2.14 Revolutionary Systemic Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.15 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.16 Appendix 1: How Harmless Behavior Can Become
Critical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.17 Appendix 2: Loss of Synchronization in Hierarchical
Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3 Social Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.1
Measuring the World 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.2
Monitoring the Flu and Other Diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.3
Flu Prediction Better Than Google . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.4
Creating a Planetary Nervous System as a Citizen Web . . . . . . 40
3.5
Sociophysics: Revealing the Hidden Forces Governing
Our Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.6
Social Forces Between Pedestrians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.7
Self-Organization of Unidirectional Lanes in Pedestrian
Counter-Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.8
Walking Through a “Wall” of People Without Stopping . . . . . 44
3.9
Measuring Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.10 Most Pedestrian Facilities Are Inefficient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.11 Crowd Disasters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.12 Countering Crowd Disasters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.13 Forces Describing Opinion Formation and Other Behaviors . . . 50
3.14 Culture: More Persistent Than Steel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.15 Reducing Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.16 What We Can Learn from Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.17 Punishment Doesn’t Always Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.18 Why “Social Capital” Is so Terribly Important . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.19 Trust and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.20 Appendix 1: Nervousnet: A Decentralized Digital Nervous
System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.21 Appendix 2: Social Fields and Social Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4 Google as God? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.1
Technology to Empower a “Wise King”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.2
A Digital “Crystal Ball”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.3
The Digital “Magic Wand”: A Remote Control
for Humans? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.4
A New World Order Based on Information? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.5
Nudging: When the State Takes Care of Our Decisions . . . . . . 68
4.6
Google as God? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.7
Errors or First and Second Kind: Doing Good Isn’t Easy . . . . 72
xviii
Contents