Into the Spannungsfeld (SIG Kickoff)

TalkRobert Peake, Venkatesh RaoJune 19, 2025

Robert Peake kicks off his special interest group on the 'Spanungsfeld' (field of tensions), building on tension-mapping workshops from Edge City Esmeralda and Edge City Lana, and drawing on landscape theory of aggregation to argue that organizations and protocols must be understood as fields of coupled trade-offs and social conflicts rather than isolated engineering decisions. Venkatesh Rao joins to extend the discussion with concepts like agonistics, emotional homeostasis in organizations, cursed problems in game design, Schelling's micromotives and macro behavior, and the idea of 'unmanaged tension fields,' proposing that protocols function as tools for decoupling complex systems and managing chronic, unsolvable tensions rather than solving them outright.

Topics

agonistics-and-emotional-homeostasis governance landscape-theory-of-aggregation organizations protocols spanungsfeld-field-of-tensions tension-games-tensions-as-partially-solved-arguments town-hall unmanaged-tension-fields-and-cascading-failures

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