Attention Economy 11: Systems of Organization This is the latest in my #attentioneconomy series of essays, and it’s a monster. I’ll need all the help I can get =D If you enjoy my stream, please read, share, and participate! ___ “Humanity is under no delusions about the nature and scale of the problems we face; we have been aware of the difficulty our future presents for at least a generation. However, for each of these tremendous challenges, the available solutions seem to fall into two rough categories: market solutions and state solutions. Private solutions and public solutions. These were the two basic organizational strategies that came out of the Enlightenment, each of which has clear advantages for certain kinds of tasks and potentially tragic disadvantages for others. The history of human organization over the last few centuries has involved finding a precarious balance between these two strategies. On the traditional model, this balancing act centered around the importance of individual freedom, and played out in the discursive border disputes that continue to rage between the public and the private spheres. The digital age has violently disrupted these delicate attempts at balance, instigating all new turf wars; but all available solutions assume that these lines have to be drawn somewhere around the individual, even while there is less and less clear sense of what such a thing might even be. Since state based or market solutions (and increasingly, some combination of the two) are the only organizational strategies on the table, there is and remains no consensus for how to reconcile these anomalies. Even while it is clear that neither state or market solutions will adequately address the problems we face, we lack any clear sense of what an alternative organizational structure might look like. This is my assessment of our […]

The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I explained a simple thought experiment for thinking about your role as an attender in the network. In this post, I will explain how attention economies fit into a larger schema of organizational strategies. This is the post where I make good on the claim to a “unified model”. ___________________________ (1) Enlightenment strategies Organizational structure is a fundamental question for any social creature; the history of human society is a history of different organizing strategies. In what follows, I will be giving a very general analysis of a certain class of organizational strategies. I’ll be painting with broad strokes that will be vague in the details in order to get the theory on the table, so please have patience with what is undoubtedly a inadequate historical analysis. In particular, much of what I will say will involve a caricature of what I call “Enlightenment” organizational strategies. By the Enlightenment, I’m referring to a wide range of philosophical and theoretical developments in the 17th and 18th centuries that, coupled with tremendous advances in the sciences, set the stage for the massive changes in human social organization that played out in the centuries that followed. On my telling, the Enlightenment culminates in the series of revolutions that characterize the age, including the French and American political revolutions and the economic and technological changes identified with the Industrial Revolution. These organizational revolutions served as the backdrop on which the drama of the 19th and 20th centuries unfolded. The Enlightenment is a conversation between many thinkers across many different social and historical contexts, so any remark on its lessons will inevitably involve a gross simplification. On my particular simplification, the Enlightenment involves a recognition and respect for the freedom of individuals. […]

This is a pretty scathing critique of our current condition, regardless of what lies in store if we continue on these paths. I’m not sure I’d blame lawyers for this. We’re all culpable for the inhumanity of the existing order of things. Julien Amelot originally shared this post: Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers By +Tom Scott #singularity #afterlife #themeaningoflife

Animesh Sharma originally shared this post: “Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional “tone” of the channels. ” Emotional persistence in online chatting communities : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user ac…

+Jon Lawhead I’ve become convinced that what’s going on here is a fundamental failure to properly understand the phenomenon of organization at a quite general level. This is just circumstantial evidence, but it gives some hint at the extent of the problem. Consider the following two Wikipedia pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism Notice how, despite the obvious conceptual relations, the two pages share virtually no overlap whatsoever. The page on “organization” is almost exclusively about human bureaucratic institutional structures– with some notable exceptions, like the link to ANT and complexity theory. There are links, of course, but there are links everywhere on the web. But on its face this discussion bears almost no relation whatsoever to the discussion of organisms, presumably exactly those entities which are so organized. There is virtually no hope, at least from the Wiki entries, of figuring out how the process of organization might lead to any of the organisms that populate the planet. That’s not enough for the full argument, but in broad outline this mismatch convinces me that we are running against a fundamental conceptual gap. And Jon, I think we’ve put together a theory that can bridge this gap in ways that have consequences throughout the disciplines. Its a theory that makes the Queen of Spades hypothesis a paradigm case instead of a curious outlier crying for explanation. That’s how paradigm shifts work. I don’t think it is coincidental that the Greek roots for the word, ??????? literally means “instrument, implement, tool, for making or doing a thing”. It makes the solution seem almost obvious in retrospect. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Do%29%2Frganon ____ Left this comment in Jon’s thread. h/t +Jonathan Langdale https://plus.google.com/u/0/103315650425474752023/posts/9efsd68tV4v Jonathan Langdale originally shared this post: Get others to do the hard essential hard work. Sounds familiar. . Queen of spades key to new evolutionary hypothesis […]

Rebecca Spizzirri originally shared this post: This research is particularly important because it overcomes some of the long standing limitations on studying fish. A colleague of mine studied clownfish for her thesis, with the goal of investigating how hormones change in the brain as the fish change sexes (clownfish change from male to female when they become socially dominant in their environment). But this process involved pairing up the subjects in test tanks to see which would become dominant, which was ultimately stressful on the fish. In fact, not a single one survived the experiment. But if researchers can use virtual environments to get the same results, then not only is that in the best interest of animal welfare, but also it increases the range of possible environments or situations that the subjects can be exposed to, allowing researchers to draw more specific conclusions from these experiments. “Dr. Ahrens and colleagues created a virtual environment for zebrafish, which allowed them to measure activity in the neurons as the fish ‘moved’. In reality, the zebrafish was paralysed to allow the researchers to image its brain; the fish perceived to ‘move’ through the virtual environment by activating their motor neuron axons, the cells responsible for generating movement.” Virtual reality allows researchers to measure fish brain activity during behavior at unprecedented resolution Researchers have developed a new technique which allows them to measure brain activity in large populations of nerve cells at the resolution of individual cells. The technique has been developed in ze…

Even spiders cooperate! Bug G. Membracid originally shared this post: This movie contains spiders!!! (and David Attenborough)

“In other words, self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level (an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets), i.e., true emergence,” they say. That’s an interesting view of emergence and certainly seems a sensible approach to the problem of the origin of life. It’s not hard to imagine groups of molecules operating together like this. And indeed, biochemists have recently discovered simple autocatalytic sets that behave in exactly this way. But what makes the approach so powerful is that the mathematics does not depend on the nature of chemistry–it is substrate independent. So the building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way. These units can be complex entities in themselves. “Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think, for example, of the collection of bacterial species in your gut (several hundreds of them) as one big autocatalytic set,” say Kauffman and co. Link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0584 Filippo Salustri originally shared this post: Closing in on a scientific explanation of how life started. Boy, that’s piss the religulous fundiots off! #science #mathematics #abiogenesis The Single Theory That Could Explain Emergence, Organisation And The Origin of Life – Technology Review Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Now a new mathematical approach to these sets has even broader implications

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: “Philosophy and science should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.” -H.P. Lovecraft

Albert Einstein originally shared this post: “Never memorize something that you can look up.” +Albert Einstein (step into my circle)