On Open Civic Systems

An Excerpt From Towards An Open Civics

Stigmergy: The Nature Of Open Civic Systems

Across the natural world, we can see examples of nature engaging in positive sum feedback loops in which plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, water, light, and soil exchange energy and information for mutual benefit. The sum total of these interactions is the “web of Life,” a nested set of relationships that form a complex adaptive system that is self-regulating, self-healing, self-reinforcing, and continuously evolving.

Stigmergy is a type of swarm intelligence¹ in which individual agents, taking their own actions, signal those actions to other agents in such a way that other agents can contribute in a positive sum feedback loop. Examples of stigmergy in non-human organisms include ants, termites, bees, flocks of birds, bacteria, and slime mold. In humans, we can see examples of stigmergy in Burning Man, open source software development², Wikipedia³, the Occupy movement⁴, and various internet experiments⁵. More akin to jazz music or an improv troupe than an institution or organization, stigmergy uses a simple set of decentralized rules to support individual agents in contributing to mutually beneficial goals. What is lost in terms of the linear clarity derived from centralized planning and control is greatly outweighed by the unplannable complexity and beauty of a swarm contributing their unique gifts towards an emergent structure.

Stigmergy is made possible by the decentralized rule set that all agents choose to abide by, creating the conditions for feedback loops that reward positive sum behaviors. Positive sum feedback is driven by stacking the contributions of individual agents. Contributions that attract more contributions feed back on themselves. These rewards are intrinsic to participation. No one needs to direct or command them to occur. When it is clear how to contribute without stepping on someone else’s toes (literally or metaphorically), humans naturally want to converge around shared efforts in which their participation is meaningful and purposeful. This is a form of participatory commons governance⁶ in the sense that it empowers us to collectively steer the ship of a common effort through our contribution instead of through our top down control of others’ agency.

Open civic systems create scaffolding for stigmergic coordination by providing open templates for agent-centric coordination. Institutional functions and all other functions of a society are ultimately based in human coordination, making open civic systems capable of achieving the same outputs as any centralized institution. Open protocols, the DNA or source code for open civic systems, function similarly to the pheromone pattern languages of ants that inform how agents communicate and stack their contributions. In this way, open civic systems integrate human social systems with the patterns of living systems.

In the same way that an ant colony or bee hive can be considered a macroorganism, an emergent whole with its own form of collective agency, a human social organism is the equivalent design pattern for human coordination. Social organisms grow out of a core mission, vision, and culture that is defined in the nucleus of the social organism’s social DNA. This social DNA serves as a north star as it is encoded and reproduced by agents through means of peer accountability, empowering human agents to opt-in to social organisms with whom they align at the fundamental DNA level. This core DNA also informs the functions, roles, flows, and membranes that are required for the social organism to achieve its purpose within its social ecology. Distinct from institutions or corporations that tend to function as a kind of “zombie” or cancerous social organism, never dying or engaging in reciprocal flows with their environment, social organisms are intended to be conceived, gestated, matured, and decomposed as the entire social ecology continues to evolve and transform to reflect the needs and desires of the many generations of agents who animate them.

While this fundamental transformation in human social behavior and structure is profound, it reflects patterns that exist all around us in the natural world. A human civilization based on these fundamental design patterns would represent a truly open civic system, able to easily adapt to changing circumstances, respond to collectively determined needs, and provide cosmo-local feedback cycles in which the collective superorganism of humanity could continuously learn and grow as peers.

Polycentricity: Holons Of Self-Organization

Embracing the living systems view of the interrelatedness and complexity present in our ecologies, and perhaps our future human systems, we begin to view components of a system as nested wholes or holons.

“A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In this way, a holon can be considered a subsystem within a larger hierarchical system” – Wikipedia

This fractal perspective allows us to view the world through the lens of polycentricity, a way of seeing that can contextually shift depending on which holon we’re seeking to understand. Because each component is a whole unto itself within a fractal web of relationships, polycentricity emerges as a way of engaging with the sovereign sphere of each holon while acknowledging that a complex system will contain many component parts which are themselves sovereign wholes. This whole systems approach allows us to engage with and design human systems that reflect the various interconnected holonic scales of a complex system, from the sub-atomic to the molecular, cellular, organismic, social organismic, ecological and biospheric scales. At each scale, the autonomy and healthy reciprocal flows within and across each holon will affect the health of the system.

This living systems understanding is reflected in political philosophy through the principle of subsidiarity⁷, an idea which emerged out of the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas⁸ and the neo-Calvinist political philosophy of “sphere sovereignty,”⁹ which states that “social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.”

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America offers a description of the principle of subsidiarity in early America. Tocqueville observed that “decentralization has, not only an administrative value, but also a civic dimension, since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs; it makes them get accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will.”¹⁰

A beautiful living example of a cosmo-local and polycentric approach to whole systems thinking, bioregionalism embraces the holonic nesting of our belonging to and embeddedness within our living systems. Thinking bioregionally shifts our perspective towards the holonic nature of our relationships. Instead of seeding a new kind of nationalism wherein the locus of power and identity is an abstract nation state, bioregionalism sees humanity as part of a single biosphere and global human community while localizing our actions at the scale at which closed loop systems are most needed and relevant. In this sense, bioregionalism and a living systems view of civic infrastructure are one and the same.

Blockchain: Peer To Peer Cybernetics

To build the infrastructures of open civic systems that align with this holonic and polycentric view, new technological substrates are needed. Although the early stages of the internet were defined by peer to peer interactions between academic institutions¹¹, our digital commons was quickly captured by centralized “web2” entities like Google and Meta who realized that by placing essential internet services on their own servers, as opposed to self-hosted ones, they could extract attention and advertising revenue. What followed was a classic multi-polar trap in which misaligned incentives and the enclosure of our digital commons led to a race to the bottom in which the monetization of our attention became an arms race between increasingly monopolistic tech giants. At the core of these dynamics is the infrastructural failure of the “client-server” model which prevents users from interacting with one another outside of a centrally mediated context.

To both address these dysfunctional system dynamics as well as to create alternative systems, it becomes necessary to develop decentralized technological substrates in which users may interact with one another peer to peer and produce novel forms of autopoetic self-governance that are not possible within centralized technology platforms. Blockchains are one such technological substrate. While not without fault or its own forms of centralized capture, blockchains – and related P2P technology – represent a significant step towards a technological substrate for civic infrastructure that supports composability and interoperability.

Emergent System Capabilities

This design approach to open civic systems is directly connected to the development of open source software, applying the same methodologies for social systems. Coherence and consensus in this stigmergic and evolutionary landscape is determined based on swarm intelligence and the utility of the outputs themselves.

As the system evolves, patterns that produce positive outcomes will be selected, with forking and merging of patterns achieving the same effects as genetic mutation and reproduction. Through an open protocol pattern language, these learnings and evolutionary adaptations can be cosmo-locally shared and integrated, allowing humanity to learn together how best to design and deploy open civic systems.

If humanity can align around open civic innovation models, our collective intelligence can be harnessed to collaboratively compose the civilization that we share.

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Footnotes

1. “Loren Carpenter Experiment at SIGGRAPH ‘91,” https://vimeo.com/78043173 ↩

2. Ted Lewis, “Why Can’t Programmers Be More Like Ants? Or a Lesson in Stigmergy” August 2015, https://blog.ubiquity.acm.org/why-cant-programmers-be-more-like-ants-or-a-lesson-in-stigmergy/ ↩

3. Justus Uitermark, “Longing for Wikitopia: The Study and Politics of Self-organisation,” Urban Studies 52, November 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283356364_Longing_for_Wikitopia_The_study_and_politics_of_self-organisation ↩

4. Kevin Carson, “The Stigmergic Revolution,” November 2011, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-the-stigmergic-revolution ↩

5. Ben Armstrong, “Coordination in a Peer Production Platform: A Study of Reddit’s /r/Place Experiment,” 2018, https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/14060/Armstrong_Ben.pdf ↩

6. Jeff Clearwater & the Stewards of VillageLab, “Participatory Commons: Innovating Organizational Structures & Processes for a Regenerative Economy,” May 2020, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U2VoanEaEoZDyURUqpDemu9Kwb6kroZougl_6t5XYB4/edit?tab=t.0 ↩

7. ”Subsidiarity,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity ↩

8. Arthur Utz, “Principle of Subsidiarity and Contemporary Natural Law,” Natural Law Forum, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=nd_natural-law_forum ↩

9. “Sphere Sovereignty,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_sovereignty ↩

10. 10 Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm ↩

11. “How the Internet Was Stolen,” https://youtu.be/oLLxpAZzy0s?si=nVWbT5Pmcp-W2R5SH ↩