All life systems have a basic fuel, a resource which the ‘organism’ cannot live without. For corporations, it’s money. For computer programs, it’s programmer attention. If the system runs out of fuel, it dies. A system is probably in a good state if it’s generating its own fuel, instead of relying on charity/theft.
Sometimes I add visual flourishes to this program I’m working on. Although I enjoy seeing them, they are not an indulgence; I am not being ‘whimsical’. I care deeply about the program’s survival, but if it does not reward me with novelty, I will lose interest and it will die.
The two large entities in the picture above are volvoxes; clusters of cells. I removed the cells themselves, and left only the connecting ‘protoplasm’. This is similar to how a large organization sometimes does not ‘see’ individual humans. They are implicitly considered irrelevant to the larger machine’s (abstract) worldview, which must exclude the unnecessary in order to function. An organism which malfunctions by failing to ignore the unnecessary is called ‘neurotic’.
