In my previous post on The Melbourne Flâneur, I discussed the crisis in schematic collective sensemaking which the Coronavirus situation has exposed.

I stated that the pollution of our collective sensemaking environment, the ‘cognitive commons’ of the Internet, through a generalized game-theoretic strategy of viral incivility online has created the conditions for a wholesale descent into species-wide psychosis.

The Coronavirus crisis has exposed the multi-polar schizophrenia of our collective schema for apprehending and making good sense of reality.  Our individual capacities to make good decisions and take effective actions with respect to the reality of our situation is impaired, and this cumulative impairment of individual capacities has synergistic ramifications for our species’ capacities to make good collective decisions and take good collective actions to arrest the virus.

Moreover, the Coronavirus has exposed the fragility of our entangled, globalized supply chains.

If you think that good schematic collective sensemaking is tangential rather than fundamental to the systemic problems which the Coronavirus has exposed, I invite you to look carefully at supply chains.

In a superindustrial world where the citizens of developed nations don’t hunt and gather for themselves, but are wholly dependent upon an international network of strangers to provide for them, nowhere is the capacity of groups of people to make good collective sense of a situation and take efficient and effective action towards it more critical—more essential, as our governments insist on calling it—to collective wellbeing than in supply chains.

Here in Australia, the Department of Defence’s former Director of Preparedness and Mobilisation, Cheryl Durrant, released a confidential report she had commissioned last year on the state of the nation’s supply chains.

Ms. Durrant invited seventeen engineers from Australia’s key industries to a private meeting here in Melbourne.  She wanted to understand how the national supply chain would fare in the event of three distinct crises—including a global pandemic.

On Day 0, the engineers determined, there would be public hoarding, such as we saw with toilet paper, soap and hand sanitiser, and businesses would engage in ‘shortage gaming’—inflating their upstream demands for supply.

By the end of Week 1, water treatment systems in Australia would start to fail and a mass decoupling of labour would begin throughout the workforce.  By the end of Week 2, the national supply chain would be under stress.

By the end of Month 1, food would begin to run out and logistics would be impacted by fuel shortages.

And by the end of Month 3, we would be living in the Mad Max world.

A national depression would have taken hold, and the population would have become ungovernable because the supply chain was completely broken: no continuous electricity; water and sanitisation snafu’d; cyber security and undersea communication cables seriously degraded.

If you’re interested in reading the ABC article, I put a link to it here.

Just three months of supply separate Australia from complete anarchy and civilizational collapse.  If you don’t regard this very material, existential problem in the maintenance of supply as fundamentally a problem in the more abstract realm of collective sensemaking, allow me to lay out the argument for you.

Much of what I’m going to say, with respect to the Coronavirus, is focused on the global charitable supply chain, which has some fundamental differences to the commercial supply chain.  But I think the argument I am going to make can equally be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the challenges which the global commercial supply chain is facing in this pandemic.

The two most significant differences which are relevant to this analysis, but which are equivalent in the circumstances we currently find ourselves, are the inherent instability of not-for-profit supply chains as compared to their for-profit counterparts, and the question of who the ultimate ‘customer’ of the not-for-profit supply chain actually is.

In the first instance, the commercial supply chain, though it obviously has to deal with perturbation and disruption, has to deal with far less of it in the course of ordinarily doing business than the charitable supply chain.  The latter must be agile and resilient enough to cope with perturbation and disruption as a matter of course:—its charge is to establish lines of supply precisely in circumstances where the normal commercial supply chain has broken down.

The commercial supply chain has some capacity for resilience incorporated in its design, but it’s basically intended to operate in circumstances of stability.  The charitable supply chain tends to be more agile than resilient, as it is typically deployed in circumstances of great instability, although in time-critical emergencies it must obviously demonstrate extraordinary temporary resilience to cope with perturbation.

Moreover, it’s typically charged with ameliorating the social and environmental externalities of the commercial supply chain, which, as a for-profit entity, is better resourced than its not-for-profit counterpart.  This lack of parity in resources means that the charitable supply chain needs to be leaner and more agile in the deployment of its resources, which tends to undermine its resilience.

Indeed, as Oloruntoba and Gray noticed in their 2006 research paper “Humanitarian aid: an agile supply chain?”, there is evidence of a frequent lack of planning in not-for-profit supply chains.  This is perhaps surprising because, as Tomasini and Van Wassenhove observed, the cost of supply chain logistics typically constitutes 80 per cent of an humanitarian organization’s overhead.

You might imagine that charities would want to get such a figure down, since it absorbs most of the donations they receive and eats into the funds they have available to spend on their programs.  But as not-for-profit entities, their resources are already stretched pretty thin, and, as Arya and Mittendorf discovered in their 2016 paper “Donor Reliance on Accounting and its Consequences for the Charitable Distribution Channel”, even if it were possible for charities to hold the administrative costs associated with planning and rationalizing their supply chains steady, donors’ perception of the length of the supply chain still significantly influences their readiness to give.

And this leads me neatly to the second question:  Who is the ultimate ‘customer’ for goods and services delivered by the charitable supply chain?  The answer is not as obvious as might appear on the face of it.

In the for-profit sector, the answer is obvious: anyone giving us money in exchange for goods and services is our customer.

All the efforts of the commercial supply chain, therefore, are geared towards optimizing it for the most efficient and effective means of putting goods and services into the hands of customers because we are, ultimately, seeking the most efficient and effective means of taking cash out of their hands.

The implications for collective sensemaking should be obvious.  The schema of the commercial supply chain is oriented around the profit motive, and all the actors within the commercial supply chain, whether organizationally or as individuals, are on the same page about what every decision they make and every action they take is intended to accomplish.

Profit is a nice means of getting people to co-operate in a common endeavour.

In my previous post, I cited the research of Luís M. A. Bettencourt into the emergent properties of information aggregation with regards to the collective intelligence of non-expert groups.  As Bettencourt points out, we have some rather ubiquitous global collective intelligence networks that operate to connect supply chains both domestically and internationally.

They’re called markets.

But as Bettencourt points out, the efficacy of markets as collective intelligence networks is patchy at best.  Under conditions where the profit motive is not unchecked by means of the pricing mechanism, the group of non-experts who collectively constitute a market can accurately assess the relative value of goods and services.

But there are also legions of instances where markets, as collective sensemaking networks, get the value of things psychotically wrong—‘psychotic’ in the clinical sense.  Their schizophrenic perceptions and assessments of the relative value of things in the marketplace become completely divorced from reality.

This is what happens when ‘bubbles’ occur in markets.

According to Bettencourt, in situations of great entropic uncertainty such as the one we are currently facing, the individuals who constitute markets fall back on heuristics, cognitive biases towards loss aversion, and irrational behaviours such as ‘decision herding’.

‘… [T]he general structure of markets certainly has the potential for aggregating information efficiently,’ Bettencourt writes.  ‘The Achilles heel of markets resides, however, on the sources of correlation between traders.

‘… Thus any behavioral heuristic or external sign that destroys the independent decision making and actions of participants in a market can potentially destroy the efficiency of the market as a whole.  Because such endogenous and exogenous coordinating mechanisms are ubiquitous, it is important to recognize that markets may be (temporarily) wrong in pricing assets….’

Indeed, we currently have such a problem in our markets, a psychotic divorce between value demanded and actual value delivered which has had deleterious effects on the collective sensemaking network of the commercial supply chain.

But this collective inability to correctly perceive the relative value of things threatens to damage the charitable supply chain even more egregiously at a time when its capacity for the agile distribution of aid to people in need, and its capacity to demonstrate extraordinary temporary resilience in unstable conditions, are needed to meet the disruption and perturbation presented by the Coronavirus.

In my first post on the Coronavirus, I described our global financial system (citing economist Eric Weinstein) as a ‘global Ponzi scheme’, one in which value demanded has become radically decoupled from actual value delivered.

The price signal, which is the cornerstone of markets’ efficiency, has become hyper-inflated.

More specifically, the corollary of the price signal—good old-fashioned ‘profit’—has significantly distorted the signal which markets, as collectives of non-expert individuals, perceive as the relative value of goods and services provisioned through the commercial supply chain.

In the early days of the Coronavirus crisis, before the bug had really crept ashore, we saw in Australia a classic anecdotal example of how markets irrationally, psychotically react when entropic uncertainty suddenly rises to disturb the collective schema of supply.  It was a display of poor collective sensemaking which sent the price signal—and the profit motive—stratospherically spiralling.

When people got ‘caught short’ (pardon the pun) with respect to toilet paper, hoarding and profiteering sent the humble roll rolling like a bowling ball through the commercial supply chain, disrupting it significantly.  Due, I would contend, to the non-transparency of the commercial supply chain, the schematic perception of scarcity on the demand side of the equation was not allayed by protestations on the supply side that there was enough toilet paper to go round.

In other words, the schema of information surrounding supply with respect to toilet paper was incomplete to consumers.  There was a sudden surge in entropic uncertainty concerning this issue, and the non-transparency of the commercial supply chain made it difficult for consumers to attenuate their uncertainty without relying upon trust.

And when, as we have seen in other posts in this series, trust is eroded by the profit motive, there is little incentive for non-experts outside the schema of knowledge pertaining to a given field to trust the protestations of experts within it.

Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci told the ABC’s 7:30 program on 18 March that there was no problem with the supply of toilet paper—provided the supermarket and its competitors didn’t have to suddenly provide for the equivalent of double the national population.

Mr. Banducci stated that the disruption to the supply chain was not due to problems on the supply side, but that it was ‘unequivocally true’ that disruption was due to a surge in demand on the customers’ side.

The price that people were willing to pay for toilet paper—(the value they suddenly attached to it)—chased profit—(the value that unscrupulous hoarders were capable of demanding for toilet paper)—up a dizzying spiral staircase that had no rational relationship with the item’s actual value.

This anecdote gives evidence of the schizophrenic behaviour that possesses markets on both the supply and demand side when collective sensemaking goes awry.  It points to the fundamental disjuncture between the price signal and the profit motive which has ramifications for the collective sensemaking capacity of supply chains both commercial and charitable.

When we understand that the commercial supply chain, as it exists in markets underwritten by the relationship between the price signal and profit motive, is not fundamentally there to most efficiently and effectively supply tangible goods and intangible services to customers, but to most efficiently and effectively separate customers from their cash, we begin to perceive what the problem is for collective sensemaking in the not-for-profit supply chain.

The ‘market environment’ and the assumptions of price and profit which are the pillars of this collective sensemaking network are not suitable metrics of efficiency and effectiveness to apply to the not-for-profit supply chain.

Nevertheless, as we live in a networked environment of markets, the apple of not-for-profit enterprise must somehow make itself comparable to the orange of for-profit enterprise which preponderates and predominates in this environment.

So when we ask who the ultimate customer is for the goods and services supplied by charity, we discover that the ‘customer’ is not the person to whom charitable goods and services are ultimately being delivered because, as Oloruntoba and Gray point out, this person ‘seldom enters into a commercial transaction and has little control over supplies.’

Instead, just as in the commercial supply chain, the ‘customer’ for charitable goods and services is the person who ponies up the dough—the donor.

It sounds obviously irrational.  Yet it isn’t the fault of poor logic, but of poor collective sensemaking.  The logic of markets being applied to an area of human exchange which is not a market transaction based on price and profit does not compute.

Moreover, when (as we have seen in the case of toilet paper profiteering) the price signal of markets is distorted by the profit motive for centralized gain in a zero-sum game-theoretic dynamic, the application of for-profit supply chain principles to the not-for-profit distribution of goods and services to people in crisis compounds the problem in sensemaking which begins at first principles with the invalid application of market logic to charity.

I stated earlier that one of the defining characteristics of the charitable supply chain is its instability.  It can and does break down at the delivery point.  It can equally break down at any point along the chain of provision due to the extraordinary perturbations it must seek to withstand.

But—perhaps counterintuitively—the place where the charitable supply chain is most unstable is not at its delivery point, but at the head of the supply chain—the gathering point of donations for distribution to people in need.

This instability is due to the uncertain nature of funding for entities who are operating on a not-for-profit basis in a for-profit market environment.

As economic agents in a market environment predicated on the profit motive, charities must play by the same rules as for-profit enterprises and compete for the cash of governments and private donors.

In other words, their supply chains also need to be optimized so as to most efficiently and effectively separate cash from the hands of their ‘customers’.

You can see how this creates a logical problem in collective sensemaking.

For while the chain of charitable supply ought actually to be focused on most efficiently and effectively distributing aid to people in need, the market’s assumption that the person who has the cash is the same person who has a problem that the spending of cash can solve leads the charitable supply chain to double back on itself and concentrate its supply efforts primarily on obtaining resources and only secondarily on distributing them.

Moreover, as Oloruntoba and Gray point out, in the market environment where rivalrous not-for-profit supply chains are forced to compete for cash, ‘donors [are] generally more sympathetic to emergencies than longer-term aid and development….’

In my second post on the Coronavirus, I hazarded an intuition as to why an urgent, visible crisis such as a global pandemic catalyzes collective action when a more exponentially urgent yet invisible crisis such as global climate change does not.

The reason I put forth was that, when crises are collectively apprehensible by the sensorium of all the individuals in a group, and when individual impressions of clear and present danger can be compared via the vector of free speech, there is little doubt in the collective sensemaking environment as to what the problem is and what action needs to be taken to mitigate disaster.

When, on the other hand (as in the case of global climate change), a crisis is so vast—not only spatially, but temporally—that it cannot be immediately apprehended by the collective sensorium of individuals, doubt as to the reality of the looming catastrophe enters into the collective sensemaking environment, and the vector of free speech tends to obfuscate rather than enlighten the situation.

It does not matter that a putative crisis such as climate change is gathering momentum on an exponential several orders of magnitude greater than the Coronavirus.  Its spatial and temporal vastness puts such paradoxical breaks of inertia upon it that, even if the wave is bearing down on us at a rate of acceleration which makes the virus seem like a Model-T Ford by comparison, the wave is so huge that it is still beyond the limits of our individual senses to perceive.

It is not until it has narrowed to a point where the crest is right over our heads, when causes and effects can be linked by our senses, that, individually and as a collective, we will be able to perceive the clear and present threat of climate change and act to prevent it.

Until that point, global climate change is not an ‘urgent emergency’ for collective sensemaking as the global pandemic is, but a long-term crisis for which we have little sympathy and patience when it comes to funding charitable enterprises seeking to ameliorate it.

The sensual immediacy of a crisis focuses our perceptions of risk and implicitly co-ordinates our collective sensemaking response.  In my last post, I explained how the Ushahidi crisis-mapping platform acts to synchronize individual schemas into a collective schema which serves to slash entropic uncertainty around crises where the commercial supply chain has broken down and co-ordinate charitable response.

Our natural empathy is collectively activated when we see people in conditions of unmistakable crisis, and where charities might ordinarily find their funding tenuous in long-term projects of amelioration, they suddenly see a generous influx of resources from donors at the head of the supply chain.

But this creates a further problem in sensemaking.  I stated above that Arya and Mittendorf found that the bias which donors exhibit towards short-term emergencies as compared to long-term missions has significant repercussions for how charities organize their supply chains.

More specifically, in a climate of competition for donors’ dollars, a charity in the unenviable position of having a long-term mission is tempted to decentralize and externalize its supply chain—and thus lower its perceived overhead—disbursing funds to subsidiary charities to deliver key aspects of the mission.

Arya and Mittendorf state: ‘… [D]onor emphasis on reported program expenses puts charities in a bind—they must skimp on either administrative or fundraising infrastructure if they have any hope of generating funds from a skeptical public and this, in turn, facilitates a starvation cycle from which charities cannot fully recover….’

In 2015, Taticchi, Garengo, Nudrupati, Tonelli, and Pasqualino undertook a review of the literature on the relationship between networked Decision Support Tools (DSTs), Decision Support Systems (DSSs), and the Performance Measurements (PMs) generated by these interfaces in sustainable supply chains—that is, in supply chains seeking to balance the triple bottom line of economic, environmental, and social costs.

Although they focused on the commercial rather than the charitable supply chain, obviously the not-for-profit sector is at the forefront of trying to balance the economic, environmental and social impacts of its supply chain, and I think the findings of Taticchi et al. are relevant to the charitable sector.

Certainly, the collective sensemaking environment of the global charitable supply chain would benefit enormously from transparent tools and systems which supported efficient and effective decision-making by providing charities with PMs more in line with their social and environmental missions.

In the current non-transparent, market-based environment where charities are competing with each other for the cash of ‘sceptical donors’, as Arya and Mittendorf observe, the only PMs available to charities and donors alike are financial accounting metrics—and these are hardly transparent DSTs.

For organizations earnestly seeking to balance their triple bottom lines, accounting metrics are obviously not the best PMs for quantifying the efficiency and effectiveness of a charity’s initiatives with respect to its mission fulfilment.

The profit motive, which in the case of charities is translated into acquiring funds at the head of their supply chains, interferes with downstream delivery of the mission—which is primarily of a social and/or environmental, and only secondarily of an economic, nature.  The necessity to satisfy the economic bottom line of program spending for donors presents too great a temptation for charities to distort their efficiency and effectiveness with respect to this variable through ‘clever accounting’.

It is the non-transparent nature of accounting metrics and the up-front pressure of donors as the source of charitable supply chains which invidiously influences many charities to externalize and decentralize their supply chains so as to give the ‘customers’ to whom they are accountable the leanest impression of overhead as a proportion of total funds donated for program spending.

The ‘appearance’ of efficiency in the non-transparent, decentralized, charitable supply chain merely externalizes redundant inefficiencies to other charities, who must in turn demonstrate to their donors the efficiency of their program spending by offsetting these compounding redundancies to supply chain partners downstream of them.

As Arya and Mittendorf discovered, the problem for collective sensemaking in long-term charitable interventions is that, in a non-transparent supply chain environment where ‘perceived efficiency’ as a PM is a function of accounting metrics, charities externalize and decentralize their supply chains in order to cut their individual administrative burdens so as to appear to achieve a greater parity between the donations they receive in a given period and the program spending they disburse from donations received.

A better PM, according to Arya and Mittendorf, would be to assess the ratio between donations received in a given period and how impactful were the interventions on the mission which the donations enabled in that timeframe.

But by employing the DSTs of accounting metrics to focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of program spending rather than on the efficiency and effectiveness of mission impact, everyone in the collective sensemaking ecology of the decentralized charitable supply chain is prone to deception due to the displacement and deferral of the externalities introduced by the financial incentive to deceive donors.

A fair amount of social signalling—of what I would call ‘fiscal virtue signalling’, in fact—acts in tandem with the profit motive to distort accounting and corrupt efficiency for organizations whose missions extend over long time horizons.  And as a charitable organization matures and its revenue stream stabilizes, according to Arya and Mittendorf, the necessity for this social signalling of ‘perceived efficiency’ decreases, as it is less beholden to its donors’ perceptions of its ‘fiscal virtue’ in order to facilitate its supply chain.

The more urgent a charity’s mission is, the more condensed and centralized is its supply chain—not because a short, internalized supply chain translates donors’ cash into aid to recipients quicker, but simply because the charity is less concerned with maintaining an ‘appearance of efficiency’ over the long term.

You might be wondering why all this collective sensemaking jive bothers me with respect to the capacity of charitable supply chains to respond efficiently and effectively to the Coronavirus.  Well, here’s the kicker.

In the case of the Coronavirus, short-term, high-impact interventions are undoubtedly required in time-sensitive hot-spots.  We have seen precisely this necessity manifest in countries like Italy.

But on the whole, despite the ‘high visibility’ of the medical crisis, the incontrovertibility of that crisis as it struck all our senses and activated a global sensemaking response, Coronavirus is not a short-term emergency.

As lockdowns lift across the world, people slowly begin to apprehend that the Coronavirus is a long-term crisis whose entangled effects, like those of global climate change, will be very slow in becoming visible.  The crest of entangled economic, political, and geopolitical effects which this cause catalyzed is now rearing over our collective heads.

We can begin to see it.

And if the collective sensemaking environment which surrounds our supply chains—both commercial and charitable—showed signs of irrational disruption and schizophrenic perturbation at the beginning of this crisis, when supply was actually pretty stable, if global chains of supply are disrupted long-term, our capacity to maintain the civilization of our societies is frankly doubtful.

Moreover, in this climate of high entropic uncertainty where the for-profit supply chain, optimized towards efficiency in conditions of stability, is more distinctly fragile than its not-for-profit counterpart, it is likely that we are going to need to rely on long-term charitable interventions in the provision of goods and services to people across the world for a long time going forward.

The unique capacities for agility and extraordinary temporary resilience in the charitable supply chain need to be strengthened.

But a donor-centric supply chain approach in a non-transparent, market-based environment will neither ultimately satisfy donors, as the ‘perceived customers’ of the charitable supply chain, nor the actual customers—the recipients of aid themselves.

Both will be negatively impacted by false perceptions of efficiency (which will have ramifications for collective sensemaking assessments of actual efficiency in combating and curing the virus) and the externalized, compounding redundancies which poor networked sensemaking introduces into a non-transparent supply chain.

While there are obvious benefits for charities focused on urgent missions to have lean, centralized, internalized supply chains, the crucial necessity for all charitable supply chains, whether centralized or decentralized, is transparency.

To build the networked trust necessary to carry out their missions, organizations with long time horizons who require stable funding at the head of their supply chains need to be universally transparent, both to their donors and to their partners, via DSTs and DSSs focused on PMs which are relevant to their missions.

Long-term missions will necessitate large overheads associated with project planning and management.  Rather than using accounting metrics as PMs, a DSS/DST environment which is universally transparent both to donors and to partners in the decentralized supply chain would allow everybody to see the actual ratio between an organization’s administration and its program spending, and the ratio between its donations and its contribution to mission impact.

The universal transparency of such a networked collective sensemaking environment for global charity would build the conditions of trust necessary to demonstrate to donors that the outcomes of supply chain choices, whether extensive and decentralized or condensed and internalized, are the most efficient and effective choices in translating their cash into aid without resorting to non-transparent accounting practices which necessarily damage a charity’s trust with its donors, if exposed.

Moreover, if donors rather than aid recipients are to be regarded as the primary ‘customers’ for charitable supply chains, the people to whom charities are accountable for the provision of their goods and services, linking supply chain processes to effective, efficient outcomes through highly visible analytics in a universally transparent DSS/DST environment builds the trust necessary to maintain the supply of funds for long-term projects whose gains are incremental and difficult to gauge with the naked eye.

And by this logic, the schizophrenic schema of the global charitable supply chain would be able to right itself.  In a decision-making, action-taking environment which was universally transparent to both donors and workers in the charity sector, freed from the invidious necessity of having to conform to the logic of markets, the supply chain relationship between donors and the recipients of their aid would itself become transparent.

I think that, if donors saw how efficiently and effectively their donations were getting to the people who needed them, rather than perceiving themselves as the people to whom charities are accountable for their spending, donors would regard themselves as accountable to the eventual recipients of their aid.

This is because the transparency of the decision-making, action-taking environment enables that ‘high visibility’ between cause and effect we need to feel our natural empathy activated in order to give.  No matter how extended and decentralized the supply chain, if it had transparently demonstrated its optimal efficiency and effectiveness in translating cash to aid, donors, I think, would be placated by being able to see the linkages between the cause of their giving and the human effect on mission impact at the other end of the supply chain.

When we can directly gauge the impact of our giving, when we can see that it’s getting to the people who need it in a timely and efficient manner, our natural desire to give and to ameliorate the suffering of our fellow human beings will be more quickly engaged and our generosity amplified.

I’ve said that universal transparency of information is key to the collective sensemaking environment of supply chains, but it’s not the only non-negotiable in this equation.

Merely exchanging large quantities of universally transparent data is not sufficient to engender conditions of trust between supply chain partners.

Indeed, in the theoretic model proposed by Akkermans, Bogerd, and van Doremalen in their journal article “Travail, transparency and trust: A case study of computer-supported collaborative supply chain planning in high-tech electronics” (2004), the value of trust presupposes transparency.

According to Akkermans, Bogerd, and van Doremalen, mutual understanding of partners’ internal processes needs to be built over time through what they call travail—‘the struggling on the long and winding path towards transparency….’  This holistic understanding of one supply chain partner and its processes by another cannot be immediately gleaned simply by access to their data.  Thus, universal transparency of processes is generated through the travail of collective sensemaking, which engenders the necessary trust to reveal more and trust more.

In the model proposed by Akkermans, Bogerd, and van Doremalen, trust is the lynchpin of the algedonic loop created between interlinking supply chain partners who are each external environments to one another.  It is at the level of trust that the feedback loop generated by their interactions can either bifurcate towards increased openness of communication—and thus greater informational transparency—or increased gaming, which leads to poorer quality decision-making for the supply chain overall because the additive value of greater informational transparency is bypassed.

In collective sensemaking, it’s easy to imagine trust and transparency as ‘chicken-and-egg’ values: to build trust, you need conditions of transparency, but without of conditions of trust, there is no incentive to be transparent.

For supply chain partners, both commercial and charitable, who have to operate under the competitive logic of markets to secure resources, this dilemma would seem to be a Gordian knot.  Someone’s got to break through the impasse by being both transparent and trusting—and trustworthy.  That, to me, seems to be the sword which solves the dilemma.

It’s taking a risk, a leap of faith, to pre-emptively demonstrate trustworthiness, expecting one’s partners to follow one’s lead, but trustworthiness is the mechanism of transparency.  As Akkermans, Bogerd, and van Doremalen discovered in their survey of the literature, behaviours of transparency between supply chain partners—including a history of open communication and co-operative behaviours between organizations—engender the conditions for a ‘virtuous cycle’ of escalating trust and commitment to the universally transparent supply chain.

The travail of building transparency and trust through the mutual demonstrations of trustworthy behaviour helps to create conditions of what is called ‘coherence’ in the collective sensemaking space.

Coherence is when we’re all on the same page.  We have the same understanding of the situation because we all have access to universally transparent information.  We trust the information, and we trust each other to act in good faith.  But coherence of sensemaking can’t be achieved except by the earnest travail of building trust and transparency.

The first task for travail in the collective sensemaking environment surrounding supply chains is for partners to define a common goal which is external to their enterprises’ individual process-based goals.  This common external goal must be established in order to create the preliminary conditions for coherence, both within organizations and among the member organizations of the supply chain.

Obviously, defining such a common external goal comes more easily to charitable supply chains than to commercial ones.  The not-for-profit supply chain existing largely to ameliorate the externalities of the for-profit supply chain, charities with a common purpose more quickly and easily apprehend an external problem to be collectively solved.

But regardless of their orientation towards profit, it is the transparency and trust demanded by the initial travail of defining the common external goal of the supply chain which activates partners’ transparency and trust towards each other.

In their case study of a commercial supply chain, Akkermans, Bogerd, and van Doremalen noticed that ‘while the project team was struggling with describing and defining their joint business and supply chain, the level of trust increased.’

There’s a high degree of transparency—of intimacy, even—required in the collective sensemaking environment as supply chain partners achieve preliminary coherence in defining the common external goal via the vector of free speech.

And so, as I conclude this series of dispatches on the Coronavirus, I circle back to my initial concerns.

The Coronavirus is a long-term existential risk of infinite impact proportions.  Understanding it and acting in accord with the merciless reality of it demands global coherence in sensemaking, and the technology by which we communicate our thoughts to one another is the vector of free speech.

Our collective sensemaking environment, what I’ve called the cognitive commons of the Internet, is broken.  If we can’t get that network right—and pronto—our capacity to make good decisions and take good actions with regards to the distribution of common resources to ameliorate the pandemic is extremely limited.  It’s a problem for commercial supply chains.  It’s an even greater problem of charitable ones, who will be asked to do more with less.

If supply breaks down due to bad collective sensemaking, we come to the edge of the existential precipice I brought to your attention in my first post on the Coronavirus.

I’m going to leave it there—for the time being.

Since mid-March, I’ve written over 27,000 words on the subject of the Coronavirus—enough for a small book.

I want to thank everyone who has read and listened to these posts, who has liked and commented on them, and who has shared them with others.

My intention has simply been to contribute in as responsible a way as I can to collective sensemaking via the vector of free speech.  I’m heartened—and I’m humbled—by the number of people who have said to me, in comments attached to these posts, in telephone conversations, in emails and texts, that they have found my analysis and commentary on events helpful in interpreting and making sense of the Coronavirus situation.

I’m still monitoring this situation, but having finally got down—in all its grisly logic—the horrific image of catastrophe I saw in one instant when the reality of this situation finally hit home, I am, as you can imagine, rather exhausted by the effort of synthesizing a lot of research into the arguments I’ve advanced in these posts.

I’m still the monitoring the situation, but I’m interested in the economic, political, and geopolitical consequences of this crisis going forward.  That long-term story, as I’ve intimated above, is yet to be written.

If the masks completely slip from the faces of governments and other big actors going forward, such that their behaviour demands commentary and analysis via free speech, I’ll take up my pen again and try to offer you what value I can in that regard.

And as regards the egregiously crazy behaviour we’re seeing not just from governments and other big actors, but from individuals right across the board, I’d like to leave you with the thought I’ve tried to impress upon you throughout these posts.

As a problem for collective sensemaking, the Coronavirus is fundamentally a problem for the freedom of speech, and thus the freedom of thought.

But freedom of speech is not the right to say whatever you like.  It’s the responsibility to use human language—the tools of human thought—to think for yourself about this crisis.

With that, I sign off.

In my continuing analysis of the Coronavirus situation, this week on The Melbourne Flâneur I want to discuss with you how we make sense of this and the other n-th order infinite impact crises which are resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic.

In my previous post, I set forth a theory of how viral incivility operates online, via social media, to poison our collective sensemaking environment—what I call the ‘cognitive commons’—and how the pollution of disinformation, misinformation, and insufficiently targeted information creates ‘externalities’ for us all in the virtual environment, just as pollution creates externalities in the real world.

I stated in that post that online viral incivility is an abuse of the privilege of free speech, which is essentially an abuse of the freedom of thought.

It occurs when people who are high in external individualism—that is, who intrinsically value their freedom of will, of action, the right to ‘do what they like’, more than their freedom of thought—instrumentally use the privilege to speak their minds to spread bile, banality and abuse throughout the cognitive commons.

Free speech, as I said, is the vector along which human beings communicate their thoughts and ideas with one another, and when, in times of existential crisis, our cognitive commons are polluted with disinformation, misinformation, and information that not everybody needs to know, our ability to make sense of the Coronavirus crisis and to take concerted, collective action against it is severely hampered.

If, as a writer, I am concerned about the way that the Coronavirus has exposed the issues associated with free speech that Western democratic societies were debating prior to the pandemic, it is because the instrumental abuse of the privilege of free speech has profound implications and ramifications not only for how we understand this crisis by the best vector we have available to communicate with ourselves as a collective, but what we do to solve it and the other n-th order infinite impact crises it has unleashed.

Our ability to collectively apply our will and act in a concerted, global effort is predicated upon our collective ability to think and make communal sense of this crisis by means of speech.

The alternative to high external individualism, as I explained in my last post, is high internal individualism—the intrinsic valuing of freedom of thought, and its instrumental application in the freedom to act, to do, to speak.

Freedom of thought and its ancillary, freedom of speech, need to be intrinsically safeguarded because it is difficult to make a case whereby acting first and thinking second is a more appropriate response to a species-level crisis than thinking before acting.

The latter value, freedom of will, is therefore instrumentally guaranteed by the intrinsic value of freedom of thought—for free thought cannot be actualized except by freedom of action.

In my third post on this topic, I introduced you to the notion of networkcentricity as the symbol—and symptom—of life in the 21st century.  The more deeply we look into our collective reality, the more the metaphor of the exponentially expanding network jumps out at us as the mandala of our age.

The Coronavirus is an exponential network.  Our social media are exponential networks, and the Internet—‘the World Wide Web’—is an exponential network.  We begin to conceive the ecosystems of nature as ‘networks’: animals school, swarm, flock and herd in networks, and we ourselves, spread across the globe, are ‘networked’, physically and virtually.

And when we consider with what avidity people high in external individualism attach themselves to clustered groups based on shared interests, preferences and biases, willingly subordinating themselves to what I called, in my last post, the ‘memetic possession’ of ideology and groupthink, it appears as though the metaphor of the network has revealed something new about the intrinsic nature of man.

We too ‘swarm’ like ants and bees, ‘school’ like fish—and ‘herd’ like sheep.

The classical model of the sovereign, Cartesian individual, he who thinks himself into being, can no longer hold—and perhaps this critical thinker high in internal individualism is more an historical and social anomaly from his peers in the long race of man, one to be ‘replaced in the modern age by transhistorical impersonal forces,’ as Edward Said put it.

Psychologist Kenneth Gergen hazarded that ‘we may be entering a new era of self-conception.  In this era the self is redefined as no longer an essence in itself, but relational’ [my emphasis].

Perhaps it is not man’s ultimate destiny to realize himself as a sovereign individual in a social network, but to realize himself as a node, a neuron in a eusocial cognitive collective.

Perhaps we’ve always been a swarming creature, like ants or bees, in our deepest nature, and the extraordinary, outsize neural network which each one of us carries in his head, and which is the species characteristic and evolutionary advantage of homo sapiens—‘thinking man’—has merely required the technological development of a non-local, externalized, virtual neural network in order for us to realize our evolutionary destiny as a ‘hive mind’.

It is well-known that human beings are the most social animals on the planet.  All the fruits of civilization we enjoy are due to our sociality, our ability to co-operate and collaborate.

Equally, all the bad things that human beings do to one another can be attributed to our instinct for sociality and the absolute abhorrence which most human beings (your humble author excepted) feel at the prospect of being utterly cut off from human society.  Like siblings who tease and hurt one another, we would rather have another human being to hate, beat, violate and murder—or be hated, beaten, violated and murdered by—than be left utterly alone.

But despite the claims of E. O. Wilson, and despite the fact of being the most pro-social lifeform on our planet, we have never graduated to that condition which certain swarming insects, such as ants and bees, have evolved to, the condition of eusociality, where every member of the collective acts individually in the best interests of the collective.

Our individual consciousness, the rational mind which allows us to think, to discriminate, to divide, which enables each of us not merely to demonstrate the same freedom of will and action that other animals demonstrate, but gives each of us the potential for sovereign freedom of thought to manifest in free action, discriminates and divides our personal, individual interests from those of the collective.

When each of us can do whatever we like to maximize our own private fitness functions, what need have we, like ants and bees, to consider the maximal fitness function of the collective?

The consciousness of our individual sovereignty, the sense of ourselves as being ‘separate’ from one another, and from the larger network of nature, has been both the tool which has gotten us to the place where we are now as a species, and the hindrance which prevents us from evolving to a steady-state, sustainable model of eusocial fitness in a finite environment.

Technology, the exponentially exploding product of our consciousness, has finally produced the Internet and social media, intellectual technologies which manifest our species’ deep-seated avidity not merely to connect relationally with one another, but to have access to each other’s minds, to pool our cognitive resources in a geometric synergy which increases computing power exponentially as each neural node is added to the network.

Which is to say that, with the digital technology of the Internet and social media, we have finally evolved a means to consciously evolve ourselves.

In his journal article “The New Superorganic” (2004), F. Allan Hanson of the University of Kansas states that, in considering our capacity to pool and share our cognitive resources via the commons of the Internet, we should include the medium itself as essentially an agentic partner in this non-local, externalized hive mind.

Citing Gregory Bateson’s ‘provocative insight that the agent conducting any activity should be defined so as to include the lines of communication essential to that activity rather than cutting across them,’ Hanson defines agency as an ‘intelligent performance’ which ‘manifests mind’.  And the act or behaviour of ‘minding’, according to Hanson, is the management of information.

In other words, there is a generalized intelligence diffused in ‘the field’—the field vectorized by the medium of the Internet—as an embodied activity.  The field itself has intelligence and synergistically ‘manifests mind’—not merely the minds of all the individual users, but a geometric ‘over-mind’ which includes the relational architecture of the network itself.

What I’m calling ‘the field’, the integration of our lines of technological communication into the collective management of information, is a symbiotic, agentic partner which is itself coevolving in our species’ coevolution towards eusociality.

We know that there is a definite biological limit to the number of social relationships human beings can healthily maintain.  Robin Dunbar found that the number of 150 social relationships (taken as an average) is directly correlated to neocortical size in primates.

We know equally that the brain is not hardwired, but malleable.  Neuroplasticity allows neurons to forge new cortical connections, reorganizing our individual neural networks so that we can learn new things, new habits.

I would hazard that if we are to evolve, in a quantum leap, to a new steady-state, sustainable model of eusocial cognitive fitness in a world we are exponentially exhausting, a species-wide ‘consciousness-raising exercise’ needs to take place:  En masse, we need to forgo old cognitive habits and enter the brain’s ‘exploration mode’, leveraging our individual capacities for neuroplasticity to consciously create an external, non-local neural network of social relations which scales beyond Dunbar’s Number to include the whole human family.

How can we achieve such a biological and spiritual coevolution in consciousness when the complexity of our common crises is exponentially reducing our capacity to make good collective sense of our problems?

Fortunately, we have one cognitive technology which maps very nicely to the externalized, visual affordances of the Internet.  It’s called a ‘schema’.

A schema is a cognitive map.  It is the assemblage of items stored in long-term, unconscious memory arranged as organized patterns of knowledge, and the possession of complex, detailed schemas is absolutely essential for an individual to make good sense of himself, of the world, and of any given domain of knowledge.

‘Our intellectual prowess is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time,’ says psychologist John Sweller.  ‘We are able to understand concepts in our areas of expertise because we have schemas associated with those concepts.’

Individuals have schemas.  At a higher level of recursion, groups such as churches, businesses, social organizations, political parties and nation-states all have schemas, which are composed of overlapping individual schemas based around shared perspectives, interests, preferences and biases.  And, at the highest level of recursion, humanity has one very schizophrenic ‘meta-schema’ composed of all schemas.

Schemas can be adapted very quickly, but their weakness is that they tend to remain static—even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.

As a species, this is the situation we find ourselves in with respect to the Coronavirus.  The spirit of life in the 21st century demands that we should change our standard ways of perceiving, thinking and doing at an exponential rate, but we are very slow and reluctant to change even with a tsunami of entangled crises bearing down on us.

Human beings—like all organisms—have two main ways of perceiving reality, thinking about it, and acting in accord with their perceptions of and thoughts about what is real.  These two main ways have been variously defined: Herbert A. Simon defines them as ‘recipes’ and ‘blueprints’; Jordan Hall has described them as ‘habit mode’ and ‘explore mode’; and Luís M. A. Bettencourt calls them ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’.

These methods of thought and action have to do with relative perceptions of risk and reward.  Like all organisms, human beings like to minimize risk and maximize reward.  ‘Recipes’, ‘habits’ and ‘exploitation’ are all variations on this strategy: where there is a perception of low uncertainty (and therefore risk) in the environment, we respond to it in a habitual fashion, employing ‘recipes’ we’ve developed to exploit the maximum reward from the environment.

These cognitive and behavioural ‘short-cuts’ are useful: they optimize our thoughts and behaviour towards efficiency in highly predictable circumstances which accord with our schemas of reality.

‘Blueprints’, ‘explore mode’ and ‘exploration’ have to do with schema-formation itself.  In novel circumstances where risk to the organism is high and the promise of reward is uncertain, it is useful to approach the environment with a fluid conceptual map of reality, one which can be redrawn to identify risks and rewards.

Obviously, the cognitive and behavioural work of schema-formation is energy-intensive, and it would not be an efficient use of an organism’s energy to ‘remake the wheel’ in conditions where rewards can be predictably exploited.  But in novel circumstances of high risk, attempting to maximize a diminishing reward in preference to exploring alternatives in the environment is a maladaptive behaviour.

As Bettencourt puts it in his 2009 journal article “The Rules of Information Aggregation and Emergence in Collective Intelligent Behavior”, ‘uncertainty’ is essentially an entropic state: when what we know about a target variable X is less than what we don’t know, the domain of knowledge to which X refers is tending towards a state of disorder.

We use the cognitive and behavioural techniques of recipes and blueprints, habit mode and explore mode, exploitation and exploration to attenuate entropic uncertainty by bringing ‘order’ to complex problems.  We arrange what we know with respect to X in a schema which shows not only what information has been collected from habitual exploitation, but also the ‘holes’ in our knowledge which need to be explored and mapped.

The novel Coronavirus is a good example of X: being new, the amount of entropic uncertainty with respect to this target variable is high, and with high uncertainty, there is high risk and low reward.  There are things our doctors and scientists do know about X, information obtained from previous cognitive explorations which has been collectively absorbed into habitual exploitation, but on the whole, there are many more gaps in our knowledge of the Coronavirus due to its novelty.

The collective schema of ‘Science’ (which is composed of many of sub-schemas such as ‘Medicine’ and ‘Biology’, not to mention the sub-sub-schemas which individual doctors and scientists hold) helps to orient the collective quest for attenuating the entropic complexity associated with X.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous phrase, there are ‘known knowns’ associated with the Coronavirus and there are ‘known unknowns’: the shared schema of Science allows us to know what we know with respect to this novel virus, but also to know what we don’t know and need to explore.

The example of the Coronavirus makes it clear that expertise is needed in domains of knowledge to develop schemas of thinking which accurately reflect reality in order to orient efficient action: the primacy of free thought undergirds the effectiveness of free will.

More specifically, the Coronavirus, as a risk which impacts all humans across a multitude of entangled dimensions, makes it clear that we need experts in all domains of knowledge if we are to develop a global schema which enables us to take effective collective action to mitigate the threat of the virus and all the n-th order infinite impact risks it entails.

And here precisely is where our meta-schema has broken down, for the popular distrust of experts produced by externalities in the global sensemaking architecture of our cognitive commons makes it that much harder for us all to be on the same eusocial page with respect to Coronavirus and individually act for the good of the collective.

Citations of the Dunning-Kruger effect with respect to the externalities introduced into our collective sensemaking environment by non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer communication of information through the Internet are now so frequent that the term hardly needs to be explained.

In fine, incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their competence in domains where they are not expert, and lacking well-developed schemas in these fields, they lack even the meta-cognitive capacity to accurately perceive their incompetence.

On the other hand, as Alexander Plencner of the University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava explains in his article “Critical Thinking and the Challenges of Internet” (2014): ‘Because [the most competent individuals] were more experienced in tested domains, they were well aware of what they did not know.  But as soon as the researchers presented them their positive results, they adjusted their self-assessment to more objective levels.’

From this we can hypothesize two implications for the Dunning-Kruger effect.  If the target variable X represents a domain of skill or knowledge, then the schema that expert individuals have built up of X is lower in entropic uncertainty than for non-expert individuals, for not only is there more definite information with regards to X available to the expert within his schema, but there is less entropy regarding what is actually uncertain within the schema: these gaps are ‘known unknowns’.

But I would go even further and hypothesize that not only can we regard X as a domain of knowledge external to the expert, but that X may also describe a ‘meta-schema’ within the cognitive economy of the expert himself: the differential uncertainty of knowledge with respect to oneself.

As entropy diminishes in that domain through the assimilation of aggregated information derived from another, more objective source, so too does uncertainty about oneself, about one’s own cognitive competencies and aptitudes, one’s own fitness in accurately adjudging and acting with respect to reality, decrease, and the accuracy of one’s schema about oneself increase.

This differential knowledge about one’s own competency to accurately adjudge and act with respect to reality is not available to the non-expert prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.  This is because, as Plencner observes, when such people are confronted with their negative results in the tested domain, they do not downwardly adjust their positive self-assessments as experts upwardly adjust their negative self-assessments.

So why does this happen?  Why do masses of people with access to ungated knowledge in the cognitive commons so radically overestimate their capacity to make good sense in domains which demand expert guidance to orient effective action?

I think two issues are at play with respect to schema-formation.

On the one hand, confronted with great entropic uncertainty such as we are facing with the Coronavirus, a maladaptive, habit-based approach which assumes there to be much less entropy in the present environment than there actually is leads people who are heavily invested in the status quo, such as politicians and inordinately successful businesspeople, to rehearse scripted, recipe-based responses intended to exploit fitness rewards which are, in fact, exponentially diminishing.

This is perhaps the easier of the two maladaptive mindsets to understand.  What I am essentially suggesting is that there is an overwhelming temptation for people who have been well-rewarded by exploitation to ignore the salient signals of danger in the environment and continue to employ the habit mode of exploitation when exploration would be a much more appropriate response to entropic uncertainty.

But on the other hand, the explosion of paranoiac conspiracy thinking which may be attributed to the popular distrust of experts in the non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer cognitive environment of the Internet demonstrates how explorative schema-mapping itself can be a maladaptive behaviour in response to a common crisis where we desperately need the responsible guidance of experts to direct us.

In this model we see that, when confronted with the same highly entropic, highly novel environment which the Coronavirus has thrust us into, non-expert individuals assume there to be too much salience in the environment: they misperceive what is actually noise as being ‘super-salient signal’.

And, paradoxically, instead of remaining open in explore mode, these people actually curtail and arbitrarily attenuate the complexity presented by the environment, seeking to collapse the super-salient signal they perceive as quickly as possible into an alternative schema which is itself more a product of exploitative habit than of genuine intellectual exploration.

In the two cases I’ve described above, both schemas are faulty, the first because it fails to apprehend novel irregularities in the environment as such, and the second because it misapprehends novel irregularities as being regularities in a schema which bears even more doubtful fidelity to reality.

One could say that in the paranoid, psychotic schema of conspiracy thinking which has exponentially exploded with the Coronavirus, the exploratory mode of schema-making itself is ‘hijacked’, exploited by habit mode.  It condenses novel irregularities too quickly into the regularities of an inaccurate, totalizing discourse which is an alternative to the ‘official story’ of the experts, producing not ‘alternative knowledge’, but what Damian Thompson calls ‘counterknowledge’—an ignorance which is the inverse of knowledge.

Why has this happened?

In my first post on the Coronavirus, I posited a theory of value extraction.  When it comes to extracting reward from any given domain of competence, an expert in that field will always be a fitter agent than a non-expert.  Our institutions—governments, corporations, universities and media—are composed of specialized experts who, due to their fitness in their respective domains, have derivatively extracted more and more real value from the commons, which they have centralized to themselves.

And information—the commodity that experts traffic in—is itself an extractable resource which, like more tangible resources, can be siloed and centralized to oneself for exclusive value gain.  With information as with wheat, corn, oil, gold or a Coronavirus vaccine, if you have the market cornered on some domain of knowledge, you can name your own price in parsing the resource out to the non-initiate.

The inequalities associated with hierarchies of experts deriving inflated value from the mass of non-experts under a policy of extraction has activated a sense of distrust in the populace.

It is very difficult to trust the motives of someone who stands to gain materially—often at our expense—by compelling or influencing our compliance with their vested prescriptions.  Whatever gain we might get from accepting the advice of experts is still differentially less than the exorbitant gain they extract from us by compelling compliance with their recommendations.

At the world-historical moment when we meet the crisis of the Coronavirus, hierarchical authorities of all kinds have lost their credibility with the populace due to the progressive erosion of trust that is a consequence of their extractive policies.

In response to the perceived greed of experts, whose superior sensemaking capacity is compromised and corrupted by vested interest in compelling compliance with their prescriptions, in the cognitive commons of the Internet and social media, people prefer and crave peer-to-peer recommendations from those they actually know and trust.

Knowledge is power, and since power inevitably corrupts, the justification for a distrustful, conspiratorial view of hierarchical authority due to the abuse of experts who have eroded our collective sensemaking capacity for personal ends is legitimated in the population, and the alternative—non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer sensemaking by non-experts—is popularly preferred.

In essence, at the moment in history when humanity desperately needs to be guided by its experts in schematic collective sensemaking, the great mass of people perceive that those who have access to the most—and the best—information do not have the collective’s best interests at heart.

The successive and exponential erosion of public trust through a policy of extraction by the fittest members in our society leads non-experts to believe that these people ‘lack empathy’ for them, since they continually extract hyper-inflated value in return for the little, heavily compromised information they parse out in return.

And in some sense, this perception of a ‘lack of empathy’ in our ‘egghead experts’ represents the differential between the game-theoretic sociality of our species and the eusociality towards which we need to collectively evolve.

The aggressive rationality, the ability to divide, discriminate and derive in our expert discernment of reality is the one-sided, left-brain development which has enabled us to optimize towards our present efficiency as a species: our reason-based collective schema is the most detailed and accurate map of reality on the planet.

But until we can transcend the neocortical limit of Dunbar’s Number, until we can consciously regard the members of our species who are most distant from us as being as much a part of ourselves as our nearest and dearest—that is, until we evolve our right-brain empathic capacity to think in wholes just as well as we can think in derivatives—we cannot transcend our game-theoretic sociality to our eusocial destiny of creating a collective schema which enables us to make the most efficient sense of reality.

How do we make such a collectively coherent map of reality which facilitates efficient, concerted action in the world towards the solution of highly complex, highly entropic problems?

The first thing to acknowledge is that non-experts have as great a place at the table in schema-formation as experts, for as Bettencourt notes, there are a surprising number of instances ‘when a solution produced by an informal collective of individuals, each with partial information, can surpass in quality and speed those produced by experts….’

We need diversity, but, as Jackie Jeffrey of Middlesex University states in her article “Diversity management through a neuro-scientific lens” (2015), the mania to include ‘diverse perspectives’ in our collective decision-making has to be re-oriented from its present approach, based on superficial and external group differences, to a ‘brain-based approach’.

‘In a review of a variety of literature and organizational policies from around the world,’ Jeffrey writes, ‘all appear to think about diversity from an equal-opportunities perspective dominated by what is perceived as “homogenous group differences, most of which are rooted in some form of oppression”.’

While it stands to reason that people from diverse races, sexes, ages and religious backgrounds bring something that is diverse to collective sensemaking, these ‘homogenous group differences’ are not the best selection criteria for geometrically amplifying our cognitive diversity in collective schema-formation.

As Jeffrey, quoting the Co-Intelligence Institute says, these homogenous group differences ‘“overshadow [the] hundreds of other differences, most of them very individual—and many of which are far more significant to our ability to generate collective intelligence” needed to effectively manage diversity….’

Individual differences in thinking style—which of course may be influenced by generic differences but are rarely determined by them—are the keys to leveraging the cognitive diversity necessary to develop a species-wide schema which will facilitate coherent and efficient collective action in the face of existential risk.

Moreover, as F. Allan Hanson points out, the individual differences in thinking style necessary to leverage cognitive diversity are enhanced by our individual interactions with the cognitive tool we use to collate and communicate information—the Internet.

The indexing of information on the Internet rather the traditional classification of it in rigid, hierarchical, taxonomic schemas enables different thinkers to ‘pull out’ different data sets from the cognitive commons.  The creative capacity to fluidly and individually reconceptualize schemas of human knowledge through indexing facilitates the inclusion of diverse perspectives in the meta-schema of our cognitive commons.

So in terms of complex problem-solving with respect to the incomplete schema of any one of our existential risks, there are definitely advantages to the non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer cognition which the Internet facilitates as an agentic partner in the management of information.

For if, as I stated in my third post on the Coronavirus, all the problems of our century are variations on the question of how we deal, as a species, with the non-linear progression of exponentials through networks, it is heartening to note, as Bettencourt does, that information itself—like the Coronavirus, like the Internet, like the network of humanity—also aggregates in a non-linear, exponential fashion.

The solution to our problems is in the form-problem itself.

Unlike matter or energy, Bettencourt states, the peculiar characteristic of information as a quantity is that ‘knowledge from many sources can in fact produce more information (synergy) or less (redundancy) than the sum of its parts.’

This can occur even in relatively non-expert populations.  If we view information, as Bettencourt does, as ‘a sort of differential between two levels of uncertainty’ with respect to a target variable X, then the entropic uncertainty regarding the schema which X constitutes can be synergistically diminished even by a group of non-experts pooling their cognitive resources.

In this example, each individual in the collective has a schema which includes partial information with respect to X.  Where the knowledge gained from each member about X is not merely additive in relation to X, but adds to the knowledge of the other members of the collective, synergy emerges from the pooling of cognitive resources.

The uncertainty surrounding the communal schema of X is reduced, but the uncertainty in the meta-schema of the group as a whole is also synergistically reduced.  As more information is transactively introduced into the consciousness of the group via the mechanism of free speech, the more probable it becomes that something somebody says unlocks a piece of information in another member’s mind which helps to fill in another gap in the schema surrounding X.

As Bettencourt says, so long as the pieces of information pooled in this form of collective cognition are ‘conditionally dependent’ (that is, they are relevant to the target variable X) yet still reasonably independent of one another, synergistic problem-solving of superior speed and quality can occur even among a population of non-experts.

How much quicker and more discerning, therefore, could our responses be to common existential problems like the Coronavirus if we transactively utilized the detailed individual and communal schemas of experts in guiding non-expert decision-making at scale?

But there’s also a place for redundancy—the aggregation of information which adds nothing new to the schema yet serves to confirm what can definitely be known about X—in schema-formation.

In triangulating and triaging information for collective sensemaking, redundancy serves the important function of validating and verifying the accuracy of information contributed by individual sources.  As Bettencourt points out, it is not sufficient that the pool of information should be ‘conditionally dependent’ with respect to the entropic state of X, but it is also necessary that the sources of information themselves should be ‘sufficiently independent’ of each other so as to confirm what can be communally known about X.

There is, therefore, a ‘social compact’ which we enter into whenever we undertake collective sensemaking via the cognitive commons.

The social compact is that each neural node in the network will earnestly contribute to reducing entropic uncertainty with respect to a communal problem through mechanisms of synergy and redundancy without needlessly and deliberately introducing misinformation about X, disinformation about X, or information which is not conditionally relevant to X into the cognitive commons.

I’ve described schemas as being ‘cognitive maps’.  When dealing with complex problems in cognition, rather than attempting to organize information within abstract taxonomies and rubrics, it’s often easier to ‘visualize’ information, and this is certainly true when it comes to cognition at scale.

As human beings, we have a right-brain bias towards holistic, visual thinking, which comes more naturally to us than left-brain, language-based reasoning.  The popularity of ‘brainstorming’ and other communal sensemaking activities which visualize information demonstrates that, when it comes to getting everyone ‘on the same page’ conceptually, it’s often best to get everyone on the same page literally, mapping out the network of connections which random ideas suggest.

When it comes to complex problems which require collective sensemaking to solve, the target variable X is both the problem and the schema—the domain of knowledge to be mapped.

My favourite example of a cognitive technology which seems to perfectly illustrate how schematic collective sensemaking attenuates this paradox is the crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi.

Developed after the Kenyan general election in 2007, the platform was initially designed to visualize real-time reports of post-election violence onto a map of Kenya.  It’s had many applications since then, most notably in crowdsourcing information and co-ordinating crisis response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

When it comes to as visceral a problem as an earthquake, it’s difficult for a population not to be on the same cognitive page: the crisis is sensed, known, experienced, and felt.  Problem and schema coalesce: X is the crisis, and we need, as a collective, to rapidly understand and rapidly respond to X.

As Claude Gilbert defines the problem: ‘disaster is first of all seen as a crisis in communicating within a community—that is, as a difficulty for someone to get informed and to inform other people.’

With the Ushahidi crisis map of Haiti, information about the crisis from the edges of the network—the sources on the ground who were most immediately knowledgeable about real conditions—was visually organized, in real-time, onto an open-source map of Haiti.

And as Craig Clarke, an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Marine Corps, told Jessica Heinzelman and Carol Waters in their report “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster-Affected Haiti” (2010) : ‘In this postmodern age, open-source intelligence outperforms traditional intel….  The notion of crisis mapping demonstrates the intense power of open-source intelligence….  [W]hen compared side by side, Ushahidi reporting and other open sources vastly outperformed “traditional intel” [after the Haiti earthquake].’

The reason Ushahidi and other open-source platforms which intrinsically value free speech in order to instrumentally facilitate free action provide better intel than traditional sources is because mutually dependent data from the edges of the network synergistically produces more information about a given unknown situation X, but it also enables verification of the accuracy of information through the redundancy of reports.

As more information is mapped onto the crisis map, the entropic uncertainty inherent in the schema which the crisis map visualizes reduces.  More information is produced which enables the collective to identify known knowns in the schema, and known unknowns which require further investigation and report.

The extraordinary thing is that this wealth of actionable information, which was vastly superior to the expert systems of crisis responders, came largely from a population of non-experts.  As Heinzelman and Waters write: ‘Of the more than 3,500 messages published on the Ushahidi-Haiti crisis map, only 202 messages were tagged as “verified”….’

Since the Haiti crisis, Ushahidi has developed better systems for triangulating and triaging crowdsourced information to better conserve the social compact of collective cognition, but even in this instance, when the technology was in its beta phase, in terms of efficiency of actionable response, the net benefits associated with schematic collective sensemaking far outstripped the hierarchical siloing of information in expert crisis response systems.

Moreover, if experts are to regain the trust of populations, there is a lesson for them to learn from the Ushahidi-Haiti crisis response which is appropriate to their expertise.

What Heinzelman and Waters call ‘sentiment analysis’, the algorithmic processing of large volumes of written language derived from emails, text messages, and social media posts to derive the overall mood of given populations in real-time, would enable experts to rebuild their empathy with the collective by demonstrating that they hear the emotions of non-experts and are sincere in offering solutions which address their emotional concerns.

Sentiment analysis at scale would enable authorities not merely to regain the trust of populations by allaying their apprehensions in real time, but would serve to mitigate extremist polarization.  As Plencner observes: ‘When dissatisfaction is strong enough and overtakes [a] critical mass of [the] public, the electorate often turns towards radical political parties.’

Failing to get their needs and concerns adequately acknowledged and addressed by mainstream experts leads non-experts to succumb to the pull of polarization and the consequent schizophrenic breakdown in schematic collective sensemaking.

As an existential threat which affects us all, the Coronavirus has revealed the urgent necessity for our species to develop a coherent shared map of reality which will facilitate agile collective action to curtail exponential risks.

It’s also exposed how fractured our communal sensemaking environment is, how deeply out of touch we are with reality, both individually and collectively.

In my ongoing analysis of the Coronavirus situation here on The Melbourne Flâneur, today I lay out for you the next conceptual block in the argument I began to advance in my first post on this crisis.

Last week, I introduced you to the concept of ‘networkcentricity’, particularly as it relates, at a metaphysical level, to a new experience of the conditions of life in the 21st century.

‘La grille’, as M. Foucault calls it, has revealed a new way of regarding life and the world.  The Internet, as a cultural product, is the most visible metaphor of what we sense, in this century, to be the underlying structure of nature, of human relations, and of the artificial systems that human beings create: the network.

All the escalating problems we have faced in this century across every domain, culminating in the Coronavirus, have been particular variations on a single, general theme:  How do we evolve from a complicated, linear, ‘process-based’ view of life to the complex, non-linear, ‘network-centric’ vision of life which we feel, at a deep somatic level, to be a more accurate model of reality?

In my previous post, I put this ‘soul-problem’ for post-Faustian man in more concrete terms: all the environmental, social, political, economic, geo-political problems we have faced since September 11, 2001 may be summarized as the conscious need to come to fundamental grips, both at an individual and collective level, with the understanding of how exponential curves interact geometrically with complex, adaptive, networked systems.

In that post, I stated that the prevailing paradigm of ‘business as usual’ was predicated on a linear, arithmetic systems model called ‘Scientific Management’, an industrial and military approach to systems which was templated for global use after World War II.

Scientific Management, as a linear, process-based model of systems, is complicated but not complex: it assumes that life moves in a gently curving arc of infinite progress, with only slight, manageable disruptions, so that when unexpected, thoroughly disruptive exponential events such as the Coronavirus occur, the centralized, pyramidal structures of Scientific Management fail spectacularly because they are optimized for efficiency in predictable circumstances rather than for resilience in exceptional circumstances.

Moreover, Scientific Management assumes that the human agents who compose these linearly-organized pyramidal structures are more or less ‘fixed’ within a hierarchy: progression up or down the pyramid is possible, but only along restricted lines of process.

The Internet, as our quintessential cultural product in the 21st century, does not resemble this mechanical model of the world.  And social media, the second-generation child of the Internet, resembles it even less.

In my second post on the Coronavirus, I stated that the exponential spread of this virus around the world could be directly attributed to restrictions on freedom of speech in China.  The doctors who initially discovered the Coronavirus networked their collective cognitive resources online.  The vector along which human beings communicate their thoughts to one another is human language, and the Chinese government’s restriction of these doctors’ ability to freely communicate with one another in the early hours of this crisis facilitated the exponential curve of existential crisis we are now travelling on.

It is more than ironic, it is in deep morphological accord with the nature of this world-historical problem that the Coronavirus, as the most visible symbol of it, should have originated in the nation with the most repressive attitude towards free speech.  The Chinese have given the decadent West an incontrovertible case study of how the diminishment of the West’s most cherished value leads ultimately—and very quickly—to massive mortality and civilizational collapse.

The semantic games which the body politic of western nations have played with the issue of free speech on social media could only be played in conditions where the exponential metastasis leading to massive mortality and civilizational collapse is not consciously apparent to the players.

This toying with the ‘right to express oneself’ is part of what I called, in my second post, the ‘abuse’ of the privilege of free speech.  It is notable that this abuse is most egregiously committed by those who utilize their privilege instrumentally in order to destroy free speech as a value.

But abuse of the privilege is more generalized than that.

With the Coronavirus crisis, we find ourselves palpably confronted with the cusp of two paradigms.  The decentralized, horizontal peer-to-peer network we want—and need—to evolve to as a species is operating under the hampering restrictions of the centralized, hierarchical paradigm of Scientific Management.

Instead of geometrically enhancing our collective cognitive capacity to make sense of the brave new world of the 21st century, our quintessential cultural product, which was developed with the intention of horizontally networking minds, is forced to operate under the assumptions of the Scientific Managerial mindset, which limits peer-to-peer communication in favour of top-down broadcast.

And because, under the extractive assumptions of Scientific Management, every actor in the network is jockeying to be at the top of the hierarchy, broadcasting his views to the network at large so as to centralize attention to himself, the Internet is polluted by egregious abuses of the right to express oneself.

The broadcast mindset of the Scientific Managerial paradigm economically rewards the centralization of attention to oneself (and thus the extraction of cognitive resources from the commons) in a multi-polar arms race of escalating bile, banality and abuse.

Rather than putting us in a position to make good sense of this crisis, our quintessential cultural product, hobbled and hampered by a moribund paradigm which restricts its efficacy, has, instead of geometrically networking minds, geometrically facilitated the pollution of disinformation, misinformation, and information which not everyone in the network needs to know, broadcasting these ‘externalities’ into the ecology of our collective sensemaking environment.

Web 2.0, the ‘Social Web’, the network of social networks, has facilitated this pollution.  The danger which attends the universal right to the free expression of thought—a danger which can never be satisfactorily counterbalanced—is that actors will abuse their privilege by virally disseminating disinformation and misinformation, or by broadcasting information which is not ‘in the public interest’ of the collective—or by speaking uncivilly to one another.

Just as in our physical environment, there are ‘externalities’ which are displaced and deferred to the cognitive commons when agents who are act extractively under the Faustian, Scientific Managerial mindset pollute the virtual environment of collective sensemaking in order to mine a derivative profit from it which they centralize to themselves.

Privatizing the profit, they socialize the cognitive cost of what I call ‘viral incivility’.

What makes finding a global solution to the Coronavirus crisis—and to all the other n-th order infinite impact risks which it has set in train—more difficult is that the exponential curve of the virus in our polluted real environment is matched by the exponential curve of poor collective sensemaking in our equally polluted virtual environment.

And the vector along which pollution in the collective sensemaking environment travels and is externalized to the cognitive commons is the vector of free speech.

When free speech is abused by individuals availing themselves of the sword of incivility, our collective ability to make sense of this crisis is weakened, as our willingness to communicate freely with one another, sharing ideas which may be horizontally scaled to solve this existential crisis with exponential speed, is diminished.

Human beings are neither essentially co-operative nor essentially competitive.  We ‘optimize’ our behaviour towards either co-operation or competition based on the strategies we perceive others in the social environment to be using.

In an environment of extractive value-taking, such as the one that operates under Faustian, Scientific Managerial conditions, a social strategy of competition for resources is an optimal short-term approach for an individual to take.

However, in a network-centric environment of mutual value-giving, the player who is optimized to compete by extractively centralizing common resources to himself will find himself outnumbered by co-operative, collaborative players who endogenously censure him.

In 2016, Antoci, Delfino, Paglieri, Panebianco, and Sabatini published the article “Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach”.  The researchers designed a game whereby players could choose to behave civilly (strategy P) in face-to-face and online interactions with others, uncivilly (strategy H), or could choose to ‘opt out’ of online interactions completely and keep their face-to-face interactions with other players to an absolute minimum (strategy N).

Antoci and his colleagues found that if the number of trolls who only meet other trolls in the social environment is less than the number of civil players who only meet trolls, then the social network optimizes towards a strategy of civility.

The researchers conjectured that this is because trolls have an ‘aversive reaction’ to meeting other trolls: they get less pay-off from encountering people as uncivil as themselves, and thus seem to abandon the strategy of incivility as the social network preponderantly selects for polite interaction.

If, on the other hand, the number of civil players who only meet other civil players in the social environment is less than the number of trolls who only meet civil players, then the social network will virally optimize towards a strategy of incivility.

Trolls will get more of a pay-off under these conditions because the number of ‘victims’ upon whom they can visit the sword of incivility is greater, and the cost to civil players for interacting with the preponderant number of trolls discourages them from pursuing civility as a strategy.

But the truly interesting finding concerns the third strategy, N.  Opting out of online social networks altogether and reducing one’s face-to-face interactions with others was found by the researchers to be the optimal social strategy, despite the fact that N players received less pay-off than either civil players or trolls.

Where all players in a social network opt out of online interaction due to incivility, the researchers found that a strict Nash equilibrium is created; that is, all players know the strategies of all other players in the social network, and no individual player can gain a personal advantage by simply changing his own strategy.

But of course, what is mathematically ‘optimal’ is hardly optimal as a social strategy.  The researchers described the Nash equilibrium created by everyone choosing to opt out of online social interaction as a ‘social poverty trap’.

‘The analysis of dynamics shows that the spreading of self-protective behaviors triggered by online incivility entails undesirable results to the extent to which it leads the economy to non-socially optimal stationary states that are Pareto dominated by others,’ Antoci and his colleagues wrote.

In an economy of attention such as our collective sensemaking environment, an environmental strategy of incivility will transmit itself virally among players, with those who are most adept at wielding the sword of incivility extractively centralizing to themselves the resources of collective attention.

Not only is the ‘social capital’ of collective cognitive resources available to solve problems extracted from the network as more and more players opt out of it due to viral incivility, but the ‘social capital’ which is available to the most uncivil players, the social network of minds they can activate through influence, is extracted from the commons and privately centralized to them.

Those who are richest in bile, banality and abuse profit the most from online social networks operating under Scientific Managerial restrictions in terms of the ‘prestige’ they garner to themselves by adopting a competitive, linear approach in these non-linear, network-centric environments.

But, as Antoci et al. make clear, there is an externalized cost which these actors displace and defer to the commons, one which we all must bear as the well of collective sensemaking becomes progressively poisoned by viral incivility.

Citing the work of Fred Hirsch, these researchers noted that the preferential adoption of opting out of the network is not driven by ‘mutating tastes’.  We do not want to ‘self-isolate’ from the virus of online incivility.

As Hirsch says in his book Social Limits of Growth (1977): ‘If the environment deteriorates, for example, through dirtier air or more crowded roads, then a shift in resources to counter these “bads” does not represent a change in consumer tastes but a response, on the basis of existing tastes, to a reduction in net welfare.’

Likewise, in the reduction of net welfare which the Coronavirus has introduced into our physical environment, we are forced to massively divert economic resources to counter the externality of this ‘bad’, and to adopt ‘social distancing’, a self-defensive behaviour which is perverse to our deeply social nature as human beings.

And just as in our physical self-isolation from each other due to the Coronavirus, ‘social distancing’ from the virus of online incivility is an attempt to mitigate the externalities which have been introduced into our collective cognitive environment.

So how does this virus of online incivility, which causes us to socially distance ourselves from each other even in real life, operate?

I am going to propose a model of viral propagation in online social networks for you to consider.

There are two main models of viral propagation, the ‘threshold’ and the ‘cascade’ models.  My intuition is that, in online social networks, both models of virality are interacting.

As a node who enters an online social network, you can initially only influence your nearest neighbours, or what are called your ‘degrees’.  Your degrees are the people known to you from real life whom you link to (or forms ‘edges’ with) in the social network by sending them friend invitations, following them, or by availing yourself of the sundry other instruments which social networks offer to facilitate linkages between their users.

The sending of solicitations to others as invitations to form edges with you I am going to call ‘outgoing edges’.  Initially, you are trying to form these outgoing edges by creating linkages in the online network between yourself and the degrees you already know offline.  You are forming outgoing edges with degrees you are already ‘in sympathy with’: these are your friends and family members, people with whom you share interests, hobbies, preferences—and even biases.

And as Saurabh Mittal says in his paper “Emergence in stigmergic and complex adaptive systems: A formal discrete events systems perspective” (2013), ‘As nodes with their preferences and biases acquire links, their behavior seems to facilitate more link making, i.e. they start portraying affinity for new links’ [my emphasis].

As people accept your solicitations to form outgoing edges with them, you receive positive feedback:—who knew that you were such a ‘socially likeable person’?  The famous dopamine response kicks in and you hunt high and low for new opportunities to form outgoing edges with people further and further afield.

Within the individual economy of the node, this is the beginning of the exponential curve towards network-wide virality.

At a certain point, you will start to receive a small number of solicitations—what I shall call ‘incoming edges’—and the satisfaction of being sought after by others is even more pleasurable than the dopamine response you get from having your outgoing edge solicitations accepted.

A person who gives a fair amount of time to the exchange of edge solicitations, and to nourishing their small strong-tie network of edges, will form part of a cluster: a group of tightly connected nodes which evolve around shared interests, preferences, and biases.

Kwak, Lee, Park, and Moon found in their 2010 paper “What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?” that sharing behaviour is based on a principle of homophily, whereby users share content more frequently—more virally—the more similar are their shared interests, preferences and biases.

At this stage, I am suggesting, virality is still rather a local affair.  It is assumed that civility is the dominant internal communication strategy of the cluster.  These are, after all, people who like one another and share interests, preferences and biases.  And it is at this stage of ‘local virality’ that I see the threshold model of neighbouring nodes influencing each other operating.

But for virality to occur at a network-wide level, clusters require a lot of ‘weak-tie connections’: each node in the cluster will know degrees who are outside the cluster, and who are themselves nodes in other clusters.  It is along the edges formed by weak-tie connections, the casual communications between people who know each other and are in varying degrees of sympathy with each other, that the threshold model of viral incivility has the potential to metastasize into a cascade model.

Stanley Milgram famously found that only ‘six degrees of separation’ lie between two complete strangers.  We all know people who seem to know everyone.  These people are particularly socially adroit, with above-average communication skills.  They have catholic interests and preferences, are unusually well-connected across all stratas of society, and seem to have a cognitive capacity to maintain social relationships well-above Dunbar’s Number.

These people, with anomalous numbers of edges connected to themselves, are what are called ‘hubs’, and hubs are very important in regulating the flow of information in social networks.  Indeed, without hubs, who activate the power law which underwrites the exponential virality of information flow across social networks, disparate clusters with disparate interests, preferences and biases would never join together to form a social network because the differences between them would be too great.

Hubs are the ‘social glue’ which hold large social networks together.  Being popular, they are ‘highly levelled’: that is, they have a high number of interactions with a high number of incoming edges.

And it is specifically on the pivot of the hub that I am suggesting the phase transition from threshold to cascade is activated in terms of viral incivility.

Jordan Hall, citing the work of Joseph Henrich, has observed that one of the very few hard-wired traits that human beings are born with is the habit of scanning their social environments with a view to identifying the most important people in it, the people they should pay attention to.  They do this, Hall says, by paying attention to the people whom the other people in their social environments are paying attention to.

Earlier I said that the collective sensemaking environment of Web 2.0 is an ‘economy of attention’.  What I meant to say is that it is an ‘economy of prestige’, where attention is to prestige what cents are to dollars.

We ‘pay attention’ to people online, and in so doing we give them ‘prestige’.  The thing about prestige, as Cataldi and Aufaure found in their 2015 paper “The 10 million follower fallacy: audience size does not prove domain-influence on Twitter”, is that it rarely extends beyond a certain domain of ‘expertise’.

Online, we talk of well-connected hubs as being ‘influencers’: the prestige they gain from the attention of friends and followers enables these hubs to exercise influence upon them, with long tails into their weak-tie networks.  But Cataldi and Aufaure found that the influence of hubs rarely extends beyond a domain in which they are acknowledged to be expert by their followers, and therefore have prestige.

And not only are the most influential hubs ‘highly levelled’, the domains in which they are acknowledged to be ‘expert’ are influential, and thus ‘highly levelled’.

This is the case of celebrities such as movie stars, pop musicians, and politicians: they are regarded as being ‘authoritative’ in their respective domains by the incoming edges who direct attention to them, and the credibility these hubs have with their incoming edges underwrites what I call a ‘prestige economy’—an economy of preferential attention.

However, despite their inordinate penetration into weak-tie networks, most hubs don’t have significant influence beyond their domains of prestige.

As Cataldi and Aufaure noted, when Barack Obama (who was the most influential hub in the political domain on Twitter at the time of their study) tweeted information in fields other than the strictly political, the dissimilarity of this information with the interests, preferences and biases of those edges affiliated with him because of his perceived authority in the political domain tended to restrict its virality.

However, well-positioned hubs whose influence straddles adjacent, highly-levelled domains of interest, and who thus have the attention of incoming edges across multiple domains, have the potential to activate virality at the cascade level due to their extraordinary degree of penetration into diverse weak-tie networks.

And the information which is most viral;—that is, which tends to spread the farthest fastest in social networks forced to operate under the extractive assumptions of the Scientific Managerial paradigm;—is bilious, banal, and abusive, exercising the attention of the cognitive commons in negative ways.

I am in indebted to Olivier Driessens of Ghent University for providing the next conceptual component in the model of online viral incivility I am proposing.  In his journal article “Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory” (2013), Driessens extends Pierre Bourdieu’s analyse des champs by adding a new form of ‘capital’ to Bourdieu’s taxonomy which I think is useful in understanding what I am calling the online ‘economy of prestige’.

Driessens, adapting his definition of ‘celebrity capital’ from the work of Robert van Krieken and Joshua Gamson respectively, describes it as ‘a specific kind of attention-generating capacity’ that is not reducible to Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic capital’—another name for ‘distinction’, or what I am calling ‘prestige’.

According to Driessens, ‘celebrity capital finds its material basis in recurrent media representations or accumulated media visibility.’

In the model of online viral incivility I am proposing, you first gain ‘celebrity capital’ by generating large numbers of incoming edges who are in sympathy with your interests, preferences and biases.  The key driver of virality is the capacity to extractively centralize the attention of incoming edges, whose esteem hierarchically elevates you as a hub of influence.  At this stage, viral influence is local and threshold.

At the point where you become a hub, you have amassed sufficient celebrity capital within the field as to be able to convert the currency of inward attention into Bourdieu’s ‘social capital’: you now have a network of minds centralized to yourself who acknowledge your authority and prestige in a given field.

The preponderant social capital you have gained within this cluster is being disseminated to the in-group’s weak-tie network, gaining more or less attention from users with adjacent interests, preferences and biases.  To the greater or lesser degree that the information you propagate through bile, banality or abuse is similar to the interests, preferences and biases of these weak-tie nodes on the periphery, to that same extent does your local, threshold capacity to generate viral incivility have the potential to cascade exponentially throughout the entire social network.

It does so because, when a certain level of critical mass is reached, the social capital you have centralized to yourself in a Pareto distribution is again convertible into Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic capital’.  The Pareto-dominant actor has ‘distinction’ within the field: his extraordinary authority is recognized as ‘legitimate’ by those under him in the hierarchy.

But, more tellingly in this model, symbolic capital is not merely recognized as legitimate by your followers, it is legitimated when it is misrecognized by your enemies.

What do I mean by this?

If you have accrued such a Pareto-dominant following that you have acquired symbolic capital with a cluster of people sympathetic to you, the mere fact that those outside the cluster who do not regard your symbolic capital as legitimate pay you any attention at all is itself a recognition of the legitimacy of your symbolic capital.

In an attentional economy, you gain prestige even from your enemies.  If you have surfed the exponent to the extent that it has brought you to the awareness of those most dissimilar to you in their interests, preferences and biases, and who thus regard you as a threat to be watched, you are further compounding the attention you are extracting from the network.

The classic example I would adduce of just how far surfing an exponential wave of bile, banality and abuse can take an individual actor, a well-positioned hub capable of transcending fields under the model I am proposing, is the present leader of the free world.

Mr. Donald J. Trump is a hub who had celebrity capital across multiple fields—principally financial and entertainment—when he chose to run for the highest office in the land.

As a hub with an inordinate weak-tie network, he was able to convert the celebrity capital he had centralized to himself with his bilious, banal and abusive plays for attention into a huge social network of minds, many of whom were prepared to accept him as an authority in a field he had, in 2016, no legitimate pretensions to—the political.

Having centralized attention to himself, Mr. Trump had an inordinate number of clustered vectors in adjacent domains along which he could propagate bile, banality and abuse in viral surges which were capable of washing through his extraordinary weak-tie network into the social network as a whole.

Activating the social capital he had accrued by exercising his social network with cascade surges of bile, banality and abuse, Mr. Trump gained the attention of enemies who exponentially contributed to the symbolic capital he had gained with his followers.  Their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of his claims to the political field was itself a compounding recognition of the legitimacy of the symbolic capital he had gained with his followers—for his enemies invested him with the symbolic aura of a bogeyman one should pay attention to, and be legitimately fearful of.

Whatever you think of Mr. Trump, I submit his Pareto dominance on social media as the exemplar of my theory of how the externalities of online viral incivility operate under the Faustian, Scientific Managerial paradigm.

Bile, banality and abuse work.  Swap out Mr. Trump for your favourite YouTuber as an example of ‘bile’, or your favourite model on Instagram as an example of ‘banality’, and I think my theory holds.

In their review of the literature, Antoci and his colleagues found ample evidence to support the empirical observation that many social media users have made: that people—including themselves—are much more ready to behave badly online than in face-to-face interactions with others.  Experiments show that computer-mediated communication tends to make users more impulsive in responding to textual cues, more assertive—even aggressive—in their speech and writing, and quicker to abandon the civility they would ordinarily employ in face-to-face encounters.

In other words, computer-mediated communication tends to ‘disinhibit’ people.  As Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire put it in a pioneering study, ‘The overall weakening of self or normative regulation might be similar to what happens when people become less self-aware and submerged in a group, that is, deindividuated.’

I have already observed that clusters in social networks form around shared interests, preferences and biases.  The deindividuated anonymity of computer-mediated communication, the way the screen itself acts as a ‘mask’, seems to lead to a decoupling of the spiritual and somatic senses of self: in the non-corporeal space of the online cluster, people coalesce in a metastatic fashion with other disembodied avatars who, like some perverse deity, are the million amorphous faces of the ideas, opinions and ideologies which collectively, memetically possess them.

Thus you have a basis for the polarized virality we see on social media, as armed camps of decorporealized, deindividuated agents coalesce around ego-based ideas of ‘who they think they are’.

And yet the curious paradox of this process of deindividuation is that every node in the cluster of memetic possession feels itself to be an ‘authentic individual’.  Certainly, as Driessens admits, one cannot acquire celebrity capital without recognizability, the differentiated ‘well-knownness’ which comes from repeated self-representation on social media and accumulated visibility within the panoptic cluster.

Gina Gustavsson, of Uppsala University, put forth an interesting metric with which to measure how different people value individualism in her paper “The Problem of Individualism” (2007).  On the one hand, we have what Gustavsson calls ‘internal individualism’, or freedom of thought, and on the other, ‘external individualism’, or freedom of action.

In Gustavsson’s view, low internal individualism is a function of subconscious forces within the individual himself, lower ‘selves’ consisting of ‘irrational desires such as passionate love and hatred or the need I might feel to conform to others’ expectations, or to distinguish myself from others and show originality at any cost.’

This is the ‘memetic possession’ of deindividuated virality which I spoke of.  A person with low internal individualism is fettered by these memetic lower ‘selves’, which interfere with his capacity for sovereign, original, individual thought.  He is the prey of ideology, and within the cluster, individuals accrue celebrity capital from the paradoxical display of an outrageous, provocative ‘originality’ which is, in fact, deeply conformist with the interests, preferences and biases of the in-group.

With viral contagions on social media, I would contend, what you see is a deindividuated coalescence of phony ‘individuals’ clustered around charismatic hubs with whom they identify their ‘individuality’.  And these hubs, it should be mentioned, are themselves often under the memetic possession of ideology.

The lower ‘selves’ of the in-group may be provoked to reaction by out-group others in the online space, and certainly, as Antoci and his colleagues found in their survey of the literature, these lower ‘selves’ do not restrain the person low in internal individualism from behaving uncivilly online.

Interestingly, Gustavsson proposed that a person high in internal individualism, one who intrinsically values freedom of thought, will value freedom of action instrumentally, as a mechanism to safeguard his intrinsic value.  Conversely, a person high in external individualism, one who intrinsically values freedom of action, will instrumentally value the freedom to think what he likes in order to guarantee that he can do what he likes.

According to Gustavsson, those who prefer external individualism will manifest a high preference for doing, rather than thinking, whatever they like.  In the online space, if you value the right to ‘be who you are’ (or rather, who you believe yourself to be), in the prestige economy of social media, the right of free speech is instrumental to acquiring celebrity capital for the still more instrumental purpose of activating social capital in the viral dissemination of memetic representations of who you believe yourself to be.

This, of course, creates externalities in the networked commons.  The instrumental abuse of free speech, which I said, in my second post, is merely the mechanism by which free thought flows in the neural network of our cognitive commons, by virally disseminating bile, banality and abuse may privately profit the individual low in internal individualism, but it socializes a cost we all must bear.

And when, as a species, we face multiple exponential curves of existential crisis, the exponential propagation of viral incivility in our collective thinking space prevents us from leveraging the geometric capacity of our cognitive network to evolve exponentially scalable solutions.

In the face of viral incivility online, more and more of us opt out of the conversation, leaving the field to the most uncivil players to extract the most attention with bile, banality and abuse.  And thus our quintessential cultural product becomes, as Antoci and his colleagues defined it, a ‘social poverty trap’.

In their conclusions, Antoci et al. stated that ‘the government should probably enforce policies to prevent defensive self-isolating behaviours….’  Perversely, we see, in the Coronavirus crisis, governments actually enforcing policies of defensive self-isolation which lead to precisely the social poverty trap Antoci and his colleagues warned against.

Given that we cannot go out of our houses—possibly for months—due to the viral externalities in our physical environment, I hazard that we will see the viral externalities in our online social environment increase as people are thrown back upon the cognitive commons for social interaction, and that many more people will ‘opt out’ of the conversation around finding solutions to our common crises.

With social poverty traps without and social poverty traps within, the personal cost to individuals of ‘thinking publicly’ in a poisonous environment might be too great.