Emergence

I just read Critical Mass: How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly (via Politech) and it really struck me because I’m also in the middle of reading Emergence. What strikes me isn’t the content, exactly. (To be honest I’m finding Emergence a little boring, perhaps because I’ve already read most of the sources the author cites.) What is interesting to me is how bottom-up organizational principles seem to be what everybody is thinking about these days. Which I can understand, because it’s exciting stuff.

While the meme du jour seems to be focused on bottom-up organization of people, I’m still interested in it as far as it applies to software. What can I say, computers just make a much more efficient lab for studying these things than mobs do. I’ve really been interested in this stuff since I first read Artificial Life in high school, but ended up ignoring it when I got to college because I thought I was a physics major (silly me). Now my interest is being rekindled, particularly because there are so many high-level network effects happening online today (web services and blogging being particularly good examples).

I guess what really got me thinking was when I started using AXIS today. It was so easy. Little more than a year ago that I was working for Palm.Net writing huge, complicated wrappers around a customized version Apache SOAP just so that other developers could integrate SOAP into their projects without doing backflips. Today, you just drop a Java file with a JWS extension into a servlet context and voila — you’ve got web services. It’s enough to make me think there really may be something to this web services thing. Computers talking to computers, over the Internet with millions of possible participants, takes this emergence thing to a whole new level.

Not that I have any concrete plans for exploring these ideas. This is all basically sleep-deprivation-induced rambling. I think that the bottom-up organizational stuff is resonating particularly well with me these days is because I’ve been working very hard recently on applying a lot of top-down structure to the code, processes, and people I work with. Maybe I should just kick back and let chaos reign…