Coordination does not require conspiracy.
I think it’s great that the word “conspire” literally means “to breath together”. I find it to be very evocative. Even if we’re conspiring to do something together over a video chat, we are still sort of “breathing in unison”, in a sense. We are having a conversation, we are thinking together, exchanging ideas.
The word “conspire” often has negative connotations – people may assume that it involves nefarious plots. But for the context of this blogpost, I’m going to use the purest, broadest sense of the word: any two people who get together to plan something are conspiring. You might conspire with someone to organize a surprise birthday party.
The interesting thing about coordination, to me, is that it does not require conspiracy. We coordinate all the time with people without having interacted with them before. Even insects and other animals seem to be capable of remarkable levels of coordination with minimal conspiracy. I think there’s something interesting to explore and understand here.
When I tweeted about this, @LughSpear pointed out that Twitter itself is a strong example of coordination-without-conspiracy. People witness other people talking about some topic, infer that there is interest in that topic, and then independently tweet on their own timelines about that topic. No backroom deals necessary, no meetings, no DMs, nothing. Monkey see, monkey do.
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This post is a “planted flag” post that I expect to return to with further updates.
Might be interesting to revisit Strogratz’s Sync for interesting clues. See also: Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation.
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I have more than a few tweets about how solving big problems require massive coordination, and how as a species we’re not yet very good at it. I would like to play a part in helping humanity get better at coordination. I think there’s something very promising about the idea that this might be something we can get better at doing without necessarily having to talk to one another.
There will certainly be lots of talking, of course. We have to get better at communicating, at understanding one another, and I think it would probably be good if net communication increases. At the same time, communication is lossy, and so if there’s anything we can do to coordinate better without conspiring, we should probably do that.
To be updated.