The Nightmare of Valve’s self-organizing “utopia”

Welcome to Flatland.

Imagine a company where everyone is equal and managers don’t exist. A place where employees sit where they want, choose what to work on and decide each other’s pay. Then, once a year, everyone goes on holiday together.

You have just imagined Valve.

— BBC, Valve: How going boss-free empowered the games-maker

In Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, he describes a two dimensional world lived in by squares, circles and other geometric shapes. Yet for all its flatness, the society of Flatland is deeply hierarchical (the higher the number of sides the higher your status) and resistant to dissent (hostile to the idea of higher dimensions). Indeed, the narrator, A Square, is imprisoned for preaching the existence of three dimensional space.

Ironically, the full arc of Flatland’s plot foreshadowed the ugly reality behind one of the tech world’s most revered workplaces.

Valve is arguably the world’s most powerful gaming company: In 2016, its Steam platform accounted for 38% of all games released and experts believe that it may dominate as much as 80% of all digital distribution of PC games. As a developer, its stable includes classics such as Half Life and Team Fortress 2 while its current roster boasts the incredibly popular Counter Strike and Dota 2. Valve also co-developed the foremost virtual reality headset, the HTC Vive.