Emergent Collaboration
#collaboration #abstraction
Leonard Read wrote his famous essay I, Pencil, to demolish the notion of socialist ideology in 1958. A simple pencil is made by many different people. Each unaware of how to do the other person’s role. Someone cuts the wood, another person mines the graphite, there’s a person to produce the paint, everything must be transported and assembled, and even a person to market the finished product. To produce a pencil, a collaborative phenomenon occurs between people without a need for them all to communicate with each other. Adam Smith called this the “invisible hand.” Every person is a part of the production process, but no one can achieve the full product alone. It’s too much for one single person to understand—despite how simple a pencil may appear.