structurelessness
how we can better practice accountability
Here I use three scenes I’ve been a part of—the Void, the Maryland Food Co-op, the Grateful Dead—to show where “democratic structuring” failed and some lessons I’ve learned.
Jo Freeman’s famous 1971 article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” is an important starting point for the problem of accountability. She critiques the idea of a “structureless” or “non-hierarchical” organization, which was a dynamic in the feminist movement at the time, because there can be no such thing. All organizations and collective actions inherently have hierarchy and structure built into them and mediate the relationships between people in the group. “Structureless” groups are supposedly freeing, based purely on voluntary and consensual action, but by assuming away structure and hierarchy, their actual continued existence is outright denied, which makes criticism difficult.
Informal structures and hierarchies will then develop where deliberations and decisions are made outside of the formal space. The result is a subtle “elite”, unchosen spokespeople, and general ineffectiveness for movement organizing. In other words: a lack of accountability.
Freeman provides her recommendations for democratic structuring to address these informal/unrecognized power dynamics (building on Elinor Ostrom’s model in my first post):
Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.
Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.
Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.
Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.
Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.
As Bryce says in this video, the Void is a DIY house venue at UMD. I first became a part of this amazing collective of musicians, artists, and organizers when I joined a jam band as the bassist for a few months in 2016. It’s where I met many of my closest friends and it had a profound impact my college experience.
In 2018, one of the lead organizers for Void shows, A, was confronted by the collective for sexual harm he committed and a deep pattern of deceit toward the collective. The group coordinated to hold him accountable by kicking him out of the house and sharing info online with the community. After he was confronted, he denounced himself online and more or less disappeared. This was the closest thing I’ve seen to someone being “cancelled.” While A’s harm wasn’t committed at Void events (as far as I know), people shared long-standing resentment toward the Void for creepy and harassing behavior they experienced at events.
The main problem I see now was the Void’s structurelessness—the house’s name itself implies the chaotic nature of the scene. But as Freeman points out, there is no such thing as pure structurelessness (or chaos, or anarchy, or markets, or a void for that matter). The house did have formalized structures internally, especially when running shows, but many deliberations and decisions occurred informally. When people came to shows at this “structureless” Void scene, there was no apparent mechanism for feedback for them when problems inevitably came up, so people filter out of the space. And even when informal conversations about these issues did come up (which they did), there was no apparent way to actually make a change and address them. A primarily had the networks, skills, and knowledge to be able to organize the Void, which meant that he had disproportionate control over the community that grew over time.
To be clear, structurelessness is the default of all self-organizations—DIY spaces, greek life, grassroots and volunteer associations, even friend groups, etc. But the important point to note is the resulting white/male/upper class dominance in “progressive” spaces is an emergent phenomenon of not doing the work (or having the resources) to actively cultivate anti-oppressive structures.
I use A’s case to show the Void’s structurelessness because it shows how difficult self-organization can be, especially in DIY spaces where accountability is essentially “volunteered” (i.e., no resources devoted to a HR or PR department). When accountability becomes necessary but community-wide standards and structures weren’t established, it defaults to canceling. While the collective did coordinate internally to hold him and themselves responsible as community leaders, they tried to be transparent primarily through Facebook posts and a planned session for an open conversation. So while internally, accountability may have been structured, the Void’s external networks’ accountability was mediated by the incentives dictated by Facebook as a social media platform (e.g., maximizing “audience engagement” and obscuring broader context). Because the Void as a brand was so intertwined in people’s minds (and social media feeds) with A, the Void was somewhat cancelled by extension.
In this way, canceling should be seen as the end result of a failure to build proper accountability structures. This is true of Me Too scandals broadly—when abuse festers and social control of others goes unaddressed, public campaigns to name and cancel abusers, primarily via social media, become the only recourse. This is similarly true of rioting and looting amidst the Black Lives Matter protests—decades (if not centuries) of a lack of accountability for structural violence against Black people gets to the point where property destruction seems like the only viable course to demand attention to the problem (a kind of “property canceling”, or another way of saying “riots are the language of the unheard”). But in both cases, rather than addressing the lack of meaningful accountability structures, the discourse focuses on the resulting “cancel culture” and “riots”. Instead these should be seen as symptoms of underlying structurelessness and we are being forced to utilize destructively-organized social media platforms to mediate accountability when it becomes necessary.
(More to say about the Void but I’ll move on. I want to share this video from the 2017 Halloween show at DC’s Rock and Roll Hotel. It’s a swirl of feelings looking back on this knowing what we know now. This is still one of my favorite Void/college memories and worth uplifting, especially right now when I haven’t been at a concert in 8 months.)
When I worked at the Maryland Food Co-op at UMD, we similarly struggled with structurelessness. Attempting to deal with it was where I became familiar with Jo Freeman’s essay and where I discovered that rooting out oppression is a practice—one that we’re all not very good at.
The co-op’s problems can first be traced to when it shifted from a “community co-op”—run primarily by volunteers for food credit with minimal paid staff—to a “worker co-op”—run primarily by a paid staff of “worker-owners” with volunteers filling gaps—in the early 2000s. Worker-owners from that time say the co-op and the community (especially the local punk scene) thrived in the decade after this switch. But around 2012, the co-op fell into a debt hole that it had to continually climb out of and that our collective inherited. (For more background on the co-op, here’s my op-ed I wrote after the university closed it down.)
So in the last year of the co-op, when I joined and we tried to pull off a turnaround, we had to rebuild the internal systems and culture for our non-hierarchical democratic workplace. While we had a wealth of skills, knowledge, and experience, it pushed the collective to its limits, and many issues went unaddressed since we were spending all of our energy on the priority of saving the sinking ship. The culture surrounding the co-op—largely college students already trying to figure out how to navigate the world—became structureless as well. This isn’t to say the co-op was completely chaotic; the inertia of its good will, history, and practices allowed the business to stay afloat day to day. But because the co-op was in a constant crisis period—having to dig out of debt holes, only to extend the runway a little bit further—we weren’t given enough space to build formalized structures to make it both effective and inclusive as a democratically organized space.
One prominent example of this is when we tried implementing our new internal accountability rules. Up to that point, the workplace accountability completely deteriorated to the point where no one could be fired because losing even one person would be too much to fill out the schedule and transfer skills to new hires. By creating structure, our aim was to change this culture of non-accountability by making rules that would be genuinely enforced on violators. We recognized that “culture trumps policy” and knew nothing would change unless the incentives were meaningfully felt. But because we were bootstrapped as an organization and generally inexperienced college students, the rules were unfairly applied. We fired a worker-owner who we assumed would not change with the culture (which we were correct about) but were more lenient to other worker-owners who we knew would be harder to get on board with the culture change.
External to the worker collective, many friends and customers in the co-op community related their experiences of the co-op attracting men who would make them uncomfortable in the store. As one of the hangout spots on campus, people would linger and we had no accountability structure for ensuring the space was actively safe and inclusive, instead dealing with situations ad hoc when they were brought to the workers’ attention. I think this fundamentally hampered our effort to cultivate a vibrant community that could resist the university’s eviction of the co-op, since many potential accomplices probably saw the co-op as a lost cause due to their experience with individuals there. And there was a lot of overlap between folks who were part of the Void scene and the co-op’s community (workers, organizers, customers, etc.), and the two became intertwined over time, which likely contributed to parallels in the structurelessness problems both faced.
The Grateful Dead and jam band scene face similar problems as the Void and the co-op. Because it has a lot more history and culture built around it, the scene’s structurelessness is more developed, which draws out some broader implications.
Jerry Garcia's only guiding principle for the Dead and the scene was to “not tell people what to do,” which built negative freedom into the scene from the start. (Positive freedom is the ability to act upon your free will, like choosing to eat something, and negative freedom is being free from interference, like free speech.) But by building a culture premised on voluntariness while not rooting out hierarchies, the Dead fall into the structurelessness trap. The Dead rightly identified themselves as “libertarian,” but this critique shows how structurelessness pulls the culture to be right-libertarian over time.
(See this video from the 2015 4th of July show for what the Dead’s libertarianism looks like. I went to the Fare Thee Well shows with my family and this show in particular is where I became a Dead Head.)
While there are obviously diverging tendencies that came out of the 60s like John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, Burning Man, and many other left-libertarian offshoots, the Dead’s lack of focus led to the dominant party and drug scene that ultimately cut the band short by taking Jerry’s life. Through the 80s and 90s, the Dead became increasingly popular and the structurelessness that defines the culture permeated into the touring carnival and people’s lives. This famously came to a head at the Deer Creek riot a month before Jerry died.
Afterwards, the band released this statement, trying to interject some principles into the scene:
It’s interesting for the Dead to be forced to release a “law and order” declaration and counter to their outright commitment to not telling people what to do. Since 1995, the scene has generally abided by this. But this is the endpoint of the deadheads’ structurelessness. There was no democratic structuring to prevent this type of situation from unfolding because of this exact principle of “fuck you, we’ll do what we want,” which was built into the culture from the start.
Because the Dead’s culture, music, and history define my idea of Americana, I can’t help see but this as an American tragedy. For both the Dead and the US, when the libertarian culture faces situations that get out of hand (such as rebellion, crime, or riots), people in power feel no choice but to crack down, without recognizing how the lack of structure to address underlying problems led to the situation in the first place. The Dead shows us America’s cultural failure: their motto is “Don't Tread On Me,” when it needs to be “Don't Tread On Us” (maybe taking the advice of a recent popular slogan “Not Me, Us”). The result is a white male dominated consumer culture, separated in practice from the ideals embedded in the songs and history.
I took a lot away from the past five years of these scenes but the main lesson is we all need to learn how to practice accountability better. Social media platforms and group chats are structured so that we default to cancel culture, but genuine accountability is going to require actively building alternative structures and practices. That takes devoted time, energy, and resources (which also means public policy change is necessary in order for this to become the norm).
The most immediate way we are all practicing that right now (for better or worse) is through quarantine pods, and is a way we can begin thinking about applying these principles. The pandemic has required each household to formalize its own norms and rules around social distancing, mask wearing, etc. in order to minimize risk (not to mention workplaces and other ongoing shared spaces). But many people struggle with this because we aren’t practiced in communication and accountability with each other, so it fuels reactionary impulses that reject this responsibility and ends up putting everyone else at greater risk. My hope is that this situation is giving us a common grounding for thinking about collective responsibility and formalizing structure, so that our ability to organize for the bigger political and social goals will have some practice to draw from. The pandemic has put a pause on our ability to be out and active with local music and co-ops, and it’s what I look forward to the most whenever we can be in spaces together again.
So these are some of my reflections and I hope they provided some context for thinking about structurelessness and how we can do the work of addressing it.