Creative Destruction
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches
toward Bethlehem to be born?
–The
Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1921
To a patriarchist*, the Dean campaign could mean the end of
the world as it should be. While wishful thinking will prompt denial and
grief anger, a more disciplined assessment would cause any elitist
to quake at the possibility, slight, thank Gawd, but still too frightening
to consider, that the proletariat might now have the means to sink the patriarchal
world into anarchy.
*I'm trying out "patriarchist" where one might normally
use the term "conservative." And I fancy "explorer" where "progressive"
has been the norm. This is consistent with the teaching of
my mentor Howard Bloom, who says that every population consists of conformity
enforcers and diversity
generators.
Sir, There may be a vulnerability..."
W. B. Yeats and Joseph Campbell and George
Lucas and now Joe Trippi teach that Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough.
The Internet has the
scaling potential to mediate the voices of us all, like a central
nervous system, so that each of us (We the Cells) have a voice weighted
in reasonable proportion to our contribution to the Rest of Us.
Anyone with
a passion for the Internet and a reasonably well developed sense of
adventure should be irrevocably committed to this possibility. |
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There are terrorists among us. For patriarchist leaders, democracy
is a form of anarchy, as Lance Knobel points
out today. Patriachist Americans also
feel that society might be endangered by a President untethered from the
hierarchy of large organizations so beloved by the politicians.
Some feel terror at the thought of a non-Bush president, even though Dubya
is the only President who's ever had a major terrorist attack happen on his
watch.
It makes you wonder if we might be safer with a President
who knows first-hand how a self-organizing smart mob works.
Disruptive Terrorists
Clue 1 Valdis
Krebs depicts
hidden data in novel ways. Here's part of a visualization from Uncloaking
Terrorist Networks to
make sense of the terrorist network surrounding the 9/11 flights:
Krebs used public knowledge to uncloak obscure relationships:
"The best solution for network disruption may be to discover possible
suspects and then, via snowball sampling, map their individual personal
networks - see whom else they lead to, and where they overlap. To find
these suspects it appears that the best method is for diverse intelligence
agencies to aggregate their individual information into a larger emergent
map. By sharing information and knowledge, a more complete picture of possible
danger can be drawn. In my data search I came across many news accounts
where one agency, or country, had data that another would have found very
useful. To win this fight against terrorism it appears that the good guys
have to build a better information and knowledge sharing network than the
bad guys (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001).
Clue 2 Gary
Wolf is writing a story for Wired about
Howard Dean's Internet campaign, trying to figure out how the smart mob
that is the
campaign functions, and whether or not it actually can be managed. Wolf finds
this to be such a challenge that he's asked his own smart mob–his readers–to
help him write the story.
"I’m used to stories having an innate structure
that allows you to start anywhere in the vicinity of the key actors and
find your way in. You just follow the trails...But the Dean campaign
is different. Yes, it is centered on a single man – the candidate.
But its activities are widely dispersed, control is decentralized, and
many of the “happenings,” for
lack of a better word, seem to have equal weight...
So, I’ve naturally
decided to do what the campaign itself has done – that
is, I’m making the network work for me.
To catalyze his network, Wolf has posted
a "retroactive
manifesto." He's asking us to imagine that the Dean campaign as we now
see it had sprung out of a manifesto. By laying down the design criteria
which might produce the campaign, he hopes we all can better understand it.
And then he'll take our collective work and put it under his byline. Following Dan
Gillmor's example,
Gary Wolf implies that he can learn more from his readers than we learn from
him:
"Here, I’ve offered a Retroactive Manifesto
of the Dean Campaign. These are the rules that might have been posted
on the wall of campaign manager Joe Trippi’s office, if there were
such a list of rules. I am looking for examples and counter-examples – confirmation
and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture
of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest? Is something
here plainly wrong? Hack away.
When you look at both stories–Krebs' search for network connectors
and Wolf's use of one network to understand another–you get it that Al Qaeda
and the Dean campaign are both self-organizing, disruptive networks. Further,
both have been catalyzed by a strong leader but neither depends on the
leader for specific direction. In fact, each network is more a response to
the strict hierarchy it opposes than the result of a purpose-built hierarchical
organization.
The Smartest Network Wins...
...is how David Weinberger puts it. We can now see that our
nation's hierarchical security model is as vulnerable to the network model
as circuit-switching phone companies are to packet-switching guerilla
protocols.
In military terms,
we look like the Red Coats marching down a road while the Green
Mountain Boys pick them off from the woods.
What if the Dean campaign prevails over the many hierarchies
that want him to fail? If so, it will be because there's something intrinsically
superior in the nature of his accidental organization vs. everyone else's
explicit organizing. Howard Bloom would suggest that the Dean campaign is
a Darwinist experiment by the American superorganism to find a way to defend
itself from a previously unknown threat. It's safe to say that a Dean administration
will seek novel ways to combine information and make connections that our
current hierarchy chooses to ignore, provably to our peril. Who knows? Maybe
even Glenn will learn to embrace the
only Internet candidate.
To Catch a Thief...
The patriarchists among us fear the Dean terrorist network
as much as Al Qaeda, perhaps more. They've forgotten that the 13 colonies
were a self-organizing network that overthrew a loathsome hierarchy. They
should take comfort knowing that it takes one
to
know one.
1:46:54 AM 
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