Thanks for that great example of social dynamics. A related example is where a town is a great place to live because of lots of walkable attractions (grocery s

Thanks for that great example of social dynamics. A related example is where a town is a great place to live because of lots of walkable attractions (grocery stores, YMCA, parks, a variety of little shops, cheap rent for other small businesses, theaters, music halls, etc.). Then lots of people want to live there, driving up prices. The stores, non-profits, small businesses, etc. all get bought out and replaced by expensive housing. And then one day people who have lived there for decades realize that the town is not that great place to live anymore because there is nothing interesting to walk to there, no jobs, rents and taxes are high, and grocery shopping involves a long drive... It can take some active planning and foresight to avoid that. Related: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html " I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." ... So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones. He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members." http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for." Part of the challenge is that human mentality evolved in the context of hunter-gatherer tribal relationships -- growing up in a tribe of mostly related kinfolk you knew from birth. It's a huge stretch to expect the human mind (and its ability to manage social relationships) to functional well in other contexts... Frankly, it's amazing the human mind works in other settings as well as it does.