Michael Hearn - Emergence Response and Swarm Theory

Steven Johnson, in writing about emergent responses in his articles, distinctly uses the examples of antlife and behavior as a comparison piece to human behavior, in some ways suggesting that ants are more successful at this kind of communal collaboration since there are so many ants and ant species and they are involved in so many different kinds of operations. His comparisons are not unfounded, while he admits that human communication is far more advanced than the communication of animals such as ants where they only have from 10 to 20 different things to communicate where humans practically have vastly more things to communicate, but the distance humans have with one another can distill our communications to the point where we do act like a swarm of ants, communicating simple things back and forth for one another's purposes. The example that kept on coming to mind reading this was the idea of our economy, how while each person involved attributing to the economy is their own complicated person with various needs and desires, the basic law of the economy that summarizes many of our communications is "supply and demand". I'm obviously simplfying and leaving out a lot about economics (so excuse me), and especially in this day where independent businesses and collaborative contributions are more common, the lines between supplier and consumer are more blurred than ever, but the basic trading of goods and services for money or other valuable goods can be simplified to just that. In that sense, there's always this kind of swarm behavior where we each contribute to one another's pursuits and in that way makes up the blueprints of cities and societies that Johnson talks about.