Part 2 of 3: Symbiotic Intelligence Theory
What does it mean that the instruments trump the goals? In Part 1, we described how two of Malone’s five collective intelligences—hierarchy and market—have formed an alliance that systematically colonizes community and democracy. But describing a pattern is not the same as explaining it. Why does this happen? And why does it continue to happen, even though people intend to prevent it?
A principle has circulated on the fringes of organizational theory and political philosophy for over a century.
The logic used as an instrument tends to colonize the goal logic. The colonization stands in proportion to the speed and utilization.
This is not a metaphor. It is a structural prediction. And it is supported by the two greatest political experiments of the 20th century.
The Communist Experiment
Communism’s stated goal was community logic. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” A gift economy on a national scale. Shared identity, mutual responsibility, collective ownership.
But to implement this vision, the movement chose hierarchy as its instrument. The vanguard party, the central plan, the command economy, the state apparatus. The hierarchy was well-justified: you cannot build a new society without organized power. Someone must coordinate the transition and suppress the old order.
Robert Michels predicted what would happen. In 1911, decades before the communist experiment matured, Michels formulated what he called the “iron law of oligarchy”. In all organizations, he said, those who control information and agenda-setting gradually transform their functional leadership into structural leadership. The mandate to coordinate becomes the power to direct. The instrument becomes the purpose.
The Soviet Union did not become a corrupt community. It became a strict hierarchy that spoke the language of community. The instrument had completely colonized the goal. And it did so because the hierarchy successively accumulated authority. Each concentration of authority – each new grade on the leader’s uniform – made the next concentration easier. Eventually, the original vision of community was nothing but a rhetorical decoration on a totalitarian state.
The Liberal Experiment
The liberal case is more subtle and harder to see. That’s why Wendy Brown’s analysis in Undoing the Demos (2015) remains so important.
Liberalism’s stated goal was individual freedom through democratic governance. That entails rights, power-sharing, equality, and popular sovereignty. The demos ruled themselves.
But to realize this freedom, liberalism used the market as its instrument. Economic freedom was the fuel for political freedom. The free market as the guarantor of individual autonomy. The reasoning was, again, pragmatic: markets distribute resources efficiently, create prosperity and limit state abuse.
And again, the instrument colonized the goal. Not through a coup – no tanks rolling into parliament – but through a gradual conflation of economic and political power. Campaign finance, lobbying, regulatory conquest, media ownership, and the revolving door between corporate boards and government.
Brown traces how neoliberal logic has gone even further. It has not only affected democratic politics but has also replaced the reasoning of democracy. The enlightened citizen has become a good consumer. Public negotiations become market signals. Political legitimacy is measured in GDP growth. The democratic subject is gradually being unmade.
The market colonized democracy because it accumulates capital that can be converted into political influence more efficiently than collective will. Each concentration of wealth made the next concentration easier, just as each authoritarian chest badge did in the Soviet case. The mechanism is different; the pattern is identical.
What Each Logic Accumulates — and how it Fights
In Part 1, we noted that markets accumulate capital and hierarchies accumulate authority. But the picture is richer than that, and completing it reveals why colonization runs in a predictable direction.
Every collective intelligence accumulates something, and each has a characteristic way of exercising power:
Hierarchy accumulates authority. It claims a monopoly on legitimate force, and the ultimate power mechanism is violence. Direct, immediate, coercive.
Markets accumulate capital. They create prosperity, and the ultimate power mechanism is exclusion: if you can’t pay, you are out. Fast and indirect, but relentless.
Community accumulates trust. It is glued together by culture — shared stories, norms, symbols, and identities that shape belonging and meaning. Its ultimate power mechanism is exclusion or ostracism, which differs from market exclusion in that it is deeply personal. It is the oldest form of social sanction.
Democracy accumulates will — collective intention, shared direction, the force that drives good decisions or revolutionary mass movements. Its power mechanism is collective (dis)obedience — the strike, the protest, the uprising. Powerful but episodic: it requires a moment of crisis to spark and flare.
Ecosystems accumulate energy — slowly, over geological time, in the form of biomass and fossil reserves. The everyday mechanism is differentiation — the relentless production of variation, where what fits survives and what doesn’t dies. Its ultimate power mechanism is extinction, an irreversible state that can´t be negotiated.
The colonization principle can be formulated:
The fast eat the slow, and the slow feed the fast. Destroy the slow, and the fast will also die.
Capital and authority are quickly compounded and translated into each other – money buys influence, power provides resources. Trust accumulates slowly and is easily broken. Collective will is powerful but episodic. Energy accumulates slowly over geological ages but can be quickly transformed with technological intervention.
This explains why the colonization almost always runs in the same direction. But it also explains something we did not address in Part 1: the colonization of nature itself.
The Ecosystem’s Stolen Capital
Industrialization was not only the hierarchy-market alliance’s colonization of the community, as Karl Polanyi documented. It was also the opening colonization of the ecosystem. Fossil fuels are ecosystem capital: solar energy stored over hundreds of millions of years through photosynthesis, compression, and geological time. The market discovered how to benefit from this capital — extract it, burn it, and convert it into economic value.
The climate crisis is not just a “market failure.” It is the very bill of centuries of colonization. When a logic of rapid accumulation extracts capital from a logic of slowness, the reaction comes as a lag. And the consequences can not be cured by the same logic that caused them. As a parallel, a virus cannot cure its host animal.
The Predecessors
We are not the first to notice pieces of this pattern. Three intellectual traditions have each captured an aspect of it.
Robert Michels (1911) described the iron law of oligarchy — how democratic organizations inevitably develop ruling elites. But Michels framed it as a property of organizations, not as a general principle about competing coordination logics.
Robert K. Merton (1940) introduced the concept of “goal displacement” — how means designed to achieve goals become the ends in themselves. We extend Merton’s profound analysis from organizations to the level of entire societal coordination systems.
Jürgen Habermas (1981) came closest. His thesis of the “colonization of the lifeworld by the system” describes precisely the phenomenon we are analyzing. Instrumental rationality invades domains where communicative rationality should prevail. Habermas recognized that this colonization came from two directions. In capitalist societies, the market colonizes the lifeworld; in socialist societies, the state does the same. But Habermas worked with a binary model – system versus lifeworld – that lacks the granularity required to propose improvements.
What is new with Malone
Combining these theories with Thomas W. Malone‘s typology of collective intelligences produces a synthesis stronger than the predecessors articulated individually:
Directionality. Colonization flows from logics with fast metabolism toward logics with slower metabolism. This holds across all five types — including the market’s liquidation of the ecosystem’s energy capital.
The instrumentality trap. It is specifically the logic chosen as the instrument that tends to colonize the logic chosen as the goal. Instruments are evaluated with quantitative measures. To increase the instrument’s capacity, more resources and organization are required. The goal is often a qualitative measure — a state to strive for. But the goal becomes dependent on the instrument. The instrument can not be dismantled right after the goal is reached; it must continue to grow and expand.
The transmission chain. Community and ecosystem are not powerless, but they exercise power differently. Community produces cultural artifacts — stories, stuff, food, science, technology… Ecosystem logic selects through differentiation — what resonates spreads, what doesn’t die. The dominant artifacts reshape what people demand and are prepared to act for. Their will becomes collective action that promotes culture. The chain runs: culture → differentiation → will → action → culture → differentiation → etc. This is how the community-democracy alliance can exercise power without coercion. It expThis is why cultural production is not a side effect of democratic life but its engine.
Predictive power. If this principle holds, it generates testable predictions. Any movement that uses market mechanisms or a hierarchical organization as instruments for community goals should expect their logic to eventually dominate.
The Design Question
This principle poses an uncomfortable question for anyone attempting to build alternatives — including the Peer Democracy project.
If every instrument eventually colonizes its goal, then the community-democracy alliance we proposed in Part One faces a specific danger. Which instrument will it use, and how will it prevent that instrument from taking over?
If we use technology as an instrument, we risk the technology’s own logic — platform dynamics, attention economics, algorithmic optimization — colonizing the democratic process. If we use organizational structure, we risk oligarchy. If we use market mechanisms (fundraising, incentives, monetization), we risk reproducing the very colonization we set out to resist.
Is there any instrument that is compatible with its goal — that strengthens rather than replaces the logic it serves? Is there a way to build a counter-alliance that does not carry the seeds of its own colonization?
That is the subject of Part 3.
This is the second in a three-part series on Symbiotic Intelligence Theory. Part 1 examined the hierarchy-market alliance. Part 3 introduces peer democracy as a design response to the instrumentality trap.