"There are just no cultures where “no one is managing things,”" --
Yes, but there are also no cultures that were designed with the pre-assumption of every citizen having a globally connected computer in their pockets. Whether or not central management is an absolute requirement for avoiding chaos is a function of what tools for self-organ…
"There are just no cultures where “no one is managing things,”" --
Yes, but there are also no cultures that were designed with the pre-assumption of every citizen having a globally connected computer in their pockets. Whether or not central management is an absolute requirement for avoiding chaos is a function of what tools for self-organization and distributed decision-making and distributed process management we have. Even just a few decades ago it was clear: we do not have good enough tools for self-organization, we do need central management. Today... I'm not sure. I'm not sure either way, the answer may easily be that yes, we still need centralization, but I definitely think it's something that hasn't been fully explored.
Pretty much all the social structures we have were designed centuries ago, and a lot of their design was informed by the technology (mostly communication tech) that was available back then. The way our once-every-four-years elections, and one-representative-per-geological-region political systems work, they made sense in the past, but not necessarily with the tech we have today. Technically we could easily build a system where any citizen can delegate their vote to anyone, possibly to multiple persons depending on area of expertise, changing their setup any time, overriding on a case-by-case basis, etc., etc. Similarly, I think a whole lot of the areas where we think central management is essential, could now be replaced with distributed, self-organizing cooperation.
I really would love to see what kind of structures we'd come up with if we re-designed it all from scratch but with today's tech in mind. And I don't mean getting it designed by a committee, but what would organically evolve out of the chaos, under today's circumstances instead of those centuries or millennia ago. Unfortunately not only do we not know, but we also don't have good ways to play around with such questions. (If I were a billionaire, I'd build online games that could serve as sandboxes for such experiments.)
You're so right, and that's just it! We need to be able to experiment and see what else might work. In practice, Singapore works the way you say. The people who live there provide feedback on EVERYTHING, and the government takes that into account and then changes the laws and the structure based on the feedback from citizens. (But they are still a benevolent dicatorship, technically, so that could change!)
I'll actually be experimenting with various models in an upcoming series on government. I'll be curious what you think!
"There are just no cultures where “no one is managing things,”" --
Yes, but there are also no cultures that were designed with the pre-assumption of every citizen having a globally connected computer in their pockets. Whether or not central management is an absolute requirement for avoiding chaos is a function of what tools for self-organization and distributed decision-making and distributed process management we have. Even just a few decades ago it was clear: we do not have good enough tools for self-organization, we do need central management. Today... I'm not sure. I'm not sure either way, the answer may easily be that yes, we still need centralization, but I definitely think it's something that hasn't been fully explored.
Pretty much all the social structures we have were designed centuries ago, and a lot of their design was informed by the technology (mostly communication tech) that was available back then. The way our once-every-four-years elections, and one-representative-per-geological-region political systems work, they made sense in the past, but not necessarily with the tech we have today. Technically we could easily build a system where any citizen can delegate their vote to anyone, possibly to multiple persons depending on area of expertise, changing their setup any time, overriding on a case-by-case basis, etc., etc. Similarly, I think a whole lot of the areas where we think central management is essential, could now be replaced with distributed, self-organizing cooperation.
I really would love to see what kind of structures we'd come up with if we re-designed it all from scratch but with today's tech in mind. And I don't mean getting it designed by a committee, but what would organically evolve out of the chaos, under today's circumstances instead of those centuries or millennia ago. Unfortunately not only do we not know, but we also don't have good ways to play around with such questions. (If I were a billionaire, I'd build online games that could serve as sandboxes for such experiments.)
You're so right, and that's just it! We need to be able to experiment and see what else might work. In practice, Singapore works the way you say. The people who live there provide feedback on EVERYTHING, and the government takes that into account and then changes the laws and the structure based on the feedback from citizens. (But they are still a benevolent dicatorship, technically, so that could change!)
I'll actually be experimenting with various models in an upcoming series on government. I'll be curious what you think!