1970: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman)

admin · June 25, 2025, 7:03pm

This article was written by Claude based on a deep research report from Gemini and then lightly edited by the administrator. Inaccuracies may exist.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness: Why Your “Flat” Organization Might Be More Hierarchical Than You Think

In 1970, a young feminist activist named Jo Freeman delivered a speech at a conference in Mississippi that would become one of the most influential essays in organizational theory. More than fifty years later, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” reads like a prophetic warning about everything from Silicon Valley startups to blockchain DAOs to the AI-driven workplaces of tomorrow.

Freeman’s central insight was both simple and radical: there’s no such thing as a truly structureless group. When organizations try to eliminate hierarchy and formal structure, they don’t create equality—they just make power invisible and unaccountable. The result is often more oppressive than traditional hierarchy, not less.

This insight has proven remarkably prescient. As we’ve witnessed the rise and fall of countless “flat” organizations, the emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and now the dawn of AI-managed workplaces, Freeman’s diagnosis feels more relevant than ever. Each new wave of organizational innovation seems to rediscover her core truth: the choice isn’t between having power structures or not having them. It’s between having explicit, accountable structures or implicit, tyrannical ones.

The Myth of the Structureless Group

Freeman’s essay emerged from her experiences in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s. These consciousness-raising groups initially thrived on informal, non-hierarchical structures that created safe spaces for women to share experiences and build solidarity. But when the groups tried to transition from internal dialogue to external action—organizing protests, publishing newsletters, lobbying for policy changes—they hit a wall.

The problem wasn’t that these groups lacked leadership. It was that their leadership was informal, unelected, and unaccountable. Freeman observed the emergence of what she called “informal elites”—small networks of friends who, through shared backgrounds and constant communication, effectively made decisions before issues ever reached the larger group. These elites were typically homogeneous: middle-class, college-educated women in their twenties who shared similar communication styles and values.

For everyone else, the group’s functioning became mystifying. As Freeman wrote, “Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away.” Because their influence wasn’t based on delegated authority, the group couldn’t hold them accountable. Members outside the inner circle were left with what Freeman called “paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”

Freeman drew a powerful analogy to laissez-faire economics: just as “free market” ideology didn’t prevent economic elites from consolidating power but merely prevented government regulation of that power, the ideology of structurelessness didn’t prevent the formation of hierarchies—it just prevented the group from acknowledging and governing them.

The Corporate World’s Unwitting Experiment

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Freeman’s insights have found an unlikely testing ground in corporate America. The rise of “flat” organizational structures in tech companies and startups has created a massive, unintentional experiment in her theories.

The promise of flat organizations is seductive: eliminate middle management, increase agility, foster innovation, and empower employees. Companies like Google, Netflix, and countless startups have embraced flatter structures, believing they could create more dynamic and egalitarian workplaces.

But Freeman’s predictions have proven remarkably accurate. Research on flat organizations consistently identifies the emergence of “shadow hierarchies”—informal power structures based on tenure, technical expertise, proximity to founders, or simple charisma. These shadow hierarchies often prove more rigid and less meritocratic than the formal structures they replaced.

The pattern is so predictable that organizational psychologists have identified a clear inflection point. Companies with fewer than 150 employees (roughly Dunbar’s number—the cognitive limit for maintaining stable social relationships) can often function with informal structures. But once they cross this threshold, the lack of formal accountability mechanisms becomes a serious liability.

Consider the cautionary tale of many tech startups. In their early days, five to ten people can coordinate through daily conversations and shared mission. But as they scale to 200 or 500 employees, those informal networks break down. New hires can’t decode the unwritten rules. Decision-making becomes opaque. The founders’ inner circle becomes an informal board of directors that no one elected and that answers to no one but themselves.

When Structure Becomes Tyranny: The Holacracy Experiment

If flat organizations represent an accidental encounter with Freeman’s thesis, systems like Holacracy represent a deliberate attempt to solve it through hyper-formalization. Holacracy replaces traditional management with an elaborate system of roles, circles, and decision-making processes, all governed by a detailed constitution.

The most famous test case was Zappos, the online shoe retailer that adopted Holacracy company-wide in 2014. CEO Tony Hsieh envisioned transforming the 1,500-person company into something more like a city than a corporation—distributed, adaptive, and innovative.

The experiment revealed both the promise and the perils of Freeman’s approach. On one hand, Holacracy succeeded in making power structures explicit and distributed. Authority was delegated to specific roles rather than concentrated in managers. Decision-making processes were transparent and documented.

But employees reported that the system felt “mechanistic and dehumanizing.” The elaborate governance meetings and rigid processes consumed enormous time and energy. Most tellingly, the system didn’t eliminate power dynamics—it simply re-encoded them. Budget decisions remained centralized, clashing with the decentralized ethos. Those comfortable with assertive, verbal communication styles thrived, while others felt marginalized by the new system’s demands.

Zappos eventually moved beyond pure Holacracy, supplementing it with concepts like “Market-Based Dynamics” and “Customer-Generated Budgeting.” The company’s journey illustrates a crucial point: even the most comprehensive formal structure isn’t a panacea. It must be adapted to the organization’s specific culture and context.

The Digital Frontier: DAOs and the Blockchain Utopia

The most recent and radical experiments in anti-hierarchy are happening in the blockchain world. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent the ultimate expression of the structureless ideal: organizations governed by code rather than humans, where smart contracts automatically execute decisions based on token-holder votes.

The utopian promise is compelling: replace fallible human managers with transparent, automated rules. Eliminate the need for traditional hierarchies through cryptographic trust. Create truly democratic organizations where every stakeholder has a voice proportional to their investment.

But DAOs have proven to be a masterclass in Freeman’s tyranny. Despite their futuristic technology, they consistently develop the same informal power structures she identified:

Token plutocracy: Voting power tied to token ownership creates new elites based on wealth. A few “whale” token holders can dominate decision-making, creating a system that’s formally democratic but functionally oligarchic.

Core team influence: Most DAOs don’t emerge fully decentralized. They’re incubated by founding teams who write the code, secure initial funding, and set strategic direction. These founders become de facto leaders with enormous influence that’s rarely formally acknowledged or democratically accountable.

Voter apathy: Low participation rates mean that critical decisions are often made by small, highly engaged minorities—another form of unelected elite.

The most successful DAOs have responded by building sophisticated formal structures on top of their blockchain foundations. They’re creating legal entities, delegate programs, working groups, and explicit governance processes. In other words, they’re implementing Freeman’s prescription for democratic structuring, just with fancier technology.

The AI Revolution: Algorithmic Management and New Tyrannies

Looking ahead, the next frontier in organizational design is the integration of artificial intelligence—not just as a tool, but as a management layer. We’re moving from generative AI that responds to human prompts toward agentic AI that can pursue complex goals with minimal supervision.

This evolution creates what might be called the “algorithmic organization”—where AI agents serve as digital workers, and algorithmic management systems handle tasks traditionally performed by human managers: performance monitoring, task allocation, scheduling, and evaluation.

From Freeman’s perspective, this represents both the ultimate formalization of structure and its most dangerous perversion. On one hand, algorithmic management creates perfectly explicit, rational systems of control. Every decision is documented, every process is transparent, and every outcome is measurable.

But these systems also risk creating the most unaccountable form of power imaginable. When the “manager” is an algorithm, who holds the real authority? It’s the people who design, train, and tune the AI systems—a new technical elite whose power is even more opaque than the informal networks Freeman criticized.

If the AI’s decision-making process is a “black box”—too complex for even its creators to fully understand—then the rules of decision-making become not just unknown but unknowable. This could represent the ultimate tyranny: a perfectly rationalized system of control that’s fundamentally anti-democratic.

Freeman’s Blueprint for Democratic Organizations

Rather than advocating for traditional hierarchy, Freeman proposed seven principles for creating democratic, accountable, and effective structures:

Delegation of specific authority: Assign specific tasks to specific people through democratic procedures
Accountability: Ensure that everyone with delegated authority is responsible to those who selected them
Distribution of authority: Spread power among as many people as reasonably possible
Rotation of tasks: Regularly rotate responsibilities while allowing time for competence development
Rational allocation of tasks: Select people for roles based on ability and interest, not popularity
Diffusion of information: Share information widely to enable informed participation
Equal access to resources: Ensure all members have equal access to what the group needs to function

These principles form a coherent framework for organizations that are both effective and democratic. They acknowledge that structure is necessary while insisting that it be legitimate, transparent, and accountable.

Lessons for the Modern Organization

The journey from 1970s feminist collectives to AI-driven enterprises reveals the timeless relevance of Freeman’s insights. The fundamental tension between freedom and effectiveness, autonomy and accountability, isn’t a problem to be solved once but a dynamic to be managed continuously.

The most important lesson is that structure isn’t the enemy—unaccountable power is. Structure is a neutral tool that can serve oppression or liberation depending on how it’s designed and governed. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate structure but to consciously design structures that serve the organization’s purpose and values.

For leaders grappling with these challenges, Freeman’s work suggests a framework for what might be called “Minimum Viable Structure”—the least amount of formal structure needed to ensure clarity, accountability, and effectiveness given the organization’s current scale, tasks, and goals.

For a five-person startup, this might mean simple weekly meetings with rotating facilitation. For a 200-person company, it might require explicit peer-to-peer commitment processes and formal conflict resolution protocols. For a global DAO, it demands sophisticated on-chain and off-chain governance mechanisms.

The key is conscious design. Rather than letting informal hierarchies emerge by default, successful organizations explicitly decide how power should be distributed, how decisions should be made, and how accountability should be maintained.

The Future of Human Agency

As we stand on the brink of an AI-dominated future, Freeman’s work becomes more urgent than ever. The greatest risk isn’t that AI will eliminate human agency, but that it will formalize systems of control that are perfectly efficient and completely unaccountable to the people they govern.

The challenge for the 21st century will be creating what might be called “hybrid governance”—systems that harness the efficiency of algorithmic management while preserving human agency and democratic accountability. This will require the same kind of intentional design that Freeman advocated, but applied to the interface between human and machine intelligence.

The principles she articulated—transparency, accountability, distributed authority, and democratic control—must become the foundational values we embed in our technological architectures. The tyranny of structurelessness taught us that hidden power is dangerous. The emerging tyrannies of algorithmic control remind us that visible, formalized power can be just as dangerous if it’s not legitimately granted by and accountable to the people it affects.

More than fifty years after Freeman first delivered her speech, her core insight remains as relevant as ever: true freedom requires not the absence of structure, but the presence of accountable, democratic structures that serve human flourishing rather than dominating it. In our rush to embrace new organizational forms—whether flat, holacratic, decentralized, or algorithmic—we would do well to remember her warning and her wisdom.

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