Johnson Reading Assignment

Throughout The Myth of the Ant Queen, Johnson discusses the idea of the the “self-organizing system.” The self-organizing system is, as its name suggests, built autonomously through the decisions and actions of hundreds of individuals. Its “complexity” derives from the fact that it is not planned and executed with precision as one would expect, but rather grows and changes to suit the demands of the population in an almost evolutionary manner. The title The Myth of the Ant Queen refers to the idea that the title of “queen” is misleading in an ant society: the queen does not dictate each and every action performed throughout the colony like a true ruler. The reason she is valued by an ant society is because she is the only one who can give birth to the next generation of worker ants. The survival of the colony depends on her, and so they prioritize her life as an instinctual behavior culminated over centuries of evolution. The society itself is built on the actions of the rest of the colony, and the actions rest on what best suits the colony’s interests. Thus, we see the development of things such as the structure of the colony, down to the placement of the “cemetery” and “garbage heap.”

Johnson juxtaposes the ant society to human society—namely, Manchester—and outlines the patterns that appear in city landscapes due to human interaction. The position of the shopping districts in relation to the slums, or the relationship between the flow of activity to the quality of life—these all arise from natural human needs and tendencies. They are, in a sense, the “cemetery” and “garbage heap” of our ant society. Johnson describes a city as appearing to have its own personality because of the way it grows and shifts naturally with the decisions and behaviors of its inhabitants. In his words, “You don’t need regulations and city planners deliberately creating these structures. All you need are thousands of individuals and a few simple rules of interaction” (199). This is the nature of the self-organized system.

The self-organized system is an unintentional collaboration of sorts between people. Much like the ideas of “crowdsourcing” and “credentialing” that Davidson discusses, the self-organized system is a collaboration of sorts between people (although perhaps unintentional). Perhaps the “shared horizon” between the three is that the self-organized system relies on both crowdsourcing and credentialing to be successful. Through crowdsourcing, people work together in a manner where each of them is equal, building and changing the city collectively as a group. At the same time, the aspect of credentialing is present in that each individual’s actions are a result of their specializations and talents, allowing for the natural evolution of patterns in the urban structure. Through specialization, everything will fit into its own niche. Through group effort, the activity of a city will shift and develop to full potential best suiting the society’s needs. It is these efforts of the people that create vast societies that seem to have a mind of their own, even when it has no more of a leader than a colony of ants.