Brainstorming with the Enemy No. 17 — The Salp Standard

The seventeenth essay in Brainstorming with the Enemy was written on the morning of 22 October 2026. It began with transport, trains, trucks, drones and cars, and the artificial intelligence that already plans their movements one fleet at a time, and turned when the machine was asked to stop thinking like a transport consultant and start thinking like a zoologist. Schooling fish, flocking starlings, pelicans, lobsters, penguins, ants and bees show that nature never optimises the vehicle; it optimises the collective. The salp, a chain of animals in which each member swims by its own jet and none pulls the others, is taken as the model: coordination that widens each member's options while creating value for all, a cooperation biologists call by-product mutualism. The essay separates two goods that moving machines can share. Time, the speed a convoy gains when braking signals travel faster than any human reaction, belongs to every member and needs no payment; energy, the drag saved behind a leader, is unequal and needs settling. It then turns the salp into a warning: salps are clones, and a chain of machines running the same software fails as one, as the processionary caterpillars that circle a vase until they starve already show. It proposes the Salp Standard, five clauses for coupling moving machines, from smart trailers and parcels to drones and self-driving cars, without a head, without a single lineage and with the right of any member to stop the chain; makes three requests, to vehicle and coupler makers, to China's fleet operators and to the Swiss cantons; and gives, as an addendum, the Coupling Clearing, a rule for sharing the energy gain, with three predictions and what would refute each. Concepts proposed by the author: the Salp Standard; the Coupling Clearing; the Bestiary Axis. Written in part with Claude (Anthropic), an AI model. The ideas, editorial decisions and responsibility for the content are the author's.