There are many invisible hands.

You’re working for one of them at least, whether you know it or not.

Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be fertile. Ideas domesticate people, weaving their individual wills into a coherent organism. Humans can’t survive solitude. They can only exist in groups. Groups require coordination: some sacrifice of individual autonomy for the sake of a collective aim. (This is why every Hollywood film and most religions are about self-sacrifice: the ultimate ethic.)

To be powerful, an idea needs many humans in service to it. But their coordination creates complex trade-offs, so the large is never so agile, so humane, so just as the small. This means every big idea, (that is: every big institution or system of intuitions), is always the most susceptible to a small, highly networked collective of agents that are working together at the perfect sweet spot between coordination and autonomy.

Coordination technologies have values and most of them are not aligned with human interests. (Spreadsheets are patriarchal. Computers are hierarchical. States are racist.) By coordination technology I mean cultural form.

When I describe myself as ‘techno socialist’ I’m not slipping into the shallow-but-deep-enough-to-drown-in ideology of techno utopianism, the idea that more information is inherently better. I’m betting not on the internet’s ability to shift information around cheaply, but it’s ability to inspire and transmit new cultural forms, or to revive old ones like we saw at Occupy.

I don’t believe groups to be inherently coercive, just that most of the coordination technologies we use to orchestrate them are imprinted with the flawed cultures that grew them. This world wide web is at least a fresh petri dish for us to play in. I know that many people have experiences to the contrary, but I’m convinced we can architect this virtual space to be intolerant of bigotry, to be inoculated against some of the worst cultural viruses infecting so many of our physical spaces.

It takes imagination but if you look between all the suffocating continents of capitalist expansionism, you can still see islands of non-exploitive, non-coercive, non-alienating coordination. We are building a space not necessarily constrained by scarcity or by private ownership. Collective abundance can be concordant with individual autonomy.

We can all sing our own songs and still harmonise in a polyphonic polyrhythmic symphony.