9th November 2022
Regular readers of this blog will know that central to my thinking about law, government and politics is the so-called Dunbar’s Number.
This number – which is about 125-150 for members of our species – is the number of individuals with which one can have meaningful relationships with at one time.
The implication of this number (in my view) for law, government and politics is that with any community or society larger in size than this number there will tend to be a limit on what can be done without shared rules and recognised commands and notions of status.
It is very difficult to be sustainably dominant merely on a face-to-face basis with large numbers of people.
One way of scaling upwards (and downwards) is by having hierarchies.
And with hierarchies we get the conceptual paraphernalia of lordship and kingship (and ladyship and queenship), with lower levels and higher levels.
But another way of scaling is more horizontal: networks and shared protocols.
Here certain signifiers and agreed rules and lore will mean that groups of people can interact.
What has made me think about this is the current contest between commercial social media platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) and the protocol-based Mastodon, of which I have become a great fan.
(And where I somehow now have 18,000 followers in just a few days.)
The commercial platforms are sometimes called “proprietary” because the software is owned by the corporation.
But they can also be regarded as “proprietary” by how they treat their users.
The new owner of Twitter, in particular, seems to see the users of Twitter as a standing asset to be exploited, by charging users for this or that.
The assumption seems to be that the users will stay and pay.
And the way the Twitter acquisition was structured and financed suggests that there has to be a high level of return very quickly.
Perhaps some users will stay and pay: but many will not.
And some will move to forms of social media where there is not one big corporation in charge, imposing its own standards (and whims), but lots of smaller platforms joined by optional or negotiated protocols.
If so, this will be nothing that new in human history.
Human activity often moves between from hierarchies and networks, and between cathedrals and bazaars.
Networks, of course, bring their own problems – especially when selflessness and self-restraint begin to fall away.
And corporations will tend to have better access to resources to finance and maintain the development of platforms.
But Elon Musk and others will not be the first to discover that the ways and means by which individuals will interact cannot easily controlled by those asserting and expecting dominance.
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I didn’t think twitter had ever been profitable so wish elon luck making money fast
You learn something new everyday – I must have missed your posts where you waxed lyrical about Dunbar’s number. Robin used to work in our department and there are some fascinating evolutionary “accidents” (all evolution being directionless) that underlie humans having language and a smile, so capable of stimulating a small endorphin release in another In contrast, chimps have to to do it the slow way by grooming, which if I recall along with their ~140-150 word vocabulary limits them to a dozen or two true social connections.
On the topic of those accidents, I recall a documentary about dogs which said that they diverged from wolves at much the same time as a significant divergence in hominid evolution.
It seems that one branch hung out with the wolves and the other drove them away.
The latter branch was generally a bit bigger and stronger: on the face of it, they look the fitter species for survival, yet they died out while our ancestors prospered.
The theory went that because the wolves would smell any threat and kick up, the hominids had less need for olfactory organs of their own. A reduced sense of smell does not need such a large snout to carry it, which led to us having a smaller tongue which is more dexterous and capable of a much more complex language, and it is exactly that which makes us what we are…
Apologies to David for going so wildly off topic.
“(And where I somehow now have 18,000 followers in just a few days.)”
I haven’t yet joined but followed the link. I too love Edward Hopper!
I saw a post on Mastodon earlier which talked about how the original concept of the internet – and especially the Worldwide Web – was a vast network of interconnected servers. It was never supposed to be dominated by a small number of large corporations, and it never had to be.
Platforms like Mastodon (other distributed social networks are available) take us back to that original idea, and the whole internet will be a much better place for it.
Peers.
The division into server and client is an oscillation back toward mainframe (“the computer”) and terminals.
Your desktop can serve something to my desktop and vice versa.
Absolutely. I’m reminded of Searls & Weinberger’s ‘World of Ends’, written almost 20 years ago & still mostly valid:
‘The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to coexist and work together. It’s an inter-network. Literally.
What makes the Net inter is the fact that it’s just a protocol — the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together.
This protocol doesn’t specify what people can do with the network, what they can build on its edges, what they can say, who gets to talk. The protocol simply says: If you want to swap bits with others, here’s how. If you want to put a computer — or a cell phone or a refrigerator — on the network, you have to agree to the agreement that is the Internet.’
The whole essay is worth a read: https://worldofends.com/
You’ve caught (on to) Open Source.
Well done.
Been a fan for many years.
“You’ve caught (on to) Open Source.
Well done.
Not really, Adrian.
To use this site (running primarily on WordPress) as an example, the code which generates the site and provides the look, functionality etc. is for the most part proudly Open Source; but David can (if he wishes – I’m definitely not saying he is..!) be as draconian, arbitrary and otherwise controlling as he sees fit with regard to how visitors interact with the site.
We need to avoid confusing the platform with the rules under which it is run – there are any number of websites out there that are Open Source and yet utterly terrible places to spend time on because of how they’re managed.
I’m thinking that everything’s a network. Underneath, there are people interacting: trading, collaborating, gossiping, arguing…
It’s just that some networks are constrained more than others – perhaps appearing like hierarchies. Those with power draw upside-down tree diagrams to show how they aim to control things.
Abstract inventions of imagination. Which work, until they don’t…
Mastodon – a network of bazaars.
If some septillionaire doesn’t emerge from his sub-oceanic palace and expose himself most reluctantly to pubic view in order to say, “How much? Come now, you are surely acquainted with the adage, ‘Every Mastodon has its price, (if it knows what’s good for it),’ So I repeat: how much?”, I may begin to wonder whether my Ian Fleming collection should, after all, be shelved under “Biography”.
Is that a typo or a Freudian slip?
I’m not looking forward to Elon Musk exposing himself to pubic view.
A double-take-provoking, mildly risqué joke.
I have often contemplated Dunbar ‘communities’ aligned along Ostroms CPR structure/ framework networks as a better bottom up democracy than our current top down hierarchy
I’d assume the same would work in social media
Networks are much more robust than hierarchy but do set their own direction
The problems with our current system are not because is it a hierarchy, but because it is top down.
I cannot see a means by which a network can properly connect the individual, whereas with a properly structured hierarchy, it is simple.
Based on Dunbar’s number, a hierarchy with four levels gives a direct connection for up to half a billion people.
(150 x 150 x 150 x 150 = 506,250,000)
One of the many examples Robin draws on is the military. A bit ‘special’, in the people in a unit don’t have other connections when on active service, whereas in other spheres we have both work and non-work connections. Beyond ~150 you have looser unit, aka ‘Tribe’ and then ‘Nation’. One wonders if the surprising (to linguists) reinforcement of local accents in the age of mass communication has occurred to maintain the ‘tribe’ identity?
My interest was piqued as soon as you mentioned Dunbar’s Number. I came across this but a few days ago, when reading Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”
Cheat: the graphic novel version is quicker and easier to assimilate.
His work is open to criticism, but he does come up with a plausible explanation fro Dunbar’s Number and perhaps, why we are the onlt Homo species left on the planet (albeit, heading for a count of zero as fast as we can make it happen :-( )
None of this helps the Musk, or explains him, but interesting, to my mind at least.
People can be nodes in many networks simultaneously. In some they play an active part (are actants, pace Bruno Latour) in others, not so much. Christopher Vitale’s “Networkologies” is a good place to start with this. https://networkologies.wordpress.com/ .
Let’s hope so…
Whilst many, if not most of us, have been deliberately myopic when we are ourselves the “product”, it is not unreasonable that it sticks in one’s craw to be forced to pay to be the “product”.
Not always – look at academic publishing. If the reward system builds in paying for the product you produce, then profits soar – commercial academic publishers are among the most profitable businesses on earth, they have fewer outgoings than, e.g., Coca Cola, which after all has to add caramel and CO2 to water and spend massively on advertising.
Things didn’t work out very well for the original Mastodon. According to wiki “Climatic change and human predation have also been discussed as possible causes of extinction.”
Hopefully prehistory doesn’t repeat itself.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my email link to authorise my new account. I guess the servers are rather busy with the “Lexocus”.