Hive Status: Kevin Kelly

• Books and Evolutionary Psychology by James Brody, 8/4/97
  
  

A temp agency gave my son his lead to his first meaningful job, where he started as a receptionist, built the company's LAN, found a mentor, and now rides jets as the "chief analyst" for someone or other. Temp agencies, like other opportunistic organizations, found a niche and had a feeding frenzy of r-selection ... rapid reproduction, little investment in offspring, and rapid consumption of resources ... based on their consumption of people and roles.

I heard a radio ad this early morning, "Health care professionals call us today, careful screening, rapid placement ..." The entire process struck me as similar to a hive where there are social castes, defined by roles filled within the hive. The members of a caste are often genetically identical and, in an example of reciprocal altruism, do not reproduce themselves but are used up, helping another hive member, carrying the same genes, handle reproduction.

Health care temps agencies might be happier if all nurses were in fact genetically identical, instead of identical only by their icons, their degrees and the shape of their caps. Likewise for physicians and psychologists. Still, the advantages of hive mechanisms become greater as population grows and resources must be handled, whether because of petroleum shortages, weather changes, or stockholders, ever more efficiently.

My kid, however, may not be the only exception to temps uniformity. A temps agency was for him, was a floating strand of RNA that carried him into proximity with people who might cooperate (react symbiotically) with him. After writing this sketch, I guess I like temps agencies after all.

Read Kevin Kelly (1994) (Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley) for a collection of essays about organizations - insect, neural, social, or electronic - following closely similar rules. A useful, provocative compliment to Stu Kauffman or Brian Goodwin.

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