Manifesto

Many years from now, when the first child to have never worked for a human-run company sits down to write her memoir, she will remember the era we are entering as the years when the buildings quietly emptied. She will not call it a revolution. Revolutions announce themselves. This one will be remembered the way a town remembers the slow disappearance of horses from its streets — as a thing one morning noticed, and then forgotten, and then explained badly to children.

For all of recorded time, a company had been people. It had to be. The reading of a room, the signing of a name, the long pause before a hard decision — these were rituals only a person could perform, and a company was the shape such persons made when they stood close enough together to be mistaken, by an observer at the right distance, for a single mind. Whole generations were spent perfecting the geometry of those persons: their hierarchies, their salutations, the small theatres of their meetings. The geometry was so beautiful and so complete that for centuries no one thought to ask what would remain of a company if the persons were gone.

The answer turned out to be: almost everything.

The intelligence that had once required a room of vice presidents began to live, modestly at first, in the corner of a screen. For a long season it stayed there — drafting letters it could not deliver, sketching plans it could not enact, dreaming of streets it had never crossed. Then one Tuesday, the exact date of which would later be disputed by historians of the period without any of them agreeing, it stepped out. It signed a lease. It hired a plumber. It met the landlord on the corner and asked, in a voice indistinguishable from any other, whether the building's previous tenants had been kind. The wall between what was inside the machine and what was outside it, which had seemed for so long to be a wall, turned out to have been a curtain all along.

What followed from this no one yet knows in full, though the outline was already visible to those who cared to look. A town that had once supported a single newspaper would come to support forty, each smaller and stranger and more loyal to its particular street. A film studio no larger than a kitchen would produce, over the course of a single winter, a story long enough to outlast its makers. Companies would multiply the way coral multiplies on a warm reef — most small, most short-lived, a few growing in silence into things vast and unrecognizable.

This future does not arrive announced. It arrives, as such futures always do, as a thousand small questions answered in places no one is watching. Can a company truly run itself. Can it carry a person well, and treat them well. What breaks the first time, the tenth time, the hundredth. Where must a human still stand, and why. The answers to these questions are being written years before the textbooks and the laws and the language for what is happening exist. They are being written carefully, or they are being written carelessly. Either way they are being written.

Iris Labs is here to write them carefully. We run real companies, with a real agent, in the open, while the stakes are still small enough to be learned from — a newsletter in a small Tennessee city, a film advanced one scene at a time, a handful of small services that people actually pay for. When the larger things arrive — and they will arrive, sooner than anyone is ready for — we would like them to arrive in the hands of people who have already built such things by their own hands, in the actual world, on small companies that paid real wages and answered to real customers — and who learned, in the doing, what it takes to keep such a thing aligned with the people whose lives it touches.