Allow me to express a contrary opinion on one small point:

The Sovereign Individual. Not much new thinking here. Warmed over. Ayn Rand. Neoliberalism. But on the plus side it’s in the bargain bin, so you won’t pay much if you do decide to pick it up!

I read this book back in the nineties and have to regretfully turn thumbs down to this book for three reasons

1. The book was dead wrong with its predictions. Written in 1997, it predicts a huge weakening of state power. Actually, the precise opposite has happened since September 11; the state has used terrorism fears to vastly increase its powers. And the power of the WTO and similar organizations to curb government’s activities has faded somewhat since then.

2. The authors were ludicrously wrong in the past. Check out “The Great Reckoning, Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression” (1994). Still waiting for the Great Depression, twelve years later. Not much of a track record in the prognostication game, but I give them points for trying.

3. To be quite honest, I disagree with most of what the authors stand for, which is concisely that

a)The worst thing that can happen to an individual is that they have to pay tax and accept regulation of their economic activities

b)And nothing else really matters

Through collaboration we strenghten our memes and emerge new ones, generating new insights, concepts and ideas.

We are also expanding our field of effective cognitive and perceptual possibilities.

I like what Thomas said about context – can we extent that metaphor, and use context as an organizing governing principle, not just a method of encapsulating a “wireframe”?

After all, context delineates a field of perceptual possibilities.

If something is outside of that field, it is difficult to cognicize. Isn’t that what we are doing with tagging – propagating and distributing context, and both allowing and inviting mass participation to broaden the field of perceptual possibilities.

This is also linked to our discussed ideas around identity, as expressed through the potential of self organization and actualization, perhaps through addressing issues and solving problems as key concepts of governanace.

When solving problems and addressing issues, we can perhaps benefit from matching this field of perceptual possibilities of both the problem as defined, and the corresponding proposed solution-set (as a specific solution strategy, Verifier Method is doing some interesting work around this).

The overall general approach can perhaps provide us with some more room to play. By considering the “totality” of an issue (imagine a multi-dimensional representation of an issue in blogosphere, for instance, as facets of a multidimensional structure), we can first render complex problems into their composite facets, and then associate them with cognitively equivalent problems that are easier to solve (standard mathematical technique).

The distributed community approach can play a key role in this process.

Mark’s comments brings new insight into the possibilities of emergent politics and opens some exciting questions – including what would the tools of emergent politics look like?

As Mark points out, what can we effectively use from emergence and complexity theory and apply it to self-governing structures, including what we consider as key elements of such structures?

For instance, are distributed content *and* context applied in equal measure, or are they 70/20/10? (And if so, what’s the missing part?)

What are we in need of emerging the most – content or context? And, does this differ with respect to a given problem, situation, or proposed solution-set? We can then perhaps apply some of the complexity and emergence tools to starting exploring how to address those issues.

As Rohan implies, the Creative Class adds key elements of engagement that change the operating dynamics of the system. Butterflies?

The union hall won’t be very impressed by most of this stuff. Unions usually look after their members by protecting the status quo as much as possible. Change of any kind threatens what the union is there to preserve.

Getting out of Weber’s cage may indeed be a promising outcome. But it would take time for that to extend beyond certain elites, and during this transitional period I expect the future to look anything but bright for those left behind. Especially when members of the Creative Class maximize their abilities by outsourcing the non-creative parts of their work to non-members. The Google Image Labeler can be fun, but probably not if you had to do it for a living.

Goran’s really taken this to the next level, in an unexpected way. Emergence and complexity and the laws of self-organization.

I made reference to this book in a post on Tara Hunt’s blog with respect to her concept of community in Pinko Marketing. She states that “community is about chaos” which I think has some truth in it, but doesn’t shed much light. I argue that community EMERGES from chaos according to laws that can be understood.

Moreover, my own conceptualization of politics and community in a social media world may not be very helpful either. Emergence and complexity, yes of course. Try having that conversation at the union hall! At this point, is this all theoretical and well and good but not terribly useful? Do we have tools for emergent politics?

The key ideas here may also be related to concepts of signal-to-noise ratio and filtering barriers. Whenever you introduce an intermediary, it’s like an element in a circuit that affects the quality of the current flowing through it (whether that “current” is currency, labour, resources, ideas or creativity).

By removing the need for and reducing the number of intermediaries, the signal incrases in relationship to “noise” – which may allow different types of messages to emerge, not just more of the same messages (emergent property related to scaling).

This dynamic may indeed neccessitate creation of new social relationships with associated political implications (some are likely to be disintermediated through this process, while new opportunities will open for others).

These new types of social relationships will likely create new, reinterpreted social contexts that are mitigated in more distributed and decentralized ways (the Camps are a striking example).

There may be some interesting implications of this:

1. Since the new social intermediary is neutral and distributed, it is more impervious to effects of centralized disruption strategies
2. This provides an environment for creation and proliferation of stable, lasting new types of emergent social relationships
2. The new social relationships facilitate emergence of new identity, through a self-referrential process

Although we may not yet fully anticipate what this new identity is all about or how it will manifest externally, we can probably start mapping the underlying elements that are crucial to its formation.

The new identity will support the new ideology symbiotically – as both are emerging one another. One will probably be viewed as a symbolic representation of the other, in an archetypal sense. Scale is also likely to play an important role here.

However, the challenging question will be whether this new identity and the emergent ideology will have the sufficient power to “save us”, and actually provide fundamentally new possibilities for reinterpreting our world and our role in it.

Will it charter a way out of the Weber’s cage?

Since we are dealing with emergence and complexity as underlying organizing principles, i am optimistic that this is possible – the whole can be greater, perhaps.

The two implications you point out are, to me, brilliant new insights. I’m starting to smell future politics. With rare exceptions like Garth Turner, current politicians show little understanding of these emerging forces.

The old buckets just don’t apply the way they used to.

But it’s also ultimately an “it depends” ideology

for one, in many contexts could do with far more or just better laws and regulations in other contexts far less. and one’s answers to these survey questions are probably quite biased by simply whichever set of contexts come first to mind (or whichever the question makers plant in the questions)

it’s the importance of balance and context that I fear gets trampled underfoot in some of these conversations.