The Double Bind

Chapter 10 left us with a distinction. Authority remains where the organizational chart says it does. Control has begun to live somewhere else. Humans continue to perform the gestures of authorship over decisions that have already migrated into systems they cannot meaningfully review. That gap, between formal authority and practical control, is what makes the illusion of control possible. The illusion persists not because anyone is lying about it but because the rituals of oversight survive after the substance underneath them has thinned.