This essay, Lessons from the Anthill by Jason Lefkowitz, somewhat like the one in the previous post, attempts to advance paleo-collectivist views citing distorted examples from insect and human behaviors.

It's interesting to reflect on the ways that evolution has shaped different species. Consider, if you will, the lowly ant. It is hard to imagine a creature that functions differently from a human being. The story of human progress has been shaped dramatically by the actions of singular individuals, people who drive society in a new direction through force of arms, intellect, or will. By contrast, ants have evolved into a purely collectivist species; instead of free will, which allows individuals to control the destiny of the group, they operate through fixed behavior patterns. On their own, each ant's behavior is relatively useless, but when swarms of ants come together, the patterns optimize naturally and allow them to accomplish tasks that should be far beyond their reach. To the outside observer, their self-organizing efforts seem to be directed by some larger force or collective intelligence. Theirs is a society that is truly more than the sum of its parts.

Ant behavior patterns are not fixed, they have evolved, are still evolving and have wide diversity. They are not optimized, they are adapted to a range of circumstances not optimal for any of them. When we look closely at ant behavior the collective myths evaporate.

Not all ants in a hill are alike. Though they may share genes the expression of those genes vary with developmental circumstances, epigenetics. What they ate, temperature and various toxins experienced at any point by them or their parents can alter expression.

Individuals initiate acts that if rewarding may be adopted by others. The story does not begin and end with a rhumba line of ants nose-to-tail, each hauling a morsel back to the hill. One of them made the initial find of a cache of food while out hunting. Excited by the find that ant dripped chemical crumbs along the trail home, marking the route. A second trip might be taken or other ants might follow the crumb trail too if they find it before it fades, and each ant that finds something useful on that trail adds its own crumbs, refreshing and marking the trail more clearly. There isn't just one trail, there are many. Not all follow the strongest trail, even ants have contrarians. Some follow no trail, seeking new sources.

There's nothing unique, remarkable or collective about this behavior. Collectivists merely read their philosophical and political preferences into the story. When ants, bees or other social insects engage in what is called collective behavior they are making individual decisions. When a foraging bee returns to the hive and does her bee dance to indicate the distance and direction of her find she isn't saying 'you should go there to forage' or 'we should forage there', she is doing a Pointer Sister; "I'm so excited that I just can't hide it". The other bees don't say 'yes, we have heard and will obey', they pull a Meg Ryan and say "I'll have what she's having."

The description of networked open source systems is just as false.

For most of its history, the Internet was the exclusive province of a class of alpha geeks squirreled away in academia, defense, and related institutions. For this reason, it should come as no surprise that the first collective intelligences to emerge from the soup of the Net were technically-oriented. These anthill communities sprang up to solve specific problems: to create software that the commercial sector wouldn't, or to clone software that was encumbered with onerous license and patent provisions. Across the world, loose networks of volunteers hacked away at tiny chunks of code, bringing their finished work back to contribute to the whole.

When it started, this kind of work didn't have a name; it was just programmers helping each other solve problems. Today, though, it has evolved into a full-fledged force in the IT industry, and it's become important enough to have not one name, but two: Open Source or Free Software (depending on whom you ask). The fruits of these programmers' work – Open Source projects like Linux, Apache, and Mozilla -- have become the backbone of today's Internet, yielding products that in many cases are more reliable and powerful than their commercial counterparts.

Each useful software creation was initially and primarily someone's idea. Linus Torvalds for Linux. Rob McCool for the NCSA HTTPD server that was tweaked to become Apache. Marc Andreesen for the NCSA Mosaic browser that became Netscape.

This is not the only way to develop software, of course. In most of the industry, the model used was more traditionally human: the Hero Geek who blazes the trail with an innovative new product or idea, followed by the masses of lesser foot soldiers who follow him into history. Almost every one of the major commercial tech companies has or had someone to fit the Hero Geek role: Steve Wozniak at Apple (usurped by Steve Jobs after the success of the Apple II), Larry Ellison at Oracle, and of course Bill Gates of Microsoft are all examples of the Hero Geek at work.

The Internet, however, allows the creation of a new model of development in which the Hero Geek is obsolete, replaced instead by a kind of collective intelligence derived from the effect of a large number of smart people all critiquing each other's work. In the words of open source evangelist Eric Raymond, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In other words, instead of relying on the omnipotent Hero Geek to foresee problems and head them off at the pass, it's possible now to gather a sufficiently large number of people so that, if a problem does exist, it's a statistical likelihood that one of them will spot it and fix it. The system organizes itself organically, just like the anthill.

Brilliant, creative and productive individuals contribute orders of magnitude more than hordes of journeymen. That's a simple human truth and has always been so. Some people are that good. When you find one you can't pay them too much. Open source does not make software heroes obsolete, it complements them. The value of open source is that more and different people hack the code than have that opportunity in proprietary environments, and they are a self selected group that do it because they are chuffed about it.

This is a very old practice that was the norm in earlier periods. For example, in the era of the mainframe when IBM deployed early commercial systems the operating system source code was distributed too. Programmers at each site modified the code to achieve particular purposes or correct defects. Those mods were shared with others in user groups and when sufficiently clean and valuable sometimes integrated into the base product. Many enhancements to the system and many independent applications were user created in this way, enabled largely by knowledge of the source and freedom to alter it to accommodate needs.

This created problems for management since the brilliant individual that created the mod might leave. Mission critical applications could not be dependent on such individuals. It also created problems for the vendor since new releases of their base system might disable user mods, inhibiting migration to new software and/or hardware. The base system became progressively less open and less modifiable due to demand from the user community. They couldn't afford either the cost or the risk of user mods which could cripple the business or service unit.

The same pattern repeats at each level. The classic case is the spread-sheet from hell developed in a user department by an individual, a series of individuals or a group on which the department becomes dependent. Maintenance and migration issues are the same as they were for the base OS and mods in earlier times. The costs and risks are the same.

The solution is the same too. User groups, not necessarily associated with a vendor, champion hacks that others can help extend and maintain as well as use for their own applications, but the community standardizes and so reduces risk.

Like ants, individuals forage for value and when they find it may influence others to adopt behaviors. They do this because of perceived value not because of a belief in collective good. Up to a point this enhances groups but when risks and costs become high there is retrenchment, standardization and limitation of further change. This is where collectivism creeps in. The pragmatic decision to reduce risk through standards and restrictions degenerates into consensus and dogma. This increases risk far more than before since it leads to total collapse due to sunk cost effects and failure to heed negative feedback. The need to justify past behavior and the risk of loss of cohesion becomes more important than survival. Collectives are inherently irrational. There are irrational individuals too but the mean of individual decisions is more rational than consensus decisions. That's why nothing in nature is collective. It doesn't work and though it may have been tried it hasn't survived, can't survive.

Social behavior, whether by insects or social animals, isn't collectivism. It is as dependent on individual decisions, dissent, contrarian behavior and conflict as it is cooperation. Everything in nature is unstable, mutinous. Even our DNA is mutinous, continually throwing up new arrangements or trotting out previously abandoned arrangements. Some work, some don't. The mean of those individual decisions determines the survival of the species or cultivar.

On the false base he created Lefkowitz launches into a list of examples of "anthill communities" such as OpenLaw, apparently oblivious to the long history of such practices that preexisted the net. Fidonets, Usenet, even Compuserve did all these things long ago. The web is easier, prettier more widely adopted but not new.

What is clear, however, is that we are witnessing the birth of a new way of getting things done, a way that moves us away from our traditional dependence on the innovative individual and instead draws out innovation from our collective wisdom. Has our technology punctured our equilibrium? Are we evolving into something more like the humble, yet powerful ant?

It could be simple ignorance, the consequence of an indifferent education and an exceedingly narrow social group - collectivist sympathizers - but it may also be politics. This sort of false and misleading publication is dead common in advocacy groups seeking to persuade others. Like sales people they say whatever is necessary to close the deal.

It is far more valuable to actually look at natural systems and understand how they work. They may or may not be relevant to human society in some way but they are never prescriptive for human societies. Is, ought etc. A chief value is in helping to recognize patterns, helping the fish see the water. Our societies are incommensurable but we share an environment. Recognizing the factors that support the resilience and robustness of other social species, and their rapidity of change due to their shorter lives, can help us part the verbal thickets of belief and illusion sowed by advocates in pursuit of gain.