After reading this essay I became convinced several different government institutions realized they could tank any grassroots movement by inserting a crazy and letting it go from there. This was of course proven to be the case with the Black Panthers where most of the violent agitators turned out to be FBI agents.
This fundamentally changed my view on flat organizations, realizing they were vulnerable to predators with such simple tactics.
At a society level, people seeking to undermine a community or nation can manufacture consent around radical astroturf movements, eg by having mass media propagandize in their favor while minimizing their crimes.
This has been noted as a failure mode of democracy — as people won’t risk their individual reputations to challenge radicals garbed in “noble” causes, until the situation is already dire.
The key here is distributed coordination. In the last few decades, the most effective social movements are those that did not rely on a single organization (hierarchical or not) but instead allowed multiple organizations and actors to work together separately and embraced a diversity of tactics.
In the 50s, John Boyd did a lot of really interesting work on the idea of "mission command" and the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop. Although he did his work for the US military, I think his ideas are broadly applicable to social movements as well, as they describe how "swarms" of autonomous actors can easily overwhelm hierarchical organizations due to their ability to make decisions faster.
Flat and structureless are not necessarily synonymous. It's certainly possible to have a highly structured yet flat organization with clear roles and non-hierarchical decision-making.
Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles.
An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course, as the individual workers don't take orders from the queen (or anyone else), but instead respond largely based on instinctual behaviours and pheremone signalling (in the case of ants at least, I'm not certain of bees).
Flat structures may lack any leadership, or have various rotating or ad hoc leaderships. These are more akin to the structureless organisations Freeman writes of.
Moreover it is arguably the converse - organisations with a deep heirarchy and a lack of operational structure - that are most prone to predators. Individuals with narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies are attracted to positions where they wield power over others but have little to no accountability. This is why it's so important for misdeeds to be brought to light and justice.
An example is the UK political system, where it's clear who has "say", but the structure for dealing with quite serious misbehaviour is very outdated. Only today there was an article in the BBC about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65856484
Well, the UK is actually not too bad on a global scale. Demagogues can cause some serious damage - Thatcher, Blair, Boris, Farage... - but are eventually discarded when they become irrelevant or their promised land fails to materialise.
Countries without a robust consensus-based governing process and an established process for removing someone from power - and that's most of them - are susceptible to strongman politics. Think Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Saddam, Gaddafi, Tito, Kagame, Mugabe, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
Outside of politics, wealth and celebrity are the obvious paths to unaccountable power. Jeffrey Epstein is an example of how a predator can get away with despicable behaviour without comeuppance for decades. Rupert Murdoch has frequently been at the centre of various scandals and serious controversies, and seems to have escaped pretty much unscathed by treating it as all part of the business.
The venture capital environment in silicon valley seems to have some of the hallmarks; we can see people like Holmes or Bankman-Fried trying to exploit the system to gain power.
Academia also springs to mind. It's surprisingly easy to get into powerful positions with very little skill/knowledge besides networking. I believe there's a real issue with toxic, abusive PhD supervisors in the UK and potentially the US, which is a classic consequence of heirarchies with little accountability.
It's well konwn that megalomaniac's thrive on vacuums of power or meaning, but that's not the most important aspect of Curtis' message imo. For me, Curtis explores how power applies highly abstracted narratives in order to disguise its mechanisms - Soviet or capitalist realism, for example. His frequent trope is how things suddenly "don't make sense" to the general public, and this is when change occurs.
But this doesn't feel too relevent to the discussion of whether an organisation can operate effectively with a flat structure.
I read an article on exactly that premise -- how to destroy a group by making sure that it accomplished nothing -- and your strategy was implicit in there. I tried to link it but I can't -- oh wait, it's part of a CIA field manual [1]. Simple but containing deep wisdom.
There's the notion of "vetocracy", which has been proposed by Francis Fukiyama, in an interview with Ezra Klein (see: "Francis Fukuyama: America is in 'one of the most severe political crises I have experienced'" <https://www.vox.com/2016/10/26/13352946/francis-fukuyama-ezr...>.
Power structures tend to form either where a single individual can bring things about, or where they can prevent their occurrence.
In a consensus organisation (either intentionally so or de facto), the individual or faction which can prevent business from transacting has effective control. If there are multiple such entities, what results is gridlock. This is unfortunately one potential failure mode of democratic or representational government.
This fundamentally changed my view on flat organizations, realizing they were vulnerable to predators with such simple tactics.