Like the struggling combination of open + abundant (public goods) (as I described in talks such as at LibrePlanet 2022), we could use a related two-dimensional combination about how people coordinate and learn to see the patterns in features in the world as we experience things. Two traits to consider in how people coordinate:
- Bottom up vs top down
- Emergent vs intentional/planned
We all know about top-down + intentional (most governments, corporations, and more secretive coordination a la conspiracies [real or imagined])
And bottom-up + emergence we know (market dynamics, social media trends, etc)
Are these traits independent, more than people usually imagine? Can we have top-down + emergence? Bottom-up + intentional?
The latter is what crowdmatching is about. How can we intentionally, directly coordinate while still having bottom-up dynamics? This combination presents challenges and yet has potential to be game-changing. Co-ops are in this direction. So is FLO software development. …
I think this framing might really be helpful in a similar way as seeing what is more or less public-goods. This framing bypasses the excessive distinctions people get stuck on in thinking about things like corporations vs government and private vs public. Top-down coordination has largely similar features in all cases even though the other distinctions do matter as well. And there’s a sort of anarchist ideology in some parts of political views focusing on markets and freedoms and such — that tends to ignore the ways emergent systems are unstable (lacking explicit rules and leadership ends up with implicit rules and leadership etc). Maybe it helps to recognize that achieving bottom-up intentional coordination has inherent challenges but we need not give up on the idea, there are examples, and we can do it better.
Example of Strong Towns
Incidentally, one organization I deeply respect is Strong Towns (which uses CC-BY-SA for their articles incidentally). Their motto is “The Bottom-Up Revolution” with emphasis on bottom-up (as in saying that their revolution is about achieving and sustaining bottom-up dynamics, not that bottom-up is a method to achieve revolution). They provide useful framings and understandings of dynamics of healthier and less healthy aspects of systems around local communities, infrastructure, finance, transportation, etc. And their method to have bottom-up + intentional is to support people to coordinate locally with neighbors and take incremental steps to build resiliency and healthy communities. They work to provide intellectual toolkits and resources but not to have centralized directives… Notably, they do express opinions about what’s healthy, what the goals are, it’s very intentional rather than blindly presuming that whatever emerges from bottom-up processes is good or inevitable.