Tonight i was in Amsterdam watching Michel give his P2P talk at deWaag in Amsterdam. While i have seen this lecture quite a few times, something happened tonight that struck me as not completely ringing true. Michel lays down a developmental model that we all start as tribal societies working together in groups until we reach the number of 150 people or Dunbar number necessitating the development of hierarchies to manage complexity. He then goes on to argue that it is only with the deployment of the networked structure of the Internet that we can once again overcome the complexity of the Dunbar number in forming networked small teams precipitating peer production, Linux, etc. But wait a minute. We already had small teams working together before the advent of the Internet and without hierarchies produced under peer production. What exactly is the difference compared to the present?
Well the significant differentiator seems to be the ability to store information and then relate to it as an object of permanent reference compared to our transitory human memory storage system which if i remember Howard Rhinegold refers to as the shift from episodic to permanent memory. This of course rears Jyri Engstrom’s Object Centered Social Model once again. At the same time the ease at which we are able to almost freely store data to form these social objects lowers the barrier to entry yet further. For example where groups used to form before and talk with each other, that communication was continued by individuals from those groups recording their thoughts(constructed train of thoughts) and afterthoughts(reflecting on discussions) in documents and perhaps published in some form of printed material distributed by hand, snailmail or via email during the early Internet days. Now with the advent of social networking platforms, blogs, wikis, email, that maintain a permanent, transparent(open for all with an internet connection to view and respond) and more rapidly iterating dialogue and combined with automated transportation technologies like rss and email alerts we are more in touch with a faster input/output rate of communication and as a consequence of, exposed to a new mixture of gaseous fluids, a new enrichment agent that breeds new forms of life. Out of that primordial soup has emerged a newly constituted and defined mode of production. So actually although the Dunbar number is useful in Michel’s original thesis it ends up being merely “a” component of how cooperation has changed and how peer production is enabled in the Internet Age. Probably i have misquoted Michel so this is an open ended post to ask for a response in clarifying his thoughts on this subject.
Hi James,
Thanks for this very interesting comment. However, I consider it as a complement rather than as a refutation of the thesis.
The key argument I’m advancing is that peer governance and production, i.e. direct decision-making by participants, has existed before, but on the smaller scale of small locally-close communities. As soon as a certain scale set-in, hierarchy would be introduced. The argument of Dunbar is that the human mind has physical limitations dealing with relational complexity, and that therefore, as soon as the group reaches a certain level, there is a re-simplification process. Indeed hierarchy essentially means that decisions must be able to be taken by the ‘man at the top’, so that is a extraordinary reduction in complexity, but it is of course, also a bottleneck and impediment.
But what if we have a technology which allows the global coordination of small teams, i.e. in fact what the internet and web enable? This is the crux of the argument, and I don’t see how that is undermined by your thesis.
Two extra caveats: I’m not sure that only the Dunbar number applies, in my experience as SME entrepreneur and director at multinationals, I noticed a similar phenomena already occurring at around 25 people, but that is just a non-scientific hunch.
Furthermore, we should also see that the internet effect had been anticipated by the other communication tools, but it is just that it enabled a quantitative jump in the scale of the possibilities, by reducing dramatically both physical and immaterial (mental) transaction costs.
What you bring to the table is another effect of our digital technologies, and I agree that it is a very important factor about which I had not thought. Yes of course, the ability to store the collective knowledge is really crucial, and is what leaves a trace to build on.
So both the arguments are components of this broader and fundamental shift, they are different aspects of the internet revolution that enables the large-scale emergence of P2P.