The Greedy Algorithm

We can talk about malevolent forces, but today, I’m going to show you how nothing has to be evil for the Whole to become sick. I’m seeing a world that is brilliantly managed yet spiritually dead.

Everyone is doing a decent job in their respective corners, and from the sky has fallen a technology that relieves us of our mundane duties. Yet here we are.

I will talk about the tendency of … you … to move toward what draws you in that very moment. Let’s call this a ‘greedy algorithm’, not as a pejorative, but as a way of naming the best visible step, taken from where you stand. ‘Greed’, from now until the end of this writing, refers to this.

In a pure world, greed is not an inherently bad thing, because, for reasons we will get into later, the Whole is integrated with the part.

But a long time ago we became deadly centralized, and ever since, we’ve engineered a world that is deeply dis-integrated and anti-nature. And so, specifically in this dis-integrated system we’ve built, greed has brought forth disastrous consequences.

Specifically, what disastrous consequences? I’m talking ads, middlemen, bureaucracy, industrial agriculture, problem-solving departments, growth hacks, credential inflation.

Each local move looks rational. Each part has its reason. The metric goes up. The chart improves. The department justifies itself. The platform grows. The machine gets busier.

And yet the Whole becomes bloated, soulless, bloodsucking, and uninspiring.

Nothing has to be evil for the whole to become sick. It is enough that each part optimizes a private metric inside an system that is not integrated.

The corporation optimizes engagement and destroys attention. The platform optimizes ads and corrupts the creator-audience relationship. The cancer cell optimizes replication. The problem-solving department creates more problems to solve.

Now, in an integrated system, one that is inspired by nature, something else happens.

The greedy move of each part is already folded into the Whole. The bee does not need to understand pollination despite it being weaved in with the bee’s desire for nectar.

In this type of world, greed does not disappear but it does get metabolized. Appetite becomes pollination. Waste becomes soil. Death becomes fertility. This waste-free turnover is what our bodies in healthy state tend toward as well.

The Whole is already present in the part, by integration, and this makes the part truthful.

A dis-integrated system asks each part to maximize, and then expects the sum to become harmony. But the sum, in this case, leads only to useless accumulation. It is a pile of victories that do not know how to belong to one another.

An integrated system is subtler. It does not require every part to stop seeking its own good. Its architecture is such that the good of the part … participates in the flow of the Whole.

Something arrives, capacity meets it, transformation happens. What is transformed becomes supply for another capacity. The mathematics of PerillaCove.

The fruit falls and feeds the soil. The cow grazes and returns fertility. Nothing stands outside the system hoarding its win. What is taken is transformed, and what is transformed is returned, continuing the cycle.

And this is why nature can appear to be full of beings seeking their own immediate good, yet still approach zero waste, because the problem was never appetite.

In a dis-integrated system, appetite becomes extraction because there is nowhere for it to return. The win has no afterlife … it is taken, counted, hoarded, and severed.

There is another way, another world we can live in. Not one of moral obedience or no appetite, but a world where the local move belongs to the Whole, in a rolling state of decentralized competence. That is what we could have.