Bottom-Up Manifesto

The top-down is the imposition of a pattern from one to the many regardless of whether it works – for example, country-wide policies.

The top-down gets selected because it makes sense, not because it works.

The top-down fails because it is applied to scale before having been tested in the conditions it will be applied to and in the conditions it will find itself after the environment reacts to its introduction.

The bottom-up is the voluntary adoption of a pattern because it works, by those who find themselves in a similar environment to where it has been proved to work.

The bottom-up works because it is adopted only after it has been proved to work.

The top-down works in theory, the bottom-up works in practice.

It doesn’t mean that if something is bottom-up it will work, but it means that: if something works it is bottom-up and that if something

• If something works it is likely bottom-up

• If something is bottom-up and reaches wide adoption then it works.

The top-down is bad because when it fails, it fails for all (because it gets introduced to scale before extensive testing in local conditions). Potentially threatening the whole.

And yet, we keep desiring top-down solutions for our problems, as if every instance of a given problem has the same cause.

The top-down inherently brings fragility, because:

• The top is centralized, thus local harm might be fatal
• Mistakes made by the top propagate to the bottom

Both the above increase risk of systemic damage.

When the top-down works, it is because it skewed the risk curve towards the tail: creating a false sense of security until it fails spectacularly. Conversely, the bottom-up front-loads the risk: what survives and gets adopted the bottom-up way is usually safer.

Long-lasting progress is always bottom-up, because the bottom-up becomes adopted after having being proven to work. The top-down is fragile because untested.

• The flow of life is bottom-up.
• The arrow of causality is bottom-up.

History repeats itself because history is made by the bottom-up, not by the top-down, and the bottom-up is relative, and the relative takes place over and over again, just like we all aspire for a better life for ourselves, no matter how good our life is.

Top-down practitioners consider their peers to be the ultimate judges of an idea; bottom-up practitioners consider reality to be the ultimate judge of an idea. Top-down that works is impossible. It necessitates full knowledge of the territory, and no single sensor could be tuned perfectly to make every detail of the territory legible (it would have to be calibrated to a single part of the territory).

We are under the illusion that there is something top-down which can influence the world in a lasting way. Either it won’t last or it’s something which emerged the bottom-up way and we confabulated it as top-down. Examples: inventions, policies, thoughts, careers, successes.

Less time should be spent on discussing top-down solutions and more on creating the conditions for bottom-up ones.