Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace [Paperback]

This being the only reason the rating dropped from five to four stars, on to what makes this an essential read. The title is a little unfortunate, as it will have some buyers believing here is another new-age bible about networked togetherness and pony-tailed social savvy. It isn't. Like Becoming Virtual, this is a serious book of philosophy, sociology and anthropology, with concepts and insights that make other theorising in the area of information technology, for example, look positively anemic by comparison. Above all 'collective' has wider meanings than the normal usage, and explaining how is probably the best way to review the book.

'Collective' usually implies a collection, a group of distinct things gathered together in some way to make a bigger thing. Some reviewers of the book use this meaning, suggesting Levy's idea is that technologies such as the internet simply extend traditional communication processes over large geographical distances, so that we can 'share information' better, and so on. Levy's collective, on the other hand, derives from Serres', where all large-scale, collective phenomena are distributive rather than summative - you don't make big, 'global' things by stacking lots of smaller, 'local' things, Lego-block style, because the local and the global don't have any necessary relationship. In fact they're separate things - this idea takes a LOT of getting used to, but once you're there you understand why Levy's concept of collective intelligence is so powerful.

Take for instance a government, with a representative parliament. Common sense, at least since Hobbes, says this government derives its validity and power from the fact that it is merely the aggregate body of citizens, who are its Lego blocks, if you will. The government is this mass of citizens added up, and represented by a few who sit at its head. Not so for Levy - each person, including government ministers, remains resolutely 'local', and a government is as local as where it happens to sit. What gives it wider or global efficacy is simply the fact that this particular local institution has managed to embody or even create certain interests which are common to the multitude of people it represents - they grant it power or allegiance because of this, but everything stays local. Decisions made by this government then give the appearance of controlling society simply because every local interest these decisions move through allows them passage, or enacts them (and when this changes to refusal, we see 'government' itself, many times in history, come under threat). This is what Levy means by collective or distributed action, where large-scale and small-scale phenomena have no ontological difference, merely a difference in emphasis. You don't find the global only at the central point (here, government), but at each and every local point in the society - the government is simply that place which has drastically simplified these millions of local actions into a (relative) few formulae which all can agree on, in one local place - parliament. It's not imposing its will, but is the distillation of these millions of local wills.

So what is collective intelligence? To quote Levy, "It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills...No one knows everything, everyone knows something...". Intelligence for Levy is a combination of skills, understanding and knowledge. Skills are what we develop when we interact with physical things; our relations with signs and information give us knowledge; our interaction with others gives us understanding. All three apply to the same object simultaneously - we 'know' about genes, for example, by studying them in their instrumental physicality (skills), in conjunction with our colleagues (understanding), while manipulating our papers and concepts about them (knowledge). Levy adds his notion of collectives to this schema to show how, with the help of new information technologies in particular, each skill, piece of knowledge and understanding is now distributed, rather than isolated in some one place. The Greenhouse Effect isn't your ordinary, isolable lab object, because AS an object it is the co-creation of many different types of scientist, as well as politician, environmentalist, farmer and so on. It is a collective object, and we have to learn to be collectively intelligent about it. Similarly marketing has long since abandoned the attempt to correctly predict what 'people will like' and has incorporated them collectively in the entire production process, so products are becoming more a co-creation of consumer and producer - they are collective products. As in the political example previously, nobody can centralise knowledge any more than power, it is global in each place, and the objects we now produce only exist or survive if they can be animated by each locality, and represented and 'controlled' by another locality which is intelligently sensitive to these localities.

The range of this book must escape the scope of any 1000-word review. Levy does some fascinating anthropological work here as well, tracing the emergence of collective intelligence through different types of societies. And lots more. Read it.

The nub of this is that the world is top down. The ideal is at the pyramid of existence and goodness derives its meaning from the top. Levy contrasts this with the new conception of the Internet. The lowest rank which is our world can create a new world above it. In our case, it is the lowest level of connectivity of the Internet. This new world is good in so far as it enables the inhabitants of our world to flourish. The lowest levels in cyberspace can create higher levels of existence with no limits on the number of levels which corresponds to the ranks of angels. Goodness flows up these levels from the real world in direct contrast to Catholic theology. Another view on this can be found in, 'The Religion of Technology' by David F. Noble. This book traces the origin of the Internet and the attitudes of its developers to Protestant theology. Instead of goodness entering the world through God's omnipotence, Protestants believe that they are required to build God's kingdom in this world. The drive in northern Europe for technological enhancements to life derives from this.

These two books support each other. Levy offers this Internet world as an ideal and contrasts it with the Catholic ideal. Noble examines it as an historical process and notes its derivation from Protestantism.

These are two very interesting books.