If Udell Is a Cell, What's the Organism?

Jon Udell has a nice summary of the meta-realities of the bloosphere in Blog Biology.

Increasingly I think about this stuff in biological terms. I'm a cell; the blog is my cell membrane; the items I post here extrude that membrane out into the intercellular environment, forming a complex surface area with which other cells interact. The other day, a piece of Brenda's extruded surface touched a piece of mine. I know that because my surface is instrumented with a variety of sensors: my referral log, del.icio.us, Feedster, PubSub, Technorati. So when this pseudopod of Brenda's touched this pseodopod of mine, I noticed.

In this case, two sensors reported contact: my referral log, and Technorati.

So far so good, but then he takes the next step as well

By subscribing to Brenda's feed, and then posting this item, I reinforce the connection, and it's cool that things work that way. But the initial discovery is the most amazing thing. It looks like serendipity, and in a way it is, but it's manufactured serendipity.

Its not just cool, its the architecture. Yes there are long tails, yes Metcalfe is right, but those are incidental effects or contributory factors to David Reed's power law which is the operating system for the internet; the fndamental process of the net is group forming, it does more efficiently than it does anything else because it is encoded into the architecture. Just as an umbrella can be a walkin stick or a weapon, but its architecture suits it best for shading the holder, so the net forms groups.

And the first act of a group is for two people to agree. OK, next idea.

What if I hadn't posted that podcast? What if Brenda hadn't found it, or hadn't linked to it? What if my sensors had failed temporarily? I can't prove it, but I feel certain that our paths would have crossed anyway. If like minds extrude themselves into the blogosphere, they'll come into contact sooner or later. It happens so naturally that it's easy to lose sight of what a miracle it is.

Maybe not, the universe is full of connections that are not made, and to assume that those that are made are in some way fated or driven together is stretching it for me, but the one thing for sure is that connections will be made and that is what the net is, a connection engine.

But there's something more because when some things reach critical levels there is a phase transition. Speed for example. If you can propel yourself at 20 KPH you can get places much faser than walking, but if you can reach 100KPH you can fly and the whole world changes.

The same applies to connections. There appears to be a critical number of connections for the phase transition to occur. In a book called "The awakining earth", back in 1982, Peter Russell suggested that 10¹⁰ was about the transtioon point. Organisations of molecules become cells at about that point, organisations of cells become organisms and so on till brains that have connections among 10¹⁰ neurons become self conscious.

Now I don't buy his cosmic stuff, but that idea has stuck with me for over 20 years because it offers the possibility that the process is not finished.

Now if Jon is proposing that "Increasingly I think about this stuff in biological terms. I'm a cell", then he also has behind that an idea that the cell is part of an organism called the network, the blogosphere, the noosphere, what ever you like.

If he and Russel are right in combination, what they are proposing is a planetary mind coming into being at about 10¹⁰ effective connections on the network and the evidence for it happening about now.

The only thing we should notice is that making connections to exchange the resources we need and dispose of the ones we don't need should become easier, faster and cheaper, just as organisms optimise those processes for their components. With constantly falling connectivity and bandwidth costs, that would seem to be a given.

But once this thing starts thinking for itself, we will be faced with some interesting questions.

• What is it thinking?
• What decisions it it making about its own wellbeing?
• How will it implement those decisions?
• Is it sane? (Or as crazy on a global scale as we are on an individual one - is the whole more rational than the sum of its parts, or less?)
• How long does it live?
• What happens to us when it dies?

Comments

[Jon]

Not that I wanna be a blogwhore, and so I won't offer any links .. just wanted to note that i and some others I was reading a year and a half ago or so said much the same thing several times. I used to rattle on about the osmosis that happened using *memebranes* and so on ... blogs enable the *scuttling back and forth between tacit and explicit*, which has always been the problematic issue in what has euphemistically been called knowedge *management*. Organizations, of course, don't like things that aren't perceived as manageable and measurable and the building, distributing and use of knowledge involves those messy humans, who are biological processes, big clumps of cells if you will. After years as a management consultant in the OD/Leadership area, I find it increasingly troublesome to think of all the ways that people try to manage people Iand all of the consulting that is sold to corporations to mold people into some form of cog rather than a viable living cell in another form of organism. I believe that it would be much more effective over a longer term to concentrate on the conditions where the cells can find the interactions they need to flourish or connect with other cells to help something bigger than either cell flourish. This is imo an important aspect of the process of blogging wrt some purposeful objective or area of exploration, study, action.

Sometime between 5 and 10 years ago, some of the big thinkers about learning and life in organization, like Peter senge and Arie de geus, wrote about knowledge work anbd organizations in biological terms, Senge noting that building an effective and responsive organization was not unlike growing a complex garden, and de Geus wrote the book "The Living Organization". Much of this has been lost in the last 5 years as business and societal activities have become more and more short-tern efficiency-oriented, or dependent upon financial engineering.

All of the interesting action is at the periphery, and much of what has promise as new business logics or more open-systems architectures .. (and all of the excitement of the relatively newly-discovered dynamics of blogging, where all sorts of really smart and.or empassioned people are foregoing what would probably have been good jobs in large corporations or institutions to do all this thinking, writing, arguing,creating, osmosing, etc.) is being ferociously guarded against by the established business order. Transition phases are always turbulent, as when water subjected to heat begins to boil, bubbling madly as it passes into the form known as steam or vapour.

The last part of your post is of course where we will end up, in some form(s) or other ... imo.