Journey to the center of the web

Come with me down the virtual crater of a digital volcano, located anywhere in the world – but for the sake of the story, let’s say Iceland.  We are about to embark on an inconceivable adventure:  an excursion to the center of the web.  Our destination is a place of mystery and danger, teeming with viruses, zombies, and trolls.

Fair warning, fellow traveler:  you will come back a different person, dog, or whatever species you belong to.  Your identity will be stolen.  The password to your inmost thoughts, not to mention your nude photos, will be hacked…

We begin our descent by penetrating a hard metal barrier known as the server shell.  The view is panic-inducing:  commercially pure aluminum boxes arrayed like a hostile army to the horizon in every direction.  Impenetrable.  “How many servers are there?” you croak, terrified.  Nobody knows.  Maybe 75 million, maybe a lot more.

“Then how do we get through?”  Easy.  In a decisive argument against intelligent design of any sort, the web has recapitulated the mind-body problem.  Servers dwell in the world of matter.  They are soulless automatons:  a precondition for the web, but no more a part of its content than the mush inside your skull is part of the Lady Gaga tune you were just humming.

Whereas servers are manufactured in physical places like Carson City and Taipei, the web is immaterial, pure symbol – created from the stuff of dreams in a secret corner of the Twilight Zone.  To get there, we ride on nothingness and toggle to a place without extension, despite abundant porn.

We Are the Bazaar

Once past the server shell, we arrive at a long corridor crowded with gaudy places of business.  Shadows flit at random, making purchases to the sound of Beatles muzak.  The atmosphere feels hauntingly familiar.  “It’s a shopping mall,” you exclaim.

It’s the digital bazaar.  For many, the only place in the web they know.  They are familiar with Macy’s at Tyson’s Mall, so they shed their fear of spending money in a place that doesn’t exist, and shop at Macy’s online.  Savvier shoppers enjoy a feast of rarified consumption, picking up anything from 1923 Bentleys to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark.  Money changes hands at the speed of light:  $1.4 trillion a year…

A voodoo-like drumming of keyboards announces our arrival at eBay.  At nearby craigslist, primitive urges wrestle eternally with the laws of supply and demand.  If you want it, you can buy it.  If you own it, you can sell it.  In the end, we barely escape being sold ourselves – to a rich Russian, for purposes that don’t bear thinking about…

In our flight, we stumble down a dim and shabby zone, deserted except for a few nerdy-looking young men making pirate noises.  Two large structures appear ahead.  Closest at hand is the devastated shell of a once-noble edifice, now shattered and charred.  We gaze in wonder at the one object that remains standing – an enormous sign, stained, defaced, but still legible:  “PROTECTED BY THE DIGITAL MILLENIUM COPYRIGHT LAW OF 1998.”

“What can it mean?” you cry, as we push on toward a church or temple, battered but stately, surrounded by a wall that looks like – seems to be – “Swiss cheese!” you confirm, taking a nibble.  “And pretty bland.”  In fact, the wall is mostly holes.  We walk in, we walk out.  Just for the hell of it.  Not that there’s much to do inside:  the gods have forsaken this temple.  On our way out, we notice flashing neon lights somehow latched to the wall.  In large black Gothic letters, they alternate their message, first

and then

“Okay, can we leave this place now?” you plead.  But one more trial awaits, before we can abandon the corridor of profit and loss.

An ethereal entity materializes in our path, a sort of wingless angel, blocking the way forward no matter which way we turn.  “Hi,” it says, sounding just like the gay android in Star Wars. “Amazon algorithm here.  You may not know this – how could you? – but customers who bought this item also bought…”

Days later, and only after we have spent our last two bits, we break the spell of desperately desiring what other customers bought who had bought what we bought.  “Internets,” says you, impressed, “is serious business.”

Googlestream to Blogline, ROFL

Leaving the bazaar behind, we jump on a raft that just happens to be zipping past.  Except this raft always just happens to be zipping past.  Everywhere.  We ride on search, a force popularly known as the googlestream – only it flows uphill, and the view from the top bends and twists the mind:  55 billion web pages drenched in the symbolic distillation of our nature.  Nothing human is alien to the googlestream, or feline either.

Below, we can see government bots across the globe busily erecting walls to keep out search.  These walls aren’t made of Swiss cheese, but still they fall down.  The web, methinks, hates a wall.  The one I observe actually standing it hates most of all:  the great firewall of China, red and immense, built to keep out the barbarian.  But look closer:  the barbarian inside the wall…

“I’m feeling lucky,” you shout happily, and aim the raft at the blogosphere.  Off we zip, coming to a stop among a gaggle of political bloggers.

The blogosphere, I discover, doesn’t look like a sphere at all.  It’s a long line spiking at one end.  Around 200 million bloggers perch like sparrows on the line, doing what they do.  This is what bloggers seem to do, viewed from inside the web:  talk to themselves.  Some say things that are quite different and original.  They’re called ranters.  Many endlessly repeat the same buzzwords and phrases and opinions that others around them are saying.  They’re called a community, and are much admired.

The political bloggers near us belong to the second category.  They adhere to the liberal persuasion, and every so often they engage in a brief but remarkable performance.  Jerking spasmodically, in a loosely synchronized manner reminding me of nothing so much as the dancers in Thriller, they build up to a fevered pitch of excitement, then suddenly stop and emit an ear-shattering, semi-articulate blast – like the world’s most powerful foghorn, only with words.

I ask one of the performers what the point is.  “Dude,” he says, shaking his dreadlocks.  “Amplify.”  When I look lost, he insists on a demonstration.  “Say something political.  Smack down Mitt Romney – but super soft, dude, like in the tiniest whisper…”  So I murmur, almost inaudibly, “Mitt Romney has donkey ears.”  Immediately the zombie dance cranks up, this time ending in a veritable eruption:  “MITT ROMNEY IS FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER DRACULA SUCKS BLOOD OF WIDOWS ORPHANS GRANNIES BLACK PEOPLE RUNS OVER LITTLE DOGS WITH HIS LIMO.”  Short pause.  “OSAMA BIN LADEN!”  Somewhat longer pause.  “OH – DONKEY EARS…”

We are positioned directly on the path of the barrage:  a terrible mistake.  Our eardrums explode.  Our brains drain.  By the time we regain control over our body functions, we have been swept clear to the edge of the googlestream.

As we stare in wild surmise at our new surroundings, we find ourselves on a gloomy intersection, with one path headed back the way we came and three more leading to the secret domains of cyberspace.  I hear voices – hundreds of millions of voices, whispering.  You whisper too:  “What is this place?”  Slowly the voices become distinct.  They friend and unfriend.  They like and they follow.  They’re in relationships and out.  They post and they tweet.  They LOL and ROFL and ROFC and LULZ – a lot.

We stand at the social crossroads, on the verge of the deep web.  Behind us, a billion Facebook users, 500 million Twitter users, and hundreds of millions belonging to other denominations squeeze their passionate but inarticulate hearts into preconceived formats.  To a surprising degree, they do it in images – 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day.  When we peer back, we can see them – images of sex and revolution, tsunamis and little league baseball, presidents and pedophilia, Justin Bieber and Beyonce – and cats:  a sickening number of cute cats.

But we can’t linger.  We must plunge into the deep web – an upside-down universe with maybe a trillion shadowy pages.  Al Qaeda and credit card hackers and sexual predators live there, but it has to be crossed if we are to reach our destination.  Betraying some nervousness, you scout the way forward and find it explained, unhelpfully, by a direction marker:

“Which one goes to the center of the web?” you ask.  Surprise:  they all do.  All emanate from the center, all are effusions of the hive.

In the end, we head down the sea of memes, for the sheer satisfaction of stomping on the heads of so many cute cats.

Hive Mind Dreams Pedobear

And suddenly, we are there.  I point a finger at the logo designating our location.  Putrid pink background, four clover leafs.  We have entered a place of myth and myth-making, the legendary anime image board responsible for the invention of rickrolling, lolcats, Anonymous, LulzSec, and an astonishing amount of memes and smut:  4chan, the dark heart and foul center of the internet, known to practitioners as the hive.

“Dunno,” you mutter.  “I expected pillars and statuary.”

No pillars.  No statues.  Just cylindrical openings off a cracked geodesic dome. . . Over 20 million visitors – almost all, socially deprived males between 15 and 30 – lurk in the hive every month, but we see or hear nothing of them.  So we wait in anxious silence, until a portentous presence at last approaches, to the sound of electrified music.

In the world of matter, he’d be Christopher Poole, pale, skinny, 24-year-old nerd.  But online he is moot, the great and powerful, lord of 4chan – eight feet tall, voice like thunder, face shrouded in mist.  His arrival is announced by the guitar riff from Trigun.

“Hnngh,” he coughs.  “I am moot, the great and powerful, and I’m kinda wondering wtf you guys are doing here.”  We explain the purpose of our journey, and beg, in turn, that he reveal to us the secrets of the hive.  “Awesome,” he nods his vaporous head.  Speaking in 4chanese, which I here translate into standard English, moot tells the story of the hive:  it’s all about freedom of expression, anarcho-artistic, uncensored and wild, but it’s also all about community, which means the only artistry anyone really cares about is in the form of anime, porn, and trolling.  Pedophilia is a favorite.  “Awesome memes, though… Pedobear.  Shoe on head.  Mudkipz. . .”

Initially cowed by the awesomeness of our host, you begin to nurse doubts.  “This is it?  Pedobear?”  I intervene to avoid unpleasantness, asking moot to introduce us to the infamous hacker, Anonymous.  Before vanishing behind a bank of swirling fog, he directs us to one of the tubular openings – “That way to /b/ – /b/tards, lol.”  Meaning, in English, 4chan’s random chat board, breeding ground of hackers and hacktivists.

/b/ is a geometric point at the absolute center of everything internet, but it smells bad, and it looks like the boys’ toilet in high school.  Fortunately, we are inside for a few seconds only, before we encounter a rickety figure wearing the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta.  “We are Anonymous.  We are legion.  Expect us,” he intones.  Something about his manner makes us laugh.  “You’re already here,” you observe.  “In a lame get-up.”  Anonymous goes rigid.  He strokes his plastic chin, and I worry that he’s about to unleash some of his lethal /b/ mockery upon you.  “Fuckwit,” he says.  “Newfag.”

“What?”

Rushing once more into the breach, I wonder aloud whether our hacking companion can relate some of his more famous exploits.  He mentions getting a teenage kid to masturbate online, then showing the video to his mother.  On hearing this, you utter a sound which loosely transliterates to “Gah.”  “None of us,” sighs Anonymous, “are as cruel as all of us.”  He also brags of taking down the Foxboro Baptist Church site.  “Homophobic faggots,” he explains.

“What?”

I observe – mostly for the benefit of my sanity – that if one believes in freedom of expression, no matter how outrageous the opinions expressed, Foxboro Baptist should top the list of the protected.  What am I thinking?  Anonymous goes rigid.  Strokes his plastic chin.  “Moralfag.  Newfag.”  Looking closer at my gray hairs, corrects himself:  “Kind of oldfag newfag.”  You?  “Weirdfag.”

“We do it for the lulz,” he proclaims.

There it is.  And there we are.  We’ve survived a terrifying ordeal, penetrated to the beating heart of the web.  Now we wonder:  in a universe constructed entirely of symbolic stuff, of articulated dreams, is this the best we can hope for?  Does the web represent an upper limit in the human capacity to reflect on our condition, and improve?

Just then I recall a rival site’s claim to online centrality.  You’re game:  “Why not?”  We zip there – bingo.  Heroic images.  Triumphant goodness.  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.  Our adventure is at an end.  We must head back to the surface – to the physical world, where matter rules and things can only be what they must – but we do so in good cheer, humming to ourselves a strange and wonderful hymn. . .

Academia in the age of Skype

The American university is in truth a medieval institution reformed along German lines in the 19^th century.  At that time, the university replaced the informal “republic of letters” as the arbiter of authority in published works.  The academic self-image resembles that of Beowulf’s dragon:  standing guard over a rare and precious treasure, in this case of knowledge.  Trespassers on the dragon’s cave, who claim authority without accreditation, suffer the intellectual equivalent of being chewed to death.

But the world inside the heads of academics is very unlike the world as it actually exists.  In this latter world, information has multiplied prodigiously, the cost of communication approaches zero, and the amateur is in command.  Today a barbarous public trespasses freely on the temples of authority.  Meanwhile, the cost of higher education over the last three decades has far outstripped inflation:  a peek at the treasure of knowledge has been converted into real treasure by academic institutions, and 37 million of the peekers have been left twitching under a trillion-dollar mountain of student loan debt.

In the ancient bargain between the university and the student, the former asked for ever larger sums of money and four years of life in bondage, while the latter received a diploma.  With the new dispensation, the public demands to know the value – not of an education – certainly not of knowledge – but of accreditation by an established institution of higher learning.

This demand represents the ragged edge of change.  The American university has been strangely uninterested in the technological earthquake rattling the walls of American society.  It prefers medieval modes of research to Big Data, and control of the flow of information by way of peer review to open access and crowdsourcing.  No matter.  The earthquake has now reached the university, and nothing will ever be the same.

The first tremors were felt as far back as 2006, with the arrival of the Khan Academy.  Using low-tech presentations and YouTube videos, and sustained by the deep pockets of Bill Gates, Salman Khan developed a demanding online curriculum, primarily for mathematics, free of charge and accessible from the nearest laptop.  Despite the absence of diplomas or Greek pillars, his approach has achieved a remarkable popularity:  the lessons have been viewed 230 million times by 7 million users globally.  People have many reasons for wanting post-high school education – the Khan Academy has shown that some of these reasons can be satisfied without attending a university.

But the fatal battering of the status quo is likely to come from the massive online open course, or MOOC.  Though still in experimental mode, the MOOC can exploit the power of the star system, recruiting the best-known lecturers in their fields and presenting them to gigantic audiences spread all over the world.  Last fall, an Artificial Intelligence MOOC taught by two well-known Stanford professors enrolled 160,000 students in 190 countries.  Some 200 signed up in Stanford itself, but the number attending the classroom version soon dwindled to around 30, “as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems.”  That judgment should terrify anyone making a living in brick-and-mortar academia.

Clay Shirky speculates that the MOOC and the higher-ed startup, Udacity, are to the university what the MP3 and Napster were to the music business:  essentially, model-breakers, destroyers of that comfortable world inside the heads of academics.

. . . the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

MOOCs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies. [. . .]

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

As can be seen, Shirky believes that “elite schools” will be spared the destructive unbundling of the academic business model.  This seems implausible.  Harvard and Stanford will survive, protected by billions in endowment.  But they will be massively disrupted, and their teaching methods will be transformed beyond recognition.

Shirky observed in Here Comes Everybody that when a medium (like recordings, say) allows stars to become widely accessible to the public, mediocrities (the local orchestra and operatic tenor) go out of business.  Today the elite schools hoard the academic stars, but Harvard and Stanford and Swarthmore and Duke fill their staffs with as many mediocrities as does Kaplan College.  They will vanish, hollowing out these universities.  More to the point, in time the stars won’t need to be associated with a prestigious institution of higher learning.  They will convey prestige – and they may choose to sell their services to the richly endowed schools, or they may go with an upstart like Udacity.

It is also possible to envisage a different intellectual climate around higher education.  The universities are bureaucracies of learning.  They produce scholastic turf warriors.  “Original research,” so much insisted upon, is in some measure like modern art:  by prizing newness and possession above insight, it leads to ever more arcane, subjective, and trivial productions.  The online university will sweep away such fevered effusions, and will inspire, as the web always does, the formation of communities around shared interests.  With a minimum of fuss and hierarchy, out of sheer love of the subject, MOOC students of particle physics or the history of the Roman Empire will gather virtually to exchange notes – and star lecturers will emerge from such tightly-woven communities to rival those bred by the bureaucracy of academia.

As invariably happens, students of the online university who have met virtually, as members of a community of interest, will wish to continue the discussion in the flesh.  For this leap into the real world, they won’t need a campus, just an entrepreneur willing to provide the necessary space – a Starbucks on steroids may be the setting for the new School of Athens, and the next generation of scholars.

A fable on the decline of human systems

Imagine an institution – say, a university (but it can be a company, a government, a military unit, a social club) – in which every person is perfectly suited to his function.  The system is optimal.  There is zero waste.  In an imperfect world, this isn’t really possible – but it can be imagined.

The lean, mean teaching machine will vastly outperform its competitors.  Success will breed an irresistible demand for growth.  But the system is already optimal.  Any addition can only subtract.

Inevitably, the system will grow.  Voices within the institution will assert, “We manage perfectly a narrow signal, but there is an infinite amount of noise in the world.”  Functions will be introduced which are irrelevant, redundant, or even contrary to the original mission.  Administration will be increased at the expense of teaching and research, and regulations will multiply to keep the administrators happy in their work.  Imposing new buildings designed by famous architects will be erected on campus, filled with ever more students who pay ever more money to be taught by an ever growing number of sub-optimal lecturers.

The bloated institution will lumber onward for a time, propelled by inertia – until a leaner, meaner alternative outperforms and outcompetes it.  Our university will then invent moral imperatives for the state to subsidize its operations at current levels or higher.  If this expedient fails, it will borrow until credit runs out, shuffle the organizational furniture, attempt reformations and rebirths.  At length, it will begin to shrivel – a process that has ever been difficult to reverse.

This is the mystery and paradox of the decline of human systems.  Once functionality is attained – once the institution achieves its purpose at peak efficiency – success becomes both inevitable and fatal.

Politics and the culture of the web

Pirate Party motto: “Prepare to change”

The latest issue of The Economist carries a longish essay on “The new politics of the internet” – in essence suggesting that web activism today may be at a take-off point, comparable to the birth of the environmental movement after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.  The essay lists bits and pieces of web-focused political activity around the globe, then asks a ponderous question:  “might the world really be witnessing . . . the creation of another such movement – this one built around the potential for new information technology to foster free speech and innovation, and the threats that governments and companies pose to it?”

The examples cited of successful web activism are almost entirely negative.  They include aborting the International Telecommunication Union’s attempt to impose by treaty government controls on the web, the defeat of property-rights restrictions in the US and Europe, the delay of plans to erect a national firewall in Pakistan.  The only positive triumph, if that is the word for it, pertains to the rise of the Pirate Party in Germany – and even here, the Economist admits that the party’s popularity with the public has collapsed since its electoral victories in the annus mirabilis of 2011.

Opposition is in the DNA of web politics, and this provides a valid parallel with the environmental movement.  Both have been most successful when they stand against.  Environmentalists made nuclear energy politically radioactive, and turned “climate change” into a powerful symbolic argument against industrial society.  But unlike, say, the fascist and Marxist-Leninist parties of the twentieth century – all of which began in opposition – the Greens have been unable to put forward a vision of governance persuasive either to voters or to authoritarians.

Web and environmental activism sprang from the same ground, but developed into quite distinct organisms.  In Douglas and Wildavsky’s terminology, the two movements are sects of the border, in eternal revolt against the political and cultural center.  They exist to oppose, but they organize to model righteousness rather than to maximize the chances of political success.  Hence the difficulty in implementing a positive program.

The difference is that environmentalism is a real movement.  It has a largely unspoken but coherent ideology, composed in equal parts of Malthus, Rousseau, and Marx.  This ideology raises a sharp barrier between those on the inside and those on the outside of the movement.  It also allows semi-hierarchical organizations like the Sierra Club to wave the Green flag and maintain the pose of revolt, while raising enormous sums of money.  In 50 years, environmentalist institutions have moved much closer to the center than their adherents would admit – certainly closer than the obscure groups (“Access Now”) which campaigned against the ITU treaty.

Web politics, conversely, are nothing like a movement.  The web is a culture with many mansions, happy to accommodate mutually hostile ideologies – from ferocious capitalism to destructive anarchism – as well as endless causes floating in a near-vacuum of ideas.  The culture of the web isn’t exactly devoid of barriers.  It hates slickness, for example.  It mocks leaders, accredited authorities, intermediaries, owners of content.  It disdains the old established institutions, those “weary giants of flesh and steel,” and demands a harsh egalitarianism.  Possibly for this reason, it has often meted out punishment to cause-mongers, like the hapless producers of “Kony 2012,” whose messages attained viral popularity.

But these are commandments of taste and style:  at most, for a prickly attitude toward authority.  Not surprisingly, those in positions of authority, accustomed to preaching to an inert “mass” audience, have rarely found the right language and tone to exploit the web politically.  But insurgents of every stripe – from Muslim Brothers in Syria to the anarchistic Pirates in Germany to the hopeful Barack Obama of 2008 – have wielded new media to alter the information balance of power with established elites.

This ideological openness is the secret to the web’s enormous disruptive capacity.  Every ruler and every existing institution is vulnerable to attack from any direction.  To join the revolt, you don’t need to sign a pledge.  You just need a cell phone.  The controversies over state and corporate control of content agitating the Economist are mere skirmishes on the edge of a colossal struggle, which has left the ground littered with the carcasses of once-proud narratives justifying authority.  And the fight has scarcely begun.

Because the insurgents have stayed true to their sectarian origins, their successes tend to be victories of negation.  Mighty despots have fallen, venerable hierarchies have been confounded; but unintended consequences have prevailed.  Wael Ghonim, whose Facebook group ignited the protests which overthrew Hosni Mubarak, consciously refused to become a leader or spokesman for the secular forces which had led the revolution.  Into that empty space moved the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization structured along the lines of a 1930s mass movement:  top down.  Similarly, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks made a mockery of the US government’s security and foreign affairs bureaucracies, releasing reams of classified cables to the public.  Yet the revelations had little discernible effect on US policies, much less on Assange’s great Satan, global capitalism.

Julian Assange

Barack Obama, twice elected to the presidency, might seem to be an exception to this rule.  I believe otherwise.  The Obama who was embraced by the online culture in 2008 – and whose campaign brilliantly worked digital media for funds, volunteers, and messaging – ran as an insurgent St. George, tilting at the establishments of both political parties.  He stood firmly against, and promised transformation of a generic, non-ideological sort, allowing the many mansions of the web to converge on his candidacy.  This coalition did not survive the president’s need to make policy decisions and transact with the orthodox forces of American politics.

By 2012, President Obama had become, inevitably, the most important figure in our political establishment; and I would argue that the weight of persuasion on behalf of his reelection was carried less by online activists who saw him as a shining knight than by a mostly friendly, wholly establishmentarian mass media.  In the event, the president reverted to a theme of revolt.  He attacked Mitt Romney on a long list of generic social and class issues, and argued that the Republican represented the true, if corrupt, ruling clique – a remarkable rhetorical stance for a president.  His success is certain to inspire future incumbents, but had no more connection to a governing program or ideology than did his candidacy in 2008.

The Economist’s suggestion of a global web movement singing kumbaya around a campfire of “free speech and innovation” strikes me as fatuous.  The reality of digital activism is far more potent than that.  It is also more destructive.  It has made governing much harder for despots and democrats alike.  Everywhere the opposition is in command of the lines of communication, and seeks to become identical with the public at large:  it is willing to revolt, reject, and condemn, while unburdened by the pressure to find practical alternatives.  In politics – as in so many domains of social life – the Fifth Wave of information has ushered in an age of negation.

President Obama and the media

Analyzing events: Equilibrium and perturbation

In an earlier post, I touched on the problem of analyzing events.  Here I’d like to extend the analysis of analysis, considered in light of Terrence Deacon’s difficult book, Incomplete Nature.  Some of the positions taken below contradict the earlier post.  Whether this is because I understand the subject in greater depth or because I am greatly confused, I’m happy to leave for the reader to decide. . .

Human communities are complex systems composed of other complex systems.  All things being equal, these systems and subsystems – nations, localities, institutions, organizations, and it may be, individuals – tend toward entropy, or equilibrium.  They seek the path of least resistance.

In a system composed of human beings, “equilibrium” means some combination of satisfaction among decision-makers and gatekeepers for each subsystem, and of acceptance by everyone else.  In a totalitarian system such as Stalinist Russia, the decision-makers were few (gatekeepers, however, were legion), and acceptance was based on fear.  An egalitarian democracy such as Switzerland, on the other extreme, has a broader base of decision-makers, and requires a greater measure of active support.  Which of these antipodal conditions tends more toward equilibrium (all things equal) is an important question, but I won’t seek to answer it here.

Human systems are in any case dynamic:  they are in constant flux and evolution, and can’t attain anything like perfect equilibrium.  Entropy is a tendency, never an end state.  Communities and their component parts pursue specific directions, determined to some extent by subjective ideals:  by desire.  Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, aimed at “pure communism” and organized many of its institutions and decisions around this distant goal.  The pursuit of personal happiness has been a powerful organizing force for Americans.  Yet ideals like communism and the pursuit of happiness are promises, glimpses into a desirable future, reconceived every generation to propel them beyond the reach of present achievement.

Analysts of events, whose job it is to study the effects of perturbation on human communities, typically fail to account for the complexity and directionality of their subject matter.  Most analysts model the political universe along Newtonian lines.  They see communities as bodies moving in a linear path, from which they can escape only when perturbed by an external cause:  for example, collision with another body.  This explains that seeming paradox, the political analyst’s love affair with economics.  For the analyst, economics is the handy-dandy, universal external cause.

Empirically, I think it can be demonstrated that the Newtonian model is a dead end.  Economic crises – say, those of 1929 and 2008 – have had very different effects on materially similar communities:  the difference must be accounted, at least in part, by factors intrinsic to the systems.  Different interactions, different ideals, different attractors pulled the outcomes far apart despite near starting positions.

But this is almost beside the point.  The Newtonian model collapses as an explanation once we accept the directionality of human communities.  That model requires the perturbing forces to be present, whether in the form of a vast impersonal cause like the class struggle, or of a material intrusion into the system like war or ecological failure.  Yet the great causal engines of human systems, like the pursuit of happiness and pure communism, are absent, and exist objectively only as attractors to subjective states – that is, as hope and desire, revelatory glimpses into a happy future.  Deacon called this effect teleodynamic.  It means that human beings act in accordance with conditions which aren’t there, and human systems, therefore, make a hash of Newtonian mechanics.

At a stroke, the analyst of events is liberated from his obsession with external forces.  Such forces are real, and represent the existential questions posed to the system by the environment.  Like the Sphinx’s riddle, the questions can be dangerous – sometimes a matter of life and death.  What I am suggesting here, however, is that it’s the answer provided by the community which carries the greatest causal weight.

Almost by definition, most sources of sociopolitical change are internal to the system.  Often change has only a distant connection to riddles posed by the environment, and has everything to do with the destructive logic of the system.  Subsystems seek equilibrium along paths which interfere with one another:  perturbation ensues, and the landscape is altered.  The Egyptian military, Hazem Kandil makes clear, had lost the battle for influence and wealth to the state security apparatus and the ruling clique around Mubarak.  The military leadership was less than satisfied with this state of affairs; the rank and file were less than accepting of the existing regime.  These perturbations of the system were invisible to an analyst working with the Newtonian model.  But they were decisive to the Egyptian revolution of 2011, when the military, once a pillar of the Mubarak regime, refused to intervene on its behalf after protesters had scattered the security forces.

It is a commonplace today among historians that the Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by invading barbarians, but fell from self-inflicted wounds.  There is a sense in which this is true of every human system.

The question of equilibrium and perturbation in human communities is closely linked to the central theme of this blog:  the technologically-enabled revolt of the public against authority, what I have called the Fifth Wave of information.  The rise of the public is a sure indicator of perturbation in the system.  A public crystallizes when a critical mass of individuals who are keenly interested in some matter defect from existing subsystems, by which they feel ill served.  Such a public is united only in non-acceptance:  criticism of decision-makers and gatekeepers, rejection of standing arrangements, demands for change.  The effect is to pull the subsystems – governments, institutions, organizations – away from their spontaneous march toward entropy, generating a perturbing uncertainty about the direction of the community.

Continued at an intense enough pitch, uncertainty will engender turbulence, disequilibrium, and phase change:  revolution.  Explaining this process – the decline and fall of human systems – generally ends in a muddle, I suspect because in good Newtonian fashion we tend to overvalue the objective factors.  The question I would pose is to what extent is disequilibrium identical to the extinction of narratives.  The search for an answer must be postponed for a future post.

Marx and the Fifth Wave

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a creature of the industrial revolution.  Colossal productive forces were unleashed during his lifetime, which swept over and altered every form of human relations.  An irreparable breach opened like a wound between nineteenth-century Europe and its own past.  Marx, a revolutionary, observed with an admiring eye the cultural disorientation – the cosmic vertigo – induced by the destructive energy of the group he mislabeled “the bourgeoisie.”

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Industry, like science, Marx believed, had been built by a ruthlessly materialistic class of men, stripped bare of illusions and ideals.  He erected his theory of history and revolution on the same principle.  Power meant control of production:  all else was utopian fairy dust.  Literature, the arts, religion, even politics and the law rode submissively behind the great locomotive of material production.  Social life resembled work in the spinning mills of Manchester:  predetermined, bounded by stuff, and necessarily exploitive.  Revolution was a question of understanding impersonal forces – a scientific enterprise.

Eleven years after the passage in the Communist Manifesto cited above, Marx sought to explain his method:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Granted that Marxism, as a science, has been wrapped in a plastic bag and dumped in the garbage can of history, it remains a deeply evocative specimen of the psychology of the industrial age.  Everything real Marx believed to be material:  hard, weighty, quantifiable, massive in scale.  I find it fascinating to contrast this mindset with that of our own wildly transformative moment in time.  We, too, feel that a breach has opened between ourselves and our immediate predecessors, the “weary giants of flesh and steel.”  The Old Ones worshipped solid matter.  We imagine we have outgrown such simplicity, but are transfixed by information – the flow of immaterial data bits through multiple devices and platforms.  Reality hasn’t changed, only the historical context.

If I brought Marx back to life, the first question he would ask is, “Who owns the means of production?”  I would answer indirectly, by trying to explain about the Fifth Wave of information now battering established authority in every domain.  The protagonist of the story, I would note, isn’t the proletariat but the public – a motley if rebellious crew of niche-dwelling amateurs.  New technologies have allowed the public to seize command of the means of communication – and, to everyone’s astonishment, it turns out that authority lapses into a state of crisis unless it can monopolize the conversation.  This is true of government, science, education, business, mass media:  top-down, heavily accredited structures all.

The resurrected Marx, still following a materialist thread, would stroke his bushy beard, then sit at my laptop and tap it.  It makes a solid sound.  “Isn’t information produced by machines assembled in factories?” he would ask.  “Don’t the means of production trump, and even control, the means of communication?”

That, I am forced to admit, is a very interesting question.

The global information sphere – that churning, boiling stream of uncontrollable content – is not identical to the web, but depends on it.  The web in turn depends on devices for access and communication.  The device from which the web first emerged like a butterfly from a caterpillar was the personal computer:  the lowly desktop began a world historical convulsion that has toppled governments and upended industries in its earliest phase.  Yet the spread of the PC meant the triumph of software over hardware, of data bits over physical products, of Bill Gates and Microsoft over PC manufacturers like IBM.

Did Gates, with his near-monopoly on operating systems, control the shape of available information?  To some extent, he did and still does, as I can plainly see when the MS Word autocorrect kicks in.  Gates’ most distinctive contribution to communication was doubtless PowerPoint, which persuaded millions of otherwise peaceful persons to converse by aiming bullets at one another.

But did Gates command the deep “economic structure of society,” while PC users populating the web frothed on the surface of things, mere “superstructure”?  I think the reverse was more nearly the case.  Microsoft’s only significant product for the web, the IE browser, was epiphenomenal to the great migration of the public into the digital universe.  It was superstructure.  More generally, cheap PCs powered by Microsoft helped make the gateway to the web personal rather than institutional, and the web itself a mustering place for armies of amateurs on the march against structures of authority – not least Microsoft itself.

The company profited mightily but controlled very little.

The same holds true for Apple.  Unlike Microsoft, Apple kept control over its devices, for which it spawned a flood of applications.  But control of content remained with a variegated public.  The alleged genius of Steve Jobs – like that of Bill Gates – consisted in helping the public move in the direction it wished to, at a price.  Easily hidden and multi-connected, the smart phone became the ultimate anti-authority weapon:  it has seemed illegal to American cops and customs officers no less than to Arab dictators.  Apple’s iPhone added to this cluster of subversive capabilities but did not invent it, nor can the company direct or control its use.

Steve Jobs

It could be argued that Google and Facebook, keepers of vast server farms, own the means of production for information.  But this confuses transmission with production.  The large web platforms depend entirely on the public to produce their content.  Most are free, and can be abandoned at no cost the moment they fail to satisfy the public’s purposes.  Because web companies trade in user information, some believe the public is really a dupe, a victim of false consciousness.  I consider this a moral judgment, not an interpretation of reality.  It presumes that the public should want other than it does, and dismisses the remorseless assault on every temple of authority as a charade to grow Google’s profits.  Maybe so:  but the argument has to be made.

In the end, I would turn back to my resurrected Marx, and deliver the bad news:  vulgar materialism can’t explain the Fifth Wave.  The concepts of the industrial revolution hang awkwardly on a digital age, obscuring far more than they reveal.

Here, in a nutshell, is why bits differ from mills.

The global information sphere was unplanned and unintended.  The system it has formed is dynamic and massively complex, and long ago slipped beyond the possibility of control by any player in it – including those who own the means of production for the devices and the software which make the system possible.  This is the case for good or evil.  Pro-democracy demonstrators and vile pornographers alike promote their messages with relative impunity on the global information sphere.  The forces at work resemble the weather more than a cohesive culture, much less commercial or ideological propaganda.

I suspect Marx would buy none of it.  He would allude, as he often did, to the kingdom of necessity:  “How do you feed people with data bits, much less overthrow rich capitalists protected by the physical force of modern governments?” he would demand.  “What is the power in pure information?”

Another good question, I acknowledge.  The answer has something to do with the human need for narratives to explain the world, and with the sense of rupture, of loss of faith, which seizes the human heart when narratives of authority are trampled before our eyes.  In other words, the power of information depends on the public’s consciousness of reality, conditioned by social existence – itself revolutionized by the new technologies.

Marx, an inflexible old goat, might disagree with my explanation – but he could not dispute my method without quarreling with himself.

Map of the internet in 2010 (Cisco Systems)

Kony 2012 and the art of going viral

The online advocacy video Kony 2012 can only be described as a digital enormity, breaking all records and rules.  By one measure, it reached 100 million views in six days, fastest in the history of the web.  But that’s only half the story.  Other mega-popular videos have been entertainment (Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”) or curiosities (“Charlie bit my finger”).  They were short, snappy, and weird.  Kony is an earnest 29-minute documentary about an obscure warlord in a forgotten corner of Africa:  as unlikely a candidate for spontaneous mass popularity as can be imagined.

From: Visible Measures blog

When a message goes viral, a good question to ask is whether it’s being propelled by the source of the message, its content, or the diffusion network.  This scheme is a tad deceptive, because the categories tend to bleed into one another, but I find it useful in teasing out the dynamics of a viral message’s trajectory.  With fair warning, I’ll employ it here.

The Source

Stephen King novels and Will Smith movies are examples of source-driven popularity.  Plots and reviews scarcely matter.  King and Smith, by their personal relationship with the public, have delivered an abnormally high number of blockbusters.

Invisible Children, which produced Kony, originally appeared to me to fall on the opposite end of the spectrum.  The organization is composed of three young Southern California film-makers, led by Jason Russell, the video’s director and star.  I had never heard of them, and I’m willing to bet most smart people on the East Coast had never heard of them either – and the few who did paid no attention.  For many of us, the makers of Kony 2012 materialized from nowhere, along with their video and their cause.

This is an inaccurate impression.  Since 2003, Invisible Children has been agitating with a fervor – and effectiveness – far exceeding its numbers.  The group has reached out to schools, colleges, and churches, in the process assembling a network of volunteer supporters who were equally zealous in passing the word about the kidnapped children of Uganda.  With their help, a previous video attained an audience of 5 million – a nontrivial achievement by any standard other than Kony’s.

For members of the network, Invisible Children were keepers of the flame – an attention-worthy source.  The organization, by the same token, could count on a pre-assembled diffusion network, and could tailor content to its tastes.

The content

Because content is what goes viral, the natural tendency among pundits and the public alike is to assign to it the lion’s share of the credit.  Kony 2012 is no exception:  its content has received exorbitant praise and condemnation.  Yet I suspect that new content by itself seldom has spontaneously “found” a new audience.  The surprise popularity of Monty Python, an eccentric foreign program, might be an example of such a discovery, though we are on surer footing with freak web video hits like “Evolution of the dance.”

Kony’s content combines slick, cleverly paced production effects with a simple fairy tale-like story about the children of light who rescue the children of darkness.  The fairy tale is perceived visually, while Russell, the narrator, intones idealistic pieties.  I noted in my last post that Ethan Zuckerman and others have attacked the video’s “simplifications,” but its persuasive power, particularly for the young, must reside precisely in the stark division of moral domains, between the fortunate us and the tormented them.

Kony 2012: darkest Africa

Kony 2012: the light of innocence

Every advocacy message must contain an “ask”:  some action required of the viewer.  Kony’s are highly original and easy to accomplish.  The public is asked to help “make Kony famous” by forwarding the video, putting up posters, and soliciting by means of social media the support of specific “culture makers” and “policy makers.”  By these ingenious requests, the content, like a selfish gene, assists in its own replication.

Kony 2012: the "ask"

My guess is that persuasiveness and originality played a small part in Kony’s viral run.  An anatomical dissection of the documentary would uncover many more barriers than draws to popularity.  The subject matter, for example, is unentertaining, unfunny, unsexy.  The length far exceeds the attention span of the target audience.  Those “asks” mentioned above appear 23 minutes into the video – by which time the average young viewer has moved on to Zelda and probably finished off a couple of levels.

It is a fact that Kony’s formal structure didn’t prevent it from going viral.  We know that now, with the wisdom of hindsight.  But nobody, lay or expert, would have predicted the video’s astonishing level of success before the fact simply by viewing the content:  and that hasn’t changed.

The network

A network can be assembled informally, like the human web of activists from black churches and colleges who led the campaign against segregation in the South.  The term can also apply to a company’s distribution apparatus:  old Hollywood firms, we are told, were “vertically integrated giants with production studios, distribution networks, and theater chains.”  The rise of the web in turn has engendered virtual networks, exploited by jihadi Islamists and fans of LOL Cats alike.

These categories bleed profusely into one another.  It’s impossible to be virtual without being human.  Mass media message-senders poach on amateurs, and vice versa.  For any given message, the only hard requirement for membership in the diffusion network is willingness to spread the word, for love or money.

By preaching the anti-Kony message in schools and churches, Invisible Children had assembled a youthful community, which the video explicitly sought to activate.  That it did so is beyond dispute.  We get a broad fix on the demographics of this diffusion network from YouTube statistics for March 13:  females aged 13 to 17 lead the charge, followed by males aged 18-14.    (In the third group, males aged 45-54, I’m tempted to see the Ethan Zuckermans of the world making sputtery sounds.)  The dominant means of diffusion, predictably for this age group, were mobile phones, Facebook, and Twitter (where #StopKony trended for several days).

A deeper probe into the character of the Kony network begins to turn up surprises.  Gilad Lotan parsed the first 5,000 posters to the #StopKony hashtag, and found they clustered around mid-sized cities in the South and heartland:  Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Oklahoma City; Dayton, Ohio; Noblesville, Indiana.  Lotan then produced a tagcloud from the user profiles of these vanguard posters.  “We easily identify prominent words,” he writes, “such as Jesus, God, Christ, University, and Student.”

From: Gilad Lotan, SocialFlow blog

The early adopters of Kony 2012 reflected the work carried out by Invisible Children among church groups across the country.  These were young people from Birmingham and Dayton rather than New York or Los Angeles, and Christian faith rather than political ideology was for many a motive for taking up the anti-Kony cause.  It’s easy to see why eastern seaboard types first missed, then misunderstood what transpired.

Lotan touches on the success of Kony’s “attention philanthropy tactics.”  Responding to the main “ask” of the video, young people in places like Noblesville and Pittsburgh – members of the network – generated a vast volume of social media communication, which aimed to persuade “culture makers” to endorse the cause.  Several did, including Justin Bieber and Oprah Winfrey.  Activation of the immense networks following these entertainers may well have driven Kony and its message above the “awareness threshold” – the point at which viral diffusion becomes self-sustaining.

Conclusion

The principle of uncertainty hovers around viral messages.  Despite the hopes and wishes – and billions of dollars – of marketing departments, it’s impossible to predict when content will go viral.  Duncan Watts has shown this conclusively.  But it isn’t impossible to explain the effect, and there are good reasons to do so.  A viral message is a probe sent into the deep space of the information sphere, allowing us a glimpse, however partial and brief, of the actions and predilections at work there.

Reflection on the facts behind the extraordinary popularity of Kony 2012 will lead, I think, to some counter-intuitive conclusions.  Most observers (myself included) considered Kony an online apparition – a social media monster.  Yet the dynamics of its explosive diffusion demonstrate the importance of face to face encounters in forging a community, and of shaping content with a keen understanding of community values.  While “attention philanthropy” seems like a brilliant marketing gambit, it was the nature of the cause and the idealism of the youthful Konyites which persuaded celebrities like Oprah Winfrey to amplify the message.  I doubt this approach could be duplicated commercially.