Swarm Creativity Blog

In my p revious post I introduced human bees, ants and leeches . Swarms of bees are motivated by creating something radically new, to draw satisfaction from inventing something that has not been there before, pollinating others and creating honey in the process. Ants are social insects too, who show loyalty to their swarm, but are obsessively competitive, motivated primarily by trying to win at all costs, be it in sports or in professional life. Leeches are more solitary insects, living off the blood they suck from others, motivated by money, and by trying to get rich as quickly as possible through whatever means available. I created the three tribes in tribecreator , training the machine learning system with the Twitter feeds of Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, JK Rowlings, and the profiles of 150+ other creatives such as designers, musicians and artists. The ant tribe was trained with the Twitter feeds of 150+ athletes such as Rafael Nadal, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, plus Nascar race...

In an earlier post I have spoken about human bees, sheep and leeches. This post extends this concept to the flow experience of groups of humans collaborating in groupflow .  The flow experience per se can be reached in many areas, from sports, art, and music, to professional teamwork. Csikszentmihalyi even describes criminals enjoying their burglaries, and the extreme example of the Marquis de Sade enjoying his sadistic behavior. On the flip side, perfectly legal flow activities might cause pain to some of the involved parties, for instance the dog and cock fights in some parts of the World, the bull fighting in Spain, or the boxing matches in the US and elsewhere. It is therefore worthwhile dividing flow experiences in three different categories sorted by positivity for the involved parties: first, the enjoyable experience of creating something radically new that has never been there before, second the gratification derived from competing against others or oneself in sports rangi...