Human stigmergy

Stigmergy is a form of self organization involving organisms and the encoding of information into their environment:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.

Originally used to describe termite behavior, it has generally been the monopoly of social insects.

But this is changing.

Stigmergy scales up to human activities quite well.

One of the best examples of a stigmergic human practice is graffiti: the encoding of ephemeral messages into the environment as a kind of metadata about territory and identity...literally tagging.

The broken window theory is another example of stigmergy in an urban setting:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

The internet is also the backdrop for a number of stigmergic practices:

The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Now that the internet is a shared environment for close to 1/4 the world population, stigmergy contextualizes online collaborative behavior very effectively.

I'm starting to think Kafka was onto something...