves them, but because they cannot tell who is corrupt and cannot afford to be wrong. The safest move is compliance. And so the system perpetuates itself without requiring constant enforcement from above.
Two variants — and why the distinction matters
The first variant is the enforced version. One or more actors know the game is rigged and enforce participation. Everyone else cooperates because the cost of refusal is visible and credible. Someone always pays the price for non-compliance — publicly enough that the lesson lands. This variant is easier to diagnose once you know what to look for, because the enforcement leaves traces.
The second variant is more insidious. Call it the Fog Dilemma. Nobody is certain who the corrupt element is, so everyone performs compliance as a defensive posture. Honest actors cooperate with a corrupt equilibrium not because they are coerced, but because defection looks like an admission of guilt — or worse, an invitation to become the next target. The fog protects the corrupt by making good-faith actors into unwilling enforcers.
“In the Fog Dilemma, good people maintain corrupt systems — not from moral failure, but from rational navigation of an environment where the rules cannot be trusted.”
This distinction matters enormously for anyone trying to intervene in a dysfunctional organization. The enforced variant requires identifying and removing the enforcement mechanism. The Fog variant requires something harder — restoring enough transparency that honest actors can afford to act honestly again. These are not the same intervention, and applying the wrong one makes things worse.
What the scapegoat is actually for
Both variants share a common feature: the scapegoat. In enforced corruption, the scapegoat is the cautionary tale — visible punishment for non-compliance. In the Fog Dilemma, the scapegoat serves a different function. They become the named source of dysfunction, which redirects collective attention away from the systemic conditions producing it.
The scapegoat is almost always someone observant, independent, or otherwise difficult to fully absorb into the informal power structure. Their independence is the threat. Making them socially radioactive — unreliable, difficult, a known complainer — is a rational response to that threat, regardless of whether anyone consciously orchestrates it. Systems select for this behavior even without a director.
The consulting diagnostic question
When I encounter a chronically dysfunctional organization, the first question I ask is not “what is wrong here.” It is “what would become visible if this environment calmed down.” Because sustained, managed dysfunction almost always functions as cover — for extractive behavior, for incompetence protected by informal alliance, for an accountability gap that someone above the chaos has a strong interest in maintaining.
The second question is “which variant are we in.” Enforced or fog. The answer determines everything about the intervention — who needs to move, what needs to change structurally, and crucially, how long it will take before honest actors feel safe enough to behave honestly again.
Neither question gets asked in a standard culture audit. Which is why standard culture audits rarely change anything.
This is the first in a series of articles examining crowd dynamics in organizational settings — how groups shape individuals, how informal power displaces formal authority, and what it actually takes to change an environment rather than just describe it.
Hugh McGillivray · APEX Deployment Business Solutions
BA Psychology (Hons) · Former CBT Therapist · Organizational Analyst · apexdeployment.com