In my opinion, a consultancy the way you guys are pursuing it, is just too hard to turn into a success. Even if you hit a critical mass of being able to sustain yourselves with projects, you only have so many hours in a day, and in the market you’re in, Pittsburgh, assigns a very low value to web design and related work. Then the only way to make more money is to grow in a linear fashion: hiring more people. If you’re just trying to make some extra cash, okay, but if you’re trying to “break free” of the corporate cycle, you need to spend your efforts on more sustainable projects that can make you a living without needing to continually inject hours into them.

The game originally envisioned by Jason and Mike is a good example, a web application is another. You need to look at the internet economy and realize where the money is being made. Stanford students are getting rich through brilliant ideas that translate into products, and not hacking away for small business.

Godesky knows I’m sincere, I battled just like you guys did and this is what I learned. Even successful Pittsburgh agencies with lots of employees and big clients deal with the same silly issues I did, and it was completely disheartening.

I embraced an investor who promised to break us free of that cycle, and give us the capital to focus on a single product, but if it’s too good to be true, it usually is… and all those tough lessons sent me to Silicon Valley. I’m a lot happier.

I’m happy to help you guys if you need, just drop me a line.

I say resurrection because it was truly dead (or at least dormant) for a time. We didn’t talk seriously about doing business until the beginning of 2006, after which we became officially incorporated and began immediately accepting contracts. “Tyler” and I are the only two original members, and he is currently not an active participant, having other commitments. There are two other active members, and while we defer certain tasks to each other based on ability and schedule, all of our decisions and our work are accomplished by consensus. Each of us participates, to varying degrees, in all aspects of keeping our group alive and sustainable.

It has been very difficult, of course; between having no startup capital and trying to earn income just to be able to go home and perform more work (often leading to nearly twice the work load of your average office drone), most businesses of our size would probably have thrown in the towel by now. I don’t believe that our struggle continues for lack of passion.

It may be true that the point of Tribal Dawn is no longer to uphold an ideology or to be an experiment or example for tribal businesses. However, an ideology is of little use unless one’s lifestyle implements it; we are not Tribal Dawn because we aspire to the tribal ideal, but because the tribal ideal is our necessary course of action.

Personally, I would rather it be that way.

To wit, the implication that Linux is in any way a product of a non-hierachical group is absurd.

It is true that Linux specifically is a far more hierarchical project than most open source. The “benevolent dictatorship” of Linus Torvalds is well known. That said, the reason that Linus produced a superior OS to Microsoft is precisely because his model was less hierarchical than Microsoft’s. Few software developers have been willing to take the obvious conclusion to this “all the way,” as it were, but open source is much better suited to a rhizome, than to a hierarchy. Jeff Vail has written a good deal about this (though primarily in the differing context of open source warfare–though, to my mind, the specific complex task is not nearly as important as the basic idea that complex tasks are better handled by less complex rhizomes).

And further still, the overall design of Linux was taken from Unix, which is a product of a huge hierarchical corporation.

Hardly! While it is true that Unix was first written for AT&T, it was originally but the palest shadow of what it became. Unix-as-we-know-it is the product of opening the code, and the feverish contributions of grad students at Berkeley.

I don’t perceive it to be typically better than the closed source products I use.

Firefox vs. IE? Microsoft vs. Linux? Even Apple threw in the towel, and leave the kernel development to the much more capable hands of FreeBSD contributors.

And among the successful open source projects with which I’m somewhat familiar, it seems that the larger the developer organizations are, the more hierarchical they are.

It is true, as we’ve noted here many times before, that at a certain scale, hierarchy becomes necessary. The more people involved, the more you need a hierarchy. That’s why it’s important to stay at a small scale.

Democracy could possibly work, but I’ve never seen it work in practice.

It only works with a small number of people. Just ask any hunter-gatherer.

Software, and all of the artifacts it requires, like computers and electricity to run them, are products of civilization.

Indeed they are. That’s why I didn’t say anything about computers, software or electricity, but “complex tasks.” Even inside the context of civilization, the less hierarchical and the more rhizome an organization becomes, the better it will be at, well, pretty much everything.

If the tribe is such a good model for a software development organization (notice how I keep saying “organization”?) then why did Tribal Dawn’s efforts at developing software using the tribal model fail in such a predictable (IMO) fashion?

Because it ceased to be a tribe. Hierarchy formed.

If that were true, then Microsoft should produce a much better OS than Linux. It doesn’t.

There’s a lot of faulty logic in that statement, but I’ll only address the key fault to save time. To wit, the implication that Linux is in any way a product of a non-hierachical group is absurd. Sure, you can customize your own kernel or create your own distro, but the actual end product that most users know as Linux is produced under very strict controls, WRT who can commit code and what ultimately makes it into a release. People are excluded from this supposed “tribe” when their patches are rejected. The Linux hierarchy may be flatter than MS’s but it’s a hierarchy nonetheless.

Moreover, Linux would be nowhere near as successful as it is without the contributions of hierarchical corporations like IBM and Red Hat.

And further still, the overall design of Linux was taken from Unix, which is a product of a huge hierarchical corporation.

The bottom line is that Linux is a product of civilization and hierarchical organizations.

Software is not antithetical to rhizome; in fact, the open source movement has conclusively proven that you typically produce better software when you remove the hierarchy.

Conclusively proven to whom? Not to me. You’re assuming your conclusion here. I use a lot of open source software, but I don’t perceive it to be typically better than the closed source products I use. And I’ve found a lot of OSS to be pure garbage. And among the successful open source projects with which I’m somewhat familiar, it seems that the larger the developer organizations are, the more hierarchical they are. (Eclipse, Apache, JBoss, come to mind.) Obviously, if it’s only one or two people developing the product, there’s little need for hierachical control, but the more developers you have, the more likely you are to have disagreements about how things should be done, and you need a way to settle those disagreements. Democracy could possibly work, but I’ve never seen it work in practice.

Yes, software’s more complex than digging sticks. That doesn’t mean that hierarchy suddenly becomes a good organizational model. Tribes have accomplished many large, complex tasks, and the success of open source stands in strong defiance of your notion that egalitarianism is somehow antithetical to it.

I’m amazed you even try to make this argument. Software, and all of the artifacts it requires, like computers and electricity to run them, are products of civilization. If the tribe is such a good model for a software development organization (notice how I keep saying “organization”?) then why did Tribal Dawn’s efforts at developing software using the tribal model fail in such a predictable (IMO) fashion?

If that were true, then Microsoft should produce a much better OS than Linux. It doesn’t. Software is not antithetical to rhizome; in fact, the open source movement has conclusively proven that you typically produce better software when you remove the hierarchy.

Yes, software’s more complex than digging sticks. That doesn’t mean that hierarchy suddenly becomes a good organizational model. Tribes have accomplished many large, complex tasks, and the success of open source stands in strong defiance of your notion that egalitarianism is somehow antithetical to it.

In bands of foragers who spend their lives doing little more than foraging for food, and perhaps building meager shelters to sleep in, there’s no real need for hierarchical management because everyone pretty much does their own thing, and nothing really significant is accomplished. If someone doesn’t work (gather their own food) then they don’t eat — it’s no big deal, and there’s no need to kick them out of the tribe because of it.

But developing software systems or building and running a business is quite different from digging roots out of the ground, because those endeavors typically require the coordinated efforts of a number of people. The idea that those activities could succeed in a structure where decisions could only be made by “consensus” is laughable. Every one of the experiences you describe above was entirely predictable.

If you want to be part of a tribe, fine, but accept that tribes are not well-suited for accomplishing large, complex tasks like building software or new businesses.

I think you might be right about chiefdoms…logically, since they do funnel resources toward a center, they’re driven to expand, and increase the power of the chief….but this would also impart to them a tendency to trigger ecological collapse, at which point they have to return to a simpler configuration. Hmmm……Of course this question is pretty much academic, since no one is advocating a New Chiefdom Revolution…or perhaps it’s one more reason you should go for that PhD in Anthropology?

On the point of unilineal cultural evolution…. One, we’re only looking at one criterion: complexity. To say that there are unstable configurations does not imply unilineal cultural evolution, I believe. Big Man societies may be stable, but I have my doubts about chiefdoms. To say that a chiefdom must either become a state or a tribe does not, I believe, imply unilineal cultural evolution. So long as we are only looking at a single criterion, a scale is implied. But by claiming, as I do, that one can go either way in that dimension, I think, contradicts the idea of a constant progress of human civilization crawling up out of the mud.