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Sharing Power (International Edition)Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)
Over the last year we have lived through a profound and perhaps epochal shift in thedistribution of power. A year ago all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook usersto turn out on election day. Today we bear witness to a ‘green’ revolution, coordinatedvia Twitter, and participate as the Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the unpleasant little secrets buried in theMPs expenses scandal – secrets which the British government has done everything in its power to withhold.We’ve turned a corner. We’re on the downward slope. It was a long, hard slog to the top – a point we obviously reached on 4 November 2008 – but now the journey is all aboutacceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the past. The configuration of  power has changed: its distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble withcircumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand with a loss of control. At acertain point our entire global culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will goairborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the roadbed of civilization behind, wecan spin the steering wheel all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its ownrationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force will meet force. Force isalready meeting force.What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what happens in the guts of CERN’sLarge Hadron Collider. Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can learn a lot – if we’re clever enough to watch these collisions as they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision willrecognizably be governments or quasi-governmental organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before we glory, Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash,we should remember that these institutions are, first and foremost, the domain of people,individuals ill-prepared for whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is
 
wearing a safety belt, even as things slip noticeably beyond control. Someone’s going toget hurt. That much is already clear.What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political science for the 21
st
century. Weneed to understand the autopoietic formation of polities, which has been so acceleratedand amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity. We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence. Weneed to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into action, and how this actionspreads and replicates itself through hypermimesis. We have the words – or some of them – but we lack even an informal understanding of the ways and means. As long asthis remains the case, we are subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor control. We can end the war between ourselves and our times. But first we must watchcarefully. The collisions are mounting, and they have already revealed much. We haveenough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new territory.
Part One: The First Casualty of War
Last month saw an interesting and unexpected collision. Wikipedia, the encyclopediacreated by and for the people, decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IPaddresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would hereafter be banned from thecapability to edit Wikipedia. This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the equivalent the Supreme Courtin the Wikipediaverse.It seems that for some period of time – probably stretching into years – there have beenany number of ‘edit wars’ (where edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the Church of Scientology andcertain of the personages in the Church. These pages have been subject to fierce editwars between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics of the Church on theother, and, in the middle, Wikipedians, who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking,
Sharing Power (Global Edition) - 2 – Mark Pesce
 
above all, to preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the encyclopedia aspires toin every article. When this became impossible – when the Church of Scientology and itsmembers refused to leave things alone – a consensus gradually formed within the tangledadhocracy of Wikipedia, finalized in last month’s ruling from the Arbitration Committee.For at least six months, several Church of Scientology members are banned by name, andall Church computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia.That would seem to be that. But it’s not. The Church of Scientology has been diligent inensuring that the mainstream media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstreammedium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology which are unflattering to theChurch. There’s no reason to believe that things will simply rest as they are now, thateveryone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for six months, like childrengiven a time-out. Indeed, the Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quicklyissued a press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking, “What’s next, willScientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?”How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come will be driven by thestructure and nature of these two wildly different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and controlflows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not incharge of Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a social contract between the parties participating in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you participate, the more power you’ll have. Power is distributed laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia hassome ultimate authority.What happens when these two organizations, so fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses lawsuitsand the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique. But Wikipedia has thus far provenimmune to lawsuits. Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia, running its
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