This week I learned that Marx had a term for the special qualities of a broader system.

He called this characteristic "general intellect".

Marx thought of it like the accumulated knowhow of the people and processes that make up a system.

High-performing organizations produce something much bigger than the sum of their parts, a kind of magic.

It happens best where you have extremely high trust of a diverse set of people who are individually good at what they do.

You could view this as a kind of general intellect, too!

It's a magical, powerful force, adjacent to the magic of the Radagast.

You could argue that the magic of an ecosystem is also this kind of general intellect.

Who gets to benefit from the value created by this magic?

The answer is typically "the employer" or "the aggregator".

You could argue that aggregation is a technology to reify the creative magic of an ecosystem into a form that can be sold.

For it to work, you have to create a boundary to enclose the ecosystem to be able to extract from it.

Sometimes there's a mismatch of members of the collective feeling ownership of this general intellect that then someone else tries to claim ownership over.

You can see this for example with the reaction of the Reddit community to Reddit's monetization deals with AI companies.

Another example of the mismatch is Adobe's AI TOS where creators thought of Adobe as a tool provider, and Adobe thought of the creators as part of an enclosed ecosystem.

You could call this dissonance a "copernican trauma".

The power dynamic is backwards from what the user had thought it was–a traumatic discovery!