High priests vs mass participation
First posted on LinkedIn.
For any organisation, the chances of becoming truly AI-fluent increase materially when technologists stop acting as high priests and start designing for mass participation.
In many religions, priests mediated access to the divine. If you wanted understanding, forgiveness, or progress, you went through them — not because people were incapable, but because access, language, and ritual were tightly controlled.
High-priest behaviour in modern form often looks like this:
- Only I understand the code.
- Only our code can get into production.
- Only our way of getting code into production is allowed.
Context lives in a few heads. Progress requires translation by the same people every time. Capability doesn’t spread; dependency does.
Mass participation looks different:
- Many people can reason about the system.
- Many people can safely shape behaviour.
- Many paths to production exist.
Context lives in the system. Progress comes from direct interaction with code, not translation. Capability spreads; dependency shrinks.
At ShopBack, we’re fortunate to have engineers who actively design against the high-priest trap.
One concrete example is how we use n8n.
The engineers focused on setting up the platform with clear defaults and guardrails, so safe usage becomes the path of least resistance. They then invested in helping others learn how to use the system — including walking through real workflows.
That’s the shift: from mediating access to multiplying capability.