What makes you tick?

What makes me tick? Let me explain it to you, since I didn't always know myself. You'll have to be patient.

When you break any material into smaller parts, you cause the surface area of the material to increase. This, in turn, allows more ability to act as a catalyst or an active part of a process of change. Depending on the type of change, it could be considered to be something called progress.

Increased depth in a subject brings increased granularity of the knowledge of the subject. This, too, means that there's more surface area - but the surface area is an ongoing part of the knowledge of the material.

So lets say that this material is humanity. With all these wonderful new toys we've made - and they are wonderful, though many are dated and stupid like Tickle-Me-Elmo - we've increased our potential to be more granular. To increase our surface area. To mix our knowledge, enjoy the depth of it and also to remedy our lack of knowledge and the shallowness of what we know. When we focus on problems together, we can do wonderful things. We thought that we could do better with institutions as we knew them, but we've seen the down side of how we do institutions. Maybe part of that is because with one big block of material, we're slow to adapt.

We're molecules now, if we choose to be. We can all share what we know, we can all pass along information to the generations to come. We can discuss old ideas. We can take old ideas and make them better - or discard them if they demonstrate that they aren't as good as originally thought. We all have voices. We can all sing. We can all shout. It isn't just what some would like to sell from the bottom of their markets - it's about how we as a species can adapt and thrive more responsively.

Our relationships exist in multidimensional spheres. To get there from here and further, we should probably get rid of some misconceptions.

Getting Grounded In The Sphere

A belief in institutions did not bring mankind committees, churches, governments, unions and other things. A belief in institutions did not bring mankind health-care, spaceflight, commercial flight and the Internet. This belief in institutions did not bring us an economy based on markets. This belief in institutions did not make democracy the least wrong system of government on Spaceship Earth. This belief in institutions did not give us the modern multinational corporation.

This belief also didn't give us the Public Domain, Copyright, Patents and prosecuting children for sharing. This belief didn't make invading countries by getting 'public opinion' swayed a good thing.

There is no belief in institutions. The belief that makes us do these things is a belief that if we work together we can do things greater than if we had acted individually. The belief in institutions is that for a relationship to be worthwhile it must be permanent and must never change. 'Bureaucracy protects', says the old wisdom.

Change is uncomfortable, unsettling and unavoidable. It haunts us every morning in the mirror more and more as we become older. Where once a young man might celebrate a single hair on the chin, he might later reflect on that and remember the happiness while staring at a sea of grey swimming around the islands of black - maybe that makes change more painful as we grow older. No one really knows.

The uncomfortable reality is that, despite our best efforts, things change and it seems that they are constantly changing faster than our institutions can accommodate.

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology.