Notices by Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥 (saraislet@infosec.exchange)

@skinnylatte me imagining this scene: "yo Adrian!" [a scene from Rocky]

Let me recap some history, because I'm mad about where we are in 2026.

Mary Parker Follet was the mother of modern management. In the early 20th century, she wrote about shared power, collaborative win-win conflict resolution approaches, empowering workers, group psychology, sociology, and communication.

MPF coined the term "power-with" (collaborative power & influence) to distinguish from "power over" (coercive, hierarchical authority).

Mary Parker Follet's legacy is in shifting management theory away from a purely mechanistic approach and towards considerations of human behavior, centralizing human relations (literally relating to humans) as core to managing people in a business. Keep in mind here that this was in the 1920s, an age of industrial, manual labor.

This article by @anildash squarely hits in the feels, names and articulates what's happening in the tech industry, and points towards pragmatic things we can do.

Notably — and I cannot sufficiently underscore how crucial this is — Anil spells out that power by its very definition is fundamentally requisite to enact any influence on the direction of tech. We cannot change the past, we cannot change everything, but we can change SOME things. And that requires power. Power isn't exclusively money or positions or authority: power is the ability to influence.

A single electron cannot do anything. But a million electrons aligned in the same direction? That sure amps things up.
https://me.dm/@anildash/115844846912829876

And that brings us to one of the worst examples of what continues today to be among the most highly recommended leadership books: High Output Management, by Andrew Grove.

The historic context above ties into what Andrew Grove writes here. When Andrew Grove writes about fear of punishment motivating galley slaves, this is literal. This is not a joke. When he writes about "new, humanistic approaches", he's referring to how the mechanistic scientific management approaches rooted in slavery and leveraged by industrial free worker labor gave way to more humane practices in the early 20th century.

Side note: Organized labor gained substantial footholds through the late 19th and early 20th century. It is not a coincidence that humanistic approaches to management grew in the 20th century as labor rights grew.

When Andrew Grove refers dispassionately to "if they stole food and got caught, they were hanged" without any kind of moral judgement, he's declaring bankruptcy on professional ethics.

That is the foundation of what business executives have been reading for 40 years: a can[n]on of mechanistic scientific management thinly anodized by a scant layer of humanized behavioral theory, with minimal and performative hints of professional ethics. (Compare, say, to medical ethics?)

The book isn't entirely without useful ideas, but this one page rather sours the entire pot when you can clearly see that his professional ethics are somewhere between absent, fraught, and deeply breached.

Mary Parker Follet's work was largely swept under the rug and disappeared for decades in American organizations (though her ideas had some influence in Britain and Japan). The torch for "power-with" was taken up by feminist sociologists like Hannah Arendt and Marilyn French.

If I understand the history of this correctly (which tbf I may not), management theory largely shifted back towards mechanistic approaches, metrics-driven performance, and a supposed emphasis on outcomes (i.e., overall, the precursors of meritocracy and OKRs).

And thus came the shift back to scientific management, measuring and analyzing economic efficiency — the Taylorism of the late 19th century that Mary Parker Follet had tried to augment with humanity.

Side note: scientific management came about from data-driven control practices exercised by plantation owners with slaves. Remember this, because it comes up.

There are some mid-20th-century theorists who bring back some human elements, such as Abraham Maslow (i.e., Maslow's hierarchy of needs, theories of human motivation), and Peter Drucker (shifting to view an increasing portion of workers as knowledge workers vs manual labor workers).

@whitequark 💖 thanks! No need to apologize! That's what I wanted to express! I thought about conveying something more like painting or gilding, but anodized is more accurate because I think it is a genuine change to the substance, it just doesn't go very deep

Did you like "amped up" at the end of the first post? My wife groaned 😂 I think I might use that in a related talk coming up

@inthehands @nikitonsky I think that when an organization is at the point of pushback on leader decisions, they've already failed.

Good leaders think ahead, gather relevant context, and incorporate feedback early in decision-making to develop sustainable strategic plans to support a well thought-out vision, even when the details aren't fully established or explored yet (not necessarily rigorously planned).

When leaders are hearing the most obvious concerns in pushback, either they've anticipated and planned for expected attrition because their vision is a change of mission or culture for the organization, or my cynicism has exceeded my ability to avoid making undercooked absolute statements, because (speaking beyond any organizations I've been part of) this year has been a boondoggle for unsustainable executive decisions

@skinnylatte I do this but for grabbing hot plates and pans with my bare hands 😂

"fork bomb but for cloud compute"

There's a (terrible) talk in there somewhere

If you tone police and drive away people trying to create a better environment more than you criticize and drive away people causing material harm, you might as well be advocating for material harm

I'm so tired of seeing this pattern over and over again. I see this on the Fediverse, in friend groups, in communities, in small organizations, and in large workplaces.

A system is what it does. If your system tolerates bad people, it doesn't matter that you intended harsher punishments or criticism of the bad people than of the people who didn't want to tolerate the bad people.

For clarity: I'm not at all concerned about what Mamdani thinks about Jewish people, but I am rather concerned that a room full of "business people" and journalists didn't interrupt the woman who said "the larger Jewish question" — nor provide context in the article that this phrase has, uhh, how to say, such a wildly antisemitic history over hundreds of years that "Nazi" doesn't begin to cover it

Pro tip: if you're trying to portray someone as "empathetic towards the concerns of Jewish people" and not antisemitic, don't use the phrase "the larger Jewish question"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/16/politics/mamdani-business-leaders-meeting-new-york

I'm embarrassed for Saint Olaf College.

«she described herself as "the lone defender of the billionaires at this point"»
(This is the woman who used the phrase, "the larger Jewish question")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Wylde

@skinnylatte wow! Looks beautiful. Do you know how safe that area of Indonesia might be for me to visit?

I'm looking for the best places in the world to find mud pots. I'm disappointed that no one made a list.

So far, I have:
★ Yellowstone (WY, USA)
★ Lassen Volcanic National Park (northern CA, USA, near Redding)
★ Salton Sea (southern CA, USA, near San Diego)
★ possibly southern Utah? (Roosevelt Hot Springs...?) — unclear if visitable/safe/etc

Fumaroles are a little easier to find:
★ all the locations above, of course
★ Namafjall Geothermal Area (northern Iceland)
★ Furnas (São Miguel, Portugal)
★ Kilauea (Hawaii, USA)
★ Vulcano (island north of Sicily, Italy)

In other news, I'd like to share that I measured a 100% gain in productivity after turning the lights on for a team that was previously operating entirely in darkness.

Though I still need to do some research to understand the Hawthorne effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

If I had a penny for every time I heard something like

"We're going to track increases in productivity that we gain by adopting GenAI"

1. So you're assuming it's an increase
2. Against what control group
3. With no acknowledgement of confounding variables or experiment design
4. Around the...famously open problem of measuring software engineering productivity?

@cR0w

There should be something like a nuclear clock that measures gamma emissions, but instead it measures the steady rate of women leaving tech

Every month it is a little more tempting to walk into a forest, curl up under a tree, and become part of the mossy forest floor forever