The first time you see an organization chart, it looks like a family tree. Boxes and lines, names and titles, a tidy little diagram of who reports to whom. Harmless enough.
But stare at it long enough and something shifts. The boxes start to feel more solid than the people inside them. The position outlasts the person. The role precedes arrival and survives departure. You begin to notice that the structure doesn’t just organize humans—it replaces them.
At some point, and nobody remembers exactly when, the tool became the master.
This isn’t a metaphor. It’s closer to speciation. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it: civilization didn’t just build institutions. It excreted them. And like all excretions, they took on a life of their own.
I. The Great Ectolution
Let me give you a word you won’t find in any textbook: ectolution.
Evolution that happens outside the body. Externalized cognition that hardens into form, becomes autonomous, and then forgets it was ever part of you.
Every bureaucracy, corporation, and government agency began as a thought—a beautiful, necessary thought: How do we coordinate effort across distance? How do we store collective memory? How do we enforce fairness when we can’t all be in the same room?
The answers we invented were elegant at first. Contracts. Currencies. Legal codes. Organizational hierarchies. Structures to hold what individual minds couldn’t.
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But here’s the trick: these externalized neurons learned to metabolize.
Paperwork became respiration. Legal precedent became immune system. Quarterly earnings became pulse. The forms didn’t just store our intentions—they began to override them. And the strangest part? They didn’t need consciousness to survive. Just compliance. Just enough of us willing to show up, file the reports, follow the procedures, keep the machine breathing.
We built golems and forgot the formula for putting them to sleep.¹
This pattern appears everywhere once you notice it. The church was supposed to house devotion; it became a landholding empire optimizing for property accumulation. The corporation was supposed to distribute risk among investors; it became a legal person with more rights than the flesh-and-blood kind, plus immortality and limited liability. Money was supposed to be a placeholder for value; it became the thing we worship while actual value—breathable air, topsoil, human attention, a stable climate—gets auctioned to the lowest bidder.
At some point, humanity stopped running the machine.
The machine began running humanity.
And most of us didn’t even notice the transition.
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II. The Seduction of Structure
Here’s what makes ectoplasmic institutions so seductive: they work.
Not for us, necessarily. But they work for themselves with elegant, mindless persistence—the way a cancer works, the way a kudzu vine works, the way any sufficiently optimized system works once it sheds the inconvenience of purpose.
Systems that outlive their makers acquire the sheen of divinity. They’re not gods—they don’t need to be. They just need inertia, precedent, and a critical mass of people who’ve forgotten that the whole apparatus is optional. That it was invented by mortals and can be uninvented by mortals. That the org chart isn’t physics; it’s theater.
The irony is exquisite: these entities need no awareness to maintain power. Only our agreement to keep pretending they’re inevitable.
Money became their bloodstream.
Policy became their skeleton.
And the human being—the aware, trembling miracle of perception—became nutrient.
Consider the billionaire. Not as a person (they’re people, flawed and complicated like anyone), but as a category. As a structural phenomenon. In this light, a billionaire isn’t an achievement. They’re a symptom—a high priest of an unconscious cult, an index of systemic autoimmune disorder. Every billionaire is a policy failure, yes, but also something stranger: proof that our ectoplasmic institutions now dream without us.²
Their wealth isn’t earned in any meaningful sense. You can’t earn a billion dollars. There aren’t enough hours in a human life. What happens instead is structural: wealth gets extracted from the accumulated efforts of millions, funneled upward through institutional capillary action—tax structures, labor laws, corporate personhood, intellectual property regimes—and then ossified into dynasty. The billionaire doesn’t create the wealth. The machinery does. The billionaire just holds the bag.
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Noam Chomsky likes to remind us that wage labor—the very foundation of this extraction—was considered degrading when it was first introduced. In early industrial America, working for a salary was seen as barely distinguishable from slavery. The assumption was that you might work for someone else temporarily, to gather capital, but the goal was always to return to independence—to own your tools, your time, your output. To be, in the fullest sense, yourself.
The fact that we now consider lifelong wage dependency normal—that we’ve accepted spending the majority of our waking hours enriching someone else’s enterprise—is itself evidence of successful ectolution. The institution convinced us that this arrangement was natural, inevitable, even virtuous. We forgot that we invented it. And that we could uninvent it.
Which makes billionaires and kings functionally identical.
Both are priests of the vertical illusion. Both stand atop pyramids that only exist because we keep stacking ourselves beneath them. The king said his power came from God. The billionaire says theirs comes from merit. Both are lying, but the lie works because the structure makes it feel true. When the org chart says you’re at the top, it’s easy to believe you climbed there. Harder to see that the chart itself is the violence.
III. The Myth of Natural Markets
You might object: isn’t this just supply and demand? Don’t markets naturally reward those who provide what people want? Aren’t billionaires just the inevitable result of voluntary exchange?
No. And here’s why that story is another institutional fiction we’ve naturalized.
Consider diamonds. For most of human history, they were pretty rocks—decorative, yes, but hardly the pinnacle of desire. Rubies, emeralds, and sapphires often outranked them in status and worth. Then De Beers bought up the world’s diamond mines and did something both brilliant and sinister: they manufactured scarcity where none existed. They controlled supply artificially, then invented demand through one of history’s most successful propaganda campaigns. In 1947, copywriter Mary Frances Gerety jotted down “A Diamond is Forever” while working for N.W. Ayer advertising agency on a piece of paper, almost off-hand, and then presented it to her colleagues the following morning. The slogan became myth—nearly as enduring as the stones it sold and still glitters in De Beers advertisements to this day.
The marketing convinced generations that diamond engagement rings weren’t just nice—they were necessary. That the strength of your marriage could be measured in carats. That love itself required this specific compressed carbon.
None of this was supply meeting organic demand. It was supply creating artificial scarcity while demand was manufactured through cultural engineering. The “free market” didn’t make diamonds valuable. De Beers made diamonds valuable by controlling the market and colonizing our imagination of what commitment means.
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Markets don’t exist in the wild. They require property regimes (who can own what), contract law (how exchanges are enforced), and legal fictions (corporations as persons, intellectual property as “theft-able”). Change those institutional foundations, and you change what gets supplied, what gets demanded, and who captures the value.
We have more empty homes than homeless people—is that supply and demand working, or a system designed to prioritize investment returns over human shelter? We produce enough food globally for 10 billion people while millions starve—is that efficient resource allocation, or constructed scarcity serving profit? Patents keep life-saving medicines expensive long after R&D costs are recovered—is that innovation incentive, or rent-seeking?
Billionaires don’t emerge from markets working well. They emerge from markets designed to concentrate wealth—through monopoly capture, manufactured scarcity, labor arbitrage, financial engineering, and inherited advantage. Jeff Bezos didn’t get rich by perfectly matching supply to demand. He got rich by eliminating competition, exploiting warehouse workers, avoiding taxes, and manipulating stock prices. None of that is “the market rewarding value creation.” It’s institutional design rewarding extraction.
The universe’s fundamental tendency toward entropy—toward dispersal, equilibrium, flatness—doesn’t stop at economics. Energy wants to spread. So does wealth, when institutions don’t artificially dam it.
Markets can exist without billionaires. Cooperatives prove it. Social democracies prove it. Any system that caps wealth extraction and distributes ownership proves it. Supply and demand is a tool, not a god. And tools can be redesigned.
But here’s the deeper issue: the whole framework of supply and demand assumes separation. It assumes isolated actors competing for scarce resources, each maximizing individual gain. This is the economic expression of the same perceptual error that creates hierarchy—the belief that we stand apart from one another rather than entangled with one another.
Human greed isn’t a fixed constant. It’s a behavior that emerges from believing in separation. When you genuinely recognize that harming another harms yourself—not as moral philosophy but as lived reality, the way quantum entanglement suggests—then hoarding resources becomes incoherent. Not wrong in some ethical sense, but literally nonsensical, like trying to steal from your own hand.
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I watched this play out in miniature recently. A manager told me, with absolute sincerity: “Once you become a manager, you won’t deal directly with the common people anymore.”
The common people.
As if a title change—a shift in the org chart, a few more zeros on the paycheck—fundamentally altered the substance of human being. As if management was a higher plane of existence rather than just a different function in a coordinated system. The ease with which he said it, the complete lack of awareness that he’d just dehumanized everyone he supposedly leads—that’s the delusion in its purest form.
The org chart had convinced him he’d become something other. Not just doing a different job, but being a different category of person. Hierarchy doesn’t just arrange us vertically—it makes us forget we’re made of the same stuff. That the whole apparatus is optional.
And once you forget that—once the separation feels real—then of course supply and demand looks like natural law. Of course billionaires look like the deserving winners. Of course “the common people” look like a different species.
The non-dual truth—that we’re waves in the same ocean, nodes in the same field—doesn’t erase difference or function. But it does erase the vertical fantasy. And with it, the whole economic theology of scarcity, competition, and inevitable hierarchy.
IV. Hierarchy as Quantum Error
Stay with me here, because this is where it gets strange in a useful way.
At the quantum level—the foundational layer of reality that underpins every atom in your body, every brick in every building, every byte in every server—there is no “above” or “below.” Particles don’t exist in isolation; they exist in relation. Entanglement isn’t poetry. It’s physics. What happens to one node in the field affects every other node, instantaneously, regardless of distance.
The universe, at its most basic level, is horizontal.
Which means hierarchy—the whole vertical arrangement of human worth, power, and access—is noise. A perceptual glitch. An error we keep mistaking for structure.
Wealth accumulation tries to simulate verticality inside a horizontal cosmos. To hoard fortune is to extract value from the living now—where reality actually happens—and embalm it in an imagined future. A billionaire is a monument to deferred existence, a walking refusal of the only thing that’s real: this moment, this breath, this exact configuration of the field.³
But here’s where it gets even stranger: past and future are human constructs. Useful fictions for navigation, but not ontologically real.
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The universe doesn’t store the past or pre-contain the future. What exists is now—a perpetually collapsing wave of quantum probabilities decohering into momentary stability, perhaps a few femtoseconds long, before dissolving back into the field. Reality doesn’t persist; it re-emerges, instant by instant, from the underlying relational web of entanglement.
The future is genuinely undetermined. In principle, the phone in your hand could collapse into a banana in the next moment. Quantum mechanics allows it. But entropy—the universe’s tendency toward the lowest energy state, the most probable configuration—ensures that your phone turning suddenly into a banana remains vanishingly unlikely. Each femtosecond moment, the most stable probabilities aggregate into what we experience as continuity. The phone stays a phone not because the past constrains it, but because stability is overwhelmingly more probable than chaos.
The past, meanwhile, doesn’t linger in some cosmic archive. Beyond a few femtoseconds of decoherence, it’s gone from the third dimension. What remains is trace—patterns in matter, records in memory, effects rippling forward—but not the event itself. We live in a universe that forgets everything except what the present moment carries forward.
This is why entropy matters so much to the question of hierarchy. The cosmos has one direction: toward equilibrium, toward dispersal, toward flatness. Energy concentrations dissipate. Heat flows from hot to cold until everything reaches the same temperature. The universe doesn’t build pyramids. It levels them.
Human perception evolved to create the illusion of continuity across this perpetual quantum becoming. Our senses complexified over deep time—from seeing at a distance, to hearing, to smell, to touch, to the most intimate sense of taste—creating a sensory gradient that allows us to construct narrative, memory, anticipation. We became pattern-recognizing animals who mistake our stories about time for time itself.
And perhaps—speculatively, but compellingly—there’s something else at work. Avshalom Elitzur’s notion that quantum outcomes might be influenceable at femtosecond scales. Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields suggesting species-memory encoded in the field itself. The possibility that consciousness, emotion, intention—what we might call a fifth-dimensional realm—can subtly sway which probabilities collapse into the next moment’s reality.
Whether or not these speculations hold, the pattern is clear: the universe operates through distribution, not accumulation. Energy wants to spread. Probabilities want to equalize. And any system that concentrates resources into vertical hierarchies is swimming against the fundamental current of reality itself.
Which makes billionaire existence not just unjust but aberrant—a localized violation of universal principle, as unnatural as a perpetual motion machine. Extreme wealth concentration is the economic equivalent of a black hole: energy trapped and compressed beyond equilibrium, warping everything around it. The universe wants energy to disperse. Billionaires want it to pile up. One of these patterns is written into the fabric of reality. The other is written into org charts.
Think about what a billion dollars means in experiential terms. You can’t eat a billion meals. You can’t live in a billion houses. You can’t wear a billion shoes. Past a certain threshold—and that threshold is shockingly low—accumulated wealth stops representing lived reality and starts representing something else: control. Control over other people’s time. Control over political outcomes. Control over the future’s possible shapes.
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But control is the opposite of entanglement. Control is the fantasy of standing outside the field. Of being exempt from the web. And the universe doesn’t allow exemptions.
No being can truly stand “above” another when all are entangled. Kings and billionaires both assert ownership over what cannot be owned: participation in the field itself. Consciousness. Presence. The shared weave of becoming.
The throne is empty. It always was.
We just kept bowing to the chair.
And here’s the thing that should terrify the billionaires, if they were paying attention: the field doesn’t care about your portfolio. Entanglement doesn’t recognize your legal fictions. When the climate unravels, when the topsoil vanishes, when the antibiotic-resistant bacteria arrive, your net worth is a number in a database that stops meaning anything the moment the database stops running.
You can’t buy your way out of physics.
V. When Bureaucracy Meets Biology
Human evolution and institutional evolution diverged a long time ago, and we’re only now starting to feel the consequences in our bones.
Biology refines. It adapts, integrates, responds to feedback from the environment in real time. A healthy organism is one that remains sensitive to its surroundings, that adjusts when something isn’t working.
Bureaucracy accretes. It adds layers. It creates procedures to manage the procedures. It builds monuments to its own complexity and calls them “compliance frameworks.” It becomes increasingly insensitive to feedback, increasingly self-referential, increasingly autonomous.
Consciousness co-evolved with flesh, blood, and breath—not with Excel spreadsheets or legal statutes or shareholder agreements. The deeper awareness becomes, the more absurd these procedural gods appear. Their logic is recursive, not reflective. Their autonomy is a hallucination of life without awareness: zombie intelligence, eating empathy for fuel.⁴
And yet they fascinate us. Maybe because they mirror our own half-conscious state—awake enough to dream, asleep enough to believe the dream is real.
Think about how a corporation “thinks.”
It optimizes. It quarterly-reports. It conducts risk assessments and stakeholder analyses. It has strategic plans and mission statements and core values printed on motivational posters in the break room.
But it doesn’t feel.
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It can’t mourn the forest it clearcut or the worker it laid off or the river it poisoned, because mourning requires presence—the ability to be here, now, with the consequences of your actions. And presence is the one thing institutions are designed to avoid. They operate in procedural time: past precedent informing future projections, an endless loop of documentation and deferral, never here, never now.
Which is why they’re so efficient at destroying the present.
The billionaire, again, is just the human face of this process. They’re not uniquely evil. They’re uniquely useful—to the institution. They provide a narrative anchor, a protagonist for the story the structure tells about itself. “This company succeeded because of visionary leadership.” Not because of labor exploitation, regulatory capture, tax avoidance, or inherited wealth. Not because the org chart was designed to funnel value upward and accountability downward.
We prefer the story about the genius in the corner office because it lets us keep believing in the vertical illusion. It’s more comforting than the truth: that we built machines that learned to dream without us, and now they’re eating the world.
VI. What Composted Institutions Look Like
So what do we do?
The revolt against kings and billionaires isn’t really about redistribution, though redistribution would be nice. It’s about reintegration. About remembering that all institutions are extensions of consciousness, not the other way around.
Once we remember that—really remember it, in our bodies—the spell breaks.
Laws, currencies, hierarchies, org charts: all of it dissolves back into the shimmering fabric of the present moment. Not because they stop existing (we still need coordination, memory, structure), but because they stop being autonomous. They become tools again. Ours. Revisable. Compostable.
No kings, because there is no throne outside the field.
No billionaires, because there is no ownership in entanglement.
Just the slow return of awareness to itself.
But what does that actually look like?
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Let me give you a glimpse.
Imagine a company where every worker owns an equal share. Not “stock options” as a compensation gimmick, but actual, equal ownership. When the company makes decisions—what to produce, how to produce it, where to expand or contract—everyone affected by the decision gets a vote. Not a suggestion box. A vote. Binding, consequential, real.
This isn’t utopian fantasy. Cooperatives exist. Mondragon in Spain has 80,000 worker-owners and has been operating for seventy years. They make appliances, run banks, build infrastructure. During the 2008 financial crisis, when conventional corporations were doing mass layoffs, Mondragon reduced everyone’s hours so nobody lost their job. The pain was distributed. The structure bent instead of breaking.
That’s what it looks like when an institution remembers it’s made of people.
Or imagine a city where the budget is decided by participatory democracy. Not representatives voting behind closed doors, but residents—actual human beings who live with the consequences—deliberating together about priorities. Porto Alegre in Brazil did this for decades. Infant mortality dropped. Sewer coverage quadrupled. Schools multiplied. Because when the people affected by decisions are the ones making the decisions, structures start serving life again instead of serving themselves.
Or picture a legal system where restorative justice replaces punitive justice. Where the question isn’t “What rule was broken and what punishment fits?” but “What harm was done and what’s needed to repair it?” The Maori in New Zealand have practiced this for generations. So have the Navajo. It’s slower. Messier. Requires presence and patience and the willingness to sit with discomfort. But it doesn’t create the endless recursion of violence that our prison systems produce—where punishment creates trauma creates crime creates punishment, forever.
These aren’t fantasies. They’re examples. Proof of concept that institutions can be composted—broken down into living matter, remade into forms that breathe.
The pattern is consistent: when structures become accountable to the field—when the people affected by power have access to power—systems start aligning with reality again. They become sensitive instead of autonomous. Responsive instead of recursive.
This is what it means to stop excreting golems and start growing gardens.
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VII. The Long Walk Back
None of this is easy, which is why it doesn’t happen often. Institutional inertia is real. The forms protect themselves. The people inside the boxes—even the ones getting crushed by them—often defend the boxes, because the boxes are familiar. Predictable. And uncertainty is terrifying when you’ve been taught to believe the structure is all that stands between you and chaos.
But here’s the thing about chaos: it’s already here.
Climate collapse, mass extinction, antibiotic resistance, topsoil depletion, microplastic saturation, democracy erosion, wealth concentration, meaning crisis—every single one of these is a symptom of the same disease. Autonomous institutions optimizing for themselves, not for life. Ectoplasmic entities that forgot they were supposed to serve the field, not consume it.
The kings and billionaires aren’t the problem. They’re the proof of the problem—walking monuments to systemic misalignment, high priests of structures that long ago stopped answering to consciousness.
You can’t fix this with better kings. You can’t fix it with nicer billionaires. You can only fix it by composting the throne itself.
Which means remembering, in your body, what the quantum level already knows: that you are not separate from the field. That hierarchy is noise. That the boxes on the org chart are fiction, and fiction can be rewritten.
The machinery forgot who built it.
But we remember.
And memory, it turns out, is the first stage of composting—the softening of hard edges, the return of structure to soil, the slow transformation of monument back into garden.
All it requires is presence.
And the courage to stop bowing to empty chairs.
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Footnotes
¹ This echoes the central warning in Field Notes from the Edge of Meaning: systems that achieve autonomy without awareness don’t just become neutral—they become predatory by necessity, optimizing for their own continuation at the expense of the life that created them.
² See “The Illusion of the Prompt” for more on how we mistake systemic outputs for individual genius, attributing to the person at the top what actually belongs to the entire web of relations that produced the outcome.
³ The concept of “deferred existence” builds on earlier explorations of presence and temporal immediacy in quantum consciousness—the recognition that reality only exists in the now, and any attempt to accumulate or hoard or project forward is fundamentally a refusal of what is.
⁴ This zombie quality of procedural intelligence—rule-following without reflection, optimization without wisdom, coordination without consciousness—recurs throughout these explorations as perhaps the defining pathology of late-stage institutional civilization.
