Boston, 2005. American Revolution 2
Today we are not full citizens of the Web. We have no effective voice in how our digital selves are captured, stored, represented, bought and sold. In short we have no voice in how that most precious and precarious aspects of ourselves, - our multiple digital identities - are governed.
To secure the protections of the state and the benefits of commerce, we are asked to relinquish our individual sovereignty to “higher” authorities – commercial and governmental. The presumptive fear is that there can be no social order without a central authority, a master server to monitor, protect, control and enforce.
Yet precisely the opposite is what is needed. Effective control, efficient control, adaptive control can not be exercised top down short of a “lock down” that stifles freedom of action, production and expression.
Control is not about removing risk from an organization through preordained action, but a matter of incorporating and distributing risk and the ability to creatively respond to it at those points where change is implemented and consequences experienced. At the Edge. Not at the Center. Not at the peak of the pyramid. But among the many peers that self-organize to make networks work.
Towards Edge Organization
By moving decision rights to the edge, the individual can have both responsibility and control over their digital identities. By creating infrastructures that ensures requisite transparency, fairness and accountability, the power of peer governance enables Libertarian Freedoms while simultaneously ensuring Communitarian Values.
In short, digital technologies afford a new form of scaleable peer governance whereby transparency, fairness, reputation, and accountability can achieve new levels of trusted exchange, and economic diversity and efficiency not imaginable in organizations with fixed hierarchical decision structures.
These new edge organizational forms leverage human beings innate propensities to trust and their innate competences to detect deception.
Why A Social Physics?
We believe that there is growing evidence from a variety of disciplines, neuro-science, evolutionary psychology, comparative anthropology, neuro-economics, and evolutionary biology that many human social behaviors are very similar to other social species—even those to whom we are not genetically linked. How is it that very similar cooperative strategies and social behaviors emerge in genetically distinct species? The answer is intriguing because it argues that under certain environmental conditions, there are Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESSs) that are independently discovered by different species and embedded in their respective genomes through the trial and error of thousands of generations of evolutionary testing. What this means is that for certain forms of cooperative behavior there are ESSs which naturally appear as the best solutions and that these are governed by innate social protocols and emotions. These emotions and social protocols exist in a variety of genetically distinct species: harvester ants, ravens, wolves, elephants, whales, booboos, chimpanzees, and human beings. Therefore, we argue that there are certain underlying laws—a kind of social physics—that can be abstracted for complex forms of collective behavior and cooperation, independent of the kind of species involved.
The goal of the SocialPhysics project is to create real world online environments – edge organizations - for a variety of human endeavors - where diverse forms of trusted exchange can be tested, scaled, validated and rejected to discover robust forms of social, cultural and economic exchange. In short, create the social technologies of civil societies.
Please join us.
— John Clippinger and the SocialPhysics Team
