Coordination is the New Edition

Today I bring you a guest post from

Spear of Lugh

, who writes deeply thought-out essays on the relationship between technology (especially the digital type) and society. The following essay exposes and analyzes a major cultural and technologial shift that is happening in the digital media landscape and will certainly have visible consequences throughout all layers of our increasinly interconnected societies. -

Alejandro Piad Morffis

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This article is a medley and reformatting of previous substack publications that I published over a span of a dozen of months. You can read the articles that led to it in order to have an idea of its genesis: here, here, here, here, here. I am thinking a lot about the transition from a written culture to a digital culture and try to do it starting from first principles. Those ideas are not clear yet and this is an ongoing work. This article is self contained though.

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Information technology and culture

Information Technology has a huge impact on how the culture is developed and transmitted through time. A striking example is the rise of Protestantism and more generally of the Reformation of the XVI° century. One of the major factor is undoubtedly the widespread of Holy scriptures that has been made possible by Gutenberg’s printing press. Long story short, the printing technology spread literacy. The access to the text of the Bible was no longer filtered by an elite (the clergy). Moreover, analyses, critics and various texts could be circulated much more quickly than before. Our modern understanding of what is a nation state and how they behave (the UN for instance) directly flows from the end of the ensuing 30 years war, a religious war between catholics and protestants, and the peace treaty of Westphalia.

Remember that before the printing press, copying information was costly and slow: some people literally dedicated their whole life copying the Bible. If someone had a new theory he could only physically spread it only few meters from himself because of the limited reach of the voice. The fact that sounds don’t last is also a hard limit. All of these defects were somehow corrected by the printing press: you can make many copies of a text easily and cheaply, plus you can spread the text so that people may access it in parallel.

In the digital era writing, publishing, modifying, updating and spreading information has a marginal cost of 0: once you have bought the infrastructure (a computer and access to the network) the fact that you publish do not bring extra costs (unlike the printing a new copy of a book which at least requires sheets and ink). A tweet, or a TikTok video, is instaneously available across the globe.

Distributed Systems

The nation state institution worked well as a provider during the industrial era. A lot of capital, not just money, but also education and infrastructure, had to be concentrated to achieve massive scale economies. Think at the amount of work needed to achieve ubiquitous access to electricity, the quality of highways, and all what is needed for the expansion of cities. This goes in par with the development of industry that required large amount of population to manpower manufacturing plants. The society as a whole has been transformed alongside: from schools to armies, the industrial era produced large quantities of everything. Its nature became a mix of a top-down information flow mixed together with an extreme division of labour. The result being what we call modernity. The digital revolution is acting on both of those fronts simultaneously.

The digital era does not limit its impacts on social media and mean tweets. Politics, and the theater of politics, have been totally transformed. Geopolitics is not handled the same way it was. Distribution (as in distributed computing) of information is dissolving historical hierarchies. They were relying on geographic constraints. The digital revolution is accompanied by a new topological space. People can now align along values and ideas now that communication is ubiquitous and instantaneous. Before they were forced to deal with their neighbors (in geographical terms). Now what is close to you is no longer limited by what you can physically reach.

A western democracy looks like the central scheme above. The depth of it depends on local peculiarities, but even today's Russia is closer to the decentralized version than to the centralized version. Maybe Switzerland is more local but it only means that the height of the decentralized tree of power is larger. What changes radically on the distributed version is that nodes have roughly the same importance with relation to the whole network. It is more symmetric by nature.

Another central point of distributed systems is that it is difficult to define/capture them properly. Think at your average app on your smartphone: for instance an app that allows you to book flight travels. From the user perspective this is a single thing: it is an app that allows you to find cheap seats in flights. Now if you think of it in terms of how does it really work it is another story. A schematic version is: you have a piece of software installed on your smartphone, this piece of software sends information (what flight, dates etc.) to a server. This server will in turn interrogate many other servers (because there are many companies etc.) to find what seats are free and at what prices (and I do not enter into the details of the market which is a whole story in itself). It builds a list and send it back to you. The list literally changes every second. Now you can imagine that in fact this application works because dozens of programs are working in concert to build you this list. Each component taken apart is not enough. So what appears as a thing is in fact the cooperation of several programs, databases etc. through the network. It is in this sense that the application is distributed. You can't pinpoint a single computer or program and say: this is the application. This underlines a fundamental difference in nature between decentralized systems -you know where the information comes from- and distributed systems -in which the whole is more than the simple juxtaposition of the parts.

Where and what are the powers in a digital society

When Elon Musk decided to cut the access to Starlink to the Ukrainian Army -specifically to deter an offensive action- it became clear that how we traditionally understood power was no longer accurate. A sovereign nation, moreover during war time, was subjected to the will of a high tech company. And it was not an indirect thing. It was direct: a guy in an office of Starlink just turned the access down and that was it. This example is illustrative at multiple levels:

1. Vital functions of the state are now subjected to technological conditions that are not under its control.

2. The environment is more and more digital: either it works perfectly or not at all. There is no real notion of "degraded mode". Things don't "more or less work". They work or they don't.

3. Borders are not limits that make sense from a technological point of view. They are limits to the sovereignty of states though - by definition.

4. Linked to 1. is the fact that some things are impossible, mainly for legal reasons, for states, but are very easy for a company. The best example is how three letters agencies and former Twitter, now X.com, have put in place a pretty sophisticated system of censorship. It presumably happened also with the other large social media platform but for X.com we know that it was the case. This partnership is assuring credible deniability on one hand and is creating deflecting excuses on the other hand: no we don't spy on you (three letters agencies) / yes we do spy on you but we were just following orders (big tech)...

So the powers that be are not “pure” as they used to be: orders were executed in the state apparatus following a clear hierarchical structure. Now the powers that be emerge from the collaboration of different entities: very much like a distributed system. It is not true that the three letters agencies directly give an order: they rather suggest or give hints on what to do but the relation is less asymetric. Big corp provides new services and are granted special rights -rather no one is going to bother them on some points in exchange of the collaboration.

Protocols

Distributed systems work with protocols : those are rules that have to be observed for the system to work correctly. The meddling with the 2020 election is clear: big corp can kill a story (Hunter Biden laptop) because it was suggested to them that it was a hoax. It had a direct impact on the campaign. Were people sincerly believing that the story was a hoax or that it was true? Actually it is not relevant. They acted as if they believed it was true and it was enough. This example shows that the political institutions have to negotiate with big corp. They can’t just give orders ... or they might lose the next elections. It bears some resemblance with negotiations between sovereign states. At the end of the day when you negotiate with Putin or the Iranian regime you can’t just give orders.

The famous article “Code is Law” is much more subtle than its title suggests. It tackles with the question of who/what will be the regulator of the cyberspace?

But no thought is more dangerous to the future of liberty in cyberspace than this faith in freedom guaranteed by the code. For the code is not fixed. The architecture of cyberspace is not given. Unregulability is a function of code, but the code can change. Other architectures can be layered onto the basic TCP/IP protocols, and these other architectures can make behavior on the Net fundamentally regulable. Commerce is building these other architectures; the government can help; the two together can transform the character of the Net. They can and they are.

The article was written in 2000. It contains very deep observations and remarks. Yet there is an untold story across the article: how do the virtual and the real world interact with one another? It is not by chance that this question is eluded. This is an exceptionally difficult question. This is nothing less than what the doctrine of Trinity is trying to tackle with. It is not like the brightest minds of the last millennia have tried to address this issue.

There is a misconception at the heart of this paper. The author explicitly i refers as TCP/IP as “the code of the internet”. I do get the idea but it is not correct. A protocol is not a program. It is a set of standards around which people agree. There is no real rule making your computer follow the TCP/IP standard. It s not like a program that has to be written following a precise syntax to work. You can follow the protocol for 10 minutes than decide to switch and use a proprietary protocol for the next 10 minutes. The same thing apply to Bitcoin. You can follow the rules for 10 months and then change your behavior (try to cheat). There is no material way to force you to follow the protocol. People follow the protocols because they gain something from adhering to them. This is the beauty of distributed system but it has a flip side: by construction you have no control over agents that don’t cooperate.

Coordinators and Editors

In a written society the editorial function is central. Remember that it was hard to write things permanently. Texts were literally carved in stone. Before carving letters in stone there are strong incentives to write things that have been vetted many times. So information is filtered through an elite: the scribes, copyist monks etc. Printing press and later radio and television do not alter fundamentally this characteristic. Peer-review process is the scientific version.

My thesis is that in a digital culture the editorial function is going to lose ground. It can be witnessed by the erosion of institutions. For instance legacy media have lost their monoply on information and on the agenda -what is talked about. Legacy media is now talking about what are the trends on social media, not really the other around anymore. Similar analysis can be done with academia: open archives like ArXiV are much more dynamic than the peer-review process. Major scientific and societal discussions are held through social media. The example of AI alignement and risks is a good example of such a discussions: at the end of the day legislators make laws and regulation partly following how such conversations have been held online.

It means that the editorial function is losing its prominent role in a digital society. It doesn't mean that it will disappear. But instead of acting as a pre-emptive strike, it will be applied after publication. What does it imply? The central role is going to shift from editors to coordinators.

Poster childs of "coordinators" are Airbnb and Uber. Airbnb doesn't need to have any house. Their job is to coordinate the efforts of landlords trying to rent their property on one hand, and on the other hands of the tourists looking for good booking opportunities. Airbnb doesn't even check or rate the apartments: customers do it. Airbnb also uses a lot of digital systems: maps, messaging, AI (to determine market price) etc... Some are integrated to Airbnb, others are not. The core job of a coordinator is to take what alreay exists and make it part of a larger distributed system that improves the utility of what was already there. In this sense Wikipedia can be seen as an early, and weak, version of coordination. Wikipedia contributors are actually agregators of already known information that are rearranged in a comprehensive and formated way.

This post is also an example of coordination.

Alejandro Piad Morffis

made an open request on substack for invited authors to publish a guest post on

Mostly Harmless Ideas

. This is typically a distributed society at work. In a digital culture we move from scarcity economics -the number of pages in a journal is limited- towards an abundance economics —there are too much information published. Abundance comes with its own issues that are often the inverse of traditional issues. Think obesity vs starvation. Now the issue is not to find information but rather to select interesting information from the deluge of data that is available. By the way, LLMs can be seen as an automated way to, partially, solve this issue. They can be seen as coordinators. LLMs don't make any judgement on what is published, they allow what is published to be accessed in a comprehensive way. Likewise social media can be viewed as solving the same issue, see Social Search Engines.

We are moving towards a society where the coordinating function will take precedence over the editorial function. We are very early in this process, and editors are not going to give up their place in the hierarchy for free. It announces troubled and interesting times ahead because it is a very deep transformation. At the time of writing what will result from this mutation is anyone's guess. I think that it is impossible to predict. I mean it technically: society is not a machine that follows a program. It is not a purely natural phenomenon, like tides, that follows a simple mathemical theory. Humans are in the loop and it is, in part, going to be what we choose it to be. The least we can do is to observe and think about it and not sleepwalk into the future.