10 Membranes

Self Organising Systems and the UK Riots

I have written before on acephalous institutions, trying to connect the organisational principles behind the shadow banking system, al-Qaeda and Anonymous, as examples of loose, unstructured, self organising yet homologous and efficacious organisations. All three mirror the structure of the internet, created by the US military as decentred network without a central node, which could survive an attack on any one part of the system, and was thus self organising and non-hierarchical in its construction. We are now seeing the social and institutional ramifications in new forms of organisation that are starting to dominate the narrative of our times, types of organisation that have proved impossible for the structured, top-down, embedded organisations characteristic of the twentieth century to effectively contain, precisely because of this radical new principle of their organisation.

I now want to develop this thesis to suggest three things – firstly that the recent riots are very much part of this pattern. Secondly, that as with my above examples, communications technology is at the heart of this new ability to organise laterally and de-centrally. Thirdly, that the nexus of  communications tech and social form is, along with globalization, the defining metanarrative of our time, contra Lyotard.

Several things are immediately clear about the riots – they were not planned in advance, they were not lead from a central source and they were geographically dispersed. The psychology of rioting would suggest that to some extent all forms of rioting are unpremeditated and that crowd dynamics, “the moment”, takes over, rendering command structures, discipline, in short, organisation, impossible. While this is true these features were more pronounced last week, largely because of the geographic spread of the disturbance. Previous UK riots had specific loci – think Brixton in the 80s or Bradford in the Noughties – that provided a well defined casus belli, which in turn provided ideological support, obvious ring leaders and a clear space (defined geographically but also conceptually and morally) or theatre within which the events were to take place. What we have today is a hydra headed, distributed, multi-purpose, self replicating but non-identical riot – one that functions much like al-Qaeda, say. There is no one bounded and unitary focus to the riots, to their goals, tactics and principles and hence they are completely self organising, genuinely anarchic, more so than most riots in the past.

That it was communications technology that enabled this form of rioting (geographically spread, notionally “triggerless”) is also clear. This happened in two principle ways. The first and most discussed is the use of Blackberry Messenger, and other instantaneous many-to-many digital communication networks to allow rapid, viral, self organisation amongst the social groups across London and around the UK. Without the ability to spread messages widely at will, these riots would have been impossible. Secondly, rolling saturation media coverage enabled everyone to see the initial outburst, implanting the idea and, in my view, directly leading to the subsequent waves of riots which were legitimated in the rioters minds by the previous riots, and so on throughout the conflagration. Communications technology is not just a sideline to the main story about the riots, but should be seen as central to the whole fact of these riots – without it they would not have been possible, and would never have spread. As with so much the defining principle of the riots exists in projection, information and communication.

Now I will press my third claim – that this collision between social organisation and communication tech is a defining metanarrative of our time.

Let’s take several steps back. Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that the postmodern, that is, the contemporary era, is defined by the collapse of metanarratives, understood as the epochal structuring forces and stories that create the social and ideological formations of a discrete era. So, for example, Christianity and feudalism might be seen as the great metanarratives of the Medieval time, whilst imperial conquest, Christian morality, industrialisation and free trade could be construed as the metanarratives of Victorian Britain. The postmodern condition, however, is when such metanarratives collapse, when the pillars around which a society organises itself wither away and we are just left with a Babel of relativised, competing narratives of superficially equal force. My problems with this are common – that there is an obvious metanarrative to our time, and that is advanced, or if you are Fredric Jameson, late capitalism, and secondly, that a more likely understanding of postmodernism is to say that its defining metanarrative is the appearance of the collapse of metanarratives, the collapse of metanarratives being itself a metanarrative.

The concept of metanarrative is helpful, and when viewed from that vantage never went away in the first place.

Lyotard was writing in the 1979. Since then we have seen such enormous transitions, as in every age, that the label postmodern is to my mind outdated – we need something new to both label and understand our world, yet nobody in academia has really risen to the challenge, or become widely accepted, as having provided a new label, a new set of metanarratives for now. And the whole post-postmodern thing is old and ridiculous; we are living beyond negatives and prefixes.

While I would shy from a label, I want to suggest two metanarratives that have supplanted those of postmodernity, the first being globalization, understood as a massive increase in the financialization of the economy and the world, forming an autonomous and basically systemically omnipotent metanarrative underpinning everything, and second, the communications-organisation nexus, which exists in dialectic with globalization. In concrete terms I am talking about hedge funds and futures, the internet and digital media. CDOs and Tweets alike are the emblems of our times, and at a fundamentally level are mutually dependent and co-created.

Communication technology has undergone successive revolutions beginning with the printing press, through the mass distribution of books and periodicals, via semaphore, exploding with the telegraph and then the telephone, coming of age with the mass media, radio, television and film, and reaching apotheosis with a grand convergence of them all through digitisation. Time and space are warped, shrunk, preserved through these phases of development, becoming progressively more tamed (see Innis and his theories on the difference between time binding and space binding communication mechanisms). Each new communications technology expands the forms and possibilities of the societies that adopt it, such that the pre-WW1 economic system was built on the telegraph, so the 21^st economic system is built on racks of supercomputers and instantaneous data transmission around the globe. The forms and boundaries of communications technology, in other words, describe the form and boundary of what is possible within a society. Each stage on this journey has meant a widening in the sphere of the possible for humanity, new forms of communication allowing new understandings and social formations, such that we are now at a point where many-to-many communication is ubiquitous and occurs aside from geographical distance and the resource of the user.

Just as the internet was the age when the abstracted network become a dominant motif, so we now live in the age when the acephalous self organising system is the dominant, or at least most powerfully emergent, structural principle. We are moving to a kind of swarm dynamics. Examples of this are widespread and well known, and usually described in excited terms as the hallmarks of web 2.0: flashmobs, Wikipedia, Apache, P2P, the protests across the Middle East, citizen journalism, surges of public opinion on Twitter. Yet I would argue many other phenomena work on this principle and have become heightened if not created in our age: terrorist cells; stock market fluctuations and crashes; multinational businesses and new kinds of media and finance organisation (agencies, hedge funds); resistance networks against regimes everywhere and their counter-parts (reactionaries in the Middle East/Tea Party); riots in the UK; hacker collectives; the phenomenon of Open Government. It took centuries for the fruits of the printing press to be felt in all areas, and we are only around 20 years in to this latest phase of communication technology (incidentally I believe communications technology will go through a period of stasis over the next 100 years – biotech, not telecoms, will be the transformative tech of the 21^st century). We should therefore expect this kind of organisation to increase, and we should expect to see many more examples cropping up in the next decades, with the riots being one instance when long term industrial and therefore capital trends intersect with the capabilities unleashed by many-to-many networks to form destructively self organising movements.

The riots aren’t anomalous. They aren’t even simply deeply rooted social problems. They are utterly typical of a new age, governed by new metanarratives, which they perfectly encapsulate.