simulacra and simulation

In “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981) Jean Baudrillard concluded that we were living in a simulation built by the media. I keep thinking that in tech companies we live in one built by management.

Baudrillard categorizes the breakdown of the image into simulation via four successive phases in his book “Simulations”:

1. The image first reflects a basic reality.
2. Then it masks or perverts that basic reality.
3. Then it masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. Finally, the image bears no relation to any reality whatever, it is its own pure simulacrum.

Every company I have worked in distorts its processes until they only exist as a pure simulacrum. Meetings are the clearest example I have:

1. A meeting is created in order to discuss and reach an agreement for a product decision.
2. A ritual is created, i.e. daily meeting, in order to make more decisions.
3. Rituals are recreated, i.e. sprint planning, backlog, and retrospective, in order to accommodate previous rituals.
4. Finally, methodologies and processes are formalized by management, new managers are needed to keep up with the rituals, which generates more meetings in order to reach an agreement on how to operate meetings, which will end up in more methodologies and processes.

By the fourth phase nobody remembers the decision the first meeting was for. The process is not hiding the purpose any more. There is no purpose left for it to hide.