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Mathematical proof offered here by David Weinberger …
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Control doesn’t scale
by davidw
I sometimes put up a Powerpoint (well, treatment Keynote) slide that says “Control doesn’t scale.”The assumption that large projects only succeed if they’re centrally controls led and managed turns out to have been true because we limited the scope of what we we considered realistic. You can build a Britannica using a centrally controlled system, but you could not build a Wikipedia that way.
But I know that there are some important counter-examples, so I’ll frequently add, “Except at an huge cost in expense and freedom,” for we know all too well that some regimes have managed to maintain intense control over massive populations for generations.
Today there’s an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald with Isaac Mao, pioneering Chinese blogger and Berkman fellow, in which he says the Chinese authorities are unable to keep up with increasing volume of social communications the 108M bloggers, millions in social networks, and people texting and twittering away.
So, maybe control doesn’t scale after all.
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Rebuttal posted by Mark Federman …
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Mark Federman, on November 27th, 2008 at 7:02 pm Said:
Control scales really well – there’s lots of history that demonstrates this principle. Control scales either through direct coercion and threat, or it scales through hegemony and concertive control.
In the former case, as the population to be controlled increases, the ratio of controllers to controllees approaches 1:1 (see East Germany under the Stazi as an example). The example of China you give demonstrates what happens when the number of controllers is insufficient to maintain this ratio. In the latter case (hegemony and concertive control, both of which are social and scale very effectively), the ratio is much lower, since coercion-wielding authorities only have to deal with those who effectively become social pariahs.
The interesting situation occurs when a previously hegemonically controlled society begins to move away from accepting the hegemonic culture (e.g., as with the rise of the “organic intellectuals” according to Gramsci). That situation, viewed through the lens of complexity, describes many of the phenomena we’re observing that occur in the context of social networking environments, among those who have not been entirely socialized into the former cultural hegemony (ie. the so-called younger demographic).
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It seems to me that we have to specify the situation a little more. It depends what we want to do, the resources we have at hand, and our understanding of the situation.
The long wall coal mining studies made a good point: sometimes management costs more than it delivers. It strikes me that the ‘crisis’ we have at the moment is revealing the same sad fact. I might add that I regard myself as a managerialist – but I study it to make things better not to deliver unwarranted privilege.
What do you think of the House Meetings that BO is rolling across the US on Dec 13 and 14?