There has been a lot of discussion here on how to hold it all together. Can forums like the Tribune survive the divergent views, the different genders, locations, cultures and nationalities, or the deluge of political issues demanding our attention? Can it survive and grow as an almost totally self-regulating structure? It seems so, by the evidence.
The notion that human social interaction systems could prosper without leaders goes against all our experience of hierarchical systems in the Western world. From school to a job, from the church of our choice to the political system we live in, everything is about a pecking order of power in which we are encouraged to move up the ladder to gain more power. In doing so we often have to give up individual feelings to `play the game’. Many of us feel entrapped in this game as we grow older. Forums such as this one however, empower people to speak out and in doing so find themselves to be part of an alternative system with different rules from the ones they have been taught to obey. In fact, people find that instead of having to obey rules, they are the rules.
More below
I won’t go into all the alternative social systems within which all creatures – including humans – operate. I’m only concerned here with the fairly new idea of systems without leaders. But some of you may want to discuss the other systems by comparison.
This diary is based on some work I have done with Chaos Pilots business school in Denmark, and the Information Management department of Amsterdam University. It is an introduction to the concept, and largely anecdotal. Some of you may know much more about the theory of this than I, so bear with me. I want to introduce this concept to a general audience in the hope that it will bring new insight into why we are here and how we relate to each other.
Take me to your leader!
Watch a large flock of birds in flight in the city. It is a liquid mass of self-propelling feathers. The flock swoops, dives and turns on a mark, before settling en masse on another roof. Who gives the orders? Which former dinosaur says `Turn right at the oak tree, lads!’ Nobody. A flock of birds has no leader. A shoal of fish has no leader. A colony of ants has no leader (though as the planet’s most successful species, they do have core values).
Who directs your brain’s hundred billion neurons to connect up? Who, indeed, directs the Internet? No one. These are all Self-Organising Systems – SOS.
And SOS is the new way to look at communities.
Love thy neighbour
How does a tree grow? Each cell in the tree `knows’ what to do according to what its neighbours do. How does a cell `know’? Cells exchange chemical messages – biochemical SMS. That’s all a cell knows. The entire universe of a cell is its neighbours. A cell certainly does not know that it is making a beautiful thing – a tree, neither can any cell say `OK lads, left hand down on twig #17960B’.
Interestingly, most religions have as their central tenet ` Do unto thy neighbour, as thou would have done unto thee’. Or other 17th century words to that effect.
Simple rules
Very simple rules guide flocks, shoals and colonies. The latest A-Life simulations produce highly complex behaviour from a handful of code lines. It’s a new way of looking at systems, even communities such as this one, because it has been previously thought that only specialisation can bring about such system complexity.
The Generation Game
Like the game of Go, chess, or even football, just a few legal moves can bring endless permutations. It seems to be a central function of the evolutionary process – throw up some new complexity with each generation, and let the best adapted survive to changing environmental contexts.
Feedback
In living systems, the evolution-honed alternative to leadership is instant reaction/instant feedback. Every bird in the flock adjusts its flight path instantly in feedback with its neighbours. At the speed that birds fly, only instantaneous reaction will work. That’s strictly for the birds – other feedback can be slower. The canopy of a tree is in a feedback system with the roots. The canopy will not grow beyond the roots because that would prevent rain run-off reaching the roots and thus nourishing the canopy. All food chains depend on feedback, and all value chains. They are self-organising.
The Mobile Brigade
Terrorists have traditionally divided into cells for security, severely limiting the number of `need-to-knows’. Each cell only knows the other cells (or members of other cells) that it contacts, it may have no knowledge of cells beyond that limited communication channel. If the system breaks down, only a few cells are compromised.
Message in a bottle
The designer of the Titanic used watertight bulkheads to prevent the flow of water through the ship, in the event of collision. What he didn’t predict was the weight of water flowing over the top of the bulkheads. Politicians like to think that having all the bulkhead hatches of society closed is going to keep them from getting wet. IT is coming in over the bulkheads.
“Sending out an SMS”
What do the removal of President Estrada of the Philippines, the country shutdown caused by fuel protests in the UK in autumn 2000, Seattle, Gothenburg and Genoa all have in common? The protesters were in self-organising systems using mobiles to provide the instant interaction.
Protesters connected by mobiles, using grouped SMS, can reach a very wide group without any of them having been introduced to each other. They say that if two men witness a murder at midnight and each tell two other about it within 10 minutes, and these 4 people each tell two others and so on, then the world will know about it by breakfast. Try that with mobiles.
Mobiles facilitate the instant and spontaneous formation of SOS groups and also allow them to function, evolve or die painlessly.
Robust, adaptable, flexible, fast
Underwater, a frustrated marlin eyes a huge metallic swirling, darting mass of sardines. It’s lunchtime. The marlin is seething because picking off a plate of sushi from the conveyor belt of a bunch of mobile low-lifes is proving amazingly tricky. 5000 pairs of eyes are better than one. And 5000 escape strategies (choose any two) are faster to react than one hungry marlin. The marlin will get a sardine eventually, and the silver neighbours of the poor sardine who cops it may slightly adapt their escape strategy in the future. But they will change their positions in the shoal and thus dilute any behavioural variation.
Designed for attrition
An SOS is designed for loss. Squash a few ants underfoot, pick off a bird or let the marlin have lunch – it doesn’t make much difference. The system keeps right on working. That’s a powerful social system asset.
There have been a few bridges collapse because one bolt sheered. In a minimalist engineering structure designed only with a small margin of safety, a minor failure can be catastrophic. It can bring the whole system down. In contrast, an SOS has massive redundancy – one bolt out of thousands cannot compromise structural integrity.
Object-oriented software
Make your software modular and, like Linux, it’s more robust. A failure in one module won’t bring the whole system down. Monoculture bad, biodiversity good.
If you only grow potatoes, the blight can wipe you out and the survivors must head for America to become the Irish-Americans.
Connecting people
SOS is also being adopted in business. Trying to locate someone at Nokia by their job title is not easy. The switchboard won’t tell you. Below upper executive level, Nokia is an SOS. At the top, the strategies are decided, the global financing organised, and the big deals in China are made. But below that teams and groups and cells form, function and dissolve organically. When problems need solving, a Nokia flock forms to face the threat, get food or fly south.
And to do that you need a lot of redundancy in the system. Like the brain.
The heresy
The brain has been compared to a computer. But in many ways the brain is very dissimilar, because in the end, a computer processor is linear – the registers all have queues. In the brain, in the mind, it all happens at the same time using very simple rules. If I’m a neuron, I’ll fire myself only if I get fired at a certain number of times in a certain time period. All I know is that. And that often I am meta-programmed by various hormone-like chemicals floating around, which affect the way I fire, but not who I fire at.
One theory has it that consciousness is the result of neural networks `terminating’ in many places at the same time. The mind, faced with a million answers, becomes aware – but that is a whole new bag of beans.
Signal to noise
The mind is an SOS. As a baby, born with 100 billion neurons, you start out submersed in sensory noise. Only later will you detect the signal and then spend your life working out what the signal means. Some connections are pre-programmed, but mostly your experience and interaction with the outside world and the rest of yourself, will make the connections for you. Experience is self-organising. And it’s reorganising all the time.
You are all the neural networks you have. As the networks reorganize, so do you.
“In a totally frictionless society, permanent communities are not needed” (adapted from Coarse’s Law)
Like the oil super-tanker, large societies are tricky to manoeuvre and hard to redirect. Leadership-free communities are much more adept at changing direction. Instantly, like the flock. Such communities are organic.
Think of the Net as an ecosystem
“The net is a great rain forest of life-forms called ideas which like organisms – those patterns of self-reproducing evolving adaptive information that express themselves in skeins of carbon – require other organisms to exist”.
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow has proposed several criteria for the future development of the Internet. Among these are relationship, interactivity, and service. “I want you, I need you and I won’t let you down”. These are standard codes of conduct in an SOS.
`Meet the new boss: no boss’
“Relationship, along with service, is at the heart of what supports all sorts of other modern, though more anonymous, knowledge workers. Doctors are economically protected by a relationship with their patients, architects with their clients, executives with their stockholders. In general, if you substitute “relationship” for “property,” you begin to understand why a digitised information economy can work fine in the absence of enforceable property law. Cyberspace is unreal estate. Relationships are its geology”.
John Perry Barlow
You can’t beat the system
The group loyalty and individual sacrifice that are an inherent part of SOS can only exist in an environment of complete trust. Altruism doesn’t survive inequitable contexts. Leadership is essentially exploitation, and hierarchical systems, in practice, are extremely prone to corruption because they are based on reward and fear. Capitalism is crowded with people trying to `beat the system’.
Co-operation, not competition
We are moving toward a rethink of capitalism. We are more sixty years from the conflict that divided Europe. It was a conflict that cemented the idea of hierarchical control of systems into our society – the military pyramid of decision-making and orders, where information flows down from the brass to the cannon fodder. The older generation of European managers grew up in a post-war society based on hierarchy. Most companies still function as hierarchical systems. So do governments. Even advertising is still based on the seminal work of the greatest brand manager of all time – Joseph Goebbels.
`Culture unites while business divides’
In nature, this depends on which microscope you are using. Look at a colony of ants and it’s true. Look at the colony feeding, and it’s not true. Look at the whole ecological system and it’s true again.
In the New Society, we need to look again at the whole ecology of society – the gestalt.
Gestalt?
Thanks to the Greeks, the classic occidental way to learn is the reductionist approach of giving everything a name or a number and categorising it. It’s all very logical, like a computer, and totally hierarchical. It’s the military approach to learning.
Take a flow chart. All of those lovely boxes connected to each other, making the whole system easy to understand. But defining a box means that you edit, you exclude. You leave out all that interesting stuff between the boxes. The stuff in the spaces may not all be useful, but it is all part of the ecology of the system.
The data sculptor can work in two ways. Starting from nothing and building up the sculpture bit by bit. Or the gestalt way is to start with a huge block and chip away what you don’t need.
The gestalt is the whole system.
A gestalt flowchart would like rather like the surface of a pond during light rain. The drops of water are events – impacts on the surface. The events create ripples, which spread concentrically and meet other waves. Where waves intersect there’s an interference pattern, which creates new waves at new frequencies. It sounds a lot like an SOS. And indeed it is, with each drop interacting with its neighbours. It is also a better way to visualise the societies of the future.
Raspberry Ripples
If you want to see SOS in action today, check out artists, musicians or writers. Most of them have to live in a hybrid system – using the hierarchy to survive financially and the SOS to create. Artists don’t interact with each other by meetings, agendas, flowcharts or even analysis. They create ripples, which interfere with neighbouring ripples. Where the ripples intersect, new frequencies are created.
Boo Tribune is indeed a pond. The frogs are watching the rain. The frogs are watching the ripples from the raindrops. Jump in and create some even bigger ripples!
