On the balance of top-down and bottom-up

Kevin Kelly is on of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, which you all know I am pretty fond of. He wrote an article (link below) recently on the balance of bottom-up emergence and top-down guidance (not necessarily ‘control’, more like ‘leadership’), that has tipped my hand to finally writing down some thoughts.

Top-down or botton-up?

This topic of balance has been on my mind quite a bit – I have followed emergence (I call it ‘complexification‘) for many years now (heck, I’m a scientist at heart); just finished Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence‘, heard some great talks by Juan Enriquez and Alex Wright, and had my own personal struggle trying to understand megacorporations (aka ‘The Borg‘).

Kevin revisits (and discusses through the many comments on the article) his 10-year old book ‘Out of Control‘, a book on swarm theory, hive mind, bottom-up emergence. One thing he has learned is that bottom up is not enough.

He uses Wikipedia as an example of something that might seem bottom up – people ‘randomly’ contributing and editing encyclopedia articles, forming a global encyclopedia of knowledge from the collective actions of a collection of individual. Kevin points out that, actually, there is some level of top-down control in Wikipedia through a set of über-contributors who do have a modicum of editorial control.

The book ‘Emergence’ relates in many example how ‘dumb’ local behaviour in a network leads to a ‘higher-order’ behaviour. The famous example is an ant colony, where the sum total of the colony members’ behavior, based on simple rules, leads to a a comlex colony-level (colony as organism) behaviour.

Networks within networks

Alex Wright and Juan Enriquez point out, in their work, that one level network leads to members that then operate at a new level. My example for this is the body. Our cells go about their single-minded business, creating a higher order network that is the body. The body then is the unit item in a network that is our social network.

Yet, Kevin struggles with his interaction with the world of user-generated-content, the swarm of content that leads to something like Wikipedia. Coming from a publishing background, he sees the need for the editor. And I think that’s fine. The editor is actually from one level up in the network and not on the level of the swarm. As with the body, the control does come from the next level up, what ever the selected forces on the next level up are.

Global control from above

Drawing a parallel back to ants, Steven Johnson points out that the colony would be in trouble if one of the ants took a global view of the colony and tried to take over. That’s because the ants are part of the swarm and should not have global control. The colony has that global control, a control that comes from the selective pressures on the colony, not the ant. The selective pressures of the colony are its survival, interaction with other colonies, its relations with the environment.

I’d claim that what Kevin is struggling with is the publishing process of Wikipedia taps into the swarm perfectly. Contributors are elements following simple rules to just spew content into Wikipedia. But, WIkipedia as an organism needs to compete at another level, which gives Wikipedia a global mandate to force a selective pressure upon the members that constitute its internal network. Yet, this will only work if 1) the network one level down subsumes itself to the collective, and 2) that none of the members of the network one level down try to assume a global view or impact.

Corporations can learn from this

This all leads me to why large corporations are so dysfunctional: too many people taking the global view.

For a network to function, there needs to be rules of action for the members and rules of interaction between the members (think of workers as cells, departments as organs). In corporations, this is done through role definition. Indeed, I think it is wonderful how much individual responsibility my corporation give the workers. And that should be sufficient for emergent behaviours to be visible. And they are, as one can see with how products and services are created.

But, the impact of the corporation (think of it as the body) is at the corporation level (bodies in a social network) and the selection is at the corporation level. Hence, the members of the corporation should not have a global view, or attempt to commandeer the global view. And It think in corporations, the members tend to know the rules, do what the corporation asks, but never return and make sure that what ever potentially global effort they have been asked to do by the corporation does not violate the original rules of being a member of the collective. Likewise, I do not see the corporation exerting its global view in culling activities that violate the network rules and try to act on the level of the corporation (the global level).

I suppose that’s my long winded way of saying that employees keep screwing things up by taking on the role of the corporation and the corporation keeps screwing up by not exerting its influence on its employees who try to commandeer the global direction. (I’ve seen this happen too many times)

Summary

Yeah, global top-down works if it comes from the next layer of network above. It won’t work from within the network.

Do folks in the open source world (or others) agree?

Link: Kevin Kelly — The Technium:

Judged from where we start, harnessing the dumb power of the hive mind will always take us much further than we can dream. Judged from where we hope to end up, the hive mind is not enough; we need an additional top-down push.