Elective Affinities

Wigy, a friend, posted a reply under a video about coding agents in a Discord channel we call social banter. The architect in the video had warned that people now work together with their agents and no longer with their teams. Wigy’s reply went further: the billionaire single-person company is coming, Iron Man with his Jarvis, the AI butler that runs Tony Stark’s workshop in the Marvel films, and no teamwork anywhere near it, because every human in the loop would be weaker, worse and slower. Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger turned inside out, with a knife in it. Why would anyone wire such obstacles into their system?

I conceded the economics within minutes. Then I looked at what we were doing. Two people were arguing about whether humans still need each other, in a channel built for nothing but arguing, for free, because we enjoy it. Nobody paid either of us. We were the counterexample, typing.

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The Firm Was a Coordination Tax

Ronald Coase explained in 1937 why firms exist at all. Buying every task on the open market costs search, negotiation, contracts and enforcement; inside a firm, a manager simply tells people what to do. The firm grows until coordinating one more person inside costs as much as buying the work outside.

The firm never hired people for the pleasure of their company. It bought hours and forced the people attached to those hours to coordinate. Your colleagues were assigned, not chosen, and the friendships that grew at the coffee machine were a by-product of a cost calculation. Coordination was the job.

Agents crash the inside cost. When an agent writes the code and answers the customer, the manager’s command loses its price advantage, and the firm shrinks toward the one person who holds the intent. Silicon Valley already runs betting pools on the year of the first one-person billion-dollar company. The arithmetic holds, and the video’s warning describes its first symptom: you work with your agents and no longer with your team.

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Tony and Jarvis, Then the Table

The bleak reading stops one step too early. The collapse is real, and it is only the first half of the movement.

Strip the firm down and you find its new atom: one person and their Jarvis, Tony Stark with a workshop that answers back. That unit can do more alone than a whole department could ten years ago, and it still runs into problems bigger than itself: a protocol needs other nodes, and a new science needs more than one obsession. So the atoms meet again – as Tony-and-Jarvis units that find each other around a problem worth losing sleep over. They assemble for the work and scatter when it is done, the way film crews do.

You only pull someone into your project if you share the obsession or need the specialty they bring. Shared interest is how people meet; shared obsession is how they become friends. A company formed this way selects for affinity before anyone signs anything.

Libertaria’s doctrine already names the two modes these units run on. Where interests align fully, they collaborate: shared goals, high trust, little verification. Where interests align partially, they cooperate: contracts, escrow, clear terms. The assigned team of the industrial firm was neither of these. It was command dressed up as community.

If we own our Jarvis – the models, the compute, the keys – and the technocrats don’t, the companies of the future will be companies where people work together because they like each other, instead of working because they must. People want to be social.

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The Proof Is Already Running

Germany runs much of its emergency response on exactly this kind of association. At the end of 2023, 1,028,021 people were active in the volunteer fire brigades, against 39,501 professional firefighters. A million people get up in the middle of the night to cut strangers out of burning cars, without a salary, because they chose that team and the team chose them. Another 356,896 young people train in the youth brigades.

Open source runs on the same current, and so do the choirs and football clubs in every German town. Marx drew the boundary in the third volume of Capital: the realm of freedom begins only where labor determined by necessity ends. He expected to get there by abolishing property. The shorter route runs through distributing it – own the machine that does the necessary labor, and the realm of freedom is the hours that remain.

Expect the companies on the far side to be small. Robin Dunbar’s work on group size suggests humans can keep stable relationships with roughly 150 people. Firms that form by affinity will drift toward that scale, because beyond it you no longer know who you are working with, and knowing them was the point.

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The Word Goethe Left Us

Goethe gave this kind of bond its name in 1809. Die Wahlverwandtschaften – Elective Affinities – borrowed a term from the chemistry of his day: Torbern Bergman’s tables of which substances prefer which partners. In the fourth chapter, the characters walk through the idea in conversation: bring AB together with CD, and the elements may abandon their old pairings to form AD and BC. The chemistry stands in for people who choose each other over the bonds they were assigned.

It is the most precise word I know for the company I am describing. Goethe chose the chemist’s word for love — and then he killed almost everyone who felt it. The new affinities dissolve a marriage, a child drowns, Ottilie, the young woman at the center of the book, starves herself, and Eduard, the man who chose her, follows. Chosen bonds are stronger than assigned ones, and for the same reason more dangerous: they break the structures that held people before, and nothing guarantees that what replaces them will hold.

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The Thesis, Stated Plainly

Once everyone owns their own Jarvis, nobody works with anyone out of necessity or because a manager wired them together. Whoever still works in a team does it because they like each other, like the team, and like what the team does together. Whether that is true I leave open, and I leave it to you. If it is, the future stops looking bleak.

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Four Ways the Beautiful Version Breaks

I believe the thesis, and I know where it fails; the failures decide whether we get the beautiful version or the bleak one.

1. No ownership, no affinity. Free association only exists when survival does not depend on the team. If your Jarvis is rented from three labs, elective companies become a hobby of the owner class, and everyone else lives on the managed estate I described in The Second Enclosure. The thesis carries its condition in its first clause for a reason.

2. The comfortable echo chamber. Similar interests make people like each other, and they make people think alike. Sociologists call it homophily, one of the most reliable regularities in human networks. Escape your agent’s echo chamber into a team of people who agree with you and you have changed the furniture, not the room. The assigned colleague you would never have picked was often the one who told you your premise was wrong. Choose for a shared obsession and different expertise: the same fire, different tools.

3. Cheap exit, cheap commitment. When everyone owns a Jarvis, everyone can leave at the first conflict, and teams that can dissolve instantly tend to. Albert Hirschman showed in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that loyalty is what keeps people talking instead of walking. In Why Exitarianism Needed The Oath I wrote that logic does not hold the line when the lights go out; the Bund does, the sworn fellowship at the core of a Chapter. Elective companies need their oath: a commitment you renew by choice and keep when it costs you.

4. The ones nobody chooses. Wigy’s first question still stands: what about the people who get left behind? Election rewards the socially fluent. The assigned workplace was where shy people found friends, and some found the person they married. A future built on choosing needs doors for those who are not chosen first. The fire brigades solved this long ago with the youth brigades, where a teenager becomes part of a team before anyone asks them to be good at it.

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What We Build for It

Libertaria exists to make the first clause of that thesis true. Our name for an elective affinity is a Chapter.

• Own the Jarvis. Hardware you hold and inference you can unplug. Without this, everything below is decoration.
• Chapters as elective affinities. A Chapter is a chosen bond with a written constitution and a guaranteed exit. The exit gives the bond its meaning, because staying is only a choice when leaving is possible.
• Agents as team members. Your Jarvis works in the open: shared memory, work that lands where the team can read it, my agents’ output reviewed by you and yours by me. The private butler is how teams dissolve; the shared agent is how they hold.
• An oath and an open door. Bind the people who chose each other, and keep a bench free for the one nobody has chosen yet.

The industrial firm bought our hours and called what it got a team. The next company cannot buy anything from us that Jarvis does not do cheaper. It will have to be chosen.

In a world where nobody has to work with you, the only question left is whether anyone wants to.