Throughout this essay, Johnson makes constant reference to "self-organized systems". A self-organized system is one that is constructed not by an outside influence or leader, but rather its own constituents. The system works whether or not the constituents are aware that the system exists or their role in it. Instead, it arises naturally from the regular interactions of its elements. Johnson uses the concept of a self-organization system to link ant colonies to urban planning. Just as ants seem to hide their midden pile away from the main colony, so to did the city of Manchester hide its underclass away from public. The remarkable aspect is that both of these tasks were accomplished without any sort of leadership. They simply evolved on their own, and this suggests something further about the fundamental nature of both ants and humans. Perhaps human, just like ants, are naturally inclined to hide the more raw and brutish aspects of ourselves and our society, whether or not a leader prompts us to do so?
The essay then goes in to define complexity in several different ways, of which one describes self-organizing systems. In describing the city of Manchester, Johnson writes, "The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions" (Johnson 199). Thus, complexity and self-organization are revealed to be closely linked ideas, both pertaining to the accumulation of small scale interactions. In these situations, as pointed out when Johnson discusses the 3 categories of problems for computers to solve, the shear number of factors and the way they interconnect is what makes these systems so complex.
This text seems to contrast with Davidson's viewpoint. Johnson seems to argue, especially with his example regarding Manchester, that groups of people working together without a leader will produce the same result as careful planning. On the other hand, Davidson argues that bottom-up collaboration and crowdsourcing is significantly better than education lead by leaders. What these authors can agree upon, however, is that when people are left to their own devices, whether it be the residents of Manchester or the students with their iPods, they will work together in incredibly complex ways yet produce amazing results.
Davidson's iPod experiment, Johnson' self-organized system and Lethem's gift economy emphasize the concept of community, the collective good for the public. As you mentioned, when people cooperate together, the emerged intelligence can "produce amazing result". Lethem also proposes an emerged intelligence: the collection of art, and literation of human race as a whole. If this intelligence is made for public use, each individual can absorb and grow from it, thus benefiting the community overall. The students in iPod experiment upload lectures online and make the resource available as a common property, also serving the purpose of common good. The ant colony works collectively, using the intelligence of a group to place the cemetery and midden site the furthest away from their residence hall. The three authors all resonate the power of collective intelligence, especially Davidson and Lethem, who stress how an individual can develop can enrich himself through the common property of human society.
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