The Social Organism
- Maxime Boulat
by Oliver Luckett & Michael J. Casey
Introduction
The cascading metabolic actions that described the pathway from “cut to closure“ during coagulation:
Thrombocyte factors
Platelets
Shape-shifting, non-nucleated megakaryocytes
incredible spider-like glue of fibrin
Social media as an organism:
with individual users as cells
with internet networks as substrate
Viral content replicates in a manner similar to a virus by exploiting the cell’s internal machinery.
A biological virus will seek out receptors on the outer membrane of cells in order to gain entry to its cytoplasm. Once there, it will start to alter the cell’s DNA.
On social media, same think happens, but through “affinity receptors“. Once access has been gained, the content starts to alter the memetic code of the organism.
Life has 7 essential characteristics:
Cellular structure
Cells in the Social Organism form a holarchy. A holon (coined by Arthur Koestler) is an object whose activity is both autonomous but limited by and dictating the rules and activity of the wider group.
Metabolism: nourishment, during which chemicals (nutrients) and energy are converted into more cellular matter, generating waste as byproduct.
The constant influx of new posts can be viewed as the nourishment which these cells feed from. All the posts that get rejected can be viewed as the waste.
Growth and complexity
As the Social Organism feeds, it grows in complexity.
Homeostasis: organisms regulate their internal environment to keep it in a stable state.
Concept of metabolic pathways: chemical reactions along which molecular components coordinate action. The temptation to interfere through censorship or ownership interferes with that mechanism.
Response to stimuli: Living things respond to changes in their external environment, instituting change in their makeup and behavior to protect themselves.
Hashtag movements are compared to immune system response: irritants / antigens that elicit a response to fight against pathogens.
Reproduction: Living things produce offspring.
Adaptation / Evolution: Transferring survivor genes to their offspring.
Social Media as driver of cultural evolution.
Chapter 1: The algorithm of life
Annual Cotton Carnival in North Mississippi and East Tenesse.
Role of the Bool Weevil Brigade.
Bool Weevil is a beetle which is the scourge of cotton farmers. Shining example of the forces of evolution, mutation and natural selection at work.
Darwin’s theory of evolution.
“If there is variation across species and if the distribution of finite resources requires a process of selection among competing living organisms, then those individual beings with variations best suited to obtaining those resources will survive and pass on their traits to their offspring.”
Daniel Dennett: “A scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of the Mind“
Cesar Hidalgo: information is constantly growing to give order and structure to matter in a universe which tends towards entropy and disorder.
A tree is a computer powered by sunlight.
Human societies give rise to “crystals of imagination“ such as computers, machines, dwellings, tools etc.
Individuals, companies, economies evolve towards ever-more complex computing and networking systems.
The greater the number of nodes and complexity in a network, the greater the total pool of computational power.
Chapter 2: From steeples to Snapchat
Emile Durkheim coined the term “Social Organism“: society as a living being whose health was determined how well the core realms of economics, politics, and culture interact with each other.
David Sloan Wilson: Darwin’s Cathedral (about religion’s role in the evolution of societies and civilization).
Religion helped increase societies' computational capacity.
“Until the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and others were burnished with the weight of scholarly curiosity and empiricism and became more widely accepted, people’s pattern recognition capacity was constrained.“
The Church as one of the world’s earliest and most successful broadcast networks.
Gutenburg’s printing press and the rise of educated middle class.
Then came Photography, wireless, moving picture, broadcast television and cable TV.
Social media represents a more evolved state for society’s mass communication architecture.
Centralized vs decentralized vs distributed networks.
Baran invented the distributed network.
US telecommunication network, at the center of which sat AT&T Corp’s Bell System.
point to point communication between two telephone based on the codes in each phone’s number.
Daves and “packet switching“ in the 60s → ARPANET → TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol).
Usenet groups, organized around threads of conversation.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): a computing language for creating online documents that formed links over a network via special pieces of embedded code.
Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic browser, later known as Netscape Navigator.
Telecom Act of 1996.
Advent of blogs.
Gordon Moore’s law (former Intel CEO): computational capacity, measured by the number of transistors that can fit on a microchip, doubles every two years.
Robert Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes.
RSS (Rich Site Summary)
Early influencers:
Justin Hall (video games)
Andrew Sullivan (political)
Mario Armando Lavandera Jr aka Perez Hilton (gossip)
Erosion of traditional journalism business model, lots of newspapers went out of business.
Rise of the Huffington Post and Gawker model.
Rise of the Social networks, where the metabolic pathways are the connections between users.
First one was called SixDegrees.com
Friendster
Myspace
“In order to grow, maintain homeostasis, and adapt to survive in the event of a change in the environment (in this case the arrival of a competitor, Myspace), content delivery systems need to keep the Social Organism’s metabolism nourished and its pathways of communication open. Curtailing creativity works against that goal.“
Myspace peaked at 75.9 million users, pulling $800 million a year in classified ad revenues.
Facebook launched in 2004. Current user base is 1.5 billion.
Next frontier became video sharing. Youtube acquired by Google in 2006.
Instagram started as a photo sharing app.
Snapchat, putting time limit of on the availability of the content for designated recipients.
Vine, for short video loops, in Nov 2015: 200 million users.
Overseas:
In China:
Facebook clone RenRen
Twitter clone: Weibo
Ebay, Kickstarter, Uber, Airbnb, Github, Stack Overflow
Howard Bloom: The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. Talks about the ancestral battle between bacteria and microbes and multicellular organisms.
Ray Kurzweil, Singularity will be upon us by 2045:
“The point at which a computer-driven artificial intelligence reaches a kind of super-intelligence that removes it from control of inferior human beings and enters a process rapidly reinforcing self-improvement cycles“.
Richard Dawkins: The selfish gene.
Chapter 3: The age of holarchy
Commonality between the Volvox (a green algae formed of spherical colonies) and the structure of the internet as visuallized by the Opte Project The Internet: 1997 - 2021 Full Length
Role of the influencers as sources of signal in the holonic structure:
Nash Grier (Vine)
By mid-216: 12.7 million followers
3.4 billion views
5.5 million followers on Twitter
Network of sub-influencers
Cody Johns
Greg Davis
Lele Pons
Andrew Bachelor (King Bach)
15 million followers
5.6 billion loops
Music promotion
Michael and Carissa (folk-pop music)
Shawn mendes
Jack and Jack
Review of toys
EvanTubeHD
DCToyCollector
PewDiePie
Influencers as super-spreaders
Is this the new oligarchy? No, because the barriers to entry are a lot lower than for traditional (brick and mortar) oligarchies.
to maintain its position, the influencer must maintain a steady level of sub-influencers. Relates to homeostasis, to maintain a stable internal environment, the metabolic pathways must be open and unbroken.
Viewers as distribution mechanism which must be sustained through nourishment.
Example of Taylor Swift’s empire.
Personal connection with her fans
Visiting a dying child
“Since social media occupies a holonic structure in which the autonomous members of the network represent both the target audience and the distribution system, emotions are now the primary tool for spreading ideas and artistic works.“
The field of Holonics
Coined by Arthur Koestler in 1960s (The Ghost in the Machine)
It’s a series of units which are nested into one another in a chain of ever greater scale.
Author goes on to babble about how companies need to restructure to themselves to be more horizontal and use empathy to regulate the interactions between the self organizing holons…
Chapter 4: Cracking the memetic code
Evolution of Watergate as a meme, first, a piece of technology. Then a place, then a hotel, then a scandal, then the suffix “gate“.
Richard Dawkins: a meme is a unit of cultural transmission.
meme compete to survive in an environment where there are limited computing resources (the finite number of brains available to ingest new memes).
The brains are limited by the following:
memory
information processing capacity
time
The contagion effect: “The history of mankind is the history of contagious ideas“ (Dan Zarella).
This process of replication and mutation (rate of memetic mutation) relate to rule 6 and 7 of the biological rulebook.
The field of memetics.
Much more nebulous than other scientific fields because hard to quantify memes.
Scientists attempting to pinpoint the passage of thoughts and ideas from one brain to the next using imaging technology.
Looking for scientific definitions of a meme.
Computers can help us visualize the rate of transmission
7000 new tweets / second
1000 new images / second on Instagram
Memes as acts of collective human creativity
Ermahgerd meme history
Social media and the proliferation of memes destroying the creative industries?
Audience is no longer “captive“
Labor statistics indicates that there are more artists than ever before
Social media fosters artistic innovation
New pathways to creative collaboration between artists
vocaloid community for example
The methods with which viral content propagates
We usually don’t spread memes intentionally, we do it inadvertently during the act of “performing“ our selfhood on social media.
Viruses have a singular purpose, they highjack resources and genetic material from living cells to self-replicate. 4 distinct phases:
capsids (outer shell housing the virus’s genetic material) try to bind to cell’s outer receptors.
Requires compatibilities with protein structure of the receptor
once attached, the capsid tries to enter the cell using variety of protein-based signals intended to deceive the cell into believing that the virus contains nutritional or other value.
once inside, virus trick the cell’s protein production process to follow the instructions in its own genome
Once in control, the virus multiplies multiple times until the cell bursts open, releasing the new clones back into the metabolism, where they recursively multiply following the same method.
The virus experiences exponential growth until the immune system is able to regain control.
Viral content follows a similar journey:
Binding to the target cell’s affinity receptors (assimilation, Francis Heylighen) requires a certain level of compatibility.
Pattern recognition is used by the cell to detect threats
Heylighen’s criteria for successful assimilation
distinctiveness
novelty
conformity (to existing mental framework)
authority
Clickbait formula “You’re no going to believe what happens next“
Retention: committing it to some form of memorization
Expression: encode it in a transferrable form
that is where mutations come into play
Transmission: send the re-encoded package to others
Depends on the breadth of the network, the connectedness and the appeal of the sender.
What should a meme contain?
Emotions are the key ingredients, because of rule 5: Response to Stimuli:
Wharton Business School study on propensity to share news story based on emotional triggers.
Limbic system:
dopamine
endorphins
oxytocin
serotonin
Cute animals, jokes, trigger these neurotransmitters.
Anger triggers adrenaline, fight or flight response, which is also intoxicating.
Chapter 5: Balanced Diet
David Bowie, performativity, multiple versions of the self, Mimesis, story telling, deception
The selfie as the ultimate form of social media performance.
This dynamic of self-expression is not unidirectional. The audience’s reaction is also a factor in the final result.
While we can exercise total control over how we express our identity, we have no control over how The Social Organism will interpret, even reconstruct it.
Coke and Mentos videos anecdote.
Red Lobster and Beyonce (“When he fuck me good I take him to Red Lobster“)
Do not fight it
Don’t starve the organism with lawsuits
Wharton Business School study showed that the two attributes to replication were:
Emotional trigger
potential for action
Nourishment of the Social Organism needs to be well balanced (positive), it also needs to be well packaged.
non-linear, object based narrative form
posted as chunks in different streams so that they can be re-assembled as a coherent storyline through hashtags or search engine query.
Counter-example of #AskJPM
Watch your tone, don’t tell them what to think
Chapter 6: The immune system
Social media can be a very effective tool for causing social harm.
No negative feedback loop to deter people from engaging in the worst behavior.
The Social Organism is divided into echo chambers.
The power dynamics are similar to those of the real world, giving some groups disproportionate power (Gamergate for example)
Warring factions settle for an uneasy stalemate where neither party is able to overwhelm the other (??), therefore achieving equilibrium, like in nature (??).
Youtuber C. G. P. Grey “This Video will Make you Angry“ video. A point of symbiosis (homeostasis) is reached “where a super successful symbiotic pair of anger germs [reaches] ecological stability“.
Some memes however are treated as threats and the Social Organism hunts it down like an organism would a bacteria or parasite.
The dentist Walter Palmer who killed Cecil the lion.
#HasJustineLandedYet
Tim Hunt
Author compares this overcorrection with the immune system’s overreactions like allergies.
We need to evolve a more advanced memetic code which does not overreact (?!)
Anti-BLM response has prevented the purge of all the bad cops, yet it behaves very much like an immune response.
Then there are purely hateful memes, such as bullying of Serena Williams, which the author likens to social cancer.
What do we do about it? Again here, we need to evolve the memetic code so that it is more effective at detecting cancer….
Encourage positive uplifting content…
Humans of New York etc
However censorship does not work because it disrupts the metabolic pathways.
Chapter 7: Confronting our pathogens
Example of the refugee debate and how the picture of the drowned boy suddenly made everyone feel guilty
The world is becoming more inclusive.
Through exposure to pathogens we develop the means to fight them.
The argument of the author is that phenomenon like BLM change our collective DNA towards enlightenment.
Chapter 8: Thomas and Teddy
the problem of centralized control over content sharing.
Thomas Jefferson gave us constitutional commitment to the right to self-expression, Teddy Roosevelt gave us the Sherman Antitrust Act to break monopolies.
The problem is that the revenue model for the infrastructure of Social Media is selling ad space.
Ad blocking.
Digital currency micropayments and new ownership model enforced by a blockchain could solve that.
Decentralized social media platform owned by a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).
Would provide the transparency to conduct audits to sniff out bot farms for example.
Smart contracts: “A simple social media smart contract might respond to someone opening and embedding a particular artist’s work in a tweet, recognizing that act as fulfillment of a condition of the underlying usage agreement, and then irrevoicably transferring an amount from the user’s store of digital currency to the artist“.
Software logic as mathematical key to unlock a response, much like organic agents bind to molecular substrate using a snug lock-and-key structure to release chemical reactions.
The need to design a Cyber-legal system.
League of legends implemented a system of control based on community consensus which resulted in reduced toxicity.
The resulting arbitration mechanism would bleed over to the real world and necessitate cooperation from government authority.
for example with regards to net neutrality.
Internet service should be treated as a public good
Human rights, such as the right to privacy, must also be standardized across nations because of the transnational nature of the Social Organism.
Algorithm transparency.
Chapter 9: Digital culture
To retain our humanity in this computer-driven world, we must:
Ensure that the decisions of the engineers are documented in a tamper-proof ledger and that these decisions are driven by a community oriented consensus.
Must ensure that we feed it quality data and avoid destructive feedback loops.
Need to reform our institutions so that they meet a more holarchical model:
Education
Government
Need for social reconfiguration, concept of antidisciplinary (the merging of scientific disciplines), the great Entanglement.
importance of the communication network, the signaling mechanism for cause-and-effect responses.
Example of mycelium, network of fungi which acts as communication system for plants.
The Social Organism behaves similarly, with the “sensors“ in the hands of every user (the cameras etc.) able to capture information and communicate it throughout the network, potentially triggering a coordinated response.
Twitter with short length messaging is closer to pheromone type systems.
We are witnessing the formation of a new cellular organism.
In the face of such mesmerizing complexity, humility, not arrogance, should be displayed.
No guarantee that we wont wipe ourselves out in the process, but the Social Organism offers a path towards progress.