

The Shirky Principle (2010) - soundsop
http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin/

======
dang
I once read something similar: "The primary function of any institution is to
preserve itself, and only secondarily to do whatever it was intended for." I
seem to recall that it was attributed to a founder of sociology, perhaps
Durkheim or Weber, but can't remember. If anybody can trace the source I'd
love to know.

~~~
michael_nielsen
Just as an additional data point: I've heard something in that vein attributed
to Durkheim, multiple times. Unfortunately, I do not know the source, and a
cursory search doesn't turn anything up.

------
jordanpg
This is more a statement about bureaucracy than about institutions generally.
I might state it as "Bureaucracies will tend to preserve the process to which
they are the solution." There are lots of other reasons that technologies
might become entrenched, but bureaucracies become entrenched because job
security means everything for people working in non-creative or expendable
positions.

Or, to consider this from another angle: [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

~~~
dkarapetyan
I was once flipping through channels and stumbled on the channel that records
the meetings for the local government. There were people sitting on some
raised platform and for 10 minutes straight they were just shuffling papers
back and forth between themselves. They were quite literally paper-pushers for
those 10 minutes. I laughed for a little bit and then felt really sad that
this was actually my own town government.

On a more technological side of things we have APIs and APIs for APIs. I have
spent non-trivial amount of time trying to build something usable on top of
AWS and OpenStack APIs. Same goes for various ecommerce APIs. The situation is
so bad that there are entire companies built around making horrible APIs more
usable. See channeladvisor and sellbrite. Horrible APIs are the equivalent of
inefficient bureaucracies for programmers and quite literally keep them
employed. More than once I've had the thought that if some API was more usable
then I would not have a job.

------
avemuri
And it creates coordination across multiple institutions. Everyone may have
different solutions, but they must all preserve the same problem.

