2025-12-11, Learn with me, researching the relation between emergence and standardization

I’ve been watching the fediverse slowly drift from a weird emergent ecosystem into something that is starting to look institutional: standards bodies, formal processes, corporate entries, “governance conversations.” Underneath all the politics and discourse, there’s a simple systems question I want to understand:

What happens to emergence when a system gets standardized?

“Emergence” here is not a mystical property. Think about the early fediverse: different codebases, different moderation norms, different experiments with identity, different kinds of sociality. It was noisy and uneven, but there was a lot of room for new things to appear. People built strange instances, new posting conventions, ad-hoc content flows. That’s emergence: local actors exploring a big configuration space.

Standardization is almost the opposite move. You write down protocols and expectations. You fix interfaces. You say what counts as compliant and what doesn’t. You introduce forms of legibility so that institutions, companies, and regulators can treat the whole thing as one object. That doesn’t just “document” the system; it changes what the system can do.

The hypothesis I’m interested in is simple:

Standardization acts as a counter-emergent force. It increases legibility and interoperability at the cost of the system’s capacity to generate genuinely new behaviors, configurations, and practices.

I don’t want to just assert that. I want to turn it into a research object, something we can actually study. That means I need to translate a vibe (“this feels like it’s killing the magic”) into a structured question.

The first step is to decide what actually exists in the picture. I treat emergence as a bundle of capacities: how many different ways can this system be built and used, how easy is it for people to remix it, how much deviation can survive, how often do new patterns appear. Call that the emergence profile of a system. Then I treat standardization as a process that introduces constraints: it picks some abstractions and freezes them, declares certain behaviors valid and others invalid, creates compliance expectations, and so on. That process is conceptual and material; it reshapes the space of possible futures for the system.

Once you see it that way, the research question becomes more precise. Instead of “does standardization kill emergence,” I ask: which parts of the emergence profile does standardization actually touch, and how? Does it mostly reduce variation (fewer implementations)? Does it mostly reduce recombination (harder to extend and remix)? Does it mostly reduce divergence tolerance (non-standard behaviors become costly)? Or are there cases where standardization actually increases some form of emergence by lowering coordination costs?

To make that researchable, I then ask what could, even in principle, be observed. For something like the fediverse, I could look at the diversity of implementations over time, the number and heterogeneity of instances, the appearance of new use-cases or interaction patterns, the survival of “weird” behaviors that don’t quite fit the standard. On the standardization side, I could look at how many constraints get written in, how tightly the protocol is specified, how much everything converges on a reference implementation, and how centralized the governance becomes. This gives me a set of signals I can watch across time.

Now the hypothesis has a spine. “Standardization as counter-emergence” isn’t a slogan; it’s a claim about how those signals tend to move when a system crosses from an emergent regime into a standardized one. The fediverse and ActivityPub are good places to explore that, but the logic should also apply to other infrastructures: file formats, identity systems, messaging protocols, even social or scientific norms.

What I’m building, then, is a general model: systems that start with high emergence, undergo standardization, and then move into different post-standardization regimes. Some may become highly legible and uniform (dead zones). Some may manage to stay emergent by using modular or extensible standards. Some may reconfigure their emergence into new forms (emergence moves up a layer instead of disappearing). The job of the research is to map those trajectories and see which patterns actually exist.

This is the kind of thing I like to show in public: the final theorems and definitions, and the way a raw intuition gets turned into an object you can investigate. Start with a particular case (fediverse institutionalization), abstract out the core forces (emergence vs standardization), define the entities and capacities, figure out what could be measured, and then let the question sharpen itself from there.