Out of Control

Ordered this used, showed up with somebody else’s highlighter marks still in it, mostly in the chapters about hive behavior, and I never did find out who they were. read it slow over about three weeks, a chapter or two between smoke checks, which suits a book this scattered better than reading it straight through would.

Kelly’s thesis, as far as I can piece it together, is that complex systems, beehives, economies, ecosystems, the internet before it was really the internet, run better without anybody steering them directly. agency shows up out of the organization itself, nobody in particular is in charge and that’s sort of the point. some of the tech predictions are dated now, this was written in the early nineties, but the biology and the swarm stuff held up better than I expected it to.

It’s not really a narrative, more a long series of essays that don’t always talk to each other, biospheres then game theory then a stretch that’s basically annotated Kauffman quotes about bureaucratic rigor mortis setting in once a system gets too many contradictory connections. one section reads almost like poetry, hive minds and supermind and moreness, which caught me off guard from a book this technical, then it swings back dry for thirty pages of column math.

A broad overview more than an argument, the kind of book that works as a starting point if your interest in complex systems is casual rather than professional, bibliography deep enough to chase down on your own after. Four stars, mostly for the parts about ants and bees, which I found myself thinking about on watch more than I expected to.