It does not relieve us <i>entirely</i> from social or political pressures, but formal lines of authority can serve as a bulwark against capricious turns of political luck. In an organization with formally defined management responsibilities, you know who to escalate to when you get conflicting requirements. If A has formal authority over the group, and tells you that you should be focusing on, say, improving the build system, but then you get a request from B (who is influential, but does not have formal authority) asking for help improving the UI, you always have the option of asking A. At the very least, if you don&#x27;t ask A, you <i>know</i> you&#x27;re taking a political risk by completing B&#x27;s request before you complete A&#x27;s. In a holocracy, you can take on massive political risks without realizing it, simply by misjudging the political dynamics of a group that you&#x27;re new to.<p>I don&#x27;t dispute that informal power structures exist even in organizations whose hierarchies are formally defined. However, a formal hierarchy serves as a baseline, and one can measure the level of political risk they&#x27;re taking by noticing how much their actions are diverging from the formal hierarchy. If I bypass the chain of command, so to speak, and bring my concerns directly to a high-level executive, I can roughly judge who I&#x27;m going to be offending by taking that step. How does one do that in a holocracy? How do I even know who the &quot;high-level executives&quot; are? The holocracy literature completely hand-waves this aspect of the organization. Holocracy advocates say that you shouldn&#x27;t worry; with time it becomes clear who the influencers are and who one should talk to for various matters. I don&#x27;t agree with that at all. As anyone who remembers attending a public high school can tell you, humans will naturally form cliques, and it&#x27;s not always obvious who the influencers are for a given clique. Moreover, as Paul Graham points out, hackers are much less interested in social dynamics (i.e. &quot;politics&quot; and &quot;drama&quot;) than average people, and so are much more likely to make political miscalculations in a holocracy. It is for this reason that I consider holocracy to be a form of organization that is inherently <i>hostile</i> to hackers. It&#x27;s a form of organization that seems custom-designed to hit us where we&#x27;re weakest.