The frontier of human coordination has moved East

A Review of Chor Pharn’s “Coordination Limit” Series, by guest writer Mosadoluwa Fasasi

Some extra context by Michel Bauwens:

People who follow my digital curation on X, via https://x.com/mbauwens, are aware that I am conducting a five-week trip into China, visiting grassroots, peer to peer communities, permaculture ecovillages, some research lab outposts run by Western university extensions, Web5 technical communities, etc … and last but not least, rather large agricultural cooperatives with DAO’s, that are supported by their local government, makerspaces, and research labs. I share my findings and interpretations through the tag #BauwensInChina (they are numbered, you can find 12 episodes so far), and I sometimes share them here as Notes on Substack as well.

My biggest current inspiration for understanding the country, apart from the Classics that I am attempting to read (from Mozi, via Tan Si Tong to Yuk Hui) and my conversations with Chinese people inside and outside the country, is the Singaporean futurist Lee Chor Pharn, who maintains the substack blog called, The Cutting Floor. His contrasts between the currently declining ‘Western’ modality of societal and economic coordination, and the emerging and strengthening ‘East-Asian’ model, but particularly the Chinese way of combining planning, markets and cybernetics, is very illuminating. Only from Chor Pharn can you find out about the actual ‘Guild Republics’ in China.

However, I feel he does miss something, as his view is very much dominated by looking at market and state infrastructures, and the behaviours associated with it. So sometimes I believe he misses out on the kinds of things I am seeing. Next week, I will publish here a collection of my diary notices to complement Chor Pharn’s insights.

In the meantime, the young Nigerian author, Mosadoluma Fasasi, who published the guest editorial about decentralized science in Africa last week, has sent me his own review of the work of Chor Pharn, which functions as an excellent introduction to his work, and I hope it may convince you to check out his blog.

Mosadoluwa, in his article below, links to the important sub-series you can find on his blog, so that you can undertake a more structured and organized reading.

The frontier of human coordination has moved East!

A Review of Chor Pharn’s “Coordination Limit” Series. By Mosadoluwa Fasasi.

Mosadoluwa Fasasi:

The Coordination Limit series is an attempt to “trace how the administrative systems taking shape before our eyes are not the death of meaning, but the scaffolding from which a new meaning may yet be built”.

Within the series are:

• Who Gets to be Chinese, The Stack: The New Sovereignty,

• Machine Surplus vs Human Surplus

  • (Episode 1: Machine Civilization: The Age of Surplus,

  • Episode 2: Machine Surplus: Governing abundance after the end of mass politics,

  • Episode 3: Machine corridors: Who gets to be American?,

  • Episode 4: Human surplus and its leftovers),

• The New Rome, and a now vanished “Eyes Wide Shut” I didn’t get to read.

The overarching theme contrasts the administrative system of the West, which has hitherto shaped the world as we know it, with the new systems taking shape in the East. In the concluding piece, The New Rome, Chor Pharn concludes that “the frontier of coordination has moved East”. Over the last few weeks, Michel Bauwens has continued to recommend Chor’s body of work to anyone interested in understanding how these systems are evolving.

First Impressions

My first engagement with Chor Pharn and his series was through The New Rome. I would find out it was the concluding piece of a series after reading to the end. But in truth, I wouldn’t have preferred it any other way. It is the most dense and most compelling. Perhaps this is why it (as at the time of writing this review) has the highest engagement. While it doesn’t seem to have been written for clicks, it is a signal that cannot be ignored.

I would argue that if you read only The New Rome, without walking backwards to catch up on preceding essays (as I did) you would still have a good understanding of Chor’s theme. As with episodic and seasonal creative work, there is always THAT part, and for The Coordination Series, it is The New Rome.

The New Rome is where Chor Pharn lays out the evolution of modern social order defined largely by the West through Markets, Bureaucracies, and Corporations.

• Markets transformed private knowledge into public price, opening up centuries-old secrets (for instance, think alchemists > natural philosophers > scientists) to the idea of commercialization.

• Bureaucracies turned local, subjective, and often personal rule into objectivity, standardizing what was once moral variance.

• Corporations scaled capital, turning scattered patronage into coordinated, audacious expansion. SpaceX and the arc of modern enterprises are living proofs.

He argues that this social order prospered in an age in which human intelligence was the scarcest resource. Today, human intelligence is no longer the scarcest resource, causing the collapse of the existing social order.

Using China’s “Sino-stack”, he presents the emerging alternative for coordination.

• Cheap capital goods are now easily acquired, enabling developing regions to develop faster and expand their physical capacity.

• Cheap intelligence from cheap capital goods is a form of knowledge transfer and adaptive intelligence.

• Upgrading the people as a result of scaled intelligence. If tools, machines and infrastructures now execute at scale, the capacity of the people must then be upgraded.

Arguably, China leads this new evolution, but as Chor emphasizes, there is yet a limit to exporting their systems at scale. Right now, nations court them because they have to not because they want to. This is something the West has mastered through narrative and storytelling. Those who want to be affiliated with America do so largely because they want to. China is winning the efficiency and machine war but it is losing the cultural war. What is China’s equivalence of the American dream and Hollywood?

Chinese, from Noun to Verb

The question above gets illuminated in “Who Gets to be Chinese?” and “The Stack: The New Sovereignty”.

Respectively, Chor establishes:

(1) that being Chinese has gone beyond biology. China leads with systems that work, and to be Chinese, you must be factored and cared for within and by the system

(2) what happens when the systems that work within China is exported globally; Resistance, Rejection and Acceptance.

Perhaps the crucial point that Chor demonstrates indirectly is that none of these is about what the world wants. But as it also turns out, history is not set by world consensus. The shape of belonging and the fate of sovereignty has always been mapped by those who set the standards. The British Empire codified nations and time zones, America made consumerism and the internet global defaults, and now, as these essays suggest, China stakes its claim through the spread of infrastructure and systems.

The failure of the Western administrative system has become a public spectacle, and as Chor suggests, China just happens to be the country moving in a somewhat optimal direction, however imperfect and sometimes, brutal this direction may take. If the West scaled its administrative systems on narrative and storytelling, the East is scaling it on functionality. The contrast is that, narratives have to be believed, functionality doesn’t have to; it just has to work, and if it is the only system that works, everyone plugs into it. It is a reminder that whoever solves the problems of daily life on a mass scale also gets to redraw the map. Those who cannot afford to reject, accept. Those who have the leverage, resist. Those who can afford to reject get to play a longer game whose result matures much later.

Overall, the essays in this part are a good addition to “The New Rome”. “Who gets to be Chinese?” particularly reads like a deliberate attempt to paint a picture for the reader. If you have never been to China and never experienced their blazing transport system, the piece paints a decent visual.

Coordinating Human Abundance

“If a society cannot offer its young either belonging or agency, they will seek transcendence instead. If it cannot channel rage into construction, rage will become a career. If it cannot restore moral gravity, spectacle will supply it.” — Chor Pharn.

In the 4 part episode of Machine Surplus vs Human Surplus, Chor Pharn describes what happens when cheap capital goods produce cheap intelligence but don’t lead to an upgrade of the people [fast enough]. Most discourse about civilization moving into the age of abundance centers on the abundance of knowledge but less about the abundance of humans. Abundance of knowledge isn’t just about intellectual overflow. When knowledge production, optimization, and digital protocols become so efficient that they leave millions of people redundant, that is also an abundance that needs coordination at scale, and fast.

Perhaps the reason why most discourse around abundance do not factor-in the human is because it is easy to treat surplus as progress; more knowledge, cheaper goods, faster tools, and truly, it is progress. But surplus doesn’t sort itself, it just piles up in new places. This is the coordination challenge, at scale.

Worthy of note, Chor Pharn doesn’t let you off the hook with buzzwords like “upskilling” or “lifelong learning”. If people aren’t upgraded, they don’t just fall behind, they become leftovers. It gets uglier because leftovers in a surplus society aren’t just there are NPC (Non-player characters). They are the raw material of populism, the ones hooked to the screens and the slop machine.

Machine Surplus vs Human Surplus reads like a cautionary tale. Is there a downside to abundance? To automation? What becomes of the human surplus? How do we redefine meaning? This is the ultimate riddle: If most of the world’s energy/compute, finance, information, security and administration challenges are being solved and increasingly getting better, (all because of an abundance of knowledge), the next challenge is how we coordinate and give meaning in the new age of human abundance.