Coordination Engine

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."

(https://metamoderna.org/the-6-hidden-patterns-of-history-chapter-1-a-brief-introduction-to-the-metamemes-model/)