Kevin Kelly: The Bottom is Not Enough
Snip from the latest essay on Kevin Kelly's Technium blog, which for me has become a must-read RSS feed:
I wrote a book, Out of Control, heralding the immense power of bottom up systems. You know: smart mobs, hive mind, web power, amateur hour, decentralized webs, network effects, and collaborative work. Twenty years ago Out of Control made a wide-ranging and exhaustive case for the remarkable things which decentralized, out-of-control systems can accomplish in biology, technology, and cultural realms. Two decades later I'm still keen on the untapped potential of emergent bottom-up systems.Link.But throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it's worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.
The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.
the latest
latest episodes
mmmmmmm ummm umm... maybe because I was reading The Prince the other day, but not seeing the new thing here...
I think there are new ways of doing things involving crodsourcing etc, but I think that you need a vision and generally that needs to be a person who can direct the effort.
My experience in Second Life, working on group projects is that you can work a sort of magic, and make a group produce things that are more than the sum of the parts, but without someone to direct operations, it falls to pieces. You can have the same people, same enthusiasm, same talents without a directing force, and the thing just collapses in on itself.
I think SL is a good experimental laboratory for theories of how things work (or don't work) and how people create together.
What I see as new is the destruction of hierarchy, and it's something which companies and institutions are going to struggle with in the UK particularly. People need authentic communication to make it work; if you start to demand a different sort of communication because you are the MD/CEO/Duke of Cornwall, then it doesn't work... everyone has to leave behind their feelings of superiority/inferiority.
Bottom-up, up-down...I think the author's premise that there isn't much intelligence at the bottom is understandable, until you read a book like Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. Of course this is just a story, but it's based on the idea that there is a very complex universe happening deep down in the substrate of reality, one that may be very intelligent.
A good book on a similar topic (I haven't read "Swarm Theory") is Steven H. Strogatz' "Sync: How order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature and Daily Life."
I would only add that the requirement for a "top-down" seems too much like the statments put forward by the Intelligent Creation crowd.
I haven't read this book or blog (although I'll now seek both out) but what this put me in the mind of first was YouTube versus broadcast/cable television. I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here, but it's interesting to me to consider YouTube as web power amateur hour, to borrow a couple of Kelly's own terms, and thus see it as a prototypical emergent bottom-up system.
Would I want YouTube to be my only entertainment option? No. It can be very entertaining and diverting, but I sometimes want something more, something the bottom-up system cannot provide. I sometimes want the total package of great writing, great directing, great acting, and great production values. For that, I must rely on top-down providers. I've yet to see anything as good on YouTube, in toto, as the new Battlestar Galactica, for example.
At the same time, we can already see the effects of the bottom-up system on the top-down system. The Flight of the Conchords--whose songs are arguably no more than very smart YouTube shorts, which is in fact where I first heard them--break down the wall between viral media and mainstream distribution. As has internets posterboy Andy Samberg, who was plucked out of the great online comedy miasma to try to resuscitate the beached whale that is Saturday Night Live.
Given time, will individual creators out there in the great bottom-up system of YouTube create something as good and complete as Battlestar Galactica? Sure--why not? But how long would it take? That's just what Kelly seems to be saying--a system that relies solely on bottom-up innovation can't move as quickly or as efficiently as a top-down system with organization and means. What is needed is a synthesis of both--something that brings the uncontrollable knowledge and discovery of the hive-mind together with the almost instantaneous implementation system of the establishment.
Thanks for posting this--a thought-provoking way to start my flu-addled morning.
The question is so broad that it's metaphysical.
"To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too." Is really, really bad leadership worse than anarchy? Did the universe need a Designer? Does Dilbert answer this question?
There are no problems, only solutions.
I remain unimpressed by Kelly.
Did the Univese need a Desiger? Does Dilbert need a Designer? Based on what humans know about artifacts, yes, all artifacts need a designer. Based on what humans know about "nature" No-Yes-Maybe is the answere. Humans know so little that disregarding the idea of a designer outright, just so we can be "good" scientifically minded peoplel, is itself, questionable "science." A good scientist might just say there is possible that there are levels of reality that we know nothing of, and at some level there is a being or beings that we might define as the creator/s. And that level might be down deep.
This is in no way like "evolution" versus "intelligent design." It's more like "single-creator intelligent design" versus "massive-teeming-numbers-of-creators intelligent design."
It's actually more a question of: do people do better work left alone or with good management? Emphasis on the word good. There's no big secret to that. Management does fulfill a role, and a good manager can be incredible.
"Management does fulfill a role, and a good manager can be incredible"
But management worked it's way up from the bottom, at least as we understand human management. In nature Management is built into the system via natural selection--if you're not doing your job well enough you die and don't get to pass on your DNA. Maybe that's how it works with Universe builders--do a bad job and your universe never wakes up and is unable to procreate (build new universes). I think our transhuman future will allow us to become universe builders, after which point we can continue talking about whether or not we are the result of some higher being's elementry school science project.