The ants move more earth every year than we do
Joi's Emergent Democracy paper has created a lot of stir, partly because he has the gall to say we need tools for better organizing (we do) and partly because he focused on the tools, because that's what he does: focus on tools. There are a few things I'd like to toss in, albeit without wading in too deep....
First, there is the issue of the ants, a metaphorical trope Joi invoked to talk about the very real fact that small actions create large effects on the world. This comes from a variety of sources, but most recently Steven Johnson's Emergence. I think it is a useful metaphor with a very limited range of applications, because there is a gross over-simplification of the complexity of ant "society" inherent in most discussions of emergent behavior.
Steven's ant discussion is very nuanced, and I respect his thinking on this subject greatly, but I think the researcher he quoted is far too taken with the minutia of ant behavior to lend an accurate foundation for a meaningful metaphorical comparison of ants and people. In fact, after reading E.O. Wilson and Bert Holdobler's The Ants, I'm with Joi, we are not so different than ants. We should recognize that is not because we are ant-like, but that ant behavior, such as the branching of regularly used trails and the explicit behavior of dragging the pheromone-producing portion of the abdomen along the ground from a food source to the colony, is very complex.
Steven Johnson wrote about this issue very astutely:
The objection revolves around the fact that humans are both more nuanced than ants in their assessments of the world and their decision-making capacity, and that they're capable of understanding the dynamics of the larger system in ways that ants cannot. As Adina Levin says, "The atoms of ant action are simple: pick up crumb, bring crumb to ant colony. The atoms of human action are more complicated: identify people and groups interested in opposing Total Information Act, encourage people to persuade local congressperson."
I think there's a lot of validity to the distinction, but I still think there's value in thinking about ants in this context. To me, when you're talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it's the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It's more like: "follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links." The decision-making process that leads one human to link to another person's page is indeed more complex than the instinctual actions of ants following pheromones, but the decision of the software to manipulate those links, and learn from them, is much more like the way ants behave ---- or at least it could be, if we choose to build it that way.
The atomic units of human action are more complex, to humans. But to the ant, who does a variety of things with its body to communicate besides deliver pheremone sprays now and again, may not be acting at all like a human and more like a part of our brain, a single cell, which produces a variety of substances to communicate with its peers -- this is what emergence is about and why it is important to understand. A good book on this topic is Conversations with Neil's Brain or any other title by William Calvin.
The tools we use to link up as people are a lot like the substances cellular units of collectively intelligent non-intelligent entities (compared to us humans) use to communicate, so we must focus on them sometimes. Joi, as a venture capitalist and nerd-with-a-long-heritage, does that naturally.
This is where the argument invoked by anti-techoutopians, who oversimplify the way we communicate, becomes weak and rather desperate, because they want to imagine that a single person can dominate in a world of followers. To some degree, I could be accused of believing that, as well, because I am convinced that leadership is the key element in any movement and that it emerges from much more than an iron will. It can come from frustration, anger, love and hatred. Without leaders the tools humans use are worthless, a truism across many dimensions of human experience. But therein lies a double bind: leaders without good tools are seldom very successful, either.
It's not clear that hypermedia represent the kind of advance in human civilization that the printing press did. The printing press, after all, enabled the creation of mass media where none had existed before, and it enabled the creation of mass education where none had existed before, and spurred scientific and technical advances in a dramatic way. The printing press literally created mass culture out of nothing, while all that hypermedia have done is speed up the flow of information a bit. If printing is like the automobile, then hypermedia is like the Interstate highway system: a nice enhancement, but not really all that dramatic.
Yes, we communicate faster than we did in our grandparents or our parents time. But the breadth and depth of the average person's knowledge -- even the incorrect beliefs and mixed up information of the confused -- is far deeper than at any time in history. That is dramatic. This didn't come to pass over single generation or century, but through many evolutions of minds and tools for communicating. Talking about how the printing press ignited mass media is wrong. It was simply another link in a long chain of the evolution of knowledge and its transmission. The mass media did not appear for centuries after the advent of moveable type in Europe. Our monkey brains barely keep up and often make tremendous leaps to do so, just like nature has with its pre-Cambrian explosions and sudden shifts in the shapes of the forebrain. In fact, it is nature we're talking about. Even our tools are part of nature.
The press did not even start literate culture, because there was a literate and cloistered European culture even in the dark ages (read Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change). Bennett ignores that since the beginning of the 16th century the amount the average person can know has increased dramatically, which changes the locus of power. He focuses on speed and distribution almost exclusively.
There is no one who can know everything anymore, because there is simply too much information for one lifetime. In the gaps, our tools grow (I choose the organic term carefully), and they allow people to unite and divide movements, to undermine leaders, to elect the unwilling to roles of leadership into which they might grow. No single person can dominate in this world for very long these days, because our tools for communicating link us like ants and we can move the world while undemocratic leaders try to hold it still. People peck the man on the big horse to death like hungry ducks if he leads them down the wrong path or takes too many liberties on the journey.
Bennett puts a label on the debate over Joi's paper, capitalizing Emergent Democracy and calling it a "meme," but I don't think anyone on the two calls in which the idea was discussed thinks they are in a revolutionary vanguard, though a few probably fall prey to thoughts of memetic terrorism. Bennett further suggests in a post on Joi's site that the paper demonstrates "lack of any awareness of how legislative bodies function, about how governments function, or about political theory generally." This proves that he hasn't changed his view of politics since sometime in his teens and misses the point entirely: this is a debate about tools that was purposefully framed that way.
We've been discussing how to change the communication channels, which does, as any historian of politics can tell you, change the nexus of power. But we are not talking about direct democracy or voting by wire, just about new tools for organizing. It's the same discussion that happened when people realized the human voice was a political tool (read Thucydides or Cicero), when people realized the press was a political tool, that radio was a political tool, that television, the mass march, the sit-in, the video camera in the home, etc., etc. Occasionally, that Poly Sci degree from Washington State University comes in useful.
You see, in the emergent democracy happenings, I probably come across as the least tools-centric and most interested in the current political system; I probably cling to my hopes for American politics more fervently than I should. I still believe in a good debate and the ability of a people to stumble on great ideas by arguing. People who can keep things stirred up for the advancement of understanding are to be treasured, because people who excel at at keeping the waters stirred so that we cannot make informed judgments rule the day.
The emergent democracy happenings, which is nothing like a movement and is misinterpreted as being a movement by some, is important precisely because it is about putting tools for reflection into the hands of many more people. If we could collectively capture enough information and just think about it for a moment, together, we could change the world -- that amount could be tiny, as small as a vial of anthrax waved by Secretary of State Colin Powell or the core of a nuclear weapon coveted by Saddam Hussein (both small, but vastly more physical than any idea), and it could change the world.
I'm all for better tools so we can connect and collect the will and force to make the world a better place. It's not that I am naive, because I am not, having been in all sorts of situations where I've seen the worst of politicians and people (and some of the best, as well), but that I think we should try. So, criticize the ideas, folks, but don't belittle the debate. It's worth having. What you have us do? Sit here and take the nonsense doled out by government today as though it was high-minded oratory and principled debate about issues of great import and fine nuance? I don't think so.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at February 27, 2003 12:07 AM | TrackBack