Vibewire Forum: Hyperintelligent Movements beyond the Tactical Moment

The Vibewire discussion on e-participation and e-democracy as part of its e-Festival of Ideas continues - and there have been a number of really interesting posts in yesterday's thread already. We're now diversifying into a number of threads, and I've posted a new contribution (picking up on some themes from yesterday) now. Comments welcome - here or on the Vibewire fora.

OK, I'll make a start here. It was very interesting to follow the discussion yesterday, and in that thread, Martin Stewart-Weeks asked a really useful critical question:

Strikes me that eDemocracy, if it's going to be anything interesting, has to play in the middle of this new (renewed?) contest between the individual and the institution. This, to me, gets close to the heart of the matter. If institutions are now, for the most part, the wrong way to harness collective intelligence for a purpose, then what will do that job in the future?

How exactly do swarms of smart, geeky "youths", for all their invention and creativity, constitute a force for sustained action and purpose - as opposed to having a wonderful time ripping down Scientology for a while?

The point about institutions is (a) their sustained attention to the issues and (b) their accountability. Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing that institutions are unfailingly honest and transparent and that is is easy to hold them accountable. Far from it. But tough though it can be at times, it is possible to hold them to account, to speak truth to power, as it were. How do you do that, and exact some level of accountability, in the network, in the swarm of hyerconnected individuals who stay together for as long as they are having fun or getting the buzz they are looking for but who will melt away the minute they get bored or something more interesting comes along to distract them?

For me, this goes right to the heart of the matter. I fully agree with Mark Pesce's suggestion that the rise of hyperintelligence (or what Pierre Lévy has called ' collective intelligence') gives rise to an entirely new way of organising collective action, and that this undermines and hollows out existing institutions.

I don't know that that's always necessarily a good thing, or that it's the end point of the development. I don't have a problem with the Anonymous movement against the cult of Scientology, or with many other cases in which the spontaneous organisation of disparate groups has mobilised strong protest groups. But on the other side of Anonymous are the Cronulla riots, for example - socially disruptive, violent mobs can be organised on the fly using much the same tools. What if the next 'something more interesting' that Martin writes about is not to harass Scientology, but a local resident (wrongfully) suspected of some devious act? What if the instigators of the next hyperconnected, hyperpolitical action deliberately manipulate public sentiment in order to achieve certain ends? They'd be using different media, but is there really much difference from the mass demagoguery of the 1920s and 1930s?

I don't mean to be too negative here - the easy (?) answer to the question is that for the most part, we trust each other's moral compass enough to hope that an action like Make Poverty History or Anonymous will generate more participation than calculated hate-mongering against certain ethnic or religious groups. But that's basically just saying that we hope most people are progressively-minded like us - and for the very reasons that Mark outlines, where hyperintelligence models are applied to undesirable causes, the resulting movements will be just as difficult to rein in as Anonymous has proven to be for Scientology.

The other key question for me follows on from what Martin asked, too. Anonymous may be happy to remain a purely tactical movement (and I'm using the term movement loosely here - they're really much less organised than a conventional movement, I think): bothering and annoying Scientology enough to hope that in its irritation, the cult will make greater and greater missteps and thereby reveal its real, insidious face. (That's a tactic which has worked very well in the fight between filesharers and the music industry, actually - the more the industry has flailed about with disruptive DRM and lawsuits against kids and grandmothers, the more music fans have realised that the industry is "founded on exploitation, oiled by deceit, riven with theft and fuelled by greed", as Robert Fripp would say.)

What if the people involved in a hyperintelligent, hyperconnected movement are interested in longer-term strategic goals, though - in reducing third world poverty, combatting climate change, developing alternative approaches to globalisation? The traditional answer would be that the movement will need more of a centre, stronger structures, nominated leaders who are able to speak to the conventional institutions (in the way that Bono and Bob Geldof have spoken on behalf of Make Poverty History) - so do we get back to a more conventional model of lobby groups, then? Rather than relying purely on random acts of participation which add up to a strong collective force, do we need a group of full-time representatives for the movement - and at that point, how different is the movement still from political parties or labour unions whose members' fees support their representatives?

Looking at the history of previous grassroots movements might be interesting as a comparison - see, for example, how the environmental and citizens' rights protest movements of the 1970s turned into the Greens parties of the 1980s and beyond (and in the process often started shedding their 'fundie' elements as they accommodated themselves to Realpolitik). Of course the grassroots movements then weren't the same as the hyperintelligent movements of today, but at the same time, I don't think many of the original protesters back then would have thought that some of their own would be elected to major political offices by the 1990s.

So, this gets back to Martin's question of playing in the middle between individual and institution. I think that even with a gradual or not-so-gradual weakening of conventional institutions in society, there will still be that pressure for hyperintelligent movements to transform themselves into 'proper' (= conventional) lobby groups, parties, etc.; how can they resist that pressure as far as possible and maintain their points of difference from such conventional groups, while also being able to speak strongly and unitedly to those in power?

In the near future, I think we're most likely to see answers to this by following what happens with MoveOn and GetUp (especially after the U.S. election later this year). Much though they might like to avoid it, they're already becoming institutions in their own right, and once the immediate 'enemies' (Howard, Bush) are gone, they'll have to formulate longer-term strategies for themselves. On another level, I think the Korean citizen news site OhmyNews is interesting in that regard as well - it, too, had achieved its immediate aim (supporting the election of a progressive South Korean president) in the election a few years back, and since then has had to rethink itself as a sustainable, long-term media organisation (while still relying on citizen journalists for most of its content). We might see the pro-am model it's developed spread to areas outside of citizen journalism, too... (As an aside, I have a chapter forthcoming in a new collection on tactical media where I try to draw some parallels between the development of OhmyNews and that of European Greens parties. Unfortunately I can't share it before the book comes out, but some more information is here.)

So, what will be the shape of these intermediate 'hyperinstitutions' (sorry, Mark ;-)? What mixture of hyperintelligence and conventional organisational structures will they be able to employ? Or am I seeing things far too much through the lens of the past, and are much more radical reformulations of e-democracy or e-participation possible?

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