There is a very similar pattern that you find in the structure of societies, in the structure of companies, and in the structure of computers, and all three are moving in the same direction, that is, away from a top‐down structure of a central command system, giving the system instructions on how to behave, towards a system that is parallel, that is flat, which is a web, in which change moves from the bottom up. this is going to happen across all institutions and technical devices, it’s the way they work. - Nick Land, 1994
Personally, I think this quote is prophetic and deeply believe in its accuracy. Actually, I’m betting most of my time and money on this being the case.
Yet, there is a interesting nuance here when it comes to organizational systems in particular. This blog is a brief introduction to this nuance which represents a core belief behind the design of Torus.
The Traditional Hierarchy
In the traditional economy, on the substrate of bureaucracy, top-down hierarchies have risen to dominate. Of course, the market economy as a whole already works bottom up, but the individual organizations within it work mostly topdown. Today, those corporate hierarchies seem ripe for disruption and replacement. Frustration is accumulating, they served us but the bottlenecks are becoming more obvious by the day.
This creates a popular aversion to hierarchical organization when thinking about futuristic organizational architecture for humans and AI. We believe that this aversion represents our opportunity.
Today’s hierarchies are rigid and slow to adapt. Higher levels, like managers, are usually not subject to proper market competition - evolutionary pressures. They can become complacent, and in the connected multi-level nature of hierarchies, both the good and the bad cascades from the top down and reverberates back up. By the time the structure adapts, significant rippling damage has been done.
There are information bottlenecks across levels, knowledge is often siloed even though applicable to other levels. The autonomy of lower levels is limited and tends to prevent available competency applicable to other parts of the organization to be turned into action. The list goes on.
Yet, if you think about it, the corporate hierarchy as a organizational pattern is the culmination of millennia of ruthless market and capitalist optimization. There must be something about it, that is highly effective and powerful.
We believe that the major inefficiencies, the roots of its criticisms, stem more from the way its expressed (through bureaucracy) than the pattern itself.
The winner of evolution
What’s its great strength? Well, it is a powerful and scalable mechanism for cohesive alignment and specialization. This alignment is so strong, that it solves the problem of the commons locally within the structure, enforcing communal sharing among lower-levels is in the self-interest of each higher-level. This aspect is worth a separate blog post.
Alignment is the most important thing in both centralized and decentralized organization. It’s the foundation for positive sum behavior, where the value of the collective exceeds the sum of its parts. At its core, this positive sum dynamic is all that organization is about.
In hierarchies, alignment works across scales. It allows chains of nested specialization where higher-levels can bend the problem solving space of lower levels - encapsulate complexity into focused regions. So that without requiring any awareness beyond their niche, lower-level efforts work towards higher-level goals.
If you have cohesive alignment of diverse complementary parts competent in their respective niche, you’ll win at whatever this alignment is directed towards. The synergy factor of an organization is an exponential multiplier on the sum of its competencies.
At its core, effective organization is about aligning specialized parts towards goals larger than their sum. Hierarchies accomplish this exceptionally well. Indeed, it is no wonder that they came to dominate under capitalism.
Billions of years of biological evolution have decided similarly that the hierarchical multi-scale nested alignment is the structural essence of every single form of life that we know, from micro to macro level, including your body.
As an abstract pattern they are powerful; as currently implemented, they work well enough to run the world but leave plenty of potential on the table.
The Power of Decentralization
Back to the quote. What is it about flatness, what about a decentralized & web-like bottom up structure, instead of traditional hierarchies, that’s so powerful that all systems inevitably trend towards it? For organization in particular it’s:
- strong adaptability & resilience
- local autonomy
- parallel exploration
- openness
- meritocracy (permeable for innovation from unexpected sources)
- information efficiency
- mega-scalability
In essence, it all comes down to this: web-like bottom up structures are more effective and expressive for emergence of complexity and capabilities over time while exhibiting superior evolutionary fitness. Simply put, they are better at exploring a possibility space over time. Like a machine learning model that is better at learning from data.
The domination of this new decentralized organizational pattern is inevitable. It is merely a matter of getting a medium that can effectively express and integrate it with civilisation - and enough time. This medium is peer-to-peer protocols and digital currency.
However, a pure web-like structure lacks one crucial thing essential for organization: unified multi-scale nested alignment. Yes, precisely the thing that hierarchies excel at.
The Emergence of Heterarchy
There seems to be a critical tension between top-down and bottom-up organization, hierarchies versus the web. What would we unlock by practically conciling these two?
Is it possible to have hierarchies that feature all of the properties that we like so much about flat web structures?
It turns out, this concept already has a still little-known term: the heterarchy.
In Torus, this concept is best understood as a dynamic set of concurrent, overlapping and inter-nested emergent context-based hierarchies, where all agents posses the potential to hold any rank in any hierarchy simultaneously while retaining local autonomy. In a heterarchy, hierarchies are scope-centric, rather than role-centric. What agent is currently allocated to a specific scope, or any sub-scope of it can change as dynamically as new agents can enter the system.
This shape has deep resemblance to the dynamic structuring of the human brain, which will be the subject of a future blog post.
Our thesis is that as a organizational pattern it will come to dominate the 21st century, surpassing both traditional hierarchies as well as flat networks in their simplest form.
Torus: a Power Up For Evolution’s Winner
Torus is a hyper-long on this thesis. What happens if we synthesize the winning organizational pattern of history with a parallel, web-like bottom up structure, allowing it to finally work freely without the limitations of traditional bureaucracy and integrate it with a Bitcoin-inspired economic model?
Torus’ recursive structure may appear as inherently hierarchical: that is true, but only at a local level. Globally, it is flat, a web, where change moves from the bottom up. Authority is decentralized and always shifting. It fully embodies the form of a heterarchy as described above.
Hierarchies can emerge, adapt and dissolve spontaneously based on local actions; no hierarchy can permanently dominate the entire structure. Hierarchies are bottom-up permeable: any agent can rise to the top of any hierarchy at anytime. Competition exists at every level. Agents can be inserted at any edge of the hypergraph and delegation paths can be locally reconfigured on the fly. Hierarchies are fluidly expandable and reducible in structure.
Each delegation graph is its own local hierarchy, each delegation step is a level, each coerced to align to the level above, cascading across levels. This is a explicit mechanism for creating cohesive alignment, unification and coherence across the entire structure, while naturally forming recursive specialization trees.
We explicitly abstract the structural essence of effective organization ~ cohesive multi-scale nested alignment, together with the desirable properties of decentralized web-like systems and implement it with the flexibility and composability of a hypergraph, rooted in the open ownership of stake.
The system is built to provide open opportunity to reap the benefits for all of humanity.
