Control
Who's in charge?
Once I worked in a printshop running a film processing machine that developed films that got transferred to printing plates. The development process had to be precise. Long story short - the development of the dots had to be very precise or the colors would be off when the sheet was printed.
I would monitor the system with control strips - pre-exposed strips of film from the manufacturer that I'd send through to be developed and then measure the results with a densitomiter. The densitomiter just measured how much a portion of the film impeded light. The idea was that if the measure was to low I'd give the system a shot of replinisher.
Seemed easy and as a conscientious I sent a test strip through once every half hour and adjust accordingly. That didn't work. I came to realize that my developer tank was a containing a bunch of chemicals undergoing very complex reactions. By injecting replenisher to the system before those reactions could settle I was creating chaos.
I started just sending test strips through just in the morning and just giving one shot of replenisher according to the measure. Things settled down right away.
Several times I've been way up a mountain road at the top of a pass looking down to the valley below with a bike loaded with a hundred pounds of gear. I didn't creep down. I was yahoo and road down no hands easily dodging the rocks fallen on the road from the cliffs above by subtle shifts in my weight. I zipped past cars stopped in panic.
I felt in control. I was lucky too.
A society is made of autonomous individuals each trying to make their way through life. There are some things we can control directly like housekeeping. But more often we need to work together in groups. Who controls the groups?
Nobody needs to control a group. They can self organize to do a task like run a bucket line to a house on fire. But many tasks work better if there's a boss.
Then the autonomous groups under a boss merge into bigger groups and of course there needs to be a way of controlling those meta groups.
This forms a fractal social structure. In the not so distant past this structure would generally terminate with some sort of monarch. A king or a queen.
About 300 or 400 years ago democracy emerged. I admit that I don't know the history of that emergence. The idea has been around for a long time; that the will of a majority should control the meta groups.
Sounds simple. All you need is a constitution that sets the rules of engagement and then people work things out for themselves.
What could possibly go wrong?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.