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Comment by kopo | Hacker News Reader

We don't really need a lot of the leadership positions we currently have. Hierarchies are possible/required when networks aren't fully connected up. As an extreme example to convey the point, Genghis Khan and Napolean play a huge role when the world is disconnected. But today the world is hyperconnected, so what does society do with its Genghis Khan characters? These people are busy trying to assert their innate Genghis-ness (see Mark Zuckerberg) but the network is so much more massive it will steamroll them sooner or later. Whats important in hyperconnected networks is consensus on direction. We are going through a transition from hierarchy to a fully connected network and we still have too many self deluding/self important characters trying to resist that.

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What makes you think that now, rather than all points in history, our "transition from hierarchy to a fully connected network" will work? Seems to me entities made up of many people are organized hierarchically for good reason.

Yes there are very good reasons for hierarchy.

Stability of the group being the main one (i.e. preventing it from splintering). Who ever is at the top of the hierarchy is expected to resolve the battles/differences unfolding at the lower levels to keep it stable especially when it is in competition with another hierarchy.

Will the transition work? Yes it will because we are at a point where no one individual or org has the power to dominate the network anymore. The network has grown orders of magnitude larger than any single hierarchy within it. And the pressure on each hierarchy to NOT splinter away is huge.

Just watch the guys at the top being overwhelmed. The 2008 financial crisis showed what happens when the network is threatened. It just pushes people to keep the larger network intact. It doesn't matter what their job titles are or where they individually stand in the hierarchy.

Same pressure you will see coming to bear on one Genghis Khan type character after another try to wrestle for overall control or disconnect to maintain control. Things will keep blowing up in their faces with all kinds of unintended and unpredictable consequences. Look at Facebooks fakenews response from 2 years ago to today. Look at whats happening with Brexit pushback. Look at Iran and North Korea not wanting to be isolated. Look at China realizing the impact of a trade war. Look at Saudi feeling the pressure to change. Look at Google unable to get its own employees to build a Chinese search engine.

All these are signs the guys at the top of all these hierarchies are struggling to get their hierarchies to do what they want because these hierarchies are now part of a much much larger network. And the only way they maintain its stability is to keep that network intact.

At these scales we aren't operating like a troupe of chimps or a pride of lions anymore with alphas. We resemble more a shoal of fish or a wildebeest herd. There is no central leadership.

And thats not a bad thing if you have ever seen a bunch of murmurating starlings. It will take some time for the Genghis Khan types to get with the programme though, at a cost to lot of people at the bottom of the food chain.

Are you being serious?

I almost agree with your sentiment however the prerequisite is that the group size is around 20 people. Earth has grown beyond where that is feasible and TCP/IP ain't gonna change shit. If you think about everyone on Earth in a connected graph the number of possible relationships in the world is 7 billion factorial. You're ever fully connecting that graph ever. And it will never be stable.

It's kind of stunning if you look at the majority of Africa and the Middle East and parts of South American those conquerer types are alive and well and steamrolling the network all day long.

It's not about being stable but the pressure on everyone to keep the fully connected network stable that matters. Wrote up a longer comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271594

Hmm I disagree with your conclusions.

What you seem to be describing is geopolitics. Honestly, not much has ever really changed.

I mean if I were to give a metaphor for how I see geopolitics has changed in the last 150 years I would say:

Imagine we are a group of kids going on a camp. First there is the argument over whether we should go on a camp at all. Next is the argument over where we should go. The last thousand years equates to fighting all the way there in the car. WWI and WWII were arguing over who got which bed after we arrived in the room. The first night came and went and followed by the first full day of camp. The first day of camp was going fine until it wasn't. That was brexit + Trump. A minor hiccup here and there but everyone lives in such close quarters at the moment we are all starting to get on each other's nerves. But mum and dad (The UN) tell us not to fight. One could break out but we try to keep the peace otherwise we know it's going to be miserable for everyone. Full scale warfare is a food fight away.

Human nature never changes but scale which it was never designed for tends to expose the very rough edges.

I am going to remember your going camping metaphor :) Minus mum and dad. This is the period where everyone figures out how to get along. Fingers crossed!

Sadly I think we hit peak getting along about 2 years back.

As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm. If you think about even the difficulty of maintaining stable relationships with the handful of people you know it's actually really damn challenging. Occasionally you have fights and disagreements and sometimes you think fuck it I just can't deal with you anymore or right now. If it's like that for everyone on Earth in their personal lives then that's what Earth is going to be like in aggregate roughly speaking.

I don't mean to be a downer about it. I just think we have a very rosy view of "the world gets better and progress gets made and that's the natural state of things". I've come to realize that that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when you look at the history of the world over the last 12 to 13 thousand years.

As it stands this is mostly a happy accident. Scariest thing is it can all go back the other way.

This is true in the sense that there is no nice safe straight path up a hard to climb mountain.

There are going to be ups and downs. And yes we are fucking things up right now, because exploiting each other is easier than helping each other climb. But its all part of learning. The more we fuck up the more we learn how not to fuck up. And have learnt a lot. About human behavior thanks to trump and brexit. If tech and psychology can mislead entire populations by pushing a couple buttons, it can also do the opposite. Those buttons are being cooked up as we speak.

I don't think we are going to have any more great world wars (people around the world aren't as desperate to enroll in the military as they once were for employment) but we are going to have huge shocks to the system that will force us each time to learn from our fuck ups. It's not going to be a nice pleasant stroll up the mountain. But human nature is to climb nonetheless.

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