The Triad of Transformation

Like cells coalescing to form organisms, organisms can cooperate to form superorganisms.

Many species on earth form superorganisms, but unlike ant colonies or bee hives, human superorganisms are dynamic. An ant colony will always look like an ant colony. It's an emergent structure from hardcoded evolutionary software running on the brains of the ants. But human superorganisms emerge from the general purpose cognitive tools of abstraction, imagination, and cooperation. Humans create all kinds of superorganisms--local communities, family businesses, universities, corporations, nations, and the entire global economic system. Individual humans exist inside multiple superorganisms at once and each one is constantly evolving. Through the emergent power of their superorganisms, humans accomplish things no individual organism could ever dream of. They have conquered the planet and they're now eyeing the stars.

Human superorganisms change via three mechanisms:

Tweak

Superorganisms can be slowly reformed using the mechanisms of change built into the superorganism.

In a democracy, this is electing representatives who will then vote on how to change the law. In a public corporation, this is shareholders electing directors who select a CEO who propagates instructions top-down through the hierarchy of the company. For a public university, it's the board of trustees wielding authority via the president/chancellor.

The rate of change depends on the quantity, contentment, and discernment of the "keys to power". Politicians' keys to power are all the people voting for and against them. CEOs' keys to power are the shareholders weighted by voting power. A large number of undiscerning keys to power results in a slow and stable system. It is very hard to convince a large critical mass of people to try something new and unproven, especially if they are currently happily benefiting from the status quo. On the otherhand, a small number of discontent keys of power will likely cause rapid and unpredictable change.

Like organisms evolving in response to their environment in nature, superorganisms evolve within their abstract environment. In an environment that is changing rapidly, institutions are also pressured to change quickly. Those with mechanisms that prevent rapid change will fail to adapt and perish. In contrast, in a stable environment there is a selection pressure for established institutions to be resistant to change, as any change carries risk.

A mechanism of change can become corrupted. An effective mechanism works by governing behavior under the influence of feedback from actual performance (in biology, natural selection based on evolutionary fitness; in science, experimental testing and open criticism; in capitalism, market evaluation). In a democracy, public opinion is intended to be a feedback mechanism for the government. But in practice, the public often becomes the object of indoctrination--subjected to an increasingly sophisticated process of opinion-formation via an elaborate media apparatus. Political party superorganisms are indeed systems that predictably increase their specialized competence (as all iterative experimentation-selection mechanisms do); but unfortunately, the specialized competence is not in administrative capability, it is in mastery of public opinion.

The consequences of the degradation of the democratic superorganism can be seen in the United States' government's precipitous drop in competence over the past few decades. Unlike the government of China, which has a limited cadre of (arguably) highly competent technocrats who are extremely motivated to rectify the Century of Humiliation and ensure it will never happened again, the USA has a distracted, undiscerning, and manipulated electorate producing a sclerotic public sector unable to navigate accelerating change.

And when superorganisms won't bend, they will break.

Topple

The next option is revolution: bypassing the internal mechanisms of change by overwhelming the superorganism.

The French Revolution exemplifies this dynamic. The monarchy's mechanisms of change had calcified completely (the Estates-General hadn't been convened for 175 years) and when environmental pressures (fiscal crisis, famine, enlightenment ideas) finally overwhelmed the system, the French superorganism was toppled and rebuilt.

Modern corporate structures are vulnerable to similar revolutionary dynamics. When OpenAI's board attempted to fire Sam Altman in 2023, they faced employee revolt. Nearly the entire staff threatened to resign, Microsoft offered to hire them en masse, and the board--despite formally holding all decision-making power--was forced to capitulate. The superorganism's official mechanism of governance was overwhelmed by the threat to destroy it entirely. The board stepped down in recognition of their sudden irrelevance, and the revolution ended.

Revolutions aren't inherently good or bad, but they are inherently populist. You can replace an old superorganism with a new one via a revolution if and only if you can convince a critical mass of people. Revolutionaries find it easy to mobilize masses who are united in opposition, but these masses rarely share coherent visions for reconstruction, therefore the new superorganism will not necessarily be an improvement over the old one. The average person has a very limited internal model of complex systems--understanding grievance far better than governance. Thus, the risk of revolution scales with the complexity of the system being overthrown. A revolution at the global level could mean mass starvation and civilizational collapse. The immense complexity and importance of the global superorganism makes its disruption and sudden replacement potentially catastrophic.

Revolutions are rare in a highly polarized, atomized, and anesthetized world. Even when they succeed, they are a desperate gamble. A complex system cannot be reborn overnight from the ashes of its predecessor.

Superorganisms, like all complex adaptive systems, can become trapped in local optima--stable but suboptimal configurations that resist both incremental reform and revolutionary disruption.

And when superorganisms won't bend or break, they will branch.

Transcend

The final mechanism of change is exodus--leaving the current superorganism to form a new one and transcending the original.

Exodus is the protestants failing to reform Catholicism and realizing that creating a new religion is necessary. It is Václav Benda in communist Czechoslovakia instigating a "parallel polis"--building alternative social structures alongside the official ones until they become strong enough to replace them. It is Morris Chang failing to bend Texas Instruments to his vision and leaving to create TSMC. This is the path of the pioneers. Instead of wasting energy on internal politics or takeovers like the reformers or revolutionaries, they simply exit and create.

The archetypal example is the founding of the United States of America. Through this example, we can examine the three characteristics of exodus that underlie its effectiveness: selection effects, design freedom, and competitive pressure.

Those who leave a superorganism are not randomly sampled from its population. Leaving the established to build the new will naturally select for specific psychological phenotypes: risk tolerance, openness to experience, low time preference, high agency, contrarian thinking, self-determination, autodidacticism, an autotelic personality, and an internal locus of control. The pilgrims who left England were dissidents willing to risk everything for autonomy. The American colonies were an amalgam of Enlightenment radicals, religious nonconformists, and commercial adventurers. A fresh start is highly enticing to a certain cognitive archetype.

A fresh start also creates the conditions for rapid change. The "blank slate" environment gives these pioneers the space and freedom to redesign superorganisms from first principles unencumbered by entrenched interests, legacy infrastructure, institutional debt, or the burden of converting skeptics. Each design decision unconstrained by path dependence opens new regions of possibility space. This allowed the Founding Fathers to construct an entirely novel system of governance unlike anything else at the time. A superorganism built by and for frontier-selected personalities will likely look alien to those accustomed to the parent structure.

This unencumbered innovation transforms the broader ecosystem as the new superorganism exerts competitive pressure on the old ones. Exodus functions as an evolutionary accelerant by producing a kind of institutional speciation--where parallel organizational experiments compete for resources and adherents in the marketplace of collective coordination. This is most apparent in a capitalist economy where ossified corporations can suddenly face existential competition and must either adopt successful innovations or risk obsolescence. The American superorganism exported its democratic ideals back to Europe--forcing monarchies to liberalize--and it became a dominant presence in the ecosystem, drawing talent and capital from established powers until it achieved the global hegemony we observe today.

Exodus works because a superorganism's most dynamic constituents self-select into frontier conditions where new systems can be rapidly developed. Successful ones force adaptation in their predecessors or simply transcend them entirely.

The entire human diaspora from Africa to every habitable corner of Earth is a cascade of repeated exodus--shifting selective pressure from individual organisms to collective superorganisms. Groups with strong reciprocal altruism and in-group loyalty outcompeted those composed of pure self-maximizers. Stories and myths that enhanced group cohesion spread. The most evolutionarily fit cultural packages were discovered through parallel natural experiments across millennia.

But now the map is essentially closed. There are no unclaimed, habitable lands left. Even if there were available lands, the quality-of-life differential between civilization and nature has grown so vast that any new society would either need enormous upfront investment (charter cities, seasteading) or zealots willing to trade technological comfort for literal privation. We are locked in a golden cage. I wonder if the loss of accessible physical frontiers is having a psychological impact on us. Knowing that "if everything sucks, we can just get the homies together and fucking leave" might be a load-bearing pillar of human wellbeing. Now, humanity has a suppressed exodus impulse metastasizing into nihilism and rage against systems that feel inescapable.

Until we colonize space, the frontier now lies in digital and abstract realms. The economic frontier is filled with moonshots that attract the pioneer archetypes into bold risky startups. The internet provided fertile conditions for the birth of countless new superorganisms. Cryptographic decentralized algorithms created a fresh possibility landscape ripe for exploration (a landscape that has unfortunately been inundated with grifters polluting the concept by association).

Perhaps frontiers still exist inside superorganisms for those with the imagination to see them. The American colonies incubated inside the British Empire--using its currency and trade routes and sheltering in its protection--until they were ready to exit, so why not form new societies within existing ones, utilizing the parent's infrastructure while the pioneers build new institutions and create economic value--like a cell duplicating its vital organelles while still sharing the cytoplasm before mitosis.

The future of the human superorganism

These three mechanisms of superorganism change are important to ponder in a world of accelerating technological progress but questionable human progress and undeniable regression in wisdom. The global superorganism is becoming delirious and constructing a hostile environment for many of its human cells, like a hive that has forgotten why it makes honey. A malaise is spreading through the populace. I worry that the mechanisms of change are failing at a time when they are of the utmost importance--reform that is straining against unfathomable inertia, revolution that is neither feasible nor advisable, exodus with nowhere to go.

If humans were like bees or ants, I would be profoundly pessimistic. But a vast and expansive frontier will always exist inside our collective mind and as long as we can still imagine, coordinate, and create--perhaps the more fundamental "triad of transformation"--I will remain delusionally optimistic.