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There will be another technology for connecting.

Tapscott & Williams propose that there are 4 principles for collective intelligence to exist:

1. Openness
2. Peering
3. Sharing
4. Acting globally

The Twitter conversation significantly changes the Openness, Peering and Acting Globally conditions. You gain followers by being open and treating individuals as peers. The ability to gather a global community of interested members makes for a powerful tool.

I’m interested to the answers to the 4 questions you provide at the end of the post.

@davidcrow – http://twitter.com/davidcrow

Why use a metaphor, then, if it’s so likely to be misunderstood? If you take your idea seriously, I would think you’d want to take the time to express it in language that captures its essence, rather than using a metaphor so likely to distract or mislead your interlocutors with the baggage it carries along with it.

At any rate: I don’t have serious conversations on Twitter. It’s wonderful for developing a sense for what I call “the Big Here,” but a lousy channel for contemplation and reflection. Which isn’t its fault, right? I mean, why should we expect that insight and subtlety of thought require anything but hard and mostly solitary work?

Adam, I particularly appreciate your comment. What little I know of your work I know from seeing you speak at LIFT on ubiquitous computing. So I appreciate your critique – both for its smackdown and insight qualities.

The way I think of periphery in this context is all those who, by choice or issues of access, do not join the accelerating open micro-content communication revolution. My concern about this widening gulf is precisely that the hyper-connected few pat themselves on the back and redesign the world while either ignoring or patronizing the disconnected many.

I think the idea of a superorganism is a useful metaphor. Clearly it is ONLY a metaphor, with limits to its usefulness. Of course humans have remarkable individual creative agency unavailable to a bee or ant. We always have free will and freedom of choice, but the construction of those choices happens within a social context, a context being transformed by our technologies.

As we reconfigure our social and political institutions in part along self-organizing rather than hierarchical lines, I think the concepts of “collective intelligence”, “swarm intelligence” or “superorganism” provide useful patterns for insight into the dynamics of the systems we are remaking for ourselves.

In fact, I’m very curious about how these emerging dynamics connect with your concept of the , a “manifesto on open-source constitutions for post-national entities”. I need to sit down with that and ponder, and encourage the commenters to this post to read it and offer their thoughts.

Join the convo on Twitter, hashtag: #swarmintelligence.

First off: count me out of your “we,” please.

Secondly, and more importantly: consider for a moment that the “non-connected periphery” may (a) not consider themselves to be at all peripheral and (b) may not want to be connected to your benevolent colonial organism at all.

In order to arrive at a valid understanding of “whose interests are harmed,” you’re first going to have to reckon with the full agency, autonomy and humanity of that “periphery.” I don’t get a whiff of that from your comments here.

Thirdly: You’re not at all concerned that self-awareness and self-consciousness – i.e. the wellsprings of what we’re pleased to call our humanity – only interfere with the resolution of collective-action and coordination problems? That if all you want to do is optimize against such problem sets, you need very little more than algorithmic local intelligence? That you may be not-so-subtly devaluing and deprecating everything that separates us from minnows, or ants, or neurons?

And finally: The Movement? Really?

We need action, we need to try things, we need to start now. We can’t plan this. If it is happen it will happen, we can only do more, and more will be different.

There’s an openness to this, but even more interesting is the power relations mentioned. I imagine the unjustified power of hierarchy has something to lose, and the budding power of global betterment something to gain.

Some thoughts in response to your provocative questions…

1. How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?

But in a network there are multiple cores and multiple peripheries – one man’s core is another’s periphery. So isn’t this really relative? Any single core will have a periphery that is, well, inherently peripheral… unless we’re talking about reaching out to any given core’s given periphery…but there’s always periphery…

2. How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?

Here’s where we need new innovative “intermediary” structures…i like to think that CSI is trying to do this…and the movement among others… but here’s where i think a lot of new activity will take place in the coming years…

3. How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?

This question plagues me. Can it be done incrementally? Or does it require destruction/rebirth? Some structures are so entrenched and so ossified that it’s hard to imagine how anything other than their collapse could really result in change… but i look to Obama’s example as a potential way of incrementally changing a firmly established set of structures…

@remarkk