Murmuration

Murmuration names coordinated movement without direction, and Marsh uses it as the clearest available image of stigmergy at work. The borrowed sense is the flocking of starlings, where a large group moves as one with no leader and no communication beyond each bird responding to those nearest it. Her human examples are chosen to show the range. Traffic is the stressful case, and anyone who has tried to cross a street in Hanoi will understand the awareness, responsiveness and blind faith in the process required to coordinate with many rapidly moving people where there is no official direction. Musical collaboration is the better one. Jazz is a musical murmuration, with everyone contributing to the whole and no discussion or direction, everyone holding autonomy while leaving room for the ideas and expression of others. The distinction between the two examples is the point. Unlike traffic, musical collaboration allows diverse and autonomous agents to collaborate towards a shared goal, which is what makes it a true expression of stigmergy rather than merely of coordination. What the image supplies to the wider argument is a demonstration that consensus is not required for coherent collective action, and that requiring it is costly. Radically innovative ideas almost never receive instant mainstream acceptance, so leaving control of work to group consensus cripples innovation, whereas letting anyone contribute their own ideas encourages a great diversity of talent and produces contributions the originator never imagined.

Murmuration is the ornithological term for the flocking of starlings, and the physics of it has been studied experimentally, with research showing each bird tracks a fixed number of nearest neighbours rather than a fixed distance. Swarm intelligence in computer science derives algorithms from the same principle, and self-organization is well established across biology and complexity science. Marsh's use is closest to the swarm intelligence tradition and differs in what she draws from it, since the technical literature is interested in how coordination emerges from local rules and she is interested in what the pattern permits, namely contribution without permission, which is a claim about autonomy rather than about mechanism.