Mortal Engine, sound by Ben Frost (found via Matt Pyke).
Power infrastructure in a favela, by andreasnilsson1976
Charles from Trampoline Systems organized a workshop on emergent democracy last week in Shoreditch. It was kind of interesting. I thought I'd post some quick notes.
First of all here's a rough definition of the phenomenon of emergence: A synergistic property or behaviour of a system that cannot be explained solely by the sum of its component parts; when the organization of a system exhibits dynamic behavioural properties that exist on a macro level in relation to its component parts. Systems that arise out of emergent phenomena are said to be complex.
One example of emergence is the development of the human foetus from the division of a single cell, through further division and specialization, into a complex human body. See Johnson's book Emergence for more examples.
Throughout the discussions it was clear there was a lack of clarity on the difference between strategies for refining democratic participation and a truly emergent system of governance. Emergence resists strategization because by definition it cannot be governed. In an emergent system it is precisely the lack of governance of the whole that allows complexity to arise from the behaviour of individual components reacting to particular constraints (governance at the component level).
This creates an interesting paradox of the expression emergent democracy. The question that the expression raises is this - what changes in participation and organisation will it take for democracy to produce a truly complex system of governance?
Let's take the complex system that arises out of traffic flows in a metropolis as an example of governing complexity. Individual agents (car drivers) are free within a set of constraints (the rules of the road, the placement of traffic lights, one-way streets etc) to make a set of choices about what route to take, how fast to drive, where to stop off and what time to travel. Car drivers really have a lot of freedoms in this system. Traffic flow is a complex system which urban planners try desperately to govern - with differing levels of success, because they don't often have good enough tools to predict the resulting behaviour of 100K+ car drivers. Because the simple rules governing the constraints on drivers mentioned above are increasingly not enough to deal with congestion in cities, governments begin adopting much more holistic governance rules (e.g. a congestion charge).
Admittedly, this is a field seeing a lot of research as a result, but it's an example of how complex systems and governance are often in tension. The rulesets that define cell replication and the instructions encoded in DNA do not attempt to govern the whole that is the human body. If you attempt to govern emergent behaviour with any top-down strategy, you eliminate the free agency of the component parts in the system. The analogy in the traffic flow example would be for urban planners to ban cars and allow people to only use public transport. Like this the level of governance would be such (the governance of routes and schedules so regulated) that the resulting traffic system may not exhibit properties of a complex system at all. What you've done is eliminate the free agents from the system. So it's difficult to imagine how you can successfully 'govern' emergent behaviour (by any accepted notion of governance) without extinguishing complexity; you probably have to re-define political 'governance' in order for it to be plausible.
In a truly emergent democracy, governance would play a role at the component level, in the rulesets that dictate how the individual citizen can participate, but would have to refrain from dictating, regulating or containing the emergent decision making patterns and structures that arise.
Charles highlighted a single change in the nature of voting that may drive emergent democracy: technology will force a shift from fixed place/time voting to continous voting in the near future. He backs this up with various historical reference points as to how technology has affected politics throughout human history. I'm inclined to agree with Charles, and this shift leads to all kinds of questions around representation and participation. Various other people contributed to an interesting discussion on the night:
Mako from Selectricity demonstrated their online polling system which has come out of research into civic technology at MIT; it supports several voting strategies (including preferential, condorcet and borda) and provides a wide variety of feedback on results. You can try out a quickvote for free or contact them for access to more advanced tools.
Sennse from Wikia provided an insight into arbitration and power dynamics at Wikipedia (which she worked at). Interestingly, Wikipedia takes the time to point out it's not an experiment in democracy or any other political system.
Edward from Involve also talked about their collaboration with local government in citizen engagement.
If you want to explore further try Joi Ito's essay on the subject.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Joichi was an early investor in Last.fm, whom I work for.
Glad to have been a part of this in some way (I handle all the API's). Now all we need is for Apple to approve the app for their store.
Update: It's been approved now so you can download it for free from the store. Toby has the full scoop.
I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview on bldgblg, Comparative Planetology
Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy).
- Wikipedia, on Grey Goo
I remember reading Eric Drexler's Engines Of Creation (1986) a few years ago and being delighted by it. Sure it's dated (the irony) and amidst the science and 'foresight' you'll find some rhetoric, but what a great read. Worth it for the cover alone.
I'm keeping up.
Well, I missed the Vint Cerf talk but ernest has put notes up.
- Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
- Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
- Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
- Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting.
- Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.
[ Linda Stone, who coined the phrase Continuous Partial Attention back in the nineties, paraphrases Dee Hock, ex Visa CEO and director of the Chaordic Alliance, during her etech 2006 keynote on attention. ]
Youth culture's DIY ethic evolves into an all inclusive DIT (Do It Together) mindset. Open source occupies an ideological void left by DC Hardcore, and the FSF adopts a stern straight-edge stance.
Jon Aquino's YubNub is a social command line for the web. Try it here. At base level it's a customisable search query form. Much like existing web browser plug-ins. However, any user can add functionality to it, and there's lots of potential in adding a formal 'piping' (as in unix piping) framework, whereby you can envisage search queries like:
amazon hasselhoff | aws_get_titles | technorati_array_query | technorati_get_authors
To give you a list of anyone who's blogged about any films david hasselhoff has ever been in (for possible contact and formation of Hasselhoff co-cast fanclub). Or simply:
google_img david hasselhoff | upload_to_flickr
Any web script triggered by a GET request can be declared as a YubNub command.
YubNub is a crucial, simple idea (cooked up as a 24 Hour challenge), and it's wholly in step with the net's slow morph from a set of interlinked documents to a global operating system running distributed, networked applications and services. It faces serious customer abuse/spam/security issues. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves in the coming weeks.
Also check Jon's Introspicious - intermediate tag analysis on the bookmarks you index at Delicious.