RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Emergence as practice

Emergence as practice

Below is a draft of the first section of my essay/maybe book on the politics of a densely networked self-organizing society... Much more coming, but this is part I want to get out and in front of smart people like you.

The question for our time is how to achieve reengagement of the people with policy without the intervening institutional mechanisms that were designed for a different time. This essay lays out a concept of “emergent polity” that blends democratic and recently developed corporate governance and accountability ideas to suggest a society of organizations-based[1] form of self-government organized by legal constitution and controlled by all participating members through a representative system[2], but limits each such organization to focusing on essentially one task.[3] It is a political practice based on principles of self-organization and distributed governance that is predicated on the recognition that the concept of sovereignty has migrated from collective institutions to the individual, in principle if not in practice. The sovereign individual has many interests and may join many emergent polities to address their different concerns through these institutions based on a literal contract between participants. Using the densely networked information technologies available today, a variety of these polities, focusing on single issues and lead by activists with specific interests, can address one issues with different policies and citizens can vote to support the polity they favor with their feet and money. A citizen may be a member of many of these polities, which will be built on standard contract law that create a tax-deductible investment through which profits and losses can be passed through to affect the individual’s tax burden, sustaining the geographic state’s role as enabler of contract law and redistributive economic policy. This approach provides a bridge from today’s monolithic polity to a plural environment of competing policies. Successful policies supported by growing constituencies will be in a position to negotiate cross-polity contracts that add further benefits and responsibilities for members, slowly knitting a new constellation of policies in which citizens are directly involved, an emergent society. This environment, like the markets, will support new entrants constantly, preventing the establishment of a permanent regime dominated by one or two political parties and creating new opportunities for direct participation in social decision-making based on special interests or skill.

 

There is an idea afoot that a new superpower is being birthed in the awakening of the Internet. It reprises an old idea, one that repeats throughout history as “counter-empires” emerge in response to established orders[4]. This essay replies to and expands on ideas presented in recent papers by Joichi Ito, Emergent Democracy[5], and James Moore, The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head[6], and suggests specific hacks to the existing system that can transform the energy rising today into a continuing political reality that liberates individual initiative and collective will to solve common problems without establishing a new political power hierarchy that must inevitably be overthrown. If a system is “emergent,” that is if it allows new order to rise of out disaggregated action, it must be architected to sustain maximum freedom to innovate while facilitating, at minimum, semi-permanent organizations that can apply political and social capital to social decisions over time. Without a mechanism for people to agree on principles and practices that are appropriate to solving their collective problems, politics cannot exist.

 

Politics is a process that flows and changes like a great river, collecting the force of new ideas about organization and the moral and ethical character of action as it interacts with other systems for achieving society’s aims, namely the church and markets. Metaphorically speaking, politics is the will of a society flowing across through plains and mountains of commerce and spiritual action, carving the complex landscapes in which we live. Depending on the route taken through politics, society will shape itself very differently in response to the characteristics of its markets and religions, which can be as hard or soft as marble or sandstone. No two interactions of these three social systems will produce the same result, yet there is no denying that the three have combined to grant humans greater self-determination within an increasingly interconnected world.

 

As much as the technology we use change, people stay largely the same over the course of generations, changing only slowly. The process of history and evolution do not run in neat synchronization and man is either comfortable or lazy enough to endure the discontinuity for decades at a time. What we begin to notice as a kind of cognitive dissonance is the onset of the realization that the pace of technological development and human evolution are so far out of step that something must change. And by that time, the change has already happened and merely needs to be acted upon. John Adams, revolutionary and America’s first conservative president, wrote to his longtime political rival and friend Thomas Jefferson of their shared experience of the break with England: “What do we mean by revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”[7] The revolution in the colonies began on August 5, 1735, in New York, when the trial of John Peter Zenger got underway. Zenger was charged with publishing seditious libels after he criticized the colonial governor in print. Despite the governor’s successful effort to pack the jury with his own cronies, Zenger was acquitted based on the argument that printing the “just complaints of of a number of men” is an essential form of free speech. Instead of pleading “Not Guilty,” Zenger’s lawyer turned the law on its head and admitted Zenger was the publisher of the language in question, and that publishing the charges against the governor was justifiable because it brought a truth to light, a concept that did not exist in Britain. While there were many more steps before the break with England was inevitable, a simple twist on the law ignited the spark that burned all the way to 1776.

 

The question is, if mankind is at another break point in history between two paradigms of social organization, what is the one small step that will cause a transition to occur? Network theory and the work of mathematician Stephen Wolfram suggest that small changes in existing systems can spread rapidly and have vast impacts on the nature of future organizations of matter and people.

 

The social hack I am suggesting is a simple inversion of contract law to empower the individual to join many different polities while preserving their ability to write off the cost of investing in social services. These corporations, which I describe as emergent polities, are narrowly focused entities that address a specific social need, such as healthcare or even military defense. A group of people with genetic markers for a particular form of cancer would contract with one another to cure that cancer. A hundred thousand people identified by making an open call for contributions would put $1,000 into the polity, and the organizers would provide that to a company wishing to commercialize a cure in exchange for free treatment of members of the polity. The cure, once developed would be available in one of two ways, by joining the polity—an investment of more than $1,000 would be required because the risk of the project would be eliminated, but because one would join prior to developing the disease and could, therefore, never get the disease, not pay a huge premium on the cost of the drug—or by purchasing the drug from the company that develops it, part of the profits of which would go back to the polity to offset the cost of future treatment. In the military arena, which has been presumed to be the domain of government, more than 3,000 companies provide some kind of military service to the U.S. Department of Defense and the global private military industry is a $100 billion business. A polity for mutual defense could span geographies, because other relationships, such as a major customer relationship, could require a contribution to defense if it were needed. Because the “insurance” provided by the mutual defense polity lowers the chance of war (in most tribal and failing state wars a few hundred or so military security professionals on the ground have stopped most violence, since thugs operate effectively only when unchallenged), the cost of the insurance would be subject to actuarial and market pricing that reduced the upfront cost of gaining future protection. A global agreement to sanction offensive action, presumably through the United Nations and enforced by nation-states intent on continuing their role as global military powers, would create a disincentive for most wars of aggression. Nothing in this essay suggests that the nation-state should or must be eliminated. The point is to distribute most governance as close to the "edge" of society as possible to engage the political energy, knowledge and skill of individual citizens.

 

These market-connected polities are just one example of the way that the cost of providing the services typically delivered through fixed channels of political power or bureaucracy can be distributed across populations that transcend the geography of the nation-state. Food provision, elder care, education, and general healthcare are open to these kinds of polities founded on a mutual recognition of need. Moreover, when a polity is established, it will have negotiating leverage with other polities and organizations to use in purchasing other benefits or providing its services to other polities. Over time, polities would become enmeshed and the monopoly of the nation-state as provider of last resort within a region will be overcome. This may not happen in our lifetimes, but it is my contention that this is an elegant solution to the question of how to catalyze a transition from today’s alienating political hierarchy to something different.

 

We are already well through another process of social evolution today. It has been described by writers with strikingly varied backgrounds and ideologies[8] as growing awareness of a global identity, the discontinuity between government and governed, the transformation of logistics and computation, and the transfer of control of information from the few to the many through the introduction of the Internet into wide usage.

 

Millions of organizations, from the lowliest village council to the largest national governments now contend over the direction history will take, all of it covered by local and planetary media, where most people lived in quiet isolation from the major debates over policy, exchange of goods and spiritual dogma until only the last few decades. The fourth force shaping the human future, the one responsible for the recent deepening of our individual involvement in social decisions, is also man-made: technology, which has presented humanity with the tools with which the course of politics, markets and religion can be shaped purposefully, often experimentally, before our “nature” takes its course through the interaction of politics, commerce and religion. We humans have taken control of our environment, our minds, our resources and our spirit, but we are still waiting to see where it will all take us. I urge you to view this as John Adams did. A revolution is a fait accompli and turning it into a political practice that institutionalizes the dynamism possible in today’s densely connected world is the challenge we must accept in order to break the cycle of periodic sociocide that has accelerated in recent centuries. It should not be necessary to kill 100 million or 200 million people, as happened in the U.S. Old West, Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and China to accomplish another generation of human organization.

 

The catalysts for a transformation in governance are evident today in the rise of non-governmental organizations that currently sit at the negotiating table with national governments, the fast-organizing and equally fast dispersing political forces in the global peace movement, the rise of sophisticated financial instruments for distributing risk across vast numbers of people and projects, and the self-organizing workforce building important components of the global information infrastructure. A dark reflection of these forces can be seen in the loosely organized terror networks that are able to rock superpowers back onto their heels, as well as the increasingly intrusive mass media and governmental surveillance enabled by innovations in computation and telecommunications. In short, we are faced with collective choices, as every generation has been since the dawn of human society.

 

Organizationally and philosophically, it is time for a break with that past that frees our social decision-making from the anchors of pre-networked institutions whenever possible. Using today’s communications tools, from the Internet to mobile phones, people across the world can come together about the issues they care about. Order and leadership can emerge from groups and vanish again as tasks are completed. But the how and why of a new politics of emergent qualities needs to be defined and the existing systems, from the neighborhood caucus and debates in the village square to the national and international political infrastructures, must be mined for features to be preserved and used in the future. Without a philosophical change that redefines how people assess the value of human action, the new will give way to the inertia of the old, because there will be no manageable relationship between these two loci of power.

 

We must make this change because politics remains a zero-sum game, a metaphorical war for absolute control and not a mechanism for a plurality of ideas and opinions to inform public policy, either within a single nation or across the planet. Yet, with the rise of a networked society, in which the potential number and range of connections available between people are increasingly dense and varied, so that they can organize to address very specific needs or issues, the necessity for a new political practice is increased by orders of magnitude, becoming more pressing with every geometric increase in the number of connections available within society. The borders and barriers to cooperation based on the pokey and expensive communications of the steam ship and telegraphic era are falling for obvious and visible reasons.

 

At the same time that deeper economic ties restrain the great powers from attacking one another, because they cannot afford the economic consequences of war, the economic, healthcare and natural resource disparity between geographic regions of the globe has created a desperate underclass that will stop at nothing to gain power or exact retribution on the former colonial powers for recent economic exploitation and wrongs committed in the distant past. Throughout the world, minority groups struggle for relevance and power in the form nationhood, defying the boundaries laid down by earlier generations, so that in the last half century the number of nation-states has doubled. Existing majorities struggle mightily, at the ballot box and in the streets, for dominance over the ever-fragmenting world.

 

A new politics requires new skills and tools be introduced as widely as possible. In many ways, the skills and tools that are required for emergent politics are already available. We simply have not thought through how to use them and what the basic rules of a political system based on densely connected societies and groups self-organizing within those societies to address problems and needs through distributed temporary and flexible aligned processes that create a social whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. The zero-sum game of modern politics, in which election campaigns are fought like wars between two parties and the winning party takes all, setting policies for the whole of society during its term of office has simply run its course because the process wastes good will and physical resources at the expense of a public whose many perspectives are reduced to blunt force slogans that barely address real public concerns. The cost in terms of personal participation in politics, too, has become far too high for anyone wanting to hole office and retain their fundamental humanity to endure intact. Candidates for office are treated not as people full of contradictions and foibles, but as candidates for a kind of priesthood that separates them from the people they represent. A candidate with skeletons in his or her closet will be crucified in public and the winner of a contest is expected to rule with messianic competence. When faults begin to show in the persona of a president or a prime minister, even the local judge, in today’s densely interconnected world, people swarm like locusts for feast on the exposed grains of human vulnerability, and it is often deserved. For example, amidst corruption charges against Philippine president Joseph Estrada (who was elected on his movie star background and looks),more than a million protesters swarmed to a square in the center of Manila after receiving text messages on their cell phones saying “Go 2EDSA [an abbreviation of the square’s name], Wear blck.”[9] Within days, Estrada was out of power.

 

The first step toward a dynamically self-organizing society that can react humanely and efficiently to significant challenges is an attempt to understand the nature of our identity today, now it has been transformed by the relentless march of interconnectivity between civilizations, societies, cultures, organizations and individuals. Without comprehension of these changes, already rooted in the way we behave toward one another and still taking root in new ways each day, the transformation of politics will never happen. That said, if you are satisfied with the state of the world and don’t want it to, or believe it can’t, change, spend your time enjoying what you have now. It is easy to believe, given the massive firepower of the world’s military arsenals and the freelance terror networks that have proven they can strike anywhere, that it is best to focus on using up what happiness we have in the moment, but this is a nihilism I cannot accept. I have children, they will have children, if the world is still intact, and my heart, mind, soul and genes all tell me that the future is what matters, not just today.

 

The question is, are the first steps toward a different form of social decision-making that I describe here, which can be put into place without a wholesale displacement of the existing power structure, a viable model for beginning the transition to something new. There are two simple reasons for exploring an admittedly gradualist approach. First, it requires fewer people to die in defense of privileges or the pursuit of control. Second, a new framework built on the technological foundations that have created the profound disconnection between past and future will preserve that foundation rather than make it a battlefield, one that might be destroyed in the struggle for power. It is power that people talk about when they talk about politics. Power may be concentrated or distributed, used for good or ill, and it may serve privilege and the existing economic orders.

 

Are we waking or sleeping still?

 

Karl Marx wrote that the traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living. This is an excellent justification for revolting against the past, but the lesson of history is that people are always awake, suffering and killing not from their forebears’ ignorance but their own failure of imagination. Change has been violent because politics is usually simplified into a contest, a war of Us versus Them. Overthrowing an Other requires sacrifices, usually of some poor schmuck that fits the sacrificial bill.

 

Many people believe politics is broken, but that is arguing that the process of public discourse is irretrievably lost and must be replaced. Politics is a process, not an artifact, and the results of this human process change over time. Politics remains a vital aspect of humanity: Politics is simply the debate about society’s options that seeks to refine the quality of life through the allocation of resources, rights, responsibility and opportunity.

 

The pace of social change has been slow, yet the scope of involvement by people in politics, as suffrage and direct political action have migrated from the elite to the masses, and the breadth of social issues that are politicized has widened consistently throughout history. There is nothing wrong with politics. It is the context of our politics that is out of step with human development, because we are trapped in the rigid borders of polities conceived for a different time even though the world is knitted into a global village by media and science has shown that at every level we are deeply interrelated and interdependent.

 

No political party or ideology has a monopoly on stupidity, because politics is the work of people. The only truly stupid idea is that one or one’s party is always right, and there is no shortage of people who believe that in the world today. I believe that because of the polarization of political options, whether for purely ideological reasons or as a result of the melding of politics with religion, in most countries that there is a pressing need for a new politics of the middle way, a consensus-oriented politics founded on energetic debate and individual sovereignty. If life were a cocktail party and politics the only topic, the room would be divided into two armed camps hurling abuse at one another; compared to real life parties, where a hundred people might discuss a thousand topics in an evening and, although they did not agree with one another, would part friends at the end of the night, real life politics is the least socially constructive form of human interaction.

 

The solution is not a politics of two extremes pulling against the middle, but a multitude of ideas and opinions that blend into a chorus of organized social action, a kind of jazz symphony that plays its music in time and with a recognizable harmony largely by accident, because the players learn that there is a line in the music of life they can all play around, with solos and digressions, that feeds the egos of every player involved. Some may play for money and others just out of sheer love of music, but they play together.

 

What can we learn from the bloodiest century in human history? It’s simple: Every human is on the same side in the struggle of life against death[10]. It is a mistake, a failure of imagination, to believe that humans are not trying to survive and thrive in the world. We are born to debate and cooperate in order to survive together. Yet, this debate rages about what is wrong with politics. Each side of this argument starts from the idea that approaches to solving social-organizational problems which differ from than those practiced within the borders of one country or at different times are approaches to achieving death; in other words, any disagreement with a faction’s specific program is a descent into death[11]. “Pure” capitalism. “Pure” Islam. “Pure” Christian. “Pure” socialism. “Pure” American. These arguments, absolutist in every fiber, are a dead end intellectually and as the philosophical foundation for society, since they set up an ideal against which all attempts at change are discounted. Life is a goulash, a hodgepodge, and fortunately so. Any attempt to standardize existence destroys its necessary complexity; in nature, it cripples ecosystems, among humanity, it destroys society, as Nazism and Stalinism have proved. Diversity—in the political sphere it is known as pluralism—is essential spiritually, valuable politically and economically and socially utilitarian, because competing ideas spawn many potential solutions to social problems.

 

Unfortunately, diversity is largely absent in modern nation-states. In the context of the nation-state, we replace one ruling elite with another and see whether they do a better job. This is the alleged situation today, as we talk of a new counter-empire of self-organizing self-governing polity rising to challenge the managed bureaucracy of the nation-state. This, and the mass media’s leveling of public discourse to a contest between would-be ruling elites, has allowed individual citizens to cede their responsibility to participate in and share the burden of freedom. I will deal later with the concept of “burdens of freedom,” but for now suffice to say that the notion we can have the burden lifted by voting for one party over another is a kind of opiate. One political elite is about as much good as another if the majority of society is disengaged from public issues except for biennial or quadrennial (or any other periodicity) elections. Peoples need to be engaged every day with their future, whether directly or through multiple representatives with whom they are in dialog to some degree, in order to create a better world. With the productivity of modern manufacturing and knowledge work to support leisure, eventually every human on the planet could have a hand in some aspect of the social investment in making a better world. With billions more people expected to be added to the global population this century, we had better come up with something constructive for all these people to do or we can expect the devil to make plenty of work for their idle hands.

 

Some people have given up on the potential for universal freedom and seek to instantiate outposts of freedom in the world. Robert Anton Wilson, writing as Hakim Bey, argues for a practice of creating temporary autonomous zones (T.A.Z.), “like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it” [emphasis in original][12]. The most highly realized example of T.A.Z. is the annual Burning Man festival, which meets in the same place every year and is not slightly fearful of being broken up by the state. Why? Because the people who attend Burning Man are the people possessed of political power in the United States, free and fairly confident that they won’t be beaten or killed for prancing around nude in the desert. However, whether a T.A.Z. is dangerously subversive or not, the notion that true freedom is only a passing epiphenomenon of briefly exercised free will is a surrender of power to someone else, to totalitarian force or apathy. This ideology—though Wilson explicitly says he is merely suggesting an idea and not an ideology, it is immanent in a variety of contemporary social theories—forfeits the many substantive roles each individual may play in the life of their society. T.A.Z. is charming, but doesn’t have the virtue of changing society when society is begging for real changes.

 

More troubling, perhaps, is the prevalence of theorists who have simply thrown up their hands with regards government. These are the people who campaign for office or advise officeholders. Neoconservatives in the United States, following the lead of British Thatcherites, say politics is broken in fundamental ways and should be abandoned, that a rational society should rely on other mechanisms, particularly the market, for the allocation of all resources. This is the faction that supports the Bush Administration’s effort to cut off funding for most government programs, known as “starving the beast.”[13] John Keane, a political theorist who heads the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, suggests that a “vast, sprawling non-governmental constellation of many institutionalised structures, associations and networks within which individual and group actors are interrelated and functionally interdependent” will supercede nation-state governments[14]. This does sound similar to what I am suggesting in the form of the emergent polity, but Keane propounds two views that belie a lack of faith in the selfless decision-making embodied in a humane democratic practice. First, he explicitly mischaracterizes the work of economist John Maynard Keynes as the basis of a “welfare state.” This is a familiar trope in the conservative arsenal and is easily supported with largely sensationalized examples of welfare mothers who drive Cadillacs to pick up their Food Stamps. Keynes advocated government spending on essential investments, such as a national highway system to spur economic activity. The conservative emphasis on defense spending as a form of economic stimulus is an anti-egalitarian program where Keynes simply suggested that when people have no work they should be paid by the government at bargain rates to build infrastructure that will have substantial economic impact. Keane’s second flawed assumption is expressed by his selection of the term “cosmocracy” to describe his vision for a world—almost void of detail about how society can initialize this change—that transcends the nation-state and becomes a global civil society. Somehow, this society allows individuals to negotiate kinship ties[15], a bow to the resurgent tribalism of the anti-globalization movement, which tends to reinforce local prejudice rather than awakening tolerance. Keane tries to be both an advocate of a political milieu that exists above and beyond the state[16] while arguing for the irrelevance of government. This begs a pure market solution in which corporations and corporate entities exert control in a top-down hierarchy, which is absolutely counter to idea I am proposing, that there is no global government. Instead, local and national governments will continue to exist in a reduced form, acting as a kind of banker for emergent polities through the tax system, continuing to provide some redistributive economic functions while marshalling local natural and human resources to generate tax revenues that support those functions which are decidedly local in nature, such as roads, police services and courts (though many of these functions, too, could be assumed by emergent polities, which might form a special tax district to pave a road or add a sidewalk with beat cops to the streets).

 

An emergent society can eliminate monolithic government monopoly on the delivery of all services and social resources. It does not necessarily eliminate government. Indeed, the fact that it does not strive for an abolition of government makes it a more pragmatic program for breaking out of the current political boundaries. Simple corporate law and, even before modifications, the tax system in towns, states, provinces and nations can support emergent polities.

 

In fact, activists should forget thinking globally until their own localities (whether those localities are geographic or based on shared interests) are transformed, because, if the notion of emergence is correct, a global society is the sum of these many local efforts and not something that can be planned or administered from the top. This requires a significant recommitment to the notion of government as the expression of a collective will to act publicly based on social and economic 

 

The nation-state isn’t going to vanish for a very long time; it may never vanish. A geographic polity can provide two critical features important to the people who live within its borders: legal regimes under which emergent polities may be organized—in fact, these legal regimes provide regions an important competitive mechanism in the global economy; second, the nation-state can remain the foundation for redistributive systems based on the extraction and use of physical resources. By focusing on local standards for justice and behavior—setting policy—today’s United States, today’s France, today’s Great Britain, today’s Japan, today’s Russia, and other countries, can forge a more vibrant regional polity than exist today. However, in emergent society, everything else we rely on government to provide would become a quasi-public service that individuals cooperate to create and deliver to themselves and their fellow citizens. In the emergent society, every individual becomes an active and participating citizen in many polities, not one that provides uniform top-down public policy; plural policies are formulated, implementation is organized and the resulting polities compete for support offered by consenting individuals. Every public service becomes the basis for a self-organizing Mayflower Compact type of polity, in which members make an active commitment to one another and renew it through shared action and investment. The competition and compromises among these emergent polities can produce an increasingly interdependent society much as the competing and adapting organisms in nature develop a self-sustaining socio-economic system.

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at August 14, 2003 10:33 PM | TrackBack