Thursday, February 21st, 2008
How much guidance does the ‘hive mind’ need in order to produce something valuable? Kevin Kelly talks about bottom-up systems that produce content, such as Wikipedia, and how editorial roles, or general guiding design are required to make the best use of the swarm’s efforts. Its an interesting piece, and the concepts and ideas are well defined. I don’t have much faith in absolutes, so it makes sense to me that the optimal way to approach things is a combination of top down design and bottom up thinking/production.
Kevin Kelly: The Bottom is Not Enough
But throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.
3:03 pm on February 22nd, 2008 1
Seems like he used a lotta words to make a simple point: individual attention and consciousness is required in order to produce meaning from a sea of boundless, decontextualized information. This is what the wikipedia “elite” do very well. This is what any interesting project does, people (yes, we still need them), ask other people for help, and she with the most interest tends toward shaping the project with the assistance of others. Hardly a ground breaking thought, but as he admits this profound “insight” is really just him talking to himself and others like him who tend toward seeing every trend in technological consumerism as an earth-shattering and world changing development.
I agree that writing like this sounds a little too sure of itself. Especially when throwing out evolutionary metaphors, this guy sounds like a thinly veiled apologist for predatory capitalism and oppressive social/belief structure (top-down “control” = TINA) in order to “lift up” the “crap at the bottom” (you could even look into the spatial metaphors used and ask why we always imagine things as top/bottom or up/down and what kind of effects this sort of thinking has).
The so-called “california ideology” is a weird mix of neo-liberalism, “hippie” lifestyle, and a severe case of technophilia. These are the consumer utopia brought to you by computing crowd. Democrats who voted for Reagan. The language in this article really quite typical of the arrogance and self-righteousness of the Western technological elites – cocksure hyper-rationalist hubris (i.e. our technological ‘mastery’ of our self-constructed bubbles of experience means we have nothing to learn from anyone for purposes other than our own)
So, the root of all this bottom up/top down shit is not whether or not “the bottom” needs “the top” or vice-versa. Rather, it should be a challenge to the authoritarian impulse to declare how and why information is considered (ill)legitimate or (in)appropriate and why this so. The instrumental rationality so loved by the techno-futurists is an unbalanced and totalitarian episteme and is directly accountable for the kind of “soft fascism” that already exists and is ever growing in the West”
In other words: You don’t everything you assholes, so stop acting like you do.