A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
May 2020

For several hundred million years, there were no stars, no planets, no living organisms, no people, no poetry in our universe. Over 13.7 billion years, things appeared one by one. Species forked and multiplied and came together, creating qualities that had never been seen before. Just like molecules—carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids—come together with their own incentives. A lipid never attempts to conspire with a protein and said, “Let’s get together and build something marvelous.” The lipid just wants to store energy or link with other lipids to create a cell membrane.

This is why the idea of “emergence” so often seems magical and mysterious. Emergent properties are collective properties, which means they are a consequence of the relationships between individuals, not the properties of individual parts. The whole becoming much more than the sum of its parts is a mesmerizing concept.

Having left NYC for a month, I miss the random eccentricity, the transient glamour, the fleeting sense of meaning, the constant reminder that I’m part of something bigger than myself. The impatient traffic relies on emergence, so does the encounter with an old friend when I miss my 6 train.

Teju Cole, in his novel set in post-911 New York, describes the magical property of the interconnected city:

“Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”

Just like our lovely city, markets, companies, computers, software all exhibit mystical attributes. In Hayek’s words, markets serve as information processors that gather and utilize the knowledge that is dispersed among individuals. The market is the accidental aggregation machine that humans created to “conquer intelligence.” In the world of technology companies, emergence explains why some start-ups can have sudden explosions in their valuation and rapid expansions in their function. It’s not just the app or the website that creates the value, but the collective incentives of all the people plugged into it.

Emergent systems create mesmerizing narratives. It’s pure magic when they work until they break. The economy from 1980 operated under the vision of a massively decentralized calculating machine until 2008. The early open-source projects on the Internet gave us a glimpse of Utopia until service providers turned community camaraderie into an offering without giving back. When things break, we see what we failed to consider. We’ve learned lessons of what led up to those system failures, which are really slow brewing of disincentives and misinformation than a sudden collapse. We’ve learned that these “emergent” properties are, in fact, not magical, but designed, both intentionally and oftentimes unintentionally. 

What we can do now better than any moment in the past, with more granular and robust data, tooling, and processing capability, to empathize with individual incentives and stories at an unprecedented scale. Unlike lipids, humans and human-designed actually get to talk to each other to coordinate, to collaborate, to learn from the past. We still don’t talk to each other enough.

The emergent system framework could facilitate a larger number of participants by breaking them up into smaller groups.

Everything is the way it is because it got that way. It’s a subtle way of emphasizing the importance of process and history in understanding why everything is the way it is. The danger of building forward with very little understanding of the past is to build for the problem that exists in a static snapshot of our current state, while the solution might only be informed by the underlying mechanisms that generate that state.

It’s been inspiring to see constructions everywhere to build new systems. Last week, I wrote about the surreal experience of strolling through worlds after worlds. The pace of building will only accelerate, and the optimists in us know that we will arrive in the future by creating the path there. But in the time of panic, we also build with a sense of answer-seeking escapism and feel-good redemption. Trying to understand what has gotten us here, to hear the voices that got left out, to confront our blind spots, is just as important as the act of building. We want to be intellectually honest where we are allocating our energy, not just individually, but as a collective. We want to operate with a sense of urgency, but also take the time to reflect on how our worlds interact with each other, with worlds emerging from the past and into the future.

On a different note, thinking about emergence and evolution also leads me onto a path of a personal expedition. I revisited this quote by David Brooks from The Second Mountain that I read a year ago. Obviously I reached my mid-life crisis when I was 22:

“The interesting thing about your personality, your essence, is that it is not more or less permanent like your leg bone. Your essence is changeable, like your mind. Every action you take, every thought you have, changes you, even if just a little, making you a little more elevated or a little more degraded.”

The pandemic reveals the design flaws of our systems and all the moving parts that evolve not just individually, but collectively. Every decision we make from now will reshape the world we will live in the future. That, to me, is a beautiful, profound, and sobering idea.