The research foundation of the Social Operative System: a doctoral investigation into governance as a designed social technology for high-complexity societies.
Research Foundation
The sOS architecture emerges from a doctoral thesis completed in 2024 that reframes governance as a social technology: a human-designed artifact for coordination that can be studied, prototyped, and redesigned — just as we redesigned transport, communication, and medicine.
The core argument: contemporary societies face a structural condition of complexity — interdependence, diversity, speed, scale, and non-linearity — that existing governance models were never designed to handle. Centralized representation becomes a computational bottleneck.
The thesis proposes a distributed coordination architecture grounded in:
The research integrates: institutional design theory, complexity science, distributed systems (DLT), collective intelligence, data sovereignty (Solid/Inrupt), and Cerdà's Eixample as a spatial model for civic geometry — the chamfered block as a unit of distributed urban coordination.
Philosophical Foundation
Dialogic Principle (Morin). Opposites are complementary, not exclusionary. Human deliberation and machine computation, individual sovereignty and collective coordination, diversity and consensus — these pairs work together, not against each other. The hybrid model of sOS is a direct implementation of this principle.
Recursive Principle (Morin). Effects become causes. Every governance action generates data traces that become new labels, which trigger new smart contract conditions, which generate new actions. The system learns from itself — this is the computational meaning of stigmergy.
Hologrammatic Principle (Morin). The part contains information about the whole. Each individual label, properly structured through tensor factorization, carries relational information about the broader social fabric — enabling the machine domain to detect interdependencies without requiring centralized oversight.
Key Contributions
1. Governance as technology. Institutions, rules, and coordination mechanisms are designed artifacts — not fixed categories. They can be improved through scientific method and iterative experimentation.
2. Stigmergic coordination. Formalizes how digital traces (data, labels, registries) can enable emergent coordination without central control — translating biological stigmergy into computational governance.
3. Distributed architecture. DAO (governance), UILL (data sovereignty), and Social Machine (collective intelligence) as integrated layers of a single governance architecture.
4. Barcelona as laboratory. The Eixample grid as a civic geometry precedent for distributed coordination — the AI/Data Sandbox as the first experimental test bed.
Complete doctoral thesis. CC BY-SA 4.0.