Project catechism for Stig People
Co-authored paper catechism for Stig People
Human-to-human stigmergic marking that promotes emergent collective behavior and creates emergent open-data social graphs with lots of uses.
Shouldn’t humans exhibit much more impactful, compelling superorganism behavior than we do?
Ants and other insects function as superorganisms through stigmergy, e.g. individuals deposit pheromones in their environment that cause larger collective behavior in their community. Termites build complex colonies, ants solve the traveling salesman problem, …
Humans in the 21st century are much more intelligent than insects, and have infinitely more diverse, complex, and subtle stigmergic actions at their disposal.
Yet Facebook and Twitter appear to be the most significant resulting superorganism behavior. That is a significant shortfall from what should be possible, no?
That is probably largely attributable to the fact that the landscape in play, and the algorithms that relate markers and actions within that landscape, are controlled by corporations whose only motivation is profit.
There is a lot of research around human stigmergy, primarily around:
These primarily assume an exterior environment in which humans perform actions, like the food landscape of ant colonies.
What if the stigmergic landscape was the humans themselves? Individual actions that drive complex community behavior would be the many things we naturally do with each other: