(2022-03-11) Rao Lands Of Lorecraft

Venkatesh Rao: Lands of Lorecraft. In the last couple of years, I’ve become aware of some genuinely fresh management thinking from an emerging cohort of thinkers on the margins of the landscape of traditional institutions.

issues (more and more every year) for which I turn to this new school of what I call lorecraft.

lorecraft is the first truly internet-native school of management and organizational thinking (network enlightenment)

The common feature in the work of these emerging thinkers is the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory. Lore, you might say is the feedstock of both stories and world-building, but is neither. It is raw cultural phenomenology.

Lore is both at the heart of how these thinkers view the world of work and organizations, and the means by which they prefer to act upon it.

Let’s look at three examples of lorecraft. The examples are from the work of three emerging masters (lords and ladies? witches and wizards?) of lorecraft: Rafael Fernandez, Kei Kreutler, and John Palmer.

Rafa’s Community Operational Framework

Rafa is developing an interesting set of ideas and mental models for working with DAOs

Here is the framework in the form of a table, though it is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg he’s developing. The red annotations are mine.

the core of it is the Lexicon and Lore columns, which have no real counterparts in older traditions

two-day strategy meeting

with one of my own clients

I ended up getting tasked with actually instantiating that aspect of our discussions in the collective work output.

improvised what I called a “memetic forecast” for the success scenario of the initiative we were discussing (ie, speculations about what sort of lore might emerge around the initiative if it succeeded).

In the process, I stumbled across a key insight that may or may not have been spotted before: lorecraft is the evil twin of marketing.

Lore is the story insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches

a paradigm for managing the insides of an organization (to the extent there is an inside to such things as loose communities and ecosystems). Movement?

lore cannot be engineered in the same way marketing can be.

subtle gardening and curation

This is why I ended up framing my contribution to the discussion a “memetic forecast” rather than a “marketing strategy.”

A very early sign of this mindset was visible even 15 years ago, when early internet marketers made fun of traditional marketers for thinking that they could “make viral videos.”

not an engineered feature of marketing.

• Unlike John Wanamaker, who famously declared that half of his advertising worked, he just didn’t know which half, digital-native organizations not only know, they automatically act on that knowledge. Lorecraft cannot unknow what organizational sousveillance makes known. It can only retreat to what the participatory panopticon cannot see.
• "I know 95% of my lore-building will fail, I just don't know which 95% until after-the-fact."

Now-classic principles like “provide the fuel, not the spark” led directly to contemporary lorecraft mental models like headless brands.

while marketing must still attempt to distill and simplify ideas as much as possible to get through to distant fresh minds as quickly and efficiently as possible, lore is often perversely inaccessible, and the illegibility is often considered a feature rather than a bug.

Kei’s Eight Qualities of DAOs

The second example is this essay by Kei Kreutler, who heads up strategy at Gnosis, on the Eight Qualities of DAOs.

The piece references my gloss on Gareth Morgan’s classic Images of Organization, but beyond borrowing Morgan’s basic scheme of an inventory of eight gestalt qualities, it is largely an original mental model of organizations.

Kei’s eight qualities are: autopoietic, alegal, superscalable, executable, permissionless, aligned, co-owned, mnemonic. Her framework is something of a cross between an impenetrable edifice of German idealism and an ironic astrology.

Kei’s essay is richly illustrated with evocative tarot-like cards

Since Kei, like many lorecraft thinkers and practitioners, came to strategy by way of art and design, it is tempting to focus on the textual arguments and dismiss the imagery as merely a personal conceit. But the incorporation of such imagery is neither incidental, nor cosmetic.

much more grounded and empiricist than traditional management thinking

I think of right-brained lorecraft tools as centering and cultivating rapid, intuitive decision-making behaviors over analysis-paralysis.

By contrast, traditional management often tends to let a theater of rigor and empiricism, driven by a deep anxiety about uncertainty, lead pseudo-rigorous thinking over a cliff.

Would you rather run blindly off a cliff, armed with a spreadsheet full of hard-earned but deeply flawed data, unaware that the cliff is even there, or thoughtfully navigate it with appropriately uncertainty-modulated mental models, with the unknown front-and-center in the form of a tarot card, and dashboards of live, accurate, but known-to-be-limited analytics off to one side?

While I haven’t yet deployed Kei’s eight qualities in a live-fire client interaction situation, I’ve been using it for offline brainstorming and analysis of problems I’m thinking about

John’s Lorecraft Aphorisms

While John Palmer does write interesting longer essays, it’s his tweets that repeatedly catch my eye. They are good examples of an emerging genre of aphorism that I think is central to the praxis of lorecraft.

*Here’s one of his recent tweets that was an aha moment for me, crystallizing clearly the source of my discomfort with vibes: "“no lore, just vibes” - a diss"

I wrote about my own discomfort with vibes a few weeks ago: A vibe is the feel of the least unsatisfying wrong resolution of a mystery

John’s tweet points to a more valuable general precautionary principle — vibes are often degenerate fogs of failed lorecraft clouding thought.

if you expect a vibe to do the work of full-spectrum managerial lorecraft of the sort suggested by Rafa’s table or Kei’s eight qualities, your effort is doomed.

While management philosophizing by aphorism is not new, in the pre-Twitter era, aphorisms were delivered and received as lofty pronouncements

In lorecraft though, aphoristic pronouncements are not really about borrowed authority but about restoring balance to discourses that tend naturally vague due to the fundamental ambiguities of lore

aphorisms without halos do actual work. They are tools of thought (thinking tools), not ornamentation.

In other words, lorecraft doesn’t work without the kind of aphoristic sense-making John practices. It is not a nice-to-have poetic extra. It’s part of the working machinery of lorecraft.

There can be no earnest way to do lorecraft because humor, satire, and irony are necessarily baked into the mode itself.

But this does not mean lorecraft is unserious. Unlike kayfabe, the wrestling itself is real, even if the coins are memes.

A Millennial Management School

the school of thought isn’t really limited to management — it seems to rather ambitiously take all of culture as its scope.

The Other Internet crew (of which Kei is a part, and which includes Toby Shorin and Aaron Lewis who have both contributed posts to ribbonfarm) is clearly a part of this, as is K-Hole (which memed normcore into existence).

I do have some speculations on why and how it emerged though.

Lorecraft is clearly a strikingly millennial school of management thinking

Founders of startups who seem to practice a sort of management by lorecraft, such as Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research, are also in this cohort.

My first instinct, when I noticed this school of thought emerging a few years ago, was to disregard its peculiar tendencies as cosmetic artifacts of the gaming (both tabletop, such as MtG, and MMO) and extended-universe/world-building milieus this generation grew up in

Then I noticed that the members of this school were disproportionately from the worlds of art, UX, and design, and I thought perhaps they were very naturally drawing on experiences with those things for their ideas about management and organization

But neither of these explanations seemed entirely adequate

Then it hit me: lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes.

The only question is: is the adaptation a cope or a capability?

When “HR” to you mainly means a bunch of cloud apps rather than Toby from The Office... you end up thinking very differently about traditional questions of supervision, authority, tasking, and coordination.

This turn to lorecraft... is an adaptation to automation.

You end up doing more of what the machines don’t. Where Organization Man types were forced to function as machines, workers entering the workforce today are forced to function in a vacuum of opportunities to act mechanically.

Instead of work as something you do for a maternalistic entity with a human face (sometimes nurturing, sometimes abusive) between you and every algorithmic process, you get a cloth mommy API if you’re lucky and a wire mommy API if you’re not.

This suggests a skeptical null hypothesis — lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment...This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a cope.

But there’s a really compelling alternate hypothesis — lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff.

And the way you get good at it is by getting increasingly attuned to the softer, subtler side of organizations

Lorecraft is about acquiring that precision and deftness.

This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a genuinely new managerial capability.

A decade ago, lorecraft was largely limited to edgelords haunting online fora thinking up the next troll for lulz and electoral mayhem. Now lorecraft is being used to manage treasuries worth millions, launch complex commercial projects, and design automation deathstars for fun and profit. A lot can and will go wrong. There’s a lot more involved in launching space missions (moon mission) than in launching meme campaigns.

• Most of the non-trivial dApp teams seem to have this going... mirror/gnosis/clarity/colony...

But not as much more as older people imagine. And Kerbal Space Program covers more of the gap than you might think.

any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lorecraft at the helm.

lorecraft will run billion-dollar ventures (whether or not they’re organized as DAOs), wage war, and run political campaigns.

Lorecraft is already a significant presence in the latter two domains.

Arguably lorecraft drove the outcomes of the last couple of US Presidential elections, and to a significant degree is shaping the course of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Prefigurings

To whatever extent I have contributed to management thinking and practice so far, it has been in a mode that could be called late industrial.

It is a context that breeds, and calls for, the posture of darkly amused cynicism that Gen X has famously, if not credibly, affected since the 80s. But unlike others of my generation with similar interests and aptitudes, thanks to being a blogger and a free-agent, I am also 50% a product of an early-internet context.

It is a two-faced Janus mode of being.

One Janus face has been turned, for fifteen years, towards the past, acutely alive to the enormous power and life left in the old institutions I grew middle-aged in, but darkly amused by the increasingly threadbare fictions that increasingly fail to sustain them

The other Janus face has been turned, through the same 15 years, towards the future, gazing with non-native fascination at the alien forms of institutional life that are rapidly growing like weeds all around us.

I mean, this stuff is at some level ridiculous to my hidebound Gen X mind. Lore? Magic? Witchcraft? Vibes?

Good for fun and games and actual fiction, but as a basis for Serious Things? Really?

When you’ve spent the first 45 years of your life convinced you are some sort of hard realist

it is hard to entertain the thought that perhaps reality is, or could potentially transform into, some sort of malleable medium for imaginations.

But of the two worlds I’ve been witnessing, I am becoming convinced that the emerging weird world being claimed by lorecraft, with tarot cards and literal magical thinking in the mix, is actually more real, and has been all along. (cf Read-World Game)