Koinospace: Where the Org Things Are

In Demons: Mediators between gods and humans, Egyptian mythology inspired me to think about entities that liaised between people and ogregores. But where do ogregores live? 

Gods live in divine worlds. We humans live in “real” 3D physical space (dirtspace). We have projections into other places, like social media personas in cyberspace. Ogregores (collective social agents like states, corporations, and other organizations) have projections in physical space (e.g., their human members and physical infrastructure) and cyberspace (e.g., apps and websites). Dirtspace and cyberspace aren’t their native realms, however.

Let’s coin the term koinospace (by analogy to physical space and cyberspace) or the koinosphere for the home of these greater-than-human agents. [1] If you prefer Rome to Athens, call it orgspace. [2]

What we see of ogregores in physical space and cyberspace are projections of their “true” being in koinospace. Their real-space projections cohere less than humans do. Humans (and other animals) have a high local density of organic matter. Ogregore’s members and artefacts are scattered around physical space. However, it doesn’t follow that they do not cohere strongly in koinospace. While a ShakeShack’s separate branches may be many miles apart, the protocols, process, and materials in them are strongly connected. The ingredients, recipes and work methods of two ShakeShacks a hundred miles apart are much more similar than those of the Burger King next door (though there are similarities; cf. The Economics of ShakeShack, WSJ). In the same way, the liturgy and parishioner values of a local Catholic church will be more different than that of the evangelical church next door than the Catholic church in the next town over.

What kind of place is the koinosphere? It’s more complicated than a mathematical vector space, I think, though one could probably use that model. (It’s worked for large language models; ChatGPT had a 12,288-dimensional embedding space, a mathematical representation that captures semantic meaning and relationships between different linguistic elements.) Koinospace seems heterogeneous – it includes texts, human and inter-organizational relationships, culture and values, money, software, and law. One could think of orgspace as a space composed of (intersections of?) other spaces like meatspace, dirtspace, lawspace, and moneyspace.

Mythologies use metaphors to describe where the gods live: Mount Olympus, the nine realms of Norse mythology arranged around the world-tree Yggdrasil, or the many levels of divine realms (lokas) in Hindusim and other Indian religions. To pick one metaphor, one might think of koinospace as a word space containing conversations, contracts, tropes, and culture generally. It’s a generalization of the space where novels live, which includes aspects of text, history, language and culture. 

Organisms (and the entities our perception has evolved to see best) tend to be well-bounded blobs in physical space. I think of ogregores as overlapping clouds in orgspace, a bit like partially charged dust clouds swirling in a young galaxy.

The Heart Nebula
(Image credit: Steve Coates | www.coatesastrophotography.com) 

What does the koinospace concept get us?

• It encourages us to think of the manifestations of ogregores (apps, stores, products, press releases, etc.) as partial projections of a greater whole 

• It alerts us to connections in orgspace that are not evident in dirtspace, such as corporate cross-ownership, industry alignments, and a single entity (e.g., Meta) centralizing data harvested by separate apps (e.g., Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp).

• It is an arena where we can imagine ogregores interacting directly with each other rather than through the proxy interactions (e.g. in peoplespace, lawspace, and moneyspace) where we can observe interactions

• It could be useful to think about koinospace proximity of ogregores by considering industry, funding mechanism, ownership, organizational structure, or age (cf. my Ogregore taxonomy and ethology). Caveat: I don’t think of orgspace as a simple multidimensional metric space, so one shouldn’t over-interpret “distance” as an objective measure. 

• It might help us this about ogregore dynamics: how they move through koinospace, grow and shrink, increase and decrease intersection with other ogregores.

• Koinospace can help us think about how to affect ogregores. Where are their weak points? Where are they concentrated and spread thin? Governments usually tackle corporations in moneyspace (e.g. through fines) and sometimes in famespace (e.g. through ratings and labels like Energy Star, airport rankings, and airline on-time arrivals).

• Applying the koinospace metaphor to people give a sense that we, too, “live” in a complex space-of-spaces. We don’t just live in dirtspace and headspace, but lawspace and moneyspace, too. Our spaces may be “smaller,” however, because ogregores include many individual people, or least qualitatively different from orgspace. 

Endnotes

[1] Kionospace and koinosphere are derived from the Greek abstract noun koinon, formed from the neuter of the adjective, koinos, “common.” Koinon could mean any sort of organization. Thomas Corsten, in the entry “Koinon” of The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (First ed., 2013, pp. 3798–3799) writes that “… koinon was used to designate all kinds of associations of a number of individuals, from small private clubs to entire states, ....” (cited in Wikipedia, accessed 20 June 2024)

[2] According to Etymonline, the noun “organization” meaning “act or process of organizing, the arranging of parts in an organic whole” dates to the early 15c. from Medieval Latin. The sense of “that which is organized” is later, by 1707; especially “an organized body of persons” (1829).