The Ecology of Information

From computers to cars, companies achieve market dominance through their ability to create morphogenic attitude fields to build momentum. If they can build a large enough field, then their information organism will grow by itself. The same principle is true for religious and social movements. Popularity of beliefs spread the popularity of beliefs. In colloquial terms, success breeds success. Rank holders want to grow and protect their information organisms. Their goal is to create a resonance field, which creates and maintains momentum. If an information organism builds a sufficient momentum level, it can grow by recreating its current procedures. It does not have to take the chance of defining something new. It can safely survive by producing more of its current data.

Listening for morphic resonance in commerce is easy. Businesses produce tangible products which people want to buy. Increasing demand and profit is one of the clearest indicators of positive morphic resonance. Public institutions have a more difficult time creating resonance because they lack hard products. Lacking hard products, they often use hard statistics. The statistics create public proof that the institutions work. The more work they do, the more the public recognizes it as public data. To acquire such proof public institutions seek out the most repeatable procedures possible. Crime prevention agencies prove their effectiveness by pointing to incarceration rates. Environmental agencies evidence their prowess by listing citations and new regulations. Armies list body counts to give public evidence of victory. These actions may or may not affect the problem at hand, but they increase the power and presence of the agency. They supply a life-giving current to the information organism within.

These procedures take place with little concern about its impact on the affected individuals. Public agencies cannot feel the effect of their actions on individuals, because an information organism has no feelings. Its mentality lacks the human sensations that let it feel individual human pain. It is a child-like mentality without a parent to teach it values. Armed with only the crudest intellect, but a strong survival instinct, it moves according to momentary trends and is subject less to the discipline of the tribe than the herd, and sometimes only the flock.

With their reduced emotional capability and their sensory levels deprived of all external signals, save the isolated bias of high-level control signals, ranking leaders react to events with a cruel predictability. Their actions give institutions a sense of inevitability. It is occasionally noted that government will do the right thing only when all else has failed. The same could be said about business and any other human organization. Leaders, who must set a direction and an emphasis, have a limited perspective of the possible alternatives because their views are tainted by their incompetence. Being distant from the tactile sensation of front-line experience, they still must make decisions with imperfect information and uncertain prospects. Under these circumstances, the only intelligent behavior is to imitate and repeat the processes being executed in your own environment. Not wanting to be left behind, leaders instinctively try to make an organization do what other organizations are doing.

People who follow trends in management consulting have seen this herd effect on thinking in many forms. When the concept of Management By Objective (MBO) came into vogue, many businesses rushed toward vast goal and objective-setting sessions regardless of any obvious need. Instead of selectively implementing the methods, managers demanded goals from the president down to the mail clerk. Rank holders may not have known if the techniques worked but they did know other large organizations were going through the same exercise. Many of these efforts did nothing more than waste time and paper. No matter. It kept the groups in the mainstream of the current momentum fads. It was OK to do it because everyone else was doing it. More recently the practice of Business Process Reengineering has engaged the attention of countless corporations. This practice can lead corporations to let many people go in the belief that a reengineered business process needs fewer people to get the same thing done.

When this wave of reengineering swept the country, even profitable companies began letting go people in the name of better business processes. The practice was called downsizing and its momentum led many companies to release employees because it was the thing to do. In some cases the practice worked. Many others did not generate any long-lasting cost savings and in some cases older employees were brought back to their original positions at higher wages because the business could not run without them. Because management was trying to survive, it looked around and saw everyone else cutting costs. The collective mentality of American management believed they had to mimic the common behavior to keep their own information organisms safe. In other words, downsizing was the current trend. If an organization did not downsize, it might be left behind as an inefficient and outmoded competitor. Once this conclusion was reached, downsizing became the dominant theme for management styles.

When uncertain of how to behave, the safest course of action is to behave like everybody else. The higher rank holders rise in an organization, the less certain they are of how to behave. To find a management compass they will try to mimic the behavior forms currently resonating through the info-ecosystem. Not only is this safe for their careers; it is what the meta-being called an information organism wants them to do. It wants to do the safe thing. It wants to follow the herd and either overtake it or be part of it, but it never wants to remain behind, because it might spell death.

In medieval times, morphic resonance was limited because the primitive communication resources could not create a powerful morphogenic field for resonance. Today the world is far more connected and most of us take global fads for granted. Few are surprised by Russian and Japanese teenagers wearing American jeans or by popular music that sounds disturbingly similar in all countries. The angst comes less from the sound than from the notion that a super information organism is taking us all under its umbrella. With media technology defining an emerging international culture, ethnic and national cultures see themselves being drowned out in the flood of new sounds. The sound's content is less of a problem than its decibel level. If the cacophony becomes too loud, it will eventually destroy older cultures and values.

A culture's strength comes from its ability to generate morphic resonance in distant lands. Without question American culture has been more forceful than its armies in securing peace. Because local youth sees itself as part of the next generation, McDonalds, Coca Cola, and Elvis Presely have found willing markets in foreign lands. They, like their management counterparts at GM and IBM, do not want to be left behind. Fighting these forces is like trying to stop the wind. For years communist governments proclaimed American music and its attendant culture to be decadent bourgeoisie affectations. Yet when the youth of East Germany starting voting with their feet and headed across the Austrian border, nothing could stop them. The lure was too great, the sensations too strong and, the nascent hope too powerful to stop with a bullet or an outdated Marxian aphorism. The winds of change blow without fear of the border guard's cartridge belt. After all, if they blow hard enough, perhaps the border guard will join the fleeing crowd.