Technology allows for vastly accelerated social evolution in the online sphere. Multi-modal, multi-player, and driven by a diversity of interests, social systems such as Wikipedia are larger than many cities, but appear to develop political order—not only mutual expectations and social norms, but hierarchies and institutions—over the course of days and weeks, rather than decades and centuries. Drawing on five years of collaborative work in both human and animal behavior, we present new results on how the minute-by-minute decision-making of hundreds of thousands of individuals in Wikipedia leads to the formation of emergent institutions that, independent of any single individual, regulate and manage the behavior of thousands. New quantitative methods allow us to track not only the formation of these institutions, but their higher order logic, including the developing tension between the rule of law, democratic accountability, and oligarchic capture.

Simon DeDeo, Indiana University and the Santa Fe Institute