Leveling up goals: a shower thought • Life: "cells maintain the environment in which RNA molecules originated." (https://www.tim-taylor.com/assets/docs/barricelli-suggestions-for-starting-theoretic-papers-6-6-1987.pdf; page 2) • Bureaucracy: you create a system that can outlive you. The system outlives its own usefulness. • Permaculture: design systems to try to make themselves less and less necessary to the functioning of the ecosystem. (https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/113040776489493243)

"Create a system that can outlives you" applies to much more than just bureaucracies. It's also true of culture, and of everything in between bureaucracy and culture in terms of intentionality (bureaucracy is set up intentionally, culture emerges). One example of "in between" is capitalism, which is encoded in tons of laws and contracts, but neither supervised by a bureaucracy created for that purpose, nor an accident of history that nobody planned for.

It is interesting to contrast bureaucracy with culture. The part that's unique to bureaucracy is: the system outlives its own usefulness. Because it was created by a central group of people and imposed along a power differential. Software is just bureaucracy by other means. Capitalism is emergent, but capitalism is fundamentally designed to encourage firms which are not emergent but built along a power differential. Firms are bureaucracies.

Culture can also outlive its own usefulness, by becoming ill-adapted to a changing environment. Example: the traditional European gender roles were just basic common sense for centuries of mostly agrarian life. Then the industrial revolution happened, and now they are just some weird tradition.