Coordination Engine
For its companion concept, see Purification Generator
Contextual Quote
"The coordination engine is the underlying pattern of how people coordinate their actions with one another and the material flows around them, through space and time. This means that they can coordinate via hunting-gathering and camp-fire talks, by seasonal work efforts to sow crops, through labor markets and state regulation and national currency, and so on. It’s about the economy in a wide sense: about how human activities link up with one another. Think about it: “an economy” is basically a pattern of coordination of human agency over space and time."
- Hanzi Freinacht [1]
Description
Hanzi Freinacht:
"The coordination engine is the underlying pattern of how people coordinate their actions with one another and the material flows around them, through space and time. This means that they can coordinate via hunting-gathering and camp-fire talks, by seasonal work efforts to sow crops, through labor markets and state regulation and national currency, and so on.
It’s about the economy in a wide sense: about how human activities link up with one another. Think about it: “an economy” is basically a pattern of coordination of human agency over space and time. I mine some ore, the shipper brings it to your plant, you smelt it and purify it, someone else takes it to a factory, the factory worker shapes it, the marketer markets it, and the retail person sells it, and the dinner guest cuts a potato with the knife that has somehow made it into her hand. An unbelievable chain of coordinated actions made that very knife hit that very potato on that very plate. In today’s world, the economy consists of countless billions of such coordinations every day. It’s human hands moving all parts, yes, but the pattern that coordinates the hands takes on a life of its own, as it were, beyond any and all comprehension of any one single agent. You might call it “an invisible hand” if you wish, but there is no reason to assume that such an entity only works through “the market” and only creates wealth. To see what a society is, in its material and social reality, is to see what patterns are in place to coordinate all of those behaviors and material flows.
And that’s the coordination engine: the emergent pattern of economic activity, the shape that economic activity takes. It’s a deeper and more generalized (and abstracted) term than the old Marxist “mode of production”. How things are “produced” is just a thin sliver of the actual coordination engine. The coordination engine includes how everything is transported, managed, powered, distributed, priced, sold, advertised, consumed, understood, experienced, disposed of, possibly recycled, calculated, and so forth. How human action is coordinated. It’s a dance, just one that includes production lines. The coordination engine interacts with material reality, by patterning it into everything from potato chips to skyscrapers to jet fighters into one seamless flow, but it’s not reducible to “the material”. It’s an informational entity. It’s the DNA, if you will, of the economy. You’re made of the potatoes you ate, materially speaking. But without your DNA, you’d still be a sack of potatoes (and who knows, maybe there’s still a chance you might be). Without the coordination engine, the “material economy” would still be minerals in the ground and fish in the sea. But the emergent property that we call cultural history intervened, and it transformed minerals and fish alike into human products with their own specific meanings in the economy.
The hard metamemes stem from updates of this coordination engine. The soft ones do not entail a revolution of the coordination engine. They revolutionize its overarching cultural superstructure."
Etymology
Hanzi Freinacht:
Engine is "derived from the Latin word “ingenitum”, which is the past participle of “ingignō”, meaning “to instill by birth”. And when we remove the in- prefix, then we’re left with gignō which directly translates into the unambiguously feminine act of giving birth."
History
Hanzi Freinacht:
"Both the Faustian and Modern coordination engines developed in two steps. If we start with the Faustian coordination engine, step one is the agricultural revolution per se: This initial step revolves around the management, investment, and timing of the surplus energy of the natural world.
Agriculture is thus the management of nature.
What’s being coordinated here is of course seeds and animals (with soil and season). Instead of immediately consuming these natural resources, extra labor energy is put into managing them in such a way as to gain a greater yield the coming harvest.
Investing surplus today to reap a profit in the future? The logic here is very similar to that of capitalism, don’t you think? We’ll come back to this.
Step two of the Faustian coordination engine is the emergence of state-like structures or “civilizations”. This step revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source: human bodies. Humans can be accessed and accumulated in increasing numbers because agriculture feeds enough of them on a small enough area and soon enough keeps them in place (they gradually lose their ability to go back to hunt and forage, or at least all of them cannot just disperse into the wilderness and survive).
Now, as long as there have been humans, some have exploited others for their labor. What I mean with human bodies as a new exploitable energy source is the way in which large agricultural societies manage to create new societal functions and strata from the surplus production of farmers and herders.
This is where we see the emergence of an increasingly diverse and hierarchical division of labor, with full-time warriors, scribes, craftsmen, merchants, and so on. Suddenly we get big cities with temples and monuments, and of course, kings and queens. And that thing we’re all a little less proud of: slavery, concubines and prostitutes included. All the things we have later chosen to call civilization.
“Civilization” is thus the exploitation of surplus energy from human bodies.
When these two elements, agriculture and civilization, start converging, that’s when we have the emergence of the Faustian engine of coordination. It starts coordinating nature for increased food yields, and then bringing more and more human bodies under its control.
Like the Faustian coordination engine, the Modern one also emerged in two steps.
Step one is the emergence of capitalism: This initial step revolves around the management, investment and timing of the surplus energy of the human world.
Can you see the similarity with the first step of the Faustian coordination engine? Here, however, it’s the surplus energy of the human world instead of the natural world that’s being managed and coordinated over space and time. And the surplus energy we’re talking about here is, of course, labor.
Capitalism is thus the management of human labor.
Investing the surplus of human labor into new, more productive, activities is basically the core of capitalism—and that goes whether it is the state or a private entrepreneur who does it. (This means, by the way, that Soviet communism wasn’t less “capitalist” than its counterpart in the West, hence it has often been termed “state capitalism”. More on that later.) You invest people’s work into some time-saving activity, and that creates more work hours you can invest into more time-saving. And, boom, in a blink of historical time, you get today’s swelling world of global capitalism.
We need to note that economic profit (unlike accounting profit), in this sense, was something entirely new that capitalism brought to the table. With this perspective, we can see what economic profit really is, what GDP growth is: you manage people’s time schedules, and voilà, you can get more “man power” out of the same unit of time! That’s what bookkeeping and banking and companies enabled.
The Faustian coordination engine never managed to effectively and consistently invest its surplus labor so that you could get more out of the same time unit. It merely exploited what was currently available through plunder or taxation (which is often more or less the same)—and then it brought more land and human bodies under its control by controlling bigger armies.
If the elites had any extra money (which is, essentially, surplus labor) they didn’t use for conquest or defense, it often just got locked away in treasure chests. And when it finally got used, it was rarely invested in new productive measures, but merely spent on embellishment and luxury items or to build big castles or pyramids and so on; it basically went to waste—according to the logic of capitalism. But when the Dutch of the 1600s managed to pool their resources, and joint risk, into companies (the first of their kind), they created social machines with delicate mechanisms to generate increased economic growth by the diligent management and re-investment of human time and effort.
Money in a mattress doesn’t do anything. Put it in a company and it does tremendous things, for better or worse.
This leads us to the next step.
Step two is the Industrial Revolution: This step revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source: fossil fuels, mainly.
The second step of the development of the Modern coordination engine is also, as you may have noticed, similar to the second step of the Faustian one. But rather than a human energy source, this time it’s a natural energy source—so we’re seeing an exact reversal of the nature-human sequence of the Faustian metameme.
Industrialism is thus the exploitation of surplus energy from the natural world.
Just as much as the second step of the Faustian coordination engine revolved around developing all the intricate social and technical mechanisms to exploit the human energy source, the industrial step of the Modern metameme is about developing and mastering all the mechanical devices and means of distribution to exploit the energy of fossil fuels as efficiently as possible.
Only after the Industrial Revolution do we see the emergence of truly modern societies. It’s when the social logic of capitalism finally converges with the technical expertise to access the hitherto untapped potential of millions of years of solar energy trapped in the ground that we see this explosion that leads to the assembly line, women’s suffrage, mass literacy, the internet, plastic Barbie dolls, and the atom bomb."