Anarchy vs. emergence

I found this passage in Lawrence Lessig’s Open Code and Open Societies (PDF) to be rather funny in the context of emergence: “[Joe] Reagle’s [of the W3C] first value [implicit in the design of the Internet] is a kind anarchy: that the net gets run not through some organized system of power, but through bottom-up control. As Net founder Dave Clark put it: “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” [...] It sounds to us [lawyers] like chaos. But the techno-anarchist is quick to lecture that our understanding of what “anarchy” is is, well, wrong. Anarchy is not about rulelessness. Anarchy is about bottom-up control.”

This illustrates, I think, pretty good why we have it so difficult with systems and organizations that are bottom-up rather than top-down: we perceive them to be anarchies. Anarchy is, I think, for most people a word with negative connotations – to a much greater degree than the word “chaos”, which I also think is close at hand when considering bottom-up control. “Anarchy” conveys to most of us that there are no interests but self-interests, no goals except egocentric goals (on the micro-level) and extremely short-term goals (if any, on the macro-level). So I think that instinctively, we prefer rigid hierarchies over seemingly anarchic networks of networks.

For more on this, see also here – here – here – here – here – and here.