Chapter 1

The Stigmergic Revolution

Several parallel developments are driving a trend toward the growing obsolescence of large, highly capitalized, hierarchical organizations, and the ability of networked individuals with comparatively cheap capital equipment to perform the functions formerly performed by such organizations. They include the drastically reduced cost of capital goods required for informational and material production, as well as drastically reduced transaction costs of coordinating efforts between individuals. [Rework organization around larger number of modular concepts]

1.1

Reduced Capital Outlays

For most of the past two hundred years, the trend has been toward increasing capital outlays for most forms of production. The cost of the basic capital equipment required for productionthe mass-production factory, the large printing press, the radio or TV stationwas the primary justication for the large organization. The economy was dominated by large, hierarchical organizations administering enormous masses of capital. And the astronomical cost of production machinery was also the main justication for the wage system: production machinery was so expensive that only the rich could afford it, and hire others to work it. In recent decades weve seen a reversal of this trend: a shift back from expensive, specialized machinery to inexpensive, general-purpose tools. Although this is true of both material and immaterial productionas attested by the recent revolution in garage-scale CNC machine tools1 it was true rst and most dramatically in the immaterial sphere. The desktop computer is the primary item of capital equipment required for entering a growing number of industries, like music, desktop publishing and software design. The desktop computer, supplemented by assorted packages
1 See Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (CreateSpace, 2010).

CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

of increasingly cheap printing or sound editing equipment, is capable of doing what previously required a minimum investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the words of Yochai Benkler: The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a signicant fraction of the worlds populationon the order of a billion people around the globe.2 (Of course since that passage was written the proliferation of cheapening smartphones has probably more than doubled the latter gure.) The growing importance of human capital, and the implosion of capital outlay costs required to enter the market, have had revolutionary implications for production in the immaterial sphere. In the old days, the immense outlay for physical assets was the primary basis for the corporate hierarchys power, and in particular for its control over human capital and other intangible assets. In many information and culture industries, according to Benkler, the initial outlay for entering the market in the days of broadcast culture was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.
Since the introduction of the mechanical press and the telegraph, followed by the phonograph, lm, the high-powered radio transmitter, and through to the cable plant or satellite, the capital costs of xing information and cultural goods in a transmission mediuma high-circulation newspaper, a record or movie, a radio or television programhave been high and increasing.3

The media of the broadcast era, for instance, were typied by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the end. This led to a limited range of organizational models for production: production in the information and entertainment industries was restricted to those who could collect sufcient funds to set up a hub.4 In the case of print periodicals, the increasing cost of printing equipment from the mid-nineteenth century on served as the main entry barrier for organizing the hubs. Between 1835 and 1850, the typical startup cost of a newspaper increased from $500 to $100,000or from roughly $10,000 to $2.38 million in 2005 dollars.5 In other words, as the saying went, freedom of the press was great so long as you could afford to own a press. The networked information economy, in contrast, is distinguished by network architecture and the [low] cost of becoming a speaker.
The rst element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its
2 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 3. 3 Ibid., p. 51. 4 Ibid., p. 179. 5 Ibid., p. 188.

1.1. REDUCED CAPITAL OUTLAYS

passive readers, listeners, or viewers.6

Today most people, at least in the developed world, can afford to own a press. And thanks to smart phones, the same is becoming true for a large portion of the developing worlds population. In the old days, the owners of the hubsCBS News, the Associated Press, etc.decided what you could hear. Today you can set up a blog, or record a podcast, and anybody in the world who cares enough to go to your URL can look at it free of charge (and anyone who agrees with itor wants to tear it apartcan provide a hyperlink to her readers). The cultural authoritarianism that resulted from this state of affairs, as Clay Shirky points out, is unimaginable to someone who grew up with access to the Internet.
Despite half a century of hand-wringing about media concentration, my students have never known a media landscape of anything less than increasing abundance. They have never known a world with only three television channels, a world where the only choice a viewer had in the early evening was which white man was going to read them the news in English. They can understand the shift from scarcity to abundance, since the process is still going on today. A much harder thing to explain to them is this: if you were a citizen of that world, and you had something you needed to say in public, you couldnt. Period. Media content wasnt produced by consumers; if you had the wherewithal to say something in public, you werent a consumer anymore, by denition. Movie reviews came from movie reviewers. Public opinions came from opinion columnists. Reporting came from reporters. The conversational space available to mere mortals consisted of the kitchen table, the water cooler, and occasionally letter writing....7

The central change that makes these things possible, according to Benkler, is that the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer."
The core functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned throughout the population of users.... The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment.8

The desktop revolution and the Internet mean that the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero. The networked environment, combined with endless varieties of cheap software for creating and editing content, makes it possible for the amateur to produce output of a quality once associated with giant publishing houses and
6 Ibid., 7 Clay

pp. 212-13. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 60-61. 8 Ibid., pp. 32-33.

CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

recording companies.9 That is true of the software industry, desktop publishing, and to a large extent even indie lm (as witnessed by affordable editing technology and the success of Sky Captain). In the case of the music industry, thanks to cheap equipment and software for high quality recording and sound editing, the costs of independently producing and distributing a high-quality album have fallen through the oor. Bassist Steve Lawson writes:
...[T]he recording processstudio time and expertise used to be hugely expensive. But the cost of recording equipment has plummeted, just as the quality of the same has soared. Sure, expertise is still chargeable, but its no longer a non-negotiable part of the deal. A smart band with a fast computer can now realistically make a release quality album-length body of songs for less than a grand.... What does this actually mean? Well, it means that for meand the hundreds of thousands of others like methe process of making and releasing music has never been easier. The task of nding an audience, of seeding the discovery process, has never cost less or been more fun. Its now possible for me to update my audience and friends (the crossover between the two is happening on a daily basis thanks to social media tools) about what Im doingmusically or otherwiseand to hear from them, to get involved in their lives, and for my music to be inspired by them.... So, if things are so great for the indies, does that mean loads of people are making loads of money? Not at all. But the false notion there is that any musicians were before! We havent moved from an age of riches in music to an age of poverty in music. Weve moved from an age of massive debt and no creative control in music to an age of solvency and creative autonomy. It really is win/win.10

As the last statement suggests, it may well be that most of the revenue loss to the music industry has fallen, not on actual performers, but on the rentiers and middlemen in the record companies themselves. Networked distribution models have already gone a long way toward challenging and supplanting older models. For example the alternative rock group Radiohead marketed an album (Rainbows) directly over the Web, making it available for free and accepting whatever contributions downloaders saw t to give. This would seem to be an ideal approach for independent artists, compared to the difculty of making it through the record company gatekeepers and then settling for the royalties paid out after all the middlemen take their cut. It only requires, for all intents and purposes, a cheap website with a PayPal button. I have personal experience with a similar approach to publishing books, making them available for free online and selling hard copies through an on-demand publisher.And outside the blockbuster market, most writers and musical artists probably know more than the house marketing experts at the big content companies about their own niche markets. So they can do a better job
p. 54. Lawson, The Future of Music is... <http://agit8.org.uk/?p=336>.
10 Steve 9 Ibid.,

Indie! Agit8,

September 10,

2009

1.1. REDUCED CAPITAL OUTLAYS

marketing their own material virally to their target audiences through blogs, email lists and social networks than they would relying on the by-the-numbers efforts of the publishers in-house promoters. This approach undermines the business model of the old record and publishing companies, and probably does cut into the revenues of their old stables of blockbuster artists. Its probably becoming a lot harder for another Stephen King or Mick Jagger to make megabucks because of competition from the networked distribution model, and surely a lot harder for the old gatekeeper corporations to make the giant piles of money they used to. But if its harder for the big boys to make gigantic piles of money, its easier for a lot more little ones to make modest piles. Endless possibilities result from all the things they can now do for themselves, at virtually zero cost, that formerly only a highly capitalized record or publishing company could do for them. As an independent scholar and author, I share Steve Lawsons view of things. From my perspective, the proper basis for comparison is the money I can make that I never could have made at all in the good old days. In the good old days, Id haveand have donepainstakingly put together a manuscript of hundreds of pages, and then put it away to gather cobwebs when I couldnt persuade the gatekeepers at a conventional publisher that it was worth marketing. Never mind whether the facsimile pdfs of my books available at torrent sites are costing me money (I dont think it isI believe the free e-books are more like viral advertising). More importantly, if it werent for digital publishing technologies and free publishing venues on the Internet, I would probably have lived and died doing menial labor with nobody anywhere ever hearing of my ideas. Thanks to digital culture, Im able to make my work directly available to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection. If only a tiny fraction of the people who can read it for free decide to buy it, giving me a few thousand dollars a year in royalties, Im richer by exactly that amount than I would have been in the good old days when my manuscripts would have yellowed in an attic. That extra money may not be enough to support me by itself, but its enabled me to pay off my debts and accumulate an F.U. fund equivalent to several months wages. That probably puts me in a much better bargaining position vis-a-vis my employer than most people enjoy. For every small full-time musician who has a harder time scraping by, and may have to supplement her performing revenues with a day job, I suspect there are ten people like me who would have spent their entire lives as (if youll pardon the expression) mute inglorious Miltons, without ever making a goddamned cent from their music or writing, but who can now be heard. And for every blockbuster writer or musician who has a few million shaved off her multi-million dollar revenues as a result of online piracy, I suspect there are probably a hundred people like me. No doubt people like Andrew Keen think the world is going to hell in a handbasket because so many riff-raff like me made it past the gatekeepersbut as far as Im concerned thats another item to add to their T.S. lists. As for the old broadcast media, podcasting makes it possible to distribute

CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

radio and television programming, at virtually no cost, to anyone with a broadband connection. As radio historian Jesse Walker notes, satellite radios lackadaisical economic performance doesnt mean people prefer to stick with AM and FM radio; it means, rather, that the iPod has replaced the transistor radio as the primary portable listening medium, and that downloaded les have replaced the live broadcast as the primary form of content.11 A network of amateur contributors has peer-produced an encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which Britannica sees as a rival. There are enormous online libraries like Google Books and Project Gutenberg, as well as more specialized efforts like Marxists.org (which archives the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and of writers ranging from Kautsky to Luxemburg to Trotsky to C.L.R. James), the Anarchy Archives (extensive archives of most of the works of classical anarchism), and Constitution.org (including, among many other things, St. George Tuckers edition of Blackstone). In effect they give any kid with a smart phone, whether in the Third World or in an American ghetto, access to the equivalent of a university library. If one is willing and able to pay an annual subscription fee, there are enormous online collections of scholarly journals like JSTOR. And rebellious scholars are in process of tearing down the paywalls and the textbook racket; scholars with JSTOR memberships are providing articles for free to their peer networks. There are also services which strip DRM from college textbook pdfs which publishers make available for rental, so that they can be used indenitely and distributed through torrent download sites. The network revolution has drastically lowered the transaction costs of organizing education outside the conventional institutional framework. In most cases, the industrial model of education, based on transporting human raw material to a centrally located learning factory for processing, is obsolete. Forty years ago Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society, proposed decentralized community learning nets that would put people in contact with the teachers they wanted to learn from, and provide an indexed repository of learning materials. The Internet has made this a reality beyond Illichs wildest dreams. MITs OpenCourseware project was one early step in this direction. But most universities, even if they dont have a full database of lectures, at least have some sort of online course catalog with bare-bones syllabi and assigned readings for many individual courses. Niall Cook, in Enterprise 2.0, describes the comparative efciencies of software available outside the enterprise to the enterprise software in common use by employers. Self-managed peer networks, and individuals meeting their own needs in the outside economy, organize their efforts through social software and platforms chosen by the users themselves based on their superior usability for their purposes. And they are free to do so without corporate bureaucracies and their ofcially dened procedural rules acting as a ball and chain. Enterprise software, in contrast, is chosen by non-users for use by other
11 Jesse Walker, The Satellite Radio Blues: Why is XM Sirius on the verge of bankruptcy?, Reason, February 27, 2009 <http://reason.com/news/show/131905.html>.

1.1. REDUCED CAPITAL OUTLAYS

people of whose needs they know little (at best). Hence enterprise software is frequently a gold-plated turd. The IT departments Ive encountered at all the places Ive worked seemed to be run by people whod read about The Feds in Snow Crash (or the Ministry of Information in Brazil), and decided to base a real-life human society on it, like that planet on Star Trek that stumbled across a book on 1930s gangland Chicago. And the corporate intranets looked like something designed by Rube Goldberg. Blogs and wikis, and the free, browser-based platforms offered by Google and Mozilla, are a quantum improvement on the proprietary enterprise software that management typically forces on its employees. My OpenOfce CD cost me all of ten bucks, as opposed to $200 for Microsoft Ofce. The kinds of productivity software and social software freely available to individuals in their private lives is far better than the enterprise software that corporate bureaucrats buy for a captive clientele of wage slavesconsumer software capabilities amount to a fully functioning, alternative IT department.12 Corporate IT departments, in contrast, prefer to invest in a suite of tools offered by a major incumbent vendor like Microsoft or IBM. System specs are driven by managements top-down requirements rather than by user needs.
...a small group of people at the top of the organization identify a problem, spend 12 months identifying and implementing a solution, and a huge amount of resources launching it, only then to nd that employees dont or wont use it because they dont buy in to the original problem.13

Management is inclined to conduct a detailed requirements analysis with the gestation period of an elephant simply in order to choose a $1,000 social software application.14 Employees often wind up using their company credit cards to purchase needed tools online rather than wait for [the] IT department to build a business case and secure funding.15 This is the direct opposite of agility. Its just one particular example of the gold-plated turd phenomenon, in which stovepiped corporate design bureaucracies develop products for sale to other stovepiped corporate procurement bureaucracies, without the intervention of user feedback at any point in the process. As a result of all this, people are more productive away from work than they are at work. And management wonders why people would rather work at home using their own software tools than go through Checkpoint Charlie to use a bunch of klunky proprietary productivity software from the Whore of Redmond. As Tom Coates put it, all these developments in the eld of immaterial production mean that the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fteen years."16
12 Niall Cook, Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work (Burlington, Vt.: Gower, 2008), p. 91. 13 Ibid., p. 93. 14 Ibid., p. 95. 15 Ibid., p. 96. 16 Tom Coates, (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything... Plasticbag.org,

CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

1.2

Distributed Infrastructure

The larger and more hierarchical institutions become, and the more centralized the economic system, the larger the total share of production that will go to overhead, administration, waste, and the cost of doing business. The reasons are structural and geometrical. At its most basic, its an application of the old cube-square rule. When you double the dimensions of a solid object, you increase its surface area fourfold (two squared), but its volume eightfold (two cubed). Similarly, the number of internal relationships in an organization increases as the square of the number of individuals making it up. Leopold Kohr gave the example, in The Overdeveloped Nations, of a skyscraper. The more stories you add, the larger the share of oor space on each story is taken up by ventilation ducts, wiring and pipes, elevator shafts, stairwells, etc. Eventually you reach a point at which the increased space produced by adding stories is entirely eaten up by the increased support infrastructure. The larger the scale of production, the more it must be divorced from demand, which means that the ostensible economies of large batch production are offset, and then more than offset, by the increasing costs of nding new ways of making people buy stuff that was produced without regard to preexisting orders. The society becomes more and more like something out of Brazil or The Feds in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash, and the distribution of occupations increasingly resembles the demographic prole of the promoters and middlemen in that crashed spaceship in A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, who founded the human race on Earth. The only way out is a new standard of progress that doesnt equate growth with larger institutional size and more centralization: scalable, distributed infrastructure, stigmergic organization, module-and-platform design congurations, and production capacity sited close to the point of consumption and scaled to demand. Paul Hawken and the Lovinses, in Natural Capitalism, stated the general principle that when load-bearing infrastructures are built to handle the load at peak demand, about 80% of the unit cost comes from the added infrastructure that comes from the 20% increased usage during the tiny fraction of time when infrastructure experiences peak load. They gave the specic example of home heating, where enormous savings could be achieved by scaling capacity to handle only average usage, with additional demand handled through spot heating. More generally, centralized infrastructures must be scaled to handle peak loads even when such loads only occur a small fraction of the time. And then they must amortize the extra cost, by breaking user behavior to the needs of the infrastructure. At the opposite pole is distributed infrastructure, in which most of the inSeptember 3, 2003 <http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_ amateurisation_of_nearly_everything>.

1.3. NETWORK ORGANIZATION

frastructural goods are distributed among the endpoints, relations are directly between endpoints without passing through a central hub, and volume is driven entirely by user demand at the endpoints. Since the capital goods possessed by the endpoints is a miniscule fraction of the cost of a centralized infrastructure, there is no incentive to subordinate end-users to the needs of the infrastructure. The classic example is Bucky Fullers own: the replacement of the untold millions of tons of metal in transoceanic cables with a few dozen one-ton satellites. The entire infrastructure consists of satellite dishes at the endpoints commuinicating via free, immaterial ether! to the satellites. Likewise projected systems which replace the ber optic backbone with satellite connections and last-mile meshworks. Also the enormous infrastructure tied up in the civil aviation systems central hubs and batch-and-queue processing, as opposed to small jets ying directly between endpoints. Another example is mass-production industry, which minimizes unit costs by running its enormously costly capital-intensive machinery at full capacity 24/7, and then requires organizing a society to guarantee consumption of the full output whether consumers want the shit or not whats called supplypush distribution. If consumers wont take it all, you soak up surplus output by destroying it through a permanent war economy, sinking it into an Interstate Highway System, etc. or maybe just making stuff to fall apart. The opposite of mass-production is distributed production on the EmiliaRomagna model described by Charles Sabel and Michel Piore in The Second Industrial Divide, with the capital infrastructure distributed to the point of consumption and output geared to local demand. The transnational corporate model of outsourcing is an attempt to put this new wine in old bottles. It distributes the production facilities, but does so on the basis of local labor cost rather than the location of market demand. So it still relies on the centralized wholesale infrastructure of warehouses on wheels/containerships, scaled to peak load, to transfer goods from the distributed production sites to the point of nal consumption. The pure and unadulterated distributed manufacturing model, on the other hand, does away with this infrastructure by siting production at the last-mile network of consumption. As we will see in later in this chapter, the model of stigmergic organization in Wikipedia and open-source designthe central theme of this bookis an example of distributed infrastructure. Individual contributions are managed entirely by endpoint users, coordinating their efforts with the nished body of work, without the intermediary of a centralized institutional framework as in old-line activist organizations.

1.3

Network Organization

As Johan Soderburg argues, [t]he universally applicable computer run on free software and connected to an open network... has in some respects leveled the

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CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

playing eld. Through the global communication network, hackers are matching the coordinating and logistic capabilities of state and capital.17 Until the early 1990s, there were many possible Internets. What makes the Internet the Internet we know is really the World Wide Web: all the billions of web pages linked together by hyperlinks. And depending on the institutional context in which hyperlinks had been introduced, the Web as we know it might never have existed.
With help from Robert Cailliau, [Tim Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on November 12, 1990) to build a Hypertext project called WorldWideWeb... as a web of hypertext documents to be viewed by browsers using a clientserver architecture. This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal as well as the automatic notication of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.18

The Web as we know it is something that could never have been built as the unied, conscious vision of any institution. Its interesting that most visions of the Information Superhighway, back in the 1970s and 1980s, imagined it as populated largely by institutional actors of one kind or another, and its communications as largely one-way. It would be built on the backbone of the Internets packet-switching infrastructure, vastly expanded in capacity by a fusion of the telephone and cable TV industries in a single high-bandwidth ber-optic network. I recall seeing a speculative article in TV Guide in the late 70s, when I was just a junior high school kid, speculating on the science ctiony wonders that would soon be possible. Everyone would have a combination digital telephonecomputer-radio-cable TV terminal as the main entertainment center in their home, cable of accessing streaming contenttelevision programs, movies, music, digitized books and periodicals, etc.presumably on a paid basis. The key actors providing this whiz-bang content would be libraries, media conglomerates, and government agencies. The Internet envisioned by gures like Al Gore and Bill Gates was, despite the decentralized nature of the physical packet-switching process, very centralized in terms of the actors providing content. Their vision of the Internet was simply as a foundation for the Information Superhighway. The legal infrastructure for the Superhighway consisted of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated barriers to telephone/cable mergers, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which created the draconian system of copyright
17 Johan Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 2. 18 World Wide Web, Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_web> Accessed September 27, 2011.

1.3. NETWORK ORGANIZATION

11

law needed for digital content providers to turn the Superhighway into a turnpike. Heres what Bill Gates had to say, as late as early 2000:
This new generation of set-top boxes that connects up to the Internet is very much part of that. The potential impact is pretty phenomenal in the terms of being able to watch a TV show whenever you want to. There will be so many choices out there. Youve got to imagine that a software agent will help you nd things that you might be interested in. ....The TV guide will almost be like a search portal where youll customize and say, Im never interested in this, but I am particularly interested in that. Its already getting a little unwieldy. When you turn on DirectTV and you step through every channelwell, theres three minutes of your life. When you walk into your living room six years from now, youll be able to just say what youre interested in, and have the screen help you pick out a video that you care about. Its not going to be Lets look at channels 4, 5, and 7. Its going to be something that has pretty incredible graphics and its got an Internet connection to it.19

But the Information Superhighwayin the sense of a fusion of telephone, cable, radio, and on-demand music and movies, accessed through a single digital home entertainment center, simply zzled out. Instead, the World Wide Web took over the Internet. Mike Masnick speculates on what the World Wide Webif it could even be called thatwould have looked like, had Tim Berners-Lee obtained a patent on the hyperlinked architecture of the Web. And his hypothetical description reads very close to the vision of TV Guide, Gore and Gates.
Where do you think the world would be today if the World Wide Web had been patented? Here are a few guesses:

Rather than an open World Wide Web, most people would have remained on proprietary, walled gardens, like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and Delphi. While those might have eventually run afoul of the patents, since they were large companies or backed by large companies, those would have been the few willing to pay the licensing fee. The innovation level in terms of the web would have been drastically limited. Concepts like AJAX, real time info, etc. would not be present or would be in their infancy. The only companies innovating on these issues would be those few large players, and they wouldnt even think of the value of such things. No Google. Search would be dismal, and limited to only the proprietary system you were on. Most peoples use of online services would be more about consumption than communication. There would still be chat rooms and such, but
19 The Emperior Strikes BackBill Gates Interview, Entertainment Weekly, January 7, 2000 <http://www.angelre.com/nt/vapor/bginterview.html>. NoteI corrected numerous errors, presumably the result of transcription or scanning error, from the online version.

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CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION there wouldnt be massive public communication developments like blogs and Twitter. There might be some social networking elements, but they would be very rudimentary within the walled garden. No iPhone. While some might see this as separate from the web, I disagree. I dont think wed see quite the same interest or rise in smartphones without the web. Would we see limited proprietary AOL phones? Possibly, but with a fragmented market and not as much value, I doubt theres the necessary ecosystem to go as far as the iPhone. Open internet limited by lawsuit. There would still be an open internet, and things like gopher and Usenet would have grown and been able to do a little innovation. However, if gopher tried to expand to be more web like, we would have seen a legal ght that not only delayed innovation, but limited the arenas in which we innovated.20

The Internet would have been a wasteland of walled-garden ISPs like AOL, with Usenet and BBSs grafted on. What Web there was would have been accessed, not by browsers or open search engines, but through portals like AOL or Yahoo!. Its not necessary to speculate that something like that would surely had happened had Berners-Lee not been rst to the draw. It was happening, in fact. As recounted by David Weinberger, the software company for which he was vice president of strategic marketing at the time was in process of developing a proprietary document format with embedded links, when it was caught off-guard by the Mosaic browser. As the developers attempted to reassure themselves, their software was far more polished and professional-looking, and had better capabilities, than Mosaic. But deep down, they knew that Mosaics lack of bells and whistles was more than compensated for by its openness.
With our software, a publisher could embed a link from one document to another, but the publisher had to own both documents. Thats ne if youre putting together a set of aircraft maintenance manuals and you want to make all the cross-references active, so that clicking on one brings up the page to which its referring. But those links had to be compiled into the system. Once the document was published, no more links could be added except by recompiling the document. And, most important, the only people who could add new links were those working for the publisher. If you were an aircraft mechanic who had discovered some better ways to clean a fuel line, you had no way to publish your page with our system and no way to link it to the appropriate page in the ofcial manual. The Web, on the other hand, breaks the traditional publishing model. The old model is about control: a team works on a document, is responsible for its content and format, and releases it to the public when its been certied as done. Once its published, no one can change it except the original publisher. The Web ditches that model,
20 Mike Masnick,What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented The Web? Techdirt, August 11, 2011 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110811/10245715476/what-if-tim-berners-leehad-patented-web.shtml>.

1.3. NETWORK ORGANIZATION

with all its advantages as well as its drawbacks, and says instead, You have something to say? Say it. You want to respond to something thats been said? Say it and link to it. You think something is interesting? Link to it from your home page. And you never have to ask anyones permission. ...By removing the central control points, the Web enabled a self-organizing, self-stimulated growth of contents and links on a scale the world has literally never before experienced.21

13

Although some idiots like Rupert Murdoch still attempt to gainsay it, the basic organizing principle of the Web as envisioned by Berners-Lee is that you can link to another persons website without having to ask permission or secure her cooperation.22 It was actually the collapse of Web 1.0 in the dot-com bubble, and with it most of the hopes of the visionaries of the 1990s for enclosing the Web as a source of revenues, that created the space in which the decentralized vision of Web 2.0 could be fully realized.As Foundation for P2P Alternatives founder Michel Bauwens described it:
All the pundits where predicting, then as now, that without capital, innovation would stop, and that the era of high internet growth was over for a foreseeable time. In actual fact, the reality was the very opposite, and something apparently very strange happened. In fact, almost everything we know, the Web 2.0, the emergence of social and participatory media, was born in the crucible of that downturn. In other words, innovation did not slow down, but actually increased during the downturn in investment. This showed the following new tendency at work: capitalism is increasingly being divorced from entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship becomes a networked activity taking place through open platforms of collaboration. The reason is that internet technology fundamentally changes the relationship between innovation and capital. Before the internet, in the Schumpeterian world, innovators need capital for their research, that research is then protected through copyright and patents, and further funds create the necessary factories. In the post-schumpeterian world, creative souls congregate through the internet, create new software, or any kind of knowledge, create collaboration platforms on the cheap, and paradoxically, only need capital when they are successful, and the servers risk crashing from overload. As an example, think about Bittorrent, the most important software for exchanging multimedia content over the internet, which was created by a single programmer, surviving through a creative use of some credit cards, with zero funding. But the internet is not just for creative individual souls, but enables large communities to cooperate over platforms. Very importantly, it is not limited to knowledge and software, but to everything that knowledge and software enables, which includes manufacturing. Anything that needs to be physically produced, needs to be virtually designed in the rst place.23
21 David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unied Theory of the Web (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002), vii-ix. 22 Ibid., pp. 52-53. 23 Michel Bauwens, Asia Needs a Social Innovation Stimulus Plan, P2P Foundation

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CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

The ghost of Web 1.0, still clanking the chains of Al Gores vision, had to be laid to rest before the World Wide Web could reach its full potential. (Of course no less a gure than Jaron Lanier is still weeping for Tammuz, and we may need more incantations and holy water against Apples attempts to call up its ghost like the witch of Endor.) The Webs many-to-many communications capabilities have enabled networks to coordinate the actions of self-directed individuals without the transaction costs of traditional hierarchies. Benkler explained the implications of networked communications, combined with the near-universal distribution of capital goods for information and cultural production:
...the technical architectures, organizational models, and social dynamics of information production and exchange on the Internet have developed so that they allow us to structure the solution to problemsin particular to information production problemsin ways that are highly modular. This allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide variety of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods. These architectures and organizational models allow both independent creation that coexists and coheres into usable patterns, and interdependent cooperative enterprises in the form of peer-production processes.24

In other words, its stigmergic organization (about which more below)what Weinberger calls small pieces loosely joined. Networked crowdsourcing venues like Kickstarter have radically lowered the costs of aggregating capital even when total outlays are still beyond the means of the average individual. That means that, in addition to circumstances like information and cultural production where physical capital outlays are minimal because the desktop computer is the main item of capital equipmenteven when the costs of the physical capital required for production are non-trivialthe transaction costs of aggregating the required investment capital from a number of small contributors, or of putting a user community in touch with the owners of spare capacity of capital goods, are much lower. But whether capital outlay requirements are large or small, network technology has had a revolutionary effect on the transaction costs of traditional organization. That was true even back in the 1990s, when the Internet was dominated by static institutional websites. Email, both individual and in discussion lists, was a powerful tool for networked organization. The forms of culture jamming described by Naomi Klein in No Logo, themselves unprecedented and revolutionary in her day, were an outgrowth of the possibilities of the Web 1.0 of the 1990s. But the rise of Web 2.0, and the free platforms it made available, increased the possibilities exponentially.To quote Benkler again:
What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.... [The
Blog, March 23, 2009 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/asia-needs-a-social-innovation-stimulusplan/2009/03/23>. 24 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 105-106.

1.3. NETWORK ORGANIZATION

networked environment] provides a platform for new mechanisms for widely dispersed agents to adopt radically decentralized cooperation strategies other than by using proprietary and contractual claims to elicit prices or impose managerial commands.... What we see in the networked information economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and the centrality of information produced in this way.25

15

Consider the drastically lowered costs of aggregating peoplein large or small numbers, with common interests or concerns of any kindinto afnity groups or movements for the sharing of information and taking concerted action. Clay Shirky cites the example of Voice of the Faithful, a Catholic lay organization formed to ght priestly sexual abuse:
Had VOTF been founded in 1992, the gap between hearing about it and deciding to join would have presented a series of small hurdles: How would you locate the organization? How would you contact it? If you requested literature, how long would it take to arrive, and by the time it got there, would you still be in the mood? None of these barriers to action is insurmountable, but together they subject the desire to act to the death of a thousand cuts.26 Because of the delays and costs involved, going from a couple dozen people in a basement to a large and global organization in six months is inconceivable without social tools like websites for membership and e-mail for communication.

I can remember, as a grad student in the 1980s, experiencing that series of small hurdles in dealing with a completely differentbut analogoussituation. If I heard of some periodical in my area of interest that the university library didnt carry, the only way to nd out more about it was to dig through the latest installment of Ulrichs Periodicals Directory, send a query letter soliciting information about the price of sample issues, wait several weeks for a response, send in the money, and wait several more weeks for my sample. Or I could go through one of the scholarly reference sources like Social Sciences Index to look for the kinds of articles that appeared in that journal, and order some likely-sounding ones through Interlibrary Loan to see if a subscription would be worth it. Today, I just Google the title of the journal, and most likely its got a website with an index of past issues. I can instantly get a pdf of any article of interest through an online indexing service like SSRN (albeit at a hefty price). Better yet, I can shop for a free torrent download of the same article from a le-sharing site, or ask a friend with a JSTOR or SSRN membership to email me a pdf as an attachment. Soon, dedicated sharing sites with indexed academic articles available free for scholars will probably be as common as mp3-sharing sitesmuch to the chagrin of the Copyright Nazis in the academic publishing industry. The cumulative effect is that a rapidly increasing share of the functions previously carried out by corporations and by the state can now be effectively carried out by what Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, called the associated producerswithout any bureaucratic intermediation. As Matthew Yglesias put it:
25 Benkler, 26 Shirky,

The Wealth of Networks, p. 63. Here Comes Everybody, p. 151.

16

CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

In its 1875 Gotha Program, the German Social Democratic Party demand[ed] the establishment of socialistic productive associations with the support of the state and under the democratic control of the working people. It turns out that nding a feasible way to do that for industrial age enterprises was fairly problematic. And yet their arguments that such associations would be benecial remain compelling. Meanwhile, the Internet makes it much easier for individuals to form socialistic productive associations without a ton of explicit support of the state.27

1.4

Stigmergy

Networked organization is based on a principle known as stigmergy. Stigmergy is a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects like termites and ants coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any need for a central coordinating authority.28 Applied by way of analogy to human society, stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization associated with wikis, group blogs, and leaderless organizations congured along the lines of networked cells. Mark Elliott, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the most thorough and comprehensive treatment of stigmergy to date, contrasts stigmergic coordination with social negotiation. Social negotiation is the traditional method of organizing collaborative group efforts, through agreements and compromise mediated by discussions between individuals. The exponential growth in the number of communications with the size of the group, obviously, imposes constraints on the feasible size of a collaborative group, before coordination must be achieved by hierarchy and top-down authority. Stigmergy, on the other hand, permits collaboration on an unlimited scale by individuals acting independently. This distinction between social negotiation and stigmergy is illustrated, in particular, by the contrast between traditional models of co-authoring and collaboration in a wiki.29 Individuals communicate indirectly, via the stigmergic medium.30 The distinction between social negotiation and stigmergic coordination parallels Elliotts distinction, elsewhere, between discursive collaboration and stigmergic collaboration. The discursive elaboration of shared representations (ideas) is replaced by the annotation of material and digital artefacts as embodiments of these representations. Additionally, when stigmergic col27 Matthew Yglesias, Actually Existing Internet Communism, Yglesias, November 9, 2010 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/actually-existing-internet-communism/>. 28 Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work, M/C Journal, May 2006 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php>. 29 Ibid. 30 Mark Elliott, Some General Off-the-Cuff Reections on Stigmergy, Stigmergic Collaboration, May 21, 2006 <http://stigmergiccollaboration.blogspot.com/2006/05/some-general-off-cuffreections-on.html>.

1.4. STIGMERGY

17

laboration is extended by computing and digital networks, a considerable augmentation of processing capacity takes place which allows for the bridging of the spatial and temporal limitations of discursive collaboration, while subtly shifting points of negotiation and interaction away from the social and towards the cultural.31 David de Ugarte quotes the Rand theorists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, in Swarming and the Future of Conict. [N]etwar, they say,
is a privateers war in which many small units already know what they must do, and are aware that they must communicate with each other not in order to prepare for action, but only as a consequence of action, and, above all, through action.32

Critics of digital communism like Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin, who condemn network culture for submerging individual authorial voice in the collective, couldnt be more clueless if they tried. Stigmergy synthesizes the highest realizations of both individualism and collectivism, and represents each of them in its most completely actualized form, without qualifying or impairing either in any way. Stigmergy is not collectivist in the traditional sense, as it was understood in the days when a common effort on any signicant scale required a large organization to represent the collective, and the administrative coordination of individual efforts through a hierarchy. But it is the ultimate realization of collectivism, in that it removes the transaction cost of concerted action by many individuals. It is the ultimate in individualism because all actions are the free actions of individuals, and the collective is simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to formulate any innovation she sees t, without any need for permission from the collective. Every individual or voluntary association of individuals is free to adopt the innovation, or not, as they see t. The extent to which any innovation is adopted results entirely from the unanimous consent of every voluntary grouping that adopts it. Each innovation is modular (meaning the project can be broken down into smaller components... that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole33 ), and may be adopted into any number of larger projects where it is found useful. Any grouping where there is disagreement over adoption may fork and replicate their project with or without the innovation. In this regard it attains the radical democratic ideal of unanimous consent of the governed, which is never completely possible under any representative or majoritarian system. Consentthe extent of the individuals partcipation in the decisions that affected herwas the central value of Jeffersonian democracy. The smaller the unit of governance, and the closer it was to the individual, the
31 Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration. Doctoral Dissertation, Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (October 2007) , pp. 9-10 32 David de Ugarte, The Power of Networks : An Illustrated Manual for People, Collectives, and Companies Driven to Cyberactivism. Translated by Asuncin lvarez (n.d.), p. 62 <http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf>. 33 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 100.

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CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

closer it approached the ideal of unanimous consent to all acts of government. Hence Jeffersons ward republics, whose chief virtue was the increased role of each individual in inuencing the outcome of policy. But this ideal can only be fully attained when the unit of governance is the individual. So majority rule was the lesser evil, a way to approximate as closely as possible to the spirit of unanimous consent when an entire group of people had to be bound by a single decision. Stigmergy removes the need for any individual to be bound by the group will. When all group actions reect the unanimous will of the participants, as permitted by stigmergic organization, the ideal of unanimous consent is nally achieved in its fullness. Group action is facilitated with greater ease and lower transaction costs than ever before, but all group actions are the unanimous actions of the participating individuals. A good example is Raymonds Bazaar model of open-source development, as illustrated in a hypothetical case by Benkler:
Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utilityif it is simple enoughor some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely available to others, with its source codeinstructions in a human-readable language that explains how the software does whatever it does when compiled into a machine-readable language. When others begin to use it, they may nd bugs, or related utilities that they want to add (e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness, and one of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The person who has found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to the software may or may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software x. Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to x the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the rst person did, and release a new version of the software with the x or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three peoplethe rst author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identied a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who xed it. This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, license. This enables some of its users to identify problems without asking anyones permission and without engaging in any transactions.34

This has had revolutionary implications for the balance of power between networks and hierarchies, and almost unimaginably empowered individuals and small groups against large organizations. In a hierarchy, all communications between members or between local nodes
34 Ibid.,

pp. 66-67.

1.4. STIGMERGY

19

must pass through a limited number of central nodes. The only communications which are allowed to pass from one member or local node to another are those which meet the standards for distribution of those who control the central nodes. Only a few nodes within a hierarchy have the power to transmit; hence the use of the phrase one-to-many to describe its topology. The version of local news that appears in the local newspaper under the byline of a local journalist may be far superior in relevant detail and analysis, but it is the wire service versioneven if far inferior in qualitywhich appears in local newspapers all around the world. It is only the communications approved by the Party Secretariat that are heard by all local cells of a party.35 In a distributed network, on the other hand, every node has the power to transmit, and any two nodes can communicate directly with each other without passing through a central node or obtaining the approval of whoever controls that node. A network is plurarchical, in de Ugartes terminology, rather than democratic. Instead of the individual members simply selecting who controls the central nodes, [s]omeone makes a proposal and everyone who wishes to join in can do so. The range of the action in question will depend on the degree to which the proposal is accepted. This system is called a pluriarchy.... Democracy is a scarcity system in which decision-making power is rivalrous: the collective must face an either/or choice, between one lter and another, between one representative and another. In a distributed network, on the other hand, decision-making power is non-rivalrous. Each individuals decision affects only herself, and does not impede the ability of others to do likewise. Even if the majority not only disagreed with a proposal, but also acted against it, it wouldnt be able to prevent the proposal from being carried out.36 [I]n the blogosphere, de Ugarte writes elsewhere,
a space where the social cost of an extra post is zero, any bloggers publishing his or her information does not decrease anyone elses publication possibilities. The marginal cost is zero. The need to collectively decide what is published and what is not simply disappears. As opposed to scarcity logic, which generates the need for democratic decision, abundant logic opens the door to pluriarchy. In such a universe, every collective or hierarchical decision on what to publish or not can only be conceived as an articial generation of scarcity, a decrease in diversity, and an impoverishment for all.37

Our discussion, in the third section of Chapter Two, of the advantages of networks over hierarchies, can be read as a direct continuation of this section. [Draft last modied March 22, 2012]

Ugarte, The Power of Networks, p. 38. pp. 39-40. 37 De Ugarte, Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century (n.d.), pp. <http://deugarte.com/gomi/ phyles.pdf>.
36 Ibid.,

35 De

18-19

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CHAPTER 1. THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

Chapter 2

Networks vs. Hierarchies

2.1

The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies

The intrusion of power into human relationships creates irrationality and systematic stupidity. As Robert Anton Wilson argued in Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis,
A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication ows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave intelligently." The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticists nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normalall fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.1

That same theme featured prominently in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which Wilson coauthored with Robert Shea. ....[I]n a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.2
A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the
1 R. A. Wilson, Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis, from Coincidance A Head Test (1988) <http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-marquis.html>. 2 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), p. 388.

21

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CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers.3

This inability of those in authority to abstract sufcient information from below, and this perception of management by workers as a highwayman, result in the hoarding of information by those below and their use of it as a source of rents. The power differential, by creating a zero-sum relationship, renders the pyramid opaque to those at its top. Radical organization theorist Kenneth Boulding, in similar vein, wrote of the value of analysis of the way in which organizational structure affects the ow of information,
hence affects the information input into the decision-maker, hence affects his image of the future and his decisions.... There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decisionmakers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.4

Or in the pithy phrasing of Robert Theobald: A person with great power gets no valid information at all.5 In his discussion of mtis (i.e. distributed, situational and job-related knowle edge), James C. Scott draws a connection between it and mutualityas opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordinationand acknowledges his debt to anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin and Proudhon for the insight.6 Mtis ourishes e only in an environment of two-way communication between equals, where the person in contact with the situationthe person actually doing the workis in a position of equality. Interestingly, R.A. Wilson had previously noted the same connection between mutualitybilateral communication between equalsand accurate informationin Thirteen Choruses. And he included his own allusion to Proudhon, no less:
Proudhon was a great communication analyst, born 100 years too soon to be understood. His system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality. The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law that is, at that is, effective communication running one way only. The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract that is, mutual agreement that is, effective communication running both ways. ("Redundance of control is the technical cybernetic phrase.)

To say that a hierarchical organization is systematically stupid is just to say that it is incapable of knowing what it knows, or making effective use of the
p. 498. Boulding, The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics, American Economic Review 56:1/2 (March 1966), p. 8. 5 Quoted in Hazel Henderson, Coping With Organizational Future Shock, Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1978), p. 225. 6 Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 6-7.
4 Kenneth 3 Ibid.,

2.1. THE SYSTEMATIC STUPIDITY OF HIERARCHIES

23

knowledge of its members; it is less than the sum of its parts. Clay Shirky quotes John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid:
What if HP knew what HP knows? They had observed that the sum of the individual minds at HP had much more information than the company had access to, even though it was allowed to direct the efforts of those employees. Brown and Duguid documented ways in which employees do better at sharing information with one another directly than when they go through ofcial channels.7

Theres a great scene in the 1985 movie Brazil. Jackbooted thugs from the Ministry of Informations Information Retrieval Department (i.e., the secret police) have just invaded an apartment by sawing a hole through the oor above and sliding down remens polesand then arrested the wrong man based on a computer error. In the aftermath, the Ministry of Works shows up to plug the hole:
JILL: There must be some mistake ... Mr Buttles harmless... BILL: We dont make mistakes. [So saying, he drops the manhole cover, which is faced with same material as the oor, over the hole in the oor. To his surprise it drops neatly through the oor into the at below.] CHARLIE: Bloody typical, theyve gone back to metric without telling us.

Thats the way things work in real life in a hierarchical institution, because it is unable to aggregate the intelligence of its members and bring it to bear effectively on the policy-making process. So policies have a myriad of unintended consequences, and various policies operate at cross-purposes with each other in unanticipated ways. And to top it all off, the transaction costs of getting information to management about the real-world consequences of its policies are prohibitive for the same reason that the transaction costs of aggregating the information required for effective policy-making in the rst place were prohibitive. But no worries. Because the CEO and his chums in the C-Suite dont live under the effects of their ass-brained policy, and subordinates are afraid to tell them what a clusterfuck they created, the CEO will happily inform the CEOs at other organizations of how wonderfully his new best practice worked out. And because these competing organizations actually exist in an oligopoly market of cost-plus markup and administered pricing, and share the same pathological institutional cultures, they suffer no real competitive penalty for their bureaucratic irrationality. A hierarchy is a device for telling naked emperors how great their clothes look. To just take one example, consider the sanitary precautions at the hospital where I work. The nursing staff is to wear gowns and gloves at all times in the rooms of patients with contact precautions for MRSA. But were not to gown up the patient when we transport her from one part of the hospital to
7 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Books, 2008), p. 100.

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CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

anotherbecause seeing it might make outside visitors uneasy. And according to the written policies, were required to wear masks in the rooms of patients on droplet isolation, and wear them outside the room and shut the door before we drop them in the red biohazard trash can outside the doorafter all, it would kind of violate the whole purpose of the mask to take it off when you were still inside breathing room air, wouldnt it? That would be stupid. Problem is, there is no biohazard trash can outside the patients door because of JCAHO re hazard restrictions on what can be stored in the hall. So we typically strip off the mask and gown and deposit them in the trash can six paces from the door, and hold our breath on the way out. In that light, the gag from Brazil about a plug from Works not tting a hole made by Information Retrieval really isnt even funny. When you constantly operate on the assumption that youre going to internalize the effects of your own actions, you have an incentive to anticipate things that could go wrong. And when you make a decision, you continually revise it in response to subsequent experience. Normal, sane human beingsthat is, human beings who are in contact with their environments and not insulated from them by hierarchiesare always correcting our own courses of action. Authority short-circuits this process: it shifts the negative consequences of decisions downward and the benets upward, so that decision-makers operate based on a distorted cost-benet calculus; and it blocks negative feedback so that the locus of organizational authority is subject to the functional equivalent of a psychotic break with reality. When policy isnt the result of systematic stupidity, its an elaborate exercise in shining it on. The primary purpose is to give management plausible deniability, the ability to say But they knew about our written policy, when the inevitable shortcuts to compensate for deliberate understafng and irrational interference result in a public relations disaster. Auschwitz probably had a written policy against killing Jews. The lack of feedback means that most organizations are successful at achieving goals that are largely articialgoals that are dened primarily by the interests of their governing hierarchies, rather than being dened by the ostensible customers or those engaged in directly serving customer needs. On the other hand, organizational frameworks like networks, which are based on two-way feedback between equals, result in a high rate of failure. As Clay Shirky puts it, [t]he bulk of open source projects fail.
Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts but because it is outfailing them. Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, and any rm can afford. Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, [and] they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes....8
8 Ibid.,

p. 245.

2.1. THE SYSTEMATIC STUPIDITY OF HIERARCHIES

25

Hierarchical institutions, on the other hand, are almost uniformly successful because everyones scared to tell the bosses how stupid their policies are and how shitty their products are. Failure is in fact a byproduct of the process by which success is achieved: most products in the corporate economy are only considered good enough because customers are powerless. The problem, to repeat, is that no matter how intelligent the people stafng a large institution are as individuals, hierarchy makes their intelligence unusable. Given that the institution does not exist as a vehicle for the goals of its members, given that there is no intrinsic connection between their personal motivation and their roles in the organization, and given that the information and agency problems of a hierarchy prevent consequences from being fully internalized by actors, individuals simply cannot be trusted with the discretion to act on their own intelligence or common sense. Thats the whole idea behind standardized work-rules, job descriptions, and all the rest of the Weberian model of bureaucratic rationality: because someone, somewhere might use her initiative in ways that produce results that are detrimental to the interests of the organization, you need a set of rules in place that prevent anyone from doing anything at all. The need to impose constraints on freedom of action, and to impede individual initiative in directly adopting the most common-sense and lowest-cost solutions to immediate problems, was explained by Paul Goodman:
...the government Peace Corps is many times as expensive as similar less ofcial operations largely because an errant twenty-year-old well-digger might become an International Incident, so one cannot be too careful in selecting him. Convenience of supervision overrides performance. And the more objective the better. If the punch card [i.e. computer punch cardthis was the mid-1960s] approves, no one is guilty. To bureaucrats, a fatal hallmark of decentralist enterprises is their variety in procedure and persons; how can one know, with a percentage validity, that these methods and persons are right?9

The result is a world which is hard to distinguish from such parodies as The Feds in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash, or Brazils Ministry of Central Services in which one cannot replace a blown fuse without a Form 27-B. The problem of replacing a door catch in the New York public school system, which suggests Form 27-B was hardly even a parody, is a good example:
...To remove a door catch that hampers the use of a lavatory requires a long appeal through headquarters, because it is city property..... ...An old-fashioned type of hardware is specied for all new buildings, that is kept in production only for the New York school system.10 When the social means are tied up in such complicated organizations, it becomes extraordinarily difcult and sometimes impossible to do a simple thing directly, even though the doing is common sense and would meet with universal approval, as when neither the child, nor the parent, nor the janitor, nor the principal of the school can
9 Goodman, 10 Ibid.

People or Personnel, p. 19. p. 52.

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CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

remove the offending door catch.11

A corporate hierarchy interferes with the judgment of what Friedrich Hayek called people-on-the-spot, and with the collection of dispersed knowledge of circumstances, in exactly the same way a state does. Most production jobs involve a fair amount of distributed, job-specic knowledge, and depend on the initiative of workers to improvise, to apply skills in new ways, in the face of events which are either totally unpredictable or cannot be fully anticipated. Rigid hierarchies and rigid work rules only work in a predictable environment. When the environment is unpredictable, the key to success lies with empowerment and autonomy for those in direct contact with the situation. Hierarchical organizations areto borrow a wonderful phrase from Martha Feldman and James Marchsystematically stupid.12 For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is smart enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobodynot Einstein, not John Galtpossesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobodys that smart, any more than anybodys smart enough to run Gosplan efcientlythats the whole point. As Matt Yglesias put it,
I think its noteworthy that the business class, as a set, has a curious and somewhat incoherent view of capitalism and why its a good thing. Indeed, its in most respects a backwards view that strongly contrasts with the economic or political science take on why markets work. The basic business outlook is very focused on the key role of the executive. Good, protable, growing rms are run by brilliant executives. And the ability of the rm to grow and be protable is evidence of its executives brilliance. This is part of the reason that CEO salaries need to keep escalatingrecruiting the best is integral to success. The leaders of large rms become revered gures.... Their success stems from overall brilliance.... The thing about this is that if this were generally trueif the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were brilliant economic seersthen it would really make a lot of sense to implement socialism. Real socialism. Not progressive taxation to nance a mildly redistributive welfare state. But lets let Vikram Pandit and Jeff Immelt centrally plan the economyafter all, theyre really brilliant! But in the real world, the point of markets isnt that executives are clever and bureaucrats are dimwitted. The point is that nobody is all that brilliant.13

No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature
p. 88. S. Feldman and James G. March, Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol, Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (April 1981); it should be noted, in fairness, that Feldman and March were attemptingunsuccessfully in my opinionto defend corporations against the charge of systematic stupidity. 13 Matthew Yglesias, Two Views of Capitalism, Yglesias, November 22, 2008 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/two_views_of_capitalism/>.
12 Martha 11 Ibid.

2.1. THE SYSTEMATIC STUPIDITY OF HIERARCHIES

27

hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of whats going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable. Chris Dillow describes it this way:
But why dont rms improve with practice in the way that individuals musical or sporting performance improves? Here are four possible differences: 1. Within rms, theres no mechanism for translating individuals learning, or incremental knowledge, into corporate knowledge. As Hayek said, hierarchies are terrible at using fragmentary, tacit, dispersed knowledge. 2. Job turnover means that job-specic human capital gets lost. 3. Bosses are selected for overcondence. But overcondence militates against learning. 4. In companies, the feedback thats necessary for improvement gets warped by adverse incentives or ego involvement. If I play a phrase or chord badly, my ears tell me to practice it more. But if a company gets some adverse feedbackfalling sales, sayno-one has an incentive or desire to say I screwed up: Id better improve. And formal efforts to generate feedback, such as performance reviews, often backre. What Im saying is what every methodological individualist knows: companies are not individuals writ large. The differences between them can mitigate against learning by doing. And herein lies the cost of the banking crisis. Because productivity growth comes from entry and exit rather than rms learning on the job, anything that retards the entry processsuch as a lack of nancewill retard aggregate productivity growth, and hence economic growth.14

The only solution is to give discretion to those in direct contact with the situation. As security analyst Bruce Schneier writes in regard to security against attack:
Good security has people in charge. People are resilient. People can improvise. People can be creative. People can develop on-thespot solutions.... People are the strongest point in a security process. When a security system succeeds in the face of a new or coordinated or devastating attack, its usually due to the efforts of people.15

The problem with authority relations in a hierarchy is that, given the conict of interest created by the presence of power, those in authority cannot afford to allow discretion to those in direct contact with the situation. Systematic stupidity results, of necessity, from a situation in which a bureaucratic hierarchy must develop some metric for assessing the skills or work quality of a labor force
14 Chris Dillow, Organizational Stupidity, Stumbling and Mumbling, September 23, 2011 <http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2011/09/organizationalstupidity.html>. 15 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003), p. 133.

28

CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

whose actual work they know nothing about, and whose material interests militate against remedying managements ignorance. When management doesnt know (in Paul Goodmans words) what a good job of work is, they are forced to rely on arbitrary metrics. Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isnt getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to see in a glass darkly a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They are forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics for evaluating the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conict of interest. All of the paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be veried because those being monitored have a fundamental conict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isnt being performed to managements satisfaction, or this or that policy isnt being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, managements response is to design yet anotherand equally uselessform. Weberian work rules result of necessity when performance and quality metrics are not tied to direct feedback from the work process itself. Theyre a metric of work for someone who is neither a creator/provider not an end user. And they are necessaryagainbecause those at the top of the pyramid cannot afford to allow those at the bottom the discretion to use their own common sense. A bureaucracy cannot afford to allow its subordinates such discretion, because someone with the discretion to do things more efciently will also have the discretion to do something bad. And because the subordinate has a fundamental conict of interest with the superior, and does not internalize the benets of applying her intelligence, she cannot be trusted to use her intelligence for the benet of the organization. In such a zero-sum relationship, any discretion can be abused. The problem is, discretion cannot be entirely removed from any organizational process. James Scott writes that it is impossible, by the nature of things, for everything entailed in the production process to be distilled, formalized or codied into a form that is legible to management.
...[T]he formal order encoded in social-engineering designs inevitably leaves out elements that are essential to their actual functioning. If the [East German] factory were forced to operate only within the connes of the roles and functions specied in the simpli-

2.1. THE SYSTEMATIC STUPIDITY OF HIERARCHIES

ed design, it would quickly grind to a halt. Collectivized command economies virtually everywhere have limped along thanks to the often desperate improvisation of an informal economy wholly outside its schemata. Stated somewhat differently, all socially engineered systems of formal order are in fact subsystems of a larger system on which they are ultimately dependent, not to say parasitic. The subsystem relies on a variety of processesfrequently informal or antecedentwhich alone it cannot create or maintain. The more schematic, thin, and simplied the formal order, the less resilient and the more vulnerable it is to disturbances outside its narrow parameters.... It is, I think, a characteristic of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that formal order. Much of this might be called mtis to the rescue.... A formal come mand economy... is contingent on petty trade, bartering, and deals that are typically illegal.... In each case, the nonconforming practice is an indispensable condition for formal order.16 ...In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplied rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.17

29

And as I keep trying to hammer home, just the reverse is true of networks and stigmergic organization: their beauty is that they render the intelligence of all their individual members more usable. While one-way communication creates opacity from above, two-way communication creates horizontal legibility. To quote Michel Bauwens:
The capacity to cooperate is veried in the process of cooperation itself. Thus, projects are open to all comers provided they have the necessary skills to contribute to a project. These skills are veried, and communally validated, in the process of production itself. This is apparent in open publishing projects such as citizen journalism: anyone can post and anyone can verify the veracity of the articles. Reputation systems are used for communal validation. The ltering is a posteriori, not a priori. Anti-credentialism is therefore to be contrasted to traditional peer review, where credentials are an essential prerequisite to participate. P2P projects are characterized by holoptism. Holoptism is the implied capacity and design of peer to [peer] processes that allows participants free access to all the information about the other participants; not in terms of privacy, but in terms of their existence and contributions (i.e. horizontal information) and access to the aims, metrics and documentation of the project as a whole (i.e. the vertical dimen16 James 17 Ibid.,

Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 351-352. p. 310.

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CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

sion). This can be contrasted to the panoptism which is characteristic of hierarchical projects: processes are designed to reserve total knowledge for an elite, while participants only have access on a need to know basis. However, with P2P projects, communication is not top-down and based on strictly dened reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system.18

Bauwens gets the concept of holopticism from Alan Rosenblith. In a prisongoverned by panopticismthe warden can see all the prisoners, but the prisoners cant see each other. The reason is so the prisoners cant coordinate their actions independently of the warden. Holopticism is the exact opposite: the members of a group are horizontally legible to one another, and can coordinate their actions. And everyone has a sense of the emerging whole, and can adjust their actions for the greatest t.19 The unspoken assumption is that a hierarchy exists for the purposes of the warden, and a holoptic association exists for the purposes of its members. The people at the top of a hierarchical pyramid cant trust the people doing the job because their interests are diametrically opposed. Its safe to trust one another because their common interest in the task can be inferred from participation.

2.2

Hierarchies vs. Networks

In a distributed network, it is impossible to prevent communication between nodes by controlling a central node. There are too many alternative nodes through which communication can be routed if any particular node or nodes are closed off. As John Gilmore famously quipped, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.20
The power of distributed networks lies in the fact that in them lters disappear: eliminating or ltering a node or node cluster will not delay access to information. By contrast with the decentralised information system which arose with the invention of the telegraph, in distributed networks it is impossible to burn bridges and restrict the information that reaches the nal nodes by controlling a few transmitters.21

As Ori Brafman and Rod Backstrom describe it, when attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.22 They use the example of the le-sharing movement. After Napster was shut down, the movement responded by becoming more decentralized and eliminating all key vulnerable nodes which could be used to shut it down. Its immediate successor,
18 Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production, Ctheory.net, December 1, 2005 <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499>. 19 Alan Rosenblith, Holopticism (accessed January 22, 2012) <http://www.slideshare.net/AlanRosenblith/holopticism>. 20 Philip Elmer-DeWitt, First Nation in Cyberspace, Time, December 6, 1993 <http://www.toad.com/gnu/>. 21 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 43. 22 Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starsh and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Portfolio, 2006), p. 21.

2.2. HIERARCHIES VS. NETWORKS

31

Kazaa, allowed users to swap les without the need for a central server. When the industry sued Kazaa and its user, its founder Niklas Zennstrom sold the Dutch parent company to owners on the South Pacic island of Vanuatu, beyond the reach of the American legal system. And each of the successors to Kazaa, likewiseKazaa lite, eDonkey, and eMulewas even more decentralized and presented even less in the way of vulnerable nodes than their predecessors.23 Thats the subject of Francesca Musianis article on the history of p2p lesharing architecture, which she argues has been shaped largely by the offensivedefensive arms race between the forces of state surveillance and those of circumvention.
The genealogy of P2P le-sharing systems is, in fact, a story of tensions between surveillance and counter-surveillance technologies. It is argued that the ways in which P2P systems have taken shape and evolved in the last decade are closely linked to the dialectic between juridico-technical measures restricting P2P-enabled le sharing activities, and sociotechnical responses that have shortly followed each of them: in other words, to the constant attempts of surveillance technologies and sharing technologies to outrun each other. In this sense, the genealogy of P2P le-sharing systems is also a history of resistance towards regulation of user behaviour by means of digital surveillance....24

The rst generation of le-sharing services, typied by Napster, were centralized, one-to-many systems. Subsequent services, as we already saw in Brafmans and Backstroms analysis, became increasingly decentralizedalthough their weak point remained imperfect anonymity. The third stage, Musiani argues, is le-sharing under cover of darknets, with membership by invitation only on a friend-of-a-friend basis. Although such organization through conventional, proprietary social networking services like Facebook is still vulnerable to the vagaries of their privacy policy, open-source social networking services like Diaspora are much more promising as avenues for darknet le-sharing.25 More recently, the clumsy attempts of the U.S. government and its allies to suppress Wikileaks through control of strategic nodes (domain name registries, Amazon, PayPal, etc.) have made the same principle abundantly clear. Wikileaks enemies have strategized against it within the paradigm of a Weberian bureaucratic institution functioning inside a Westphalian nation-state. Will Wilkinson mocked the sheer idiocy of people like Joe Liebermanand all the clucking chickenhawks in the neocon blogosphere calling for Bradley Manning or Julian Assange to be waterboardedin his blog at The Economist:
Let me start by suggesting that the politicians and pundits calling for Julian Assanges head are playing into his hands.... If Mr Assange is murdered tomorrow, if WikiLeaks servers are cut off for a few hours, or a few days, or forever, nothing fundamental is really changed. With or without WikiLeaks, the technology exists to allow whistleblowers to
pp. 22-25. Musiani, Privacy as Invisibility: Pervasive Surveillance and the Privatisation of Peerto-Peer Systems, tripleC 9:2 (2011), p. 127. 25 Ibid., pp. 132-138.
24 Francesca 23 Ibid.,

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leak data and documents while maintaining anonymity. With or without WikiLeaks, the personnel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. Jailing Thomas Edison in 1890 would not have darkened the night. Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumpsas if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be xed; as if this is a nuisance that can be made to go away with the application of sufcient government gusto. But I dont think the matter can end this way. Just as technology has made it easier for governments and corporations to snoop ever more invasively into the private lives of individuals, it has also made it easier for individuals, working alone or together, to root through and make off with the secret les of governments and corporations. WikiLeaks is simply an early manifestation of what I predict will be a more-or-less permanent feature of contemporary life, and a more-or-less permanent constraint on strategies of secretkeeping. Consider what young Bradley Manning is alleged to have accomplished with a USB key on a military network. It was impossible 30 years ago to just waltz out of an ofce building with hundreds of thousands of sensitive les. The mountain of boxes would have weighed tons. Today, there are millions upon millions of government and corporate employees capable of downloading massive amounts of data onto tiny devices. The only way WikiLeaks-like exposs will stop is if those with the permissions necessary to access and copy sensitive data refuse to do so. But as long as some of those people retain a sense of right and wrongeven if it is only a tiny minoritythese leaks and these scandals will continue.26

Mike Masnick, in similar language, expressed his amused contempt for calls from people like Christian Whiton and Marc Thiessen to kill Assange or declare war on Wikileaks and shut it down:
....As was pointed out at the time, this is a statement totally clueless about the nature of Wikileaks, and how distributed it is. If you shut down one node, ve more would likely pop up overnight, and theyd be harder to track and harder to shut down. Whiton and Thiessen are reacting to Wikileaks as if it were a threat from an individual or a government. In other words, theyre treating it like a threat from decades ago, rather than an open effort to distribute leaked information.... ....What the internet allows is for groups to form and do stuff in a totally anonymous and distributed manner, and there really isnt any way to prevent thatwhether you agree with the activity or not. Some think that a few arrests of folks behind Anonymous would scare off others, but I doubt it. I would imagine that it would just embolden the temporary gathering of folks involved even more. Going back to the beginning of the post, if the US government really
26 Will Wilkinson, Missing the Point of Wikileaks, Democracy in America (The Economist), December 1, 2010 <http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/12/after_secrets>.

2.2. HIERARCHIES VS. NETWORKS

was effective in stopping Julian Assange, how long do you think it would take for an even more distributed group to pick up the slack? It could be Anonymous itself, who continues on the tradition of Wikileaks [sic], or it could be some other random group of folks who believe in the importance of enabling whistleblowing. A few years back, Rod Beckstrom (now head of ICANN) wrote a book called The Starsh and The Spider which more or less predicted much of this. It pointed out that the US government and military was designed to ght opposition that was centralized (like a spider), but that it was not at all well-prepared to handle a totally decentralized organization, where cutting off one arm simply leads the organization to grow another (like a starsh). It wasnt just about the US government, but about general organization philosophies around that concept, and I would think that things like Wikileaks and especially Anonymous would t well into the book as even better examples than almost all that are in there.... ...The key to understanding how and why that might happen is to certainly get beyond thinking of them in the purely traditional organizational sense of a group where if you take out its leaders, it goes away. Theres something quite powerful about the concepts behind both Wikileaks and Anonymous (again, whether or not you agree with what either is doing), but to think that they either cant impact the world enough, or that the way to stop such impacts is to simply cut down a few key people, seems like a pretty serious folly of folks who dont quite understand the nature of distributed, ad hoc power.27

33

As Reasons Jesse Walker put it,

I remember when the record companies were lled with men and women who thought the key to stopping online lesharing was to shut down a company called Napster. I remember when a teenaged programmer named Shawn Fanning was attracting the sort of press that Julian Assange is getting today. In 2010, the average 14-year-old probably doesnt know who Fanning is. He might not even recognize the name Napster. But he knows how to download music for free.28

Despite the misconceptions of Lieberman & Co., there is no central plug to be pulledshort of shutting down the entire Internet, a possibility we will consider below. The resilience of Wikileaks against attempts at suppression by the corporate state, in particular, is remarkable. James Cowie described the whack-a-mole game from the moles perspective:
For the long answer, you need to examine their DNS and BGP congurations: the mapping from domain names (like wikileaks.ch) to IP addresses (like 178.21.20.8), and from IP addresses to the providers who host them. These are the protocols that make the Internet sur27 Mike Masnick, The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous, and How Little the Old Guard Realizes Whats Going On, Techdirt, October 26, 2010 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101026/01311411586/the-revolution-will-be-distributedwikileaks-anonymous-and-how-little-the-old-guard-realizes-what-s-going-on.shtml>. 28 Jesse Walker, Our Leaky World, Reason.com, December 15, 2010 <http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/15/our-leaky-world#commentcontainer>.

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vivable, and after a somewhat shaky start, its clear that WikiLeaks is exploiting them very effectively to stay alive.... In recent months, wikileaks.orgs content had lived happily in just a few IP address blocks, hosted by Bahnhof and PRQ (two Swedish ISPs with ... lets say ... liberal policies for the content they host), and French provider Cursys. Then, when the cables were rst released at the end of November, WikiLeaks added additional hosting in Amazons EC2 cloud (presumably to cope with the tremendous volumes of trafc being generated in the rst days of the release). It was not to last Amazon evicted them on December 1st for terms of service violations. In response, they diversied by hosting the wikileaks.org domain in two different IP blocks: one in France, hosted by OVH, and another in Sweden, hosted by Bahnhof. A couple days later, on December 3rd, EveryDNS (their DNS provider) shut them off, refusing to supply a valid IP address to queries for wikileaks.org. Today, if you ask the .org root for the authoritative DNS servers for wikileaks.org, you still get back the same four EveryDNS servers ... but they wont answer.... Respawning globally Remember, when EveryDNS made their call to turn off DNS for the wikileaks.org domain on December 3rd, the WikiLeaks IP address space was still routed and their servers were still alive (though intermittently unavailable due to tremendous inbound DDoS attacks). When the wikileaks.org domain stopped resolving, WikiLeaks simply diversied into alternative ccTLDs (country code top level domains) and pointed those names towards existing IP addresses, or added new hosting. The country-level domain for Germany (wikileaks.de) has Swedish hosting from PRQ in Sweden and 1&1 in Germany; the European Union (wikileaks.eu), Finland (wikileaks.), the Netherlands (wikileaks.nl), Poland (wikileaks.pl), Sweden (wikileaks.se), and Tonga (wikileaks.to) have been pointed at the existing 88.80.0.0/19 block, hosted by Bahnhof in Sweden. But just to make good and sure, additional country-level domains for Austria (wikileaks.at), the Cocos Islands (wikileaks.cc), and Switzerland (wikileaks.ch, held by the Swiss Pirate Party) came up on Bahnhofs 88.80.0.0/19 block over the weekend. Norwegian wikileaks.no has hosting from French OVH and Swedish Bahnhof, and Luxembourg (wikileaks.lu) marches to its own drum, getting hosting from local provider Root SA. (There are probably some Im missing, and the set continues to mutate daily, adding additional hosting in different countries to continuously reduce vulnerability to takedown.) To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversication. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, youll nd no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia. And if you ask any of those 14 servers where to nd wikileaks.ch, theyll point you to one of three differently routed IP blocks, contain-

2.2. HIERARCHIES VS. NETWORKS

ing web server IP addresses with diverse geolocation.... Are you getting the picture yet? Taking away WikiLeaks hosting, their DNS service, even their primary domain name, has had the net effect of increasing WikiLeaks effective use of Internet diversity to stay connected. And it just keeps going. As long as you can still reach any one copy of WikiLeaks, you can read their mirror page, which lists over 1,000 additional volunteer sites (including several dozen on the alternative IPv6 Internet). None of those is going to be as hardened as wikileaks.ch against DNS takedown or local court order but they dont need to be. Within a couple days time, the WikiLeaks web content has been spread across enough independent parts of the Internets DNS and routing space that they are, for all intents and purposes, now immune to takedown by any single legal authority. If pressure were applied, one imagines that the geographic diversity would simply double, and double again. And were only considering the website itself, not the torrented data les, which ensure that cryptographically signed copies of the website and its backing data are dispersed beyond all attempts to recall or suppress the information they contain. Thats an Internet infrastructure subject for another day.29

35

The networked movement to blog and tweet Wikileaks dotted-line IP addresses around the Web, and to mirror the site by the thousands, should be a source of pride to all friends of information freedom. It reminds me of the DeCSS uprising, in which the illegal DeCSS hack for movie DRM was distributed at thousands of blogs and websites worldwide, and sympathizers even showed up for Eric Corleys trial in T-shirts bearing the DeCSS code. And as Cowie suggests, even if the site were entirely shut down it would be feasible to move beyond the current website-based model and simply distribute content worldwide by torrent download. Similarly, the Egyptian governments so-called shutdown of the Internet during the early 2011 uprising was circumvented by (inter alia) using dialup connections and virtual private networks. As with Wikileaks, social media sites were reportedly still available at their IP addresses. And use of the Tor anonymizer tripled.30 Andrew Mclaughlin reported, in the same vein:
The blackout has proved increasingly ineffective. A handful of networks have remained connected, including one independent ISP, the countrys academic and research network, and a few major banks, businesses and government institutions.... Moreover, innovative Egyptians are nding ways to overcome the block. They are relaying information by voice, exploiting small and unnoticed openings in the digital rewall, and dusting off old modems
29 James Cowie, Wikileaks: Moving Target, renesys blog, December 7, 2010 <http://www.renesys.com/blog/2010/12/ wikileaks-moving-target.shtml>. 30 Klint Finley, Egypt: Tor use Skyrocketing as Users Route Around Internet Blocks, ReadWrite, January 28, 2011 <http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/egypt-tor-use-skyrocketingas.php>. See also 20 Ways to Circumvent the Egyptian Governments Internet Block, Pastebin, January 29, 2011 <http://pastebin.com/9jJUku77>.

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to tap foreign dial-up services.31

Whats more, another lesson of the shutdown is just how catastrophic the economic consequences are.
A central unknown at this moment is what the economic harm to the country will be. Without internet and voice networks, Egyptians are losing transactions and deals, their stocks and commodities cannot be traded, their goods are halted on frozen transportation networks, and their bank deposits are beyond reach. Also unknown is how many Egyptians have been harmed in noneconomic waysas human beings. As things stand, a worried mother who has not heard from her son or daughter cant send an email or check Facebook for a status update. A witness to violence or abuse cant seek help, document responsibility, or warn others via Twitter or a blog. Life-saving information is inaccessible. Healthy, civil debate about the future is squashed. And in the absence of trustworthy news, rsthand reports and real-time images, rumour and fear ourish. In all those ways, the total internet cutoff undermines the governments own interest in restoring calm and order.32

In fact the measure seems so drastic, and the effects so severe, that governments are likely to treat them as a last resort and put them off until its too lateas was the case in Egypt. Governments are as prone to the Boiled Frog Syndrome as we are. Attempts to suppress efforts like Wikileaks by interdicting their access to centralized intermediaries like domain name services, web hosts, PayPal, etc., simply serve as a catalyst to create new, decentralized versions of those intermediaries which are less vulnerable to interdiction. There has already been talk about setting up an open-source domain name service by one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Even before Wikileaks emerged as a major story, services like PayPal had come under criticism from the open source community for their lack of accountability to the user community, and sparked assorted attempts to create an open-source alternative. Attacks on Wikileaks have just increased the momentum behind such movements to reduce the vulnerability of centralized intermediaries.33 The users power of voice over PayPal is virtually nil, but their power of exit is potentially enormous. Again, the Net is now in the process of treating censorship as damage and routing around it. Projects to harden the Net against shutdown. Even before the Egyptian government shut down the Internet during the Twitter Revolution in early 2011, there was a wide range of projects aimed at increasing the Internets resilience in the face of state attempts at shutdown or control. The Egyptian governments
31 Andrew McLaughlin, Egypts big disconnect, The Guardian, January 31, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2011/jan/31/egypt-internet-uncensored-cutoffdisconnect>. 32 Ibid. 33 Mike Masnick, How Wikileaks and Operation Payback Have Exposed Infrastructure That Should Be Decentralized But Isnt, Techdirt, December 16, 2010 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101215/02391012281/how-wikileaks-operation-paybackhave-exposed-infrastructure-that-should-be-decentralized-isnt.shtml>.

2.2. HIERARCHIES VS. NETWORKS

37

shutdown, combined with talk in the U.S. of an Internet kill switch, added a sense of urgency to these projects. Its worth bearing in mind, of course, that the resistance movement was quite creative in circumventing the so-called Net shutdown while it was actually going on. Telecomix, a group of European online freedom activists, offered technical support to Egyptian protestors:
[Stephan] Urbach says the situation was relatively easy when they were dealing with Egypt. True to the Telecomix motto We Rebuild, Egyptian activists were simply rerouted so that they could go online again. To do so, Telecomix activists rst organized what are known as modem pools in countries with particularly large numbers of sympathizers, including Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany. They then used search engines to track down the cached fax numbers of Egyptian libraries, hotels and IT companies. To these, they faxed telephone numbers that Egyptians could use to circumvent their Internet service providers (ISPs) and still go online.34 Egyptians with dial-up modems get no Internet connection when they call into their local ISP, but calling an international number to reach a modem in another country gives them a connection to the outside world. We Rebuild is looking to expand those dial-up options. It has set up a dial-up phone number in Sweden and is compiling a list of other numbers Egyptians can call. It is distributing information about its activities on a Wiki page. One of the dial-up numbers is run by a small ISP called the French Data Network, which said it was the rst time it had set up such a service. Its modem has been providing a connection every few minutes, said Benjamin Bayart, FDNs president, speaking in an online chat. The international dial-up numbers only work for people with access to a telephone modem and an international calling service, however. So although mobile networks have been suspended in some areas, people have posted instructions about how others can use their mobile phones as dial-up modems. The few Egyptians able to access the Internet through Noor, the one functioning ISP, are taking steps to ensure their online activities are not being logged. Shortly before Internet access was cut off, the Tor Project said it saw a big spike in Egyptian visitors looking to download its Web browsing software, which is designed to let people surf the Web anonymously.35 And now many Egyptians are nding ways around the cuts and getting back on the Internet, allowing them to more easily communicate with the outside world and spread information from the inside. One popular method is to use the local phone lines, which remain
34 Ole Reissmann and Marcel Rosenbach, A Geek Role in the Arab Spring: European Group Helps Tackle Regime Censorship, Spiegel Online, October 14, 2011 <http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,791370,00.html>. 35 Nancy Gohring and Robert McMillan, Without Internet, Egyptians nd new ways to get online, Computerworld, January 28, 2011 <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207078/Without_Internet_Egyptians_nd_new_ways_to_get_online>.

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intact. The trick is to bypass local Egyptian ISPs (Internet Service Providers) by connecting to remote ones hosted in outside countries -- many are hosted here in the United States; Los Angeles seems, for whatever reason, to be a popular site. This is easy enough for the most computer-illiterate among us to do using basic settings and a built-in Help function, but Egyptians have a second hurdle as most homes in the country are unable to call internationally. One way that many are getting around this is by linking through a mobile phone network by establishing a connection between a cell with built-in bluetooth compatibility and a laptop with similar functionality or a computer with a bluetooth dongle.36

Telecomix has also provided a package for bypassing state Internet surveillance and censorship in Syria:
...we were totally blind and thus wanted to reach people for two reasons: * Promote the use of security tools such as Tor, using HTTPS, avoiding spreading personal information on Internet, etc. * Try to help in letting data such as videos or personal testimonies get out of the country while preserving leakers anonymity.

Telecomix put together the package on a number of mirrored websites and then circulated links to them by email spam:
It took about one month to design, write, discuss, erase, rewrite, correct and nally package the software. Many people gave their advice either on the design, on the technical content or on how the message would be welcomed on the Syrian side. One of our Syrian contacts put his heart and guts to provide us a perfectly polished Arabic translation. At this point, the 60MB Telecomix Safety Pack website was ready. It contained security Firefox plugins, a Tor bundle, secure instant messaging software, a link to the Telecomix chat and more. It also emphasized basic guidelines such as avoid revealing personal information over the Internet.... 19 mirrors, all using different domain names, managed by 2 load balancers. Not that huge, but hopefully robust enough to both reply to all requests and circumvent a potential blocking against some domain names. Webservers specially installed and congured for this aggressive broadcast. The crossing point between high technical skills, deep emotional involvment and decentralized technological power. I pushed the button on the 5th of September at 1:53am CEST. Then came the anxious monitoring of our respective servers. Thousands of requests were scrolling on the screen, several megabytes per second were passing through the main mirrors. All servers kept responding bravely to all these requests during the operation time. Fucking hell yeah. It was working. Cheers, champaign!37
36 Nicholas Jackson, Despite Severed Connections, Egyptians Get Back Online, The Atlantic, January 29, 2011 <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/despite-severedconnections-egyptians-get-back-online/70479/>. 37 KheOps, When the Internet does not let citizens down, Reets, September 11, 2011 <http://reets.info/opsyria-when-the-internet-does-not-let-citizens-down/>.

2.2. HIERARCHIES VS. NETWORKS

39

Putting together the methods of circumvention actually used with whats technically feasible with existing resources, we get this:
The situation in Egypt inspired much discussion about work-around for situations when the government (or Internet Service Providers) wants to shut down the Internet. Here are some of the suggestions made in relation to Egypt. 1) Toll-free international dial-up lines as well as free local access numbers to international dial-up. 2) Ship in (this should be a global program) solar-powered Internet nodes, creating a mesh network 3) Drop in Wi-Max hubs with satellite connections (no cost to endusers) 4) Put SMS gateways on all hubs 5) Free cell phones with SMS capability to any who need one (or an unregistered unlocked one) 6) Support the Google-Twitter voice into twitter initiative 7) Explore and test microwave and vsat options38

The urgency was intensied in August 2011, when Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) asked wireless providers to cut off service at four San Francisco stations to stop the use of cell phones to coordinate a protest against a shooting by a BART police ofcer.39 One open Net project, the Chokepoint Project, states its mission as To identify chokepoints, understand the issues behind who owns what and has the power to turn off connections or control aspects of internet control like domain names.40
During the recent uprising in Egypt, in January 2011, the order was given to turn off the Internet, sending shock-waves around the world. Murmurs were heard of US security agencies and American politicians asking for access to a similar kill switch. These actions force us to look at who owns The Internet? This is where the Choke Point Project comes in mapping the nodes of control in service of the multitude of global citizens under who authoritarian regimes can act upon without their consent. We are in favor of exploring approaches to the decentralization of access in favor of guaranteeing connectivity as a counter-weight to the control of the Internet by nation states and corporate inuence. A team comprised of web researchers, software developers and data visualization experts aim to gather data from across the web and show the control points, while clearly explaining the issues involved: history of Internet control, current legal situation, choke points, possible strategies for decentralization, reasons for and against kill switches.
38 Internet Work-Around for Egypt and Others, P2P Foundation <http://p2pfoundation.net/Internet_Work-Around_for_Egypt_and_Others> Accessed December 13, 2011. 39 Cell Phone Censorship in San Francisco? Blog of Rights: Ofcial Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union, August 12, 2011 <http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/cell-phone-censorshipsan-francisco>. 40 <http://chokepointproject.net/>.

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We are condent to succeed with this project, through the interconnected network of designers and hackers available through the communities of ContactCon (a major conference focused on an independent Internet which will be held October 20th, 2011 in New York, convened by Douglas Rushkoff ) and members of the P2P Foundation community.41

The object of this research is to develop an Internet architecture that is not vulnerable to shutdown. The umbrella term for projects to develop such an architecture is NextNet.42 The term was coined by David Rushkoff.43 Most visions of such a distributed, decentralized Internet architecture involve meshworks of various kinds, in which there is actually a physical many to many distribution of hardware itself.44 As Rushkoff describes the advantages:
Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a networkalbeit an asynchronous one. One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but Im sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a server. This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple. Now FidoNet employed a genuinely distributed architecture.... 25 years of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how much better we could do?45

The existing Internet architecture still has a considerable hub-and-spoke physical architecture, given its dependence on web-servers and routers. Meshworks overcome this limitation:
Meshies believe that mesh networks will overthrow traditional networking and communications and create entirely new kinds of distributed software. For the purposes of this column, mesh networks (sometimes called mobile ad hoc networks, or MANETs) are localarea networks whose nodes communicate directly with each other through wireless connections. It is the lack of a hub-and-spoke structure that distinguishes a mesh network. Meshes do not need designated routers: instead, nodes serve as routers for each other. Thus, data packets are forwarded from node to node in a process that network technologists term hopping."
41 The

Project, Choke Point Project <http://chokepointproject.net/the-project/>.

42 <http://p2pfoundation.net/NextNet>. 43 David Rushkoff, The Next Net, Reality Sandwich, February 17, 2011 <http://www.realitysandwich.com/next_net>. 44 Michel Bauwens and Sam Rose on the Choke Point Project, P2P Foundation Wiki <http://p2pfoundation.net/ Michel_Bauwens_and_Sam_Rose_on_the_Choke_Point_Project>. 45 Rushkoff, The Next Net.

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Before dismissing mesh networks as being of interest only to specialists, consider their advantages over existing hub-and-spoke networks. Mesh networks are self-healing: if any node fails, another will take its place. They are anonymous: nodes can come and go as they will. They are pervasive: a mobile node rarely encounters dead spots, because other nodes route around objects that hinder communication.46 In a typical Wi-Fi network, theres one router and a relatively small number of devices using it as a gateway to the internet. In a mesh network, every device is also a router. Bring in a new mesh device and it automatically links to any other mesh devices within radio range. It is an example of what internet architect David Reed calls cooperative gain the more devices, the more bandwidth across the network.47

41

Another benet of meshworks is that, even if the central ber-optic network is shut down and there are area limits to the propagation of the network, the local meshwork can support community darknets based entirely on their members computers and mobile devices. Short of blanketing an entire country with an electromagnetic pulse, theres no way to shut down local meshworks. The Freenet project is one form of architecture for an encrypted local dark meshwork. It is completely anonymous, since individual nodes routing functions are encrypted. The downside is that it is not a proxy for the Web; the Freenet includes only material from the World Wide Web which has actually been imported into it and stored on member hard drives.48 Nevertheless an urban Freenet, even if completely disconnected from the Web, could provide a robust range of services for a local counter-economy, including: hosting resident websites and community bulleting boards, a community encrypted currency on the model of Grecos credit-clearing networks, local email, sharing of music and other content les (including CAD/CAM les for micromanufacturers), telecommunication and teleconferencing links, assorted collaborative platforms, rating and reputational systems for local commerce, etc. It could also provide similar services for a distributed network like a phyle (about which more in a later chapter). The Freenet, as a platform, can host member web pages, sites (freesites) and social networks visible only to members of the Freenet. It can be used as the darknet or Virtual Private Network platform for any local organization or distributed network. For example the Las Indias cooperative, with which phyle theorist David de Ugarte is afliated, uses Freenet for its internal functions. Another meshwork/nextnet project, Commotion Wireless, aims to build a new type of tool for democratic organizing:
an open source device-as-infrastructure distributed communications platform that integrates users existing cell phones, WiFi-enabled
46 Jason Pontin, From the Editor: Mesh Networking Matters, Technology Review, September 2005 <http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/14740/>. 47 David Weingerger, The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All, Wired.com, May 8, 2009 <http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/the-grid-our-cars-and-the-internet-oneidea-to-link-them-all/>. 48 <http://freenetproject.org/>.

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computers, and other WiFi-capable personal devices to create a metroscale peer-to-peer (mesh) communications network. What it means: Democratic activists around the globe will gain access to a secure and reliable platform to ensure their communications cannot be controlled or cut off by authoritarian regimes.49

The Commotion Wireless website itself describes the general outlines of the project in much greater detail:
As recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have illustrated (and Myanmar demonstrated several years prior), democratic activists around the globe need a secure and reliable platform to ensure their communications cannot be controlled or cut off by authoritarian regimes. To date, technologies meant to circumvent blocked communications have focused predominantly on developing services that run over preexisting communication infrastructures. Although these applications are important, they still require the use of a wireline or wireless network that is prone to monitoring or can be completely shut down by central authorities. Moreover, many of these technologies do not interface well with each other, limiting the ability of activists and the general public to adopt sophisticated circumvention technologies. With support from New America Foundations Open Technology Initiative (OTI), Chambana.net, and Acorn Active Media the developers, technavists, and organizers here propose to build a new type of tool for democratic organizing: an open source device-as-infrastructure distributed communications platform that integrates users existing cell phones, WiFi-enabled computers, and other WiFi-capable personal devices to create a metro-scale peer-to-peer (mesh) communications network. Leveraging a distributed, mesh wireless infrastructure provides two key enhancements to existing circumvention technologies and supports human rights advocates and civil society organizations working around the globe. First, a distributed infrastructure eliminates the ability of governments to completely disrupt communications by shutting down the commercial or state-owned communications infrastructure. Second, device-as-infrastructure networks enhance communications security among activists by eliminating points for centralized monitoring, by enabling direct peer-to-peer communication, and by aggregating and securing individual communications streams. For over a decade, developers here have pioneered the development of device-as-infrastructure broadband networks. By utilizing cell phones and best-of-breed open source projects from around the globe, OTIs implementation strategy integrates already existing hardware (and extensions to currently available open source initiatives) to dramatically increase the security and robustness of telecommunications. Specically, this project proposes the following ve-point solution:

Create a robust and reliable participatory communications medium that is

49 Venessa Miemis, 10 Projects to Liberate the Web, Shareable: Science & Tech, October 4, 2011 <http://www.shareable.net/blog/10-projects-to-liberate-the-web>.

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not reliant upon centralized infrastructure for local-to-local (peer-to-peer) and local-to-Internet communications; Design ad hoc device-as-infrastructure technologies that can survive major outages (e.g. electricity, Internet connectivity) and are resilient during emergencies, natural disasters, or other hostile environments where conventional telecommunications networks are easily crippled; Secure participants communication to protect data integrity and anonymity through strong end-to-end encryption and data aggregation; Implement communications technologies that integrate low-cost, pre-existing, off-the-shelf devices (e.g. cell phones, laptops, consumer WiFi routers) and maximize use of open source software; and, Develop an open, modular, and highly extensible communications platform that is easily upgraded and adapted to the particular needs and goals of different local users.50 More closely related to the specic problems presented by police in Cairo and San Francisco, Stephanie Brancaforte of Avaaz announced a project to blackoutproof the protests
with secure satellite modems and phones, tiny video cameras, and portable radio transmitters, plus expert support teams on the groundto enable activists to broadcast live video feeds even during internet and phone blackouts and ensure the oxygen of international attention fuels their courageous movements for change.

As of February 25, 2011, she reported over 17,000 donors, and weve got 15 blackout-breaking satellite internet kitssome already in Libya and more headed to other countries now!51 The FreedomBox is a small plug-in server with a built-in Tor router, which can plug into an electrical outlet in your home and provide wireless serviceas well as providing point-to-point meshwork connection to others with FreedomBoxes, in the event local wireless networks are shut down.
What is FreedomBox?

Email and telecommunications that protects privacy and resists eavesdropping A publishing platform that resists oppression and censorship. An organizing tool for democratic activists in hostile regimes. An emergency communication network in times of crisis.
50 <https://tech.chambana.net/projects/commotion>. 51 Stephanie Brancaforte, Blackout-proof the protestsits happening! Ahvaaz email newsletter, February 25, 2011.

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FreedomBox will put in peoples own hands and under their own control encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging. Much of the software already exists: onion routing, encryption, virtual private networks, etc. There are tiny, low-watt computers known as plug servers to run this software. The hard parts is integrating that technology, distributing it, and making it easy to use without expertise. The harder part is to decentralize it so users have no need to rely on and trust centralized infrastructure. Thats what FreedomBox is: we integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy. Data stays in your home and cant be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors. With FreedomBoxes in their homes, anybody, regardless of technical skill, can easily enjoy secure, private, even anonymous communication! Why FreedomBox? FreedomBox integrates privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy. Data stays in your home and cant be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors. Other practical examples where FreedomBox is useful:

FreedomBoxes are encrypted web proxies. Boxes in uncensored countries can bounce signals for users stuck behind censorship walls---each one is a tiny crack in the Great Firewall. Chinese users could surf the entire net free from government censorship. The US government famously sought information about internal WikiLeaks communications from Twitter and other social websites. By moving our communication from centralized monoliths to decentralized servers in our homes, we protect our data from government prying. Many whistleblowers and dissidents need to anonymously talk to media and the public. With the FreedomBox, we can use VOIP to encrypt telephone calls and can create anonymous web servers over TOR to publish documents. Anonymous instant messaging or microblogging are also possible. Egyptian Democracy activists had trouble talking to demonstrators in the streets because the Mubarak regime shutdown parts of the internet as well as many cellular networks. If our internet plug is pulled, the box will use mesh routing to talk to other boxes like it. If any of them can get a packet across the border, they all can. FreedomBoxes are useful on a daily personal level too. That same proxy technology can scrub web sites of ads and tracking technology as you use them, thus protecting your privacy. FreedomBoxes help you encrypt your email. They also know who your friends are and can back up your data in

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encrypted form to their FreedomBoxes. You can get your data back even if you dont know your password. Even absent a crisis, privacy matters.52 Speaking of Tor, Tor released a same-day x when Iran attempted to block it.
Yesterday morning (in our timezones that evening, in Iran), Iran added a lter rule to their border routers that recognized Tor trafc and blocked it. Thanks to help from a variety of friends around the world, we quickly discovered how they were blocking it and released a new version of Tor that isnt blocked.... How did the lter work technically? Tor tries to make its trafc look like a web browser talking to an https web server, but if you look carefully enough you can tell some differences. In this case, the characteristic of Tors SSL handshake they looked at was the expiry time for our SSL session certicates: we rotate the session certicates every two hours, whereas normal SSL certicates you get from a certicate authority typically last a year or more. The x was to simply write a larger expiration time on the certicates, so our certs have more plausible expiry times. There are plenty of interesting discussion points from the research angle around how this arms race should be played. Were working on medium term and longer term solutions, but in the short term, there are other ways to lter Tor trafc like the one Iran used. Should we x them all preemptively, meaning the next time they block us it will be through some more complex mechanism thats harder to gure out? Or should we leave things as they are, knowing there will be more blocking events but also knowing that we can solve them easily? Given that their last blocking attempt was in January 2011, I think its smartest to collect some more data points rst.53

Other innovations in local protest communications support infrastructures include The Peoples Skype (a phone-powered, distributed voice and voting system for the #Occupy Movement),54 Vibe (an anonymous alternative to Twitter designed for protestors, which operates locally and leaves no permanent record of tweets for law enforcement),55 In May 2011 the Mozilla Foundation fell afoul of Homeland Security by refusing to remove a new extension from its Firefox browserMAFIAArewhich circumvents censorship of the Web by federal law enforcement and the Copyright Nazis. MAFIAAre negates ICEs domain seizures, by automatically rerouting users to alternate domains.
Thankfully, Mozilla didnt just fold, but instead left it up and sent DHS a list of questions concerning the request. The list of questions is really fantastic, as it goes way beyond the direct request to really get
52 Learn About the FreedomBox! Freedom Box Foundation <http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/> Accessed December 14, 2011. 53 Iran blocks Tor; Tor releases same-day x, The Tor Blog, September 14, 2011 <https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-blocks-tor-tor-releases-same-day-x>. 54 <http://peoplesskype.org/>. 55 Adrienne Jeffries, The Anonymous, Anarchist Version of Twitter Being Used at Occupy Wall Street, Betabeat, September 29, 2011 <http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/29/vibe-theanonymous-anarchist-version-of-twitter-being-used-at-occupy-wall-street/>.

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to the heart of the questionable nature of ICEs activity with domain seizures: To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Securitys request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAre.com add-on from Mozillas websites, can you please provide the following additional information: 1. Have any courts determined that MAFIAAre.com is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings) 2. Have any courts determined that the seized domains related to MAFIAAre.com are unlawful, illegal or liable for infringement in any way? (please provide relevant rulings) 3. Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify. 4. Has DHS, or any copyright owners involved in this matter, taken any legal action against MAFIAAre.com or the seized domains, including DMCA requests? 5. What protections are in place for MAFIAAre.com or the seized domain owners if eventually a court decides they were not unlawful? 6. Can you please provide copies of any briefs that accompanied the afdavit considered by the court that issued the relevant seizure orders? 7. Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down MAFIAAre.com is based? 8. Please identify exactly what the infringements by the owners of the domains consisted of, with reference to the substantive standards of Section 106 and to any case law establishing that the actions of the seized domain owners constituted civil or criminal copyright infringement. 9. Did any copyright owners furnish afdavits in connection with the domain seizures? Had any copyright owners served DMCA takedown notices on the seized domains or MAFIAAre.com? (if so please provide us with a copy) 10. Has the Government furnished the domain owners with formal notice of the seizures, triggering the time period for a response by the owners? If so, when, and have there been any responses yet by owners? 11. Has the Government communicated its concerns directly with MAFIAAre.com? If so, what response, if any, did MAFIAAre.com make?56

In response to the likely passage of SOPA in late 2011, Reddit formed a subgroup called darknetplan for users interested in developing an encrypted meshwork to evade surveillance by the federal government and the proprietary content
56 Mike Masnick, Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains, Techdirt, May 5, 2011 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110505/14444714170/homeland-security-demandsmozilla-remove-refox-extension-that-redirects-seized-domains.shtml>.

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industries.57 And Firefox announced a new extension, explicitly directed against SOPA, which functioned much like the earlier MAFIAAre to circumvent domain name takedowns.58 Supporters of SOPA have dismissed the threat from such means of circumvention, in language much like that Cory Doctorow cited from those in the proprietary content industry who believed that DRM circumvention would be a marginal phenomenon limited to geeks.
Opponents of SOPA have argued that the DNS ltering, even though it will have a number of harmful effects on the technical and political structure of the Internet, will not be effective in preventing users from accessing the blocked sites. Mr. Castro cites our research as evidence that SOPAs mandate to lter DNS will be effective. He quotes our nding that at most 3% of users in certain countries that substantially lter the Internet use circumvention tools and asserts that presumably the desire for access to essential political, historical, and cultural information is at least equal to, if not signicantly stronger than, the desire to watch a movie without paying for it. Yet only a small fraction of Internet users employ circumvention tools to access blocked information, in part because many users simply lack the skills or desire to nd, learn and use these tools. In our report, we looked at three sets of censorship circumvention tools: complex, client-based tools like Tor; paid VPNs; and web proxies. We estimated usage of those three classes of tools. We used reports from the client tool developers, a survey to gather usage data from VPN operators and used data from Google Analytics to estimate usage of web proxy tools. Counting all three classes of tools, we estimated as many as 19 million users a month of circumvention tools. Given the large number of users in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other states where ltering is endemic, this represents a fairly small percentage of internet users in those countries; 19 million people represents about 3% of the users in countries where internet ltering is pervasive. We actually believe that 3% gure is high, as some of the tools we study are used by users in open societies to evade corporate or university rewalls, not just to evade government censorship. We stand behind the ndings in our study (with reservations that we detail in the paper), but we disagree with the way that Mr. Castro applies our ndings to the SOPA debate. His presumption that people will work as hard or harder to access political content than they do to access entertainment content deeply misunderstands how and why most people use the internet. Far more users in open societies use the Internet for entertainment than for political purposes; it is unreasonable to assume different behaviors in closed societies.
57 Andy Greenberg, Wary Of SOPA, Reddit Users Aim To Build A New, Censorship-Free Internet, Forbes, December 23, 2011 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/23/wary-of-sopa-reddit-users-aim-tobuild-a-new-censorship-free-internet/>; <http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/>. 58 Melanie Pinola, DeSopa for Firefox Bypasses SOPA DNS Blocking, lifehacker, December 20, 2011 <http://lifehacker.com/5869665/desopa-for-refox-bypasses-sopa-dns-blocking>.

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Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specic pieces of political content. Rather than comparing usage of circumvention tools in closed societies to predict the activities of a given userbase, Mr. Castro would do better to consider the massive userbase of tools like bit torrent clients, which would make for a far cleaner analogy to the problem at hand. Likewise, the long line of very popular peer-to-peer sharing tools that have been incrementally designed to circumvent the technical and political measures used to prevent sharing copyrighted materials are a stronger analogy than our study of users in authoritarian regimes seeking to access political content. Second, our research has consistently shown that those who really wish to evade Internet lters can do so with relatively little effort. The problem is that these activities can be very dangerous in certain regimes. Even though our research shows that relatively few people in autocratic countries use circumvention tools, this does not mean that circumvention tools are not crucial to the dissident communities in those countries. 19 million people is not large in relation to the population of the Internet, but it is still a lot of people absolutely who have freer access to the Internet through the tools. We personally know many people in autocratic countries for whom these tools provide a crucial (though not perfect) layer of security for their activist work.59

Another possible chokepoint, as suggested above by Avaazs system of autonomous satellite antennas, is the communications satellites themselves. As if the previously mentioned projects werent ambitious enough, members of the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin have initiated the Hackerspace Global Grid60 project for creating a complete satellite communications system.
Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit. The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The projects organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.... Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit - usually only for brief periods of time - but tracking the devices has proved difcult for low-budget projects. The hacker activist Nick Farr rst put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.
59 Ethan Zuckerman, SOPA and Our 2010 Circumvention Study, My hearts in Accra, December 23, 2011 <http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/12/23/sopa-and-our-2010circumvention-study/>. 60 <http://shackspace.de/wiki/doku.php?id=project:hgg:open_tasks>.

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"The rst goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Lets take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities, Mr Farr said.... The amateur radio satellite Arissat-1 was deployed into low earth orbit last year via a spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts from the International Space Station as part of an educational project. Students and academics have also launched other objects by piggybacking ofcial rocket launches. However, these devices have often proved tricky to pinpoint precisely from the ground. According to Armin Bauer, a 26-year-old enthusiast from Stuttgart who is working on the Hackerspace Global Grid, this is largely due to lack of funding. "Professionals can track satellites from ground stations, but usually they dont have to because, if you pay a large sum [to send the satellite up on a rocket], they put it in an exact place, Mr Bauer said.... When Mr Farr called for contributions to Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and others decided to concentrate on the communications infrastructure aspect of the scheme. In the open-source spirit of Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and some friends came up with the idea of a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals. Used together in a global network, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time, while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth. "Its kind of a reverse GPS, Mr Bauer said. "GPS uses satellites to calculate where we are, and this tells us where the satellites are. We would use GPS co-ordinates but also improve on them by using xed sites in precisely-known locations." Mr Bauer said the team would have three prototype ground stations in place in the rst half of 2012, and hoped to give away some working models at the next Chaos Communication Congress in a years time. They would also sell the devices on a non-prot basis. "Were aiming for 100 euros (84) per ground station. That is the amount people tell us they would be willing to spend, Mr Bauer added. Experts say the satellite project is feasible, but could be restricted by technical limitations. "Low earth orbit satellites such as have been launched by amateurs so far, do not stay in a single place but rather orbit, typically every 90 minutes, said Prof Alan Woodward from the computing department at the University of Surrey.... "Thats not to say they cant be used for communications but obviously only for the relatively brief periods that they are in your view. Its difcult to see how such satellites could be used as a viable communications grid other than in bursts, even if there were a signicant number in your constellation." This problem could be avoided if the hackers managed to put their satellites into geostationary orbits above the equator. This would allow them to match the earths movement and appear to be motionless

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when viewed from the ground. However, this would pose a different problem. "It means that they are so far from earth that there is an appreciable delay on any signal, which can interfere with certain Internet applications, Prof Woodward said.61 "The rst step is establishing a means of accurate synchronization for the distributed network, HGG said. Next up are building various receiver modules (ADS-B, amateur satellites, etc) and data processing of received signals. A communication/control channel (read: sending data) is a future possibility but there are no xed plans on how this could be implemented yet." The group also has a list of open tasks for those who want to participate.62

2.3

Networks vs. Hierarchies

But if hierarchies dont do so well at suppressing networked organizations, centralized, hierarchical institutions are nding themselves all too vulnerable to networked resistance. In the early 1970s, in the aftermath of a vast upheaval in American political culture, Samuel Huntington wrote of a crisis of democracy; the American people, he feared, were becoming ungovernable. In The Crisis of Democracy, he argued that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess of democracy. Huntingtons analysis is illustrative of elite thinking behind the neoliberal policy agenda of the past thirty years. For Huntington, Americas role as hegemonic power in a system of world order depended on a domestic system of order; this system of ordervariously referred to as corporate liberalism, consensus capitalism, Cold War liberalism, and the welfare-warfare stateassumed a general public willingness to stay out of government affairs.63 And this was only possible because of a domestic structure of political authority in which the country was governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive ofce, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law rms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment."64 Americas position as defender of global capitalism required that its government have the ability to mobilize its citizens for the achievement of social and political goals and to impose discipline and sacrice upon its citizens in order
61 David Meyer, Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship, BBC News, January 4, 2012 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16367042>. 62 Chloe Albanesisus, Proposed Hacker Satellite System Would Fight Web Censorship, PCMag.com, January 1, 2012 <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398268,00.asp>. 63 Samuel P. Huntington, Michael J. Crozier, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission: Triangle Paper 8 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 105-6. 64 Ibid., p. 92.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

51

to achieve these goals.65 Most importantly, this ability required that democracy be largely nominal, and that citizens be willing to leave major substantive decisions about the nature of American society to qualied authorities. It required, in other words, some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups."66 Unfortunatelyfrom his standpointthese requirements were being gravely undermined by a breakdown of traditional means of social control, a delegitimation of political and other means of authority, and an overload of demands on government, exceeding its capacity to respond."67 The phenomena that caused Huntington to recoil in horror in the early 1970s must have seemed positively tame by the late 1990s. The potential for networked resistance created by the Internet exacerbated Huntingtons crisis of governability beyond his wildest imagining. The Internets potential for networked resistance, for swarming the state, supplanted Huntingtons old crisis of governability with the aspect of a Rehoboam: My little nger shall be thicker than my fathers loins. There is a wide body of literature on the emergence of networked modes of resistance in the 1990s, beginning with the Rand studies on netwar by David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla and other writers. In their 1996 paper The Advent of Netwar, Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote that technological evolution was working to the advantage of networks and the detriment of hierarchies. Although their focus was on the military aspect (what has since been called Fourth Generation Warfare), they also mentioned governability concerns in civil society much like those Huntington raised earlier. Intellectual property pirates, militant singleissue groups and transnational social activists, in particular, were developing netwar-like attributes.
Now... the new information technologies and related organizational innovations increasingly enable civil-society actors to reduce their isolation, build far-ung networks within and across national boundaries, and connect and coordinate for collective action as never before. As this trend deepens and spreads, it will strengthen the power of civil-society actors relative to state and market actors around the globe.... For years, a cutting edge of this trend could be found among leftleaning activist NGOs concerned with human-rights, environmental, peace, and other social issues at local, national, and global levels. Many of these rely on APC afliates for communications and aim to construct a global civil society strong enough to counter the roles of state and market actors. In addition, the trend is spreading across the political spectrum. Activists on the rightfrom moderately conservative religious groups, to militant antiabortion groupsare also building national and transnational networks based in part on the use of new communications systems.68
65 Ibid., 66 Ibid.,

pp. 7-8. pp. 113-5. 67 Ibid., pp. 7-8. 68 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar MR-789 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,

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In Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks (1996) Ronfeldt focused on the special signicance of networks for global civil society.
...[A]ctors in the realm of civil society are likely to be the main beneciaries. The trend is increasingly signicant in this realm, where issueoriented multiorganizational networks of NGOsor, as some are called, nonprot organizations (NPOs), private voluntary organizations (PVOs), and grassroots organizations (GROs)continue to multiply among activists and interest groups who identify with civil society. Over the long run, this realm seems likely to be strengthened more than any other realm, in relative if not also absolute terms. While examples exist across the political spectrum, the most evolved are found among progressive political advocacy and social activist NGOse.g., in regard to environmental, human-rights, and other prominent issuesthat depend on using new information technologies like faxes, electronic mail (e-mail), and on-line conferencing systems to consult and coordinate. This nascent, yet rapidly growing phenomenon is spreading across the political spectrum into new corners and issue areas in all countries. The rise of these networks implies profound changes for the realm of civil society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when most social theorists focused on state and market systems, liberal democracy fostered, indeed required, the emergence of this third realm of activity. Philosophers such as Adam Ferguson, Alexis de Tocqueville, and G. W. F. Hegel viewed civil society as an essential realm composed of all kinds of independent nongovernmental interest groups and associations that acted sometimes on their own, sometimes in coalitions, to mediate between state and society at large. However, civil society was also considered to be a weaker realm than the state or the market. And while theorists treated the state and the market as systems, this was generally not the case with civil society. It was not seen as having a unique form of organization equivalent to the hierarchical institution or the competitive market, although some twentieth century theorists gave such rank to the interest group. Now, the innovative NGO-based networks are setting in motion new dynamics that promise to reshape civil society and its relations with other realms at local through global levels. Civil society appears to be the home realm for the network form, the realm that will be strengthened more than any othereither that, or a new, yet-to-benamed realm will emerge from it. And while classic denitions of civil society often encompassed state- and market-related actors (e.g., political parties, businesses and labor unions), this is less the case with new and emerging denitionsthe separation of civil society from state and market realms may be deepening. The network form seems particularly well suited to strengthening civil-society actors whose purpose is to address social issues. At its best, this form may thus result in vast collaborative networks of NGOs geared to addressing and helping resolve social equity and accountability issues that traditional tribal, state, and market actors have
1996) <http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR789/>.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

tended to ignore or are now unsuited to addressing well. The network form offers its best advantages where the members, as often occurs in civil society, aim to preserve their autonomy and to avoid hierarchical controls, yet have agendas that are interdependent and benet from consultation and coordination.69

53

Networked global civil society, in the words of James Moore, is becoming a Second Superpower:
As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a second superpower that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world nd such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the eld of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States. There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the will of the people in a global social movement. ... While some of the leaders have become highly visible, what is perhaps most interesting about this global movement is that it is not really directed by visible leaders, but, as we will see, by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants.... What makes these numbers important is the new cyberspace enabled interconnection among the members. This body has a beautiful mind. Web connections enable a kind of near-instantaneous, mass improvisation of activist initiatives.... New forms of communication and commentary are being invented continuously. Slashdot and other news sites present high quality peerreviewed commentary by involving large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items. T ext messaging on mobile phones, or texting, is now the medium of choice for communicating with thousands of demonstrators simultaneously during mass protests. Instant messaging turns out to be one of the most popular methods for staying connected in the developing world, because it requires only a bit of bandwidth, and provides an intimate sense of connection across time and space. The current enthusiasm for blogging is changing the way that people relate to publication, as it allows realtime dialogue about world events as bloggers log in daily to share their insights. Meta-blogging sites crawl across thousands of blogs, identifying popular links, noting emergent topics, and providing an instantaneous summary of the global consciousness of the second superpower. The Internet and other interactive media continue to penetrate more and more deeply all world society, and provide a means for in69 David F. Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks P-7967 (Santa Monica: RAND, 1996) <http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967/>.

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stantaneous personal dialogue and communication across the globe. The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action. Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of emergent democracy that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the rst superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed ofcials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individualmaking sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the rst superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action. How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the rst day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small g roups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same rst day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the rst superpower is the eaglean awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in ight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention. In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of the second superpower can, I believe, be expected to eventually prevail. Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in picketing, in exposing corruption, and in purchases from particular companies, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society. More effect, I would argue, than the devastating but unsustainable effect of bombs and other forms of coercion. Deliberation in the rst superpower is relatively formaldictated by the US constitution and by years of legislation, adjudicating, and precedent. The realpolitik of decision making in the rst superpoweras opposed to what is taught in civics classcenters around lobbying and campaign contributions by moneyed special interestsbig oil, the military-industrial complex, big agriculture, and big drugsto mention only a few. In many cases, what are acted upon are issues for which some group is willing to spend lavishly. By contrast, it is difcult in the US government system to champion policy goals that have broad, long-term value for many citizens, such as environment,

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

poverty reduction and third world development, womens rights, human rights, health care for all. By contrast, these are precisely the issues to which the second superpower tends to address its attention. Deliberation in the second superpower is evolving rapidly in both cultural and technological terms. It is difcult to know its present state, and impossible to see its future. But one can say certain things. It is stunning how quickly the community can actespecially when compared to government systems. The Internet, in combination with traditional press and television and radio media, creates a kind of media space of global dialogue. Ideas arise in the global media space. Some of them catch hold and are disseminated widely. Their dissemination... becomes a pattern across the community. Some members of the community study these patterns, and write about some of them. This has the effect of both amplifying the patterns and facilitating community reection on the topics highlighted. A new form of deliberation happens. A variety of what we might call action agents sits guratively astride the community, with mechanisms designed to turn a given social movement into specic kinds of action in the world. For example, fundraisers send out mass appeals, with direct mail or the Internet, and if they are tapping into a live issue, they can raise money very quickly. This money in turn can be used to support activities consistent with an emerging mission.... ...The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human mindsyour mind and my mindtogether we create the movement. In traditional democracy our minds dont matter muchwhat matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them. In the emergent democracy of the second superpower, each of our minds matters a lot. For example, any one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list. Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpowerbut the one that eventually catches re is started by an individual. And in the peeroriented world of the second superpower, many more of us have the opportunity to craft submissions, and take a shot. The contrast goes deeper. In traditional democracy, sense-making moves from top to bottom. The President must know more than he is saying goes the thinking of a loyal but passive member of the rst superpower. But this form of democracy was established in the 18th century, when education and information were both scarce resources. Now, in more and more of the world, people are well educated and informed. As such, they prefer to make up their own minds. Top-down sense-making is out of touch with modern people. The second superpower, emerging in the 21st century, depends upon educated informed members. In the community of the second superpower each of us is responsible for our own sense-making. We seek as much dataraw facts, direct experienceas we can, and then we make up our own minds. Even the current fascination with reality television speaks to this desire: we prefer to watch our fellows, and decide ourselves whats the story rather than watching actors and actresses play out a story written by someone else. The same,

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increasingly, is true of the political stagehence the attractiveness of participation in the second superpower to individuals.70

In The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico,71 Arquilla, Ronfeldt et al. expressed some concern over the possibilities of decentralized netwar techniques for destabilizing the existing political and economic order. They saw early indications of such a movement in the global political support network for the Zapatistas. Loose, ad hoc coalitions of afnity groups, organizing through the Internet, could throw together large demonstrations at short notice, and swarm the government and mainstream media with phone calls, letters, and emails far beyond their capacity to cope. Ronfeldt and Arquilla noted a parallel between such techniques and the leaderless resistance ideas advocated by right-wing white supremacist Louis Beam, circulating in some constitutionalist/militia circles. The interesting thing about the Zapatista netwar, according to Ronfeldt and Arquilla, is that to all appearances it started out as a run-of-the-mill Third World armys suppression of a run-of-the-mill local insurgency. Right up until Mexican troops entered Chiapas, there was every indication the uprising would be suppressed quickly according to the standard script that had worked up to then, and that the world outside Mexico would little note nor long remember it. It looked that way until Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatistas made their appeal to global civil society and became the center of a networked movement that stirred activists the world over. The Mexican government was blindsided by the global reaction.72 Swarmingin particular the swarming of public pressure through letters, phone calls, emails, and public demonstrations, and the paralysis of communications networks by such swarmsis the direct descendant of the overload of demands Huntington wrote of in the 1970s. In Swarming & the Future of Conict, Ronfeldt and Arquilla focused on swarming, in particular, as a technique that served the entire spectrum of networked conictincluding civicoriented actions.73 Despite the primary concern with swarming as a military phenomenon, they also gave some attention to networked global civil societyand the Zapatista support network in particularas examples of peaceful swarming with which states were ill-equipped to deal:
A recent example of swarming can be found in Mexico, at the level of what we call activist social netwar (see Ronfeldt et al., 1998). Briey, we see the Zapatista movement, begun in January 1994 and continuing today, as an effort to mobilize global civil society to exert
70 James F. Moore, The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head, Chapter Two of John Lebkowski and Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., Extreme Democracy (Lulu, 2005), pp. 37-41 <http://www.extremedemocracy.com/>. 71 John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, Graham Fuller, and Melissa Fuller. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico MR-994-A (Santa Monica: Rand, 1998) <http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR994/index.html>. 72 David Ronfeldt and Armando Martinez, A Comment on the Zapatista Netwar, in Ronfeldt and Arquilla, In Athenas Camp: Preparing for Conict in th Information Age (Santa Monica: Rand, 1997), pp. 369-371. 73 Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming & the Future of Conict DB-311 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), iii <http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briengs/DB311/>.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

pressure on the government of Mexico to accede to the demands of the Zapatista guerrilla army (EZLN) for land reform and more equitable treatment under the law. The EZLN has been successful in engaging the interest of hundreds of NGOs, who have repeatedly swarmed their media-oriented re (i.e., sharp messages of reproach) against the government. The NGOs also swarmed in forceat least initiallyby sending hundreds of activists into Chiapas to provide presence and additional pressure. The government was able to mount only a minimal counterswarming re of its own, in terms of counterpropaganda. However, it did eventually succeed in curbing the movement of activists into Chiapas, and the Mexican military has engaged in the same kind of blanketing of force that U.S. troops employed in Haitiwith similar success.74 At present, our best understanding of swarmingas an optimal way for myriad, small, dispersed, autonomous but internetted maneuver units to coordinate and conduct repeated pulsing attacks, by re or forceis best exemplied in practice by the latest generation of activist NGOs, which assemble into transnational networks and use information operations to assail government actors over policy issues. These NGOs work comfortably within a context of autonomy from each other; they also take advantage of their high connectivity to interact in the uid, exible ways called for by swarm theory. The growing number of cases in which activists have used swarming include, in the security area, the Zapatista movement in Mexico.... The [Zapatista movement] is a seminal case of social netwar, in which transnationally networked NGOs helped deter the Mexican government and army from attacking the Zapatistas militarily.... Social swarming is especially on the rise among activists that oppose global trade and investment policies. Internet-based protests helped to prevent approval of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in Europe in 1998. Then, on July 18, 1999a day that came to be known as J18furious anticapitalist demonstrations took place in London, as tens of thousands of activists converged on the city, while other activists mounted parallel demonstrations in other countries. J18 was largely organized over the Internet, with no central direction or leadership. Most recently, with J18 as a partial blueprint, several tens of thousands of activists, most of them Americans but many also from Canada and Europe, swarmed into Seattle to shut down a major meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on opening day, November 30, 1999in an operation known to militant activists and anarchists as N30, whose planning began right after J18. The vigor of these three movements and the effectiveness of the activists obstructionism came as a surprise to the authorities. The violent street demonstrations in Seattle manifested all the conict formations discussed earlierthe melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming. Moreover, the demonstrations showed that informationage networks (the NGOs) can prevail against hierarchies (the WTO and the Seattle police), at least for a while. The persistence of this
74 Ibid.,

57

p. 39.

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Seattle swarming model in the April 16, 2000, demonstrations (known as A16) against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, D.C., suggests that it has proven effective enough to continue to be used. From the standpoints of both theory and practice, some of the most interesting swarming was conducted by black-masked anarchists who referred to themselves collectively as the N30 Black Bloc, which consisted of anarchists from various afnity groups around the United States. After months of planning, they took to the eld individually and in small groups, dispersed but internetted by two-way radios and other communications measures, with a concept of collective organization that was uid and dynamic, but nonetheless tight. They knew exactly what corporate ofces and shops they intended to damagethey had specic target lists. And by using spotters and staying constantly in motion, they largely avoided contact with the police... In these social netwarsfrom the Zapatistas in 1994, through the N30 activists and anarchists in 1999swarming appears not only in real-life actions but also through measures in cyberspace. Swarms of email sent to government gures are an example. But some hacktivists aim to be more disruptivepursuing electronic civil disobedience. One notable recent effort associated with a collectivity called the Electronic Disturbance Theater is actually named SWARM. It seeks to move digital Zapatismo beyond the initial emphasis of its creators on their FloodNet computer system, which has been used to mount massive ping attacks on government and corporate web sites, including as part of J18. The aim of its proponents is to come up with new kinds of electronic pulse systems for supporting militant activism. This is clearly meant to enable swarming in cyberspace by myriad people against government, military, and corporate targets. 75

More recently, a series of DDOS attacks by Anonymous, many of them against targets associated with efforts to suppress Wikileaks or Occupy Wall Street, illustrate the same phenomenon. Swarming, in all its manifestations, involves a new understanding of the strategic principle of mass, in which mass is achieved by a rapid, transitory concentration of forces at the point of attack. The ash mob, when used for activist purposes, is a good example of this. Another, older example of the same phenomenon was the Wobbly practice of unannounced one-day strikes at random intervals. The new principle of mass, as manifested in swarming protests like the Seattle anti-globalization demonstration in 1999 and the 2006 anti-Lukashenko ash mobs in Minsk, is far less vulnerable to preemptive disruption in its preparatory stages. Swarming attacks, which can be organized on comparatively short notice by loose networks, require far less advance planning. More conventional mass demonstrations in the previous era, like the East German uprisings in 1989, were much more visible to authorities during their planning stages. Now the planning and preparatory phase is drastically shortened and virtually invis75 Ibid.,

pp. 50-52.

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59

ible to the authorities, with the highly visible public demonstration seeming to appear out of nowhere with little or no warning.76 The German Blitzkrieg doctrine, by way of analogy, relied on radio-equipped tanks to turn their armored forcefewer, more lightly armored and with lighter guns than that of the Frenchinto a coordinated group weapon.77 German armored formations, by converging rapidly at the breakthrough point and then rapidly dispersing, or by achieving concentration of re without spatial concentration, pregured the ash mobs whichalthough possessing far less repower than the states policeare able to form and disperse before the state can react to them. Since then, doctrines like the American Airland Battle of the 1980s attempted to attain mass through concentration of re (coordinated artillery, missile and air strikes) on the Schwerpunkt, with the physical concentration of rapidly assembled and dispersed ground forces playing a secondary role. A force with superior agility, despite smaller numbers, can achieve local superiority at will and defeat the enemy in detail. Netwar, Ronfeldt and Arquilla wrote elsewhere, is characterized by the networked organizational structure of its practitionerswith many groups actually being leaderless and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in swarming attacks.78 The disappearance of time and space limitations, associated with networked communications operating at the speed of light, has strong implications for the growing capability of swarming attacks. Consider the radical compression of the time factor, as described by Sarah Wanenchak:
Now the spread of information is nearly instantaneous. A protest is violently put down in an afternoon; by the evening, one can see solidarity demonstrations in multiple other nations. People act and react more quickly and more uidly in response to new information, to changing perceptions of opportunity and threat. The heartbeat of collective action has sped up. Coordination across large distances is another practical result of the increased speed of information sharing.... [N]ow protesters in multiple different countries call a day of protest, and over 900 cities worldwide take part.79

And as Julian Assange argues, such advances in speed and ubiquity make it possible for the swarming attack to take the form of a full court press, overwhelming multiple governments or agencies at once so that each is too preoccupied dealing with its own swarming attacks to cooperate with the others.
In relation to the Arab Spring, the way I looked at this back in
Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, pp. 168-169. pp. 172-173. 78 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Introduction, in Arquilla and Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy MR-1382-OSD (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001) <http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/> ix. 79 Sarah Wanenchak, Everything New is Old Again: Historical Augmented Revolution, Cyborgology, November 29, 2011 <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/11/29/everything-newis-old-again-historical-augmented-revolution/>.
77 Ibid., 76 Clay

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October of 2010 is that the power structures in the Middle East are interdependent, they support each other. If we could release enough information fast enough about many of these powerful individuals and organizations, their ability to support each other would be diminished. Theyd have to ght their own local battles theyd have to turn inward to deal with the domestic political fallout from the information. And therefore they would not have the resources to prop up surrounding countries.80

The rest of this section is, in many ways, a direct continuation of our discussion of stigmergy in the previous chapter. It might be fruitful to reread the fourth section of Chapter One and proceed directly to the material below. Many open-source thinkers, going back to Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, have pointed out the nature of open-source methods and network organization as force-multipliers.81 Open-source design communities pick up the innovations of individual members and quickly distribute them wherever they are needed, with maximum economy. This is a feature of the stigmergic organization that we considered earlier. This principle is at work in the le-sharing movement, as described by Cory Doctorow. Individual innovations immediately become part of the common pool of intelligence, universally available to all.
Raise your hand if youre thinking something like, But DRM doesnt have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals!... ...I dont have to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other generalpurpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted.82 It used to be that copy-prevention companies strategies went like this: Well make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cashpoor/time rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy. But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet.....83

Bruce Schneier describes the stigmergic Bazaar model as automation lowering the marginal cost of sharing innovations.
Automation also allows class breaks to propagate quickly because less expertise is required. The rst attacker is the smart one; everyone else can blindly follow his instructions. Take cable TV fraud as an example. None of the cable TV companies would care much if someone built a cable receiver in his basement and illicitly watched cable television. Building that device requires time, skill, and some money.
80 Michael Hastings, Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview, Rolling Stone, February 2, 2012 <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview20120118?print=true>. 81 Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar <http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading>. 82 Doctorow, Microsoft DRM Research Talk, in Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008), pp. 7-8. 83 Doctorow, Its the Information Economy, Stupid, in Ibid., p. 60.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

Few people could do it. Even if someone built a few and sold them, it wouldnt have much impact. But what if that person gured out a class break against cable television? And what if the class break required someone to push some buttons on a cable box in a certain sequence to get free cable TV? If that person published those instructions on the Internet, it could increase the number of nonpaying customers by millions and signicantly affect the companys protability.84

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This reduced transaction cost of aggregation or replicating small contributions is a key feature of stigmergywhat David Weinberger called small pieced, loosely joined. To put it in the terms of The Matrix, traditional hierarchies are being besieged by a self-replicating army of Agent Smiths. This is one illustration of a broader advantage of stigmergy: modular design. In Schneiers words, expertise is [e]ncapsulated and commoditized. Take a class break [i.e. a hack], automate it, and propagate the break for free, and youve got a recipe for a security disaster.85 Australia, in fact, was recently the location of a literal geeks helping grandmas story, as hackers at The Pirate Party provided technical expertise to seniors wishing to circumvent government blockage of right-to-die websites:
Exit International is an assisted suicide education group in Australia, whose average member is over 70 years old. The Exit International website will likely be blocked by the Great Firewall of Australia, so Exit International has turned to Australias Pirate Party and asked for help in producing a slideshow explaining rewall circumvention for seniors. Its a pretty informative slideshowteachers could just as readily use it for schoolkids in class in a teaching unit on getting access to legit educational materials thats mistakenly blocked by school censorware.86

Open-source insurgency follows the same model, with each individual contribution quickly becoming available to all. John Robb writes:
The decentralized, and seemingly chaotic guerrilla war in Iraq demonstrates a pattern that will likely serve as a model for next generation terrorists. This pattern shows a level of learning, activity, and success similar to what we see in the open source software community. I call this pattern the bazaar. The bazaar solves the problem: how do small, potentially antagonistic networks combine to conduct war? Lessons from Eric Raymonds The Cathedral and the Bazaar provides a starting point for further analysis. Here are the factors that apply (from the perspective of the guerrillas):

Release early and often. Try new forms of attacks against different types of targets early and often. Dont wait for a perfect plan.
84 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003), p. 95. 85 Ibid., p. 96. 86 Cory Doctorow, Australian seniors ask Pirate Party for help in accessing right-to-die sites, Boing Boing, April 9, 2010 <http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/09/australian-seniors-a.html >.

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CHAPTER 2. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES Given a large enough pool of co-developers, any difcult problem will be seen as obvious by someone, and solved. Eventually some participant of the bazaar will nd a way to disrupt a particularly difcult target. All you need to do is copy the process they used. Your co-developers (beta-testers) are your most valuable resource. The other guerrilla networks in the bazaar are your most valuable allies. They will innovate on your plans, swarm on weaknesses you identify, and protect you by creating system noise.87

The rapid innovation in Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) achieved by opensource warfare networks in Iraq and Afghanistan is a case in point.88 Any innovation developed by a particular cell of Al Qaeda Iraq, if successful, is quickly adopted by the entire network. Stigmergic, networked organizations are far more agile than hierarchical institutions because they require no permission or administrative coordination to act. A traditional hierarchy, in which decisions are mediated administratively or socially, incurs enormous transaction costs getting everyone on the same page before anyone can act. As Heather Marsh argues, an idea developed within a hierarchical framework
must rst be pitched by the originator, who will attempt to persuade a group to adopt the idea. The group must be in agreement with the idea itself and with every stage of its development. The majority of energy and resources are spent on communication, persuasion, and personality management, and the working environment is fraught with arguments and power struggles.... With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus (collaborative) to propose an idea or initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea, if an idea is exciting or necessary it will attract interest. The interest attracted will be from people actively involved in the system and willing to put effort into carrying the project further, not empty votes from people with little interest or involvement. Since the project is supported or rejected based on contributed effort, not empty votes, input from people with more commitment to the idea will have greater weight. Stigmergy also puts individuals in control over their own work, they do not need group permission to tell them what system to work on or what part to contribute. The person with the initial idea may or may not carry the task further. Evangelizing the idea is voluntary, by a group that is excited by the idea; they may or may not be the ones to carry it out. It is unnecessary to seek start up funding and supporters; if an idea is good it will receive the support required. (In practise, that is not true yet, as
87 John Robb, THE BAZAARS OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM, Global Guerrillas, Sept3ember 24, 2004 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/09/bazaar_dynamics.html>. Eric Raymond has raised a caveat concerning Robbs application of the Bazaar paradigm [email] 88 Adam Higginbotham, U.S. Military Learns to Fight Deadliest Weapons, Wired, July 28, 2010 <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_roadside_bombs/all/1>.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

few people have the free time to put into volunteer projects because most are tied to compulsory work under the existing nancial system.) Secrecy and competition is unnecessary because once an idea is given, it and all new development belongs to anyone who chooses to work on it. Anyone can submit work for approval, the idea cannot die or be put on hold by personalities; acceptance or rejection is for the work contributed, not the person contributing it. All ideas are accepted or rejected based on the needs of the system. Responsibility and rights for the system rest with the entire user group, not just the creators. There is no need for people to leave the system based on personality conicts as there is no need for communication outside of task completion and there are usually plenty of jobs with complete autonomy. As no one owns the system, there is no need for a competing group to be started to change ownership to a different group.89

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The speed and agility of the network, its shortened reaction time, and the rapidity with which it shares information and new techniques, mean that networks are typically inside what strategist John Boyd called the OODA loop of hierarchies. They react more quickly to changing circumstances than do hierarchies, so they can stay a step ahead of them and keep them constantly off-balance. We quoted, earlier, Robert Anton Wilsons observations on the tendency of hierarchy to suppress accurate feedback to those in authority, so that they were unable to formulate appropriate changes in policy in response to information from their environment. Open, networked associations, on the other hand, are agile precisely because, in an organization where individuals possess no authority over each other, there are no barriers to accurate feedback. Although Demings motto Drive out fear can never be fully realized in a hierarchy, it can be in a self-organized network. The whole ethos of the network, as illustrated by Raymonds Bazaar, is based on sharing knowledge (release early and release often) and beneting from feedback (many eyeballs make shallow bugs). A good example is modern science. Alchemists, Clay Shirky argues, failed to benet from each others knowledge because they were, as a group,
notably reclusive; they typically worked alone, they were secretive about their methods and their results, and they rarely accompanied claims of insight or success with anything that wed recognize today as documentation, let alone evidence. Alchemical methods were hoarded rather than shared, passed down from master to apprentice, and when the alchemists did describe their experiments, the descriptions were both incomplete and vague. This was hardly a recipe for success; even worse, no two people working with alchemical descriptions could reliably even fail in the same way. As a result, alchemical conclusions accumulated only slowly, with no steady improvement in utility. Absent transparent methods and a formal way of rooting out errors, erroneous beliefs
89 Heather Marsh, A proposal for governance: Stigmergy, beyond competition and collaboration, WL Central, January 9, 2012 <http://wlcentral.org/node/2419>.

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were as likely as correct ones to be preserved over generations. In contrast, members of the Invisible College [a number of natural philosophers grouped around Robert Boyle in 1645direct ancestor of the Royal Society] described their methods, assumptions, and results to one another, so that all might benet from both successes and failures.... Culturenot tools or insightsanimated the Invisible College and transmuted alchemy into chemistry. The members accumulated facts more quickly, and were able to combine existing facts into new experiments and new insights. By insisting on accuracy and transparency, and by sharing their assumptions and working methods with one another, the collegians had access to the groups collective knowledge and constituted a collaborative circle.90

And the American bureaucratic national security states clumsy response to terrorism is typical of the way hierarchies react to networks.
The reliance on IT also enables open-source groups to identify and respond to problems much more rapidly than a more structured, topdown entity canbe it the Pentagon or a large software company such as Microsoft. According to some estimates, it now takes Iraqi insurgents less than a month to adapt their methods of attack, much faster than coalition troops can respond. For every move we make, the enemy makes three, U.S. Brigadier General Joe E. Ramirez Jr. told attendees at a May conference on IEDs. The enemy changes techniques, tactics, and procedures every two to three weeks. Our biggest task is staying current and relevant. Unfortunately, the traditional weapons acquisition process, which dictates how the United States and other Western militaries dene and develop new weapons systems, is simply not designed to operate on such a eeting timescale. It can take years and sometimes decadesnot to mention many millions or billions of dollarsfor a new military machine to move from concept to design to testing and out into the eld. Worse, the vast majority of the battleeld technologies now wending their way through the acquisition bureaucracy were intended to ght large force-on-force battles among sovereign nations, not the guerrilla warfare that typies the conicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.... This past spring and summer I interviewed dozens of current and former military ofcers, analysts, weapons developers, and others to try to understand why the coalition forces technological might has proved so ineffectual. Nearly everyone I spoke with agreed there is a serious mismatch between the Wests industrial-age approach to warfare and the insurgents more uid and adaptive style.... Terrorist Web sites serve not only to spread propaganda but also to share knowledge among insurgent groups.... That helps explain why the learning cycles among Iraqi insurgents are some 20 times as fast as the Irish Republican Armys were in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, according to military estimates.... That unconventional style of mine warfare is something coalition
90 Clay

Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 138-139.

2.3. NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

forces clearly didnt anticipate, and response has been slow. Earlier this year, for instance, the Pentagon decided to spend $25 billion on mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored vehicles, whose V-shaped hulls and raised chassis make them better than armored Humvees at fending off bomb blasts. The price tag includes $750 million to airlift the 12-metric-ton vehicles to Iraq, instead of sending them by ship. In August, though, the Pentagon scaled back its schedule, saying only 1500 of the planned 3900 vehicles would be delivered by years end. Its a race against time. As happened rst to unarmored Humvees and then to armored Humvees, insurgents have made destroying MRAP vehicles a high prioritya trophy kill, as some observers call it. MRAP designs are already reportedly being rethought to deal with emerging insurgent tactics. You might think that the lag time was due to bureaucratic screwups, but in fact, thats just how long the bureaucracy takes to respond. Marine commanders in Iraq rst requested MRAP vehicles in May 2006. Acquisition ofcials reviewed the request and ultimately approved it late in the year. By April, ve suppliers had demonstrated they could meet survivability requirements, production numbers, and delivery timelines, and they were then awarded contracts.... Acquisition is even more cumbersome when the United States wants to send equipment to Iraqi security forces. Any request for equipment is rst given a congressional review, which takes up to a month. Then the U.S. government has to draw up a letter of acceptance, which must be signed by the Iraqi government, after which a payment schedule is negotiated. Only then can the Defense Department begin to procure the requested equipmentwhich itself takes time.... There has been no shortage of attempts to streamline weapons acquisition. Since 1975, at least 129 studies have been conducted on how to reform the process and make it more rational and responsive. Few of the recommendations have had any lasting impact, though. A March 2006 GAO report found that for the largest acquisition programs, the average estimated development time has risen from 11 years to 14 years. Even if you could design an F-22 in a single day, it would still take years to prepare the paperwork to win funding and more years of operational tests before the plane could go into full-scale production.91

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Open-source asymmetric warfare networks, by making ad hoc use of off-theshelf technology, are able to develop weapons that rival in sophistication the products of years of military R&D. As Cory Doctorow notes, cheap technologies which can be modularized and mixed-and-matched for any purpose are just lying around. ...[T]he market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. He cites Robbs notion that [o]pen source insurgencies dont run on detailed instructional manuals that describe tactics and techniques. Rather, they just run on plausible premises. You just
91 Robert N. Charette, Open-Source Warfare, IEEE Spectrum, <http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/opensource-warfare/0>.

November

2007

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put out the plausible premisei.e., the suggestion based on your gut intuition, based on current technical possibilities, that something can be donethat IEDs can kill enemy soldiers, and then anyone can nd out how to do it via the networked marketplace of ideas, with virtually zero transaction costs.
But this doesnt just work for insurgents it works for anyone working to effect change or take control of her life. Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to nd out how to do this, where to nd the equipment to do it even the rms that specialize in doing it for you. In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.

Doctorow mentions Bruce Sterlings reaction to the innovations developed by the protagonists of his (Doctorows) Makers: Theres hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. Or as Doctorow puts it, it assembles rather than invents.
Its not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be congured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efcient or effective as a bespoke solution, but its all close enough for rock-n-roll.92

Murray Bookchin anticipated something like this back in the 1970s, writing in Post-Scarcity Anarchism:
Suppose, fty years ago, that someone had proposed a device which would cause an automobile to follow a white line down the middle of the road, automatically and even if the driver fell asleep.... He would have been laughed at, and his idea would have been called preposterous.... But suppose someone called for such a device today, and was willing to pay for it, leaving aside the question of whether it would actually be of any genuine use whatever. Any number of concerns would stand ready to contract and build it. No real invention would be required. There are thousands of young men in the country to whom the design of such a device would be a pleasure. They would simply take off the shelf some photocells, thermionic tubes, servo-mechanisms, relays, and, if urged, they would build what they call a breadboard model, and it would work. The point is that the presence of a host of versatile, reliable, cheap gadgets, and the presence of men who understand all their cheap ways, has rendered the building of automatic devices almost straightforward and routine. It is no longer a question of whether they can be built, it is a question of whether they are worth building.93
92 Cory Doctorow, Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise, Locus Online, July 5, 2009 <http://www.locusmag.com/ Perspectives/2009/07/cory-doctorow-cheap-facts-andplausible.html>. 93 Murray Bookchin, Toward a Liberatory Technology, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley, Calif.: The Ramparts Press, 1971), pp. 49-50.

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67

Among the practical results are the so-called Assassins Mace weapons, which simply take the same off-the-shelf components used by the state and make better use of them. The term initially appeared in the press in the context of cheap black boxes broadcasting on multiple frequencies and capable of disrupting the expensive American air-to-surface missiles which knock out SAM sites by homing in on radar signals. But it refers, more broadly, to all cases of ephemeralization where a countermeasure can knock out a weapons system costing several orders of magnitude more: asymmetric power... allow[s] cheap things to undo expensive ones.
The Pentagon denes the Maces as technologies that might afford an inferior military an advantage in a conict with a superior power. In this view, an Assassins Mace is anything which provides a cheap means of countering an expensive weapon. Other examples might include Chinese anti-satellite weapons, which might instantly knock out U.S. space assets, or a conventional ballistic missile, designed to take out a supercarrier and all its aircraft in one hit. Its an interesting contrast to the perspective of the American arms industry, which can end up spending vast amounts countering low-tech, low-cost threats like mines and IEDs.94

As an example of the comparative agility of self-organized networks and bureaucratic hierarchies, in carrying out similar tasks, consider Yochai Benklers treatment of Napster:
Imagine for a moment that someonebe it a legislator dening a policy goal or a businessperson dening a desired devicehad stood up in mid-1999 and set the following requirements: We would like to develop a new music and movie distribution system. We would like it to store all the music and movies ever digitized. We would like it to be available from anywhere in the world. We would like it to be able to serve tens of millions of users at any given moment. Any person at the time would have predicted that building such a system would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars; that running it would require large standing engineering staffs; that managing it so that users could nd what they wanted and not drown in the sea of content would require some substantial number of curatorsDJs and movie buffsand that it would take at least ve to ten years to build. Instead, the system was built cheaply by a wide range of actors, starting with Shawn Fannings idea and implementation of Napster. Once the idea was out, others perfected the idea further, eliminating the need for even the one centralized feature that Napster includeda list of who had what les on which computer that provided the matching function in the Napster network. Since then, under the pressure of suits from the recording industry and a steady and persistent demand for peer-to-peer music software, rapid successive generations of Gnutella, and then the FastTrack clients KaZaa and Morpheus, Overnet and eDonkey, the improvements of BitTorrent, and many others
94 David Hambling, China Looks to Undermine U.S. Power, With Assassins Mace, Wired.com, July 2, 2009 <http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/china-looks-to-undermine-us-powerwith-assassins-mace/>.

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have enhanced the reliability, coverage, and speed of the peer-to-peer music distributionall under constant threat of litigation, nes, police searches, and even, in some countries, imprisonment of the developers or users of these networks.95

As we observed earlier in the case of the World Wide Web, this le-sharing architecture developed by the cumulative stigmergic efforts of individuals is something that could hardly have been conceived, let alone accomplished, by any unitary institution. The difference in agility is even more apparent in the respective ways the le-sharing movement and the recording industry handled their mutual conict.
At the labels, each decision needs to be analyzed and approved by the executives. Meanwhile, the P2P networks are reacting at blazing speed, constantly mutating and staying a step ahead of the labels. Containing this series of mutations is like capturing mercury. You put down Napster, Kazaa pops up. You get rid of Kazaa, Kazaa Lite emerges, and so forth. Although the small P2P companies dont have many resources at their disposal, theyre able to react and mutate at a frighteningly quick pace.96

2.4

Systems Disruption

The dynamics of competition between networks and hierarchies lead to what John Robb calls systems disruption. Networks, despite much smaller resources than those which hierarchies can eld, are able to leverage those resources through focused attacks on key nodes or weak points that achieve incapacitation many times greater than the apparent damage. Because of their agility and the nature of network organization itself, they are able to route around damage much faster than hierarchies. But perhaps the most important advantage of networks is the way hierarchies respond to attack. Hierarchies typically respond to network attacks by adopting policies that hasten their own destruction. Brafman and Backstrom stated the general principle, as we saw earlier, that when attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized. On the other hand, when attacked, centralized organizations tend to become even more centralized.97 Hierarchies respond to attacks by becoming even more hierarchical: more centralized, more authoritarian, and more brittle. As a result they become even less capable of responding exibly to future attacks, actively suppressing their own ability to respond effectively. Al Qaeda has adopted an explicit strategy of open-source warfare, using relatively low-cost and low-risk attacks, whose main damage will come not from the attacks but from the U.S. governments reaction to them. In its slick English language e-zine Inspire, aimed at an American readership, it announced:
95 Benkler,

The Wealth of Networks, pp. 84-85. and Beckstrom, The Starsh and the Spider, p. 41. 97 Ibid., p. 139.
96 Brafman

2.4. SYSTEMS DISRUPTION

To bring down America we do not need to strike big. ...[With the] security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch.

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Robb, in the blog post from which the quote above was excerpted, cited additional material from Inspire on the thinking behind the recent parcel bomb attack:
Al Qaedas choice of a demonstration was to use parcel bombs (called Operation Hemorrhagea classic name for a systems disruption attack). These low cost parcel bombs, were inserted into the international air mail system to generate a security response by western governments. It worked. The global security response to this new threat was massive.... Part of effective systems disruption is a focus on ROI (return on investment) calculations.98

And Al Qaeda, in its commentary at Inspire, made it clear that ROI calculations were very much on its mind:
Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us. . . On the other hand this supposedly foiled plot, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.99

So Al Qaedas deliberate strategy is pretty much to goad the U.S. into doing something stupidusually a safe gamble. Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn explicitly stated in a March 2010 video statement, that the U.S. governments response to failed attacks, and the resulting economic damage, was their whole point:
Even failed attacks can help the jihadists by bring[ing] major cities to a halt, cost[ing] the enemy billions, and send[ing] his corporations into bankruptcy. Failed attacks, simply put, can themselves be successes. This is precisely why AQAP devoted an entire issue of Inspire to celebrating terror attempts that killed nobody.

All the other supposedly failed attacks on air travel have been resounding successes, by this standard. From Richard Reeds shoe bomb to the alleged liquid explosives in shampoo bottles, to the so-called underwear bomber on Christmas 2009, every single failed attack results in an enormously costly and reactive knee-jerk TSA policyresulting in increased inefciencies and slowdowns and ever more unpleasant conditions for travelersto prevent that specic mode of attack from ever happening again. It doesnt matter whether it works or not, or if the person attempting it is a complete and total dickhead. So we have to take off our shoes, leave our shampoo and bottled water at homeand most recently, choose between being ogled and groped. Every such new measure
98 John Robb, Open Source Jihad, Global Guerrillas, November 21, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2010/11/note-on-innovation-inwarfare.html>. 99 Quoted in Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Foreign Policy, November 23, 2010 <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/23/death_by_a_thousand_cuts>.

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amounts to a new tax on air travel, and results in yet another small but signicant group of travelers on the margin deciding its the last straw. After the TSA required checked baggage to be screened, for example, air travel dropped by 6% between 4th Quarter 2002 and 1st Quarter 2003.100 Air travel on Thanksgiving 2010 was down about a tenth from the gure in 2009, which probably owes something to the public furor over the new body scanners and enhanced patdowns. Its only a matter of time till some Al Qaeda cell is smart enough to allow one its agents to get caught with explosives in his rectum (or her vagina), andif TSA reacts according to patternthe whole civil aviation system dissolves into chaos. The same approach is shared by bureaucracies in the peaceful world of corporations, universities and government agencies, as described (in the case of an academic science department) by blogger thoreau:
If you make it costly to go through Ofcial Channels, people will nd ways to do things outside of Ofcial Channels. Most of what they do will be harmless. However, some of it wont be. By driving the activity underground you guarantee the following: 1) Harmful activities will not be spotted except through chance or when theres An Incident. And we all know what bureaucracies do when theres An Incident. 2) There will be no chance to work with people on making their activities safe, because they wont come to you in advance. The only chance youll have to talk to them is when they get caught by chance (at which point theyll be more focused on doing a better job of keeping secrets) or when theres An Incident (at which point their main concern will be deection of blame). 3) The institutional culture will develop an even greater disdain for Rules and even (in many cases) for Safety. Given the realities of how these things work out so frequently, disdain for Rules and even Safety (in most cases) is largely a healthy thing. However, to the extent that a bureaucrat actually values these things, that bureaucrat should try to make it so that doing things through Ofcial Channels is cheaper than skipping Ofcial Channels. Thats your only hope of getting people to actually respect these things. Well, theres also fear, but fear isnt respect. Its mindless, panicked compliance, and it can fade over time, or motivate people to nd even better evasive tactics. Another thought on when theres An Incident: Besides all of the usual problems with incentives and information in large institutions, it occurs to me that size guarantees that the people responsible for Safety, Compliance, and related matters will be separated from the people on the ground doing whatever it is that the organization is allegedly there to do. Consequently, the person who enforces a ridiculous rule, or who makes you sit through a useless presentation full of statements that are at best insulting and at worst factually wrong, will
100 Nate Silver, The Hidden Costs of Extra Security, Nate Silvers Political Calculus (NYT), November 18, 2010 <http://vethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/the-hidden-costs-ofextra-airport-security/>

2.4. SYSTEMS DISRUPTION

not be having lunch with you. Often the local enforcers (especially people whose primary task is something other than Safety) are more reasonable than the distant enforcers because, frankly, they need to be. Yes, their access to local information leads to smarter decisions, and they have at least some sort of incentive to see that the job gets done (whereas the distant enforcers only care about Compliance). But they also cant afford to piss everyone else off (too much) because they will be having lunch with everyone else. If they insult everyone else with a boring and factually wrong Powerpoint, theyll be ostracized.101

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Hierarchies degrade their own effectiveness in another way, as well: by becoming less capable of preventing future attacks. 9/11, as Robb pointed out, was a Black Swan event: i.e., it was a one-off occurrence that could not have been predicted with any degree of condence, and which is unlikely to be repeated. And most subsequent new kinds of attack, like the shoe bomber and underwear bomber, were of similar nature. The surveillance state, in increasing the scope of its data collection in order to anticipate such events, simply increases the size of the haystack relative to the needle and generates lost of false positives. Even when there is fairly high quality, actionable intelligence specically pointing to some imminent threat, like the warning from the underwear bombers uncle, the system is so ooded with noise that it doesnt notice the signal. Given the very large pool of individuals who are generally sympathetic to Al Qaedas cause or who t some generic terrorist personality prole, and given the very small number of people who are actively and deliberately involved in planning terror attacks, its inevitable that genuinely dangerous suspects will be buried 99.9-to-0.1 in a ood of false positives. As Matt Yglesias argues,
Out of the six billion people on the planet only a numerically insignicant fraction are actually dangerous terrorists. Even if you want to restrict your view to one billion Muslims, the math is the same. Consequently, tips, leads and the like are overwhelmingly going to be pointing to innocent people. You end up with a system thats overwhelmed and paralyzed. If there were hundreds of thousands of alQaeda operatives trying to board planes every year, wed catch lots of them. But were essentially looking for needles in haystacks.102 ...the key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.... ...If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, youre going to nd 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. Id be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means your 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool thats overwhelmingly
101 Thoreau, Continuing observations on bureaucratic organizations, Unqualied Offerings, September 16, 2011 <http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2011/09/16/13653>. 102 Matthew Yglesias, Too Much Information, Think Progress, December 28, 2009 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/12/too-much-information/>.

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composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaedas movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.103

One commenter, apparently equating bureaucratic safety rules with safety considerations as such, earnestly reminded thoreau of the importance of safety, recounting a serious accident caused by a physicist who thought he knew what he was doing. In response, thoreau continued:
I dont think that safety in the lab is a joke, Eli. I think that most of the safety training sessions that Ive sat through were worthless, that many of the procedures are more focused on covering bureaucratic ass than on helping people do things safely, and that anybody who relies on the safety ofcers to tell him how to be safe (as opposed to learning everything he can about the apparatus that hes using, and learning from other peoples experiences with similar apparatuses) is the one auditioning for a Darwin Award. I think that clowns who say Look! Somebody almost died in some other context! as soon as somebody criticizes a safety rule (Ive dealt with such people) are the ones who lack the critical thinking ability to think through a situation and make good choices. A student once left a harmless chemical in a refrigerator that had food. This refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Again, the refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Please re-read that sentence as many times as you deem necessary. I will be the rst to say that the student should be severely chastised and learn a very harsh lesson. Not because there was anything remotely dangerous about the situation, but because the student needs to learn good habits if he is going to avoid truly dangerous situations. (In fact, I was hoping that Samuel L. Jackson might get involved, and say something about the path of the righteous man, just to really make the lesson as dramatic as possible.) Instead, the response was to take away the refrigerator. A refrigerator that was NOT in a laboratory room. A refrigerator that was in fact in an ofce. One joker even tried to ban food from the room before I pushed back. Again, the room was NOT a laboratory. It was a shared ofce area. And when I said that this was stupid, do you know what the response was? Some idiot pointed out that a student had died in a re in a chemistry lab at another school. As if that had anything to do with this. What did the student learn? The student learned that if you get caught people will do stupid things. The teachable moment was tainted. At this point it is customary for somebody to point out that a person once died or nearly died in some other situation. As if that had anything to do with this.

All of this together means that attempts to anticipate and prevent terror attacks through the bloated surveillance state, or to prevent attacks through standard103 Yglesias, Very Rare Terrorists are Hard to Find, Think Progress, December 31, 2009 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/12/very-rare-terrorists-are-very-hard-to-nd/>.

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ized policies like shoe removal and enhanced patdowns, amount to nothing more than an elaboratebut practically worthlessfeel-good ritual (no pun intended). Its the placebo effector in Bruce Schneiers memorable phrase, security theater. When your system for anticipating attacks upstream is virtually worthless, achieving defense in depth with the last mile becomes monumentally important: having people downstream capable of recognizing and thwarting the attempt, and with the freedom to use their own discretion in stopping it, when it is actually made. Since 9/11, all the major failed terror attacks in the U.S. were thwarted by the vigilance and initiative of passengers directly in contact with the situation. The underwear bomber was stopped by passengers who took the initiative to jump out of their seats and take the guy down. And the ofcial response to every failed terror attack has been to further restrict the initiative and discretion of passengers in direct contact with the situation. Perhaps the best recent example of systems disruption is Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange Robb describes as one of the most important innovators in warfare today.104 A number of commentators have noted that the U.S. governments response to Wikileaks is directly analogous to the TSAs response to Al Qaeda attacks on civil aviation and the RIAAs response to le-sharing. For example Mike Masnick of Techdirt, in a juxtaposition of articles that probably wasnt coincidental (even the titles are almost identical), wrote on the same day that the TSAs security policies are exactly what Al Qaeda wants,105 and that both the TSA and Wikileaks stories showed
how a system based on centralization responds to a (very, very different) distributed threat. And, in both cases, the expected (and almost inevitable) response seems to play directly into the plans of those behind the threat.... ...Its what happens when a centralized system, based on locking up information and creating articial barriers, runs smack into a decentralized, open system, built around sharing. For those who are trying to understand why this whole story reminds me of whats happened in the entertainment industry over the past decade, note the similarities. Its why Ive been saying for years that the reason Ive spent so much time discussing the music industry is because it was an early warning sign of the types of challenges that were going to face almost every centralized industry or organization out there. That included all sorts of other industries, but it also includes governments.106

Assanges stated goal is to destroy or degrade the effectiveness of hierarchies,

104 Robb, Julian Assange, Global Guerrillas, August 15, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ 2010/08/global-guerrilla-julianassange.html>. 105 Mike Masnick, How The US Response Turns Failed Terrorist Attacks Into Successes, Techdirt, December 2, 2010 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101130/03585512056/how-usresponse-turns-failed-terrrorist-attacks-into-successes.shtml>. 106 Masnick, How The Response To Wikileaks Is Exactly What Assange Wants, Techdirt, December 2, 2010 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101202/02243512089/how-response-to-wikileaksis-exactly-what-assange-wants.shtml>.

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not through direct damage from attack, but by their own responses to attack. He starts by describing as conspiratorial authoritarian institutions which encounter resistance to their goals, and therefore nd it necessary to conceal their operations to some extent. (It would be remarkable if the people who routinely dismiss conspiracy theories would not admit the phenomenon Assange describes.)
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efcient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive secrecy tax") and consequent systemwide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.107

Blogger Aaron Bady describes the double bind into which this imperative puts an authoritarian institution:
The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information ows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

This means that the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to think as a system, to communicate with itself.
The leak... is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and nd the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. 108

Theres a great scene in Stephen Kings The Stand, where Randall Flagg, the Antichrist-gure in charge of a post-apocalyptic regime ruled from Las Vegas, confronts Paul Robeson, his chief of secret police. Robson let several of the good guys spies escape to report back to their compatriots in the Boulder Free
107 Julian Assange, The Non-Linear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Governance, December 31, 2006. Reproduced at Cryptome.org <http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf>. 108 Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy: To destroy this invisible government, zunguzungu, November 29, 2010 <http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracyto-destroy-this-invisible-government/>.

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Zoneonly because he wasnt on the cc list for Flaggs list of persons of interest. Robeson wasnt on the need to know list. Flagg held his cards too close to his chest because he didnt trust his subordinates. So public embarrassment resulting from the cable leaks is not the end, but the means to the end. The end is not embarrassment, but the authoritarian states reaction to such embarrassment:
...Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American states conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.109

The effect, a degrading of synaptic connections within the hierarchical organization, is analogous to the effect of Alzheimers Disease on the human brain. Noam Scheiber at The New Republic argues that Wikileaks is about dismantling large organizationsfrom corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction. In language much like Assange himself, he argues that as an organization grows, the pool of potential leakers grows at the very same time as their personal bonds of loyalty to each other and the organization weaken. Hence
Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered.

There are two options for dealing with this. The rst, to suppress leaks and tighten up internal control, is probably impossible in the long run. Which leaves the second option:
....to shrink. I have no idea what size organization is optimal for preventing leaks, but, presumably, it should be small enough to avoid wide-scale alienation, which clearly excludes big bureaucracies. Ideally, youd want to stay small enough to preserve a sense of community, so that peoples ties to one another and the leadership act as a powerful check against leaking. My gut says its next to impossible to accomplish this with more than a few hundred people. The Obama campaign more or less managed it with a staff of 500. But the record of presidential campaigns (one industry where the pressure to leak has been intense for years) suggests thats about the upper limit of whats possible. Id guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted celllike structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one anothers name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node cant disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks
109 Ibid.

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to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like . . . Wikileaks.110

Recall our discussion above of the secrecy tax which self-censorship and internal authoritarianism imposes on hierarchies. Robb, in Brave New War, refers to a terrorism tax on a city resulting from
an accumulation of excess costs inicted on a citys stakeholders by acts of terrorism. These include direct costs inicted on the city by terrorists (systems sabotage) and indirect costs because of the security, insurance, and policy changes needed to protect against attacks. A terrorism tax above a certain level will force the city to transition to a lower market equilibrium (read: shrink).

In particular, a terrorism tax of 6.3 to 7 percent will overcome the laborpooling and transportation savings advantage of concentrating population sufciently to compel the city to move to a lower population equilibrium.111 Similarly, the excess costs imposed on hierarchies by the imperatives of conict with hostile networks will act as a tax on them, compelling them to move to a lower size equilibrium. And increased levels of disobedience and disregard of government authority, and increased transaction costs of enforcing the law, will function as a disobedience tax. As a result, simply put, the advantages of hierarchy will be outweighed by the disadvantages at a lower size threshold. Large hierarchical institutions, both state and corporate, will become increasingly hollow, unable to enforce their paper claims to authority. Hierarchies are entering a very brutal period of natural selection, in which some will be supplanted from outside by networks, and some (those which survive) will become more network-like under outside pressure. The hierarchies which survive will be those which, faced with pressure from systems disruption, adapt (in Eric Raymonds phrase) by decentralizing their functions and hardening their local components. Hierarchies will face pressure to become less authoritarian internally, as they nd themselves competing with networks for the loyalty of their workers. The power of exit will reinforce the power of voice. This natural selection process is inevitable, even without intentionally malicious attacks by networks on hierarchies. Eric Raymond argues that the prevailing bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions of the 20th century were more or less workable, and capable of functioning based on Weberian rules and best practices, so long as the complexity of the problems they faced was not insupportable. Even in those days, of course, there were signicant efciency tradeoffs in return for control. In James C. Scotts terminology, rendering the areas managed by hierarchies legible to those at the top entailed a level of abstraction and oversimplication that severely limited the functionality of the leaderships understanding of the world. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.112
110 Noam Scheiber, Why Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government, The New Republic, December 27, 2010 <http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/80481/game-changer>. 111 Robb, Brave New War, p. 109. 112 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 262.

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And the process of rendering the functioning of the managed areas legible, through standard operating procedures and best practices, also entailed disabling or hindering a great deal of the human capital on which an organization depended for optimal functioning. The proper functioning of any organization depends heavily on what Friedrich Hayek called distributed knowledge, and what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge. It is direct, practical knowledge of the work process, which cannot be reduced to a verbal formula and transmitted apart from practical experience of the work. It is also practical knowledge of the social terrain within the organization, and the network of personal relationships its necessary to navigate in order to get anything done. Scott uses the Greek term metis, as opposed to techne. Bureaucratic micromanagement, interference, and downsizing, between them, decimate the human capital of the organization113 much like the eradication of social memory in elephant herds where a large enough portion of the elderly matriarchs have been destroyed to disrupt the transmission of social mores. For all these efciency losses, from the hierarchys perspective they are necessary tradeoffs for the sake of acquiring and maintaining power. Reality must be abstracted into a simple picture, and specialized knowledge known only to those actually doing the work must be eradicatednot only to make the organization simple enough to be manageable by a nite number of standard rules, but because the information rents entailed in tacit/distributed knowledge render the lower levels less easily milked. But today, the complexity of problems faced by society has become so insupportable that hierarchies are simply incapable of even passably coping with it. As Scott points out, the policies of bureaucratic hierarchies have always been made by people who ignore the radical contingency of the future and fail to account for the possibility of incomplete knowledge.114 But contingency and incompleteness have increased exponentially in recent years, to levels with which only a stigmergic organization can cope. Eric Raymond argues that the level of complexity in American society, in the mid-20th century, was such that it could be managedif not effectively, at least more or less adequatelyby the meritocratic managerial classes using Weberian-Taylorist rules to govern large bureaucratic organizations. But if Gosplan and Bob McNamara could manage to stumble along back then, the level of unsupportable complexity in recent decades has outstripped the ability of hierarchical, managerial organizations to manage.115 Meanwhile, hierarchies responses to network attacks are self-destructive in another way besides the secrecy tax. They undermine their own perceived legitimacy in the eyes of the public. For one thing, they undermine their moral legitimacy by behaving in ways that directly contradict their legitimizing rhetoric. As Martin van Creveld argued, when the strong ght the weak they become weakin large part because the public cant stomach the knowledge of what
pp. 334-337. pp. 343-344. 115 Eric Raymond, Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority, Armed and Dangerous, January 5, 2010 <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1551>.
114 Ibid., 113 Ibid.,

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goes into their sausage. The public support on which the long-run viability of any system of power depends is eroded by loss of morale.
The reason is that when the strong are seen beating the weak (knocking down doors, roughing up people of interest, and shooting ragtag guerrillas), they are considered to be barbarians. This view, amplied by the media, will eventually eat away at the states ability to maintain moral cohesion and drastically damage its global image.116

We saw this with the public reaction to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And every video of an Israeli bulldozer attening a Palestinian home with screaming mother and children outside undermines the beleaguered Israeli David vs. Arab Goliath mystique on which so much third party support depended. The David vs. Goliath paradigm is replaced by one of the Warsaw Ghetto vs. the Nazis, with the Israelis in the role of bad guys. But more importantly, networked resistance undermines the main source of legitimacy for all authoritarian institutions, which is their plausible premisetheir ability to deliver the goods in return for loyalty and compliance. Every attack against a hierarchy, to which it demonstrates its inability to respond effectively, undermines its grounds for expecting loyalty. Its one thing to sell ones soul to the Devil in return for a set of perks. But when the Devil is unable to deliver the goods, hes in trouble.

2.5

The Transition from Hierarchies to Networks

New Wine in Old Bottles. The U.S. military has attempted to duplicate the agility of open-source organization by incorporating networked elements into its doctrine and practice. And this is part of a larger phenomenon: an attempt by hierarchical institutions to coopt the potential of networked organization for their own benet. As Andy Robinson describes it:
I think part of the crisis of the 70s has to do with networks and hierarchies. The old system was highly hierarchical, but was suffering problems from certain kinds of structural weaknesses in relation to networksthe American defeat in Vietnam being especially important.... And ever since the 70s the system has been trying to nd hybrids of network and hierarchy which will harness and capture the power of networks without leading to chaos or system-breakdown. We see this across a range of elds: just-in-time production, outsourcing and downsizing, use of local subsidiaries, contracting-out, Revolution in Military Affairs, full spectrum dominance, indirect rule through multinational agencies, the Nixon Doctrine, joined-up governance, the growing importance of groups such as the G8 and G20, business networks, lifelong learning, global cities, and of course the development of new technologies such as the Internet.... In the medium term, the loss of power to networks is probably irreversible, and capital and the state will either go down ghting or
116 John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 28.

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create more-or-less stable intermediary forms which allow them to persist for a time. We are already seeing the beginnings of the latter, but the former is more predominant. The way I see the crisis deepening is that large areas will drift outside state and capitalist control, integrated marginally or not at all (this is already happening at sites such as Afghanistan, NWFP, the Andes, Somalia, etc., and in a local way in shanty-towns and autonomous centres). I also expect the deterritorialised areas to spread, as a result of the concentration of resources in global cities, the ecological effects of extraction, the neoliberal closing of mediations which formerly integrated, and the growing stratum of people excluded either because of the small number of jobs available or the growing set of requirements for conformity. Eventually these marginal spaces will become sites of a proliferation of new forms of living, and a pole of attraction compared to the homogeneous, commandist, coercive core.117

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Such efforts include attempts by corporate business enterprises to incorporate network elements through such fads as the Wikied Firm and Enterprise 2.0, while using articial property rights to coopt the networks for their own purposes. Unfortunately for them, in both military and business affairs, such attempts usually fail despite the understanding of their designers because their implementation depends on traditional hierarchies that are jealous of threats to their prerogatives. As John Robb describes it, the culture of a bureaucratic hierarchy is totally at odds with the needs of networked organization:
Affordable. Government-mandated systems and services are unlikely to produce anything within reason that is affordable.... Efciently Allocated. Given the examples of pork and insider dealing in government contracts, this is not even an option if it is centrally controlled.... Broad-based and participatory. By their nature, states desire complete control over security (a de facto security monopoly). This creates a situation of dependence and a sloughing off of responsibility.118

We see the same result in all areas of life, when hierarchies attempt to incorporate network elements. No matter how well the theorists understand the need to become more network-like, the people actually running the hierarchies are simply unable to keep their hands off. There are a thousand and one management theory fads out there about attening hierarchies, self-management, empowerment, and all the rest of it. But because the theories are put into practice by bosses, in every case they wind up looking like warmed-over Taylorism. Getting back to the military case:
Faced with the crisis in Iraq, the Pentagon has made a number of attempts to speed up the acquisitions process. The U.S. Army, for example, has established a Rapid Fielding Initiative to try to shorten the time it takes to get requested equipment to soldiers. That has enabled the deployment of the Advanced Combat Helmet, which offers
117 Andy Robinson, [p2p research] Berardi essay, P2P Research email list, May 25, 2009 <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-May/003079.html>. 118 Robb, Brave New War, p. 163.

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better protection, comfort, and hearing, and an improved rst-aid kit for treating bleeding and removing airway obstructions. The Armys Rapid Equipping Force identies unconventional commercial products that may be of use on the battleeld. Industrial leaf blowers, for instance, are now being strapped on to vehicles to blow away dirt and debris from hidden bombs. The Pentagon is also now granting certain high-priority projects rapid-acquisition authority. That process allowed warheads for the thermobaric Hellre missile, used to attack caves and tunnels, to be developed in just 60 days, rather than the year it might have taken. Then there are the robots, like the PackBot and the unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), which have proved invaluable in Iraq and elsewhere. Many of these systems are not being developed as programs of recordalthough theyre in wide use, they are still considered prototypes in the R&D phase. As such, they are continually being improved and retted based on real-world experience. The companies that design the robots tend to be small, entrepreneurial enterprises, and therefore quick to respond and change. Already, some 3000 smaller ground robots have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 1000 unmanned aerial vehicles of various stripes have also been deployedfrom hand-launched, low-altitude surveillance planes to high-altitude, remotely piloted Reaper UCAVs equipped with infrared, laser, and radar targeting as well as four air-to-ground Hellre missiles and two 500pound bombs. These machines are probably the closest thing to an insurgent-resilient weapons system that the West has. ....The danger is that as the cost and complexity of the robots grow, they will cease to be considered expendable assets. Already, a fouraircraft package of Reapers carries a price tag of nearly $70 million. Its not hard to imagine the day when UCAVs will end up costing as much and taking as much time to develop as the manned systems theyre intended to replace.... And so, for the most part, such shortcuts in acquisition are mere Band-Aids. The current approach effectively decouples the needs of soldiers on the ground from the process of acquiring the equipment theyll ultimately get. No sustained attempt has been made to create an insurgent-resilient model of acquisition. What all this likely means is that when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan nally end, the Pentagons current cathedral approach will envelop robots, UCAVs, and any other interesting technology developed in the heat of battle. As the war winds down, the forces of standardization will reassert themselves, says Rand Corp. vice president Thomas McNaugher, an expert on defense acquisition. Thats likely to kill many of the innovations now in use on the battleeld.119

According to John Robb ofcial military doctrines for fourth-generation warfare are aimed at copying the resilience and exibility of networked adversaries like Al Qaeda. This means taking advantage of the possibilities new communications technology offers to enable decentralized operation due to better informed
119 Charette,

Open-Source Warfare.

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people on the ground. But no matter how sensible (or even brilliant) the doctrines churned out by 4GW experts in the academies, as applied by the military bureaucracy they mean using the technology instead to enable more complicated and hierarchical approval processesmore sign offs/approvals, more required processes, and higher level oversight.
Risk mitigation trumps initiative every time. Careers are more important than victory. Risk evaluation moves upward in the hierarchy. Evaluation of risk takes time, particularly with the paucity of information that can be accessed at positions removed from the conict.120

Afghan War veteran Jonathan Vaccaro, in a NYT op-ed, describes the bureaucratic nightmare in detail:
...Our answer to Afghans seeking help was: I cant come today or tomorrow, but maybe next week. I have several bosses that I need to ask for permission.... In my experience, decisions move through the process of risk mitigation like molasses. When the Taliban arrive in a village, I discovered, it takes 96 hours for an Army commander to obtain necessary approvals to act. In the rst half of 2009, the Army Special Forces company I was with repeatedly tried to interdict Taliban. By our informal count, however, we (and the Afghan commandos we worked with) were stopped on 70 percent of our attempts because we could not achieve the requisite 11 approvals in time. For some units, ground movement to dislodge the Taliban requires a colonels oversight. In eastern Afghanistan, traveling in anything other than a 20-ton mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle requires a written justication, a risk assessment and approval from a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and sometimes a major. These vehicles are so large that they can drive to fewer than half the villages in Afghanistan. They sink into wet roads, crush dry ones and require wide berth on mountain roads intended for donkeys. The Taliban walk to these villages or drive pickup trucks. The red tape isnt just on the battleeld. Combat commanders are required to submit reports in PowerPoint with proper fonts, line widths and colors so that the ling system is not derailed. Small aid projects lag because of multimonth authorization procedures. A United States-nanced health clinic in Khost Province was built last year, but its opening was delayed for more than eight months while paperwork for erecting its protective fence waited in the approval queue. Communication with the population also undergoes thorough oversight. When a suicide bomber detonates, the Afghan streets are abuzz with Taliban propaganda about the glories of the war against America. Meanwhile, our messages have to inch through a press release approval pipeline, emerging 24 to 48 hours after the event, like a
120 John Robb, Fighting an Automated Bureaucracy, Global Guerrillas, December 8, 2009 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/journal-ghting-an-automatedbureaucracy.html>.

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debutante too late for the ball.121

Speaking of propaganda efforts and other use of communications media, networked insurgents are able to run rings around the U.S.:
Many of the insurgent groups in Iraq, [Rands Brian Jackson] notes, are very Internet-savvy in terms of using it as an information-dissemination medium. The number of Web sites run by terrorists climbed from fewer than a dozen in 1997 to nearly 5000 in mid-2006, according to Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa, in Israel, who has studied terrorism and the mass media. Not all of those sites pose a signicant threat. Last year, a team of Pentagon analysts told Congress that of the thousands of jihadist sites they monitor, they closely watch fewer than 100the ones they deem the most hostile. Whereas the mass media used to control access to the public, Jackson says, insurgents now post videos and descriptions of their attacks online within hours of their occurrence, many of which are then picked up and replayed in the global media. Al Qaeda has a media afliate that produces slick, branded video and audio les for online distribution. The videos are often encoded in multiple formats, so you can watch them on your cellphone or play them on a big-screen television. Some insurgents are even shooting in HDTV.122

Interstate Conict as a Catalyst. During the overall transition from networks to hierarchies as the dominant form of social organization, we can expect the rst signs of a tipping point to create a positive feedback process by which the system in decline fractures internally and hastens its own demisethe cliches be eaten last and sell us the rope to hang them with come to mind here. In particular, the supplantation of hierarchies by networks will be hastened by conict in the international state system. Even though states in general tend to rally in defense of hierarchies against networks, individual states may aid networked insurgencies against their competitors in order to get a leg up in the interstate competition. To the extent that the war on network organizations is identied with one hegemonic state or group of states in particular, the tendency of other states to coalesce into an anti-hegemonic alliance will create divide the forces of hierarchy and create breathing room for networks. And likewise, to the extent that the hegemonic states promotion of the hegemony of hierarchies is part of its larger policy of suppressing the emergence of viable state competitors in the international arena, other states may see furthering networked resistance movements as a weapon against the dominance of the hegemonic state. Tom Friedman, in an admirable moment of frankness, once said For globalism to work, American cant be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden st. . . . And the hidden st that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valleys technologies to ourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
121 Jonathan Vaccaro, The Next SurgeCounterbureaucracy, New York Times, December 7, 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/12/08/opinion/08vaccaro.html>. 122 Charette, Open Source Warfare.

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As imposing as the present global corporate order may seem, we would do well to remember how vulnerable it really is. Its only as strong as its weakest link. The Washington Consensus has pursued a maximalist position in enforcing digital copyright claims against le-sharing sites, carrying out reprisals against Wikileaks to the full extent of its powers, etc. Therefore states which resist the hegemony of the United States, or attempt to defy the Washington Consensus, are at least temporarily objective allies. A good example is the decision by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to mandate the use of open-source software in all government agencies. Iceland is emerging as a haven for information freedom, and in so doing sets itself up as a stumbling block to Washingtons attempt to impose a DRM Curtain on the world. One of the worlds most powerful information freedom movements has prompted Icelands Althing (parliament) to establish Iceland as an information freedom haven. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), introduced over a year ago with widespread support in the Althing, passed unanimously last June. The idea, to quote Althing member Birgitta Jonsdottir, is to make Iceland a haven for freedom of information, freedom of expression and of speech. In particular, that means a safe place for people to put Internet servers and host online material that their governments might want to shut down. Among the leading activists and organizers behind the initiative, in close cooperation with Birgitta, is my online acquaintance Smari McCarthy of the P2P Foundation. He specically mentions the goal of providing webhosting services for whistleblowers and leakers of state secrets. And it will be a refuge for evading insane libel laws like Britains, next time some corporation like Tragura gets a super-injunction against reporting an embarrassing question from an MP in the House of Commons. Theres been some speculation as to whether the information freedom agenda will include repudiating the Washington Consensuss proprietary content industrydriven, maximalist understanding of intellectual property rights. Might Iceland become a haven for successors to The Pirate Bay, as well as Wikileaks? Taking on IP policy doesnt seem to be on their immediate public agenda. Apparently the folks behind IMMI have decided confronting IP head-on immediately will undermine the rest of their effort. But Im familiar with McCarthys writing and the groups he frequents, and he takes a decidedly negative view of copyright on principle. The movement behind IMMI includes digital rights as well as information freedom activists. And McCarthy knows a number of members of the Althing who favor at least a scaling back of the American maximalist version of digital copyright law. The new constitutions draft articles include some language on information freedom that offers great hope for addressing digital rights in the future. In English, draft Article 26 (current numbering may change) reads: Everyone can create, seek, receive, store and disseminate information. Remember, its not necessary to repudiate copyright in principle in order to make digital copyright unenforceable. As Cory Doctorow points out, the

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desktop computers a machine for copying bits, and any business model that depends on stopping people from copying bits is doomed to failure. Enforcing digital copyright is simply impossible within traditional principles of copyright law. It requires a totalitarian lockdown of the communications media, enforced by a global superpower and its hangers-on, unprecedented since the fall of the old Soviet Empire. Simply restoring traditional fair use and rst sale doctrines, treating ISPs as safe harbors, and putting the burden of proof on plaintiffs, would kill digital copyright deader than Judas Iscariot. That essentially an application of print copyright law ca. 1980 to digital content was more or less the import of Spains old copyright law, for which the U.S. and other countries of the DRM Curtain threatened to turn her into a pariah state. Even the new Icelandic legal provisions protecting intermediares like ISPs from liability will go a long way toward undermining enforcement. And its doubtful whether the courts will be any more compliant with attempts to shut down ISPs in the face of legal threats without due process in cases of alleged piracy, than in cases of libel and revealing state secrets. Simply eliminating the content industries ability to enlist ISPs as accomplices will be a huge blow. Its a safe bet that, even without further legislation, Iceland will be a pretty unfriendly venue for the Copyright Nazis. To the extent that states defying Washingtons hegemony attempt to nullify its advantage in force by resorting to weapons of the weak like asymmetric warfare and the kinds of cheap Assassins Mace weapons we considered earlier in this chapter, their geopolitical competition with the American bloc may overlap with and reinforce the networked resistances emphasis of agility over brute force in all kinds of interesting ways. Weapons that deny access to superior force or degrade the performance of advanced offensive weapons systems are frequently cheaper, by several orders of magnitude, than the weapons theyre deployed against. The so-called Assassins Mace technologies we considered earlier are relevant here. Such means include the use of mines at maritime chokepoints, anti-ship missiles like the Sunburn that can in theory take out aircraft carriers, and Irans apparently successful hacking of American surveillance drones. The Obama administrations recent new Strategic Guidance document announced, as a top priority, overcoming adversary states attempt to nullify the United States strategic advantage through comparatively cheap area denial weapons.
President Obamas new military strategy has focused fresh attention on an increasingly important threat: the use of inexpensive weapons like mines and cyberattacks that aim not to defeat the American military in battle but to keep it at a distance. The president and his national security team predict that the security challenges of the coming decade will be dened by this threat, just as the last one was dened by terrorism and insurgency. A growing number of nations whose forces are overmatched by the United States are elding these weapons, which can slow, dis-

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rupt and perhaps even halt an American offensive. Modern war plans can become mired in a bog of air defenses, mines, missiles, electronic jamming and computer-network attacks meant to degrade American advantages in technology and hardware. It is a lesson that potential enemies drew from the way American public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plummeted as armored vehicles each costing millions of dollars were broken and their troops killed and maimed by roadside bombs costing only a few hundred dollars apiece. China and Iran were identied as the countries that were leading the pursuit of asymmetric means to counter American military force, according to the new strategy document, which cautioned that these relatively inexpensive measures were spreading to terrorist and guerrilla cells. At his announcement at the Pentagon last week, Mr. Obama said the country should invest in the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access. The new strategy specically orders that efforts to counter the threat, which the military calls anti-access, area-denial, become one of the 10 primary missions of the American military. That will help dene how the four armed services compete for shares of a shrinking Pentagon budget. The United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged, the strategy document said. Sophisticated adversaries will use asymmetric capabilities, to include electronic and cyberwarfare, ballistic and cruise missiles, advanced air defenses, mining and other methods to complicate our operational calculus. For example, in recent exercises by the naval arm of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran has practiced swarming attacks by a number of small, fast boats that could be loaded with high explosives; if one such boat got through, it might blast a hole in the hull of a major American warship. Irans navy especially the naval arm of Irans Revolutionary Guards has invested in vessels and armaments that are well suited to asymmetric warfare, rather than the sort of ship-to-ship conict that Iran would surely lose, Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in a recent essay for Foreign Policy. With Chinese and Russian help, Mr. Singh added, Iran is also elding sophisticated mines, midget submarines and mobile antiship cruise missiles. Nathan Freier, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, Irans capabilities are best suited for imposing high costs on those who might need to force their way through the Strait of Hormuz, and on those in the region whom the Iranians perceive as being complicit in enabling foreign access. The potential challenge from China is even more signicant, according to analysts. China has a eet of diesel-electric attack sub-

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marines, which can operate quietly and effectively in waters near Chinas shore to threaten foreign warships. China also elds short-, medium- and long-range missiles that could put warships at risk, and has layers of radar and surface-to-air missiles along its coast. Finding, identifying and striking an American warship is a complex military operation. But the thicket of Chinese defenses could oblige an American aircraft carrier and its strike group to operate hundreds of miles farther out to sea, decreasing the number of attack sorties its aircraft could mount in a day and diminishing their effectiveness. Perhaps most worrisome is Chinas focus on electronic warfare and computer-network attacks, which might blunt the accuracy of advanced American munitions guided by satellite.123

Decentralizing and Hardening. Vinay Gupta coined the term degovernancing for the restructuring of institutions or systems to make them less dependent on governance.
to reduce the need for governance in a situation, frequently by intentional structural change. To buy each child their own version of a toy to reduce ghts about sharing is an example of degovernancing.124

It overlaps to a considerable extent with Eric S. Raymonds recipe of decentralizing and hardening.

2.6

The Question of Repression

Ive encountered plenty of people who are, on the whole, pessimistic about the likely use of hunter-killer drones and other control technologies to root out the counter-economy, when the corporate state sees itself as in a desperate enough position to throw off the pretense of democracy and resort to undisguised largescale repression. In its most dystopian form, the idea is a repressive onslaught of surveillance systems, hunter-killer drones, crowd-control technologies like microwaves/sonic blasts, and psychopharmacological engineering of the enforcement troops to stamp out the alternative economy and enforce a system of global corporate neo-serfdom under the rule of multibillionaires living inside militarized luxury enclaves. A good ctional portrayal of such an approach is the speech by The Major in Daniel Suarezs Freedom(TM), on the eve of an all-out counter-insurgency operation against the network of resilient local communities in Iowa.
. . . kill everyone you can nd, burn every structure, and destroy every vehicle. Without exception. The knowledge and equipment that makes these communities work must be eradicated. The cultural memory that they ever existed must be erased. . . .125
123 Thom Shanker, Pentagon Tries to Counter Low-Cost but Potent Weapons, New York Times, January 9, 2012 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/world/pentagon-tries-to-counter-lowcost-but-potent-weapons.html>. 124 Vinay Gupta, New word: degovernancing, The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution, May 19, 2011 <http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/new-word-degovernancing-2491>. 125 Daniel Suarez, Freedom(TM)

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John Robb describes the way assorted robotic technologies might be used for such purposes. Drones are already being used increasingly for internal surveillance functions by domestic law enforcement, with the actual arrests still being carried out by human boots on the ground.126
...[H]ow do a very, very small group of neo-feudal plutocrats control a global population (of economic losers) in the modern context? Right now? Lawfare and the bureaucracy of the nation-state. As things continue to degrade, that veneer of legality and constraint will fade and become less effective. Long term? Bots. Software bots. Drones. My good friend Daniel Suarez did a great job of demonstrating how this works in his books Daemon and Freedom. In short, bots will increasingly allow a VERY small group of people (in our case, a small group of plutocrats that act as the worlds economic central planners) to amplify their power/dominance in a the physical world to a degree never seen before. Software bots automate information dominance. They can do everything from checking purchasing habits to energy use (via smart meters) to social media use o look for terrorist signatures. They can dominate markets as we are seeing high frequency trading. These software bots can also automate interactions with human beings from the simple phone spam/customer service phone tree to interfaces like Siri. Hardware bots include everything from ying drones to crawling rats to kill, maim, or incapacitate individuals and/or groups. Driven by the ability of computational hardware to mimic nature, these bots will be able to do what their counter-parts in nature can do and more (already, although the data isnt ofcial yet, I anticipate the majority of enemy combatants killed by the US security system in 2011 were killed by drones). Expect to see them operating in swarms/clouds, conducting highly autonomous decision making (including the decision to kill), and serving in hunter killer roles. The combination of the two bot systems, software and hardware, provides the means to automate control of vast populations. A perfect, privatized solution for an extremely small group of plutocrats (many of whom are pathogenic). OUR job is to avoid this future. Build resilient communities that can provide independence and defend themselves. Provide an alternative for those unwilling to become economic losers.127

Vinay Gupta, in a recent exchange with me on Twitter, recently argued that the passage of the NDAA (with its provisions for indenite detention without trial) and the shutdown of Megaupload without due process of law signaled the emergence of the U.S. as a full-blown fascist state. And he suggested the possibility that, as governments implode in the face of networked resistance
126 John Robb, Drones in the US of A, Global Guerrillas, December 11, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2011/12/drones-in-the-us-of-a.html>. 127 John Robb, Q: How Will Plutocrats Dominate a World? A: Bots, Global Guerrillas, November 16, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/11/q-how-will-plutocratsdominate-a-world-a-bots.html>.

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movements in countries like Spain and Greece, free information havens emerge in places like Iceland, and one domino after another in the global South begins to secede from the neoliberal order, the United States will become embroiled in a desperate World War of counterinsurgency, using air strikes, blockades, cyberwar, black ops, hunter-killer drones, and crowd-control technologies to suppress the emerging free order. The street ghting between riot cops and Occupy protesters was just a dress rehearsal, as Spain was for WWII. So are we headed for a likely future in which Skynet and the Terminator HKs are controlled, not by an articial intelligence, but by Dick Cheney? I dont think so. Weve already seen, earlier in this chapter, that networked, stigmergic movements are more agile than authoritarian hierarchies, and able to get inside the states OODA loop in developing technologies of circumvention faster than the state can develop technologies of control. Weve seen that authoritarian hierarchies respond to attack by becoming more authoritarian and hierarchical, while networks respond by becoming more agile and resilient. As for the specically technological component of the Empires strategy for control, the development of technologies like drones seems to be governed by a sort of analogue to Moores Law: drone tech developed today at an R&D cost of billions will likely be available off the shelf ve years later at a tiny fraction of the cost, thanks to open-source hardware hackers. In 2009, Iraqi militants used commercial technology to eavesdrop on unencrypted video feed from American surveillance drones. The interesting part is that the feed was actually unencrypted, not as an oversight by a stupid bureaucracy, but for reasons of efciency. According to security analyst Bruce Schneier,
encrypting the data is the easiest part; key management is the hard part. Each UAV needs to share a key with the ground station. These keys have to be produced, guarded, transported, used and then destroyed. And the equipment, both the Predators and the ground terminals, needs to be classied and controlled, and all the users need security clearance. The command and control channel is, and always has been, encrypted -- because thats both more important and easier to manage. UAVs are own by airmen sitting at comfortable desks on U.S. military bases, where key management is simpler. But the video feed is different. It needs to be available to all sorts of people, of varying nationalities and security clearances, on a variety of eld terminals, in a variety of geographical areas, in all sorts of conditionswith everything constantly changing. Key management in this environment would be a nightmare.

Any consideration of the repressive use of drones must take into account the possible spread of such technology to the resistance. As John Robb writes, the cost of drone technology is plummeting:
The cost and size of drones will shrink. Nearly everyone will have access to drone tech (autopilots already cost less than $30). Further, the software to enable drones to employ swarm behavior will improve. So, dont think in terms of a single drone. Think in terms of a single

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person controlling hundreds and thousands.128

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As evidence, Robb cites the DIY Drone community.129 Our earlier discussion of Assassins Mace weapons is relevant here. The resistances agility in technical development mean it is able to develop mashups of existing technology faster than the corporate state was able to develop the original technologies. It can develop means of circumvention faster than the state can deal with them. This greater speed of innovation is just one example of the broader phenomenon of an agile resistance movement staying inside its enemys OODA loop. Consider Tor developers creation of a same-day hack to the Iranian regimes attempt to block its routers. Consider the development of a Firefox workaround extension for SOPA before the bill even came up for a vote. Consider the FBIs seizure of the MegaUpload domain name after many months of preparationto which Anonymous responded in a matter of hours with the largest DDOS attack in history and a doxing of MPAA chief Chris Dodd. The exibility and rapid innovations in Occupy Wall Street tactics, in response to police repressionfor example the use of light infantry tactics to exploit superior mobility against the plodding riot cops, is yet another example. Generally speaking, the resistance is able to stay a step ahead of the corporate state and keep it permanently off-balance. For example, Robb wrote seven years ago that homebrew directed energy weapons might wind up being more useful to the Resistance than to the Empire.
The US military is hard at work designing, building, and using directed energy weapons (HERFs -- high energy radio frequency or microwave weapons) for use against micro-electronics and fuel vapor. Unfortunately, directed energy weapons are much more valuable to global guerrillas than nation-state militaries due to the target imbalance between nation-states and non-state foes. The technology needed to build these weapons is generally available and inexpensive (numerous experiments, including this one, scroll to bottom, with a converted microwave oven demonstrate this). Homemade directed energy weapons will eventually become the weapon of choice for global guerrillas intent on infrastructure destruction. A good reference on this is Col. Eileen Wallings High Power Microwaves: Strategic and Operational Imperatives for Warfare (PDF). She lists four distinctive characteristics of a microwave weapon:

They dont rely on knowledge of the system. They leave persistant and lasting effects on the system through destruction of circuits and components. They can impact systems even when they are turned off. To counter the weapon the entire system must be hardened.
128 John Robb, The Future of Drone Warfare, Global Guerrillas, December 21, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2011/12/drone-bonjwas.html>. 129 <http://diydrones.com/>.

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Here are some attributes of microwave weapons:

Entry to a system can be direct or indirect (through a variety of backdoor channels). Destruction occurs from the inside out. Extreme lethality for electronic components (and fuel systems). Repair is extremely difcult -- it requires high level systems analysis. Most systems are not hardened against microwave frequencies. Area attacks are possible. Insensitive to weather (rain, fog, etc.). Long reach depending on power used. Replenishment is easy (nothing except power is expended). Scalable size (a weapon that weighs less than 10 lbs is possible). Logistics are limited to battery/power source replacement. Limited collateral damage.130 This is true of other technologies of imperial control, as wellfor example drones. As Robb suggested, the asymmetry between the state and the Resistance results from the formers relative target density. It also results from the nature of its infrastructure systems and the proliferation of key nodes that can be struck randomly and produce damage at great distances.
Standoff attacks. Like many historical swarming attacks, global guerrillas will have signicant standoff repower potentialthe ability to attack from a distance. However, this repower isnt a traditional weapon, rather, its the global guerrillas ability to use attacks on infrastructure to impact downstream systems miles (perhaps hundreds of miles) distant. Attacks will be rotated among infrastructures in a modern variant of horse archer tactics.131

The American states insurgent enemies today, Schneier wrote, have access to technologies the Soviets could never have dreamed of.
Defending against these sorts of adversaries doesnt require militarygrade encryption only where it counts; it requires commercial-grade encryption everywhere possible. This sort of solution would require the NSA to develop a whole new level of lightweight commercial-grade security systems for military applications not just ofce-data Sensitive but Unclassied
130 John Robb, HOMEMADE MICROWAVE WEAPONS, Global Guerrillas, May 19, 2004 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/journal_homemad.html>. 131 John Robb, GLOBAL GUERRILLA SWARMING, Global Guerrillas, May 18, 2004 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/global_guerrill.html>.

2.6. THE QUESTION OF REPRESSION

or For Ofcial Use Only classications. It would require the NSA to allow keys to be handed to uncleared UAV operators, and perhaps read over insecure phone lines and stored in peoples back pockets. It would require the sort of ad hoc key management systems you nd in internet protocols, or in DRM systems. It wouldnt be anywhere near perfect, but it would be more commensurate with the actual threats.132

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In other words, it would require a very high and broad-based level of trust in the lowest-level functionaries of the intelligence apparatusquite dangerous, given the possibility (discussed below) of demoralization and defection within the apparatus in the event of a full-scale war of terror by the American state against its domestic population. Robb has argued that the likely widespread deployment of autonomous drones in the near-term future will render the threat of outside hacking moot. In an article announcing a prototype drone from Northrop Grummond, he wrote:
Its an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs). Say that word again: autonomous. Thats the breakthrough feature. This also means: It can make its own kill decision. Again and again and again. That decision is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper (Moores law has made insect level intelligence available for pennies, rat intelligence is next). It isnt vulnerable to a pilot in Nevada directing it to land in Iran. Oops. It will eventually (sooner than you think) be the Queen, making decisions for thousands of smaller swarmed (semi-autonomous) drones it lays on a battle zone (aka city"). In sum: It allows an unprecedented automation of conventional violence. Granted, it will be possible for small groups to put together systems like this on the cheap. For offensive or defense reasons. However, Im much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).133

He went on, in a subsequent post, to describe the implications for the future of warfareincluding domestic counterinsurgency:
Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters. However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense). What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are
132 Bruce Schnerier, Intercepting Predator Video, Schmeier on Security, December 24, 2009 <http://www.schneier.com/ blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_pr.html>. 133 John Robb, The Future of Warfare, Global Guerrillas, January 27, 2012 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2012/01/the-future-of-warfare.html>.

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replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces. Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, dont require many people to deploy/operate, dont put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up. The nal benet of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group cant. What does this mean? It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die. Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalabilitywouldnt that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation). Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something. If they dont do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system). With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less than <$1000 a strike in the next half dozen years (particularly if kamikazee drones, like Switchblade, are used to reduce explosive payload requirements). What can we look forward to? The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline? Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx. All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on signatures") and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.134

Rargues that the only real defenses against drones are to harden targets and thereby raise the average cost of attacks relative to target value, or to develop a counter-offensive drone capability. Drones, like nukes, shift the advantage almost entirely to the offensive.
Drones tip the scales of conict in favor of offense. All of the technological trends in motion will only increase the offensive tilt: * Smarts + + + * Numbers + + + * Cost - - * Maneuverability + + + * Range + + + * Payload + + +
134 John Robb, Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die, Global Guerrillas, January 30, 2012 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/drone-diplomacy-comply-ordie.html>.

2.6. THE QUESTION OF REPRESSION

Frankly, against a foe this maneuverable, numerous, and smart/crafty the ability to physically defend against an attack from a distance is nearly nil. This is the same problem the USSR ran into when cruise missiles (early, but very expensive, drones) were deployed in the 80s. The cost of an air defense system necessary to protect against cruise missiles was beyond their means. Some more detail: * Missile Defense? Radar, missiles, etc. The cost of a missile that has the capacity to intercept a swarm of drones ying evasively is prohibitively expensive. * EMP/HERFs/Lasers. Power and range problems. * Kinetic weapons. Again, the range is too short. These point defenses would overwhelmed. In reality, all you can do is armor/bunker up and make the attack expensive in material as you can. - or Have a similar offensive capacity. This means one thing: drones of your own. Drones that can do damage to a foe that is at least equivalent to the value of you as a target.135

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Robbs category of hardening against attack would probably include encryption and anonymizing technologies of all kinds, and open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, in order to reduce the transparency of social media as a source of targeting information. The development of such alternatives is already well underway, and the rst drone kills based on social media proles will hasten the development mightily. His reference to the availability of drone technologies on the cheap, combined with the primacy of the offense, is also suggestive. Some of Robbs readers were quick to connect the dots:
Why only nation states? What is it in dronetech that cannot be open sourced and turned against the oppression? If I was a dronemaker, at least a clandestine one, Id want one of my drones on the news for whacking someone newsworthy, not some noname schlub whose only crime is being too clever to be duped into believing nation states are somehow worthy of preservation. The combination of anonymous communications (TOR++), anonymous currency (Bitcoin) and dronetech, at least as far as I can tell, should go some ways of evening the playing eld between oppressive governments and their citizens. Most governments can already whack pretty much any subject they care to. But the reverse is not true. With widely available enough drones, some symmetry might again be restored.... Stuki136
135 John Robb, Is There a Defense Against Drones? Global Guerrillas, January 31, 2012 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html>. 136 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/drone-diplomacy-comply-ordie.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e201630069ae46970d>.

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What are the weaknesses of drone support crews, drone manufacturers and their employees? Craig137 ...you could characterize drones as elements in a network and attack/subvert/co-opt critical nodes in that network just the same as you could do when attacking anything else. (And who knows what those may be?) Mercutio138 You defeat drones by killing its tail, the US has these things all over the world, but operating out in the open to a great extent, would not take much ground work to nd out where they are ying from and the operational crew, nd their base, and kill them on the ground, and kill there ground crews too.... Kill the guys who send the drones, they are ndable and hittable, equalize the kill zones, bullets and bombs travel both ways. The Black139 It seems to me that one defense would be to grab the belt, in various ways. I would go after the personnel involved, from leadership and their families to the operators. The air force, and their dependents, have escaped conict for far too long. EN140 It will also inspire asymmetric attacks we cannot handle. Rule 1 in reality-based warfare is dont throw stones when you live in a glass house. What is actually happening is that Somali pirates, to take one example, now gain an incentive for mobilizing random pieces of the Somali diaspora to do incalculable damage to local - global infrastructure. This has not been thought through. It is typical ideological idiocy run amok. Robert David STEELE Vivas141 Attacking the drones themselves is far far more difcult than neutralizing the C&C structure behind them. ) As The Black mentioned above nd the guys with the joysticks and their chain of command. Sam 142 On the kinetic level, drones work both ways. When an insurgent can cheaply print a few dozen with small explosive warheads and swarm them at an enemy aireld, the playing eld is a bit leveled. Paddy Moyne and the rest of the SAS were able to take out hundreds of Axis planes on their African airelds using very small charges. Do I

137 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/drone-diplomacy-comply-ordie.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20168e668714e970c>. 138 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20168e66db702970c>. 139 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20167616c8f4f970b>. 140 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20168e66e82f5970c>. 141 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20163007945e1970d>. 142 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20163007b375d970d>.

2.6. THE QUESTION OF REPRESSION

need to expound? B143 Look at the numbers of contractors that supported the war in Iraq/ are supporting the war in Afghanistan. Contractors quit EASY. Pick a company, and Im not dog piling, but for example Blackwater/XE. How long would their contractors have worked protecting Dept. of State if a family a month was being murdered stateside? Fill in the blank. Contractors are mission critical and can quit on a moments notice. matt144

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The general concept of Assassins Mace weapons applies much more broadly. The leading powers in the emerging bloc coalescing against the Sole Remaining Superpower are providing sophisticated technologies to small states that come under re from the Empire. A good example is the Russian SS-N-22 Sunburn missile, which the Russians have sold to China and Iran. The missile is claimed by some to be potentially lethal to aircraft carriers. The Chinese are in process of introducing an even more lethal missile, the Dongfeng 21-D, designed explicitly for its carrier-killing capability. The purpose is to neutralize U.S. carrier groups in up to 3000k from the Chinese coast. At the estimated cost of production, about 10,000 of them could be produced for the price of a single aircraft carrier.145
Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College asserts that now China can reach out and hit the U.S. well before the U.S. can get close enough to the mainland to hit back. China has maneuvered itself into a position where it can threaten and deter US action. The US has only faced such a situation during the action in the Pacic against the Japanese during WWII and when facing down the Soviet threat during the Cold War. Considering the implications and signicant threat of Chinas new generation of carrier-killing missiles, Yoshihara foresees the possibility that they could have an enduring psychological effect on U.S. policymakers. It underscores more broadly that the U.S. Navy no longer rules the waves as it has since the end of World War II. The stark reality is that sea control cannot be taken for granted anymore."146 In a conict, the U.S. Aegis destroyers and cruisers that accompany aircraft carriers could be used to foil anti-ship missiles with SM-3 interceptor rockets, experts say. But [Naval strategy consultant Paul] Giarra noted that interceptor capacity on Aegis-equipped ships isnt enough to reliably defend
143 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20168e675b6ff970c>. 144 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/is-there-a-defense-againstdrones.html#comment- 6a00d83451576d69e20168e68062f4970c>. 145 David Cohen, China Conrms Carrier-Killer, The Diplomat, July 15, 2011 <http://thediplomat.com/china-power/2011/07/15/china-conrms-carrier-killer/>. 146 Terrence Aym, US Navy Stunned: Deadly new Chinese Missiles can Sink Every US Supercarrier, OpEd News, August 7, 2010 <http://www.opednews.com/articles/US-Navy-stunned-Deadlyne-by-Terrence-Aym-100807-781.html>.

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against a volley of well-placed anti-ship ballistic missiles.147

Returning to our previous discussions of hierarchy becoming more brittle in response to attack in the war between networks and hierarchies, the vulnerability of the state to the human factor extends much more broadly than the narrow question of superiority in innovation. It extends to questions of internal dissension, loss of morale, and a high rate of defection (not to mention internal leaks, sabotage, etc.) among low-level functionaries demoralized by a perpetual war of terror against their own domestic populations. The danger, for the ruling class, is something like the defection of the Winter Palace guards in the Bolshevik Revolution. Vinay Gupta argues that ghting a networked resistance movement, in the current technological environment, increasingly puts both repressive states and their general populations in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is an edited version of a Twitter chat I had with him, streamlined into blog post format:
GUPTA: 1> No national government is capable of planning clearly for the horror of resource wars between China, America and Europe/Russia. 2> Therefore, other narratives are being created to cover these inevitable economic and standard-of-living conicts: drug war, terrorism. 3> This is why so much of the war seems to be huge amounts of money and manpower for totally ineffective results: immoral == blinding self. The implication is that a moral side even a smaller one could out-compete the Great Powers because moral ground = intellectual clarity. The strategic advantage of a moral war is the ability to think clearly about the ends required to meet a genuinely justied end. . . . Now refactor that through national politics: the government is stupid because the government is evil. Clarity would reveal it as such. The implication is, frankly, that you cannot be smart unless youre going to be good, excepting the genuinely evil who know that they are.... This is important, even though it seems simple, because its a moral asymmetry in warfare its a reason to believe the good guys do win. In a conict, the side which can bear to dene its goals clearly can then plot a strategy to attain them. It can win. You cant win a war whos purpose you cannot bear to dene: the Americans in Iraq dened ghting with their eyes closed: empire narrative. Now, what this represents is an opportunity to develop new fundamental doctrine based on whole-of-society offensive/defensive engagement. There is room here for a new moral philosophy, a doctrine of war that cannot easily be used to empower evil regimes. Seriously. . . . Now, consider a whole-of-society democratic engagement in defensive war: Why are we here? To defend ourselves from <those bastards>.
147 Erik Slavin, New Chinese anti-ship missile may complicate relations with U.S., Stars and Stripes, July 19, 2010 <http://www.stripes.com/news/new-chinese-anti-ship-missile-maycomplicate-relations-with-u-s-1.111552>.

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Heres my question: can soldiers who do not understand their purpose out-compete those who do? Answer: probably not. Poor strategic thinking. . . . And this is the critical opportunity to modernize the defensive military of democratic States: put strategists on the front line, networked.... Because, actually, brainwashing the initiative out of soldiers then trying to breed it back into special forces is Medieval, literally. The Thinking War, which is what all high tech war is, requires people who can clearly model why they are ghting to for effective decisions. In a networked environment, if we were going to radically empower individual initiative in war, wed have to have moral alignment rst. What Im driving at is a moral limitation which command-andcontrol evolved to get around: wars for the goals of the ruling European classes. And that stuff is all baked into the military, right down to the bone. But we know from Deming that Understanding & Equality = Quality. If you look at a modern military through Demings eyes, the entire thing is a machine for producing cockups. www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dstools/process/deming.html In short,a transparent and cooperative battle space is only possible when soldiers individually understand their true purpose and objectives. Because if you feel youre in the wrong, you cant bear to look at the data, and you live in a fantasy world: SNAFU and hierarchy lies. CARSON: ...Your train of thought suggests fascist regimes cant afford to let their soldiers be smart; they will therefore be defeated by networks. Soldiers ghting for an authoritarian cause have morale trouble from cognitive dissonance, and cant be trusted with initiative. Thats the same thing Julian Assange said about hierarchies becoming more brittle and opaque to themselves, in response to attack wasnt it? GUPTA: And the side which can bear to face its actions head-on can see the battlespace clearly right down to each individual ghter. The more monitoring and intelligence gear you have, the worse it gets: the intel analysts cant bear to think about what theyre seeing. Moral failure means your front lines get shit information: self-deception is a critical strategic failure which your enemies can exploit. In short: hit them in their cognitive dissonance. Map it as a strategic asset, and whip ass on it as hard as possible. What I am suggesting here is simple: TECHNOLOGY EMPOWERS MORAL WAR. I think we may nd that it cripples immoral war: evidence is current. GUPTA [in response to mention of drones by Smari McCarthy @smarimc]: Drone pilots are getting horrible problems. . . Air Forces number one stafng issue is drone pilots. Now, imagine the Iraqis and the Afghans had a a vast supply of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons and good quality anti-tank gear. All that stuff is cheap, weapon cost less than 1% of target cost, say. They did this based on RPGs and landmines. Imagine if theyd had kit. Why? To have effective swarm response, fast, uid tactics, you need a general consensus on strategy, which comes from political clar-

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ity.... Now, lets take this and look at post-economic Greece, Spain and Italy. Italy is city states. Greece and Spain nearly went Anarchist nr WW2. With a moral case for war in those nations, they could be the rst testbeds for rst world populations ghting for new politics. Shit. . . . If you just dump the data into a bucket, in a transparent battle space, the moral clarity is what results in coordination at the macro scale. That efcient swarm coordination requires shared goals and common knowledge, and IMMORAL WAR has split goals in the force and secrecy. The battlespace inevitably becomes transparent because the world is turning into one big camera. Even EMP wont do it, in 5 years. CARSON [after the fact]: Same thing goes for the battleelds at Oakland, UC Davis, NYC. For the rst time, the public is forced to confront what that thin blue line really does. Moral unity between the public and those sainted rst responders is disrupted. GUPTA: ...And thats the core concept: transparent battlespace == local decision-making (hello RTS games) == side with lower cognitive dissonance wins. The idea that the structural stupidity of the immoral force would be revealed to its own ghters by its own software seems to be new. . . . Conclusion: a shared, rational moral reason for war is an essential part of winning in a transparent battlespace because it enables thinking. And particularly in urban environments, the pace of war requires decision-making to be done as far forwards as possible, and in teams. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsNLbK8_rBY multiplied by every team plugged into the battle computers, looking at the carnage wrought, in short. . . . It also suggests that, in high ux environments, the better trained side will lose because theyre better at doing what theyre told. Tech provides coordination, which makes Just Following Orders a less adaptive response than looking at the map and acting. Power shift. In short, when the Army is no longer a Will-Multiplier for a Strong Center, but a self-service collective defense system, it works different. Thats actually the key, right there: the military was constructed to magnify the will of a Sovereign, and when that breaks down, boom. Because a sufciently transparent society, or battlespace, highlights the conicts of interest between Sovereigns and Soldiers. ...Under those circumstances, a sort of Digital Swiss Model cooperative, networked hedgehog defense integrated to the political level wins. Your cadres vote on procurement, on recruitment, and on mission, and it carries uidly right into the urban conict environment. . . In short, for exactly the same reason Communism was out-competed by Capitalism, Networked societies will out-compete Capitalist ones. Its only the unied moral basis which allows for a networked ghting force to nd effective unity: without that,transparency tears apart. I keep saying it in different ways: when everybody can see everything, the goal of transparent battlespace, the good guys tend to

2.6. THE QUESTION OF REPRESSION

win. Because what Im saying here is very simple: the Americans are probably going to be the Bad Guys on the next outing. #NDAA And I think its important to understand their failings in Iraq and Afghanistan as being optimistic signs for global Liberty. Learn & repeat. Conclusion of conclusion: there is a decent chance that Netwar will cripple American offensive capability in unjust wars due to moral loss. . . . To ght on a high tech platform is going to require a fundamental political rethink, rebuilding command-and-control from rst principles. And in that process, we might discover an effective, populationled decision-making process to replace our broken electoral democracies. War, by the people, for the people, and of the people must be the inevitable consequence of transparency on the battle eld. Because, to win, the left hand must know what the right hand is doing, and the right hand is stufng money down Dick Cheneys pants. . . . And now for some scholarship: the classic Why Arabs Lose Wars www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars its this but for our own nation state militaries.148

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As an example of how the suppression of networked resistance, in a world of instant communications, destroys the unity of state and people and the internal morale of the state, consider George Lakeys account of the uprising (otpur) against Milosevic in Serbia:
Impatient with the cautious ways of many of their pro-democracy elders, the youths organized in coffee bars and schools, posted grafti almost everywhere, and used their street actions to embarass the regime. Milosevic counter-attacked. His police routinely beat up the protesters, in the streets and more thoroughly in the police stations. His spies were everywhere. His monopoly of the mass media meant that the Otpur was described as hoodlums and terrorists.... The young people who started Otpur had a clear conception of how domination works. They saw their society as a pyramid, with Milosevic and his cronies at the top, in alliance with business owners, party leaders, and generals. The direction of power was typically topdown, and included both obvious repression (the army, police, secret police) and subtle repression like a monopoly of the media and school curricula. Heres where Otpur activists diverged from conventional wisdom about power. They noticed that each layer of domination was in fact supported by the layer below; that the orders that were given were only carried out because those below were willing to carry them out. Rather than buy into the top-down version of power that Milosevic wanted them to believe, they decided instead to picture Serbian society as organized into pillars of support holding up the dictator. If the pillars gave way, Otpur believed that Milosevic would fall.
148 Kevin Carson, Vinay Gupta: The Authoritarian Cause Will Be Defeated by Its Own Cognitive Dissonance, P2P Foundation Blog, January 17, 2012 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/vinaygupta-the-authoritarian-cause-will-be-defeated-by-its-own-cognitive-dissonance/2012/01/17>.

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This alternative view of power became so central to Otpur that it was taught in all the trainings of new Otpur members. (All new Otpur members were expected to go through the training so they could understand the winning strategy.) Since the top power-holders depend on the compliance of those beneath them to stay on top, Otpurs strategy was to weaken the compliance and nally to break it. First, Otpur needed to ask: which are the pillars of support needed by the dictatorship? Then: what are the tactics that will weaken those pillars?... Heres just one example of how it worked in Serbia. One pillar of support for Milosevic was his police. Otpur systematically undermined that pillar. The young activists knew that ghting the police would strengthen police loyalty to Milosevic (and also support the mass media claim that the young people were hoodlums and terrorists). So they trained themselves to make nonviolent responses to police violence during protests. One of the slogans they learned during their trainings was: It only hurts if youre scared. They took photos of their wounded. They enlarged the photos, put them on signs, and carried the signs in front of the houses of the police who hurt them. They talked to the cops neighbors about it, took the signs to the schools of the police ofcers children and talked with the children about it. After a year of this, police were plainly reluctant to beat Otpur activists even when ordered to do so, because they didnt want the negative reactions of their family, friends, neighbors. The young people joked with the plainclothes police assigned to inltrate them and reminded the cops that everyone would get their chance to act for democracy. Through the assertive outreach of the activists, relationships were built with the police, even into the higher ranks. When the movement ripened into a full-edged insurgency in Belgrade, many police were sent out of the city by their commanders while other police simply watched the crowds take over the Parliament building. It wasnt easy, as one of my Otpur friends who had been beaten repeatedly told me. It was, however, simple; the strategy guided the young activists to develop creative tactics that took away one of the key pillars of the dictators support.149

As suggested by Lakeys account of relations with the police, the idea is to undermine the morale of the enforcers. In Lakeys words, the movement creates dilemma demonstrations:
This form of direct action puts the power holders in a dilemma: if they allow us to go ahead and do what we intend to do, we accomplish something worthwhile related to our issue. If they repress us, they put themselves in a bad light, and the public is educated about our message.... One place to look for dilemma demonstration ideas is the community work that activists are already doing. Community gardens, for example, might be planted in places which need reclaiming. In the
149 George Lakey, Strategizing for a Living Revolution, History is a Weapon site (accessed January 14, 2012) <http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lakeylivrev.html>.

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midst of the Battle of Seattle some activists did guerrilla gardening in the median strips of downtown streets and avenues along the wharf.

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That is, as we will see in the appendix to the next chapter, exactly what the Occupy movement has done through the occupy our homes campaign.150 The idea, in this stage of a revolution, according to Lakey, is to create a morality play of good guys (demonstrators) vs. bad guys (cops and soldiers) for an audience that consists of the vast uncommitted majority. The ultimate goal is to undermine the regimes legitimacy in the eyes of the public, to encourage mass defection from the law (e.g. refusal of taxes and rents, refusal to obey unjust laws when compliance isnt veriable), and in general to encourage mass non-cooperation with the regime. When a large enough portion of the public sees the regime as illegitimate and feels no moral obligation to obey the law, the revolution has reached a tipping point beyond which mass repression only results in more defection.
When Iranian students and others protested against the rule of the Shah of Iran in the late 70s they experienced extreme repression. The secret police used torture and the army shot down nonviolent demonstrators. Faced with police-state conditions, the movement used funerals as means of protest, so the army killed funeral attenders. Outraged by the repression, masses of people attended the funerals, each of which became another massacre. On one occasion a public square full of nonviolent demonstrators was bathed in blood as helicoptor gunships slowly circled ring into the crowd. Immediately after, President Jimmy Carter (our human rights president) publically telegraphed the Shah assuring him of U.S. support. The Iranians did their work well, continually asserting solidarity as the movementand repressionincreased. Finally the Shah faced his military chiefs, who told him that the game was over. They said that the entire country was on strike, that the army could not get either the economy or the political institutions moving again. All the army could do at that point was to continue to kill, and within the military there was rising noncooperation even with that. The next day the Shah left the country.151

The next stage is mass non-cooperation.

When Iranian students and others protested against the rule of the Shah of Iran in the late 70s they experienced extreme repression. The secret police used torture and the army shot down nonviolent demonstrators. Faced with police-state conditions, the movement used funerals as means of protest, so the army killed funeral attenders. Outraged by the repression, masses of people attended the funerals, each of which became another massacre. On one occasion a public square full of nonviolent demonstrators was bathed in blood as helicoptor gunships slowly circled ring into the crowd. Immediately after, President Jimmy Carter (our human rights president) publically telegraphed the Shah assuring him of U.S. support. The Iranians did their work well, continually asserting solidarity as
150 Ibid. 151 Ibid.

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the movementand repressionincreased. Finally the Shah faced his military chiefs, who told him that the game was over. They said that the entire country was on strike, that the army could not get either the economy or the political institutions moving again. All the army could do at that point was to continue to kill, and within the military there was rising noncooperation even with that. The next day the Shah left the country.152

In the meantime, the movement needs to be engaged in its primary task of building counter-institutions on the dual power model.
The institutions will have grown from the seeds of the organizing stage: the alternative institutions, the networks, radical caucuses, and afnity groups. During the confrontation stage these organizations need to grow, which is easier to do when the power holders are busy discrediting themselves by responding violently to movement campaigns. Probably the period of fastest growth for the organizations, though, will be in the period of mass noncooperation. An atmosphere of turbulence encourages mainstream as well as radical people to seek alternative ways of getting things done. In Argentina as I write, for example, workers are taking over some factories and operating them. Of everything we sell, a ceramics factory worker said, we divide the prots equally among all the people who work here. Neighborhood assemblies in Argentina have typically been meeting weekly to agree on a list of demands and proposals for change, then bringing the proposals to inter- neighborhood assemblies for agreement. Markets for barter have sprung up, where people trade everything from old video games to food to skilled services. No government money is allowed. Credit slips are used as a kind of micro-currency. And of course theres been an explosion of Indymedia to supply the need for reliable information. In the fth stage these organizations come fully into their own, because they become part of the infra-structure of the new society. In contrast to the old Leninist model in which the party seizes the state and then re-organizes society from the top down, this strategic model proposes a bottom-up re-structuring, supported by the radicals who all along have been innovating organizational forms that reect a radically democratic vision.... The transformational networks which have been developing their technologies all along will come into their own in this last stage. While its true that this strategic model avoids the top-down controlling function so dear to the hearts of the Leninists, it does not throw out the need for coordination. Essential services must be provided, communication must be maintained and judgements made about the best use of limited resources in a turbulent situation. Unity requires shared information and negotiated agreements among the forces for change. In the advanced stages of struggle, coordinating councils will be needed on local, regional, national, and transnational levels. If the transformational networks do their work creatively, these councils will
152 Ibid.

2.6. THE QUESTION OF REPRESSION

grow organically from the struggle, as have spokescouncils in the anti-globalization confrontations where many afnity groups come together. At least since the 70s movement against nuclear power, activists have been experimenting with non-authoritarian forms of coordination through councils. The job of those who sustain transformational networks will be to retain the lessons learned from these experiments, put attention to cultural differences in communication style, and assist the newly formed councils to be able to their job on all levels. The councils are the bodies which form, in the last stage, the parallel governments. (I put government in quotes because these bodies may not look at all like the governments we know.) In this fth stage the people pay their taxes [an unfortunate choice of language from my anarchist standpoint] to the councils instead of to the governments of the oppressive order. The councils organize essential services such as trafc regulation, garbage collection, and the like. In my personal vision, the national council works with the other councils to dismantle the national government by distributing its legitimate functions to local, regional, and transnational levels. The councils can also work with the workers caucuses, cooperatives, and afnity groups to dismantle in an orderly way those corporations which are worth decentralizing.153

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Although Gupta and Lakey describe the problem of cognitive dissonance largely in terms of cohesion between the rulers and domestic population, or between the rulers and rank-and-le security functionaries who enforce their will, it also applies to internal cohesion within the ruling elite itself. Things are complicated for the U.S. ruling elite (I make the assumption that the U.S., as global military hegemon and core state of the global corporate system, will be the center of any rear-guard effort at repression), in a scenario of mass repression of the domestic population or aggressive foreign wars against peaceful secessionists from the corporate world order, by the problem of internal divisions. The situation is further complicated, at the Empires core, by the contaminating effects of the surrounding American societys culture. I hate to sound like an American exceptionalist. But while its no doubt easy to nd a sufcient number of specialized functionaries in uniform who are willing to waterboard or provide technical advice to Pinochet, I doubt there are a sufcient number to provide a stable and internally coherent pool of functionaries to serve the daily needs of such a system. When you look at the sheer numbers of grunts in uniform that are requiredpolice or militaryI suspect a majority of them would be so contaminated by the residual effects of Midwestern checkered tablecloths and apple pie, civics book rhetoric about democracy, etc., as to be quite unreliable in a Winter Palace guards scenario. And thats not even counting the enormous number of cubicle drones required to carry out the administrative functions of the corporate state. So there would probably be a considerable rate of open deance, and a much higher rate of quiet defection and internal sabotage. This is all just further illustration of Assanges general observation, noted
153 Ibid.

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earlier, about bureaucracies closing in on themselves because they cannot trust their own lower-level functionaries. Hierarchies respond to outside attacks by becoming even more centralized, authoritarian and brittle. And they respond to internal defection, leaks and sabotage by becoming more opaque to themselves, adopting more cumbersome and slow-moving decision-making procedures, and cutting off increasing numbers of decisionmakers from the ow of information required to make intelligent decisions. Its quite likely the bureaucracy governing Skynet would end up looking a lot like that of Neal Stephensons ctional Feds in Snow Crash. Or the ctional example we saw above from Brazil, of the Ministry of Works attempting to plug a hole created by the Ministry of Information: Bloody typicalthey went metric again without telling us! Another question concerns the possible emergence of new, authoritarian institutions in the power vacuuum left by the destruction of the previous ones. In Murray Bookchins typology of revolutions, revolutionary movements generate local organs of self-management and self-governance: soviets, workers factory committees, neighborhood assemblies, and so forth. Orwells description of Barcelona in the July days of 1936, in Homage to Catalonia, is a good illustration. Unfortunately, the next step is usually for a new revolutionary regime to consolidate its power, and either coopt or liquidate the organs of self-governance, and proclaim itself the only legitimate institutional representative of the revolutionnow that the situation has been normalized. Its a common pattern: the Thermidorean Reaction and the Directory in France, the Bolsheviks liquidation of the Workers Opposition and parties of the libertarian Left and suppression of the Kronstadt Revolt, etc.
These are not simple consequences of a revolution happening unprepared, so to speak. Indeed; they happen chiey when small but well-organised groups are able to gain enough traction to take over the violent enforcement apparatus from the old regime. Those small groups usually have a very well-dened agenda, and they tend to be extremely dogmatic about that agenda.154

But the networked revolution pregured by the Zapatistas, and currently presenting itself in the form of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, is the rst in history in which the technical means which made the revolution possible in the rst place also help to make the successor society ungovernable by any would-be revolutionary regime.

2.7

The Question of Collapse

The material in the previous section on distributed, modular architectures is relevant to traditional collapse scenarios. [Joseph Tainter, Dmitri Orlov] In an interview with Ken Rose, Joseph Tainter argued that the greater the
154 Revolutions Deserved, anarchism.is, <http://anarchism.is/2011/11/16/revolution.html>.

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16,

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complexity, the more additional complexity is required to deal with it. Complexity increases as we try to solve problems.
Rose: There is no alternative to increased complexity when we are faced with problems. Tainter: So long as you can afford it.155

John Michael Greers collapse scenario is based largely on Tainters analysis:

The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain.... As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants..., the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the societys stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that cant be covered by the resources on hand. Its what happens next thats crucial to the theory. The only reliable way to solve a crisis thats caused by rising maintenance costs is to cut those costs, and the most effective way of cutting maintenance needs is to tip some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster. Thats rarely popular, and many complex societies resist it as long as they possibly can, but once it happens the usual result is at least a temporary resolution of the crisis. Now of course the normal human response to the end of a crisis is the resumption of business as usual, which in the case of a complex society generally amounts to amassing more stuff. Thus the normal rhythm of history in complex societies cycles back and forth between building up, or anabolism, and breaking down, or catabolism. Societies that have been around a while China comes to mind have cycled up and down through this process dozens of times, with periods of prosperity and major infrastructure projects alternating with periods of impoverishment and infrastructure breakdown. A more dramatic version of the same process happens when a society is meeting its maintenance costs with nonrenewable resources.... Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth owing in from your empire or your oil elds begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under. Thats catabolic collapse. Its not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs signicantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline thats traced by the history of so many declining civilizationshalf a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and youve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial
155 Interview with Joseph Tainter on the Collapse of Complex Societies, <http://p2pfoundation.net/ Interview_with_Joseph_Tainter_on_the_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies>.

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Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.156

Greer tacitly assumes that progress equates to increased complexity and capitalintensiveness, and that resource constraints translate into a less advanced way of life.
This notion that technological progress is a one-way street not subject to economic limits invites satire, to be sure, and Ive tried to ll that need more than once in the past. Still, there are deep issues at work that also need to be addressed. One of them, which Ive discussed at length elsewhere, is the way that progress has taken on an essentially religious value in the modern world, especially but not only among those who reject every other kind of religious thinking. Still, theres another side to it, which is that for the last three hundred years those who believed in the possibilities of progress have generally been right.157

So Greer shares certain unexamined assumptions with thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter, John Kennneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandlerwhat might be called the Whig Theory of Industrial History. He assumes, in particular, that the only alternative is an Internet infrastructure based on ber optic networks and enormous server farmsand with it an extremely expensive, centralized and capital-intensive power grid.
Could an electrical grid of the sort we have today, with its centralized power plants and its vast network of wires bringing power to sockets on every wall, remain a feature of life throughout the industrial world in an energy-constrained future? If attempts to make sense of that future assume that this will happen as a matter of course, or start with the unexamined assumption that such a grid is the best (or only) possible way to handle scarce energy, and xate on technical debates about whether and how that can be made to happen, the core issues that need to be examined slip out of sight. The question that has to be asked instead is whether a power grid of the sort we take for granted will be economically viable in such a future that is, whether such a grid is as necessary as it seems to us today; whether the benets of having it will cover the costs of maintaining and operating it; and whether the scarce resources it uses could produce a better return if put to work in some other way.158

Its not that Greer doesnt recognize the likelihood of shifting to a more distributed, less resource-intensive power systemperhaps a mix of centralized grids in concentrated urban areas and local generating facilities at the point of consumption in rural areas. He specically refers to it in the same post. Its that he assumes such a system is incompatible with the Internet, and that a scalable Internet using such a power infrastructure is outside the realm of the possible. But what happens when the primary unit of the Internet is locally powered community meshworks in which each node is a router and servers are replaced with
156 John Michael Greer, The Onset of Catabolic Collapse, The Archdruid Report, January 19, 2011 <http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html>. 157 John Michael Greer, The Logic of Abundance, The Archdruid Report, March 24, 2010 <http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/03/logic-of-abundance.html>. 158 Ibid.

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distributed hosting on the members own hard drives, and the primary link between these local meshworks is via communications satellites that cost a small fraction of the overland ber optic infrastructure? Greers scenario ignores a central reality: the rapid implosion, governed by something analogous to Moores law, in the amount of stuff required to organize basic communication functions. When you break the linear relationship between the cost of stuff in an infrastructure and the functions it performs, all bets are off. Greer and Pollard assume a remarkably static view of technology, in their projections of catabolic collapse of the Internet. Even their pessimistic scenarios assume the basic infrastructure wont start to collapse on a signicant scale until the mid-21st century. So their collapse scenarios are only meaningful on the assumption that the Internets physical infrastructure is organized, thirty or forty years from now, on the same centralized, expensive and capital-intensive model as at present. This neglects a number of considerations. It neglects the possiblity that the present level of capital-intensiveness in our basic infrastructures results not from some inherent technological imperative, but from the state tipping the balance towards one of the least efcient among a number of competing models. It neglects the possibility that the physical infrastructures of the Internet will plummet faster than the resources for maintaining it. It neglects the extent to which the open-source community is already actively developing the technologies of transition to a cheap, distributed infrastructure of local wireless meshworks and satellite uplinksa potential ephemeralization on the same scale as Fullers famous example of the replacement of the transatlantic cable system with the communication satellite system. And it underestimates the extent to which much lower cost, underutilized infrastructures like railroads and the Internet offer an alternative to the older, capital-intensive infrastructures undergoing catabolic collapse. One major difference between the present situation and the fall of Rome: Rome had no cheaper infrastructures as an obvious, low-hanging fruit alternative to the imperial highways and aqueducts. Greers catabolic collapse scenarioas illustrated by the example of the Easter Islandersalso assumes a relatively small amount of slack, at crisis points, in terms of available uncommitted resources that can be used to convert to less resource-intensive ways of doing things.
On Easter Island, as I think most people know by now, the native culture built a thriving society that got most of its food from deepwater shing, using dugout canoes made from the once-plentiful trees of the island. As the population expanded, however, the demand for food expanded as well, requiring more canoes, along with many other things made of wood. Eventually the result was deforestation so extreme that all the tree species once found on the island went extinct. Without wood for canoes, deepwater food sources were out of reach, and Easter Islands society imploded in a terrible spiral of war, starvation, and cannibalism. Its easy to see that nothing would have offered as great an economic advantage to the people of Easter Island as a permanent source

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of trees for deepwater shing canoes. Its just as easy to see that once deforestation had gone far enough, nothing on Earth could have provided them with that advantage. Well before the nal crisis arrived, the people of Easter Island even if they had grasped the nature of the trap that had closed around them would have faced a terrible choice: leave the last few big trees standing and starve today, or cut them down to make canoes and starve later on. All the less horric options had already been foreclosed.159

The old centralized corporate-state infrastructure is indeed undergoing a catabolic collapse scenario described quite well by Tainters framework of catabolic collapse. The difference is that, unlike previous collapses (the classic example is the catabolic collapse of the Western Roman Empire) the old infrastructure this time isnt all there is. For the rst time there is an alternative. The old system, indeed, has responded to stresses with increased complexity (i. e., adding more and more parts which require more and more organization). But new network technologies have created unprecedented possibilities for responding to complexity through decentralizing and hardening, modularization, and degovernancing. And what amounts to a new, distributed infrastructure is emerging within the old, dying society. Tainters equilibrium at a lower level of simplication can be achieved, not only through a regressive decrease in connectedness, but by adopting more less capital-intensive and more resilient modular architectures. For example, Eric Raymond suggests decentralization and hardening as an explicit response to unsustainable complexity.

2.8

Conclusion

The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates said above) eliminated the gap between what can be produced in large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them. The practical signicance of this, which we shall develop in the following chapters, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions. [Draft last modied March 22, 2012]

159 John Michael Greer, The Economics of Decline, The Archdruid Report, May 20, 2009 <http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/economics-of-decline.html>.

Chapter 3

The Desktop Revolution in Regulation

3.1

The Regulatory State: Myth and Reality

Under the old industrial age paradigm, most forms of economic activity required enormous outlays of physical capital, so that only large organizations could afford the capital assets; massive, centralized bureaucracies were needed to govern those physical assets and direct the labor hired to work them. And monitoring these massive bureaucracies was another function that could only be performed by other large bureaucratic organizations. Thats the standard interest group pluralism model taught by most mainstream political scientists, and the model of countervailing power John Kenneth Galbraith described in American Capitalism: Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor check each others power.1 Unfortunately, the reality is generally better described by the Power Elite model of C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff: a fairly small and interlocking directorate of government and corporate elites, with the same few thousand people shufing around between government agencies and Cabinet departments, corporate boards and c-suites, and the big foundations, universities and think tanks. The state has become centralized under a concentrated executive regulatory apparatus, while the economy has become centralized under a few hundred giant corporations. As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its trafc with the others increases.2 So although the upper-middle class suits in the alphabet soup regulatory agencies act as ostensible watchdogs over the upper-middle class suits in the
1 John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1962). 2 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New Edition (Oxford University Press, 1956, 2000), p. 7.

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regulated industries, in reality they constitute an interlocking directorate. The Vice President for This and That at Evil Global Megacorp LLC, ve years from now, will most likely be a Deputy Assistant Secretary at Department of the Other Thingand vice versa. And, Mills added, the corporate and state hierarchies are also united by a common culture through the services of an army of corporation lawyers and investment bankers in staff positions.3 As Paul Goodman described it, rather than checking each other, the regulatory bureaucracies and regulated bureaucracies more often than not cluster together in complexes of related institutions: the industrial-military complex, the alliance of promoters, contractors, and government in Urban Renewal; the alliance of universities, corporations, and government in research and development. This is the great domain of cost-plus."4
...[T]he genius of our centralized bureaucracies has been, as they interlock, to form a mutually accrediting establishment of decisionmakers, with common interests and a common style that nullify the diversity of pluralism.5

Such clustersor complexesalso include the USDA-agribusiness complex, the automobile/trucking/highway complex, the alliance between the Copyright Nazis of the RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft and the Justice Department, the public education/human resources complex, the Drug War/border control/prison complex, and the post-9/11 security-industrial complex, among many others. To quote Mills again, the theory of interest group pluralism, that interests of competing groups are balanced in a neutral venue,
also assumes that the units in balance are independent of one another, for if business and labor or business and government, for example, are not independent of one another, they cannot be seen as elements of a free and open balance. But as we have seen, the major vested interests often compete less with one another in their effort to promote their several interests than they coincide on many points of interest and, indeed, come together under the umbrella of government. The units of economic and political power not only become larger and more centralized; they come to coincide in interest and to make explicit as well as tacit alliances.6

A good example is liberal West Virginia Senator Robert Byrds alliance with the coal industry and United Mine Workers against environmental regulations, and John Dingells similar alliance with the UAW and Detroit auto industry. These coalitions between regulated and regulators sometimes enlist wellmeaning liberal idealists: the so-called Baptists and Bootleggers phenomenon. It was originally named for the tendency of teetotaling Baptist politicians to serve as useful idiots for bootleggers who didnt want to have to compete with legal liquor sales, and who preferred the black market prots they could obtain in dry counties.
3 Mills, Power Elite, p. 291. Consider, for example, the composition of FDRs brain trust, and particularly the role of GE chief Gerald Swope in formulating the New Deal economic agenda. 4 Goodman, People or Personnel, p. 115. 5 Goodman, Like a Conquered Province, p. 357. 6 Mills, Power Elite, pp. 266-267.

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The general phenomenon includes all cases where progressive regulators, or activists for more regulation, have unwittingly served the interests of the regulated. Gabriel Kolko presents considerable evidence that the regulated industries were a primary inuence on the Progressive Era regulatory state. His thesis, in The Triumph of Conservatism, was this:
Despite the large numbers of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and nancial interests, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible competitive trends under control. Although prot was always a consideration, rationalization of the market was frequently a necessary prerequisite for maintaining long-term prots. As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could rationalize the economy. Although specic conditions varied from industry to industry, internal problems that could be solved only by political means were the common denominator in those industries whose leaders advocated greater federal regulation. Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.7

Economic rationalizationi.e., cartelization of the economywas to be achieved through what Kolko called political capitalism:
Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and securityto attain rationalizationin the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic uctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent denition as the improvement of efciency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable prots over the long run.8

For example, Kolko argued, the main political impetus behind Progressive Era regulations like the Meat Inspection Act was lobbying by the regulated industriesthe large meat-packers in the latter case. Contrary to the high school American history version, the large meat-packers had actually been under an inspection regime since the late 19th century. After a public relations disaster involving tainted canned meat imported into Europe from Armour, the U.S.
7 Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 19001916 (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 4-5. 8 Ibid., p. 3.

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government had established an inspection system for all meat-packers producing for the export trade. This was actually done in the interest of the regulated industry, since the regime was of essentially the same sort that would have been established by an industry cartel. It served as a sort of ofcial seal of approval that was useful for marketing purposes; but because it was imposed across the board on all the meat export rmswhich included all the large packersit wasnt an issue of cost competition between them. And because it was a government-enforced cartel, it avoided the destabilizing threat of defection. Its main shortcoming, from the perspective of the regulated meat-packers, was that it exempted the small meat-packing rms that produced solely for the domestic market. The Meat Inspection Act was actually passed to close this loophole, to avoid giving a competitive advantage to the small players.9 It was passed, in other words, for the same reason as the recent extensionat the behest of the big brewersof Wisconsin brewing regulations to cover microbreweries. Interestingly, the great Progressive Teddy Roosevelt, far from being spurred to action by Upton Sinclairs account of the meat-packing industry, regarded him as a useful idiot in the service of an agenda that Roosevelt adopted for his own purposes. Of course... in any movement it is impossible to avoid having some people go with you temporarily whose reasons are different from yours and may be very bad indeed. Thus in the beef packing business I found that Sinclair was of real use. I have an utter contempt for him.10 But despite the facts of the matter the Meat Inspection Act has endured in liberal mythology as the premier example of Great Trust-buster TRs knighterrantry against malefactors of great wealth, and as the paradigmatic example of public-spirited regulation to restrain the excesses of Gilded Age laissezfaire. Thats a standard talking point on the comment threads at Daily Kos, where the regulars like to rub libertarians noses in the alleged fact that the Gilded Age conditions against which the Progressive Era state reacted were laissez-faire: If you want to see a laissez-faire free market, just read The Jungle. The idealistic novelist Upton Sinclair served as a useful idiot, by clothing this cynical government-industry collusion in the goo-goo raiment of general welfare. And when we look at the man behind the curtain, we nd that theres a similar story behind most public interest regulation. As Roy Childs put it, historically liberal intellectuals have been the running dogs of big businessmen.11 The liberal panacea for remedying such problems is structural reform: campaign nance regulations, public nancing of campaigns, restrictions on contact with lobbyists, and restriction on corporate employment of former regulators or legislators. But its important to remember that this isnt a problem just because of political collusion or deliberate attempts to manipulate regulations. Much or
pp. 98-112. p. 112. 11 Roy Childs, Big Business and the Rise of American Statism, Reason, February 1971, pp. 12-18, and March 1971, pp. 9-12. Reproduced by Roderick Long at Praxeology.net <http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm>.
10 Ibid., 9 Ibid.,

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most of the problem would remain even if all election campaigns were publicly nanced, and there were real restrictions on the rotation of personnel between state and corporate hierarchies. The perspective of the so-called structural Marxists is relevant here: The state does not have to serve as an instrument of capitalist interests in the crude sense of being inuenced by subjective motivations like personal interconnections and briberythe so-called instrumentalist theory of the state. Even with public nancing and other procedural reforms, the policy-making apparatus would act based on the logic of the overall system within which it was embedded, in response to what it perceived as its objective imperatives. Such imperatives include avoiding a stock market crash that cleans out 401k accounts, mass unemployment or large-scale capital ight. The leadership of the state, given its functional role in the larger system, inevitably nds itself confronted with the need to stabilize and reproduce the corporate capitalist system as it nds it. To quote Nicos Poulantzas:
The direct participation of members of the capitalist class in the state apparatus and in the government, even where it exists, is not the important side of the matter. The relation between the bourgeois class and the State is an objective relation. This means that if the function of the State in a determinate social formation and the interests of the dominant class in this formation coincide, it is by reason of the system itself: the direct participation of members of a ruling class in the State apparatus is not the cause, but the effect, and moreover a chance and contingent one, of this objective coincidence.12

The state doesnt just serve corporate interests because its controlled by them in a crudely instrumental sensealthough it may well be. It does so because the very structure of the corporate economy and the situations it creates confront the state leadership with what is perceived as an objective reality. But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they [the state] allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump?13 In essence, the crudely instrumentalist stuff is an epiphenomenon of the structural stuff. As Matthew Yglesias wrote of getting money out of politics:
To me, this doesnt solve the problem that when Washington regulates the nancial system, its dependent for expertise on people with ties to the nancial industry. It doesnt solve the problem of the revolving door. It doesnt solve the problem that politicians need the legislative subsidy of lobbyists to do policy analysis. Nor does it solve the problem of monied interests exercising disproportionate inuence over think tanks, advocacy groups, or even (through speaking fees and the like) journalists and pundits. Presumably the people who make the F-22 will still be allowed to advertise about how high levels of defense spending are awesome, just as ExxonMobile will still
12 Nicos Poulantzas, The Problem of the Capitalist State, New Left Review 58, p. 73; quoted in G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), p. 19. 13 Mills, Power Elite, p. 8.

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be allowed to advertise about how fossil fuel extraction is the road to prosperity. Youll have created some big new logistical hassles for political campaigns without, I think, addressing any concrete issues. Id say that in general, the problems we have with money and politics arent really that theres too much money in the politics and we need to get it out. Its too difcult for non-incumbent candidates to get any money. And its too difcult for elected ofcials to get expert technical opinion on issues without relying on interested parties.14

Consider also what Mills had to say about divestiture of investments by corporate leaders appointed to political posts.
The interesting point is how impossible it is for such men to divest themselves of their engagement with the corporate world in general and with their own corporations in particular. Not only their money, but their friends, their interests, their trainingtheir lives in shortare deeply involved in this world. The disposal of stock is, of course, merely a purication ritual. The point is not so much nancial or personal interest in a given corporation, but identication with the corporate world. To ask a man suddenly to divest himself of these interests and sensibilities is almost like asking a man to become a woman.15

Charlie Wilson really did believe what was good for GM was good for America. As weve already seen in regard to the Baptists and Bootleggers phenomenon, a functionally instrumental view of the state does not require the assumption that all political actors are cynical operators out for the main chance. Many politiciansparticularly the marginal ones on the fringes of their own party establishmentsare sincere idealists. The above-mentioned Sinclair is a good example. But by an invisible hand mechanism, such idealists get their ideas put into practice only when they coincide with the interests of the regulated industries. Even those whose personal integrity and idealism are beyond reproach operate based on a largely implicit set of views of what is possible and what is the obvious or natural response to a given problem. Regulators and regulated share not only similar educational and career backgrounds, but similar assumptions about the only normal way of organizing the functions they oversee.
The members of the higher circles may also be conceived as members of a top social stratum, as a set of groups whose members know one another, see one another socially and at business, and so, in making decisions, take one another into account....16 I.... In so far as the power elite is composed of men of similar origin and education, in so far as their careers and their styles of life are similar, there are psychological and social bases for their unity, resting upon the fact that they are of similar social type and leading to the fact of their easy intermingling....
14 Matthew Yglesias, What Problem is Getting Money Out of Politics Supposed to Solve? Think Progress, September 27, 2011<http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/27/330310/whatproblem-is-getting-money-out-of-politics-supposed-to-solve/?>. 15 Mills, Power Elite, p. 285. 16 Mills, Power Elite, p. 11.

3.1. THE REGULATORY STATE: MYTH AND REALITY

II. Behind such psychological and social unity as we may nd, are the structure and the mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the high military now preside.17

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The ruling elites of the corporate-state nexus are what Thomas R. Dye called the very serious people, and their mindset is characterized by what C. Wright Mills, in The Causes of World War Three, called crackpot realism. The very serious people used to be called the best and the brightestor in Ward Churchills terminology, Little Eichmanns. Crackpot realism amounts to the approach described by Einstein: attempting to solve a problem by the same level of thinking that created it. Crackpot realists, according to Mills, do not set forth alternative policies; they do not politically oppose and politically debate the thrust toward war. . . . These are men who are so rigidly focused on the next step that they become creatures of whatever the main drift the opportunist actions of innumerable men brings.18 The crackpot realists self-image is of the grownup who understands what needs to be done to keep things functioning smoothly in the real world, and quietly does it behind the scenes, while the idealists and sloganizers occupy the public stage. At its worst, crackpot realism is personied in the character of The Major in Daemon and Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez.
And that [the murder of the Central American trade unionist] began his awakeninghis realization that the Western World was a bedtime story of comforting humanistic bullshit. Slavery existed everywhereeven in the United States. We were all slaves in one way or another. Slavery was just control, and control kept things running in an orderly fashion. It was what made progress possible. *** Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. . . . They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesnt just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly.19

Libertarian Robert Higgs brilliantly summarized the crackpot realist mindset in his appreciation of Mills:
For Mills, this signied a frame of mind characteristic of what another elite theorist, Thomas R. Dye, has called the serious people of the governing circles. Such people are to be distinguished from the glad-handing, back-slapping buffoons who seek and gain election to public ofce. The electoral ofce seekers are specialists: they know how to get votes, but as a rule they know nothing about how to run a railroad, whether that railroad be a business, a government agency, or any other sort of large operating organization. So, after the election, the elected ofce holders always turn to the serious people to run the showthe Dick Cheneys and the Donald Rumsfelds, to pick not so randomly from the current corps.
17 Ibid.,

p. 19. The Causes of World War Three 19 Daniel Suarez, Freedom(TM)

18 Mills,

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The serious people always pretend to be the grownups, as opposed to the starry-eyed rest of us, who couldnt run Halliburton or G. D. Searle & Co. if our lives depended on it. These are the sorts of executives who are tempted to, and sometimes actually do, roll their eyes at the silly questions journalists ask them at press conferences. Visibly pained by the necessity of spelling out the facts of life, they explain that childish things, such as keeping the country at peace, simply wont get the job done. Sometimes, the public must recognize that as a no-nonsense response to the harsh situation we face, the serious people have to drop some bombs here and there in order to reestablish a proper arrangement of the worlds currently disordered affairs. The serious people are frequently to be found stabilizing something or other. Trouble is, Mills explained, these serious people are fools. They seem to know whats going on, and how to right whats wrong with the world, only if one accepts their own view of how the world works. So practical are these serious people, however, that they understand nothing beyond their noses and outside the circle of their own constricted understanding and experience. Strange to say, the power elite does not get out muchremember the rst President Bushs amazement when he, a former Director of Central Intelligence, visited a supermarket and encountered for the rst time the mind-boggling technology of a bar-code reader at the checkout counter. Especially when these movers and shakers deal with matters of war and peace, they continue to make the same sorts of disastrous decisions over and over, constantly squandering opportunities to maintain the peace, almost invariably painting themselves into corners of their own making, and all too often deciding that the only option that makes sense in their predicament is to bomb their way out.20

Crackpot realism is a failure of imagination: an inability to imagine alternatives outside of a limited institutional framework.
Lack of imagination, Gerald W. Johnson has noted, is not to be confused with lack of principle. On the contrary, an unimaginative man is often a man of the highest principles. The problem is that his principles conform to Cornfords famous denition: A principle is a rule of inaction giving valid general reasons for not doing in a specic instance what to unprincipled instinct would seem to be right.21

Reform within the system is usually governed by the Crackpot Realist approach. The reason is easy to understand. Reform within the system is usually carried out by the people running the system, based on their institutional mindsets and basic assumptions about how the world works. Since the fundamental purpose of the system is good, and its basic operating assumptions are self-evident, any reform must obviously be limited to tinkering around the edges. Any reform coming out of the system will be designed to optimize the functioning of the existing system, and amenable to being carried out only by the managerial caste
20 Robert Higgs, On Crackpot Realism: An Homage to C. Wright Mills, The Independent Institute, February 18, 2003 <http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=798>. 21 Mills, Power Elite, p. 285.

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currently in charge of the system. Whats more, since the unstated purpose of the present system is to serve the interests of those running it (or rather, since the stated purpose is tacitly interpreted so as to be identical with those interests), any attempt at optimizing the present system will translate in practice into further consolidating the power of the little Albert Speers and Bob McNamaras running things. Hence the related concept of extremism. That label is a way of evaluating ideas, not in terms of their truth or falsity, but in terms of how far they deviate from the median view of the world. And the median view of the world, otherwise known as the moderate position, is largely determined by a cultural apparatus that consists of centralized, hierarchical institutions, and whose main purpose is to secure a cultural environment which is favorable to the continued existence and power of those centralized, hierarchical institutions. In other words, the cultural reproduction apparatusthe media and schoolsis designed to produce a public which accepts the organization of society around such institutions as the only possible way of doing things. Any political ideology that challenges the power of large, centralized institutions, or the legitimate authority of those running them, and proposes altering or abolishing them rather than tinkering around the edges, will be labeled extremist. By denition, whatever is classied as mainstream or centrist in any system of power falls within the range of positions that are compatible with preserving that system of power. Any reform that involves tinkering around the edges of a power structure without fundamentally changing it, and can be implemented by the same classes of people who are running the present system, will be classied as moderate. Any proposal that involves changing the fundamental structure of power and disempowering the groups that run it will be called radical. Objectively collusive relationships are inevitableeven without deliberate collusionnot only because of the shared culture of regulators and regulated, but because regulated industries are of necessity the primary source of data for the regulatory state. Short of creating a state-appointed shadow management of regulators whove been sent to b-school and constitute a parallel chain of command within the corporate bureaucracy (like the parallel shadow bureaucracy of Party ofcials serving as deputies to the state manager at every rung in the Soviet industrial bureaucracy), the regulatory state cannot avoid relying on largely unveriable self-reporting by industry as the source of most of its statistics. And even if the state did create its own massive, parallel hierarchy of numbers-crunchers inside the corporate bureaucracies, in order to function effectively and understand the businesses they were regulating theyd have to have degrees in business administration and absorb a great deal of the culture of the regulated industrieswhich, presumably, would just take us back to the original problem. Take, for example, the relationship between British Petroleum and the Naval command in charge of BP cleanup efforts in the Gulf last Spring. Mac McClelland, a reporter with Mother Jones, recounted her experience trying to clarify statistics:

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I wrote another piece last week when I got an emailyou know, theres this guy from the Navy who sends out these ofcial emails from the response center that says, heres what weve been doing, heres how the cleanup effort is going, here are, you know, all the stats that you need. And I called this lieutenant commander to ask him to check up on one of the stats which said that there are 24,000 responders working on the spill right now. And I was justI mean, I was just curious, does that include, for example, Audubon volunteers who are, you know, cleaning up birds? Does that only mean people [who] are on the BP payroll? And so I called this guy from the Navy and asked him, do you have the breakdown for these numbers? And he said, I dont have them and theyre not actually our numbers. Those are BPs numbers and so Im going to have to get back to you on that. So not only is the government releasing BP numbers as ofcial stats, theyre not even fact-checking them. I mean, this guy didnt have a spreadsheet that could explain what the breakdown was. And it took several days for BP to get it back to him.22

Again, though, where would this lieutenant commander have obtained his own spreadsheet for fact-checking BPs numbers, short of the Navys oversight operation maintaining an entire management bureaucracy parallel to BPs own for large-scale gathering and processing of raw data? The only way to have an effective regulatory state that doesnt rely on the Fortune 500 as its main source of data input is to create a regulatory parallel, embedded bureaucracy on the same scale as Fortune 500 managementand in practice, they would operate about as independently of each other as the managerial and Party bureaucracies in the Soviet industrial ministries, where the party oversight ofcers were notorious for being on the take and normally entered into collusive relationships with factory managers against their own superiors. Whatever the reasons and motivation, the functional relationship between big business and big government will always be more cooperative than adversarial. Thanks to desktop computers and the Internet, though, we dont have to rely on Tweedledum to monitor Tweedledee. For all the reasons we considered in the previous chapter, the entry barrier to being a watchdog has fallen to virtually zero. According to Alex Carey, the 20th century model of representative democracy emerged, not as a way of putting the will of the majority into effect, but as a way of protecting ruling elites from the public. Three broad trends, roughly simultaneous, emerged around the turn of the twentieth century: the rise of formal democracy with universal suffrage, the rise of big business, and the need to protect big business from democracy.23 The central problem for actually existing representative democracy, in other words, has been to prevent the formal
22 Op-Ed: Reporters Covering Oil Spill Stymied (transcript) NPR, June 14, 2010 <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=127836130>. 23 Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

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democracy from becoming actualto preserve the rules of formal democracy while preventing the exercise of any real power by a popular majority. As Walter Lippmann put it, the public must remain spectators of action rather than participants.24 The model of democracy promoted by ruling elites is a system with regular elections but no serious challenge to business ruleas opposed to a system in which citizens may play some meaningful part in the management of public affairs.25 Proudhon compared representative democracy to constitutional monarchy:
The illusion of democracy springs from that of constitutional Monarchys example--claiming to organize Government by representative means.... What they always want is inequality of fortunes, delegation of sovereignty, and government by inuential people. Instead of saying... the King reigns and does not govern, democracy says, the People reigns and does not govern....26

The network revolution may mean the nal realization of the very thing that Bernaise et al tried to thwart: the achievement of genuine democratic self-rule, not through the representative state, but through voluntary association.

3.2

Individual Superempowerment

According to Tom Coates, as quoted in the previous chapter, the desktop revolution has had an enormous effect in blurring the distinction in quality between work done within large organizations and that done by individuals at home. The individual has access to a wide array of infrastructures formerly available only through large organizations. As Felix Stalder writes:
There is a vast amount of infrastructuretransportation, communication, nancing, productionopenly available that, until recently, was only accessible to very large organisations. It now takes relatively littlea few dedicated, knowledgeable peopleto connect these pieces into a powerful platform from which to act.27

The result is what John Robb calls individual superempowerment: the ability of one individual to do what it took a large company or government agency to do a couple of decades ago...28 Open-source warfare enables individuals and groups to take on much larger foes, as
the power of individuals and small groups is amplied via access to open networks (that grow in value according to Metcalfes law = Internet growth + social networks running in parallel) and off the
24 25 Noam

Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Ch. 11. Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century. 27 Felix Stalder, Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology, n.n., November 6, 2010 <http://remix.openows.com/node/149>. 28 John Robb, Julian Assange, Global Guerrillas, August 15, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas /2010/08/global-guerrilla-julianassange.html>.
26 Pierre-Joseph

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shelf technology (that grows rapidly in power due to the onslaught of Moores law and the markets relentless productization).29

Richard Telofski, a corporate consultant who writes on these issues from the standpoint (and thats an understatement) of the corporation, describes something that sounds quite similar to Robbs individual superempowerment. After quoting Mark Twain on the folly of picking a ght with a man who buys his ink by the barrel, Telofski updates the principle for the 21st century: never get in a dispute with someone with access to a computer, or who is mad enough and persistent enough to make your life hell. He illustrates the basic principle with a saying of Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice, who threatened to clear my desk of all my other cases and make your life a living hell.30 Of course it was possible for determined individuals even before the digital/network revolution, as exemplied by the Leo Szlyck character in Jeremy Levens Satan, to inict serious punishment through nothing but letters and phone calls. Szlycks method was quite effecitve, in terms of destroying his targets life, when he got a serious hard-on against someone. But the new possibilities offered by network organization make Szlycks efforts look positively tame by comparison. Malcolm Gladwell dismisses networked activism, of the kind organized through social media, on the grounds that its built on weak ties. It doesnt elicit the same levels of personal commitment, or require the same levels of sacrice from those buying into it, as did (say) the sit-ins of the Civil Rights era. It is, he says, a cheap substitute for commitment.31 I think this misses the point. Gladwell argues that the levels of effort and commitment involved in most networked participation are quite casual compared to the dedicated effort required for real change. But hes assuming that the amount of effort needed to combat hierarchies is itself fairly constant. The real change, which he ignores, is the shift in the relative balance of power between individuals and small groups, versus hierarchies: the rapidly declining amount of effort it takes for a motivated individual to put a serious hurt on a large institution. His reference to the level of commitment needed to persevere in the face of danger is begging the question. The amount of damage that one pissed-off individual can do to a hierarchy with little or no danger to herself is increasing exponentially. The beauty of individual super-empowerment is that it lowers the levels of cost or sacrice required to inict major defeats on hierarchical targets. The reduced levels of risk made possible by new technologies of encryption, enabling networked movements to operate under the cover of darknets, are a plus. The whole point of networked organization is that it shifts the balance of power. Gladwell sounds a bit like an aging geek boasting that in my day, we had to
29 John Robb, Open Warfare and Replication, Global Guerrillas, September 20, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/09/open-warfare-andaugmentation.html>. 30 Richard Telofski, Insidious Competition: The Battle for Meaning and the Corporate Image (New York and Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2010), pp. 44-45. 31 Malcolm Gladwell, Twitter, Facebook and Social Activism, New Yorker, October 4, 2010 <http://www.newyorker.com/r eporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell>.

3.2. INDIVIDUAL SUPEREMPOWERMENT

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use a slide rule! Gladwell himself admits that an advantage of network structures is that they are enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. But he neglects the possibility that the level of risk itself is not a constantthat warfare against state and corporate hierarchies is becoming a progressively lower-risk situation because of advances in network technology. The whole point of superempowerment is that the risk and cost entailed in organizing against the state are becoming lower and lower. And whether or not they require the same levels of effort and risk as your grandfathers activism back in the day, the examples of Wikileaks and Anonymous make it clear that in our day networks are, as Mike Masnick pointed out, achieving signicant real-world results.
Malcolm Gladwell recently got some attention for a [sic] writing a New Yorker piece dumping on Twitter, saying that real revolutions come from the strong ties that bind people together, rather than the weak ties found on Twitter. But, as many people have already responded, this is totally missing the point. This isnt just about Twitter, either, or about whether a group of folks online were able to change the course of history yet. They havent. But, to ignore the rising power (for good or bad) of groups of people who can connect (often anonymously) in a distributed fashion to do things that shake foundations and lead government ofcials to demand they be killed, suggests something a bit more powerful than just a bunch of folks talking about eating lunch on the internet.32

A good example is the minimal effort required to spark the Occupy Wall Street action, whose proximate causeas we shall see in the appendixwas just a tweet from the Adbusters editorial staff. Richard Telofski uses the terms chaotic and cosmic to distinguish the uncoordinated individual posting of negative information by consumers and workers on the Internet from coordinated efforts by organizations. But the distinction is overblown. He ignores the extent to which individual and small group superempowerment, and stigmergic organization, make it possible for even a few individuals to organize a movement with cosmic effectiveness in cases where their resources would have limited them to chaotic attacks just a few years earlier. Of course none of this means that networked movements will lack a core of activists with the same level of commitment as the civil rights activists of fty years ago. As David de Ugarte has argued, even in networked activism a single node will generally be the source of new initiatives. But networked organization drastically lowers the transaction costs entailed in a single node of committed activists leveraging support through the network, and drastically increases the size of the larger coalition which the committed activists can leverage from the less committed. The increased ease of draw32 Mike Masnick, The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes Whats Going On, Techdirt, October 26, 2010 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101026/01311411586/the-revolution-will-be-distributedwikileaks-anonymous-and-how-little-the-old-guard-realizes-what-s-going-on.shtml>.

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ing additional support from the less committed does not reduce the preexisting number of the more committed who would have participated anyway. It just increases the bang for the buck from that preexisting level of commitment. And on the other hand, even if Gladwell wants to dismiss the signicance of activism that consists of clicking a PayPal widget to contribute a few bucks, its not like that person would have attended meetings and participated in marches absent such alternatives. They just wouldnt have given the money, either. Movements are better off by the amount of each additional contribution, whether the contributor is strongly or weakly motivated. Would Gladwell prefer the strongly committed act alone without the additional help? As Adam Thierer wrote in response to a similar argument from Evgeny Morozov:
....Morozov belittles some of the online communities that have formed to support various charitable or civic causes by arguing that if you divide the number of members of such online groups by the aggregate amount of money they raise, it comes out to mere pennies on the dollar per community member. But so what? Do we know if those communities or causes would have come together at all or spent more money without digital communications and networking technologies? It is certainly true that merely setting up a new cyber-cause and giving a few bucks to it isnt the same as going on a mission to Africa to build homes and water systems, but does Morozov really want to us to believe that more of that sort of thing would happen in the absence of the Net and digital technology?33

Cory Doctorow suggests that Morozovs snide approachand the same critique applies to Gladwellreects a serious ignorance of real-world activism.
Morozov observes the hundreds of thousandsmillions, evenof people who are motivated to take some small step in support of a cause, such as changing their Twitter avatar or signing an online petition and concludes that the ease of minimal participation has diffused their activist energy. I look at the same phenomenon and compare it to the activist world I knew before the internet, in which the people who could be coaxed into participating in political causes were more apt to number in the hundreds or thousands, and reect on the fact that every committed, lifelong activist I know started out as someone who took some small casual step and went on to greater and deeper involvement, and I conclude that the net is helping millions of people wake up to the fact that they can do something about the causes they care about and that some fraction of those people will go on to do more, and more, and more.34

Not to mention, as he points out, the sheer increase in efciency network organization via the Internet makes possible in performing the routine administrative tasks of traditional activist organizations:
33 Adam Thierer, Book Review: The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, The Technology Liberation Front, January 4, 2011 <http://techliberation.com/2011/01/04/book-review-the-net-delusion-byevgeny-morozov/>. 34 Cory Doctorow, We need a serious critique of net activism, The Guardian, January 25, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-delusion>.

3.2. INDIVIDUAL SUPEREMPOWERMENT

As to the question of privation as being key to hardening activists commitment, Im condent that for every task that is automated by the internet, new, difcult-to-simplify tasks will well up to take their place. As a lifelong political activist, I remember the thousands of personhours we used to devote to putting up yposters, stufng envelopes, and running telephone trees simply to mobilise people for a protest, petition or public meeting (Morozov minimises the difculty of this, asserting, for example, that Iranians would just nd out, by word of mouth, about demonstrations, regardless of their tools which leads me to suspect that he never tried to organise a demonstration in the pre-internet era). Im sure that if wed been able to get the word out to thousands of people with the click of a mouse, we wouldnt have hung up our placards and called it a day; that drudge work absorbed the lions share of our time and our capacity to think up new and exciting ways to make change.35

123

Seriously: do people like Gladwell and Morozov really believe the Seattle protests or Occupy Wall Street would ever have happened without the spontaneous swarming potential enabled by the Web? Im surprised these good industrial age liberals havent tried to prohibit unlicensed activism without the supervision of properly qualied professionals. Yochai Benkler expresses the same concept in terms of the granularity of the Web, or the size of the nodes. Although the nodes vary widely in granularity, stigmergic organization and modularity mean that the transaction costs of cooperation between large and small nodesand hence of leveraging a much larger scale of action than a single large node could achieve by itselfare radically lowered.
Imagine that you were trying to evaluate how, if at all, the Web is performing the task of media watchdog. Consider one example...: The Memory Hole, a Web site created and maintained by Russ Kick, a freelance author and editor. Kick spent some number of hours preparing and ling a Freedom of Information Act request with the Defense Department, seeking photographs of cofns of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. He was able to do so over some period, not having to rely on getting the scoop to earn his dinner. At the same time, tens of thousands of other individual Web publishers and bloggers were similarly spending their time hunting down stories that moved them, or that they happened to stumble across in their own daily lives. When Kick eventually got the photographs, he could upload them onto his Web site, where they were immediately available for anyone to see. Because each contribution like Kicks can be independently created and stored, because no single permission point or failure point is present in the architecture of the Webit is merely a way of conveniently labeling documents stored independently by many people who are connected to the Internet...as an information service, it is highly modular and diversely granular. Each independent contribution comprises as large or small an investment as its owner-operator cares to make. Together, they form a vast almanac, trivia trove, and
35 Ibid.

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news and commentary facility, to name but a few, produced by millions of people at their leisurewhenever they can or want to, about whatever they want.36

To put it in Gladwells terms, a traditional activist organization like a union or civil rights organization, composed of a membership with strong ties and high levels of commitment, can achieve more on the Netwar or corporate campaign modelby leveraging weaker ties to a large number of other organizations, and weaker ties to sympathetic individualsthan it could in the old days when it would have had to rely entirely on the strong ties of its own members. The additional leverage of weaker ties does not negate or subtract from the preexisting strong ties. Strong ties and weak ties together are stronger than strong ties alone. Thats the beauty of the stigmergic form of organization we examined in the previous chapter: the barriers to small contributions from independent actors are lowered. Individuals can make small contributions to a larger project, coordinating their own small efforts with the larger project through the common platform without any central coordinating authority. So stigmergic organization can leverage many, many small contributions that wouldnt have been worth the transaction costs of coordinating them in the old days. According to Clay Shirky, the original Wikipedia stub on asphalt in March 2001 simply read Asphalt is a material used for road coverings. In the years since then, thousands of individual contributors added bits of text, improved the wording of previous contributions, added external links, etc., with their incremental contributions adding up to an article comparable in quality to those in professional encyclopedias. Wikipedias predecessor Nupedia, an attempt at creating a professional online encyclopedia with entire articles solicited from experts, failed because it was hard to get any one expert to write an entire article for free. But millions of people who wouldnt feel competent to write an entire article independently do feel competent to add a bit of information to one that already exists.37 In the old days, the threshold for making a contribution to an encyclopedia article, like that for writing the entire article, was being qualied to write an entire article. Until some scholar was recognized as qualied to write an entire article and was also prepared to contribute the full effort of doing so, nothing would be written at all. And once the article was written, if it was, whatever errors were in it would remain until someone else was qualied and willing to write an entire new article, and the editors representing an organization with the capital to underwrite an encyclopedia could be persuaded to substitute one for the other. But under the rules of stigmergic association that prevail at Wikipedia, the contributor need only be qualied to add the specic material. Even someone who knows only a bit about a subject can use what she knows to improve the article. The lowered threshold for contributing makes individual thresholds less granular. Of his own experiences in contributing to an article on
The Wealth of Networks, pp. 102-103. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 118-119.
37 Clay 36 Benkler,

3.2. INDIVIDUAL SUPEREMPOWERMENT the Koch snowake (an example of a fractal), Shirky writes:
You may have noticed that I accidentally introduced a mistake in my edit, writing ad intum when I should have written ad innitum. I missed this at the time I wrote the entry, but the other users didnt; shortly after I posted my change, someone went in and xed the spelling. My mistake had been xed, my improvement improved. To propose my edit, I only had to know a bit about the Koch snowake; there are many more people like me than there are mathematicians who understand the Snowake in all its complexity. Similarly, xing my typo required no knowledge of the subject at al; as a result, the number of potential readers who could x my mistake was larger still....38

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In Wikipedia as in the networked activism dismissed by Gladwell, the larger project can incorporate efforts that would previously have been too small to bother with. The same is true of stigmergic, modular projects like the Linux community. The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.39 In the case of social activism, Shirky gives the examples of the Flyers Rights movement sparked by the eight-hour diversion of several American Airlines ights to Austin in 2006, and student protests against HSBCs 2007 announcementwith no advance warningthat it was canceling its free overdraft protection policy. Social networking technology made it possible to leverage support from those with only limited motivation.
Many people care a little about the treatment they get from airlines or banks, but not many care enough to do anything about it on their own, both because that kind of effort is hard and because individual actions have so little effect on big corporations. The old model for coordinating group action required convincing people who care a little to care more, so that they would be roused to act. What Hanni and Streeting did instead was to lower the hurdles to doing something in the rst place, so that people who cared a little could participate a little, while being effective in aggregate. Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration.... Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.40

By the same tokenas we saw earliernew tactics developed at enormous cost by one node are now, thanks to stigmergic organization, immediately available at no cost to the entire network. So not only can small contributions be leveraged by large movements, large contributions can be leveraged by a large number of small movements. Either way, the contributions of each become a common-pool resource of all, and the transaction costs of aggregating all con38 Ibid., 39 Ibid.,

p. 132. p. 239. 40 Ibid., pp. 175-183.

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tributionslarge and smalldisappear. Back in 2002, Javier Corrales noted that the hopes of cyber-enthusiaststhat [t]he Internet would empower the political Davids... and restrain the Goliaths by making their actions easier to scrutinizenever materialized.
Few major transformations in politics seem to be occurring. The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2002 further dampened the mood of cyber-enthusiasts. Those who once expected dot-coms to revolutionize democracy now feel embarrassed at their hyperbole.41

Looking back from my vantage point nine years laterI write the rst draft of this passage in October 2011, nine months after the beginning of the Arab Spring and on the eve of Bloombergs threat to clear out Occupy Wall Streetits easy to laugh at Corrales dismissal. Sure, he really was to blame for missing the signicance of stuff like Seattle and the campaigns against Nike and Shell. But a lot of it was natural, given the time he was writing in. His identication of the dotcoms with the hope for democracy is very telling. It was, in fact, the collapse of the dotcom bubble and with it the dead hand of Web 1.0 that made possible the revolution, organized through Web 2.0 technologies like social media, that has materialized.

3.3

The Long Tail in Regulation

The very same long tail phenomenon of incorporating small efforts at minimal transaction cost also applies to networked regulatory state functions. Before the network revolution, large-scale efforts were organized through hierarchies in order to reduce the transaction costs involved in coordinating actions between individuals. But hierarchies carried their own institutional costs, which meant that a regulatory bureaucracy could focus on only a few issues at a timegenerally those most important to the people at the top of the hierarchy, or to the dominant groups in the ruling political coalition. But if the old regulatory bureaucracy could do only a few big thingswith apologies to Isaiah Berlinthe desktop regulatory state can do many things. Thats a result of the lowered transaction costs of leveraging and aggregating small efforts, associated with stigmergic organization, which we saw in the previous chapter. To quote Clay Shirky again:
What happens to tasks that arent worth the cost of managerial oversight? Until recently, the answer was Those things dont happen. Because of transaction costs a long list of possible goods and services never became actual goods and services; things like aggregating amateur documentation of the London transit bombings were simply outside the realm of possibility. That collection now exists because people have always desired to share, and the obstacles that prevented sharing on a global scale are now gone. Think of these activities as
41 Javier Corrales, Lessons from Latin America, in Leslie David Simon, ed., Democracy and the Internet: Allies or Adversaries? Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington, D.C. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 30.

3.4. NETWORKED RESISTANCE AS AN EXAMPLE OF DISTRIBUTED INFRASTRUCTURE127

lying under a Coasean oor; they are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the rst place make those activities not worth pursuing.42

Back when the only choices were doing stuff through institutions and not doing it at all, a lot of stuff just didnt get done at all. Thats changed. Stuff that once was important to someone but not important enough to justify the cost just to satisfy the limited demand can now be done at little or no cost by small groups or individuals. Loosely coordinated groups not only perform functions once performed by large institutions, but can now achieve things that were out of reach for any other organizational structure....43 This long tail is a natural outgrowth of the stigmergic principle we examined in the previous chapter. In the words of Scott Bradner, formerly a trustee of the Internet Society, The internet means you dont have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.44 The regulatory state, in particular, used to focus on a few, basic, minimal standards. Now the desktop regulatory state can tailor regulations to those who consume them. Now it is the regulated industries that use the old-line regulatory state to suppress the ne-tuned, long-tail regulatory state. Networked reputational and rating systems can provide information on any aspect of corporate and other institutional performance that someone nds of interest. Information warriors and open-mouth saboteurs (see below), or whistle-blowing sites, can expose any behavior they nd objectionable.

3.4

Networked Resistance as an Example of Distributed Infrastructure

Think back to our discussion in Chapter One of distributed infrastructure. Now lets consider networked resistance in light of the principles we discussed there. A conventional, old-style activist movement had to maintain an ongoing organizational apparatus with at least a minimal permanent infrastructure and staff, regardless of the actual level of activity. It was just another example of centralized infrastructure that had to be scaled to peak load, even though peak loads occurred only a tiny fraction of the time. It was an illustration of the 20/80 rule, with 80% of costs coming from the infrastructure required to handle the last 20% of the load. As we saw the authors of Natural Capitalism argue, by designing a central heating or cooling system to handle only the rst 80% of the load, and addressing the other 20% through spot heating/cooling, one can reduce costs to an enormous degree. A distributed infrastructure thats mainly mainly at end-points, likewise, is much more ephemeral and can operate on a much leaner basis. The classic
42 Shirky, 43 Ibid.,

Here Comes Everybody, p. 45. p. 47. 44 Ibid., p. 77.

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example of ephemeralization was Bucky Fullers: a few tons of communications satellites replacing thousands of tons of transoceanic cable. Or in more recent times, a local wireless meshwork (in which the endpoints themselves are routers) replacing a last-mile ber-optic infrastructure. Now read this passage from Digitally Enabled Social Change, by Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport:
As we have shown, ash activism... is not about a steady and long stream of contention. Instead, it is about the effectiveness of overwhelming, rapid, but short-lived contention.... On the participants side, there has never before been an opportunity to be a ve-minute activist who navigates between participating in an e-tactic, checking Facebook, and doing job-related work on a computer. There have only been opportunities to spend hours or more coming together with people and put oneself in harms way... We expect that the ease of participation then, could produce quick rushes of participation when a call for participation is made. Further, these rushes of participation dont require high relative participation rates.... Given that this is true, it is possible to have both ash-style activism and varying levels of activity by any given potential participant. If potential participants have time one day and not the next, mobilizations can go forward as long as some people have some time each day.... ...[S]ince the central tools needed to create e-tactics are usually software routines and databases, not the knowledge inside long-term activists minds, e-tactic organizing is easy to shut off and restart later, unlike traditional organizing.... Instead of SMOs [Social Movement Organizations], ash drives might hold the organizing blueprints (through archived Web pages and software) that allow online protest actions to be remounted in the future.... [S]tarting a second petition is no harder years after a rst one than it would be the next day.... [W]hy not just shut off a movement and turn it back on later? Why not organize around something that is short term? Why not organize whenever the time seems right and not organize when it doesnt seem so? Without social movement activists to support, there can be real on and off switches that perhaps have fewer repercussions to a campaigns ability to mobilize.45

So just as a lean, distributed manufacturing system on the Emilia-Romagna model makes it possible to scale production to spot demand without the imperative to full capacity utilization and push distribution to amortize the high ongoing overhead from expensive mass production machinery, distributed/networked activism can scale particular actions to the needs of the moment without the need to maintain permanent, high-overhead infrastructure between actions. In military terms, the principle of mass can be achieved through coordination of re from widely dispersed forces, rather than the slow and costly physical massing of forces in a single spatial formation (the basis of military theories from Airland Battle to Fourth Generation Warfare).
45 Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 184-186.

3.4. NETWORKED RESISTANCE AS AN EXAMPLE OF DISTRIBUTED INFRASTRUCTURE129 The reference to organizing blueprints being held on hard drives to allow online protest actions to be remounted in the future is relevant to our discussion in Chapter Two of the moduleplatform basis of network organization. The basic toolkit of techniques, software and templates of a networked movementmany of them developed through the experience of many local nodesis available as a platform to the entire movement, or even to a meta-movement (like the complex of Arab Spring/M15/Syntagma/Occupy movements), for individual nodes to use when and how they see t. In The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, I argued (or rather quoted Eric Huntings argument) that open source, module/platform designs are a way of minimizing R&D unit costs by spreading them out over an entire product ecology. A common, open-source library of techniques based on the past collective experiences of a wide body of local movements and nodes of movements enables the experience of any one node to become the common property of allthe same way an mp3 stripped of DRM by one geek and hosted on a torrent site becomes the freely-available property of every non-tech-savvy grandma who wants to hear the song. Its the same basic principleas we saw in Chapter Onethat Eric Raymond described in the free software movement, John Robb described in Open Source Insurgency, and Cory Doctorow described in the le-sharing movement. In the modern repertoire, tactics are in fact thought to be modular so that multiple movements could benet from the same tactical form.46 The short tail in conventional activism, as we saw in the previous section of this chapterwhich, with apologies to Berlins hedgehog, does a few big thingsresults from the high cost of doing anything. When the basic infrastructure of activism is distributed and available for any movement or node to piggyback off of free of charge, it becomes possible to create new movements suited to niche markets at virtually zero marginal cost. As Earl and Kimport argue, social movements have traditionally been about weighty issues because
they have been expensive to create and grow, leading people to only attempt to create (and likely only succeed in creating) a movement when the stakes are high enough to justify the costs. But when the stakes are much lower, can the stakes be lower, too?47

This lastthe lessening of stakes as overhead costs become loweris the same principle I described for the economic and industrial realm in Homebrew Industrial Revolution: the lower the capital outlays and other sources of overhead or xed costs, the lower the revenue stream required to service them; hence the greater the ability of an enterprise to weather slow periods without going in the hole, and the larger the portion of the revenue stream thats free and clear in good periods.

46 Ibid., 47 Ibid.,

pp. 187-188. p. 187.

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3.5

Informational Warfare (or Open-Mouth Sabotage)

Perhaps the single most important way consumer and worker networks act as countervailing powers against corporate institutions is by exposing them to scrutiny. And the scrutiny to which government and corporate hierarchies are now liable to be subjected is far beyond their previous imagining. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Mexican government was caught completely off guard by the amount of scrutiny its campaign against the Zapatistas received, and by the extent of global support for them. The subsequent appearance of networked activism as a standard feature of political life has meant that government and corporate actors have been caught similarly off guard on a recurring basis. Like the Mexican government, global corporations have been caught off guard when what once would have been isolated and easily managed local conicts become global political causes. Even back in the 1990s, in the darkest days of Web 1.0, Naomi Klein wrote:
Natural-resource companies had grown accustomed to dealing with activists who could not escape the connes of their nationhood: a pipeline or mine could spark a peasants revolt in the Philippines or the Congo, but it would remain contained, reported only by the local media and known only to people in the area. But today, every time Shell sneezes, a report goes out on the hyperactive shell-nigeriaaction listserve, bouncing into the in-boxes of all the far-ung organizers involved in the campaign, from Nigerian leaders living in exile to student activists around the world. And when a group of activists occupied part of Shells U.K. Headquarters in January 1999, they made sure to bring a digital camera with a cellular linkup, allowing them to broadcast their sit-in on the Web, even after Shell ofcials turned off the electricity and phones.... The Internet played a similar role during the McLibel Trial, catapulting Londons grassroots anti-McDonalds movement into an arena as global as the one in which its multinational opponent operates. We had so much information about McDonalds, we thought we should start a library, Dave Morris explains, and with this in mind, a group of Internet activists launched the McSpotlight Web site. The site not only has the controversial pamphlet online, it contains the complete 20,000-page transcript of the trial, and offers a debating room where McDonalds workers can exchange horror stories about McWork under the Golden Arches. The site, one of the most popular destinations on the Web, has been accessed approximately sixty-ve million times. ...[This medium is] less vulnerable to libel suits than more traditional media. [McSpotlight programmer] Ben explains that while McSpotlights server is located in the Netherlands, it has mirror sites in Finland, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia. That means that if a server in one country is targeted by McDonalds lawyers, the site will still be available around the world from the other mirrors.48
48 Naomi

Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000, 2002), pp. 393-395.

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131

Smile, pigyoure on candid camera. Corporations are immensely vulnerable to informational warfare, both by consumers and by workers. The last section of Naomi Kleins No Logo discusses in depth the vulnerability of large corporations and brand name images to netwar campaigns.49 She devoted special attention to culture jamming, which involves rifng off of corporate logos and thereby tapping into the vast resources spent to make [a] logo meaningful.50 A good example is the anti-sweatshop campaign by the National Labor Committee, headed by Charles Kernaghan.
Kernaghans formula is simple enough. First, select Americas most cartoonish icons, from literal ones like Mickey Mouse to virtual ones like Kathie Lee Gifford. Next, create head-on collisions between image and reality. They live by their image, Kernaghan says of his corporate adversaries. That gives you a certain power over them... these companies are sitting ducks."51

At the time Klein wrote, technological developments were creating unprecedented potential for culture jamming. Digital design and photo editing technology made it possible to make incredibly sophisticated parodies of corporate logos and advertisements.52 Interestingly, a lot of corporate targets shied away from taking culture jammers to court for fear the public might side with the jammers against the corporate plaintiffsas they did against McDonalds in the McLibel case. The more savvy corporate bosses understand that legal battles... will clearly be fought less on legal than on political grounds. In the words of one advertising executive, No one wants to be in the limelight because they are the target of community protests or boycotts.53 And bear in mind that, back in the Mesozoic Era of Web 1.0, informational warfare was limited largely to static websites, Usenet and email. Since then, Web 2.0 innovations like blogs, wikis, Facebook and Twitter have exploded the capabilities of informational warfare by at least an order of magnitude. Klein borrowed Saul Alinskys term political jujitsu to describe using one part of the power structure against another part. Jujitsu, like most martial arts, uses an attackers own force against her. Culture jamming is a form of political jujitsu that uses the power of corporate symbolssymbols deliberately developed to tap into subconscious drives and channel them in directions desired by the corporationagainst their corporate owners.54
Anticorporate activism enjoys the priceless benets of borrowed hipness and celebrityborrowed, ironically enough, from the brands themselves. Logos that have been burned into our brains by the nest image campaigns money can buy, ...are bathed in a glow.... ...Like a good ad bust, anticorporate campaigns draw energy from the power and mass appeal of marketing, at the same time as they hurl that energy right back at the brands that have so successfully
49 Ibid., 50 Ibid.,

pp. 279-437. p. 281. 51 Ibid., p. 351. 52 Ibid. p. 285. 53 Ibid., p. 288. 54 Ibid., p. 281.

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colonized our everyday lives. You can see this jujitsu strategy in action in what has become a staple of many anticorporate campaigns: inviting a worker from a Third World country to come visit a First World superstorewith plenty of cameras rolling. Few newscasts can resist the made-for-TV moment when an Indonesian Nike worker gasps as she learns that the sneakers she churned out for $2 a day sell for $120 at San Francisco Nike Town.55

The effect of sully[ing] some of the most polished logos on the brandscape, as Klein characterized Kernaghans efforts,56 is much like that of Piss Christ. It relies on the power of the very symbol being sullied. Kernaghan played on the appeal of the dogs in 101 Dalmatians by comparing the living conditions of the animals on the set to those of the human sweatshop workers who produce the tie-in products. He showed up for public appearances with his signature shopping bag brimming with Disney clothes, Kathie Lee Gifford pants and other logo gear, along with pay slips and price tags used as props to illustrate the discrepancy between worker pay and retail price. In El Salvador, he pulled items out of the bag with price tags attached to show workers what their products fetch in the U.S. After a similar demonstration of Disney products in Haiti, workers screamed with shock, disbelief, anger, and a mixture of pain and sadness, as their eyes xed on the Pocahontas shirta reaction captured in the lm Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti.57 Culture jamming is also an illustration of the effects of network culture. Although corporate imagery is still created by people thinking in terms of one-way broadcast communication, the culture jammers have grown up in an age where audiences can talk back to the advertisement or mock it to one another. The content of advertising becomes just another bit of raw material for mashups, as products once transmitted on a one-way conveyor belt from giant factory to giant retailer to consumer have now become raw material for hacking and reverse-engineering.58 Corporate America, the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argue, still views the Web as just an extension of preceding mass media, primarily television. Corporate websites are designed on the same model as the old broadcast media: a one-to-many, one-directional communications ow, in which the audience couldnt talk back. But now, the beauty of the Web is that the audience can talk back.
Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. Theyre passive, yeah, but more than that: theyre isolated from each other. Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking all these poor bastards up. Theyre still watching the same old crap. Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-color aside and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that?...
55 Ibid., 56 Ibid.,

pp. 349-350. p. 351. 57 Ibid., p. 353. 58 Ibid., p. 294.

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The audience is suddenly connected to itself. What was once The Show, the hypnotic focus and tee-vee advertising carrier wave, becomes... an excuse to get together.... Think of Joel and the bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The point is not to watch the lm, but to outdo each other making fun of it. And for such radically realigned purposes, some bloated corporate Web site can serve as a target every bit as well as Godzilla, King of the Monsters.... So heres a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has 50 million people on it [this was 2001, remember], and theyre not all as dumb as they look, but the corporations trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as dumb as they look, how long before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone else? The correct answer of course: not long at all. And as soon as he starts laughing, hes not Joe Six-Pack anymore. Hes no longer part of some passive couch-potato target demographic. Because the Net connects people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a gment and a fantasy. The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that authority is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.59 ....Look at how this already works in todays Web conversation. You want to buy a new camera. You go to the sites of the three camera makers youre considering. You hastily click through the brochureware the vendors paid thousands to have designed, and you nally nd a page that actually gives straightforward factual information. Now you go to a Usenet discussion group, or you nd an e-mail list on the topic. You read what real customers have to say. You see what questions are being asked and youre impressed with how well other buyersstrangers from around the worldhave answered them.... Compare that to the feeble sputtering of an ad. SuperDooper GlueHolds Anything! says your ad. Unless you ick it sidewaysas I found out with the handle of my favorite cup, says a little voice in the market. BigDisk Hard DrivesLifetime Guarantee! says the ad. As long as you can prove you oiled it three times a week, says another little voice in the market. What these little voices used to say to a single friend is now accessible to the world. No number of ads will undo the words of the market. How long does it take until the market conversation punctures the exaggerations made in an ad? An hour? A day? The speed of word of mouth is now limited only by how fast people can type....60 ...Marketing has been training its practitioners for decades in the art of impersonating sincerity and warmth. But marketing can no

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59 Chapter One. Internet Apocalypso, in Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Perseus Books Group, 2001) <http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html>.. 60 Chapter Four. Markets Are Conversations, in Ibid.

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longer keep up appearances. People talk.61

This has always been true in meatspace to some extent. A good example, as described by blogger thoreau at Unqualied Offerings, is the mockery of bureaucratic rules by members of a committee:
One way that people start to drink kool-aid is by assimilating into absurd tasks. I was told to chair the curriculum committee, and one thing we have to do is comply with a bunch of absurd rules, even when doing worthwhile tasks. So, when we do something absurd, I make a point of saying that it is absurd. I dont belabor it or turn the meeting into an hour-long gripe session, but I will say OK, and then well put this in there because somebody is insisting that we comply with this stupid rule when we segue into the stupid part of the task. If we have to make several decisions, some of them involving the actual substance of what were doing, and some of them involving how we will contort this substantive, meritorious thing to t into somebodys stupid procedure, I will say Lets decide on the important stuff rst and save all the bureaucratic nonsense for the end. I nd that when I do this, the people who have not yet drunk the kool-aid smile, and the people who have drunk the kool-aid say Now, now, those rules and procedures were put in place for a reason. My response is always Yes, but is it a good reason? Does it lead to a good result, or does it lead to us twisting ourselves into pretzels to do even simple and important things? A touch of vinegar is the best defense against kool-aid.62

But in the meatspace model thoreau described, the kool-aid was distributed campus-wide by a university administration transmission belt. The vinegar was limited to a departmental conference room. Network culture takes the possibilities of countering kool-aid with vinegar to an entirely new level. As we already noted, the informational warfare campaigns Naomi Klein recounted, which were so discomting to McDonalds, Nike, Shell and Kathie Lee Gifford, all took place within the connes of Web 1.0. Since then, weve seen a quantum leap in the possibilities of networked organization. Richard Telofski, the corporate consultant mentioned earlier who advises companies on protecting their public image against open-mouth saboteurs, writes at a time when anticorporate activists have the full resources of social media for propagating so-called cybersmear. Telofski points out that employees have been bitching about the company as long as there have been employees and companies. But theres a difference now:
Previously your trash talk was kept, for the most part, on the inside, the inside of the company about which you were complaining. Now, welcome to the 21st century. That trash talk has gone public. Very public. Globally public. Painfully public.... Comments about employers spread very quickly. They spread from sites like JobVent.com if only just by readers passing it along to their
61 Ibid. 62 Thoreau, The road to kool-aid is eroded by vinegar, Unqualied Offerings, January 18, 2011 <http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2011/01/18/12377>.

3.5. INFORMATIONAL WARFARE (OR OPEN-MOUTH SABOTAGE)

Facebook, Digg, or MySpace accounts. They spread even further outside the primary venue, the job bitching site, and the secondary venues, such as Facebook, Digg, and MySpace, because that trash talk gets indexed by search engines.... In terms of insidious competition, this means that any web surfer seeking information about a particular company may also pick up, for example, the JobVent.com comments about that company, in their search results.... Your Employees compete with your companys efforts to improve and maintain its image.63

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Telofski is morally outraged by the idea that a companys image is not determined primarily by the company itself. Well, thats what youve got a TS List for, my friend. Imagine if every large institution had the same control over its image that Telofski seems to think companies are entitled to: governments, churches, unions... activist groups? Should the Nazi German governments image have been fully within the control of Josef Goebbels? Part of the reason for the effectiveness of informational warfare is cultural. The disjuncture between the democratic and humanitarian legitimizing rhetoric used by hierarchical institutions, and the brutal and authoritarian reality of their actual behavior, is probably greater than ever before in history. And directly observing the latterseeing how ones sausage is madeis also easier than ever before. There have always been glitches in the Matrix. The cultural reproduction apparatus, by its nature, generates a fairly high number of factory rejects. Throughout history, there have probably been many such people who saw the fnords: whose perception of the conict between practice and preaching brought on a failure of ideological conditioning. But the Internet era for the rst time reduces to almost nothing the transaction costs of bringing such people together and forming a critical mass. The political and media culture we live in today seems almost deliberately designed for generating glitches in the Matrix, birthing people who see the fnords, undermining elite morale, and inculcating cognitive dissonance both between rulers and ruled and among the ruled themselves. Remember Vinay Guptas remarks in on cognitive dissonance in the previous chapter?According to Felix Stalder, were experiencing a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves.
Is it a coincidence that so far the vast majority of WikiLeaks material has originated from within institutions in democratic systems? I think not. In its rhetoric, Western politics is becoming ever more moralising. Tony Blair was the undisputed master in this discipline . He could speak passionately about humanitarian wars which were supposed to advance human rights. Afghanistan was to prosper under the warm attention of allied forces, following decades of neglect and
63 Richard

Telofski, Insidious Competition, pp. 225-227.

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civil war. This time, the invasion was going to develop the country, rebuild infrastructures, liberate women, give children hope and whatnot. The Iraq waronce the weapons of mass destruction turned out to be imaginarywas about liberating the Iraqi people from despotism, bringing democracy to the Middle East and ushering in a new era of peace, rule of law and commercial opportunities. All in all, these were just wars, wars we wanted to ght, wars soldiers could be proud of ghting. To some degree, there is always a gap between political rhetoric and practice, particularly in times of war. Yet, there is a qualitative difference now. Western political systems seem to have lost their ability to construct overarching historical narratives that would justify and give meaning to their actions and make sense of the ugliness that is part of any war. Since the end of the Cold War, politics can no longer be said to pursue a historical project creating a void which has been papered over by empty moralising. However, if a supercial morality is all that is left, then the encounter with the brutal day-to-day operations of the battle eld is unmediated and corrosive. The moral rationale for going to war quickly dissolves under the actual experience of war and whats left is a cynical machinery run amok. It can no longer generate any lasting and positive identication from its protagonists. In some way, a similar lack of identication can be seen within corporations, as evidenced in the leaks from Swiss banks. With neoliberal ideology dominant, employees are told over and over not to expect anything from the company, that their job is continually in danger and that if they do not perform according to targets they can be replaced at a moments notice. There is no greater narrative than the next quarter and generalised insecurity. ....People are asked to identify personally with organisations who can either no longer carry historical projects worthy of major sacrices or expressly regard their employees as nothing but expendable, shortterm resources. This, I think, creates the cognitive dissonance that justies, perhaps even demands, the leaker to violate procedure and actively damage the organisation of which he, or she, has been at some point a well-acculturated member (this is the difference to the spy). This dissonance creates the motivational energy to move from the potential to the actual.64

In the specic case of Iraq, all the talk about free markets and democracy didnt go down well when presented alongside the reality of ratication of international intellectual property accords, suppression of independent unions, and the privatization of state industry to Halliburton, all rubber stamped by the American puppet regime in Baghdad. The same principle applies to the divorce between the rhetoric in the corporations mission statement and other Ofcial Happy Talk, and its actual treatment of workers and consumers. To take a case in my own experience, listening to the management of the hospital where I work talk about extraordinary pa64 Felix Stalder, Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology, n.n., November 6, 2010 <http://remix.openows.com/node/149>.

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tient care, enriching the lives in the communities we serve, and going above and beyond, while relentlessly downsizing patient care staff and skimming off the savings for themselves, is like listening to a priest talk about how much he loves Jesus while hes buggering an altar boy. National Lampoon once printed a parody of the IBM Charlie Chaplin ad, contrasting the public facade represented by Chaplin with its real internal culture (represented, of course, by Hitler). John Robb describes the technical potential for information warfare against a corporation, swarming customers, employees, and management with propaganda and disinformation (or the most potent weapon of all, I might addthe truth), and in the process demoralizing management.
As we move forward in this epochal many to many global conict, and given many early examples from wide variety [sic] of hacking attacks and conicts, we are likely to see global guerrillas come to routinely use information warfare against corporations. These information offensives will use network leverage to isolate corporations morally, mentally, and physically.... Network leverage comes in three forms:

Highly accurate lists of targets from hacking black marketplaces. These lists include all corporate employee e-mail addresses and phone numbersboth at work and at home. <$0.25 a dossier (for accurate lists). Low cost e-mail spam. Messages can be range from informational to phishing attacks. <$0.1 a message. Low cost phone spam. Use the same voice-text messaging systems and call centers that can blanket target lists with perpetual calls. Pennies a call....
In short, the same mechanisms that make spamming/direct marketing so easy and inexpensive to accomplish, can be used to bring the conict directly to the employees of a target corporation or its partner companies (in the supply chain). Executives and employees that are typically divorced/removed from the full range of their corporations activities would nd themselves immediately enmeshed in the conict. The objective of this infowar would be to increase...:

Uncertainty. An inability to be certain about future outcomes. If they can do this, whats next? For example: a false/troll e-mail or phone campaign from the CEO that informs employees at work and at home that it will divest from the target area or admits to heinous crimes. Menace. An increased personal/familial risk. The very act of connecting to directly to employees generates menace. The questions it should evoke: should I stay employed here given the potential threat? Mistrust. A mistrust of the corporations moral and legal status. For example: The dissemination of information on a corporations actions, particularly if they are morally egregious or criminal in nature, through a NGO charity fund raising drive.

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With an increase in uncertainty, menace, and mistrust within the target corporations ranks and across the supply chain partner companies, the targets connectivity (moral, physical, and mental) is likely to suffer a precipitous fall. This reduction in connectivity has the potential to create non-cooperative centers of gravity within the targets as cohesion fails. Some of these centers of gravity would opt to leave the problem (quit or annul contractual relationships) and some would ght internally to divest themselves of this problem.65

Obviously, we cant conclude this discussion without a mention of Wikileaks. Although it gured in the press in 2010 primarily insofar as it exposed the secrets of the American national security state, Wikileaks started out as a whistleblowing site oriented at least as much toward corporate leaks. And according to a late 2010 interview with Forbes magazine, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stated that about fty percent of all documents uploaded to the site came from private sector institutions. He further announced that the site in early 2011 would publish a major cache of documents related to the malfeasance of a major bank. In his words, it could bring down a bank or two.
It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume. Usually when you get leaks at this level, its about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, theres only one similar example. Its like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the agrant violations. This will be like that. Yes, there will be some agrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that comes out, and thats tremendously valuable.... You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But its also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight thats not done, the priorities of executives, how they think theyre fullling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

Assange clearly sees the function of online whistleblowing as analogous to that of a regulatory state:
Lets say you want to run a good company. Its nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if theyre not screwing other people over. Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more protable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one thats cutting its milk powder will take you over. Thats the worst of all possible outcomes. The other possibility is that the rst one to cut its milk powder
65 John Robb, INFOWAR vs. CORPORATIONS, Global Guerrillas, October 1, 2009 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/10/infowar-vs-corporations.html>.

3.5. INFORMATIONAL WARFARE (OR OPEN-MOUTH SABOTAGE)

is exposed. Then you dont have to cut your milk powder. Theres a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation. It just means that its easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected [sic] negatively by leaks than honest businesses. Thats the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, were creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies. No one wants to have their own things leaked. It pains us when we have internal leaks. But across any given industry, it is both good for the whole industry to have those leaks and its especially good for the good players. But aside from the market as a whole, how should companies change their behavior understanding that leaks will increase? Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well. I think its extremely positive. You end up with a situation where honest companies producing quality products are more competitive than dishonest companies producing bad products. And companies that treat their employees well do better than those that treat them badly.... By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means theres a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who theyre dealing with.66

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As interviewer Andy Greenberg put it, after exposing the misdeeds of the American military Assange is gunning for corporate America, and the business community can expect plenty of sequels. Whats more, Wikileaks is just the beginning of a growing trend:
Modern whistleblowers, or employees with a grudge, can zip up their troves of incriminating documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sitesor simply submit them directly to WikiLeaks. What do large companies think of the threat? If theyre terried, theyre not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks is high prole, legally insulated and transnational, says former Commerce Department ofcial James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. That adds up to a reputational risk that companies didnt have to think about a year ago. ...WikiLeaks adds another, new form of corporate data breach: It offers the conscience-stricken and vindictive alike a chance to publish documents largely unltered, without censors or personal repercussions, thanks to privacy and encryption technologies that make anonymity easier than ever before. WikiLeaks technical and ideological example has inspired copycats from Africa to China and rallied
66 Andy Greenberg, An Interview with Wikileaks Julian Assange, Forbes, November 29, 2010 <http://blogs.forbes.com/ andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julianassange/>.

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transparency advocates to push for a new, legal promised land in the unlikely haven of Iceland.67

An especially promising recent development has been efforts of some gures in the Icelandic government, in cooperation with Wikileaks, to turn Iceland into a free information haven. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), introduced over a year ago with widespread support in the Althing (the Icelandic parliament), passed unanimously in June 2010. The idea, to quote Althing member Birgitta Jonsdottir, was to make Iceland a haven for freedom of information, freedom of expression and of speech. In particular, that means a safe place for people to put Internet servers and host online material that their governments might want to shut down. Among the leading activists and organizers behind the initiative, in close cooperation with Birgitta, is my online acquaintance Smari McCarthy of the P2P Foundation. He specically mentioned the goal of providing webhosting services for whistleblowers and leakers of state secrets.68 And it will be a refuge for evading insane libel laws like Britains, next time some corporation like Tragura gets a super-injunction against reporting an embarrassing question from an MP in the House of Commons.

3.6

A Narrowcast Model of Open Mouth Sabotage

Under a blog post of mine on open-mouth sabotage, one commenter raised this question: perhaps as the more prevalent this practice (hopefully) becomes, the more it will become just another source of general white-noise to be ltered and ignored not only by the media, but by consumers as welli.e., at what point does open mouth sabotage become a fully saturated market?69 This point would be a valid criticism in regard to the general broadcast media and traditional newspapers. The good thing about network society, though, is that were not forced to work through broadcast media. So each message thats relevant to some people doesnt have to be directed to everyone, thereby submerging the particular messages that are relevant to each person in a sea of white noise. Its possible to narrow-cast each message of open mouth sabotage to the specic audience who will be most interested in it: the major stakeholders of a corporation, its vendors and outlets, the community where its a major institution, and all the other recipients that would cause maximum embarrassment to the target. We already saw Telofskis account of how bitching about an employer might
67 Greenberg, Wikileaks Assange Wants to Spill Your Corporate Secrets, Forbes, November 29, 2010 <http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/wikileaks-julian-assange-wantsto-spill-your-corporate-secrets/>. 68 Sam Knight, Icelandic Parliament Strengthens Protections for Journalists and Whistleblowers, Truthout, July 10, 2010 <http://archive.truthout.org/media-reform-passes-icelandicparliament61180>. 69 Kevin Carson, Open-Mouth Sabotage, Networked Resistance, and Asymmetric Warfare on the Job, P2P Foundation Blog, March 15, 2008 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-mouthsabotage-networked-resistance-and-asymmetric-warfare-on-the-job/2008/03/15>.

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get circulated via social networking or bookmarking sites, and then show up in Google searches for the employers name. But this is merely what Telofski calls a chaotic, rather than a cosmic, attackthe more or less spontaneous side-effect of people bitching to each other rather than a deliberate campaign to hurt the employer.70 What happens when one disgruntled employee sets up an anonymous blog dedicated to exposing the dirt on her employers greed and mismanagement, publishing (and relentlessly mocking and sking) company Ofcial Happy Talk memos, etc., and systematically posts links to it at blog comment threads, message boards, email lists, and Facebook groups dedicated to customers or employees of the industry it serves? The white noise objection is, to a large extent, a particular application of the Library of Babel critique of network culture skeptics like Andrew Keen.71 But the dening feature of the Library of Babel, which Keen et al miss, is that it doesnt have a card catalog. Mechanisms for ordering informationltering, indexing and taggingproliferate as fast under network culture as the volume of information itself. In particular, injustices by local actors can be countered by local information campaigns hitting them where they live. For example, consider Justin Kurtzs campaign against T&J Towing, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kurtz alleged one of the companys wreckers towed his car from a space at his apartment complex for which he had a valid sticker, requiring him to pay $118 to get it out of hock. He subsequently started a Facebook page called Kalamazoo Residents Against T&J Towing to protest its predatory towing practices. The company sued him for $750,000, claiming his defamatory comments had cost them business. (T&J Towing, incidentally, already had a failing grade with the local Better Business Bureau because of similar complaints that it had towed validly parked cars.)72 Kurtz backed down and led a counter-suit. Months later, Joseph Bird (owner of T&J) dropped his suit. It seems the Facebook group had attracted thousands of members, many of whom complained about their own experiences with T&J. And in yet another illustration of the Streisand Effect (about which more below), Birds lawsuit attracted many times more negative media attention than did Kurtzs Facebook group itself. Indeed, Bird claimed the negative publicity cost him business amounting to $174,000 in lost prots and drove him into bankruptcy.73 Other examples include search engine pessimization and the creative use of tags at bookmarking sites to direct web searches on a company toward critical commentary, and the use of social media to target criticism of rms toward their
Insidious Competition, p. 230. Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Todays Internet is Killing Our Culture (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday/Currency, 2007), p. 72 Dan Frosch, When Companies Respond to Online Criticism with Lawsuits, New York Times, June 1, 2020 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/us/01slapp.html>. 73 Gabrielle Russon, Litigation between T&J Towing, Justin Kurtz over Facebook group to end with no payments, Kalamazoo Gazette, December 22, 2010 <http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/12/ litigation_between_t_j_towing.html>.
71 Andrew 70 Telofski,

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primary niche markets.74 The use of social media as a marketing tool is now virtually obligatorywhich leaves corporations quite vulnerable to the use of their own social media tools against them. For example, social justice activists joined the Facebook Kit Kat group to demand that Nestle stop sourcing its palm oil from a company that clearcut large tracts of rain forest. Although Nestle initially responded by deleting critical comments, that only drew further attention to the controversy. In the end, they caved.
Social networks as a viral marketing tool are thus a double-edged sword: they allow for an unprecedented dissemination of marketing messages at minimal cost, but they remain largely out of control, and can quickly turn into negative publicity. They effectively level the ground between marketers and consumer activists, who can now run worldwide campaigns virtually free of charge with the help of SNSs [social networking sites].75

3.7

Attempts to Suppress or Counter Open Mouth Sabotage

Informational warfare against the corporate image is just starting to come to the attention of those who manage that image. In the past few years theres been an upsurge of interest in cybersmear, and a proliferation of services aimed at tracking down disgruntled employees allegedly libeling their former or current employers. But attempts at suppression are generally ineffectual. Governments and corporations, hierarchies of all kinds, are learning to their dismay that, in a networked age, its impossible to suppress negative publicity. As Cory Doctorow put it, Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and the King of Thailand have discovered... [that] taking a piece of information off the Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.76 Its sometimes called the Streisand effect, in honor of Barbra Streisand (whose role in its discoveryabout which more belowwas analogous to Sir Isaac Newtons getting hit on the head by an apple). One of the earliest examples of the phenomenon in the Internet age was the above-mentioned McLibel case in Britain, in which McDonalds attempt to suppress a couple of embarrassing pamphleteers with a SLAPP lawsuit wound up, as a direct result, bringing them worse publicity than they could have imagined. The pamphleteers were indigent and represented themselves in court much of the time, and repeatedly lost appeals in the British court system throughout the nineties (eventually they won an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights). But widespread coverage of the case on the Web, coupled with the defendants deliberate use of the courtroom as a bully pulpit to examine the
Insidious Competition, pp. 160-162. Langheinrich and Gunter Karjoth, Social networking and the risk to companies and institutions, Information Security Technical Report xxx (2010), p. 2. 76 Doctorow, Its the Information Economy, Stupid, p. 60.
75 Marc 74 Telofski,

3.7. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS OR COUNTER OPEN MOUTH SABOTAGE 143 factual issues, caused McDonalds one of the worst embarrassments in its history.77 (Naomi Klein called it the corporate equivalent of a colonoscopy.)78 Two important examples in 2004, the Sinclair Media boycott and the Diebold corporate emailsdetailed in Appendix IIboth decisively demonstrated the impossibility of suppressing online information when information could be replicated and websites mirrored with a few mouse-clicks. An attempt to suppress information on the Wikileaks hosting site, in 2007an encounter which, though Wikileaks was still virtually unknown to the general public, brought it under the radar of the national security communityresulted in a similar disaster.
Associated Press (via the rst amendment center) reports that an effort at (online) damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on Wikileaks for posting classied information about some of its wealthy clients. While Bank Julius Baer claimed it just wanted stolen and forged documents removed from the site (rather than close it down), instead of the information disappearing, it rocketed through cyberspace, landing on other Web sites and Wikileaks own mirror sites outside the U.S.... The digerati call the online phenomenon of a censorship attempt backring into more unwanted publicity the Streisand effect. Techdirt Inc. chief executive Mike Masnick coined the term on his popular technology blog after the actress Barbra Streisands 2003 lawsuit seeking to remove satellite photos of her Malibu house. Those photos are now easily accessible, just like the bank documents. Its a perfect example of the Streisand effect, Masnick said. This was a really small thing that no one heard about and now its everywhere and everyones talking about it.79

The DeCSS uprising, in which corporate attempts to suppress publication of a code for cracking the DRM on DVDs failed in the face of widespread deance, is one of the most inspiring episodes in the history of the free culture movement.
Journalist Eric Corleybetter known as Emmanuel Goldstein, a nom de plume borrowed from Orwells 1984posted the code for DeCSS (so called because it decrypts the Content Scrambling System that encrypts DVDs) as a part of a story he wrote in November for the well-known hacker journal 2600. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that Corley deed anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by posting the offending code.... The whole affair began when teenager Jon Johansen wrote DeCSS in order to view DVDs on a Linux machine. The MPAA has since brought suit against him in his native Norway as well. Johansen testied on Thursday that he announced the successful reverse engineering of a DVD on the mailing list of the Linux Video and DVD Project
77 McDonalds Restaurants v Morris & Steele, Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case> (accessed December 26, 2009). 78 Klein, No Logo, p. 330. 79 PR disaster, Wikileaks and the Streisand Effect PRdisasters.com, March 3, 2007 <http://prdisasters.com/pr-disaster-via-wikileaks-and-the-streisand-effect/>.

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(LiViD), a user resource center for video- and DVD-related work for Linux.... The judge in the case, the honorable Lewis Kaplan of the US District Court in southern New York, issued a preliminary injunction against posting DeCSS. Corley duly took down the code, but did not help his defense by deantly linking to myriad sites which post DeCSS.... True to their hacker beliefs, Corley supporters came to the trial wearing the DeCSS code on t-shirts. There are also over 300 Websites that still link to the decryption code, many beyond the reach of the MPAA.80

In the Usmanov case of the same year, attempts to suppress embarrassing information led to similar Internet-wide resistance.
The Register, UK: Political websites have lined up in defence of a former diplomat whose blog was deleted by hosting rm Fasthosts after threats from lawyers acting for billionaire Arsenal investor Alisher Usmanov. Four days after Fasthosts pulled the plug on the website run by former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray it remains ofine. Several other political and freedom of speech blogs in the UK and abroad have picked up the gauntlet however, and reposted the article that originally drew the takedown demand. The complaints against Murrays site arose after a series of allegations he made against Usmanov.... After being released from prison, and pardoned, Usmanov became one of a small group of oligarchs to make hay in the former USSRs post-communist asset carve-up.... On his behalf, libel law rm Schillings has moved against a number of Arsenal fan sites and political bloggers repeating the allegations....81

That reference to [s]everal other political and freedom of speech blogs, by the way, is like saying the ocean is a bit wet. An article at Chicken Yoghurt blog provides a list of all the venues that have republished Murrays original allegations, recovered from Googles caches of the sites or from the Internet Archive. It is a very, very long list82 so long, in fact, that Chicken Yoghurt helpfully provides the html code with URLs already embedded in the text, so it can be easily cut and pasted into a blog post. In addition, Chicken Yoghurt provided the IP addresses of Usmanovs lawyers as a heads-up to all bloggers who might have been visited by those august personages. A badly edited photo of a waif in a Ralph Lauren ad, which made the model appear not just emaciated but deformed, was highlighted on the Photoshop Disasters website. Lauren sent the site legal notices of DMCA infringement,
80 Deborah Durham-Vichr. Focus on the DeCSS trial, CNN.Com, July 27, 2000 <http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/27/decss.trial.p1.idg/index.html>. 81 Chris Williams, Blogosphere shouts Im Spartacus in Usmanov-Murray case: Uzbek billionaire prompts Blog solidarity, The Register, September 24, 2007 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/24/usmanov_vs_the_internet/>. 82 Public Service AnnouncementCraig Murray, Tim Ireland, Boris Johnson, Bob Piper and Alisher Usmanov. . . Chicken Yoghurt, September 20, 2007 <http://www.chickyog.net/2007/09/20/public-service-announcement/>.

3.7. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS OR COUNTER OPEN MOUTH SABOTAGE 145 and got the sites ISP to take it down. In the process, though, the photoand storygot circulated all over the Internet. Doctorow, in the face of a threat of retaliation for reproducing the photo, issued his deance at BoingBoing:
So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, were gonna mock them. Hence this post.... ...And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will: a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and; b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can nd it and take heart; and c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.83

The Tragura case probably represents a new speed record, in terms of the duration between initial thuggish attempts to silence criticism and the company lawyers nal decision to cave. The Tragura corporation actually secured a court super-injunction against The Guardian, prohibiting it from reporting a question by an MP on the oor of Parliament about the companys alleged dumping of toxic waste in Africa. Without specically naming either Tragura or the MP, reporter Alan Rusbridger was able to comply with the terms of the injunction and still include enough hints in his cryptic story for readers to scour the Parliamentary reports and gure it out for themselves. By the time he nished work that day, Tragura was already the most-searched-for term on Twitter; by the next morning Traguras criminal actsplus their attempt at suppressing the storyhad become front-page news, and by noon the lawyers had thrown in the towel.84 The re-emergence of Wikileaks as a focus of attention in 2010, after earlier U.S. government concerns in 2007, presents another case study in the Streisand Effect. According to K. Vaidya Nathan, U.S. government attempts to suppress the site illustrated the Streisand Effect in spades:
Though, the action of the US government was intended to suppress the leaks, the Streisand effect made sure that the outcome was exactly the opposite. People all over the world, who hadnt even heard of the Website, were typing WikiLeaks.org on their keyboards only to nd a site-unavailable message, which increased their curiosity. People sympathetic to WikiLeaks, in the meantime, had voluntarily mirrored the website in order to keep it online. The entire content, with its million plus documents is now available on multiple servers, with different domain names and its fan-base has increased exponentially. The State Department tried to suppress one source. The upshot not only has the source multiplied itself but its fan base has grown radically. Even though WikiLeaks doesnt advertise, the State Department
83 Doctorow, The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesnt want you to see! BoingBoing, October 6, 2009 <http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html>. 84 Alan Rusbridge, First Read: The Mutualized Future is Bright, Columbia Journalism Review, October 19, 2009 <http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_mutualized_future_is_brigh.php>.

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has become its biggest advertiser.85

Robin Bloor describes the combination of mirror sites, torrent downloads and darknets which have been used to circumvent censorship of Wikileaks and its documents as a form of Super Streisand Effect.86 More generally, hierarchical institutions are nding that the traditional means of suppressing communication, that worked as recently as twenty years ago, are useless. Take something as simple as suppressing a school newspaper whose content violates the administrators sensibilities. An increasingly common response is to set up an informal student newspaper online, and if necessary to tweak the hosting arrangements to thwart attempts at further suppression.87 The above-mentioned Richard Telofski, as we shall see in greater detail below, devotes most of his book Insidious Competition to advice on how to counter NGOs, activists, labor unions, etc., in the public battle for meaning, and how to ght for control of the corporate image. But in the case of what he calls the Nasties, which are mostly either foreign governments or foreign companies, he says, this is impossible. The reason is that the attacker is anonymous and their attack is covert. Its impossible to suppress them because they cant be identied.88 But he ignores a central question: What stops an individual, in the fact of attempts at suppression, from taking advantage of the tools of individual super-empowerment, going underground, and becoming a Nasty? Besides attempts at suppression, there is a growing interest in waging information warfare from the other side. Telofskis Insidious Competition is perhaps the most notable example of Corporate Americas increased focus on networked informational warfare, with a view toward ghting back in the marketplace of ideas. ...[S]ocial media, he writes, has the power to compete with you for the meaning of your corporate image...89
As I write, marketers are experimenting with, and discovering, how social media can be used successfully within their marketing promotions mix. But what business people are not considering nearly as much is that if social media can be used to promote products and services..., then alternatively it can be used to demote or damage the image of products and servicesand yes, even your corporate image.... And that power is going to be used both in unexpected ways and by unexpected persons or entities.... These new competitors dont want to sell your customers, clients, or consumers a comparable product or service. These new competitors want to sell your customers, clients, or consumers a competing image of your product, service, or your very company. An image of your company that is not as attering
85 K. Vaidya Nathan, Beware the Streisand effect, Financial Express, December 17, 2010 <http://nancialexpress.com/ news/beware-the-streisand-effect/725720/0>. 86 Robin Bloor, The Internet, Wikileaks and the Super Streisand Effect, The Virtual Circle, December 6, 2010 <http://www.thevirtualcircle.com/2010/12/the-internet-wikileaks-and-the-superstreisand-effect/>. 87 Mike Masnick, Yet Another High School Newspaper Goes Online to Avoid District Censorship, Techdirt, January 15, 200 <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090112/1334043381.shtml>. 88 Telofski, Insidious Competition, pp. 317-318. 89 Ibid., p. 15.

3.7. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS OR COUNTER OPEN MOUTH SABOTAGE 147

as that which you work hard to maintain every business day....90

Telofski advises his clients to develop their own largely autonomous social media squads, to get out there and engage the corporations opponents in the battle for meaningto contest attempts by insidious competitors like workers and consumer activists to subvert the companys carefully constructed image, and regain control of that image. The one strategy Telofski recommends that actually seems plausible is one that reputation management rms already engage in: search engine optimization.91 That means, essentially, gaming search engines to make sure positive results about your company come up on the rst page of search results, and negative stuff is buried several pages in. The rest of it amounts to polishing a turd.
Tactic: Anticipate negative memes that attackers might create. Provide information nullifying the claims made by the attackers. Address the issue before it becomes an issue.... Tactic: Run public service announcements (PSAs) stating that the facts shared in social media are not always true and are usually unvetted, and that the false and misleading information in social media is a disservice to the public.... Tactic: Have company social media staff enter into problematic discussions with links back to the third-party sources [of information].... Tactic: Identify the attacker as mistaken. Present information within social media discussions encountering image-damaging claims. Link back to the third-party sources created in the proactive strategies. Tactic: Make alliances with other organizations to have them help present your case. Tactic: Radicalize the attacker. Through social graphing software, look for connections to the attacker which will weaken their case or associate them with questionable sourcing.... Tactic: Hold the attacker to liability laws. Frame your argument in the truth stating that the attacker is disseminating misleading information.92

Regarding the rst four tactics listed above, which center on contesting the facts of corporate critics and providing alternative information to the public, Telofski later elaborates that the company should appeal to independent authority by linking to third-party, objective sites providing information which counters the claims being made, information which is sound and based on good science, economics, etc.93
Your job, as a reputable company, is to call attention to the truth while discrediting reporting that is not grounded in the facts. Dont let the falsehoods of NGOs and Activists stand uncorrected, particularly if their false assertions have already broadly mutated. Challenge their assertions in the social web. By framing their assertions as
90 Ibid., 91 Ibid.,

p. 16. p. 275. 92 Ibid., pp. 274-277. 93 Ibid., p. 289.

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being misleading and by declaring the importance of responsible reporting, readers will, by extension, question the responsibility of the NGO/Activist reporting. ...[C]ounter-attacking or preempting NGOs and Activists in social media is about the truth. Its about operating on a higher level than the opponent. The truth sets everyone free.94

In this regard, I suspect that Telofskis standards of sound information and good science are somewhat lower than mine. For example, he repeatedly counters activist critiques of corporate environmental policy with the withering rejoinder that they obey all environmental laws and regulations. Telofski issues repeated caveats that his strategic advice isnt meant for corporate malefactors, or those who want to mislead the public. Those people should clean up their act before worrying about image management. But he makes it clear, throughout his book, that he regards such bad apples as a small minority in the corporate world. The great majority of large corporations are honest and law-abiding,95 and all about solving the problems of individuals.96 You know, as opposed to the corporations in the Bearded Spock universe where they have cowboy CEOs like Bob Nardelli, Rick Scott and Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who follow the downsize everybody, give yourself a bonus, cash in your stock options and split before the chickens come home to roost school of management. Seriously, anyone whos ever made a rst-hand comparison between the Ofcial Happy Talk in the mission statement about customer service, and a companys actual practice of gutting customer service staff, will know that corporations act like classic monopolistsseeing how much rent they can extract by rationing out and spoonfeeding a minimum of solving the problems of individuals in return for maximum returns. Anyone whos ever talked to an automated customer service line or sought information from a blue-smocked Wal-mart associate will know just how much of a ying fuck they give about solving the problems of individuals. The main individuals whose problems theyre interested in solving are CEOs trying to afford a third vacation home or a private jet. In Telofskis Bizarro world, while large corporations are overwhelmingly a bunch of Dudley Dorights, NGOs and activist organizations are a different story altogether. In his references to anti-corporate activists claims to serve the public interest and promote benets for societyas opposed to his straight-faced reiteration of such claims in corporate happy-talkTelofskis sarcasm fairly drips off the page. He criticizes NGOs for their lack of democratic accountability and for harming the interests of consumers allegedly served by corporations. But he takes the corporate image pretty much uncritically and at face value. For Telofski, a world dominated by large corporations is entirely natural and normal, and the only rational way to organize the world. Attacks on corporations are attacks on the job security and prosperity of their employees, on
94 Ibid., 95 Ibid.,

p. 305. p. 10. 96 Ibid., p. 295.

3.7. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS OR COUNTER OPEN MOUTH SABOTAGE 149 wages and job benets, and on the development of the new forms of technology the corporations might otherwise have produced. Managements agenda, by denition, is best business practices, and in the social interest. And outside interference with best business practices, by denition, causes inefciencies. So the interests of the corporation are the interests of society. No other form of organization is conceivable as an acceptable basis for society. The corporation must be safeguarded as a bulwark protecting everything we hold dear. The real is rational. Telofski, as an apologist for the feudal economic regime seven hundred years ago, might have asked in almost identical terms, who would provide the land to cultivatethus solving the problems of individualsif not the lords of manors. For Telofski, the assorted safety and environmental regulatory standards which most corporations meet represent the latest, best and soundest science. The very idea that a revolving door of personnel between the senior management of the regulated industries and political appointees at regulatory agencies might have rigged a set of dumbed-down, least-common-denominator standards that preempt stricter standards of common law liability, that they are designed to provide a safe harbor or g leaf against liability for all rms that meet this minimal standard, or that an awful lot of the sound science theyre based on bears the imprint of the industry-funded research that produced it, ranks right up there in terms of sheer tinfoil hattery with Ickes lizard people and the Bavarian Illuminati. In practice, most of the sites which I see defending corporate virtue with their allegedly sound science turn out to be efforts like CornSugar.org and EnergyTomorrow.org (Log on to learn more). If you ever saw the lm shown by that meat industry guy to Lisa Simpsons third grade science class to counter disinformation from vegetarians, you get the idea. Telofski himself warns his clients not to give these NGOs and Activists more ammunition to use against you by linking to third-party sites for which the client company represents too high a proportion of the total inbound linking sites.97 But really, who does he think hes kidding? When you take away all the industry-funded independent junk science research, and all the objective third-party organizations whose primary clients are trade associations, theres not much left. Telofski repeatedly recommends the use of fact checking software. But most of the factual issues between the two sides in any public relations dispute between corporations and consumer activists are not things that can be resolved by a simple visit to Snopes.com. Most of them involve the partial presentation of facts, the lack of context, or a disingenuous interpretation of themmainly on the corporate side. A good example is the television PSA from EnergyTomorrow.org, in which the blonde actress (fact is, a growing world will demand more) states how many years of automobile use American fossil fuel reserves are sufcient to provide. Thats just ne, except it totally ignores the centrally important question
97 Ibid.,

p. 308.

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of EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment): how many years demand the reserves amount to doesnt matter nearly so much as the maximum feasible rate of extracting it, or the costin both money and energy termsof extraction per unit of usable energy. And despite Telofskis assumption of the factual high ground, most of whats out there, in the way of objective third-party sources, is stuff like the abovementioned CornSugar.org and EnergyTomorrow.org. In most contests of scientic fact between the corporate world and consumer and environmental activists, the disingenuous oversimplications and half-truths turn out to be on the corporate side. Weve already seen the laughable picture fossil fuel industry PSAs present of the usability of energy reserves. Another good example is the ex cathedra pronouncements of the late Norman Borlaug on organic farming, which form the basis of so many appeals to authority by assorted agribusiness industry shills. Borlaug blithely asserted that organic farming would result in massive deforestationdespite the fact that intensive horticulture actually requires less land than conventional mechanized/chemical agriculture for a given unit of output. Conventional commercial farming techniques maximize, not output per acre, but output per labor-hour. To do so, agribusiness must actually use the land in a less intensive way. Borlaug also argued that organic farming would require deforestation for more pasturage to provide manure for fertilizer; apparently he never heard of composting or green manuring with leguminous cover crops. John Jeavons, who developed the Biointensive method of raised-bed cultivation, has disproved both of the Borlaug canards by growing enough food to feed a single human being on only 4,000 square feetusing no fertilizer besides green manuring and closed-loop recycling of waste. The anti-organic party line also claims that an atom of nitrogen is an atom of nitrogen; i.e., a plant cant tell the nitrogen in organic fertilizer from that in synthetic. That ignores the ways in which the soil ecosystemsoil friability, the symbiotic interaction between root hairs and soil bacteria, etc.affects the absorption of nitrogen. In any contest of facts and logic between Borlaug and such thinkers on the other side as Frances Moore Lapp or John Jeavons, Ill put my money on the latter. Another example is the registered dietitians who argue against nutritional supplements on the grounds that anything above the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance just means more expensive urine going into your toilet bowl. This ignores, rst of all, the fact that the RDA is simply the bare minimum of a nutrient required to prevent deciency-related diseases; it neglects the possibility that amounts above the RDA might contribute, albeit with diminishing returns, to optimal functioning. Second, it ignores the nature of anti-oxidants; for example all the ascorbic acid molecules over and above the RDA going into your toilet bowl have free radicals attached to them. Telofski advises prospective social media squads not only to provide high quality, information-based responses, with links to supportive, independent,

3.7. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS OR COUNTER OPEN MOUTH SABOTAGE 151 backing information, but to stay in the debate venues for the long haul.98 Oh, yes, please do. Because if theres one thing weve seen repeatedly demonstrated, its that high-quality information of the sort provided by Norman Borlaugs regurgitators and EnergyTommorow.org cant stand up to much in the way of follow-up questions. Giant corporations, of necessity, rely on Ofcial Happy Talk and supercial half-truths that are designed to deect scrutiny. Telofski wants corporate information warriors to identify the attacker as mistaken, to confront the opponent with facts, obtained from objective, third party sources. All I can say is, bring it on! Corporate debunking can be countered with still more unattering facts and critical analysis of the debunking itself. The corporation nds itself ghting an ongoing public battle in which it is forced to engage its critics on the grounds of truthand the critics can keep talking back. Their worst nightmare, in other words. Theres a reason PR acks and politicians dont like follow-up questions. A great deal of corporate propaganda is supercially attractive appeals to free enterprise and free markets that can be cut off at the knees by showing just what a bunch of corporate welfare queens and hypocritical protectionists those piggies at the trough really are, and how dependent they are on IP laws and other forms of protectionism. (Take, for example Monsantos use of food libel laws to suppress commercial free speech. Take attempts to suppress competition from those with more stringent quality standards, like meat-packers that test for mad cow disease more frequently than required by law, on the grounds that it constitutes disparagement of those who meet only the minimal regulatory standard.) A battle based on facts and truth? Dont even go there. The only hope for corporate power is that people stay ignorantin a hegemonically constructed reality created by big businessas long as possible. Telofski also elaborates on his suggestion to radicalize the attacker. That means to expose the NGOs agenda as leaning heavily left, with connections that can be considered radical, extremist, outside the mainstream of society, or highly politically-motivated. The corporate counter-attack should use social graphing software to uncover the groups and individuals that link to the NGO, and the associations of its members. For American NGOs, the company should check the organizations Form 990 which identies where they get their funding. Ever hear the saying about glass houses? Telofskis sword cuts both ways. You may show that anti-corporate activists are friends with some Dirty Fucking Hippies, but we can show that most of your factual propaganda and most of the messages coming from your allied organizations are Industry-Funded Junk Science. We can show that the boys in the C-Suite are so many Little Eichmanns, who would bulldoze Guatemalan peasants into mass graves just to lower the price of sugar a penny a pound. Whats more, even if some of us may look like Tommy Chong, we can get our factsfacts which overwhelmingly disprove the corporate pretend real98 Ibid.,

p. 311.

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ityfrom genuinely independent scholarly and respected public interest sources so straight they make Wally Cox look like Jerry Garcia. What it comes down to in the end is factscan your glossy bullet points and Did you knows. . . stand up to relentless cross-examination in a world where we can nally talk back? I repeat: Bring it on! The very fact that Telofski nds it necessary to pursue such an agenda of contesting with activists for the factual sphere means the war is lost. Corporate power depends on one-way control of discourse. If they have to wage a contest of facts and reason against those who can talk back, theyre already beaten. Telofski is about the best theyve got but hes still not good enough. As for his recommendation that companies hold the attacker to liability laws, well, it gives new meaning to the phrase dont go there. Seriously, this guy never heard of the McLibel case? The Streisand Effect? He really, really doesnt want to open that can of worms. Its a good way to wind up being systematically taken apart in front of a much, much, much larger audience. To repeat: Telofski is probably the best that their side can ever hope to come up with. But hes still not good enough. If they slow down and try to avoid decisive engagements, appeal to image and market their products mainly to stupid people with brand loyalties, they might just spin out the process of being nibbled to death by networked piranha for a few more decades. If they try to ght a pitched battle against us on his model, well just kill them faster.

3.8

Who Regulates the Regulators?

Its sometimes asked how a stateless society would prevent private malfeasors from doing this or that bad thing, like the criminal negligence that resulted in the Deepwater Horizons oil spill in the Spring of 2010. That reminds me of the August 9, 2010 Time magazine cover with the picture of a mutilated Afghan woman on the cover, and the title What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan. Um, apparently it also happens if we dont leave Afghanistan, considering the photo wasnt transmitted from the future. Anarchists can respond to such questions, with a grin, by saying I dont know. How did the state prevent it? But less facetiously, as we have already noted, the states supposed oversight agencies are quite prone to developing common interests with the industries they are ostensibly regulating. Given the average level of performance of regulatory and oversight agencies in the real world, networked advocacy organizations can frequently take more active and effective measures against private wrong-doers than the regulators are willing to. And whats more, they can expose the regulatory states collusive behavior in ways that were once impossible without rst sending a query letter to Ralph Nader or Barry Commoner. The regulatory state is there, supposedly, to sanction abuses by private business. So what are you supposed to do when the CEO calls the regulator Uncle Billy Bob? Again, who regulates the regulators? Answer: We do. A case in point is an incident in Louisiana, where local law enforcement acted as private security for British Petroleum. During much of the oil spill

3.8. WHO REGULATES THE REGULATORS?

153

aftermath, BP was notorious forillegallyblocking press access to the cleanup efforts. And according to the same Mac McClelland mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the line between the Jefferson Parish sheriffs department and BP in enforcing such blockage wasto put it mildlyrather blurry:
The next day, cops drive up and down Grand Isle beach explicitly telling tourists it is still open, just stay out of the water.... The blockade to Elmers [Island] is now four cop cars strong. As we pull up, deputies start bawling us out; all media need to go to the Grand Isle community center, where a BP Information Center sign now hangs out front. Grand Isle residents are not amused by the beach closing. Inside, a couple of Times-Picayune reporters circle BP representative Barbara Martin, who tells them that if they want passage to Elmer they have to get it from another BP ack, Irvin Lipp; Grand Isle beach is closed too, she adds. When we inform the TimesPic reporters otherwise, she asks Dr. Hazlett if hes a reporter; he says, No. She says, Good. She doesnt ask me. We tell her that deputies were just yelling at us, and she seems truly upset. For one, shes married to a Jefferson Parish sheriffs deputy. For another, We dont need more of a black eye than we already have." "But it wasnt BP that was yelling at us, it was the sheriffs ofce, we say. "Yeah, I know, but we have. . . a very strong relationship." "What do you mean? You have a lot of sway over the sheriffs ofce?" "Oh yeah." "How much?" "A lot." When I tell Barbara I am a reporter, she stalks off and says shes not talking to me, then comes back and hugs me and says she was just playing. I tell her I dont understand why I cant see Elmers Island unless Im escorted by BP. She tells me BPs in charge because its BPs oil." "But its not BPs land." "But BPs liable if anything happens." "So youre saying its a safety precaution." "Yeah! Y ou dont want that oil gettin into your pores." "But there are tourists and residents walking around in it across the street." "The mayor decides which beaches are closed. So I call the Grand Isle police requesting a press liason, only to get routed to voicemail for Melanie with BP. I call the police back and ask why they gave me a number for BP; they blame the re chief. I reach the re chief. Why did the police give me a number for BP? I ask. "Thats the number they gave us." "Who?" "BP."99
99 Mac McClelland, Its BPs Oil, Mother Jones, May <http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/oil-spill-bp-grand-isle-beach>.

23,

2010

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The liability and safety concerns struck McClelland as rather imsy, considering not only that tourists were let through to areas from which the press was barred, but that she observed BP cleanup workers in jeans and T-shirts.100 Not to mention, it was widely reported that BP specically forbade cleanup crews to wear protective gear in order to avoid anyahemunfortunate images on the evening news. In a follow-up, McClelland described an encounter in which local law enforcement ofcialsin uniform and using ofcial vehicleswere actually using their ashers to pull over reporters while on BPs payroll:
But a Louisiana sheriffs deputy pulling over a video camera-wielding private citizen because the head of BP security wanted to ask him some questions is a whole other level of alarming. Last week, Drew Wheelan, the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association, was lming himself across the street from the BP building/Deepwater Horizon response command in Houma, Louisiana. As he explained to me, he was standing in a eld that did not belong to the oil company when a police ofcer approached him and asked him for ID and strongly suggest[ed] that he get lost since BP doesnt want people lming".... Heres the key exchange:

Wheelan: Am I violating any laws or anything like that?" Ofcer: Um...not particularly. BP doesnt want people lming." Wheelan: Well, Im not on their property so BP doesnt have anything to say about what I do right now." Ofcer: Let me explain: BP doesnt want any lming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not lm anything right now. If that makes any sense. [Mr. Corleone dont like it when people dont pay their protection money. So all Knuckles and I can do is strongly suggest you pay up right now. If that makes any sense.]
Not really! Shortly thereafter, Wheelan got in his car and drove away but was soon pulled over. It was the same cop, but this time he had company: Kenneth Thomas, whose badge, Wheelan told me, read Chief BP Security. The cop stood by as Thomas interrogated Wheelan for 20 minutes, asking him who he worked with, who he answered to, what he was doing, why he was down here in Louisiana. He phoned Wheelans information in to someone. Wheelan says Thomas conscated his Audubon volunteer badge (hed recently attended an ofcial Audubon/BP birdhelper volunteer training) and then wouldnt give it back, which sounds like something only a bully in a bad movie would do. Eventually, Thomas let Wheelan go.... ....The deputy was off ofcial duty at the time, and working in the private employ of BP. Though the deputy failed to include the trafc stop in his incident report, Major Malcolm Wolfe of the sheriffs ofce says the deputys pulling someone over in his ofcial vehicle while working for a private company is standard and acceptable practice,
100 Op-Ed:

Reporters Covering Oil Spill Stymied.

3.9. MONITORY DEMOCRACY

because Wheelan was acting suspicious and could have been a terrorist.101

155

So apparently BPs security personnel were exercising law enforcement functions on land not occupied by BP, and law enforcement ofcials were acting as hired help. Sounds like something straight out of a Billy Jack movie, doesnt it? Julian Assange, in his Forbes interview, specically addressed this issue. When the state itself is lawless, or in bed with those it ostensibly regulates, legal protections are meaningless.
Do you think that the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative [a series of bills to make Iceland the most free-speech and whistleblowerprotective country in the world] would make it easier to do this right if it passes? Not at the highest level. W e deal with organizations that do not obey the rule of law. So laws dont matter. Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior. What about corporate leaks? For corporate leaks, yes, free speech laws could make things easier. Not for military contractors, because theyre in bed with intelligence agencies. If a spy agencys involved, IMMI wont help you. Except it may increase the diplomatic cost a little, if theyre caught. Thats why our primary defense isnt law, but technology.102

3.9

Monitory Democracy

John Keanes idea of monitory democracy overlaps to a large extent, albeit imperfectly, with the things weve been discussing here:
Monitory democracy is a new historical form of democracy, a variety of post-parliamentary politics dened by the rapid growth of many different kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms. These monitory bodies take root within the domestic elds of government and civil society, as well as in cross-border settings once controlled by empires, states and business organisations. In consequence... the whole architecture of self-government is changing. The central grip of elections, political parties and parliaments on citizens lives is weakening. Democracy is coming to mean more than elections, although nothing less. Within and outside states, independent monitors of power begin to have tangible effects. By putting politicians, parties and elected governments permanently on their toes, they complicate their lives, question their authority and force them to change their agendasand sometimes smother them in disgrace. ....Those with a taste for Latin would say that it is the tertium quid, the not fully formed successor of the earlier historical experiments with assembly-based and representative forms of democracy. In
101 McClelland, La Police Doing BPs Dirty Work, Mother Jones, June 22, <http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/06/BP-louisiana-police-stop-activist>. 102 Greenberg, An Interview with Wikileaks Julian Assange.

2010

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the name of people, the public, public accountability, the people or citizensthe terms are normally used interchangeably in the age of monitory democracypower-scrutinizing institutions spring up all over the place. Elections, political parties and legislatures neither disappear, nor necessarily decline in importance; but they most denitely lose their pivotal position in politics. Democracy is no longer simply a way of handling the power of elected governments by electoral, parliamentary and constitutional means, and no longer a matter conned to territorial states. Gone are the days when democracy could be described... as government by the unrestricted will of the majority. The bullheaded belief that democracy is nothing more than the periodic election of governments by majority rule is crumbling. Whether in the eld of local, national or supranational government, or in the powerridden world of non-governmental organisations and networks..., people and organisations that exercise power are now routinely subject to public monitoring and public contestation by an assortment of extraparliamentary bodies.103

Monitory democracy is a restraint not only on the power of government, but on that of institutions once considered to be outside the political realm like the workplace and family.104 Keane associates the rise of monitory democracy with the new media. If assembly-based democracy used the spoken word as a medium, and the ascendancy of representative democracy coincided with print and the early mass electronic media, monitory democracy is tied closely to the growth of multi-mediasaturated societiessocieties whose structures of power are continuously bitten by monitory institutions operating within a new galaxy of media dened by the ethos of communicative abundance. The new media include new, more adversarial styles of gotcha journalism in place of the old model of so-called objective journalism, and new technical capabilities like electronic memory, tighter channel spacing, new frequency allocation, direct satellite broadcasting, digital tuning and advanced compression techniques, along with the fundamentally new possibilities of computer-linked communications networks and a wide variety of real-time communications media operating on a 24-hour news cycle.105 The new, pervasive media atmosphere means that the realms of private life and privacy and wheeling and dealing of power in private have been put on the defensive.... Every nook and cranny of power becomes the potential target of publicity and public exposure; monitory democracy threatens to expose the quiet discriminations and injustices that happen behind closed doors and in the world of everyday life.106 Assorted monitory democracy bodies
specialise in directing questions at governments on a wide range of matters, extending from their human rights records, their energy
103 John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), pp. 688-690. 104 Ibid., pp. 708-710. 105 Ibid., pp. 737-739, 106 Ibid., p. 740.

3.9. MONITORY DEMOCRACY

production plans to the quality of the drinking water of their cities. Private companies are grilled about their services or products, their investment plans, how they treat their employees, and the size of their impact upon the biosphere. Questions are raised about which SUVs are most likely to roll over, which companies retail the worst fast food, and which are the biggest polluters.... In the age of monitory democracy, bossy power can no longer hide comfortably behind private masks; power relations everywhere are subjected to organised efforts by some, with the help of media, to tell otherspublics of various sizesabout matters that had been previously hidden away, in private.107

157

The ways in which Keanes monitory democracy differs from our desktop regulatory state are suggested by his quip that democracy is coming to mean more than elections, but nothing less. Bodies associated with monitory democracy in Keanes schema include not only non-governmental public interest organizations and movements, but also internal bodies like citizen review boards, omsbudsmen and the like attached to the state apparatus. Keane sees monitory democracy, and the rise of NGOs and civil society, as perfecting state democracy rather than supplanting it. In one sense the institutions of monitory democracy can be interpreted, as by Keane, as a way of making the political apparatus more democratic and accountable to the citizenry. Keane treats monitory democracy as something that presupposes representative democracy and makes it work better.108 But they can also be interpreted as ways to shift the balance of power from the state to civil society, and to constrain abuses of both state power and private power in ways that once required the state. Not only do institutions of monitory democracy in the private realm constrain the state and make it less statelike, but insofar as they undermine the power of private entities like large corporations or constrain the acts of racial and other majorities against minorities, they supersede functions once performedor nominally performed, in an actual atmosphere of collusionby government regulatory and civil rights agencies. If monitory democracy reins in abuses of state power, it also performsbetter than the statemany surveillance and protective functions traditionally associated with the regulatory state. Regardless of Keenes view of the state as a viable component of monitory democracy, the latter is a useful tool for those of us whose goal is not only to rein in the states discretionary power and level the playing ground between state and citizens, but also piecemeal supplanting of the state by voluntary selforganization wherever possible, and pressuring the state to become to take on more of transparent, networked and p2p character where it continues to exist and retain its statelike character. Pushed to this ultimate conclusion, the monitory democracy project blends in with Panarchy and what the P2P Foundation calls Open Everything.
107 Ibid., 108 Ibid.,

pp. 744-745. pp. 698-699.

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3.10

Open Everything

The Open Everything agenda starts with connectivity, moves toward virtual networks and regional decision-support centres, and culminates in all humans connected to all informationespecially true cost informationso as to achieve Panarchyinformed self-governance at all levels on all issues.109 As stated in Robert Steeles phasing schema, it entails the creation of an open, autonomous Internet which, through assorted meshwork and other alternative architectures, cannot be shut down by governments, corporations, or predatory non-government organizations. This autonomous Internet will be the basis of universal connectivity, in order to harness the distributed intelligence of all humans, and to create the aggregate people power to overcome secular corruption that is the source of all scarcity and conict... This people power will also require other autonomous platforms and infrastructure: the establishment of true cost information for every product and service, and the coincident establishment of local water, power, and currency options that begin to dismantle the dysfunctional grid that wastes half of what it moves in the movement.110 By way of explanation, true cost is an attempt to achieve, through the distributed collection and indexing of information, an easily accessible, productby-product and service-by-service database of information on the real component costs (including costs externalized on the taxpayer) of all the things we consume.
Someday we may be able to access the following through a mobile handset about any product while pointing to superior alternatives:

Water-use Energy-use Known toxins Chemicals corporations use without disclosing research about the chemicals (secrecy) Use of child and slave labor throughout production Tax avoidance & amount of tax subsidies Travel/migration of products life cycle111
109 Autonomous Internet Road Map, Foundation for P2P Alternatives Wiki. Accessed October 2, 2011 <http://p2pfoundation.net/Autonomous_Internet_Road_Map>. 110 Strategic Phasing, Foundation for P2P Altertnatives Wiki. Accessed October 2, 2011 <http://p2pfoundation.net/ Strategic_Phasing>. 111 Main Page, True Cost Wiki. Accessed October 2, 2011 <http://wiki.recongure.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>.

3.10. OPEN EVERYTHING

159

In other words, point the phone and read the bar code, and see if this product will kill you or if someone else was killed or abused as part of the products development.112 As for Panarchy, we will discuss it in detail below. According to Venessa Miemis, the growing number of people in the Third Worldhundreds of millions and growing exponentiallywho have affordable Internet access via mobile device, added to near-universal connectivity in the developed world, means that the goal of universal connectivity is near. The explosion of social media as a network tool also furthers the Open Everything goal of ubiquitous aggregation of people power to challenge state and corporation.113 And the emerging possibility of bankless Third World people participating in long-change via encrypted e-currencies means the Open Everything project of distributed currency options is also within reach.
All of these tools offering ways for people to connect, quantify, collaborate, and take action add up to new infrastructures for building trust and exchanging value at every level.... On the fringes of society exists the complementary currency marketa range of mechanisms that allow for peer-to-peer value exchange through mutual credit systems like LETS or via decentralized currencies like Bitcoin. When the tools are in place to allow individuals or groups within a local area to easily exchange value without using traditional/centralized currency, its reasonable to expect a serious challenge to the ingrained public perception of money.114

The list of Open Everything on P2P Foundations Autonomous Internet Road Map page includes, well, pretty much everything: Open...
Borders, Business, Carry, Communications, Culture, Government, Hardware, Intelligence, Library, Money, Networks, Schools, Search, Skies, Society, Software, Space, Spectrum115

Consider how the Open Everything movements legal strategy, despite a signicant difference in emphasis, dovetails with the positive side of Keanes Monitory Democracy:
The emergence of the Autonomous Internet will transform the global to local legal system. Legal rights rooted in corruption and privilege, and especially legal rights affording secrecy and monopoly privileges as well as personality protections to corporations, will be over-turned by public consensus, rst at local and state levels, then nationally, and nally globally. In the interim, and rooted rmly in the concepts of public sovereignty, localities and states or provinces will combine both local implementation of the Autonomous Internet, with nullication of federal or inter112 Review: Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover), Public Intelligence Blog, April 28, 2006 <http://www.phibetaiota.net/ 2006/04/revolutionary-wealth-hardcover/>. 113 Venessa Miemis, 4 trends shaping the emerging superuid economy, Global Public Square, April 29, 2011 <http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/29/4-trends-shapingthe-emerging-superuid-economy/>. 114 Miemis, 4 trends. 115 Autonomous Internet Road Map.

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national attempts to impose restrictions on spectrum use, to take one example, that are from a more corrupt and less technically evolved Industrial Era. In extreme cases, secession will be the solution chosen by a sovereign public group, with Vermont and Hawaii being the two most obvious candidates for full independence from the United STATES of America. This Road Map does not favor secession or any other political course of action; it is designed to empower all humans everywhere to be free with dignity and empowered to live in a prosperous world at peace, however they choose to dene their own circumstances.116

3.11

Panarchy

The concept of panarchy was originally put forward by Paul Emile de Puydt. Different forms of government, as an extension of the general principle of laissezfaire, were to compete with one another. And monarchists, republicans, etc., were to choose a government to their liking in the same way they would shop among competing providers of goods. These governments would not cover an entire contiguous geographical area, but would be distributed, with citizens voluntarily declaring allegiance to them wherever they lived.
...assemble, declare your program, draw up your budget, open membership lists, take stock of yourself; and if numerous enough to bear the costs, establish your republic. Whereabouts? In the Pampas? No, certainly not; here, where you are, without moving.117

Each citizen would register with a Bureau of Political Membership, and ll in a form:
In each community a new ofce is opened, a Bureau of Political Membership". This ofce would send every responsible citizen a declaration form to ll in, just as for income tax or dog registration. Question: What form of government would you desire? Quite freely you would answer, monarchy, or democracy, or any other. Question: If monarchy, would you have it absolute or moderate ..., if moderated, how?" You would answer constitutional, I suppose. Anyway, whatever your reply, your answer would be entered in a register arranged for this purpose; and once registered, unless you withdrew your declaration, observing due legal form and process, you would thereby become either a royal subject or citizen of the republic. Thereafter you would in no way be involved with anyone elses government - no more than a Prussian subject is with Belgian authorities. You would obey your own leaders, your own laws, and your own regulations. You would pay neither more nor less, but morally it would be a completely different situation.
116 Autonomous 117 Paul

Internet Road Map. Emile de Puydt, Panarchy (1860) <http://www.panarchy.org/depuydt/1860.eng.html>.

3.11. PANARCHY
Ultimately, everyone would live in his own individual political community, quite as if there were not another, nay, ten other, political communities nearby, each having its own contributors too. If a disagreement came about between subjects of different governments, or between one government and a subject of another, it would simply be a matter of observing the principles hitherto observed between neighbouring peaceful States; and if a gap were found, it could be lled without difculties by human rights and all other possible rights. Anything else would be the business of ordinary courts of justice.... There might and should be also common interests affecting all inhabitants of a certain district, no matter what their political allegiance is. Each government, in this case, would stand in relation to the whole nation roughly as each of the Swiss cantons, or better, the States of the American Union, stand in relation to their federal government. Thus, all these fundamental and seemingly frightening questions are met with ready-made solutions; jurisdiction is established over most issues and would present no difculties whatsoever.... My panacea, if you will allow this term, is simply free competition in the business of government. Everyone has the right to look after his own welfare as he sees it and to obtain security under his own conditions. On the other hand, this means progress through contest between governments forced to compete for followers. True worldwide liberty is that which is not forced upon anyone, being to each just what he wants of it; it neither suppresses nor deceives, and is always subject to a right of appeal. To bring about such a liberty, there would be no need to give up either national traditions or family ties, no need to learn to think in a new language, no need at all to cross rivers or seas, carrying the bones of ones ancestors. It is simply a matter of declaration before ones local political commission, for one to move from republic to monarchy, from representative government to autocracy, from oligarchy to democracy, or even to Mr. Proudhons anarchy - without even the necessity of removing ones dressing gown or slippers.... What is most admirable about this innovation is that it does away, for ever, with revolutions, mutinies, and street ghting, down to the last tensions in the political tissue. Are you dissatised with your government? Change over to another! These four words, always associated with horror and bloodshed, words which all courts, high and low, military and special, without exception, unanimously nd guilty of inciting to rebellion, these four words become innocent, as if in the mouths of seminarists, and as harmless as the medicine so wrongly mistrusted by Mr. de Pourceaugnac. "Change over to another means: Go to the Bureau for Political Membership, cap in hand, and ask politely for your name to be transferred to any list you please. The Commissioner will put on his glasses, open the register, enter your decision, and give you a receipt. You take your leave, and the revolution is accomplished without spilling any more than a drop of ink....

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So, free competition in the business of government as in all other cases.... Under the present conditions a government exists only by the exclusion of all the others, and one party can rule only after smashing its opponents; a majority is always harassed by a minority which is impatient to govern. Under such conditions it is quite inevitable that the parties hate each other and live, if not at war, at least in a state of armed peace. Who is surprised to see that minorities intrigue and agitate, and that governments put down by force any aspiration to a different political form which would be similarly exclusive? So society ends up composed of ambitious resentful men, waiting for vengeance, and ambitious power-sated men, sitting complacently on the edge of a precipice. Erroneous principles never bring about just consequences, and coercion never leads to right or truth. Then imagine that all compulsion ceases; that every adult citizen is, and remains, free to select from among the possible offered governments the one which conforms to his will and satises his personal needs; free not only on the day following some bloody revolution, but always, everywhere, free to select, but not to force his choice on others. 118

[Paul Herzog, Panarchy: Governance in a Networked Age; Ronfeldt and Arquilla, In Athenas Camp]

3.12

Collective Contract

The Direct Action Networks Collective Contract proposes taking advantage of the low transaction costs of aggregating collective action outside of traditional hierarchies, as a source of leverage against powerful institutions. The idea, specically, is to aggregate individual purchasing power into associations for the coordinated imposition of terms of service on corporations as a condition of doing business with the members. Individuals are thereby enabled to deal with corporations as equals.
Today we can evolve another new mechanism of democratic accountability. The development of the internet means that we can form a different kind of union - one which stops the misuse of political power derived from the money given to corporations. This is a union of the end-users of corporations. It can break out of the corporations unilateral contract by withholding custom. The Direct Action Network is a platform designed to allow such a union to form. As such, it is democracys missing link. It provides a means by which we can all fulll that duty we owe.119 The rst thing that you to do is to register on the Network as an end-user of a corporation (or many corporations). It could be your electricity company, it could be Paypal, or a credit card corporation, it could be Walmart, your cell phone company or your mortgage com118 Ibid. 119 Part

I: Democracys Missing Link, The Direct Action Network <http://wikiterms7.pen.io/>.

3.12. COLLECTIVE CONTRACT

pany. It could even be a corporation that you do not receive goods or services from. [2028?] You are now part of the User-Base of that corporation on the Network.... If you are not an activist or a corporation, you have two interfaces on the Network. Broadly speaking the rst is for catching corporations. The second is for taming them. The rst goes by the name uTOU Interface". U stands for union, TOU stands for terms of use. uTou enables you to do something more amazing than lassoing a stampeding rhino with a thread of spiders silk. But having caught this wild rhino, you are going to need some help in taming it. This is what the second interface is for, and this is called rather enticingly the Campaign Interface." The rst interface enables you to serve terms of use on a corporation. These TOU are part of the contract between you and the corporation. They are legally binding on the corporation.... A collective contract is an agreement given by a union of individuals. It can be a union of any kind. The 1689 and the 1791 Bill off Rights are examples of collective contracts, so is Magna Carta. So are wage settlement agreements of a trade union. For our purposes, a collective contract is one given by the 99% to the corporations.[2028?]... What you are doing by sending terms of use to a corporation is asserting a right to control how the corporation uses the money that it receives from you for its goods or services.[2028?]... The terms of use do this by imposing on the corporation ve duties 1. Transparency to the User-base 2. Consultation with the User-base in decisions affecting the Userbase. 3. Privacy of the data of the User-base. 4. Coherence (Not trading with a corporation which does not abide by the terms of use ) 5. Due Process....120 A primary function of the Network is to enable the user-base of a corporation to organise themselves effectively and quickly so that the target corporation cannot generate prots from it products. The Network makes it possible for end-users to employ a variety of tactics to achieve a corporate arrest.... ...The Network allows a total boycott by all the end-users of the corporation. By allowing a union of the whole user-base, the Network makes the traditional boycott a much more effective tool than it has been previously. By allowing a union of the whole user-base, the Network makes the traditional boycott a much more effective tool than it has been previously. This effectiveness comes from four other new factors.
120 Part

163

II: The Architecture of the Network, The Direct Action Network.

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Firstly, the Network enables the user-base to attack the corporations economic activity both directly through its products and indirectly, through the supply chain of the corporation. This prevents the corporation from getting the raw materials and nance needed to function within its prot margins. These are smart boycotts". The network allows pin-point strikes against particular assets or functions of the corporation. It allows the user-base, for example to attack the private shareholdings of the chief executives of the target corporation, that he or she holds in another corporation, as means of leveraging compliance from the target corporation. The second new factor is enforcing the boycott through other corporations in the target corporations supply chain. A corporation signed to the collective contract cannot engage in any kind of commercial relationship with a corporation which is not signed or is in breach of its obligations under the TOU. The third factor is that non-cooperation of the user-base becomes a constant factor for the corporations. Boycotts were traditionally ineffective because they were temporary or one off actions. There was nothing to stop a corporation returning to its harmful activities once the boycott was over. There was no effective way of consolidating the gains made by the boycott. The collective contract makes the gains a permanent feature. Lastly, the motivation of end-users to act against harmful corporations has always been lessened by image make-overs and the allpervasive corporate propaganda. The Network, to borrow a phrase from Anonymous does not forgive and does not forget". It provides end-users with a way of remembering - a corporate criminal record which remains forever attached to its products. End-users can always see this whenever they go to buy a product from a corporation with such a history. The combination of these factors makes it possible to totally arrest the economic activity of a rogue corporation. Tactics would not be limited to a boycott, for example the endusers of a non-compliant corporation could threaten to switch to a rival corporation or in fact switch. The possibility of this move creates a competitive advantage for corporations that sign to the Collective Contract. The Network is designed as a platform for the mobilisation of endusers. It provides a connection between all the end-users who are affected by the actions of a corporation and all the end users of that corporations supply chain network. This enables the entire user-base to coordinate itself. Overall the Network provides a lightning rod which connects the entire user-base of the whole global corporate network.... The user-base of a corporation has two ways to make sure that a corporation abides by the terms of the Collective Contract. The main one simply arises from the fact that a corporation cannot afford to be in conict with its main source of nance. But breach of the Collective Contract is also legally enforceable against the corporation. This would result in the corporation having to pay damages to the endusers. The level of those damages might reach is an untested area of

3.13. HEATHER MARSHS PROPOSAL FOR GOVERNANCE

law. In any event, a corporation would be very reluctant to defend a breach of the TOU in court because it would a create an embarrassing publicity nightmare for it to be seen ghting the very people it needs to woo to sell its product.... Campaigns are conducted by end-users through the Campaign Interface of the Network. So let us have a look at how this operates.

165

Because the Campaign interface provides users with a comprehensive list of rms in a corporate supply chain, even a minority of consumers participating in a boycott campaign pursuant to a Collective Contract, by systematically attacking key nodes in the chain, could impose signicant costs from attrition on the target rm.121

3.13

Heather Marshs Proposal for Governance

There are numerous proposals that fall loosely within Comtes conception of replacing domination over men with the administration of things. For example, Heather Marshs Proposal for Governance:
Governments up till now have been run by hierarchical groups, which act as the nal authority on all topics for an entire region for an arbitrarily specied length of time or until they are overthrown by another group. What these authorities govern is a series of systems, controlled by the state or corporations, and run as dictatorships where workers individual rights are exchanged for the basic necessities of life. These systems have prot for the top of the hierarchy as their objective; they are not set up to provide an efcient or superior service or product to the users. If these systems were organized as autonomous, transparent, porous, peer to peer user groups, they would be far better governed by themselves. The current political structure does not recognize that every system is not of concern or interest to everyone in the region, or that some users have far greater knowledge and expertise in specic areas than others. We need a system where responsibility and control rests with the entire user group and expertise is acknowledged and put to best use. Autonomous: each user group should consist of all people affected by the system and no people not affected by the system. Transparent: all information related to the system must be fully transparent in order for users to participate in tasks or auditing. Porous: contribution at all levels of each user group must be open to all users with acceptance by peer review. Peer to peer: each user group should consist of users: audit and provide feedback, contributors: interested users who periodically present work for acceptance by the members, members: have acquired expertise and been accepted as full contributing members by the user group, and a core group: recognized by the group as having the necessary level of expertise to provide direction for the system.
121 Part

III: Campaigns, The Direct Action Network.

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Meritocracy: A side effect of these user groups is that they provide workers with the three motivators which provide the greatest job satisfaction, autonomy, mastery and purpose. People can work on anything they like, they are not required to submit resumes, acquire accreditation, seniority, or approval from an individual authority. If their work is good enough it will be accepted by the user group. Everyone can work on the system that interests them, doing the jobs at the level they are capable of, with as much or as little involvement as they choose. Systems should be organized by user groups, not by nations or treaties. International systems would include things such as the internet, telecommunications and knowledge, local systems would include things such as transit, food production and social services, and in any situation where only one family or an individual is affected, the responsibility would lie with only them. Each local user group or individual would have access to outside user groups for trade, shared knowledge, disaster relief, etc., autonomous but networked.122

[Last modied March 15, 2012]

122 Heather Marsh, A proposal for governance in the post 2011 world, WL Central, December 24, 2011 http://wlcentral.org/node/2389<>.

Chapter 4

Basic Infrastructures: Networked Economies and Platforms

When it comes to networked economies, it seems to be steam engine time. Of course it shouldnt be surprising that a wide range of thinkers came up with similar ideas for social organizationas is the case with any other innovationas soon as the building blocks became available and there was a perceived need for it. The building blocks were the digital revolution and the open Web of the 1990s. As for the perceived need, it should be obvious to anyone whos read James Scott on not being governed or Hakim Bey on pirate utopias that the perceived need is as old as the state and class society. To quote Peter Ludlow:
The reason that anarchy becomes a topic of interest in cyberspace is simply that with the widespread availability of various technologies (such as public key cryptography) it now appears that certain anarchist ideals may be possible, if not inevitable. That is, cryptography and related technologies like anonymous remailers and electronic cash may undermine the concentrations of power that we are currently familiar with (nation states, for example), thus allowing us to take on substantially more individual responsibility.1

At the root of all the networked platform models examined below is what Timothy May, writing in 2001, called the virtual community: The Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts are both examples of virtual communities that span the globe, transcend national borders, and create a sense of allegiance, of belonging, and a sense of community. Likewise, the Maa is a virtual community (with its enforcement mechanisms, its own extralegal rules, etc.) Lots of other examples: Masons, Triads, the Red Cross, Interpol, Islam, Judaism, Mormons, Sendero Luminoso, the IRA, drug cartels, terrorist groups,
1 Peter Ludlow, Preface, in Ludlow, ed., Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2001), xvii.

167

168CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS Aryan Nations, Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front, and so on. There are undoubtedly many more such virtual communities than there are nation-states, and the ties that bind them are for the most part much stronger than are chauvinist nationalist emotions. Any group in which the common interests of the group, be it a shared ideology or a particular interest is enough to create a cohesive community.
Corporations are another prime example of a virtual community, having scattered sites, private communication channels (generally inaccessible to the outside world, including their authorities), and their own goals and methods. In fact many cyberpunk (not cypherpunk) ction authors make a mistake, I think, in assuming the future world will be dominated by transnational megacorporate states. In fact corporations are just one example of many such virtual communities that will be effectively on a par with nation states. (Note especially that any laws designed to limit use of crypto cause immediate and profound problems for corporations and that countries like France and the Philippines, which have attempted to limit the use of crypto, have mostly been ignored by corporations. Any attempts to outlaw crypto will produce a surge of sudden incorporations, thus gaining for the new corporate members the aegis of corporate privacy.) In an academic setting, invisible colleges are the communities of researchers. These virtual communities typically are opaque to outsiders. Attempts to gain access to the internals of these communities are rarely successful. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies... may inltrate such groups and use electronic surveillance (ELINT) to monitor these virtual communities. Not surprisingly, these communities have been early adopters of encryption technology, ranging from scrambled cellphones to full-blown PGP encryption.... The advent of full-featured communications systems for computermediated virtual communities will have even more profound implications. MUDs and MOOs (multi-user domains, etc.) and 3D virtual realities are one avenue [as also multi-player online role-playing gamessee below under Suarez], and text-centric Net communications are another....

The so-called Internet2 is projected to link tens of thousands of community anchor institutions throughout the United States and the world with a much higher capacity ber optic backbone. Of course, on one level it sounds like a renewed attempt at a high-bandwidth Information Superhighway with paid streaming content. But it also offers the potential of increasing the scope and power of networked platforms far beyond their present state. All sorts of collaborative software platforms, serving resilient communities, might piggyback on this infrastructure. [cite Gordon Cook] A common theme in the networked platform models discussed below is that they are scalable and modular, with any number of local communities or organizations being able to connect to them on a stigmergic basis.

4.1. HAKIM BEY

169

4.1

Hakim Bey

Although Bey, as we saw in an earlier chapter, was rather pessimistic about the potential of Temporary Autonomous Zones to become the building blocks of a successor society, and he imagined the Web as a mere shadow counter-net of hackers, zines and BBS systems parasitizing on the ofcial government/university Internet of the mid-1980s, he still had a vision of the Web as a support platform for TAZs thats relevant to our interests.
Thus the Web, in order to produce situations conducive to the TAZ, will parasitize the Netbut we can also conceive of this strategy as an attempt to build toward the construction to an alternative and autonomous Net, free and no longer parasitic, which will serve as the basis for a new society emerging from the shell of the old. The counter-Net and the TAZ can be considered, practically speaking, as ends in themselvesbut theoretically they can also be viewed as forms of struggle toward a different reality.2

Bey anticipated a Web that might provide logistical support for the TAZ and help bring it into being. The TAZ would exist in information-space as well as in the real world; capabilities provided by the Web would compensate for its limited duration and xity of locale. The Web, in this vision, is a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it invisible or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand.3

4.2

Bruce Sterling: Islands in the Net

The Net in Islands is much closer to an extrapolation from older visions of the Information Superhighway than to the post-Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web. Sterlings Net, written as his story was before the emergence of the Web, was largely divided between a Superhighway of Cable TV and proprietary streaming content, and corporate intranets. One gets some idea of the avor from a statement by an elderly character who says she doesnt like the Netshe never even liked Cable TV. It is of a type with most pre-Tim Berners-Lee visions of the Net, whether they be William Gibsons cyberspace or the metaverse in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash: monolithic, institutional, closed. Sterlings transnationals did, however, to some extent foreshadow the kinds of platforms later envisioned by David de Ugarte (phyles), Daniel Suarez (the Darknet/D-space), and John Robb (Economies as a Software Service)see below. The platforms, apparently, almost all belong to transnationals of one sort or another. But the transnationals include a wide variety of enterprise forms. The protagonists transnational, for instanceRhizomeis a worker cooperative with an ofcial philosophy of self-management. Its bottom line is ludic joy rather than prot, and it has replaced labour, the humiliating specter of
2 Hakim Bey, T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Autonomedia 1985, 1991) <http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/taz.htm>. . 3 Ibid.

170CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS forced production, with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure. A large number of its associates do no paid work at all, but participate in the internal non-money economy of Rhizome or are taken care of as dependents.4 And its a worldwide distributed network of local facilities using the Netor rather the corporate platform hosted by itas a base of support.

4.3

Phyles: Neal Stephenson

The term phyles, as far as I know, itself comes from Neal Stephensons novel The Diamond Age. The Diamond Age is set in a ctional world where encrypted Internet commerce destroyed most of the tax base of conventional territorial states (as soon as the media grid was up and running, nancial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared),5 most states became hollowed out or collapsed altogether and the world shifted instead (after a chaotic Interregnum) to organization based on localized city-states, and on transnational distributed networks (the phyles). A phyle, in the novel, was a non-territorial global network. Most phyles were national or ethnicthe neo-Victorians and Nipponese were the two most important, but there were many dozens more including Zulu, Boers, Israelis, Mormons, Ashanti, Sendero (Shining Path, a Colombian MaoistGonzaloist phyle)and others were synthetic (of which the largest and most important was the First Distributed Republic, a hacker phyle that created and maintained nodes for the global CryptNet). The larger phyles commonly maintained territorial enclaves in major cities around the world (much as the Venetians, as described by de Ugarte, rented enclaves for the habitation of their merchants in major cities on the Mediterranean coast). The neo-Victorian (Vickies) enclaves tended to predominate in former countries of the Anglosphere; the Nipponese demographic base for recruitment was the territory of the former state of Japan, and Nipponese enclaves tended to cluster in areas of former Japanese economic inuence on the Pacic Rim. But there were Vicky and Nipponese quarters in most of the major cities of the world. Although the novel is vague on the nature of the support platforms provided by the phyles, its clear from the specic case of the neo-Victorian phyle that it supports an ecosystem of Vicky member enterprises.

4.4

Phyles: David de Ugarte

In his series of books culminating in Phyles, David de Ugarte developed the phyle concept as a model for real-world organization, in an era of declining
4 Bruce 5 Neal

Sterling, Islands in the Net, p. 195. [Full cite] Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or, a Young Ladys Illustrated Primer (Bantam, 1995), p.

247.

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

171

states and corporations and rising networks. His primary model for the concept is the Las Indias Cooperative Group to which he belongs (about which much more below). He also devoted an extensive portion of the book to realworld historical precedents for such organizations, including a number of networked merchant organizations and guilds in the Middle Ages (he characterizes his phyle movement as neo-Venetian). One of his historical examples of the neo-Venetian model, including an effective reputational system, is Jewish merchants in the Maghreb
(that is, in Western Islam), who reached the region in the 10th century, eeing the conict and political persecution in Baghdad, then the turbulent capital of the Abbasid caliphate. These merchants would set up shop in Al-Andalus and the Maghreb as well as in the emergent Italian republics, and in general, in the Christian Mediterranean, capitalising on a signicant part of interregional trade. They established a dense social network, in which some members worked as agents for other members in dozens of European ports, fairs, and markets. What [Avner] Greif points out is that the identity shared by this group, originally based on the experience of mutual support and exile, discouraged treason even if commercial relationships were not expected to last. Maghribi Jews constituted an identitarian community. They preferably hired other members of the network, previously tested, as agents, and uently shared the information, for after all they constituted a distributed and dense network, aware of sharing a common economic metabolism. A distinct, increasingly dense group culture contributed, among them, to reduce transaction costs and the need for extended and complex regulations... This internal operation raised costs for any possible new member who wanted to cheat another member or abuse his trust. Who would want to lose the chance of working and trading with his own people, that is, with the entire network, and forever?6

De Ugartes phyles, as a model of organization, embody all these featureswhile incorporating the benets of digital technology and network organization as force multipliers. As he describes the process of their development, rst the network replaces centralized systems and then communities arise on the backbone of the network. Finally, some communities evolve into phyles.
The phyle is a real community (then transnational and virtually born) who collectively have rms or [a] group of rms with the declared objective of feeding economically the autonomy of the community. Community precedes and has always priority over business, so economic decision making processes never can impose its results over the scope of community plurarchy. For phyle members there are two simple truths: the preeminence of the transnational community[s] needs and freedoms over its own economy and the necessity of producing and trading in a plain, non hierarchical environment. When both principles are linked by the economic democracy principle (usually through cooperativist forms) we are talking about neovenetianism. But, neovenetianism its not
6 David

de Ugarte, Phyles, pp. 128-129.

172CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

an organized movement nor a structured ideology but an environment related to the conversation on phyle and phyle building. Indeed we could say that neovenetianism is a multitude of forever-opened phyle-related discussions: cooperatives vs familiar rm networks, virtual markets vs monetary and trade ecosystems, communitarism vs universalism, open communities vs integration procedures, etc. Over all of them [the] phyle itself could be consensually dened as a networked, distributed, small sized, hacker ethic empowered, Internet born organism with high productivity and great resilience [which] has its own universe of myths, narratives and tools....7

Las Indias, as described by the members of that phyle, is a case in point. Las Indias,8 according to the accounts of several of its members, emerged from the European cyberpunk movement of the late eighties as a distributed virtual group of civil rights activists more or less centered on Berlin. According to de Ugarte, the rise of phyles was a natural outgrowth of the Internet and World Wide Web, and the emergence of transnational linguistic cultures built on the Internet: The Internet is the great steroid jar of this century. Take the ethics of the lonesome Ivy League hackers of the 80[2032?]s and set them loose on the web: in 15 years you will get Linux, Firefox, free music, the Public Domain movement and the end of the old culture industry. Take the old BBS, fanzines and fan conventions, move them to the Internet, and you will get the greatest conversational community boom since the Babel Tower.
When conversations take place in languages such as French, Spanish, or Arabic, they become transnational with great ease. Only 2 out of every 5 people who write in French on the Internet live in France. More than half the readers of any Madrid website with more than 1000 visitors per day are in Latin America. Arabic in the Western Islamic world has gone, in ten years, from being a religious language superimposed onto regional, almost mutually unintelligible varieties (Moroccan, Algerian, etc.), to having a standard that is gradually reunifying the local dialects: Al Jazeera Arabic. Virtual communities arise in new spaces, the spaces of the various globalisations associated with the great transnational languages. The main players in these communities belong to two generations that have grown up with Himanens hacker ethic: the network logic of abundance and the work ethic of free software are the glue that binds the blogosphere. The result: conversational communities, identitarian, transnational non-hierarchical tribes, based on the powerful in7 David de Ugarte, Neovenetianism in a nutshell: from networks to phyles, El Arte de las Cosas, September 18, 2010 <http://elarte.coop/neovenetianism-in-a-nutshell-from-networks-tophyles/>. 8 The following account of the origins of Las Indias is based on statements of several members of the phyle. They include ; Syntectics: Las Indias Cooperative Group, myninjaplease.com, November 15, 2010 <http://www.myninjaplease.com/?p+16169>; De Ugarte, Phyles, El Correo de las Indias. Accessed October 19, 2011 <http://deugarte.com/phyles>. ; Maria Rodriguez Munos personal email of November 13, 2011; Because I fused so many bits and pieces from these different documents into a single narrative, my only attributions to individual sources are for material in quotes.

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

centive that is recognition. Let us place these communities in the midst of the whirlwind that is a world where national states are sinking and the globalisation of the economy is eroding all the good old institutions that used to make people feel secure. Many of these communities will wish to have their own economy, community companies and common funds (de Ugarte, Phyles).

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The Las Indias cooperative arose from the cyberpunk milieu in Europe, centered in Berlin, and more particularly Spanish circles afliated with it:
A time ago, in the far, far days of the falling of communism, some cyberpunk young people started in Berlin a kind of small virtual community trying to understand what was happening in the world. With the years it developed into an ezine and a civil rights cyberactivist group (de Ugarte, from My Ninja Please interview).

Spanish cyberpunks went from cyberactivism and literature to constituting a group of cooperative enterprises straddling South America and Madrid. Their new banners: economic democracy, resilience, and transnationality. They changed names: now they are known as Indianos, the Spanish word for the emigrant who would return to his home village after making his fortune in the Americas. Only that the Indianos America has been the Internet, and their business has spread from consultancy to sustainable production or local development (de Ugarte, Phyles). Unfortunately, problems like different nationalities, legal regimes and passports causedto say the leastserious inconvenience for a virtual community that transcended national boundaries. Some members of the Spanish cyberpunk movement participating in this loose virtual community realized that a virtual community couldnt remain strong and independent without an economic structure (Maria Rodriguez, email, Nov. 13). It meant a lot more of discussions, ideas and study, but nally we arrived to the idea of building our own economical structure in order to give safety to our way of living and to the liberty we always loved but we only lived in the Internet. A s we had seen at this moment, wars, some states to fall and some democratic revolutions to fail, we thought from the very rst moment in non national terms. The only possible securitywe thoughtis to have a distributed environment and distributed income sources in the same way Internets safety is based in its distributed architecture.
Las Indias Cooperative Group is the materialization of this project (de Ugarte, My Ninja Please interview).

Jose Alcantara, in the My Ninja Please interview, concurred that it was an online Spanish cyberpunk group behind Las Indias: it was mainly centered on supporting/launching activism campaigns on both the Internet and the physical world, and both inside and outside the territories controlled by the Spanish State. Likewise, he backs up de Ugartes and Rodriguezs assessment of the need for economic autonomy based on a legally recognized organizational structure:
At some point, the group discovered that its survival was dependent on some economic autonomy and soon some of the members

174CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

of this Spanish Cyberpunk group found themselves forming an small enterprise and, later, wanting to extend to their daily life the environment they have been enjoying for years on the net. This is how the Sociedad de las Indias Electronicas was born. A few years later, after transferring all the democratic principles and all the hacker ethics to the way Las Indias organizes itself, and also after giving birth to a new cooperative, the Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias got to 2010 with a healthy, full-of-goals mindset.

So based on their realization of the need for a common economic structure, and on their ideological afnity for the principle of economic democracy, they rst built a Las Indias electronics cooperative and then set up over it, as an umbrella structure, the Las Indias Cooperative Group as a transnational cooperative. The Las Indias phyle is a transnational community of people that guarantee their autonomy and freedom through companies organized by the principle of the economic democracy around Las Indias Cooperative Group. (Maria Rodriguez, email, Nov. 13, 2011) The Group started out with a small community of only three persons in 2002, and has since grown to include not only two cooperative rms, but two comfortable bases (Madrid and Montevideo) and... is seeding our environment, promoting new businessfour only during the past year (Rodriguez, My Ninja Please interview). According to Natalia Fernandez, the electronics cooperative, founded in 2002, was the rst cooperative of the Las Indias group, and has also been our engine over the years.
Born with a capital of only 3000 euros, we developed, and have developed projects in the past, with a number of companies in the IBEX35 (Madrid Stock Exchange) and public institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Spain. The activity of La Sociedad Cooperativa de las Indias Electronicas covers a wide geographical area that includes Spain and Latin America (My Ninja Please interview).

Manuel Ortega added, in the same interview, that the electronics cooperative was the head of the Cooperative Group. It centralizes the commercialization of our products and services. It was also, he said, the embryo of the economic democracy in the Indiana phyle. Las Indias is a phyle based largely in the Spanish-speaking world, with its two primary physical bases in Madrid and Montevideo. As the members of the phyle explained in the My Ninja Please interview:
David de Ugarte: They are the rst two dots of a distributed network of places, ofces, business and social infrastructures we are dedicated to build. Probably the third one will be in Africa. . . or maybe in other part of America. More dots: more security for our way of living, more welfare for us, more social action in our everydays social environment. . . more phyle we will be :D Maria Rodriguez: There is not much relation between the two cities, but there is a strong emotional relation between las Indias and Montevideo. Madrid is the easiest place for making business in the Spanish-Portuguese-speaking-world (what we call the latoc world). So we make business mainly in Madrid, but we enjoy mainly Mon-

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

tevideo. Anyway, we hope to open new bases in other latoc cities soon. . . Jose F. Alcantara: Madrid is where it all began, even though most of us are not from Madrid. Montevideo symbolizes our will of living transnationally, our commitment to achieve that and the very rst touchable fact that we are on the right way. Montevideo is where we decided to set our rst stable location. We chose that for many reasons including practical ones (Montevideo is really well connected with every important city in the region as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires or many others, so that it enables us to really operate in the whole Ibero-american region from a single city) and personal ones (Uruguay is a quiet country with a profound democratic culture. Add the nice restaurants and the fact that Montevideo is placed near the sea and youll have it made). Natalia Fernandez: Montevideo is where we decided to locate our headquarters out of Spain. Therefore, it is a very special place for us, as it represents the staging of our commitment to a transnational way of life. From Montevideo we can easily get everywhere through the Southern Cone, allowing as to effectively work in the region. What we like the most is to enjoy the country and their conversations, though. We try to contribute to these and we certainly do it, to the best of our abilities. Manuel Ortega: The special relationship between Madrid and Montevideo for us resides in that both are a part of the latoc world and they are now two places where we nd the minimum freedom to live ours lives.

175

This community is central to understanding the phyle. Alcantara says the phyle is a community of people who know each other, and subsequently decides to give birth to some enterprises.... [I]ts also important to understand that the community goes before, and will always go before, the companies. Our community owns the companies, not the other way. And de Ugarte adds that the community, the Las Indias phyle, is the owner of our coops.
If you add to it transnationalization you will have an egalitarian community which organizes its own economy as a democracy and which is dened over state and national borders. We call it a phyle (My Ninja Please interview).

In the same interview, de Ugarte mentioned Sterlings Islands in the Net as preguring the phyle organization. [I]n a time where national states are day by day more clearly the problem, he said, virtual communities empowered by coops as economic democracies are a possible alternative. The internal cultural milieu of the phyle is propagated by a variety of online platforms, like aggregated member blogs:
David de Ugarte: I think it is a good representation of what we are. Posts are written in individual, personal blogs. If one day you decide to go, you take what you gave with you (as it happens with cooperatives capital). But the interesting thing its that when you read lasindias.info (as well in ezine or blog format or through the RSS) you will nd that the result its far away from the mere addition of individual sources. Its not just an aggretator, even [though] technically it is

176CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

just an aggregator of our blogs and wikis. There is interaction, truly interaction of everyone, from personal independence, reecting the permanent discussion, the social digestion of information, personal and collective experience. Maria Rodriguez: El Correo de las Indias is the newspaper of our world, the world of las Indias. As any newspaper it has its own hierarchy: latoc world strategic news (energy, globalization, etc.) and environmental news make the headers, the second line of news is made by the two cooperatives blogs; one is focused on social effects of Internet, the other on economic democracy and cooperativism, then you have our personal blogs headlines and nally our most cultural part. . . But probably the most surprising thing about El Correo de las Indias is that it is really a puzzle. We write everything in our personal blogs and according the way a post will be tagged it will appear in a section or another. Because of it, it is the public representation of our community: it is not over the personal stuff, it is just that if you order what we write and you aggregate all in a single place you will get a map of las Indias common thoughts and deliberations. That is El Correos magic. Jose F. Alcantara: El Correo de las Indias is designed, and it is also its very purpose, for providing a fast shot on whats going on in Las Indias. There in El Correo you may nd blog posts coming from our corporative blogs (elarte.coop and lasindias.coop), but also you will nd all the content we put on our personal blogs, the one we put on specic, vertical thematic-narrowed blogs as ecoperiodico.com and latoc.info, and even some blog posts coming for the members of our council of advisors. When you put all of these together, and because we have many different backgrounds, El Correo provides you a fast repository of fresh to peek at, where you can nd stuff on business intelligence, community organizations, geostrategy from a latoc point of view (Latin occidental, or occidental Latin, marging the Spanish and Portuguese language areas), new economic frameworks, social network analysis and development, risk and privacy managing, environmental news, . . . along with the latest concepts added to the Indianopedia. As a result of how it is built and what it shows, under this not-sopolished and relaxed liquid blue-on-white appearance, El Correo de las Indias is one of our sites we love the most, maybe the one we love the most. Natalia Fernandez: El Correo de las Indias is a small sample of we are and we do. In El Correo we share our interests, theoretical reections and deliberations. El Correo represents our dimensions and we have all a community, personal and business dimension. A new user will nd articles on sociotechnology, economy, environment and business intelligence. But that new user will also get to read a theoretical framework, personal blog posts and even the recipes develop and/or adapt in our daily cooking here in Las Indias. Manuel Ortega: El Correo de las Indias is the collective journal where appears all we publicate in ours personal blogs, the blogs of

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

the two cooperative which now are part of the cooperative group, blogs that synthesize our deliberation (who, by the way, often began in personal blogs. . . some internal feedback there). In El Correo de las Indias appears what publicate our councilors and our dogo. That way is the way in which they contribute to our deliberation [My Ninja Please interview].

177

As for the specics, the basic ideological principles, of the Las Indias phyles culture: the Groups principles of identity and action, Maria Rodriguez wrote me by private email, are distributed networks and abundance logic, transnationality, economic democracy, the hacker ethic and devolutionismo (devolutionism). (Maria Rodriguez, email, Nov. 13, 2011) The distributed network architecture is intended to achieve maximum freedom and autonomy for the participating communities, by avoiding dependence on some single node (which would generate control and dependence). Abundance logic reects a desire to overcome the articial creation of shortage which is central to the business models of so many conventional capitalist ventures. The principle of transnationality derives from the phyles origins. As a result of the evolution from a virtual community (cyberpunk movement), we never had a unique location or a national identity. Thats why the members in our community have different passports but the same rights and responsibilities, participate in the same deliberation and work in the same network. We dont feel as part of any nation or any imagined community..., our center is our real community (the people we know and we love, and people that make up our environment and the environment of our environment). For the same reason, our work and our deliberation run at the same time in several cities in different parts of the world, and thats because we move between them. The internal governance of the economic structure is based on economic democracy. Because the phyle collectively confronts genuine shortage situations, members must decide between options. The best way to deal with such scarcity is, externally, in an open market (without dependence on donors or subsidies), and internally making decisions democratically as to the most efcient way to allocate limited resources. The phyle is both a safety net and a safe haven, giving members a basea Digital Zionfrom which to operate:
Natalia Fernandez: The Cooperative Group is the legal form that orders our economic activity. In our organization, people are above companies, this means we organize ourselves according to our needs. The happiness and welfare of each of us is above the economic benet. This allows us to decline those well-paid jobs that do not satisfy us and this also allows us to build together a free and full life. Manuel Ortega: The Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias is the materialization of the economic structure of the indiana phyle. Its comes from years of constructing and it looks a way to administrate scarcity, a need which appear when we want to put our lives like a Digital Zionism into reality. And a need that take us to Economic Democracy [My Ninja Please interview]

The hacker ethic, as described by Rodriguez, sounds much like the ludic ethos

178CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS attributed to Bruce Sterlings ctional Rizome network in Islands in the Net.
The hacker ethic represents the values of a distributed network world and forms our way to understand cooperativism. We would sum it up as: 1) The afrmation of a new work ethic with the knowledge as driving force and main motive in the productive activity and in the community life. 2) There is no division between joy time and work time in the social production of knowledge, which involve the vindication and practice of multi-specialization. 3) The freedom of doing as fundamental value: against the existing institutions we dont demand things to be done, we do it by ourselves and if there is a claim, it would be to eliminate the obstacles of any kind that stop us from building the necessary skills to develop freedom and well-being in our environment.

Of the obstacles Rodriguez mentions, probably one of the most important is the existence of articial monopolies established by law, like intellectual property and copyrights. Its another way to create articial shortage that benets a few, using the repressive power of the State. Accordingly, Las Indias advocates a progressive reduction in patent and copyright laws to the point of their complete extinction. In the meantime, Las Indias proves it is possible to develop knowledge, cultural goods and free skills liberating all our works through open licenses. (Rodriguez email, November 13, 2011). The internal democracy of the phyle is based on principles of distributed intelligence and deliberation.
David de Ugarte: I believe in deliberation as the way to develop a common open source intelligence by a community. Deliberation means long term discussion without the urgency of taking a decision. A permanent and opened deliberationwhat you can see in our chat rooms, blogs and newsgroupsleads, in time, to consensus, but also to a great diversity of personal positions and points of view. We try to build from these consensus a guide for decisions on scarcity (economy) but we also know that our most precious treasure is diversity. The wider our diversity is, more freedom will be enjoyed by any of us, more fertile will be our ideas and intellectual creations and more valuable will be our proposals to the market. Maria Rodriguez: None of them; I believe in distributed intelligence. Ants or bees use to be associated with collective intelligence, but we are non hierarchical, we are plurispecialists, we are multifunctionals. Jose F. Alcantara: If theres a way of improving the intelligence we all own as single persons, it is not to aggregate them as they used to tell us on the wisdom of crowds. No, if theres something that really makes a difference is the intelligence you give birth when different people put their efforts on a distributed way. Under this architecture, when you let people work and coordinate their efforts freely, synergies emerge. Whether it is or not something higher, the only think Ill admit is that its success is not based on collective efforts, but on the way you let them interact: the distributed architecture is the key. Natalia Fernandez: The key word would be distributed instead

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

of collective. Connect all nodes, eliminate the hierarchy and youll be allowing that all knowledge to ow through the members of the network (My Ninja Please interview).

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Las Indias was not the only virtual tribe to emerge in the same period, as de Ugarte points out. In these very same years,
the Murides, the old pacist Sus from Senegal, went from having a nationalist discourse and growing peanuts to constituting a community trade network with two million members that spreads from South Africa to Italy. Its transformation isnt over yet, but the young Murides have turned the daras, the old Koranic schools, into urban communes that are also business cells. At rst blush, nothing could be farther apart than cyberpunks and the Murides. But the parallelism is signicant: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness. They are phyles. Phyles may function democratically and be cooperative-based, as in the case of the Indianos, or else they may have a small-business structure and even a religiously inspired ideology, as in the case of the Murides. But they share two key elements: they possess a transnational identity, and they subordinate their companies to personal and community needs. Phyles are order attractors in a domain which states cannot reach conceptually and in areas that states increasingly leave in the dark: phyles invest in social cohesion, sometimes even creating infrastructures, providing grants and training, and having their own NGOs. Transnational thinking allows them to access the new globalised business before anyone else. A phyles investment portfolio may range from renewable energies to PMCs, from free software initiatives to credit cooperatives. Their bet is based on two ideas. First: transnational is more powerful than international. Second: in a global market the community is more resilient than the classic capitalist company. Winning a bet in the cyberpunk and postmodern world we live in nowadays amounts to nothing but resisting and thriving. In order to do so, one must truly belong in this world, truly love its frontiers. Phyles are the children of its explorers: of free software, virtual communities, cyberactivism, and the globalisation of the small. Maybe because of this, they are indubitably winning their bet (de Ugarte, Phyles).

In fact the phenomenon seems to be the wave of the future, given the growing economic importance of ethnic diasporas around the world coupled with the increasing availability of network communications technology:
Consider the difference between China and the Chinese people. One is an enormous country in Asia. The other is a nation that spans the planet. More Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Then there are some 22m ethnic Indians scattered across every continent (the third Indian base in Antarctica will open next year). Hundreds of smaller diasporas knit together far-ung lands:

180CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

the Lebanese in west Africa and Latin America, the Japanese in Brazil and Peru, the smiling Mormons who knock on your door wherever you live. Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia. Today two changes are making them matter much more. First, they are far bigger than they were. The world has some 215m rst-generation migrants, 40% more than in 1990. If migrants were a nation, they would be the worlds fth-largest, a bit more numerous than Brazilians, a little less so than Indonesians. Second, thanks to cheap ights and communications, people can now stay in touch with the places they came from. A century ago, a migrant might board a ship, sail to America and never see his friends or family again. Today, he texts his mother while still waiting to clear customs. He can wire her money in minutes. He can follow news from his hometown on his laptop. He can y home regularly to visit relatives or invest his earnings in a new business. Such migrants do not merely benet from all the new channels for communication that technology provides; they allow this technology to come into its own, fullling its potential to link the world together in a way that it never could if everyone stayed put behind the lines on maps. No other social networks offer the same global reachor commercial opportunity. This is because the diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the ow of information across borders: a Chinese businessman in South Africa who sees a demand for plastic vuvuzelas will quickly inform his cousin who runs a factory in China. Second, they foster trust. That Chinese factory-owner will believe what his cousin tells him, and act on it fast, perhaps sealing a deal worth millions with a single conversation on Skype. Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities. In countries where the rule of law is uncertainwhich includes most emerging marketsit is hard to do business with strangers. When courts cannot be trusted to enforce contracts, people prefer to deal with those they have condence in. Personal ties make this easier.... The creativity of migrants is enhanced by their ability to enroll collaborators both far-off and nearby. In Silicon Valley, more than half of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers share tips about technology or business opportunities with people in their home countries.... A study in 2011 by the Royal Society found that cross-border scientic collaboration is growing more common, that it disproportionately involves scientists with diaspora ties and that it appears to lead to better science (using the frequency with which research is cited as a rough measure). A Chinese paper co-written with a scientist in America is cited three times as often as one produced solely in China. Diaspora ties help businesses as well as scientists to collaborate. What may be the worlds cheapest fridge was conceived from a marriage of ideas generated by Indians in India and Indians overseas. Uttam Ghoshal, Himanshu Pokharna and Ayan Guha, three Indian-

4.4. PHYLES: DAVID DE UGARTE

American engineers, had an idea for a cooling engine, based on technology used to cool laptop computers, that they thought might work in a fridge. In India visiting relatives they decided to show their idea to Godrej & Boyce, an Indian manufacturing rm.... The new type of hyperconnectivity that enables such projects is fundamental to todays networked diasporas, according to Carlo Dade, of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, a think-tank. Migrants are now connected instantaneously, continuously, dynamically and intimately to their communities of origin...This is a fundamental and profound break from the past eras of migration. That break explains why diasporas, always marginalised in the at-map world of national territories, nd themselves in the thick of things as the world becomes networked.9

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In similar language, Alcantara in the My Ninja Please interview describes the Las Indias and Murides as logical outgrowths of the technological and organizational changes of our time:
The Internet is the revolution of our times. The consequences it will have on the way the world is organized can already be felt. The emergency of real communitiesas the phylesand the lost of the hegemonic power the States used to have are both effects due to the same cause: our communications are mainly based on a network that, for the rst time in all history, has a distributed architecture. This is an important, not negligible aspect thats already transforming, and doing it from the very roots, our world. One of the consequences of these changes is that many non-State actors (they may be corporations, or huge cooperative groups as Mondragon, or real communities as the Muridies), may realize that they have a role to play in the new transnational arena. Diplomacy is the necessary key to avoid getting it wrong and many of them are starting to realize. They need an internal diplomacy division but usually they dont have a clear understanding on how to form, organize and use this diplomatics. One of the consequences of having our world organized through a distributed network comes from the economy. From an economic point of view, the Internet has consequences as it removes the barrier to entry for many markets. Consequently and unexpectedly, you may nd yourself having access to new markets originated around the Internet, but also to some old markets whose access were forbidden in the past due to many reasons (need of intensive capitalization, oligopolies that were restricting the free competence). But the emergency of markets with a virtual innite competition also removes the rents: the benets that came from having a control over a market with a restricted competence. Under this circumstances, innovation and development are the only way of improving benets. But as they provide extra benets only for a short period of time, the need of internalization of these processes, so that continuously we have some new development or some brand new innovative strategy, are key to
9 Migration and business: Weaving the world together, The Economist, November 19, 2011 <http://www.economist.com/node/21538700/>.

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the survival of any community.

In the Montevideo Declaration of Las Indias, the founding document of the Las Indias phylefounded, as we saw above, by Spanish cyberpunksde Ugarte writes:
A person is only free if [he] owns the foundations [of] his own livelihood, when he has no obligation to pay homage to anyone and can leave his network effectively if he understands that no longer serves the needs of their own happiness, happiness that only himself can judge. Effective access by each one to property and general commercial development, are therefore the economic foundations of any citizenship that does not consist in a mere representation. We name this simple truth as Neovenetianism. The indianos phyle is a network of free merchants and entrepreneurs dedicated to the purpose of building and testing a space of economic democracy, made without coercion or any state or group and dedicated to the development of a transnational and deterritorialized space in which to deepen the freedoms and rights that enable a full life in overlapping and non-coercive pluriarchic communities. For this purpose we constitute ourselves as a freely distributed network of people, acting politically by themselves and economically through coordinated and voluntarily allied rms to create a common infrastructure of bases, distributed throughout the world, which must serve to free our trade and our discussion of the vicissitudes of any state or market and, above all, to provide equal opportunities for all members, regardless of the state that provides them with a passport.10

So the phyle platform supports a modular ecosystem of enterprises. Another useful ctional illustration, alongside Stephensonsand perhaps more relevant to de Ugartes neo-Venetian modelis the starfaring human subspecies in Poul Andersons Kith series, genetically and culturally isolated by time dilation from the rest of the human race. With lifetimes of thousands of years by the local time of planet-bound populations, and with an individual returning to any one planet only at intervals of decades or centuries, the starfarers (much like de Ugartes Venetians) rented Kith enclaves (the Kith quarter, much like the Greek or Jewish quarters in the cities of the Western Roman Empire) in spaceport cities on planets throughout the area of human settlement to house merchants on-planet at any given time. Kith families maintained houses in the clave that were occupied by any members currently doing business there. De Ugarte has referred directly to John Robb and to Suarezs Darknet (see below) as fellow travelers with his phyle movement. Interestingly, the Las Indias cooperative uses the Freenet as an internal communications and webhosting platform, and de Ugarte recommends it as a primitive version of the Darknet envisioned in Suarezs work.11 Although de Ugarte mentions Freenet in the
10 Sociedad de las Indias Electrnicas ; Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias, Las Indias Montevideo Declaration, translated by de Ugarte. The original was a foundational document of the las Indias phyle, published in June 2008 <http://p2pfoundation.net/Las_Indias_Montevideo_Declaration>. 11 David de Ugarte, Darknets: ms all de la frontera del control, Sociedad de las Indias Electronicas, December 7, 2010 <http://lasindias.coop/darknets-mas-alla-de-la-frontera-del-

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context of John Robbs writing and Daniel Suarezs novels, he admits it is still nowhere near the level of technical advancement they envision. Freenet is still far from the darknet described in FreedomTM, accessible through augmented reality goggles. Local Freenets are a lot like the Web of the mid-90s, when updating a website took time, searches were slow, and blogs (or ogsFreenet blogs) had to be written without ready-made software like Wordpress and Blogger. Nevertheless, it is a forerunner to what Robb and Suarez envisioned, of entire virtual economies built on local darknet platforms.

4.5

Bruce Sterling: The Caryatids

The Caryatids is set in the world of the 2060s, in which most nation-states have collapsed from the ecological catastrophesdesertication, droughts, crop failures, rising sea levels, monster storms, and multi-million refugee Volkswanderungs as entire countries became uninhabitableof the previous decades.12 The world is dominated by two networked global civil societies, the Dispensation and the Acquis. The two civil societies coexist uneasily, engaging in constant worldwide competition and sending teams to monitor each others activities under the terms of a negotiated accord (something like the system of meta-law that regulates relations between the phyles in The Diamond Age). Both are engaged in the reclamation of devastated areas and oversee networks of refugee camps housing millions of displaced persons. Both have ideologies strongly centered on sustainable technology. The Acquis is largely green, opensource and p2p in orientation. The Dispensation is commercial and proprietary, oriented toward what we would call the Progressive/Green/Cognitive Capitalism of Bill Gates, Bono and Warren Buffett. The two networked societies are articulated into local enclaves much like Stephensons, although the Dispensation is more geographically centered than the Acquis. Its cultural and geographical heartland is southern California and the Greater Los Angeles region, and there are vague references to a surviving legislature and governor in Sacramento. The Acquis, on the other hand, is more purely networked, with its claves widely distributed around the world and no one geographical base. The major urban centers of Europe appear to be Acquis, and there are large Acquis claves in Seattle, Madison, Austin, San Francisco and Boston. The Acquis, and in particular its experimental reclamation project on the Adriatic island of Mljet, is most relevant to our consideration here of networked platforms. The Acquis team there is linked by the sensorweb, a neural network, with brain-computer interfaces. Individuals can maintain constant realtime communications with the rest of the team, or surf the Net by cerebral cortex. The neural net enables anyone connected to it to view the physical world, with the help of uplink spex, with a virtual overlay superimposed on it.
control/>; Por qu me gusta tanto Freenet? El Correo de las Indias, December 15, 2010 <http://deugarte.com/por-que-me-gusta-tanto-freenet>. 12 Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).

184CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS Members of the team are able to semantically tag real-world objects with information; the whole visual world is like a graftoed wall, with its individual parts labeled for signicance, linked to relevant sources online, and indexed to each other.

4.6

Daniel Suarez

In Suarezs ctional world, local holons are built on common Darknet platforms much as Stephensons claves are built on the platforms of the phyles. [His Darknet platform is a lot like Sterlings sensorweb. MMORPG, GPS, RFID, etc.] Joe Brewer, at Chaotic Ripple, wrote a brilliant article on virtual reality and gaming architectures as platforms for the alternative economya virtual world that encompasses the real one:
Imagine its the year 2050 and a vibrant, high-tech global economy is thriving. We made the transition away from fossil fuels. Our cities are designed around regional security and multi-layered resilience. Prosperity is widespread and capitalism has taken a new form that promotes human well-being as its modus operandi. In other words, weve transitioned to a conguration of sustainability and relative stability on a planetary scale. How did we get here? It took a revolution. But how did a movement comprised of rogue thinkers displace the existing powers that be? Id like to suggest that the great 20th Century futurist, Buckminster Fuller, captured it in his assertion that You never change things by ghting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. What if we were to take him literally and envision a parallel universe of global collaboration, one that has its own monetary currency, systems of governance, rules and agendas. Could such a system be built on a planetary scale to syphon economic productivity away from the existing model? I want to suggest that this sci- future may be closer than we think. Weve already got SEVERAL parallel universes of global collaboration. Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and the Linux Operating System are all global platforms for collaboration with their own social order. Online games like World of Warcraft and the Gears of War series invite people to explore an alternate reality with hundreds of thousands of other people in real time. And were just scratching the surface of what these social technologies are capable of. So what if the revolution takes place in a parallel universe?... Systems of virtual reality have been built on new capabilities from mobile technologies, distributed computing, and online gaming. This makes it possible for large numbers of people to operate in a virtual world that encompasses the real one. Alternate currencies and new management tools allow for the emergence of a new social order that syphons resources away from the old economy.

4.7. JOHN ROBB: ECONOMIES AS A SOCIAL SOFTWARE SERVICE

Writers like Cory Doctorow and Daniel Suarez have written several books that explore how weaknesses in cyber security enable entirely new forms of guerilla warfare and economic production.... They offer a new way forward as technology outpaces the authoritarian systems of control that held democracies in check throughout history. The futurist, Jane McGonigal, offers a vision for deploying alternate reality games to solve real-world problems. We are entering a new era of possibilities.13

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According to Clay Shirky, early conceptions of cyberspace, whether that of William Gibson or that of John Perry Barlow, were shaped in a world where those connected to the Internet were a tiny minority of the total population and hence unlikely to know each other in meatspace. Cyberspace was a kind of alternate reality mediated by the worlds communications networks, a world separate and apart from the real world. Back then, Shirky argues, the concept of cyberspace made sense, because there was little overlap between ones social relations online and ofine: the people you would meet online were different from the people you would meet ofine, and these worlds would rarely overlap.
But that separation was an accident of partial adoption. Though the internet began to function in its earliest form in 1969, it was not until 1999 that any country had a majority of its citizens online.... In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-ve-yearold is one of substantial overlap between online and ofine friends and colleagues.... The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life.14

If d-space is overlaid on the physical world, rather than constituting a separate cyberspace dissociated from the physical world, then it reinforces physical community and becomes a tool for facilitating it. Such a platform promotes relocalization, and builds social capital.

4.7

John Robb: Economies as a Social Software Service

For some time, John Robb has written about Resilient Communitiesgenerally along the same conceptual lines as Transition Towns or Global Villagesas an emergent form of social organization to ll the void left by the collapse of the centralized state and large corporation.15
Not only are nearly all governments nancially insolvent, they cant protect citizens from a global system that is running amok. As services and security begin to fade, local sources of order will emerge
13 Joe Brewer, Global Revolution in Alternate Reality? Chaotic Ripple, August 18, 2011 <http://www.chaoticripple.com/2011/global-revolution-in-alternate-reality>. 14 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, pp. 194-196. 15 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/resilient_community/>.

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to ll the void. Hopefully, most people will opt to take control of this process by joining together with others to build resilient communities that can offer the independence, security, and prosperity that isnt offered by the nation-state anymore.16

Parallel with his thought, he has also been exploring the idea of networked platforms as a support base for his resilient communities. In his 2006 book Brave New War, he discussed the importance of platforms as a vehicle for decentralization.
A platform is merely a collection of services and capabilities that are common to a wide variety of activities aggregated in a way that makes them exceedingly easy to access. The benet of this approach is that it becomes easier for end users of this platform to build solutions because they dont need to re-create the wheel in order to build a new service, and it is easier for participants to coordinate and interconnect their activities.17

As an example of a platform, he mentioned Skype, the free VOIP service, which can serve as a vehicle for communication between local communities around the world. Platforms can include peer rating services, capital aggregating services like Kickstarter, digital currencies of various sorts, and encrypted darknets. Platforms can also include a wide range of software, like CAD software for creating open-source industrial designs that can be shared between widely separated designers and micromanufacturers around the world. They can include platforms for teleconferencing, wikis, and other vehicles for collaboration. In a couple of blog posts in December 2009-January 2010, he developed this theme, apparently under the inuence primarily of Suarez, but in language that also sounded very much like de Ugartes.
A Darknet is the system that runs an autonomous social network (a tribe, a constellation of resilient communities, a gang, etc.). It is composed of a software layer and hardware infrastructure that connects, organizes, allocates, and automates the functions of the synthetic social system it is built for. Some details:

Software can be built that automates the rules by which any social and economic system operate. Nearly any social construct imaginable can be automated (at least on a small scale). Whether it works efciently or is appealing to recruits is another story entirely. Early experience in MMO games and social software development indicate that this is not only possible, but probable. The networks hardware and software infrastructure ensures that all members of the network are provided access to the system and the tools necessary to use it effectively. It is also constructed in a way that makes it opaque to outside observation and impervious to non-members or intrusion.
16 Chris Arkenberg, Robb Interview: Open Source Warfare and Resilience, BoingBoing, June 15, 2010 <>. 17 John Robb, Brave New War, p. 172.

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This system, both economic and social, runs both in parallel and in conjunction with the global economy (the environment). It is self-referencing, autonomous, and willing to defend its own interests. It can be parasitic or additive to the global environment (or more effectively: both). It is competitive with other entities that operate within the global environment, from nation-states to corporations.
"Darknet is a term used by Daniel Suarez, in his books Daemon and Freedom (TM)....18 Which social, political and economic system can BOTH protect you from the excesses of an uncontrollable/turbulent global system AND advance your quality of life? One thing is increasingly clear: hollow nation-states arent the answer.... Heres an option: DIY your solution. Roll your own tribe or community. Build it from the ground up to be resilient, decentralized, fair, and meritocratic. If you are so inclined, cut the rules into software so you can be both local and global at the same time. Change those rules by popular consent when the environment changes (and it will, often). Attract members to your new tribe. If it becomes unfair, leave it and roll another one. Compete for members. Use this bootstrapped system to negotiate and connect with the global economic system on equal terms, rather than as supplicants.19

David de Ugarte left comments under both posts, and Robb expressed interest in Phyles in the second exchange. Shortly thereafter, Robb put increasing stress on the inadequacy of isolated efforts at building Resilient Communities, and the consequent need for networked organization as a base of support.
Resilient communities will:

Shield us from increasingly frequent shocks and breakdowns of an out of control global system. Protect us from predatory and parasitical non-state actorsfrom globe spanning banks/corporations to local/transnational militias/gangs. Provide us with a path that will allow us to thriveeconomically, socially, individually, and spiritually.
Unfortunately, nobody is going to help us build them. The nation-state cant and wont. It is losing power across the board as the global system strengthens. Organizationally, the nationstate has lost control of its nances, borders, media, economics, use
18 Robb, A Darknet, Global Guerrillas, December 17, 2009 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/ 12/a-darknet.html>. 19 Robb, Central Question of 21st Century Governance, Global Guerrillas, January 4, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/journal-central-question-of21st-century-governance.html>. Interestingly, de Ugartein Phylescited Robbs post as a major source on phyles.

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of force, etc. Worse, moral and ideological moorings that served the nation-state well for hundreds of years have rotted away. The nationstate is now adrift, unable to orient its decision making cycles. As a result, the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entitiesfrom parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system (they prot from the ability to distort core nancial and economic functions to manufacture virtual wealth") to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goodsand that corruption is spreading. Nothing can get done at the nation-state level anymore and what does get done (as the recent health and nance legislation in the US proves), is only being done to drive forward protability in parasitical rms or sap our resources (making us more vulnerable to predation by local threats). Worse, nation-state bureaucracies are becoming more insulated and focused on self-preservation by the day from the institutional level down the individual government employee contractor. So, what can we do? Attempts to bootstrap resilient communities are denitely possible. However, isolated and small, I fear these efforts will either result in a reduction in the quality of life for its participants or quickly fall prey to parasites/predators (as in, you wont get far if bankruptcy, privatization, and gangs-disorder guts your community). The dominant solution to all of these pitfalls, dangers, and threats is to team up. Create a virtual tribe that helps communities become resilientby nancing, protecting, and accelerating them. While its possible to build a virtual tribe via a completely ad hoc process, the best way to build platforms in software that make the growth of tribal networks fast and easy. If we can build these software platforms, we can turn the transition to resilient communities from a process prone to high rates of failure, into a process that spreads virally and generates immediate improvements for its participants. A vibrant future awaits, all we need to do is build it.20

What emerged from Robbs rumination on network organization, later in the year, was the concept of complete economies and social structures delivered as software serviceor Economies as a Software Service.
These software based economies and social structures could allow:

A plethora of new economic systems within which you can make a living (all you need to do is opt-in to the one that makes sense to you). The ability to build and experiment with new rules that both x the increasingly dire problems with the current dominant economic system while providing new capabilities and avenues for success (new currencies, new incentive structures, new forms of status, etc.). Rapid rates of innovation/improvement. Since the rules of these systems are software based, they can evolve very quickly. Further, some of these new structures have the potential to generate rates of improve20 Robb, Why a Resilient Community Network? Global Guerrillas, January 12, 2010 <http://boingboing.net/2010/06/ 15/john-robb-interview.html>.

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ment/innovation/wealth creation at rates an order of magnitude greater than the current system. Nearly costless scalability. The infrastructure of these systems scales at a nearly costless level and the platforms envisioned can support a huge amount ecosystem diversity without much strain.21 In an added comment under that post, Robb explained how such networked economies could enforce their rules entirely by endogenous means, even if the state was unwilling to enforce members contractual obligations to obey bylaws.
If N-1 strategies (theft, cheating, fraud, etc.) only yield small amounts and continued association is very benecial, the sanctions used to ensure people dont act badly are variations of expulsion. With opt-in systems, as opposed to geographically based systems, theres no requirement for membership by accident (and no need for coercion to join).

At the time, I still had some trouble fully grasping the concept. In response to my question in the comment thread of how such networked platforms were to enforce their rules without recourse to outside enforcement mechanisms, he explained that their opt-in basis was itself an enforcement mechanism.
Carson: So long as the economy remains virtuali.e., so long as it continues to function within the framework of a still at least somewhat viable nation-state, and pay nominal allegiance to itwont its ability to enforce its rules against defaulters or opportunists also be somewhat virtual? If it attempts to enforce them by endogenous means, wont the state interpret it as a challenge to its monopoly on the legitimate use of force? And might not the state refuse to enforce certain contractual agreements of membership in the virtual economy (especially if its enterprises run afoul of the more irrational and inefciencyinducing zoning and licensing laws, or its currency violates legal tender and banking laws, or something)? Robb: Theres a trick here Kevin. If N-1 strategies (theft, cheating, fraud, etc.) only yield small amounts and continued association is very benecial, the sanctions used to ensure people dont act badly are variations of expulsion. With opt-in systems, as opposed to geographically based systems, theres no requirement for membership by accident (and no need for coercion to join).

Later elaborating on the same concept under a slightly different name (Economies as a Service), Robb explained that the networked platform need not be completely deterritorialized. His Resilient Communities (local communities with relocalized industry and agriculture, resilient local power and water systems, local communication meshworks, exchange systems, etc., which occupy a central role in his work) will often be the local instantiation of the values/rules
21 Robb, Completely New Economies as a Software Service, Global Guerrillas, November 4, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/why-a-resilient-communitynetwork.html>. <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/completelynew-economies-as-a-software-service.html>.

190CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS of the Economy as a Service.22 As in Stephensons phyles, local city-states or enclaves may be afliated with one another through deterritorialized, virtual networked societies. One of the complications of building networked economy platforms in the period of the states decline is that the state will attempt, at least sporadically and haphazardly, to suppress such efforts. So a networked platform will confront the simultaneous problems of providing internal sanctions against fraud and misfeasance by its members, and evading state surveillance. Hence the value of Robbs opt-in structure. The Freedom Engineering blog posted a detailed article on how to police an internal marketplace while maintaining secrecy:
What people want to know about a stranger before they engage in a volitional exchange of value is. . . (1) how many volitional exchanges of value this stranger has completed before and (2) were some of these exchanges carried out with someone that they already know and trust? Now lets say that Sue runs a hairdressing shop out of her house. She has a limited clientele but she wants to expand. But recently Sue has read in the news about the crack down on illegal home based black-market businesses such as hers. How does Sue continue to make an honest living in this hostile environment? How does Sue accept a stranger as a new customer with absolute condence that this stranger is not a snitch and is not a local code enforcer? Well, Sue could ask to see a prospective new customers prole on moow.co! Sue has created an ad on craigs list to solicit new customers who desire $8 haircuts. Jake, who is looking for the 8$ free-market priced haircut that Sue can provide instead of the 25$ haircut that he can get in the government regulated main street market is incentivized to prove to her his good repute with other traders. Jake sends Sue an email that contains his public pgp key and a link to his prole on moow.co. Jakes prole includes minimal identifying information; * a name or nym * his public pgp key (optional) * his value ow connections these value ow connections (vfc) are categorized into 4 types; 1. internet interaction 2. meat space interaction 3. low (1 to 3) free-market transactions 4. high (4 or more) free-market transactions VFC #1 and #2 may prove to be irrelevant and I am open to dropping them from the service in order to keep it simple. What do you think?
22 Robb, EaaS (Economy as a Service), Global Guerrillas, November 11, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2010/11/eaas-economy-as-aservice.html>.

4.7. JOHN ROBB: ECONOMIES AS A SOCIAL SOFTWARE SERVICE

The most valuable data on ebay.com for instance when looking at a persons prole is the numbers of transactions that they have conducted. A graphical interface of this prole would show your node on the network connected to other nodes by different colors of beams to indicate the different bonds. Although the beta version of this website will show a simple table showing this information. Users of this service would be able to see if they are connected to a stranger by others in the network so if Sue and Jake have no connection yet but they have both done trades with Billy and they both trust Billy then they may just decide to make a connection and engage in a mutual exchange of value with eachother. Signing up for this service should be drop dead easy! Simply pick a user name and a password and then youll have a prole. Users will be able to create a real world identity prole or one for a pseudonym. Users can chose to link a pgp key to their account or not. Users can chose to link social networking proles to their moow.co prole or not. Now how does the network get populated? Lets say that Sue cuts Jakes hair and she does a fabulous job. Jake in fact says Fabulous! Sue will ask Jake to drop by her prole on moow.co and make a bond with her. All that Jake has to do is click on Sues prole and check any of 4 boxes; 1. Have you had internet interactions with Sue? 2. Have you had real life interactions with Sue? 3. Have you conducted 1 to 3 free-market transactions with Sue? 4. Have you conducted 4 or more free-market transactions with Sue? And that is all the feedback that one needs to do! We could create a database that keeps comments or measures of trust or opinions (sometimes not objective ones) on specic attributes but we want to keep this simple. But what if after a few transactions between two individuals that a problem arises? This is where the arbitration service providers come in. Note; this site will not provide arbitration services it will just link to them perhaps an afliation program with an arbitration service will provide some revenue. Also at any moment a user can chose to break a value ow connection with another user. In the graphical user interface this may look like a red X across the bond.23

191

Robbs schema is much like Suarezs and Stephensons, with the Resilient Communities building upon the common platforms offered by EaSS. Considering that Daniel Suarezs Daemon and Freedom(TM) were published in 2009 and 2010, respectively, and Suarez credited Robb with some inuence
23 value ow connections, Freedom Engineering, December <http://freedomengineering.org/2011/12/value-ow-connections/>.

15,

2011

192CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS on his ideas, it seems likely there was also some cross-pollination between the two of them, although Im unable to discern the direction of it. Robb is optimistic about the rate of adoption of networked platforms in the transition period. Based on a survey of the rates of adoption of new technologies over the past century, Robb notes that the lag between discovery and deployment is dropping over time, [and] the rate of adoption has accelerated over time."
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (either on a desk or in a smart phone), the rate of adoption for new tech has dropped from years to quarters. Theres almost no lag between development and deployment, and applications that represent major innovations can roll out to globally signicant levels in months. ....Given how fast things move now, its not hard to imagine that a new economic system (better design), decentralized nancial wire service, or P2P manufacturing system could sweep the world in months, drawing in tens of millions of people into a ways of creating, trading, and sharing wealth. In short, new digital systems that make the transition to local production within networked resilient communities easier and faster since they can help generate the wealth required to do it without starving/freezing and the vision of the future that motivates people to persist despite setbacks.24

4.8

MiiU and Openworld

To promote real-world development of his ideas on Resilient Communities and Economies as a Software Service, Robb created the MiiU project, centered on the MiiU Wiki.25 Its purpose is to provide a central clearinghouse and repository of information for projects engaged in building resilient communities. One of the more important projects on the MiiU Wiki, apparently a direct outgrowth of Robbs EaSS, is Openworld. The Openworld content on the MiiU Wiki is the creation of the Openworld Team, which both part of the MiiU Wiki community and a standalone outside venture under the leadership of Mark Frazier.26 The Openworld Game uses game architecture with built-in design and collaboration tools as a platform for creating and sharing visual designs for residential developments, health centers, resilient farms, resorts, retirement communitiesand asset-awakening enterprise zones for real-world neighborhoods and communities. It also provides for the design of institutional mechanisms for transparency and accountability, like open-source eGovernment platforms.27
24 John Robb, The Digital Roll-Out of Resilient Communities, Global Guerrillas, December 22, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/12/why-a-focus-on-digitalchange.html 25 <http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Main_Page>. 26 Openworld Team, MiiU.Org. Accessed October 22, 2011 <http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Openworld_Team>; <http://www.openworld.com/>. 27 Openworld Game, MiiU.Org. Accessed October 22, 2011 <http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Openworld_Game>.

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193

4.9 4.10

Vinay Gupta: Government in a Box Meshkit Bonre

The concept of the Meshkit Bonre project, its website says, is Focusing on the social layer in wireless mesh communities:
Augmenting and interconnecting localized communities in the real world through mesh networking, social gaming/networking mechanics and a p2p exchange economy to create a community of reciprocity, trust and interdependence while extending the communitys need for a mesh beyond the decentralized value. For example: while a community garden may provide extrinsic benets such as inexpensive food, to a neighborhood, there are additional social benets that keep the participants in a seasonal, perpetual cycle of participation. Meshkit proposes a HTML5/Javascript universal application built on top of open source mesh protocols (B.A.T.M.A.N.-adv, Babel, OLSR, SMesh, etc.) for aiding in the organic growth and sustainability of proximity-based wireless mesh networks, while providing localized community services to engage users not inherently interested in decentralized networking to ensure quality of service and livelihood of the mesh.28

4.11

Medieval Guilds as Predecessors of the Phyle

Among the services which the guilds performed for their memberswho named each other as brothers and sisters under the terms of their charterswere relief of the destitute, paying the compensation for members convicted of a crime to prevent the nancial ruin of them and their families, and arbitration of disputes between practitioners of a craft.29 The town communes frequently acted as bulk buyers of commodities like grain and salt, using their bargaining power to negotiate prices near cost from the foreign merchants and then distribute them among the households.30 The guilds, likewise, bought raw materials in bulk for their members, and marketed their products.31 They acted as quality certifying bodies on behalf of the members, assuming responsibility for the quality of goods marketed and seeking to prevent the sale of adulterated or defective goods for the sake of the memberships reputations.32 The craft guild was then a common seller of its produce and a common buyer of the raw materials, a fact which helped account for the high status and historically high standard of living of manual labor at the apex of the High Middle Ages.33
28 Meshwork 29 Kropotkin,

Bonre <http://www.jrbaldwin.com/meshkit/> Accessed December 14, 2011. Mutual Aid, pp. 172-173. 30 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 183-184. 31 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 185. 32 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 192-193. 33 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 191.

194CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

4.12

Modern Networked Labor Organizations and Guilds as Examples of Phyles

A number of labor organizers, advocates and historians have advocated a return to the guild model of the labor union in situations where membership through a workplace-based local is impractical: freelance workers, professionals and tradesmen in occupations with project- or task-based employment rather than jobs with a single employer, and members of the so-called precariat. Hoyt Wheeler described it as a step back toward a preindustrial concept of unions as fraternal and benet organizations.34 The line between labor unions and such in the nineteenth century, and the kinds of friendly societies and mutuals described by writers like E.P. Thompson and Pyotr Kropotkin, is so blurry as to be almost nonexistent. And when friendly societies offered relief to unemployed members, the practical difference from a strike fund could be rather hard to discern. It certainly was from the standpoint of the state, which was hostile to mutuals in many countries for just this reason. The very distinction between the trade unions and other friendly or benet societies is an articial one, argues Bob James.
...[I]t makes much more historical sense to see the core of Labour History as a range of benet societies, and to see what are called trade unions as just one culturally-determined response within a group and along a time-line.... What we now call trade unions were and are benet societies, just like the Grand United Oddfellow and Freemason Lodges.... Concern about working conditions and the strategy of withdrawing labour, going on strike", developed naturally out of the lodge habit of insuring against all sorts of other future dangers. Strike pay was just another benet covered by contributions....35

In the United States, labor unions often started out as benevolent associations providing for the wives and children of deceased or incapacitated members. This was true, in particular, of the early railroad unions.
The industry was so injury-prone that the early rail unions were much less concerned with collective bargaining than with insurance against mishap. The twelve locomotive engineers who met secretly in Detroit in 1863 to form the Brotherhood of the Footboard (later changed to the Grand International Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers), called post-mortem security their main problem. The handful of conductors of the Illinois Central who formed a union later known as the Order of Railway Conductors in 1868 proclaimed as their object material aid... from a fund attained upon the assessment plan, to disabled members... and their widows, children, and heirs. The Brotherhood of Firemen originated in 1873 when eleven men met
34 Hoyt Wheeler, The Future of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 77. 35 Bob James, The Tragedy of Labour History in Australia. According to Takvers Radical Tradition: An Australian History Page, where the article is hosted, the text is based on James notes for a lecture given in several different venues. <http://www.takver.com/history/tragedy.htm>.

4.12. MODERN NETWORKED LABOR ORGANIZATIONS AND GUILDS AS EXAMPLES OF PHYLES195

to take a collection for an associate killed in a boiler explosion on the Erie the day before.36

More generally, Sam Dolgoff observed:

The labor movement grew naturally into a vast interwoven network of local communities throughout the country, exercising a growing inuence in their respective areas. And this early movement did not conne itself solely to immediate economic issues.... The mutualaid functions of the unions expanded to keep abreast of the growing needs of the members.... They created a network of cooperative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children and adults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing, credit associations, et cetera. All these, and many other essential services were provided by the people themselves, long before the government monopolized social services wasting untold billions on a top-heavy bureaucratic parasitical apparatus; long before the labor movement was corrupted by business unionism.37

Charles Johnson stresses the importance, from the standpoint of worker independence and bargaining strength, of such self-organized mutual aid:
Its likely also that networks of voluntary aid organizations would be strategically important to individual ourishing in a free society, in which there would be no expropriative welfare bureaucracy for people living with poverty or precarity to fall back on. Projects reviving the bottom-up, solidaritarian spirit of the independent unions and mutual aid societies that ourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the rise of the welfare bureaucracy, may be essential for a ourishing free society, and one of the primary means by which workers could take control of their own lives, without depending on either bosses or bureaucrats.38

One possibility is the resurrection of the guild as a basis for organizing mutual aid. Some writers on labor issues have argued that unions should shift their focus to attracting memberships on an individual basis, whether it be in bargaining units with no certied union or among the unemployed; they would do so by offering insurance and other services. A good example is the Healthy Workers medical plan, organized by Working Partnerships USA and the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System, which provides health insurance with no deductible at half the price of competing commercial plans.39
The Labor Wars, p. 45. Dolgoff, Revolutionary Tendencies in American Labor--Part 1, in The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning. Originally published in 1980 in Resurgence <http://www.iww.org/culture/library/dolgoff/labor4.shtml>. 38 Charles Johnson, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008). Quoted from textle provided by author. 39 WPUSA launches Healthy Workers medical plan (March 5, 2010), Recent Win Archive <http://www.wpusa.org/ About-Us/recentwinarchive.html>
37 Sam 36 Lens,

196CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS Somewhat more outside the mainstream is Guy Standings example of sex workers in Vancouver, BC, who
set up social protection funds, for emergencies and for scholarships for children of dead or sick workers; they developed a group medical plan, drew up occupational safety guidelines, provided an information service for potential entrants to the profession, and developed courses to teach life skills.40

Thomas Malone discusses such possibilities at considerable length in The Future of Work, in exploring the implications of a free-agency economy of independent contractors. Like many popularizing writers on networked enterprise in the new economy (Tom Peters most notorious among them), Malone can come across as a bit glib in celebrating the new era of freedom. But unlike Peters, he acknowledges the real problems faced by workers in such an economy: the lack of job security and job-based benets chief among them. And his proposals are intriguing:
Rather than relying on employers and governments to provide the benets traditionally associated with a job, a new set of organizations might emerge to provide stable homes for mobile workers and to look after their needs as they move from job to job and project to project. These organizations might be called societies, associations, fraternities, or clubs. But the word I like best is guilds, a term that conjures up images of the craft associations of the Middle Ages. Growing out of tradesmens fraternities and mutual assistance clubs, medieval guilds served a number of functions. They trained apprentices and helped them nd work.... They offered loans and schooling. And if misfortune struck, they provided an income for members families.... Existing organizations already perform some of these functions today. Take the Screen Actors Guild. As much as 30 percent of the base pay of Screen Actors Guild members goes to the guilds benets fund. In return, members get full health benets (even in years when they have no work), generous pensions, and professional development programs. Imagine an extended version of this arrangement, in which members pay a fraction of their income to a guild in good times in return for a guaranteed minimum income in bad times. Unlike conventional unemployment insurance, provided through a distant, impersonal bureaucracy, the unemployment benets provided by a guild could go well beyond temporary cash payments. For instance, other guild members would have an incentiveand often the opportunityto help fellow members nd work. A guild would also have the means and the motivation to help its members gain new skills to remain economically productive as times change. Finally, the members would likely exert social pressure on unemployed colleagues who they felt werent really trying to nd work.... Companies have also traditionally helped their employees learn
40 Guy Standing, Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2009), p. 315.

4.12. MODERN NETWORKED LABOR ORGANIZATIONS AND GUILDS AS EXAMPLES OF PHYLES197

skills and, by assigning job titles and other kinds of credentials, signify to the world the capabilities of their workers. These kinds of services could also be provided by guilds. Lawyers and doctors, for instance, have professional societies that establish and monitor the credentials of practitioners and provide continuing educational opportunities. Unions have also had similar functions for years, helping craft workers progress from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman.41

Malone sees the modern-day guilds arising from professional societies, labor unions, temp agencies, and alumni associations, among other existing organizations.42 Although the educational and certifying functions of craft unions or guilds are a service to the members from one perspective, they are also of interest to employers in ways that dovetail with our discussion later on of the hiring hall or temp agency model of unionism. Hoyt Wheeler writes:
A further advantage of the craft form of organization is its ability to provide a stream of trained, competent workers to employers. In the building trades, and in some other elds as well, individual employers have no incentive to train workers who may soon move on to work for someone else. The long-term interests of employers as a group require a trained workforce. Yet the interests of individual employers militate against this coming about. A good solution to this dilemma is a union of workers who train one another and spread the costs of training across the industry. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners... recognizes this rationale, and is utilizing it in an attempt to encourage employers to move away from their traditional aversion to the union.43

Bill Luddy, onetime Administrative Assistant to the President of UBCJ, argued that the construction industry was suffering from a critical shortage of skilled trades workers. The contractors, having weakened the unions, are nding that they have no good alternative source of labor. Nonunion contractor associations have tried to overcome the prisoners dilemma problem caused by training costs in a uid labor market, creating common training funds, but couldnt get enough contractors to participate. Union training, Luddy said, was the only practical solution.44 The kinds of income- and risk-pooling functions that Malone proposes for guilds are likely to take on growing importance in a time of increasing unemployment and underemployment. In addition, networked unions might serve as platforms for member enterprises, offering such services as insurance, crowdsourced nance, payroll software, legal services, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. There are venerable precedents for this. According to E. P. Thompson, for
41 Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), pp. 84-87. 42 Ibid., pp. 87-88. 43 Wheeler, The Future of the American Labor Movement, p. 50. 44 Ibid., pp. 80-81.

198CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS example, there are... a number of instances of pre-Owenite trade unions when on strike, employing their own members and marketing the product."45 And G. D. H. Cole writes:
As the Trade Unions grew after 1825, Owenism began to appeal to them, and especially to the skilled handicraftsmen.... Groups of workers belonging to a particular craft began to set up Co-operative Societies of a different typesocieties of producers which offered their products for sale through the Co-operative Stores. Individual Craftsmen, who were Socialists, or who saw a way of escape from the exactions of the middlemen, also brought their products to the stores to sell."46 ...[This pattern of organization was characterized by] societies of producers, aiming at co-operative production of goods and looking to the Stores to provide them with a market. These naturally arose rst in trades requiring comparatively little capital or plant. They appealed especially to craftsmen whose independence was being threatened by the rise of factory production or sub-contracting through capitalist middlemen. The most signicant feature of the years we are discussing was the rapid rise of this... type of Co-operative Society and the direct entry of the Trades Unions into Co-operative production. Most of these Societies were based directly upon or at least very closely connected with the Unions of their trades, ...which took up production as a part of their Union activityespecially for giving employment to their members who were out of work or involved in trade disputes....47

Cooperative producers need for an outlet led to Labour Exchanges, where workmen and cooperatives could directly exchange their product so as to dispense altogether with either capitalist employers or capitalist merchants. Exchange was based on labor time. Owens Labour Notes for a time not only passed current among members of the movement, but were widely accepted by private shopkeepers in payment for goods."48 The principle of labor-based exchange was employed on a large-scale. In 1830, the London Society opened an Exchange Bazaar for exchange of products between cooperative societies and individuals.49 The Co-operative Congress, held at Liverpool in 1832, included a long list of trades among its participants (the bs alone had eleven). The National Equitable Labour Exchange, organized in 1832-33 in Birmingham and London, was a venue for the direct exchange of products between craftsmen, using labor-notes as a medium of exchange.50 The rst major wave of worker cooperatives in the United States, according to John Curl, was under the auspices of the National Trades Union in the
Making of the English Working Class, p. 790. Cole. A Short History of the British Working Class Movement (1789-1947) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 76. 47 Ibid. p. 78. 48 Ibid., pp. 78-79. 49 Ibid., p. 76. 50 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 791.
46 G.D.H. 45 Thompson,

4.12. MODERN NETWORKED LABOR ORGANIZATIONS AND GUILDS AS EXAMPLES OF PHYLES199 1830s.51 Like the Owenite trade union cooperatives in Britain, they were mostly undertaken in craft employments for which the basic tools of the trade were relatively inexpensive. From the beginning, worker cooperatives were a frequent resort of striking workers. In 1768 twenty striking journeyman tailors in New York, the rst striking wage-workers in American history, set up their own cooperative shop. Journeyman carpenters striking for a ten-hour day in Philadelphia, in 1761, formed a cooperative (with the ten-hour day they sought) and undercut their masters price by 25%; they disbanded the cooperative when they went back to work. The same was done by shoemakers in Baltimore, 1794, and Philadelphia, 1806.52 This was a common pattern in early labor history, and the organization of cooperatives moved from being purely a strike tactic to providing an alternative to wage labor.53 It was feasible because most forms of production were done by groups of artisan laborers using hand tools. By the 1840s, the rise of factory production with expensive machinery had largely put an end to this possibility. As the prerequisites of production became increasingly unaffordable, the majority of the population was relegated to wage labor with machinery owned by someone else.54 Most attempts at worker-organized manufacturing, after the rise of the factory system, failed on account of the capital outlays required. For example, when manufacturers refused to sell farm machinery to the Grangers at wholesale prices, the Nebraska Grange undertook its own design and manufacturing of machinery. (Hows that for a parallel to modern P2P ideas?) Its rst attempt, a wheat head reaper, sold at half the price of comparable models and drove down prices on farm machinery in Nebraska. The National Grange planned a complete line of farm machinery, but most Grange manufacturing enterprises failed to raise the large sums of capital needed.55 The Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, undertook a large-scale effort at organizing worker cooperatives. Their fate is an illustration of the central role of capital outlay requirements in determining the feasibility of self-employment and cooperative employment. The K. of L. cooperatives were on shaky ground in the best of times. Many of them were founded during strikes, started with little capital and obsolescent machinery, and lacked the capital to invest in modern machinery. Subjected to economic warfare by organized capital, the network of cooperatives disintegrated during the post-Haymarket repression.56 The defeat of the Knights of Labor cooperatives, resulting from the high capitalization requirements for production, is a useful contrast not only to the artisan production of earlier worker co-ops, but to the potential for small-scale production today. The economy today is experiencing a revolution as profound
51 John Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), p. 4 52 Ibid., p. 33. 53 Ibid., p. 34. 54 Ibid., pp. 35, 47. 55 Ibid., p. 77. 56 Ibid., p. 107.

200CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS as the corporate transformation of the late 19th century, but in the opposite direction. This time around the original shift which brought about large-scale factory production and the wage systemthe shift from individually affordable artisan tools to expensive machinery that only the rich could afford to buy and hire others to workis being reversed. We are experiencing a shift from expensive specialized machinery back to inexpensive, general-purpose artisan tools. And the monopolies on which corporate rule depends, like so-called intellectual property law, are becoming less and less enforceable. Another revolution, based on P2P and micromanufacturing, is sweeping society on the same scale as did the corporate revolution of 150 years ago. But the large corporations today are in the same position that the Grange and Knights of Labor were in the Great Upheaval back then: ghting a desperate, futile rearguard action, and doomed to be swept under by the tidal wave of history. The worker cooperatives organized in the era of artisan labor paralleled, in many ways, the forms of work organization that are arising today. Networked organization, crowdsourced credit and the implosion of capital outlays required for physical production, taken together, are recreating the same conditions that made artisan cooperatives feasible in the days before the factory system. In the artisan manufactories that prevailed into the early 19th century, most of the physical capital required for production was owned by the work force; artisan laborers could walk out and essentially take the rm with them in all but name. Likewise, today, the collapse of capital outlay requirements for production in the cultural and information elds (software, desktop publishing, music, etc.) has created a situation in which human capital is the source of most book value for many rms; consequently, workers are able to walk out with their human capital and form breakaway rms, leaving their former employers as little more than hollow shells.

4.13

Virtual States as Phyles: Hamas, Etc.

[Robb on virtual states like Hamas outcompeting hollowed-out conventional states in providing services to subject populations]
Many terrorist networks have developed complex and sophisticated systems that provide important social services to their supporters. These terrorist social networks thrive in the vacuum created by a failed state. A good example of this is Hamas (who may be serving as a model for al-Sadr in Iraq). Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has proven to be a well run counterweight to Yassar Arafats corrupt Palestinian National Authority (which, in many ways is the Palestinian state). Hamas runs the following services (a more detailed outline of the Hamas structure is available here): 1) An extensive education network 2) Distribution of food to the poor 3) Youth camps and sports 4) Ederly care

4.13. VIRTUAL STATES AS PHYLES: HAMAS, ETC.

5) Funding of scholarships and business development 6) Religious services 7) Public safety 8) Health care This network of social services provides Hamas with multiple benets. These include: 1) Popular support that shelters the organization. 2) A plentiful supply of recruits for its terrorist mission. 3) Sources of external funding through charity organizations that support their social mission (much of which can be redirected to the terrorist mission) and funding through a small number of protable businesses. The rise of terrorist social services indicates that the loose networks that power terrorist military organizations can also replicate the social responsibilities of nation-states. As a challenger to the nationstate system, this capability speaks volumes. This leads me to think that there is a generalized ("business") model that can be derived for fully developed terrorist organizations operating in failed states.57

201

Robb, in developing his ideas of Economies as a Software Service, no doubt applied this generalized business model to the purely civilian realm. According to Robb, Hamas built a ber optic backbone to serve the areas under its control in Lebanon. That was one of the actual issues behind the Israeli invasion in 2008.
Mays dispute between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah is an interesting example of the contest between hollow states and virtual states over legitimacy and sovereignty. As in most conicts between gutted nation-states and aggressive virtual states, Hezbollahs organic legitimacy trumped the states in the contest (an interesting contrast between voluntary afliation and default afliation by geography). The ghting was over in six hours. Whats more interesting than the actual ghting is what the conict was about. In summary, the government made an attempt to slow the expansion Hezbollahs ber optics network, which provides secure/robust communications and surveillance (via automated cameras) to the group. Specically, the government tried to shut down surveillance nodes of the network overlooking Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah responded by dening the network as a core part of its organization and that they were willing to defend it with violence if necessary. So, we can now conclude that in addition to a 4GW militia and social services, a parallel communications/surveillance network is a core feature set of virtual states. This tracks with our emerging experience in Sadr City. It also implies we may see interesting virtual variants of this via the parasitic piggybacking of open source insurgencies (the
57 John Robb, THE TERRORIST SOCIAL NETWORK, Global Guerrillas, April 7, 2004 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/04/terrorist_organ.html>.

202CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

PCC, al Qaeda, etc.) on cell phone networks and the Internet.58

4.14

A Proposed Phyle Organization for OSE Europe

[Background on OSE/Factor e Farm] Nikolay Georgiev of OSE-E drafted a summary of the projects Open Governance model at the OSE wiki:
Here we describe the Governance of OSE Europe. OSE Europe is an open, dynamic, self-organizing group of people implementing the OSE Europe Mission: The creation of an open society, where everybodys needs are met, and where everybody has access to information, material productivity, and just governance systems - such that human creativity is unleashed, for all people.

Open - everyone is free to join and leave. Dynamic - OSE Europe is not a xed group of people. It is ever changing and people participate there where they want and can do their best. Self-organizing - everyone share about themselves (who they are, what they do, what they want to do, how they want to participate) and can connect with everyone or a group of people. Everyone shares valuable information to the others.
As we grow we will describe how exactly we govern this open and live process. We will answer the questions:

How do we implement Open Access? Is the source code available to all developers, at the same time? What open source licenses we use? How do we support the developers? Do they have open access to the mailing list, bug-tracking, developer documentation and other tools? Is the Roadmap publicly available? Is the decision-making transparent? Is the whole process described publicly and are the meeting minutes open to everyone? How do we implement Open Collaborative Development?
58 John Robb, HOLLOW STATES: LEBANON, Global Guerrillas, May 17, <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/05/hollow-states-l.html>.

2008

4.14. A PROPOSED PHYLE ORGANIZATION FOR OSE EUROPE

203

Are the requirements and the process to become a contributor transparent? Is the contributions and acceptance process transparent? Is it transparent who made the contribution? Is it transparent who are the contributors to a project? Derivatives Is there any control how derivatives can be used, shared etc? More ...
59

On the P2P Research email list, Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peerto-Peer Alternatives quoted a private email from Georgiev in which he sought advice on the open governance model:
OSE Europe is growing! What we are doing is something very similar and very different than Factor E Farm. We want to create an open, dynamic, self-organizing network of people, communities, organizations, and open enterprises working towards an open society. Last week we saved Solar Fire, the solar concentrator, which Marcin couldnt open source [a] few months ago, and showed that We Together can achieve more than one leader. http://oseeurope.org/

Bauwens, in response, outlined a model of open organization that sounded very much like de Ugartes phyle model:
1) the community is the core and allowed [sic] permissionless contributions ; selection for excellence is done by accepted maintainers who have gained the condence of the community and of each other 2) OSE-E is the formal entity responsible for maintaining the infrastructure of cooperation, but is not in command and control of the production process; it should be democratically managed 3) Use the peer production license to allow free usage by other commons-friendly market entities, but make other for-prots pay (dene set of minimum conditions) 4) try to create your own cooperative entity for such activities, and create some kind of alliance of entities using the commons, which integrates various stakeholders 5) develop an ethical funding strategy, based on crowdfunding; look into the open hardware central bank, Goteo60
59 OSE Europe/Open Governance, Open Source Ecology wiki <http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/OSE_Europe/ Open_Governance>. Accessed November 6, 2011. 60 Michel Bauwens, Re: [P2P-F] OSE EuropeOpen Process, November 5, 2011 <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/2011-November/004311.html>.

204CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS In January 2012 Nikolai Georgiev announced plans to recruit staff for an OSE demo site in Germany.
We start with the technology needed for the creation of a small scale civilization with modern comforts the Global Village Construction Set and other relevant tools. From tractors, wind turbines to cars. Every technology will be developed with values like modularity, simplicity, lifetime design, low-cost, closed loop manufacturing, Do-ItYourself, exible fabrication and high performance. We want to open source the whole lifecycle of each technology from its parts sourcing, fabrication, use, maintain and repair to its reuse and recycle. We will open source also our ecological food production, housing, workshop constructions and business models our complete economy. All this economically signicant information will be saved digitally on the Internet as text, manufacturing les, pictures and videos so that we distribute it not only to our current generation, but to all other future generations on Earth who can use it and build upon it! We are looking for the pioneers to join us in this endeavor! Our rst main goal is to establish the initial Development Team dedicated to create the community in 2012. The Development Team is open to everyone who works on the creation of the community and has a specic group of people, the Core Team, who will start up and develop the community no matter where or how. We would need help with all areas of community creation and development: organization, communication, land search, ecological housing and workshop architecture and construction, fabrication, engineering, mechatronics, permaculture and organic farming, business, law, social, nancial etc. We have laid out an initial Roadmap. In January we will connect with a lot of people and learn about each other and the possibilities to start the community. Visits are planned in Frankfurt and Berlin. The Roadmap will be expanded and become more concrete as we grow.61

4.15

P2P Foundation Phyle

At one point Michel Bauwens, Director of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, announced plans to create a phyle based on the P2P Foundation.
we ofcially created our coop, as a phyle through our constitution and principles but legally as a dutch legal cooperative, mid-year 2011; franco can provide you with text links if you want we have signed our rst big commercial contract and gone through initial teething problems of getting real contractual cooperation off the ground with people who are not physically co-located, we will be able to make a rst assessment mid 2012 however, keep in mind its a very small outt of 3-4 people62
61 Nikolai Georgiev, Creating OSE Community in Germany, OSE Europe, January 2, 2012 <http://oseeurope.org/2012/ 01/ creating-ose-community-in-germany/>. 62 Michel Bauwens, Re: [P2P-F] How do I get support to start a new Phyle / Cooperative? P2P Foundation mailing list, December 20, 2011.

4.16. GROW VENTURE: THE NETWORKED PLATFORM AS INCUBATOR FOR ENTERPRISES205

4.16

Grow Venture: The Networked Platform as Incubator for Enterprises

The Grow Venture Community is a global distributed network for organizing crowdfunding of startups, as an alternative to banks and venture capitalists. The people creating the companies of the future will be the 99%, not the rich.
There is a signicant body of evidence that shows us that participatory, open, socially orientated connected platformscan be built cheaply, operate differently to conventional models of organisationwhich can outperform these large siloed incumbents.... GrowVC believes an important part of that mission is to make the platform and ecosystem open to all parties to develop services and businesses on top of the technical and legal framework which has been created. GrowVCs vision is that they want to see 3rd parties able to run successful business by utilizing the GrowVC platform and tools. To date the Grow Venture Community and micro funding network has grown to over 11,000 entrepreneurs, investors and experts from 200 different countries. Its platforms exist in Chinese, German and Portuguese. Funds of up to $2/3m have been raised. Grow is running a partner programme in 70 US American campuses which I suggest we will see evolve rapidly over time.63

4.17

Venessa Miemis: Collaboratory

Venessa Miemis of Emergent by Design blog has set up a Collaboratory project that seems to fall within the general category of phyles.
The Collaboratory is essentially an engine of co-creation combined with a Commons. You bring in your community of practice, set up shop in your own global space area, and set permissions for what is visible, shareable, or private. The metaphor weve been using to conceptualize it is Storefront / Cafe / Backroom. Storefront: This is like the Macys window from the street. Its your showcase of the best of whats inside. Public-facing view of your projects and ventures. Cafe: This is your shop. Just like stores have rules to enter (no shirt, no shoes, no service), there are permissions to be granted to enter the shop. (ie referral via trust network, sign NDA, whatever terms you set. its your space.) Backroom: This is the creators workshop. Deepest level of access permissions. Maybe its just your core team and your workow management. Maybe its where you invite potential collaborators or investors
63 The NEXT Silicon Valley is not a place its a platform, NSL Blog, December 17, 2011 <http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/the-next-silicon-valley-is-not-a-place-its-a-platform/>.

206CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

to check out your big picture vision. It might be a bit chaotic, but its where the magic happens. ***intentcast: participants who want to play. we have 25 so far. ***intentcast: someone who can install SQL and Conuence when we go self-hosted ***intentcast: WikiGardeners & Curators for the GetShiftDoneipedia ***intentcast: Sherpas and Guides to be welcoming party give orientation for n00bs in the Collaboratory. Also looking for co-creators for white papers & research about organizational transition that we can offer to companies to help them ride the edge. We have one community member, Bernd Nurnberger, who is currently paying monthly for our hosted license for 25 user accounts. If we each just pitch in $5/month, the cost is distributed, and we essentially co-own our collaboration infrastructure. with scale, the price drops. ***intentcast: free Atlassian license. Much of what were doing qualies as an open source project Another thing were experimenting with is dynamic team formation and developing methods to evaluate and strengthen human infrastructure. This emerged from my thoughts about a strengths-based society.64 To that end, weve created a partnership with The Gabriel Institute65 and they are providing us with role-based assessments, which provide measures of Coherent Human Infrastructure66 indicators. Learn more about the roles in an innovation team.67 Taking the assessment and sharing your role is a prerequisite to participating in the Collaboratory. If youd like to join the tory, you can request access here :)6869

4.18
The Hub.

Assorted Hub Networks

4.19

The Value of the Phyle as Opposed to Other Models of Cooperation

Venessa Miemis, a scholar who specializes in questions of networked collaboration, in early 2010 experienced a personal epiphany (in her words a snowcrash)
64 <http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/03/09/framework-for-a-strengths-based-society/>. 65 <https://thegabrielinstitute.com/index.php>. 66 <https://thegabrielinstitute.com/consulting.php>. 67 <https://thegabrielinstitute.com/Roles/>. 68 <http://collaboratory.cc/>. 69 Venessa Miemis, Intentcasting an Epic Vison: How to Bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0, emergent by design, January 16, 2012 <http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/16/intentcasting-anepic-vision-how-to-bootstrap-creative-economy-3-0/>.

4.19. THE VALUE OF THE PHYLE AS OPPOSED TO OTHER MODELS OF COOPERATION207 on the signicance of networks as the wave of the future.
All this time, I was thinking way too big, trying to understand how to change the world. I kept asking myself, but how do we leverage networks? We dont. We ARE the network. Networks self-organize. We only have to leverage ourselves, and the infrastructure gets built. Each one of us has to create our own ecosystem of relationships that will be benecial to us personally. Well all have some relationships that overlap, but none of us will have the exact same set. The point is that we want to build trust so that when we need help we know who we can access to help us. Now imagine, if youre a entrepreneur, or an organization, or a non-prot, or a corporation, and you understand this message and spread it to each and every one of your employees. What happens when your entire organization of people, as a unit, is a network in itself, but each person also has their personal networks of relationships to draw on, which extend beyond the organization? You then have an INCREDIBLE competitive advantage. (Yeah, there can still be competition in a collaborative society, its just different, because its based on trust.) Your organization becomes agile. It becomes a learning network, where every person has access to information that can be shared, interpreted, and implemented. Youll be able to identify weak signals faster, come up with solutions faster, and adapt to change faster. The world will keep moving. Its accelerating at an accelerating rate. The ONLY WAY to deal with it is not to cling to the old hierarchies and silos and pride and egos. We have to understand that we can only deal with this as a fully connected system. And the really crazy part is: we already have everything we need to make this happen. Its already in place. All that needs to change is the mindset. Let me repeat: All that needs to change is the mindset. So how are we going to x everything? I have absolutely no idea. Thats kind of the point. None of us do, individually, or even as groups. The system needs to be interwoven rst, and then well collectively know how to gure it out. Well be exible, adaptive, and intelligent, because well be able to quickly and freely allocate resources where theyre needed in order to make change. The rst step is to build our networks. This all hit me like a bolt of lightening, a pattern that emerged out of all the complex information. Its an option that seems not only possible, but preferable, and comes with a plan thats implementable immediately. I thought that made this an idea worth spreading.70
70 Venessa Miemis, An Idea Worth Spreading: The Future is Networks, emergent by design, March 16, 2010 <http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/03/16/an-idea-worth-spreading-the-

208CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS Two years later, she complained of the slow pace at which networks were actually taking off. The transaction costs entailed in setting up stable trust networks are a lot higher than those for establishing connections.
Fast forward 18 months or so, and I nd myself embedded within overlapping networks of networks. . . . and yet I still dont see the magic happening that had appeared so clearly in my mind. Whats the deal? I chuckle now looking back at my own starry-eyed naivete, as if it were enough to just be connected. Im reminded of something Stowe Boyd said when I interviewed him for the Future of Facebook Project: Theres no natural reason that were all gonna come together and sing kumbaya just because were using the same social tools. So, yeah. Its not the technology, its about us. Weve been through the binding phase over the past few years, which was all about getting linked. We delighted in relatively low risk interaction and sharing, nding our tribes, forming communities of mutual interest and learning. And its been wonderful. The connection phase was great. It has transformed me. But now were moving into the collaboration phase, and there are some different requirements. The next few years are going to be dened by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If were going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to rst change in order to make that possible.... Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redenition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being. And yet there is still fear. Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed yet again? My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?... For me, it all comes down to trust. Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who Im connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins. Its not a process I think can be done safely. Meaning, you cant really half-ass it with one foot outside the door. Like Yoda said, Do or do not. There is no try.
future-is-networks/>.

4.19. THE VALUE OF THE PHYLE AS OPPOSED TO OTHER MODELS OF COOPERATION209

Ive been doing it. Its scary. Ive been let down and disappointed several times. I know Ive let down and disappointed others as well. But Im learning, Im growing and unfolding as a human being, and Im building a depth in my relationships that is simply not possible when in a fear-based mentality. Without going too woo on you, I can say that there is a heart-opening that happens, a vulnerability that paradoxically unlocks tremendous power, and an energetic eld that expands, calibrates, amplies, and makes seemingly impossible things manifest.71

Stowe Boyd, in response, suggested that establishing that level of trust was too high a hurdle without some intermediate steps. Instead of trying to establish stable, ongoing collaborative networks, he argued, we should be engaging in ad hoc, project-based cooperation:
I think Venessa is trying to do something thats very hard: shes trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And shes right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament. But why form a collective? As she points out, its risky. If you want to build things, you can dene a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the rst thing gets done just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk. The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration. Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust that time-consuming, political practice and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about others motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control. In these contexts, people start with the presumption that the others in the project are professionals and that everyone will focus on doing their jobs as best as the can. A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise. This is how freelancers generally work, and its the way that cities work. But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them. My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Dene some constrained projects, with more modest
71 Venessa Miemis, How Will We Collaborate If We Cant Trust Each Other? emergent by design, January 8, 2012 <http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/08/how-will-we-collaborate-if-we-canttrust-each-other/>.

210CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

goals and dened time frames, and work on them with a few others. It might lead to deep trust, but even if it doesnt you can still be working, making headway, and maybe some money, too. Me, Im trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything. Im going to work with Teresa DiCairano of Intervista on ambient innovation, which is our term for social, bottom-up innovation. Im going to work with Claude Thoret of Nexalogy exploring the science underlying social networks, and trying to make that more accessible to the average person. And I am going to push ahead with my analysis in work media the use of streaming social media tools in the enterprise and I will be pulling a few others into that project with me, too. But these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants. I am not making everything, everything. I am trying to remain liquid, loosely connected to others, heading the same general direction. I am specically not trying to solidify relationships build deep trust before getting something done with others. So, my general recommendation is that people should favor loose connectives social networks with less tight ties that rely only on swift trust. If and when you establish deep trust with individuals, perhaps during short-term, swift trust-based projects, then perhaps your can form a collective, where the principles shared common, longterm purpose. But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy. Why should I have to agree on a long term strategic vision about the future of work media just to work with other researchers on the state of that industry, for example? Or to take the example of the city, all the stores on Main Street do not have to agree to not compete with each other, or to pool their prots, or even to paint their storefronts the same color. The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.72

The problem with the kind of ad hoc, project-based, one-off free agent relationships Boyd described is that they leave the individual isolated without a safety net, and thus leave the project-based model of p2p collaboration open to cooptation (as free agents become a precariat) by capitalist business rms. Miemis argued, in response to her perception that Boyd misinterpreted [networks based on deep trust] as attempting to form some kind of unied hive72 Stowe Boyd, Getting to Trust: Better Swift Than Deep, Stowe Boyd, January 9, 2012 <http://www.stoweboyd.com/ post/15566266958/getting-to-trust-better-swift-than-deep>.

4.19. THE VALUE OF THE PHYLE AS OPPOSED TO OTHER MODELS OF COOPERATION211 mind, that they were not a cult, sacrice of self-interest, or borg. Rather, they served the purposes of genuine self-interest, constituting (in the words of Brian Eno) a scenius:
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. Individuals immersed in a productive scenes will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenes, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you. The geography of a scenes is nurtured by several factors: * Mutual appreciation Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. * Rapid exchange of tools and techniques As soon as something is invented, it is aunted and then shared. Ideas ow quickly because they are owing inside a common language and sensibility. * Network effects of success When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success. (Collective Epic Wins!) * Local tolerance for the novelties The local outside does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

The purpose of deep trust networks is

To provide creative entrepreneurs and business owners the tools and ongoing support to bootstrap their ventures from inception to maturity, so they can have a continuous positive impact on systems and culture.73

It strikes me that the phyle is a middle case between these two extremes. It overcomes the transaction costs of achieving deep trust by providing a basic infrastructure of transparency and reputational trackingnot to mention adjudication mechanismsto recreate the functional equivalent of deep trust where it has not been developed by purely interpersonal relations. And having done so, it creates a larger frameworka platformwithin which ongoing collaborative relationships can take place. At the same time, it provides the risk and cost pooling mechanisms that prevent an unprotected society of atomized free agents from being reduced to a precariat. Whether p2p is coopted into a corporate capitalist framework or becomes a separate model of self-organized production in its own right, depends on who has the most leverage from owning the means of production and being able to walk away from the bargaining table. Ongoing relationships facilitated by common platforms reduce precarity and individual vulnerability, and potentially gives p2p communities the leverage to pull down the pillars of the capitalist temple. [Last modied February 23, 2012]
73 Venessa Miemis, Core Principles for the New Economy: Human Agency & Enlightened Self-Interest, emergent by design, January 10, 2012 <http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/10/core-principles-for-the-new-economy-humanagency-enlightened-self-interest/>.

212CHAPTER 4. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED ECONOMIES AND PLATFORMS

Chapter 5

Basic Infrastructures: Money

5.1

What Moneys For and What It Isnt

Local currencies, barter networks and mutual credit-clearing systems are a solution to a basic problem: a world in which there is a lot of work to be done, but there is simply no money around to bring the people and the work together.1 One barrier to local barter currencies and crowdsourced mutual credit is a misunderstanding of the nature of money. For the alternative economy, money is not primarily a store of value, but a unit of account for facilitating exchange. Its function is not to store accumulated value from past production, but to provide liquidity to facilitate the exchange of present and future services between producers. The distinction is a very old one, aptly summarized by Joseph Schumpeters contrast between the money theory of credit and the credit theory of money. The former, which Schumpeter dismissed as entirely fallacious, assumes that banks lend money (in the sense of giving up use of it) which has been withdrawn from previous uses by an entirely imaginary act of saving and then lent out by its owners. It is much more realistic to say that the banks create credit.., than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them.2 The credit theory of money, on the other hand, treats nances as a clearing system that cancels claims and debts and carries forward the difference....3 Thomas Hodgskin, criticizing the Ricardian wage fund theory from a perspective something like Schumpeters credit theory of money, utterly demolished any moral basis for the creative role of the capitalist in creating a wage fund through abstention, and instead made the advancement of subsistence funds from existing production a function that workers could just as easily perform for one another through mutual credit, had the avenues of doing so not been
p. 112. [full cite] Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis. Edited from manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 1114. 3 Ibid., p. 717.
2 Joseph 1 Lietaer,

213

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CHAPTER 5. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: MONEY

The only advantage of circulating capital is that by it the labourer is enabled, he being assured of his present subsistence, to direct his power to the greatest advantage. He has time to learn an art, and his labour is rendered more productive when directed by skill. Being assured of immediate subsistence, he can ascertain which, with his peculiar knowledge and acquirements, and with reference to the wants of society, is the best method of labouring, and he can labour in this manner. Unless there were this assurance there could be no continuous thought, an invention, and no knowledge but that which would be necessary for the supply of our immediate animal wants.... The labourer, the real maker of any commodity, derives this assurance from a knowledge he has that the person who set him to work will pay him, and that with the money he will be able to buy what he requires. He is not in possession of any stock of commodities. Has the person who employs and pays him such a stock? Clearly not.... A great cotton manufacturer... employs a thousand persons, whom he pays weekly: does he possess the food and clothing ready prepared which these persons purchase and consume daily? Does he even know whether the food and clothing they receive are prepared and created? In fact, are the food and clothing which his labourers will consume prepared beforehand, or are other labourers busily employed in preparing food and clothing while his labourers are making cotton yarn? Do all the capitalists of Europe possess at this moment one weeks food and clothing for all the labourers they employ?... ...As far as food, drink and clothing are concerned, it is quite plain, then, that no species of labourer depends on any previously prepared stock, for in fact no such stock exists; but every species of labourer does constantly, and at all times, depend for his supplies on the coexisting labour of some other labourers.4 ...When a capitalist therefore, who owns a brew-house and all the instruments and materials requisite for making porter, pays the actual brewers with the coin he has received for his beer, and they buy bread, while the journeymen bakers buy porter with their money wages, which is afterwards paid to the owner of the brew-house, is it not plain that the real wages of both these parties consist of the produce of the other; or that the bread made by the journeyman baker pays for the porter made by the journeyman brewer? But the same is the case with all other commodities, and labour, not capital, pays all wages.... In fact it is a miserable delusion to call capital something saved. Much of it is not calculated for consumption, and never is made to be enjoyed. When a savage wants food, he picks up what nature spontaneously offers. After a time he discovers that a bow or a sling will enable him to kill wild animals at a distance, and he resolves to make it, subsisting himself, as he must do, while the work is in progress. He saves nothing, for the instrument never was made to be consumed,
4 Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 [1825]), pp. 36-40.

5.1. WHAT MONEYS FOR AND WHAT IT ISNT

though in its own nature it is more durable than deers esh. This example represents what occurs at every stage of society, except that the different labours are performed by different personsone making the bow, or the plough, and another killing the animal or tilling the ground, to provide subsistence for the makers of instruments and machines. To store up or save commodities, except for short periods, and in some particular cases, can only be done by more labour, and in general their utility is lessened by being kept. The savings, as they are called, of the capitalist, are consumed by the labourer, and there is no such thing as an actual hoarding up of commodities.5

215

What political economy conventionally referred to as the labor fund, and attributed to past abstention and accumulation, resulted rather from the present division of labor and the cooperative distribution of its product. Capital is a term for a right of property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes these cooperative functions, and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor.
Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence.6

Franz Oppenheimer made a similar argument against the wage-fund doctrine in A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics":
THE JUSTIFICATION OF PROFIT, to repeat, rests on the claim that the entire stock of instruments of production must be saved during one period by private individuals in order to serve during a later period. This proof, it has been asserted, is achieved by a chain of equivocations. In short, the material instruments, for the most part, are not saved in a former period, but are manufactured in the same period in which they are employed. What is saved is capital in the other sense, which may be called for present purposes money capital. But this capital is not necessary for developed production. Rodbertus, about a century ago, proved beyond doubt that almost all the capital goods required in production are created in the same period. Even Robinson Crusoe needed but one single set of simple tools to begin works which, like the fabrication of his canoe, would
5 Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966 [1827]), p. 247. 6 Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 71.

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occupy him for several months. A modern producer provides himself with capital goods which other producers manufacture simultaneously, just as Crusoe was able to discard an outworn tool, occasionally, by making a new one while he was building the boat. On the other hand, money capital must be saved, but it is not absolutely necessary for developed technique. It can be supplanted by co-operation and credit, as Marshall correctly states. He even conceives of a development in which savers would be glad to tend their savings to reliable persons without demanding interest, even paying something themselves for the accommodation for securitys sake. Usually, it is true, under capitalist conditions, that a certain personally-owned money capital is needed for undertakings in industry, but certainly it is never needed to the full amount the work will cost. The initial money capital of a private entrepreneur plays, as has been aptly pointed out, merely the rle of the air chamber in the re engine; it turns the irregular inow of capital goods into a regular outow.7

E. C. Riegel argues that issuing money is a function of the individual within the market, a side-effect of her normal economic activities. Currency is issued by the buyer by the very act of buying, and its backed by the goods and services of the seller.
Money can be issued only in the act of buying, and can be backed only in the act of selling. Any buyer who is also a seller is qualied to be a money issuer. Government, because it is not and should not be a seller, is not qualied to be a money issuer.8

Money is simply an accounting system for tracking the balance between buyers and sellers over time.9 And because money is issued by the buyer, it comes into existence as a debit. The whole point of money is to create purchasing power where it did not exist before: ...[N]eed of money is a condition precedent to the issue thereof. To issue money, one must be without it, since money springs only from a debit balance on the books of the authorizing bank or central bookkeeper.10
IF MONEY is but an accounting instrument between buyers and sellers, and has no intrinsic value, why has there ever been a scarcity of it? The answer is that the producer of wealth has not been also the producer of money. He has made the mistake of leaving that to government monopoly.11

Money is simply number accountancy among private traders.12 Or as Riegels

7 Franz Oppenheimer, A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part Three), The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 3, no. 1 (1944), pp, 122-123, [115-124] 8 E. C. Riegel, Private Enterprise Money: A Non-Political Money System (1944), Introduction <http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/pem/introduction.html>. 9 Ibid., Chapter Seven <http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/pem/chapter07.html>. 10 Riegel, The New Approach to Freedom: together with Essays on the Separation of Money and State. Edited by Spencer Heath MacCallum (San Pedro, California: The Heather Foundation, 1976), Chapter Four <http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/naf/chapter4.html>. 11 Riegel, The Money Pact, in Ibid. <http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/naf/essay1.html>. 12 Spencer H. MacCallum, E. C. Riegel on Money (January 2008) <http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/documents/AboutRiegel.pdf>.

5.1. WHAT MONEYS FOR AND WHAT IT ISNT

217

disciple Thomas Greco argues, currencies are not value units (in the sense of being stores of value). They are means of payment denominated in value units.13 In fact, as Greco says, barter systems are more accurately conceived as credit clearing systems. In a mutual credit clearing system, rather than cashing in ofcial state currency for alternative currency notes (as is the case in too many local currency systems), participating businesses spend the money into existence by incurring debits for the purchase of goods within the system, and then earning credits to offset the debits by selling their own services within the system. The currency functions as a sort of IOU by which a participant monetizes the value of his future production.14 Its simply an accounting system for keeping track of each members balance:
Your purchases have been indirectly paid for with your sales, the services or labor you provided to your employer. In actuality, everyone is both a buyer and a seller. When you sell, your account balance increases; when you buy, it decreases.

Its essentially what a checking account does, except a conventional bank does not automatically provide overdraft protection for those running negative balances, unless they pay a high price for it.15 Theres no reason businesses cannot maintain a mutual credit-clearing system between themselves, without the intermediary of a bank or any other third party currency or accounting institution. The businesses agree to accept each others IOUs in return for their own goods and services, and periodically use the clearing process to settle their accounts.16 And again, since some of the participants run negative balances for a time, the system offers what amounts to interest-free overdraft protection. As such a system starts out, members are likely to resort to fairly frequent settlements of account, and put fairly low limits on the negative balances that can be run, as a condence building measure. Negative balances might be paid up, and positive balances cashed out, every month or so. But as condence increases, Greco argues, the system should ideally move toward a state of affairs where accounts are never settled, so long as negative balances are limited to some reasonable amount.
An account balance increases when a sale is made and decreases when a purchase is made. It is possible that some account balances may always be negative. That is not a problem so long as the account is actively trading and the negative balance does not exceed some appropriate limit. What is a reasonable basis for deciding that limit?... Just as banks use your income as a measure of your ability to repay a loan, it is reasonable to set maximum debit balances based on the
13 Thomas Greco, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis (1990), Part III: Segregated Monetary Functions and an Objective, Global, Standard Unit of Account <http://circ2.home.mindspring.com/Money_and_Debt_Part3_lo.PDF>. 14 Greco, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009), p. 82. 15 Ibid., p. 102. 16 Ibid. pp. 106-107

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amount of revenue owing through an account.... [One possible rule of thumb is] that a negative account balance should not exceed an amount equivalent to three months average sales.17

For a credit clearing system to thrive, it must offer a valued alternative to those who lack sources of money in the conventional economy. That means it must have a large variety of participating goods and services, participating businesses must nd it a valuable source of business that would not otherwise exist in the conventional economy, and unemployed and underemployed members must nd it a valuable alternative for turning their skills into purchasing power they would not otherwise have. So we can expect LETS or credit clearing systems to increase in signicance in periods of economic downturn, and even more so in the structural decline of the money and wage economy that is coming. Karl Hess and David Morris cite Alan Watts illustration of the absurdity of saying its impossible for willing producers, faced with willing consumers, to produce for exchange because theres not enough money going around:
Remember the Great Depression of the Thirties? One day there was a ourishing consumer economy, with everyone on the up-andup; and the next: poverty, unemployment and breadlines. What happened? The physical resources of the countrythe brain, brawn, and raw materialswere in no way depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a so-called nancial slump. Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be elaborated at lengths by experts in banking and high nance who cannot see the forest for the trees. But it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, that boss had to say, Sorry, baby, but we cant build today. No inches. Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood. We got metal. We even got tape measures. Yeah, but you dont understand business. We been using too many inches, and theres just no more to go around.18

The point of the mutual credit clearing system, as Greco describes it, is that two people who have goods and services to offerbut no moneyare able to use their goods and services to buy other goods and services, even when theres no money.19 So we can expect alternative currency systems to come into play precisely at those times when people feel the lack of inches. Based on case studies in the WIR system and the Argentine social money movement, Greco says, complementary currencies will take hold most easily when they are introduced into markets that are starved for exchange media.20 The widespread proliferation of local currencies in the Depression suggests that when this condition holds, the scale of adoption will follow as a matter of course. And as we enter a new, long-term period of stagnation in the conventional economy, it seems likely that local currency systems will play a growing role in the average persons strategy for economic survival.
p. 134. Hess and David Morris, Neighborhood Power: The New Localism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 154-155. 19 Greco, The End of Money, p. 116. 20 Ibid., p. 158.
18 Karl 17 Ibid.,

5.2. THE ADOPTION OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS

219

5.2

The Adoption of Networked Money Systems

Alternative money systems tend to be adopted in situations in which the existing currency system is wanting. [The Depression. Argentina. Greece]

5.3

Examples of Networked Money Systems.

There are a number of competing digital complementary currency systems, most of them providing networked currency platforms on something resembling Grecos principles: among them Community Exchange Systems, Community Forge, Community Tools, Ripple, and Cyclos. CES21 was developed in 2002 and has three hundred participating communities.22
The Community Exchange System (CES) is a community-based exchange system that provides the means for its users to exchange their goods and services, both locally and remotely. It could also be described as a global complementary trading network that operates without money as it is commonly understood. Unlike the conventional money-based exchange system, the CES has no physical currency. The idea that such a currency is required before any trading can take place is an ancient one and increasingly irrelevant in this day and age of computers and the Internet. Information can replace currencies and at the same time eliminate most of the problems associated with regular money. There are many similar trading systems around the world, commonly known as Community Exchange Systems, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), Mutual Credit trading systems or Time Banks. Apart from using information instead of currencies to effect exchange, these exchange systems are community-focussed [sic] in order to build community and keep wealth where it is created. The CES takes this a step further by providing the means for inter-community trading, right up to the global level. As the currency in the above types of exchange systems is information it does not have to be created like conventional money so there is no need for an issuing authority or for a supply of it, and none is required to start trading. Money in these systems is a retrospective score-keeping that keeps a record of who did what for whom and who sold what to whom. There can never be a shortage of information as there can be of money, as information does not have to be created and limited by a third party (banks or government) in order to give it value. For this reason the concepts of borrowing, lending and interest are meaningless in the CES.... How does it work?
21 <http://www.ces.org.za/>. 22 Compare with CES and Community <http://communityforge.net/compare>.

Tools

Accessed

November

15,

2011

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CES exchanges compile and distribute a directory of goods and services offered by the users registered with them, as well as a list of their wants or requirements. When a user requires something advertised in the directory the seller is contacted and the trade takes place. The buyer pays the seller by signing a trading sheet provided by the seller or by handing over a cheque-like trading slip that records how much the buyer is agreeing to be debited by the seller for the goods/service delivered. The slip is either handed by the seller to a group administrator who will enter the amount into the computerised system, or the information is entered directly by the seller. Sales are recorded as credits for sellers and as debits for buyers. The central book-keeping system records the relative trading positions of the traders. Those in credit can claim from the community goods and services to the value of their credit and those in debit owe the community goods and services to the value of their debit. Traders receive a regular statement of account that lists their trades and gives their balance at the end of the period. Information about the trading position of others prevents unscrupulous buyers from exploiting the system. Newsletters assist in building links and enhancing the sense of community. Is this a form of Barter? No! Barter almost always involves bargaining between two individuals to establish the relative worth of the goods or services they wish to exchange. There is no bargaining in the CES as the recipient is in no way obligated to the provider; you pay for what you have received by delivering/selling something to another trader in the community at a later time. Complementary exchange systems are as versatile as conventional ones.23

As with Grecos system, there is no need to accumulate a store of value from past exchange before one can participate in the system. Ones account simply tracks the net balance of exchanges to date. CES money is abundant and can never be in short supply; hence It bridges the money gap between the skills/offers/talents/gifts of sellers on the one hand and the wants/needs/requirements of buyers on the other. Conventional money usually cant bridge this gap because its supply is limited or non-existent.24 Drupal, the open-source content management system, can serve as the architecture for a wide range of alternative currency systems. Community Accounting Complementary Currencies Virtual Currencies Community Exchange Time Banking
23 What is the CES? Accessed November 15, 2011 <http://www.ces.org.za/docs/whatces.htm>. 24 Advantages of the CES Accessed <http://www.ces.org.za/docs/advantages.htm>.

November

15,

2011

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS. Community Currencies Credit Unions

An all-embracing and exible package which includes a mutual credit ledger, super-congurable transaction forms and displays, including several views and blocks. It can be used as a digital back-end for paper money projects, or to run an entire LETS, Timebank, or several in parallel. With a little tweaking, it can manage currencies conforming to a wide range of designs. Autopayments can be done with a little glue code. Features

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Multiple currencies 1stparty, 3rdparty & mass payments Pending transactions (parties must sign) email notication customisable transaction forms pluggable global/personal min/max balance limits Complete views integration visualisation & stats API for other modules to create exchanges Time Banks, LETS, barter
Community currency projects should nd that this module works almost out of the box, but if you have no resources to commit to properly customising such a web site, you should think carefully about whether you have the resources to nurture a new economy. This is not a shop, a cart, or an ecommerce system, but a mutual credit system which tracks credit extended between users, though it will meet more business-like objectives in time, for example, there is an experimental ubercart payment method.25

To take one example, Community Forge is a local currency system based on the Drupal architecture.
Starting with a LETS architecture coded into the Drupal platform, CommunityForge aims to deliver its web solution as many LETS communities with transaction-enabled social networking web sites. With a membership base, it will seek to devolve power and skills while providing more and better tools to more local communities seeking to strengthen and build resilience.
25 matslats, Community Accounting, <http://drupal.org/project/mutual_credit>.

Drupal,

September

7,

2009

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By offering economic tools, to enable real-world and virtual communities to declare their own localised currencies, and to trade in them using open source software, thus building a more sustainable economy for the 21st century.

Its purpose, as described in the Community Forge Mission Statement, is to Make Community Currencies Ubiquitous.
1. to enable communities to use mutual credit currencies as part of a larger localisation movement 2. to campaign and educate for interest free money 3. to concentrate expertise and foster experimentation in CC design26

As described by the Community Forge project, CF is of special value because its designed to be scalable and modular:
Our software, based on Drupal, is the only community currency trading software built on a social networking platform. That means thousands of software developers can set up similar sites, and many of them could easily modify the software. As a popular open source project, the code is very high quality and continually improving. And we take a more holistic view in terms of building up a community of users who can support each other.27

CF is two years old, and has some fty communities participating.28 As the Ripple website points out, a trust-based local currency performs exactly the same function your checking account does. Every time you write a check, youre giving a merchant an IOU backed by the merchants faith in the banks ability to make it good.
Money as we know it is made from promises, specically bank promises, in the form of bank account balances. Ripples goal is to make your promises as useful for paying people as bank promises are. To start with, lets look at what happens if you tried to use your own promise as money. Suppose you went to the store and tried to pay with an IOU. This might work, except for two things:

1. The store owner may not know you are trustworthy.

2. Even if the owner trusts you, many others dont, so she cant use your IOU to buy things.
26 Our Story, CommunityForge.net. Accessed November 15, 2011 <http://communityforge.net/our-story>. 27 Whats so special about CommunityForges service? Accessed November 15, 2011 <http://communityforge.net/node/ 233>. 28 Compare with CES and Community Tools Accessed November 15, 2011 <http://communityforge.net/compare>.

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

Ripple solves the rst problem by nding one or more people who can exchange your IOU for one issued by someone the store owner trusts. For example, if the store owner trusts your friend Alice, and Alice trusts you, you can give your IOU to Alice, and Alice can give her IOU to the owner. This can all happen instantly over the internet. The cool thing now is that the store owner can actually use Alices IOU to buy things, because Ripple can convert it into IOUs that are useful for paying other people. That solves the second problem.29

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Ripplepay.com is a part of the Ripple project to develop a peer-to-peer network protocol for making decentralized Ripple payments between users on different computers.
Ripple is a monetary system that makes simple obligations between friends as useful for making payments as regular money. Normally, if your friend Alice owed you $10, she would have to pay you back before you could make any use of that debt. If you were creative, however, you might be able to pass the debt on to someone else who knew and trusted Alice, in exchange for something you wanted. For example, you might be able to get a book you want from Bob, who also knows Alice, in exchange for letting Alice know that she now owes Bob $10. Instead of money, you used Alices IOU to pay Bob. Alice acts as an intermediary between you and Bob. Ripple does the same thing, only it takes the idea one step further. What happens if you want to get a haircut from Carol, who doesnt know Alice at all? Your $10 IOU from Alice isnt useful because Carol being owed money by Alice doesnt mean anything to Carol. But suppose you had a way to nd out that Bob, who knows Alice, also knows Carol. You could talk to Bob and arrange for him to take Alices IOU in exchange for giving his own IOU for $10 to Carol. Since Alice owes him exactly what he owes Carol, Bob is even on the deal. Both Alice and Bob act as intermediaries between you and Carol. And thats how Ripple works. You create a prole on the system and indicate who you know and how much you trust them by connecting to people by email address and giving them credit limits. Then whenever you want to make a payment to another Ripple user using only friendly obligations, the system nds a chain of intermediaries connecting you to the person you want to pay, and records the payment in each intermediarys account all the way down the chain. You end up owing one of your neighbours on the system, and the payment recipient ends up being owed by one of her neighbours.30

[Cyclos. http://project.cyclos.org/] At the very least, its questionable whether Bitcoins technical features are preferable to the other major digital currency systems we consider in this section. The biggest shortcoming of Bitcoin, from a community currency standpoint, is that it serves more as a store of value than as a simple denominator of exchange. [Describe backing]. Its quantity is xed beyond a certain point, which
29 RippleWiki/Main

Accessed November 15, 2011 <http://ripple-project.org/>.

30 <http://ripplepay.com/about/>.

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means that individual units will appreciate in value as people come into the system. That is, its deationary. From the perspective of most currency designers, thats a serious bug. Deation makes it subject to Greshams law: that is, people will hold onto it as an investment rather than keep it in circulation.31 Most LETS systems have a tendency toward hoarding because the range of good and service providers participating in them means the average member can only meet an unsatisfactory portion of her total needs through the system, and has leftover notes with nothing to spend them on. Silvio Gesell built demurrage into his currency systemi.e., it lost value over timeas an incentive to spend it rather than hoard it, and overcome the deation and idle capacity of the larger economy. And because the money is created by a third party rather than by the very act of spending it, it doesnt solve the problem of liquidity for those who lack conventional money. Despite its arguable technical shortcomings, Bitcoin created by far the biggest splash with its appearance in the mainstream media in 2011. The moral panic surrounding Silk Road made it front page news for people whod never heard of encrypted currencies. Rick Falkvinge, the gray eminence of The Pirate Bay, described Bitcoin as the Napster of Banking. Despite its technical shortcomings, its innovations in peer-to-peer architecture and its sheer impact on public awareness made it the forerunner of whatever encrypted currency system winds up taking over the ecosystem.
One general rule of technical advancement is that its not necessarily the most feature rich variant of a new technology that reaches the tipping point and critical mass, or even the cheapest or most available: rather, it tends to be the easiest to use. I frequently cite YouTube as an example here. It was not the rst site to offer video over the net. Heck, porn had done that for ve years when YouTube came around, and techies for ten years. There were at least a dozen common ways to share digitized audio and video online with one another. History so far tells us that it takes about ten years from conception of a technology, or an application of technology, until somebody hits the magic recipe in how to make that technology easy enough to use that it catches on. And when it does, boy, does it catch on. It would be rude to not mention Napster in this context. I started swapping les over FidoNet using a 2400-bps modem in 1989. Text, music, images. It was crude, but we were doing it. A new protocol called TCP/IP hit the shelves, and 1995-ish we all switched to that. Big deal, it was still packet switching. In 1999, Napster hit. . . and suddenly everybody was exchanging music les. DC++ and other follow-suits made sure that we would share anything we wanted.
31 Sebastiano Scrona, Scronas answer to Bitcoin: If one were to make a competitor to Bitcoin, what features would be desirable? Quora, June 15, 2011 <http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Ifone-were-to-make-a-competitor-to-Bitcoin-what-features-would-be-desirable/answer/SebastianoScr%C3%B2na?srid=uLs>.

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

It took ten years for music sharing to become easy enough to wildre, courtesy of Napster. It took video sharing ten years to become easy enough to wildre. So if you want a crystal ball of the next battle, look at what many techies are doing right now, but that is obscure and hasnt caught on; something that has a very clear and attractive use case once it becomes easy enough. Heres whats on my radar: banking. Theres at least a dozen different variants of decentralized cryptographic currencies and transaction systems out there, very sophisticated and totally incomprehensible. Theres Ripple, BitCoin, ecash and others. Just as BitTorrent made the copyright industry obsolete in the blink of an eye, these stand to make banks obsolete. These, or their successor, will hit a tipping point as soon as somebody makes it easy enough to use. The technology is there, the use case is theretheres certainly no shortage of annoyance with big banking. Its just a matter of usability now. When this tipping point happens, there wont be any central point of control over economies. It will be like everybody traded in cash, traditional anonymous cash, once again. Why, then, will this make governments dump a ton of bricks on the Internet? Up until now, from the perspective of governments, its only been some friends complaining about a sales slump of CDs, so governments have given them some legislative breadcrumbs to shut up. How do you think governments across the world are going to react when they realize theyve lost the ability to tax the public? Imagine the ramications of that for a moment. The governments of the world are on the brink of losing the ability to look into the economy of their citizens. They stand to lose the ability to seize assets, they stand to lose the ability to collect debts. No application of force in the world is going to help: everything is encrypted, and destroying a computer with any amount of police repower will accomplish zilch. All the worlds weapons in all the worlds police hands are useless against the publics ability to keep their cryptographic economy to themselves. Wont make a scratch. If you thought the wars over knowledge and culture were intense, I believe well see much more interesting events unfold in the coming decade. The decentralized, uncontrollable economy where one lifetime employment is no longer central to every human being is something Ive called the swarm economy, and I predict it will redene society to an immensely larger extent than the ability to get rap music for free.32

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Chris Pinchen, likewise, sees Bitcoin as a harbinger of future developments at a time when existing governance mechanismsstates and corporationsare crumbling from within. The crypto-currency movement
32 Rick Falkvinge, With the Napster of Banking Round the Corner, Bring Out Your Popcorn, Falkvinge & Co. on Infopolicy, May 11. 2011 <http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/11/with-the-napsterof-banking-round-the-corner-bring-out-your-popcorn/>.

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is signicant because it is a vanguard phenomenon. It is a crossover species that is pioneering a transition from the current socioeconomic order of bureaucratic states, grounded in rigid hierarchies, rule-sets and territorial control, to a new order that more resembles an ecosystem whose governance institutions are based on peer to peer social relations that co-evolve within a global socio-technological framework. ...Bitcoin is very likely the rst in a series of real world experiments in new forms of trustworthy digital institutions that will challenge the sovereignty and governance power of states. These new institutions may even come to supplant traditional, physical democratic institutions because of their inherent efciencies, versatility, stability and safeguards against corruption.33

Bitcoins encryption, combined with a p2p architecture which frees it from dependence on a central server network, makes it extremely opaque to the authorities. Moral scolds like Sen. Charles Schumer went ballistic at news that Bitcoin was being used as a medium of exchange in black market venues like Silk Road for purchasing illegal drugs. But as usual, their outraged squawking about the goings-on in the Intertubes far exceeded their actual power to do anything about it.
Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer technology to manage transactions and validate payments. Since no bank is involved, purchases dont leave a paper trail for law enforcement agencies to track criminal activity. The only method of payment for these illegal purchases is an untraceable peer-to-peer currency known as Bitcoins. After purchasing Bitcoins through an exchange, a user can create an account on Silk Road and start purchasing illegal drugs from individuals around the world and have them delivered to their homes within days, the senators wrote. The senators neglected to mention the much larger negative implications of Bitcoin usage in the letter. If the currency became popular enough to compete with a national currency, it could have the power to undermine that governments authority far beyond regulating drugssomething China realized and outlawed in 2009. However, nding black markets like Silk Road that promote the use of Bitcoin wont be easy. The only lead investigators have is tracking transaction patterns that may suggest the exchange of real money for Bitcoin, according to the report.34

Bitcoin is vulnerable at its real-world interface with the ofcial currency, as shown by the hacking of the largest Bitcoin currency exchange, Mt. Gox. As with the suppression of Napster, Bitcoin users responded with Dark Exchange,
33 Chris Pinchen, Why Bitcoin is a Foundational Change That Wont Go Awayand Could Change Everything, P2P Foundation, November 26, 2011 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/whybitcoin-is-a-foundational-change-that-won%E2%80%99t-go-away-and-could-changeeverything/2011/11/26>. 34 Tom Cheredar, Forget piracy, U.S. government is going after Bitcoin, VentureBeat, June 8, 2011 <http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/08/government-crackdown-on-bitcoin/>.

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

227

a distributed p2p exchange for bitcoin.35 As reported by the Gawker article which Cheredar cites, law enforcement actually does have some tools despite the end-to-end encryption of the Bitcoin architecture itself.
Sellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Roads users with computer forensics, theyd have nowhere to look. TOR masks a users tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to creatively disguise their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesnt accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins. Bitcoins have been called a crypto-currency, the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders computers. (The name Bitcoin is derived from the pioneering le-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money ows across borders as free as bits. To purchase something on Silk Road, you need rst to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate uctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. Thats probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience. Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision. Many of its users come from Bitcoins utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy drugs. Silk Roads administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of Agorism. The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and all forms of coercion, Silk Road wrote to us. Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market.".... Silk Road and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution. But anonymity cuts both ways. How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she gets? As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can blur. Update: Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all
35 <https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange>.

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the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction ow and track down individual Bitcoin users. "Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the eld by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb, he says.36

Timothy B. Lee explains, in greater detail, the vulnerability of Bitcoin where its encrypted architecture intersects with the non-encrypted world:
Remember, people want money so they can buy stuff. There are a few goods and services, like pornography or consulting work, that can be delivered entirely over the Internet. But people mostly buy products that need to be physically delivered. An American who wants to deal primarily in Bitcoins will, at some point, need to either buy food and shelter in Bitcoins or convert some of their Bitcoins to dollars. And that means making Bitcoin payments to people in the US. But the US government could easily require any business accepting Bitcoin payments (or converting Bitcoins to dollars) to collect identication information from their customers in the same way that know your customer regulations require nancial institutions to collect information about their customers. And once the government has de-anonymized a signicant fraction of the addresses on the network, theyll be able to infer many of the others using basic detective work. Remember, the full pattern of transactions is a matter of public record. Ofcials trying to identify a particular address will have a complete record of every address thats ever sent money to, or received money from, that address. If any of them are within the United States, they can be compelled to disclose details (IP addresses, shipping addresses, contact email address, etc) that could help identify the addresss owner. Now this isnt to say that a determined individual couldnt use Bitcoin in a way that preserves his privacy. But it would either require a high level of technical savvy or signicant lifestyle changes. He could avoid working for traditional US employers and buying things from mainstream US businesses. But most users just dont care about privacy enough to make those kinds of major lifestyle changes to get it. Another approach would be to use technical means to obfuscate the ow of funds to and from his accounts. He could route all Bitcoin trafc through an anonymization service like Tor. He could create a large number of decoy accounts and have different people pay different accounts. There could even be Bitcoin money laundering services that accept money from you and pay you back in another account. But few people have the patience or technical know-how to do this effectively. Moreover, people willing to go to that much trouble can obtain roughly the same degree of nancial privacy using dollars. Most obviously, you can conduct transactions in cash, which is inherently re36 Adrien Chen, The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable, Gawker, June 1, 2011 <http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-anydrug-imaginable>.

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

sistant to government surveillance. For remote transactions, there are any number of offshore intermediaries in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and elsewhere that have been helping privacy-conscious Americans stay beyond the long arm of the law for decades. And all of these transactions have an important advantage over Bitcoin: they dont produce public entries in a global distributed database.37

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But Thomas Lowenthal, at Active Rhetoric, argues that automated user interfaces in future upgrades of Bitcoin will enable average users to take the obfuscation and laundering countermeasures described by Lee without it being that much trouble.38 After all this back-and-forth, perhaps the best conclusion we can come up with is that an encrypted currency like Bitcoin would work best when coupled with another trust network like a phyle, whose members have been vetted for trustworthiness. But far more important than questions of security and opacity to the state is the question of Bitcoins functional role. The problem with Bitcoin is that its a store of value. So if neither party to a transaction has Bitcoins from past transactions, or that theyve bought with ofcial currency, there is no source of liquidity for an exchange of services between them. Because Bitcoin isnt generated by the act of exchange itself, people with skills and needs who lack money are stuck with the old mutual coincidence of wants system of barter. The only thing Bitcoin is good for, over and above conventional currency, is payments where condentiality is at a premium:
At the moment there is no need to use Bitcoin, as anything that can be bought for BTC can be bought for real money elsewhere, a Redditor writers. Love it or hate it, Silkroad is the one example of Bitcoin actually being used as it was designed.39

In other words, while its good for black marketeers who need an anonymous medium of exchangeand theres certainly nothing wrong with that!its useless for the primary purpose of an alternative currency: to provide liquidity for exchange between people, in an economic downturn, who need a way to transform their services into purchasing power in an environment where theres no money. Historically, people turn to alternative currencies in large numbers under precisely such conditions. [Argentina] In Greece, people have increasingly turned to alternative currency networks as a source of liquidity for exchange between people who have nothing to exchange but their skills. For example, the Local Alternative Unit alternative currency (the Greek acronym is TEM) in Volos operates on principles much like
37 Timothy B. Lee, How Private Are Bitcoin Transactions? Forbes, July 14, 2011 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/ timothylee/2011/07/14/how-private-are-bitcoin-transactions/>. 38 Thomas Lowenthal, Bitcoin: More Covert than it Looks, Active Rhetoric, July 14, 2011 <http://activerhetoric.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/bitcoin-more-covert-than-it-looks/>. 39 Adrienne Jeffries, Price of Bitcoin Still Dropping, Falls Below the Price of Mining, BetaBeat, October 17, 2011 <http://www.betabeat.com/2011/10/17/price-of-bitcoin-still-dropping-fallsbelow-the-price-of-mining/>.

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The rst time he bought eggs, milk and jam at an outdoor market using not euros but an informal barter currency, Theodoros Mavridis, an unemployed electrician, was thrilled.... I felt liberated, I felt free for the rst time, Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to. Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals and to receive discounts at some local businesses. Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market, the Volos network has grown exponentially in the past year, from 50 to 400 members. It is one of several such groups cropping up around the country, as Greeks squeezed by large wage cuts, tax increases and growing fears about whether they will continue to use the euro have looked for creative ways to cope with a radically changing economic landscape.... Ever since the crisis theres been a boom in such networks all over Greece, said George Stathakis, a professor of political economy and vice chancellor of the University of Crete. In spite of the large public sector in Greece, which employs one in ve workers, the countrys social services often are not up to the task of helping people in need, he added. There are so many huge gaps that have to be lled by new kinds of networks, he said....

TEM operates on the same basic principle as most of the other alternative currency systems described in this section:
The groups concept is simple. People sign up online and get access to a database that is kind of like a members-only Craigslist. One unit of TEM is equal in value to one euro, and it can be used to exchange good and services. Members start their accounts with zero, and they accrue credit by offering goods and services. They can borrow up to 300 TEMs, but they are expected to repay the loan within a xed period of time. Members also receive books of vouchers of the alternative currency itself, which look like gift certicates and are printed with a special seal that makes it difcult to counterfeit. Those vouchers can be used like checks. Several businesspeople in Volos, including a veterinarian, an optician and a seamstress, accept the alternative currency in exchange for a discount on the price in euros. A recent glimpse of the database revealed people offering guitar and English lessons, bookkeeping services, computer technical support, discounts at hairdressers and the use of their yards for parties. There is a system of ratings so that people can describe their experiences, in order to keep transparent quality control.... (The network uses open-source software and is hosted on a Dutch server, cyclos.org, which offers low hosting fees.) The group also holds a monthly open-air market that is like a cross

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

between a garage sale and a farmers market, where Mr. Mavridis used his TEM credit to buy the milk, eggs and jam. Those goods came from local farmers who are also involved in the project. For Ms. Houpis [Maria Houpis, one of the networks founders], the network has a psychological dimension. The most exciting thing you feel when you start is this sense of contribution, she said. You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.40

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Similar networks are springing up in towns and cities all over Greece The Open Tabs system, launched in private alpha on Guy Fawkes Day 2011, is a sort of digitized version of Grecos credit-clearing networks.41 As described by Melvin Carvalho,
Opentabs.net is a free software tool to help the 99% of us be less dependent on abusive banking fees....Private alpha launch is this Saturday! Imagine you owe me money from, say, a train ticket that I bought for you. We then have two options: if it was a small amount, we can decide to forget about it (gift economy), but if it was any noteworthy sum, then we would probably end up using the Plain Old Banking System to settle this little peer-to-peer transaction. People use banking between friends, between house mates, and even between family members, and abusive banking fees play too big a role in our day-today life. This has to stop. With Opentabs.net there will be a third option: just tab it! You can tab amounts of money, beers, hours of work, bitcoins, books, whatever you want to leave unpaid. Just like when you tell the waiter in a bar to put a round of drinks on your tab", Opentabs.net is a tool for having tabs open with your peers, until it cancels out against something else. The Opentabs.net web app does not make actual transactions. It is not a currency, and it is not a bank. It just helps you to cryptographically sign open tabs ("IOUs") between peers, as an alternative to actually executing a bank transfer. This way we can both forget about that train ticket you owe me, and strike it off against other transactions, until maybe at the end of the year we clear the balance once, and settle the tab. Just like tabs in a bar.42

[http://www.artbrock.com/] [http://www.ingenesist.com/] [Common Good Finance. http://commongoodnance.com/home] [http://socialapp.mylocal.coop/myLocal_Video_Release-on-myLocal_Cooperative_275028_1403. http://www.indiegogo.com/myLocalCoop]

40 Rachel Donadio, Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks, New York Times, October 1, 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/europe/in-greece-barternetworks-surge.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1>. 41 <http://opentabs.net/> 42 Melvin Carvalho, Open TabsDecentralized Money Coming This Week, The Next Net, November 2, 2011 <http://groups.google.com/group/building-a-distributed-decentralizedinternet/browse_thread/thread/7e4a41590cc6eccc?hl=en>.

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Right now were in a period of ux, with a thousand owers simultaneously in bloom and undergoing the natural selection process to determine which one becomes the standard encrypted currency platform. The elements already exist; all that remains is for them to be combined in a single platform which reaches the takeoff point. As Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) Media Coordinator Tom Knapp told me, by private email:
Whats needed is a killer P2P mutual credit appRipplePay, only with no central server and set up so that mutual trust networks can be created in an encrypted, more-anonymous-at-length manner, e.g., I trust you and know who you are; someone else who trusts me can know that I trust you, and give you some trust for mutual credit purposes on that basis, WITHOUT knowing who you are; the nonanonymous trust webs ramify, encrypted and increasingly anonymized, out to several degrees of separation. The nal piece is probably to make the whole thing somewhat accessible not only by smart phone, but loadable onto mag-strip debit card type devices and/or QR codes for those who dont have nearly 100%-reliable and redundant tech access themselves (or for their area, e.g. an agricultural village where only one person has a computer and Internet access via a phone tether) and need to be able to carry physical cash linked to the system. My guess is that all the tech pieces are already there, just waiting to be put together, to make this kind of thing happen. Weve got public key encryption, distributed computing, the loom (for secure/redundant databasing?), mag-strip/QR readers for smartphones, and P2P networking tech. It might be some kid who reads the Morung Express in Dimapur or the New Age or New Nation in Dhaka who puts it all together because you brought it up.43

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions I suspect the ecology will work out, in the face of trial and error, into a tiered system. There will be a variety of local credit-clearing operations, LETS, etc, along Tom Grecos lines, which are more for denominating simultaneous exchanges of services or future transactions than for storing value. Then there will be some encrypted store of accumulated value like bitcoin for exchanging surpluses between different systems, and for one-off dealings like illegal transactions in which anonymity is at a premium. C4SS Sysadmin Mike Gogulski added the caveat that local might be less a function of geography than of social graph proximity.44 In any case, if the social graph is organized along the lines of de Ugartes phyles or Robbs Economy as a Software Service, on an opt-in basis, it could include a pretty substantial number of people who are only casually acquainted if at all and who rely on their reputation within the system for their livelihood (as well as access to support platforms that are tied to membership). [Encrypted barter network as possible utility piggybacked on Freenet platform. To the extent that this restricted use of the currency to a trust network
43 Thomas 44 Mike

Knapp, private email, May 22, 2011. Gogulski, private email, May 30, 2011.

5.3. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKED MONEY SYSTEMS.

233

of members in a phyle, or to exchanges between such trust networks with a history of dealing with each other and mutual condence in their mechanisms for verifying member trustworthiness, it would largely overcome Adrien Chens caveats about Bitcoin quoted above.] [Last modied January 18, 2012]

234

CHAPTER 5. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: MONEY

Chapter 6

Basic Infrastructures: Education and Credentialing

6.1

Introduction: Whom Do Present-Day Schools Really Serve?

Before we ask what would take the place of the existing model of institutionalized schooling, we should examine what function it really serves, and then ask ourselves: how much of that function do we even want served? Despite the propaganda of the institutional schooling systems hangers-on, the primary function of institutionalized schooling has not been to serve the interests of students in pursuing their own, autonomous life-choices as effectively as possible. It has been, as an adjunct of the rest of the institutionalized power structure of the corporate state, to process human resources into the form that is most usable by corporate and state employers. [C4SS material on cultural reproduction apparatus] [Material by Goodman, Illich, Bowles and Gintis, Gatto, Lasch, etc., on real history of educationist ideology. Friedenberg on captive clientelescoalitions of educational and HR bureaucracies.] Its impossible to overestimate the institutional effects of public education in shaping human raw material to t into corporate round holes. Trained human resources are one of the most important subsidized inputs the state supplies to big business. [Adam Smith on effect of education] Because corporate HR departments are provided, at state expense, with an abundant supply of technically trained and credentialed cogs to t in their machines, encultured to show up on time and to view taking orders from an authority gure behind a desk as normal, the state has already shifted the terms of the bargaining relationship such that employers simply state their requirements and would-be employees meet them as best they can. The conditions of employment and workplace culture are hardly even an issue for negotiationor 235

236CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING at least are far less of an issue than they would be if the educational system werent geared to processing human raw material to corporate specs. Culturally right-wing libertarians often react with visceral outrage when college students demonstrate for free higher education or student loan amnesty. But their outrage is misplaced. The student demands arise in the context of a system in which, in collusion with employers, the state has made higher education a necessity rather than a luxury, and at the same time driven its costs through the roof. This state of affairs, in which credentialing is necessary for decent entry-level jobs and also costs $100,000 or more, is entirely a creation of the corporate state. As Keith Taylor writes:
A great deal of research has shown that people used to be able to move upward in corporations and government, facilitated in part by internal educational programs. Anecdotally, a friends dad moved up to the higher ranks of the VA despite having no college degree, something my generation will probably never be permitted to do. Professional workplaces that used to hire from within have cut these education programs. These workplaces then require university credentials/degrees in order to land simple entry level jobs or move up one rung of the professional ladder.... In other words professional workplaces have externalized their costs onto society. The barrier-to-entry (time lost at work, time spent hitting the books, and cost for tuition) for even low-skilled, low-paying jobs has increased. Universities are playing this game too. Universities are paying their administrators loads of money while holding campus wages down. In a public forum, President Hogan of the University of Illinois stated without remorse that while it was difcult to keep staff wages down, he had to pay administration the best money possible to get the best talent possible; I guess that logic doesnt carry over to support staff and professors. By the way, President Hogan makes over $620k a year for living in central Illinois, good work if you can get it. Have a glance at the University of California systems administrator pay packages. The statewide board of trustees has drastically cut educational programs in the humanities and raised tuition. How did the UC Administration cope? They got fat raises.... Administrators also give out sweetheart contracts to their universitybusiness inner circles. Just try to get a copy of your local universitys vendor contract and watch their reaction as they attempt to keep you from what is by all measures public information. Part of the reason universities were so reluctant to enter into fair trade certied buying programs for university apparel is the reluctance to open the books to the general public. Their desire to milk the system means more overhead for others to pay in the form of blood, sweat and tears. Have no doubt about it, the student loan venders are making bank off of this downward spiral. These same lenders were the recipients of the $7 TRILLION + no-strings-attached bailout package from the Federal Reserve at the tail end of the Bush Jr. Administration. The same folks who bailed them out are the same folks who are under the weight of crushing student loan debt....

6.1. INTRODUCTION: WHOM DO PRESENT-DAY SCHOOLS REALLY SERVE? 237

One would think that with all the rhetoric used by university administrators extolling their service orientation toward the student populace that they would come out swinging on behalf of students with crippling debt. That is until one realizes that universities are now heavily reliant on their endowments. Guess who manages the endowment funds? Thats right, many of the same people who also divvy out student loans. You take away the student loan cash cow, and you severely hit the capacity of endowments to provide a bloated return on investment.... Governments and businesses collude to further emphasize the necessity of a college education at these corrupted universities, then they turn around and gut their funding. These bloated universities then externalize their costs; instead of cutting administrative benet packages, administrators increase tuition costs and pat themselves on the backs for these new revenue sources by giving themselves even more generous compensation. More overhead for other to pay. More student loan debt.1

I would also point out the gross inequity in the incentives for student loan lenders and borrowers, respectively. Repayment of principal and interest to lenders is guaranteed by the federal government; meanwhile, students are barred from even Chapter 13 bankruptcy regardless of what catastrophic event befalls them. Its an example of what Ivan Illich called radical monopolythe state subsidizes a certain high-overhead, capital-intensive, and costly way of doing things, and then turns that high-cost input into a necessity for everyone by crowding out the alternatives. [Paul Goodman on preempting other avenues] The students may be wrong about the solutionfree universal higher education, by itself, would just further inate the credentialing requirements for basic employment and increase the tyranny of professionalism. But theyre not the spoiled ingrates those on the Right make them out to be. The system is riddled with all sorts of other articial scarcities, like the barrierswhich Ivan Illich discussesagainst the low-cost transfer of knowledge and skill. Teacher credentialingwhich makes teaching services articially scarce and expensive, and crowds out self-organized, non-credentialed and non-accredited forms of instructionis one example. Marcus Winters pointed out the absence of any correlation between teacher credentialing and effectiveness, and questioned the need for it.
Winters went on to propose the idea of removing the barriers to becoming a teacher, suggesting that since there is no correlation between certication and teacher effectiveness, anyone with a college degree should be given the opportunity to teach if they are able to nd someone to hire them. The fact is that many of us who went through teacher preparation and certication programs know they were not very helpful when it comes to the realities of the classroom. It is no
1 Keith Taylor, The Student Loan Debt System, Center for a Stateless Society, December 9, 2011 <http://c4ss.org/ content/9115>.

238CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING

surprise then that such certication has little impact on student success. I think Winters idea deserves some attention, particularly in the case of secondary studies, but I wonder why he believes that a college degree should be required. If you are an expert in your eld, chances are you may have reached this success without such a degree. Especially, if we consider experts who may be interested in taking up teaching upon retirement from their career. Academic ination is only a recent phenomena. Historically the majority of careers i.e. business, programming, entertainment casting or directing, writing, advertising, photography, art, etc. did not require such certication for success.... What if instead of requiring individuals to jump through certication hoops, we lled our secondary schools with real-world photographers, journalists, scientists, businesswomen, and others. These people also might not necessarily be employed full-time at the school. Instead, they may perhaps teach a class or two each semester. They may take on the important charge of connecting students with mentors in their eld, helping them grow their personal learning networks, and supporting them in acquiring apprenticeship and/or internship opportunities. For this vision to be effective, wed need to do something that Winters didnt give much attention. Wed need to seriously change traditional evaluation of secondary schools, educators, and students and align it to evaluation metrics used in the eld the student was interested in studying. Instead of grades, students could meet challenges aligned to the real-world needs of their potential future careers. Such challenges might be what lands a student an internship or apprenticeship opportunity. Perhaps to demonstrate mastery students earned badges that could be earned in a number of meaningful ways, chosen by the students. Students, educators, and schools, could be assessed on how successfully they acquired such badges. Additionally, depending on student learning goals, assessment could be further tied to schools if they supported students in reaching their personal success plans that honored not only students interested in an academic track, but also those interested in pursuing a vocational track as they do in countries like Finland.2

Richard Mitchell certainly has plenty to say about the value of the pedagogical courses taught in education BA programs. [Track down I.N. Jenear article] Imagine, instead of our present unholy alliance between the bloated educational bureaucracies and bloated HR bureaucracies, an educational system that treated pupils as customers rather than a product, and was geared to serving their perceived interests and learning needs. Imagine a bottom-up, user-driven curriculum. Under such a system, without employer access to a supply of readymade human capital produced to order, the prerequisites for employment and conditions of work might actually be a contested issue.
2 Could the Key to Teacher Effectiveness Mean Dropping Certication Requirements? The Innovative Educator, December 14, 2011 <http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2011/12/coulddropping-certication.html>.

6.2. ALTERNATIVE MODELS

239

So unlike most analyses of the educational system and proposals for educational reform, we are not starting from an assumption of the corporate economy and its personnel needs as a given, and then trying to gure out how the schools could better meet corporate employers needs to be more competitive in the global corporate workplace, and better train pupils for success in their working lives. This approach is typied, at its most extreme, by David Colemanapostle of the common core standards cooked up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in cahoots with the Department of Education: [A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really dont give a shit about what you feel or what you think.... It is rare in a working environment that someone says, Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.3 Well, he at least gets points for honesty. But if nobody in our working environment gives a shit what we feel or think, that makes it all the more imperative that we pay attention ourselves to what we feel and think. And ifas Coleman admitsthose in charge of the workplace dont give a shit about us, then explicitly dening the mission of the state school system as shaping human personalities and characters to suit the needs of employers that view them as disposable production inputs is morally equivalent to loading people on boxcars to Auschwitz. It amounts to an explicit admission that students are the product, not the customers, of the educational system. Unlike most analyses, we will not hold everything steady except education, and then gure out how to reform education so as better to serve the needs of the other institutions. Instead, we will assume a society which has come into being as the culmination of all the trends underway at this minute: the replacement of large, centralized, hierarchical employers as the dominant economic form by small, largely family- or cooperatively owned, neighborhood micromanufacturing enterprises, truck farms and permaculture operations, commons-based peer producers, mutuals, and informal and household enterprises. The destruction of large-scale bureaucratic enterprises and their monopsony power in the labor market, and the rise of networked learning alternatives, mean that bargaining power will become more equal and credentialing standards will be negotiated rather than declared by at. In such a society, the interaction of the training and credentialing requirements of business enterprises with the educational interests of would-be employees will be a matter for negotiation, on a case-by-case basis.

6.2

Alternative Models

Robert Pirsig, in the Church of Reason passage of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describes the functioning of an education system when
3 Sam Smith, The war on education (and reading): David Colemans common core of nonsense, Undernews, November 4, 2011 <http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2011/11/war-on-educationand-reading-david.html>.

240CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING it becomes a tool for self-directed learning, rather than processing human resources for institutional consumers. Phaedrus speculated on the likely career of a good cramming, rsum-padding student who was exposed for the rst time to an educational system in which grades and degrees had been eliminated.
Such a student... would go to his rst class, get his rst assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment in. Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed hed completed the assignment might be a little more difcult to understand, however, and this difculty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would nd quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty. In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difcult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasnt learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached. But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybodys part, would have unked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. He wasnt there for a real education in the rst place and had no real business there at all. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned. The students biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, If you dont whip me, I wont work. He didnt get whipped. He didnt work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, the system, is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, location point of view, but its not the Church attitude. The Church attitude is that civilization, or the system or society or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one hed abandoned, in what used to be called the school of hard knocks. Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe thats what he would do for the

6.2. ALTERNATIVE MODELS

rest of his life. Maybe hed found his level. But dont count on it. In time...six months; ve years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satised with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stied by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. Hed think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didnt have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, hed now nd a brand of theoretical information which hed have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering. So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. Hed no longer be a grade-motivated person. Hed be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. Hed be a free man. He wouldnt need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. Hed be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and theyd better come up with it. Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would nd himself, he wouldnt stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because hed see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that werent directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldnt be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.4

241

Networked learning writer Will Richardson, in an open letter to his kids, takes a similar life as classroom approach:
I promise to support you for as long as I can in your quest to learn after high school, whatever that might look like. Ill do everything I can to help you nd what your passions are and pursue them in whatever ways you decide will allow you to learn as much as you can about them. Ill help you put together your own plan to achieve expertise in that passion, and that plan may include many different activities and environments that look nothing like (and in all likeli4 Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (New York: William Morrow Publishing Company, 1979). Online version courtesy of Quality page, Virtual School Distributed Learning Community <http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/index.html>.

242CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING

hood will cost much less than) a traditional college experience. Some of your plan may include classrooms, some may include training or certication programs. But some may also include learning through online video games, virtual communities, and informal networks that you will build around your interests, all moving you further along toward expertise. (Remind me at some point to tell you what a guy named George Siemens says about this.) And throughout this process, I will support you in the creation of your learning portfolio, the artifact which when the time comes, you will share to prospective employers or collaborators to begin your lifes work. (In all likelihood, in fact, you will probably nd these people as a part of this process.) Instead of the piece of paper on the wall that says you are an expert, you will have an array of products and experiences, reections and conversations that show your expertise, show what you know, make it transparent. It will be comprised of a body of work and a network of learners that you will continually turn to over time, that will evolve as you evolve, and will capture your most important learning.5

Once we abandon the idea of schools as institutions run by educational professionals, and of learning as an activity that takes place at a designated location under the supervision of such professionals, the possibilities for linking individual learners to sources of knowledge are almost innite. Proudhon, writing in the mid-19th century, wrote of breaking down barriers between the rest of society in ways that anticipated Ivan Illich. His provisions for technical training, for example, relied heavily on linking the public education system with the workers associations, the latter serving as
both centers of production and centers for education.... Labor and study, which have for so long and so foolishly been kept apart, will nally emerge side-by-side in their natural state of union.6

lProudhonian ideas of apprenticeship, merging of schooling apparatus with agro-industrial federations, etc.] [Illich on learning nets.] The integration of education into the community can be physical, as well as functional. In Claude Lewenzs Villages, classroom spacerather than being concentrated in some centrally located specimen of Stalinist architecture and serviced by a bus systemis decentralized throughout the community. He quotes Christopher Alexanders Pattern No. 18 (from A Pattern Language):
Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a xed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralise the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching
5 Will Richardson, Dear Kids, You Dont Have to Go to College, Weblogg-ed, November 7, 2006 <http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/dear-kids-you-dont-have-to-go-to-college/>. 6 On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865), in Selected Writings of Proudhon. Edited by Stewart Edwards. Translated by Elizabeth Fraser (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1969), pp. 86-87; General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by John Beverly Robinson (New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1923, 1969 [1851]), p. 274.

6.3. POTENTIAL BUILDING BLOCKS FOR AN OPEN ALTERNATIVE

younger children, museums, youth groups travelling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people and so on.

243

"The Village, Lewenz writes, serves as a life-long classroom. By decentralizing control of education to the primary community of a few thousand people, the Village can greatly reduce overhead. Lewenz again quotes Alexander on the elimination of expenses from overpriced, centrally located buildings and administrative salaries, and the use of the savings to reduce student-teacher ratios down to ten or so. He recommends building small schools, one at a time, located in the public part of the community, with a shopfront and three or four rooms."7 The parallel to the platforms and the local economies plugged into them, from the previous section, to my mind seems obvious. The old educational system was a classic example of the kinds of authoritarian institutions described by Paul Goodman in People or Personnel and Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality: characterized by a bureaucratic, hierarchical culture, enormous overhead, cost-plus accounting, and markups of 300% or more over and above the costs required by the purely technical considerations involved in doing anything. As John Robb has pointed out, a system of higher education that fully exploited all the possibilities of new forms of organizationnetworked platforms and open-source materialscould make the equivalent of a college education available for $20 a month.8

6.3

Potential Building Blocks for an Open Alternative

[networked virtual classrooms, Ryan Lanhams material on higher ed, Dig through Maria Droujkovas sites. Venessa Miemis] The industrial model of transporting human resources to a central processing site is just plain stupid, at a time when information can be transported anywhere more cheaply than tap water. Why pay the salary of the teaching assistant who teaches a rst- or secondyear class in an enormous lecture halland the overhead costs of the physical plant and utilities that host the classwhen lectures by the greatest minds in a eld can be replicated at zero marginal cost for millions of students, via streaming video?9 If theres any justication for it, it certainly doesnt lieas any college student can tell youin the greater one-on-one interaction or tailoring of material to individual needs provided in the auditorium class.
How to Build a Village, p. 119. Robb, The Education Bubble, Global Guerrillas, April 13, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2011/04/journal-the-educationbubble.html>. 9 Robb, Industrial Education? Global Guerrillas, January 13, 2009 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2009/01/industrial-education.html>.
8 John 7 Lewenz,

244CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING And of course networked collaborative platformsthink of blogs and wikis as the grandfather and Googles abortive Wave as the fathermake it eminently feasible for students to interact with their instructors and with each other. Robb suggests the potential for gaming architecturesas we saw already in this chapter, enormously promising platforms for a networked economyas an educational tool.
Online games provide an environment that connects what you do (work, problem solving, effort, motivation level, merit) in the game to rewards (status, capabilities, etc.). These games also make it simple to get better (learn, skill up, etc.) through an intuitive just-in-time training system. The problem is that this is virtual fantasy. So the really big idea isnt guring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes.... Instead, its about nding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD. This isnt tech utopian. Its reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, its a game that being run for the benet of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we dont have any choice. Lets invent something better and compete with it. Lets provide people with a choice.10

As we already saw earlier in this chapter, the basic mapping architecture of MMORPGs can be tied to real-world geography, persons and objects, as a platform for coordinating their real-world interactions in virtual space. And as Robb pointed out in the passage above, much of our real livesthe way we pay our bills, etc.already are governed by what amounts to a virtual architecture piggybacked on physical reality. [Sterling on educational system of Acquis attention camps on Mljet in The Caryatids] In surveying open course materials and open learning platforms, you probably cant do better than to start out with Anya Kamenetzs work. [DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.] Her how-to resource, The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential, provides reference material for a would-be DIY scholar.11 It was designed to be
a comprehensive guide to learning online and charting a personalized path to an affordable credential using the latest innovative tools
Online Games, Superempowerment, and a Better World, Global Guerrillas, March 18, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/03/online-gamessuperempowerment-and-reality.html>. 11 Anya Kamenetz, The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2011) <http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/77938/1/the-edupunks-guideto-a-diy-credential>. Various free online versions of the actual text can be found at <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/77938>.
10 Robb,

6.3. POTENTIAL BUILDING BLOCKS FOR AN OPEN ALTERNATIVE

and organizations. This guide is full of people, programs, and ideas that are part of the future of learning. Ive spoken to over 100 learners from programs and sites around the country and around the world that offer new methods of content delivery, new platforms for socialization, and new forms of accreditation. Most of them take advantage of the technology now at our disposal theyre either all-online programs that complement the experiences youre already having; or hybrid programs, combining in-person and online experiences. Nearly all of them are cheaper than your average state university. Many are even free! And Ive given you the tools to go out and nd even more options, and to create them for yourself.12

245

The Guide was written as a follow-up to DIY U. In that book I say more about why higher education needs to change. This guide focuses on how education IS changing, and how you can be a part of it. DIY education means getting the knowledge you need at the time you need it, with enough guidance so you dont get lost, but without unnecessary restrictions. DIY doesnt mean that you do it all alone. It means that the resources are in your hands and youre driving the process.13 The Guide includes chapters on how to do research online, write a personal learning plan, teach yourself online, build your personal learning network, nd a mentor, get a credential, and demonstrate value to a network.14 The Personal Learning Networka network of people to bounce ideas off of and provide suggestions for further researchmay well evolve into the peer network from which one seeks credentialing and work opportunities.
in the long run, no one learns alone. You need people to bounce ideas off, answer questions, and help you when you get stuck, and to give you ideas about where to go next in your learning. Your Personal Learning Network... is the group of people who feed your learning head. In a true PLN, youre a contributor, not just a consumer.... Over the course of your learning plan, your PLN will begin to overlap with the professional network of practitioners in your eld, where youll need to demonstrate value in order to connect with opportunities....15

The chapters in the rst half of the 96-page guide are mostly general rules, but the second half is a catalog of resourcesreproduced in more easily accessible form on the Resources page of the books websitethat are of potentially immense value to an independent scholar. The rst two categories consist mainly of means for obtaining class credit for extracurricular learning, alternative or irregular major programs, and the like. The third, the most important for someone engaged in self-directed learning outside the formal university system, is Open Worlda guide that includes sections on open content, open social learning, open learning institutions, open ed startups, and reputation networks.16
the Guide, The Edupunks Guide <http://edupunksguide.org/about>. html text <http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/77938/4/the-edupunksguide-to-a-diy-credential>. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 <http://edupunksguide.org/resources>.
13 Online 12 About

246CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING The open content includes a wide array of open course materials like syllabi, lectures and textbooksamong them MITs Open Coursework, Open Yale Courses and Open Textbooks. The open social learning section includes various online networks, but has the serious shortcomingin my viewof neglecting eld-dedicated scholarly email lists. Open learning institutions and open ed startups are unconventional learning networks and open universities, like P2PU and Uncollege.

6.4

Open Learning Platforms

P2PU17 is a free, open platform which anyone can use to set up courses. In many ways, its a revival of the medieval model of the university: those with something to teach can set up a course, select the course materials, organize lesson plans, and solicit learners; groups of learners interested in learning about a subject can perform the same functions for themselves and learn together. Of course its possible to create synergies between the open learning platform and open course materials available elsewhere like MIT Open Courseware (see below), structuring courses around such open syllabi and reading lists. [UnCollege http://www.uncollege.org/ The Open University http://www.open.ac.uk/ University of the People http://www.uopeople.org/ Udemy http://www.udemy.com/ iversity http://www.iversity.org/ Wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page\ Sophia http://www.sophia.org/ Connexions http://cnx.org/ Academia.edu http://www.academia.ed Zero Tuition College: A Community of Self-Directed Learners http://www.ztcollege.com/ SkillShare.com http://www.skillshare.com/ Free Skool http://freeskool.org/ The Public School http://all.thepublicschool.org/ Hour School http://hourschool.com/ Open Study http://openstudy.com/ Course Hero http://www.coursehero.com/ School of Everything http://schoolofeverything.com/]

6.5

Open Course Materials

[Open Courseware Consortium http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/courses/browsesource] [MIT Open Courseware] In December 2011, the MIT Open Courseware program introduced MITx: an interactive learning program which certies completion for students who demonstrate master of course material.18 [University of California at Irvine Open Courseware http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/] The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has (as of November 2011) undertaken an Open Course Library project to make a college education more affordable.
The online library will house a collection of textbooks, readings, activities, and other educational materials for 81 of the states most
17 <http://p2pu.org/en/>. 18 MIT launches online learning initiative, MIT News Ofce, December 19, <http://web.mit.edu/newsofce/ 2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html>.

2011

6.6. OPEN TEXTBOOKS.

popular general education and pre-college courses. The texts are available under an open license to other higher education institutions, as well as anyone else who wants to access them. The effort has the potential to save students millions of dollars. The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooksabout a quarter of the total cost of attending school full-time. Some classes will still require students to purchase a textbook, but for Open Course Library classes, the cost cant exceed $30 per student. All other materials will be free.19

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Open Textbooks.

[Flat world Knowledge http://www.atworldknowledge.com/] [TextbookRevolution http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Main_Page]

6.7

Credentialing

The signaling function of post-secondary education is a way of overcoming the transaction costs of evaluating individual qualications for specic functions on an ad hoc basis, when the hiring unit is a giant bureaucracy and the hiring functionaries are bureaucrats who need a standard procedure for evaluating large numbers of people on an impersonal basis. The solution is to process workers in batch lots with bureaucratic certication of their skills. But when most production and training units are distributed, small and local, the transaction costs for horizontal certication systems become much lower. When the entity doing the hiring is a neighborhood garage factory, and Dave is applying for a job as a machinist, his credentials might be something like this: I took these classes at the town learning center, apprenticed in Bobs machine shop, and passed the certication exam with the NE Ohio Machinists Guild. OK, Dave, lets try you out on this router. Emlyn ORegan writes that universities provide three major sources of value, which are in the process of being de-linked from one another: learning (largely replaceable with free online content / study guides) networking (replaceable online, in fact a lot of why nerds built the net in the rst place) credentialing this is still the hard one
Credentialing is the force behind the higher education bubble. People pay more and more to get that piece of paper. Its an unjustiable,
19 Liz Dwyer, In Washington State, the End of $200 Textbooks is Here, Good Education, November 3, 2011 <http://www.good.is/post/in-washington-state-the-end-of-200-textbooks-is-here/>; <http://www.opencourselibrary.org/>.

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unproductive, exploitative money pump. If you could route around that, youd blow this industry to pieces. Now one way to split credentialing off from the rest of the concerns of education is to provide something like recognition for prior learning. All kinds of institutions, like TAFE in Australia, or like lots of little accreditation bodies, dabble in this already. But, its tough; you have to test people rigorously to gure out if they deserve a credential or not, and you can easily make mistakes. Thats why we prefer the Unis, because we know the person had to more or less sit through X many years of study, so theres some minimal learning assumable even if everything else fails. But Im wondering, can we crowdsource credentialing? Take a social network, or even better a professional network like LinkedIn. Let people just add qualications they have (skills? Is there a more appropriate word?). Then, crucially, get others to rate them. To make this work, you need some kind of credibility rating for the raters. Credibility should be domain specic, and also person specic:

if the rater is an expert in eld X, they have higher credibility in eld X if the rater has worked closely with person Y, they have higher credibility with respect to rating person Y
But also, a rater should have a general credibility factordo their ratings match reality, or are they bullshitters? Maybe higher for more ratings, lower for ratings outside area of expertise, modied by how much their ratings match other peoples ratings in the context, maybe lowered for complaints registered about them.20

In other words, a sort of Slashdot rating system built into LinkedIn. But what about voluntary certication through somewhat more formal arrangements? For example: Professional associations or guilds certifying the ability of members, and providing continuing education, with the incentive to avoid grade ination being the need to maintain the credibility of their brand. Voluntary courses in various skills, with certain course providers becoming the gold standard based on their reputation. Apprenticeship programs conducted through guilds or professional associations. Possible credentials for plumbers, software designers, machinists, whatever, would be along the lines of: I was trained as a master plumber under Joe the Plumber. I took the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers coursework and passed their certifying exam. My customer satisfaction rating on the Podunk, Iowa Darknet local economy platform is ve stars.
20 Emlyn ORegan, Crowdsourced Credentialling, point7, August <http://point7.wordpress.com/2011/08/20/ crowdsourced-credentialling/>.

20,

2010

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Its much like a kosher butcher or organic farmer posting a sticker of approval from some accrediting agency on their front window. Even without state-mandated licensing or college accreditation, ones credentials would still carry weight based on the degree of public condence in the reputation of the accrediting agency.

6.8

Conclusion

Lets go back now and take another look at the self-driven model of education Pirsig described in his Church of Reason piece. Were approaching a state of affairs in which the widespread availability of cheap, networked educational technology coincides with the widespread availability of cheap, networked manufacturing toolsresulting in a two-pronged attack on the institutional alliance between the HR departments of large corporate employers and large educational institutions. In a world where course materials are freely available to anyone interested in them, and students (whether ofcially recognized as such or not) can interact with each other and contact an entire world of scholars from their own homes, the environment will be far more conducive to informal credentialing arrangements between employers or work teams and workers. Instead of a small number of accredited institutions acting as credentialing gatekeepers and providing an entire educational package (if you want any of it, you have to buy the whole thing) as a condition for certifying you to potential employers, the work team at the local garage factory or permaculture truck farm can negotiate with would-be members as to what particular course certications are most useful. [Last modied January 26, 2012]

250CHAPTER 6. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING

Chapter 7

The Desktop Licensing Board

7.1

Legibility: Vertical and Horizontal

The technical basis, in network technology and the tools of individual superempowerment, already exists for supplanting regulatory state functions (on the assumption, of course, that the regulatory state really does perform its ostensible functions). And theyre becoming available at a time when the regulatory state is becoming hollowed out by scal crisis, and by the technological obsolescence of many of its enforcement mechanisms. This is a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing trends, all making for a phase transition in the way society organizes most of its functions. But getting from here to there will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in how most people think, and the overcoming of centuries worth of ingrained habits of thought. This involves a shift from what James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, calls social organizations that are primarily legible to the state, to social organizations that are primary legible or transparent to the people of local communities organized horizontally and opaque to the state.1 The latter kind of architecture, as described by Pyotr Kropotkin, was what prevailed in the networked free towns of late medieval Europe. The primary pattern of social organization was horizontal (guilds, etc.), with quality certication and reputational functions aimed mainly at making individuals reliability transparent to one another. To the state, such local formations were opaque. [Material from C4SS paper on James Scott] With the rise of the absolute state, the primary focus became making society transparent (in Scotts terminology legible) from above. Things like the systematic adoption of family surnames that persisted from one generation to the next (and the 20th century follow-up of Social Security Numbers and other citizen ID numbers), the systematic mapping of urban addresses for postal or 911 service, etc., were all for the purpose of making society legible to the state. Like us, the state wants to keep track of where its stuff isand guess what we
1 James

Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

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are? Before this transformation, for example, surnames existed mainly for the convenience of people in local communities, so they could tell each other apart. Surnames were adopted on an ad hoc basis for clarication, when there was some danger of confusion, and rarely continued from one generation to the next. If there were multiple Johns in a village, they might be distinguished at any particular time by trade ("John the Miller"), location ("John on the Hill"), patronymic ("John Richards Son"), etc. By contrast, everywhere there have been family surnames with cross-generational continuity, they have been imposed by centralized states as a way of cataloguing and tracking the populationmaking it legible to the state, in Scotts terminology.2 During the ascendancy of the modern state, the horizontal institutions of the free towns were at best barely toleratedand usually not even that. Kropotkin wrote:
For the next three centuries the States, both on the Continent and in these islands, systematically weeded out all institutions in which the mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression. The village communities were bereft of their folkmotes, their courts and independent administration; their lands were conscated. The guilds were spoliated of their possessions and liberties, and placed under the control, the fancy, and the bribery of the States ofcial.... It was taught in the Universities and from the pulpit that the institutions in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organized State; that the State alone could represent the bonds of union between its subjects; that federalism and particularism were the enemies of progress, and the State was the only proper initiator of further development. By the end of the last century, the kings on the Continent, the Parliament in these isles, and the revolutionary Convention in France, although they were at war with each other, agreed in asserting that no separate unions between citizens must exist within the State.... No state within the State! The State alone... must take care of matters of general interest, while the subjects must represent loose aggregations of individuals, connected by no particular bonds, bound to appeal to the Government each time that they feel a common need.... The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In proportion as the obligations towards the state grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.3

Likewise, the preemption and absorptionor suppressionof all regulatory functions by the state favored the development of a mindset by which providers of goods and services were relieved of their obligations to provide reliable certications of the quality of their wares to consumers, and consumers were relieved of their obligations to scrutinize their quality and the reputations of the
pp. 64-73. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909), pp. 226-227.
3 Pyotr 2 Ibid.,

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vendors. It was the states job to take care of that business for us, and we neednt bother our heads about it. But its usually a false condence that relies on the imprimatur of the state for the quality of goods and services; the average citizen consumes endless amounts of things like genetically modied organisms, pesticide and herbicide residues, and parabens, on the assumption that they couldnt sell it if it was dangerouswhen the so-called regulatory standards are largely written by the regulated industries. And whatever minimal genuine quality and safety standards exist in the regulatory code become, in practice, a ceiling as much as a oor; often corporations have successfully pressured the courts, when their competitors advertise a product quality or safety standard higher than the regulatory state requires, to treat such advertising as product disparagement on the grounds that it suggests products which merely meet the ordinary standard (which of course is based on sound science) are inferior. For example, Monsanto frequently goes after grocers who label their milk rBGH free, and some federal district courts have argued that its an unfair competitive practice to test ones beef cattle for Mad Cow Disease more frequently than the mandated industry standard.4 In short the regulatory state, by supplanting self-organized reputational and certifying mechanisms, has relieved the citizen of the burden of thinking for herselfand the corporation has rushed in to take advantage of the fact. [Chartier on safe harbors] [Kropotkin, from The State, on Roman law] To accomplish a shift back to horizontal transparency, it will be necessary to overcome a powerful residual cultural habit, among the general public, of thinking of such things through the minds eye of the state: i.e, if we didnt have some way of verifying compliance with this regulation or that, some business somewhere might be able to get away with something or other. We must overcome six hundred years or so of almost inbred habits of thought, in which the state is the all-seeing guardian of society protecting us from the possibility that someone, somewhere might do something wrong if the authorities dont prevent it. In place of this habit of thought, we must think instead of ourselves creating mechanisms on a networked basis, to make us as transparent as possible to each other as providers of goods and services, to prevent businesses from getting away with poor behavior by informing each other, to prevent each other from selling defective merchandise, to protect ourselves from fraud, etc. The state has attempted to coopt the rhetoric of horizontality (e.g. We are the government.). But in fact, the creation of such mechanismsfar from making us transparent to the regulatory statemay well require active measures to render us opaque to the state (e.g. encryption, darknets, etc.) for protection against attempts to suppress such local economic self-organization against the interests of corporate actors. We need to lose the centuries-long habit of thinking of society as a hub4

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and-spoke mechanism and viewing the world vicariously from the imagined perspective of the hub, and instead think of it as a horizontal network and visualize things from the perspective of the individual nodes which we occupy. We need to lose the habit of thought by which transparency from above even became perceived as an issue in the rst place. Because the people who are seeing things from above, in reality, do not represent us or have anything in common with us. As Charles Johnsonaka Rad Geekargued, the market is nothing more than a series of choices made by human beings as to how to interact with one another5 :
Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else? A. We will.... ...Its convenient to talk about market forces, but you need to remember that remember that those market forces are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. Market forces are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from peoples economic choices. S if the question is, who will stop markets from running riot, the answer is: We will; by peacefully choosing what to buy and what not to buy, where to work and where not to work, what to accept and what not to accept, we inevitably shape and order the market that surrounds us. When we argue about whether or not government should intervene in the economy in order to regiment markets, the question is not whether markets should be made orderly and regular, but rather whether the process of ordering is in the hands of the people making the trade, or by unaccountable third parties; and whether the means of ordering are going to be consensual or coercive. The one thing that I would want to add to Sheldons excellent point6 is that there are two ways in which we will do the regulating of our own economic affairs in a free society because, as I have discussed here before, there are two different kinds of peaceful spontaneous orders in a self-regulating society. There is the sort of spontaneity that Sheldon focuses on the unplanned but orderly coordination that emerges as a byproduct of ordinary peoples interactions. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal without a prior blueprint for the goal.) But a self-regulating people can also engage in another kind of spontaneity that is, achieving harmony and order through a conscious process of voluntary organizing and activism. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal through means freely chosen, rather than through constraints imposed.) In
a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else? Rad Geek Peoples Daily, June 12, 2009 <http://radgeek.com/gt/ 2009/06/12/freed-market-regulation/>. 6 This post was a commentary on Sheldon Richmans article, Regulation Red Herring: Why Theres No Such Thing as an Unregulated Market, Foundation for Economic Education, June 5, 2009 <http://www.fee.org/articles/tgif/regulation-red-herring/>. The point Johnson referenced was that an unregulated market was actually regulated by market forces.
5 In

7.1. LEGIBILITY: VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL

a freed market, if someone in the market exploits workers or chisels costumers, if she produces things that are degrading or dangerous or uses methods that are environmentally destructive, its vital to remember that you do not have to just let the market take its course because the market is not something outside of us; we are market forces. And so a freed market includes not only individual buyers and sellers, looking to increase a bottom line, but also our shared projects, when people choose to work together, by means of conscious but noncoercive activism, alongside, indeed as a part of, the undesigned forms of spontaneous self-organization that emerge. We are market forces, and the regulating in a self-regulating market is done not only by us equilibrating our prices and bids, but also by deliberately working to shift the equilibrium point, by means of conscious entrepreneurial action and one thing that libertarian principles clearly imply, even though actually-existing libertarians may not stress it often enough, is that entrepreneurship includes social entrepreneurship, working to achieve non-monetary social goals. So when self-regulating workers rely on themselves and not on the state, abusive or exploitative or irresponsible bosses can be checked or plain run out of the market, by the threat or the practice of strikes, of boycotts, of divestiture, and of competition competition from humane and sustainable alternatives, promoted by means of Fair Trade certications, social investing, or other positive pro-cott measures. As long as the means are voluntary, based on free association and dissociation, the right to organize, the right to quit, and the right to put your money where your mouth is, these are all part of a freed market, no less than apple-carts or corporations. When liberals or Progressives wonder who will check the power of the capitalists and the bureaucratic corporations, their answer is a politically-appointed, even less accountable bureaucracy. The libertarian answer is the power of the people, organized with our fellow workers into ghting unions, strikes and slow-downs, organized boycotts, and working to develop alternative institutions like union hiring halls, grassroots mutual aid associations, free clinics, or worker and consumer co-ops. In other words, if you want regulations that check destructive corporate power, that put a stop to abuse or exploitation or the trashing of the environment, dont lobbyorganize! Where government regulators would take economic power out of the hands of the people, on the belief that social order only comes from social control, freed markets put economic power into the hands of the people, and they call on us to build a self-regulating order by means of free choice and grassroots organization. When I say that the libertarian Left is the real Left, I mean that, and its not because Im revising the meaning of the term Left to suit my own predilections or some obsolete French seating chart. Its because libertarianism, rightly understood, calls on the workers of the world to unite, and to solve the problems of social and economic regulation not by appealing to any external authority or privileged managerial planner, but rather by taking matters into their own hands and working together through grassroots community organizing to build the kind of world that we

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want to live in.

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This will require, more specically, overcoming the hostility of conventional liberals who are in the habit of reacting viscerally and negatively, and on principle, to anything not being done by qualied professionals or the proper authorities." Arguably conventional liberals, with their thought system originating as it did as the ideology of the managers and engineers who ran the corporations, government agencies, and other giant organizations of the late 19th and early 20th century, have played the same role for the corporate-state nexus that the politiques did for the absolute states of the early modern period. This is reected in a common thread running through writers like Thomas Frank, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, and Chris Hedges, as well as documentary producers like Michael Moore. They share a nostalgia for the consensus capitalism of the early postwar period, in which the gatekeepers of the Big Three networks controlled what we were allowed to see and it was just ne for GM to own the whole damned economyjust so long as everyone had a lifetime employment guarantee and a UAW contract.7 Paul Fussell, in Bad, ridicules the whole Do-it-Yourself ethos as an endless Sahara of the Squalid, with blue collar schmoes busily uglifying their homes by taking upon themselves projects that should be left toall together nowthe Properly Qualied Professionals.8 [quote] On his old MSNBC program, Keith Olbermann routinely mocked exhortations to charity and self-help, reaching for shitkicking imagery of the nineteenth century barn-raiser for want of any other comparision sufcient to get across just how backward and ridiculous that kind of thing really was. In Olbermanns world, of course, such ideas come only from conservatives. The only ideological choice is between plain, vanilla avored managerialist liberalism and the Right. In Olbermanns world, the decentralist Left of Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and Colin Wardthe recessive Left that emerges when the dominant strain of Lenin and Harold Wilson is occupied elsewhere, as one of the editors of Radical Technology put itdoesnt even exist. [cite] Helping your neighbor out directly, or participating in a local self-organized friendly society or mutual, is all right in its own way, of courseif nothing else is available. But it carries the inescapable taint, not only of the quaint, but of the provincial and the picayunevery much like the stigmatization of homemade bread and home-grown veggies in corporate advertising in the early twentieth century, come to think of it. People who help each other out, or organize voluntarily to pool risks and costs, are to be praisedwith just the slightest hint of condescensionfor heroically doing the best they can in an era of relentlessly downscaled social services. But that people are forced to resort to such
7 For more on the ideological inclinations of the managerial-professional classes, and their hostility to decentralist ideas, see Carson, The Thermidor of the Progressives, 8 Paul Fussell, B.A.D.

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expedients, rather than meeting all their social safety net needs through onestop shopping at the Ministry of Central Services ofce in a giant monumental building with a statue of winged victory in the lobby, a la Brazil, is a damning indictment of any civilized society. The progressive society is one of comfortable and well-fed citizens, competently managed by properly credentialed authorities, contentedly milling about like ants in the shadows of miles-high buildings that look like they were designed by Albert Speer. And that kind of H.G. Wells utopia simply has no room for atavisms like the barn-raiser or the sick benet society. Aesthetic sensibilities aside, such critics are no doubt motivated to some extent by genuine concern that networked reputational and certifying mechanisms just wont take up the slack left by the disappearance of the regulatory state. Things like Consumer Reports, Angies List and the Better Business Bureau are all well and good, for educated people like themselves who have the sense and know-how to check around. But Joe Sixpack, God love him, will just go out and buy magic beans from the rst disreputable salesman he encountersand then likely put them right up his nose. Seriously, snark aside, such reputational systems really are underused, and most people really do take inadequate precautions in the marketplace on the assumption that the regulatory state guarantees some minimum acceptable level of quality. But liberal criticism based on this state of affairs reects a remarkably static view of society. It ignores the whole idea of crowding out (consider the extent to which the state actively suppressed self-organized mechanisms for horizontal legibility, as recounted by Kropotkin), as well as the possibility that even the Great Unwashed may be capable of changing their habits quite rapidly in the face of necessityand that given enough time they might even gure out how to wipe their own bottoms without supervision by state-licensed shit-removal professionals. Because people are not currently in the habit of automatically consulting such reputational networks to check up on people theyre considering doing business with, and are in the habit of unconsciously assuming the government will protect them, conventional liberals assume that people will not shift from one to the other in the face of changing incentives, and scoff at the idea of a society that relies primarily on networked rating systems. But the simple fact of the matteras we saw described by Kropotkin aboveis that there was a society in which the certication of quality and enforcement of commercial standards was achieved by horizontal legibility: the society of the free towns in the late middle ages, where such functions were performed by local, self-managed institutions like the guilds. These local institutions had their origins in necessity, as the new towns lled up with runaway serfs who, in continuation of the village tradition, united in guilds for mutual protection and supportand as merchants of necessity worked out mechanisms for tracking their reliability as trading partners. And its also a simple factagain, as recounted by Kropotkinthat this society of horizontally legible regulatory bodies was stamped out by the state. In a society where people are aware that most licensing and safety/quality codes are no longer enforceable, and caveat emptor is no longer just a cliche,

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it would be remarkable if things like Angies list, reputational certication by local guilds, customer word of mouth, etc., didnt rapidly grow in importance for most people. They were, after all, at one time the sort of thing people did rely on before the rise of the absolute state, and as ingrained a part of ordinary economic behavior as reliance on the regulatory state is today. Peoples habits change rapidly. Fifteen years ago, when even the most basic survey of a research topic began with an obligatory painful crawl through the card catalog, Readers Guide and Social Science Indexand when the average persons investigations were limited to the contents of her $1000 set of Britannicawho could have foreseen how quickly Google and SSRN searches would become second nature? In fact, if anything the assumption that they couldnt sell it if it wasnt OK, because that would be illegal leaves people especially vulnerable, because it creates an unjustied condence and complacency regarding what they buy. In many cases, this all-seeing central authority we count on to protect us is like a shepherd that puts the wolves in charge of the ock. Self-styled enemies of what Andrew Keen calls the cult of the amateur are fond of throwing the example of the amateur brain surgeon in our faces. Oddly enough, though, the analogy never seems to come up in a discussion of actual brain surgery. Rather, when virtually any kind of licensing or professional regime comes up for debate, in contexts ranging from homeschooling to unlicensed cab services, the hoary amateur brain surgeon is dragged out and dusted off. In the more extreme cases, like the aforementioned Mr. Keen, its applied to amateur restaurant critics and books published without the benet of a publishing house gatekeeper. As Clay Shirky argues: The stock gure of the amateur brain surgeon comes up only in conversations that arent about brain surgery. The real assertion is that every time amateurs and professionals differ, we should prefer the professionals, and brain surgery is just one illustrative example.9 More importantly, no onenot even free market anarchistswould choose someone to perform a high-risk procedure of any kind without some form of licensing or other certication to attest to their capability. The real question at issue is whether a licensing or certication regime need be provided by the state. [Yglesias on practical issues] Even when state licensing regimes exist as a barrier to entryas they do almost everywhereand traditionally served to limit the number of competing providers that shifted the balance of power between the priest (ahem, professional) and the layperson, the rise of network technology is having a revolutionary effect on that balance of power. If a licensing regime is intended to exert some quality control over professionals, it also has the tendency to create a closed priesthood with limited accountability to the customer. The desktop regulatory state serves to control the authority granted to licensed professionals, and to hold them accountable.
9 Clay

Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 152-153.

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Previouslyto take medicine as an examplea patient usually felt pressured by time constraints not to ask a doctor all the things she really wanted to know, not to question the purpose or possible side-effects of medications, and to take terse answers as nal rather than asking follow-up. Even when the doctor encouraged questions and the seeking of second opinions, the culture of professionalism resulted in an asymmetric power relationship in which many perceived a doctors advice as doctors orders. Of necessity, even with a doctor willing to answer questions, the doctor was the main chokepoint controlling information available to the patientand wittingly or not, her professional culture and tacit background assumptions ltered the kinds of information she provided. Thanks to the Internet, however, there are websitesranging from the most mainstream like WebMD to a variety of alternative medicine sites and even information-sharing sites like Erowid for recreational drug usersproviding an embarrassment of information riches to the patient. There are large online communities of people suffering from an almost innite variety of ailments (Shirky gives the example of PatientsLikeMe)10 , in which its possible to ask questions and exchange information. The patient can arm herself with better questions for the doctor, and compare the doctors advice to a universe of independently accessible information. Even when state-mandated licensing regimes are still in effect, the balance of power between physician and patient is far less asymmetric than fteen years ago. The layperson is empowered to question and evaluate the judgment of the professional from a more equal position. And networked, p2p reputational systems are rapidly becoming more effective than corporate branding or mass advertising campaigns at securing consumer attention. In a world where our attention is increasingly scarce and expensive to acquire, our peers are much better at getting our attention than are corporate advertisers. The reason is that, unlike corporations, our peers can interact with us; they can reciprocate our attention.
Brands face a huge obstacle in the attention economy because corporations cannot reciprocate. A corporation is owned by and exists for the benet shareholders. Shareholders generally expect a nancial return, therefore monetization is a necessity. The same is not true for individuals. Individuals can engage in a true attention economy without any pressure to ultimately convert that attention into a monetary form. Peers are free to value attention for its own intrinsic benets. An effective attention currency would have to be designed very subtly. . . fungible enough to facilitate more efcient reciprocation but not so fungible that it becomes awkwardly thoughtless.11

And as William Gillis argues, the more effective networked, p2p reputational systems become at providing the information we desire, the harder our attention will be for corporate advertisers to get hold of:
Cognitive Surplus, pp. 155-158. Understanding Attention ScarcityWhy the Attention Economy Belongs to Peers, Not Brands, On the Spiral, April 28, 2011 <http://onthespiral.com/understanding-attentionscarcity>.
11 Greg, 10 Shirky,

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...Their whole empire [i.e. of corporations like Google and Facebook that attempt to monetize attention through advertising revenue] is predicated on the assumption that advertising dollars are even a thing. But openness is antithetical to a core presupposition of advertising: people are susceptible to suggestion and anecdote because they dont have enough informationor time to process that informationwhen it comes to purchasing choices. Forget everything youve learned about madison avenue manipulations. Those manipulations are only possible when people have any reason to pay attention. Build a box that delivers all the relevant information and perfectly sorts through it in an easily manageable way and any form of advertising starts to look like laughable shucksterism. Who are you trying to fool? Why arent you content to let your product speak for itself? In this sense much of the fertile territory being seized by Google is detrimental in the long run to one of its core income sources. As search improves and our instincts adapt to it theres simply no reason to click on the featured product getting in the way of our actual results. The more intuitive, streamlined and efcient our product comparison the less need there is to pay any attention to anything else. And if the app providing our results is tampered with then we can swap to another app. Walk into any given store with its inventory already listed and analyzed on our phone. Of course advertising covers more than just price comparisons between laundry detergents, but theres no end to what can be made immediately transparent. How cool is this product with a certain subculture or circle of my friends? Give me a weighted aggregate of consumer reports highlighting the ups and downs. List common unforeseen complexities and consequences. How would I go about navigating the experience of changing checking accounts? Et cetera. Every conceivable variable. With ease of interface and sufcient algorithmic rigor one can easily recognize a tipping point. Algorithms trawling for greater targeting power on the part of advertisers are jumping at comparatively trivial increases in efciency with serious diminishing returns. (And insofar as new understandings might inform actual development/policy wouldnt that a good thing?) Further, taken in a broad view, the issues of complexity to such datatrawling and analysis leans to the favor of consumers because theres simply far more of us than there are sellers. Relatively simple advances in consumer analysis of sellers would drastically turn the tables against advertisers and corporate bargaining advantage in general. In such light their current golden age of analysis is but one last rich gasp. In no way do I mean to underplay the threat posed by governments themselves, who surely have a huge investment in the establishment of institutions like Facebook and or projects like that of Palantir. At the end of the day they will remain a threat and continue working on these kinds of projects. But the context theyre operating in makes a big difference. The NSA isnt going to cut Facebook a check to keep it aoat. The government simply doesnt have the kind of money that

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the private sector is putting in to distort the development of norms in social networking / communications in the rst place. Those are slippery cultural / user-interface issues that are far too complex for the state to navigate with requisite nuance. The sooner we take it upon ourselves to kill the advertising industry the less time itll have to build weapons for the state. Sure, like our current struggle to kill the IP Industry, itll be a ght thatll last a while and involve complex cultural/political campaigns alongside purely technical ones. But at core itll be a downhill battle for us. Easier to spread informationboth technologically and culturallythan to contain it.12

7.2

Networked Certication, Reputational and Verication Mechanisms.

Without the current role of the state and other centralized institutions in overcoming the transaction costs of certifying quality and credit-worthiness, what is called goodwill, or reputational effects, would likely take on much greater importance, with the patterns of exchange coalescing around social ties. This, too, would be a benecial social effect of economic decentralization. Adem Kupi remarks on the role of the state in articially lowering the transaction costs involved in establishing trust, underwriting risk, etc., in the anonymous transactions that occur in large markets:
...The Security State makes it too easy for people to stop thinking. In fact, it penalizes over-thinking by shortening time horizons. We just dont have time to think too much about anything, and we dont have enough options to weigh. Theyve done the thinking for us and pre-limited our options.... In the skeptical society, on the other hand, trust has to be earned, and people will rely on their local social networks to provide them with accurate information. Honesty, and not bullshit, will become the most valuable commodity. Authority as such will be scorned, unless it is backed up by a great deal of legitimate evidence. People will think more and do less, because that will be the only way to deal with risk. In the process, wealth will localize. No more vast towers of concentrated power. Production will become more interdependent, and decentralized, because no particular group will be able to sustain large-scale production, and thus no one will be denied the opportunity for small scale production.... The current growing ratio of noise to signal is putting pressure on the world to become more skeptical, which will put pressure on societies to shift away from guaranteeing security. They just wont be able to do it effectively. The idea of managing anything larger than a local area will become preposterous.13
12 William Gillis, Lets Just Kill The Advertising Industry, Human Iterations, December 31, 2011 <http://humaniterations.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/lets-just-kill-the-advertising-industry/>. 13 Adem Kupi, The Security State vs. the Skeptical Society, A Pox on All Their Houses, July 12,

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This applies to networked platforms as well as local economiessee below for more on communities based on networked platforms. Even in the present economy, organization theory blogger quasibill writes of the benets of fraternal organizations in facilitating exchange between their members. Newsletters contain ads from members who market their small businesses to each other (contracting, printing, landscaping, etc.) Quasibill asked a friend in a fraternal organization whether such ads paid off. The answer was yes":
He noted that most members preferred doing business within the organization because there was a social peer enforcement mechanism at work. Specically, he noted that while a vendor might be willing to work to rule with many customers, or even be willing to le bankruptcy against general creditors, the social peer pressure that could be exerted through the organization made dealings within the organization more fair and certain. You could win your case in court on a legal technicality, but if the members of the organization determined that you werent acting fairly, you were going to be ostracized from the organization before you could turn your head.14

The same was true, to a large extent, in the old Main Street business culture, when local merchants and tradesmen depended on repeat business from people they knew. Eric Frank Russells story of Idle Jack, in And Then There Were None"set in the universe of Russells Great Explosion seriesis relevant here. The world in which the story takes place was founded by Gandhian refuges from the Terran Empire centuries before, and is organized more or less along the lines of market anarchy suggested by Josiah Warren. Land ownership is based on occupancy and useno landlordsand the economy is based on a sort of labor exchange system ("obligations or obs"). A visitor wondered what the penalties were for running up obligations and then refusing to meet them. The answer took the form of a traditional morality lesson, the tale of Idle Jack, a scratcher (One who lives by accepting obs but does nothing about wiping them out or planting any of his own.).
Up to age sixteen Jack got away with it all along the line. He was only a kid, see? All kids tend to scratch to a certain extent. We expect it and allow for it. But after sixteen he was soon in the soup.... He loafed around the town gathering obs by the armful. Meals, clothes and all sorts for the mere asking. It wasnt a big town. There are no big ones on this planet. They are just small enough for everybody to know everybodyand everyone does plenty of gabbing. Within a few months the entire town knew that Jack was a determined and incorrigible scratcher.... Everything dried up.... Wherever Jack went people gave him the, I wont. He got no meals, no clothes, no company, no entertainment, nothing. He was avoided like a leper. Soon be became terribly hungry,
2005 <http://poxyhouses.blogspot.com/2005/07/security-state-vs-skeptical-society.html>. 14 Quasibill, Function Follows Form, or Vice Versa (except if either one contradicts your pre-determined outcomes), The Bell Tower, June 10, 2008 <http://the-belltower.blogspot.com/2008/06/function-follows-form-or-vice-versa.html>.

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busted into someones larder one night, treated himself to the rst square meal in a week. What did they do about that? Nothing, not a thing. That must have encouraged him some, mustnt it? How could it? asked Seth with a thin smile. It did him no good. Next day his belly was empty again. He was forced to repeat the performance. And the next day. And the next. People then became leery, locked up their stuff and kept watch on it. Circumstances grew harder and harder. They grew so unbearably hard that soon it was a lot easier to leave the town and try another one.... To do the same again, Harrison prompted. With the same results for the same reasons, Seth threw back at him. On he went to a third town, a fourth, a fth, a twentieth. He was stubborn enough to be witless. But he was getting by, Harrison insisted. Taking all for nothing at the cost of moving around. Oh, no he wasnt. Our towns are small, as I said. And people do plenty of visiting from one to another. In the second town Jack had to risk being seen and talked about by visitors from the rst town. In the third town he had to cope with talkers from both the rst and second ones. As he went on it became a whole lot worse. In the twentieth he had to chance being condemned by anyone coming from any of the previous nineteen.... He never reached town number twenty-eight.15

Social guarantees of trust become especially important if we reject the role of the state in enforcing debts on borrowers, under bankruptcy law. Dean Baker points out, in rather colorful language, the nature of strict bankruptcy laws as a form of welfare for the rich:
In a free market economy, businesses know that investment decisions dont always work out as expected. Sometimes businesses invest in developing a product... that doesnt have the market they anticipated. They may invest based on trends, such as rising oil prices, that do not continue, leaving them with large losses. Or, they may extend credit to people... that turn out to be bad credit risks. No one expects that the government will step in and sustain the demand for a bad product. Nor do we expect the government to intervene to make sure investors expectations about rising oil prices are realized, for example, by buying up massive amounts of petroleum. But when it comes to making bad credit decisions, the nanny state conservatives do expect the government to step in and bail them out. The nanny state conservatives think that it is the role of the government to act as a strong-arm debt collector for businesses that did not accurately assess the risks associated with their loans.... They want the government to chase after individual debtors, following them throughout their lives, to wring out every possible cent of debt repayment....
15 Eric Frank Russell, And Then There Were None, Astounding Science Fiction, vol. XLVII, no.4 (June 1951) <http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php>.

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...[I]nstead of having the incompetent lenders go out of business... the conservative nanny state stepped in to bail them out with the 2005 bankruptcy law, using the force of the government to squeeze every last cent from debtors. Under the new bankruptcy laws, the government will monitor debtors for many years after they have declared bankruptcy, seizing assets or garnishing wages for debts that may have been incurred 20 or 30 years in the past.... ...Historically, most loans required little involvement from the government because they were attached to physical property such as land, a house, or a car. If a debtor had fallen behind on his payments, then the role of the court in the debt collection process was essentially a one-time proposition: the court would simply require the debtor to turn over ownership of the relevant asset to the creditor, and the case would be over.... However, in the last two decades there has been an explosion of debt, mostly credit card debt, that is not secured by a physical asset....16

16 Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2000), pp. 59-61. Lysander Spooner argued that unsecured debt carried no legal obligation beyond the debtors ability to pay at the time of bankruptcy. The law requires no impossibilities from any man. If a man contract to perform what proves to be an impossibility, the contract is valid only for so much as is possible.... It was the creditors responsibility to judge the debtors ability to repay before loaning money. [Lysander Spooner, Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846) <http://www.lysanderspooner.org/Poverty.htm>.] Murray Rothbard later held the similar position, based on the inalienability of moral agency, that promises were legally unenforceable. But he made an exception for debts, treating default on a debt as a fraud on the assumption that the borrower at the outset undertook an obligation to repay with a deliberate intent to default. In that case, his acceptance of funds or goods on false pretenses amounted to theft, and he is liable for restitution. We shall see that fraud may be considered as theft, because one individual receives the others property but does not fulll his part of the exchange bargain, thereby taking the others property without his consent.... Contract must be considered as an agreed-upon exchange between two persons of two goods, present or future.... Failure to fulll contracts must be considered as theft of the others property. Thus, when a debtor purchases a good in exchange for a promise of future payment, the good cannot be considered his property until the agreed contract has been fullled and payment made. Until then, it remains the creditors property, and nonpayment would be equivalent to theft of the creditors property.... An important consideration here is that contract not be enforced because a promise has been made that is not kept. It is not the business of the enforcing agency or agencies in the free market to enforce promises merely because they are promises; its business is to enforce against theft of property, and contracts are enforced because of the implicit theft involved. Evidence of a promise to pay property is an enforceable claim, because the possessor of this claim is, in effect, the owner of the property involved, and failure to redeem the claim is equivalent to theft of the property. [Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1962, 1970, 1993), pp. 152-153.] But as blogger quasibill argued, the borrowers subjective intent to defraud is a question on which the lender has the burden of proof. ...Professor Rothbard... starts with an insight that he quickly backtracks on: while it may well be the moral thing to keep ones promises, ...it is not and cannot be the function of law.. in a libertarian system to enforce morality. After providing this insight, however, Rothbard resorts to the metaphysical concept of title to transform an unenforceable promise into an enforceable condition of ownership transfer.

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Rothbard does not make clear just what is the fundamental distinction between a promise and a condition.... He merely states that a condition creates an incomplete transfer of title to another person, whereby the failure of keeping the promise, or condition, turns the breacher into a thief! This... stretches the denition of thief beyond anything any normal person would ever recognize. First, even Rothbard would admit that no violence has occurred in the transaction. Possession of the item was transferred voluntarily. Along the same lines, possession was given with the full knowledge of the original possessor, so it cannot be analogized to a pick-pocket or other non-violent theft. Given these conditions, Rothbard attempts to shoe-horn the circumstances into the concept of legal fraud. However... even this fails, as the failure to keep a promise, by itself, does not meet the legal denition of fraud. Generally speaking, fraud requires an intentional misrepresentation of material fact, upon which a victim relies to their detriment.... Mere failure to perform a future condition is not, by itself, an intentional misrepresentation of material fact. The promisor may full well intend to fulll his promise at the time he makes it. As such, it cant be said that his statement was an intentional misrepresentation. This insight is so basic that most jurisdictions have rules that require more than a mere failure to perform in order to establish an intentional misrepresentation. Leaving aside legal formalities, it is clear that Rothbards argument fails from a deontological viewpoint as well. If we view contract negotiation as the art of risk allotment, as most contract drafters do, we can understand the ethical standing of the parties involved. The original property owner, who transfers possession to another in return for a promise, is implicitly accepting the risk that the promise wont be performed. If he didnt accept the risk, he would retain possession until the promise was performed. It is clear that, even under current contract law, or even Rothbards proposed law, such risk allotment occurs regardless of any language in a contract governing the transfer. For example, if, after the transfer of a car contingent upon the future payment of a set sum, the transferee dies in a crash that wrecks the car, the transferor has, in all likelihood, lost all recourse through no act of aggression or deceit on the part of the transferee. He took this risk, whether he knew it or not. This concept of risk allocation is well detailed in the history of the legal concept of impossibility.... So the answer appears to be that the best conict avoiding contract law system is one where possession is, in effect, 9/10 of the law. The only exception is where possession was obtained through aggression, intentional deceit, or theft (of the pickpocket variety). Those parties who engage in voluntary transactions are free to write contracts detailing the terms of their agreement. However, the legal system will not employ legalized violence to enforce such promises. While it may be moral to keep such promises, and reputation for keeping promises may become a social good that is much sought after, it will not be a concern of the legal system. [Quasibill, Property rights and contract enforcement, The Bell Tower, March 22, 2007 <http://the-bell-tower.blogspot.com/2007/03/property-rights-and-contract.html>. Blog defunct; recovered via Internet Archive.] ....In actuality, a loan agreement involves a transaction whereby lender gives property in exchange for a promise of future performance. The contract is complete at that moment. The lender is in complete control of this, BTWhe can refuse to transfer the property until he is subjectively assured of the value of the promise. Some possibilities, including what you have mentioned, are insurance, or bonds, or co-signers... The question of whether you can coercively enforce performance of a promise is one answered by Rothbard in an eminently reasonable fashion, IMHO.... ....Dont forget that only coercion is forbidden. Boycott and shunning, especially organized forms, are absolutely justied actions that you can pursue rather than grin and bear it". And if, as I think likely, there is some sort of moral court that helps organize these things (think credit agencies that have some sort of adversarial hearing), you will rarely have to grin and bear it", unless you made a really foolish decision to trust someone that had nothing to lose with respect to commercial reputation.... The key is that coercive remedies wouldnt be available until you proved that intentional misrepresentation. However, the commercial consequences of failing to keep your word, even if not fraudulent, would likely be tremendously severe in a society that adopted my model, even if the consequences were not coercive. Very few people would do business with you under any circumstance, and those that would would demand onerous conditions like large insurance contracts or deep-pocket co-signers who can be trusted. I would guess that even fewer people would default in

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More importantly, from the perspective of any potential malfeasant, is the consideration that ones livelihoodas illustrated by Russells story of Idle Jackdepends on a good reputation. In a world where consumers turn to networked reputational mechanisms to avoid the risks of one-off transactions, and repeat business depends on ones reputation in the network, screwing over your customers amounts to shitting where you eat. In a genuinely free market, all the licensing and certication regimes presently in place would be replaced by voluntary alternatives. Morris and Linda Tannehill write:
Of course, stiff competition between businesses is the consumers best guarantee of getting a good product at a reasonable pricedishonest competitors are swiftly voted out of business by consumers. But, in addition to competition, the market would evolve means of safeguarding the consumer which would be vastly superior to the contradictory, confusing, and harassing weight of government regulations with which the bureaucrats claim to protect us today. One such market protection would be consumer rating services which would test and rate various products according to safety, effectiveness, cost, etc. Since the whole existence of these rating services would depend on their being right in their product evaluations, they would be extremely thorough in their tests, scrupulously honest in their reports, and nearly impossible to bribe.... Businesses whose products were potentially dangerous to consumers would be especially dependent on a good reputation. Drug manufacturers, for example, would know that if their products caused any illness or death through poor quality, insufcient research and preparation, or inadequate warnings on the labels they would lose customers by the thousands. The good reputation of a manufacturers brand name would be its most precious asset.... Besides this, drug stores would strive for a reputation of stocking only products which were high quality, safe when properly used, and adequately labeled.... A good reputation would also be important to doctors in the absence of government-required licensing. Of course, any man would be free to hang out a shingle and call himself a doctor, but a man whose treatments harmed his patients couldnt stay in business long. Besides, reputable physicians would probably form medical organizations which would only sanction competent doctors, thereby providing consumers with a guide. Insurance companies, who have a vested interest in keeping their policyholders alive and healthy, would provide another safeguard in the eld of drugs and medical care. Insurance companies might well charge lower rates on life and health insurance to policyholders who contracted to use only those medicines and to patronize only those doctors sanctioned by a reputable medical assosuch a society, because they couldnt hide been [sicbehind?] legalistic decisions or sharp practices to defeat the plain understanding of what they promised to do. [Quasibill, A Challenge to Anti-Corporate Libertarians and Anarchists, LeftLibertarian2, January 4, 2008. <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/16883> See also Contract enforcement consolidation, The Bell Tower, December 20, 2007. <http://the-belltower.blogspot.com/2007/12/contract-enforcement-consolidation.html>.]

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ciation.17

Sam Kazman, in a 1998 article written fairly early in the move toward federal standards for organic labeling, described the success of voluntary certication in the past:
As demand for organic food has grown, private organic-certifying agencies have arisen. Some have stricter standards than others, and some may have standards and enforcement practices so lenient that they are practically meaningless. But to the extent that differences between them really mean something to consumers, those consumers are fully capable of distinguishing between them (or of choosing retailers who do the job for them).... The lack of any pressing necessity for [government] involvement is clear. The large organic-foodstore chains already have established connections with suppliers and certifying agencies; the same is true of conventional supermarket chains that carry organic products.... Organic growers themselves are also capable of doing without a cumbersome federal denition. According to one organic-farming newsletter, many growers say that if certied organic becomes too difcult, or meaningless, they will just use another word to market their produce.... Consumers who care about such issues dont need the force of law in order to obtain the information they want about food products. USDA has already announced that its eventual denition will not allow genetically modied foods, but suppose it had ruled otherwise. Producers of organic foods that were not genetically modied could still communicate that fact to interested consumersthrough labeling, through advertising, and even through private organic-certication systems that make a point of prohibiting bioengineered products. Information that groups of consumers want will make its way to them without legal compulsion.

In fact, legal compulsion is used more often to suppress free commercial speech, in the interest of those whose products include bioengineered food, by prohibiting the labeling of GMO-free products. Kazman goes on to describe the free market certication regime for kosher foods:
In a sense, this is exactly what has happened for kosher certication.... For [those concerned about the strictness of the standard met by the product] there are competing rabbinical inspection boards, each with a different logo. With the possible exception of guarding against outright fraud, there is little need for government involvement.... Consumers seem capable of sorting things out peacefully.18

Game Theory Considerations. [Cooperative versus defecting strategies for Prisoners Dilemma, tit-for-tat, importance of ongoing rather than one-off relationships. Robert Axelrod] Potential Building Blocks.
17 Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (New York: Laissez Faire Books, 1984), pp. 49-50. 18 Sam Kazman, The Mother of All Food Fights, The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 48:11 (November 1998) <http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=3699>.

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[Material from C4SS Communal Property on services rendered by guilds] As we saw in the previous chapter, David de Ugarte cites tenth century Jewish merchants in the Maghreb (that is, in Western Islam) as anticipating the reputational mechanisms in a phyle:
These merchants would set up shop in Al-Andalus and the Maghreb as well as in the emergent Italian republics, and in general, in the Christian Mediterranean, capitalising on a signicant part of interregional trade. They established a dense social network, in which some members worked as agents for other members in dozens of European ports, fairs, and markets. What [Avner] Greif points out is that the identity shared by this group, originally based on the experience of mutual support and exile, discouraged treason even if commercial relationships were not expected to last. Maghribi Jews constituted an identitarian community. They preferably hired other members of the network, previously tested, as agents, and uently shared the information, for after all they constituted a distributed and dense network, aware of sharing a common economic metabolism. A distinct, increasingly dense group culture contributed, among them, to reduce transaction costs and the need for extended and complex regulations... This internal operation raised costs for any possible new member who wanted to cheat another member or abuse his trust. Who would want to lose the chance of working and trading with his own people, that is, with the entire network, and forever?19

[Reread de Ugarte networked reputational mechanisms] Pierre Omidyar originally founded eBay on the assumption that people are basically good; within weeks, so many transactions had involved cheating that he introduced a reputation system based on mutual reviews for honesty, promptness, etc., between buyers and sellers.20 It was designed, in Clay Shirkys words, to cast the shadow of the future over both parties, giving each an incentive to maintain or improve their standing on the site....21 [Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood, The Value of Representation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment, Experimental Economics 9.2 (2006): 79-101. [Amazon] [Angies list, http://www.ratedpeople.com/ etc.] [Personal reputation rating tags in Suarezs Darknet. Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom] Theres break potential for activist organizations to compile databases of corporate misbehavior, with consumers checking products against the database by simply scanning a product bar code with a smart phone application. One step in this direction is Boycott SOPA,
an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an objects manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.
19 David

de Ugarte, Phyles, pp. 128-129. Cognitive Surplus, p. 177. 21 Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 284.
20 Shirky,

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If youve ever scanned a barcode on your Android phone to look up a book or CD on Amazon, Boycott SOPA works in exactly the same way: First you have to install the ZXing Barcode Scanner app, but then you simply go around pointing your phones camera at product barcodes. Boycott SOPA gives you a big red cross if the product is distributed by a SOPA supporter, or a green tick if its clean. Much to my chagrin, Coca-Cola supports SOPA but Smirnoff, on the other hand, does not. If you ever needed a sign from Above that you ought to drink more, there it is. Scanning food isnt really where Boycott SOPA is at, though: Really, its all about scanning books, CDs, movies, and games products that are protected by massively militant groups like the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA who are spending millions on buying off Representatives to shoehorn SOPA through Congress.... ...The idea is that you should scan everything that you buy at the supermarket, and refuse to put any SOPA-backed products into your basket. Its a very grandiose idea, and in a day and age where shoppers regularly eschew a selection of products on principle (damn babykilling multinationals!), or buy entirely local produce, Boycott SOPA ts right in. Inadvertently, though, the developers of Boycott SOPA have given us a tantalizing hint of how technology empowers consumers. Imagine for a second if you chopped SOPA from the name of the app and simply called it Boycott. Imagine if there was an Android app that let you boycott whatever you wanted. If you had a personal beef with Coca-Cola which has very long tendrils indeed you could program the app to pick up anything produced by Coca-Cola and its manifold subsidiaries. Likewise, if you want to stick it to publishers or artists that refuse to make their songs available on Spotify, you could tell Boycott to block them. You could even take it one step further and make Boycott the onestop-shop for all of your political needs. Imagine if you could scan a cereal box and nd out that the companys CEO likes to hunt rhinos, ride elephants, and eat shark n soup at the same time. Imagine if you could scan a video game box and immediately see all of the active legislation, the Representative sponsors and supporters, and how much money theyve received from industry lobbying. You could even go as far as equipping the app with facial recognition, so that you can point your phone at a Senators face on the TV and quickly nd out whether what hes saying actually jibes with his real world behavior and voting record. This isnt a futuristic concept; we could do this right now with the tech we have.22

[Last modied January 20, 2012]

22 Sebastian Anthony, Boycott SOPA: An Android app that terries publishers and politicians, ExtremeTech, January 9, 2012 <http://www.extremetech.com/computing/112579-boycott-sopa-an-android-app-thatterries-publishers-and-politicians>.

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Chapter 8

The Open Source Labor Board

For some eighty years, since the New Deal labor accord, the protection of worker rights has centered on the use of large, hierarchical institutions (bureaucratic unions run by the labor establishment, labor boards, OSHA, etc.) to regulate other large, hierarchical institutions (corporations) and limit their power. The problem, as in all the other examples of countervailing power examined in this book, was that the relationship between institutions was at least as much collusive as it was countervailing. Indeed the origins of the New Deal labor pact, in the Wagner Act, lie in corporate managements need for stable control of the production process. The domesticated industrial unions of the CIO, under Wagner, to a large extent continued the same functions performed by company unions under the American Plan. Corporate management enlisted the labor bureaucracy as a junior member of the ruling class, in order to provide social stability in the workplace. The New Deal business coalition centered on large, capital-intensive, massproduction industry. For such industries, labor costs were a comparatively modest part of total unit costs. And given the long planning horizons of the technostructure (as described by John Kenneth Galbraith)1 and the vulnerability to output disruptions in industries where idle capacity was an enormous source of cost, it was in the interest of such companies to trade productivity-based wage increases, a grievance process and seniority-based job security in return for an end to wildcat strikes, slowdowns, walkouts and sitdowns. The Wagner regime was no doubt undertaken in response to pressure from such labor action, and required concessions from management theyd have preferred to do without in an ideal world. And labor denitely got something in return. But the single most important function of the New Deal labor accord, from the standpoint of American capitalism, was to enlist the union leadership into enforcing contracts against wildcat strikes and other disruptions by its own rank-and-le. The central principle of the labor pact was let management manage.
1 John

Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Signet Books, 1967).

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As I said, the advantages of job security and middle class wages for workers were real. Management did have to trade something for stability and a free hand. But thats beside the point, because corporate America has decided these past thirty years or so that the New Deal labor accord no longer suits its needs. Union-busting is the order of the day, private sector union membership has shrunk to record lows, and unionized industries are extorting harsh concessions from surviving unions lest they close the remaining plants and shift production overseas. This suggests we need a new model for labor relations.

8.0.1

Historic Models

The model of labor struggle before Wagner, which could be characterized as a form of asymmetric warfare within the workplace, centered on the kinds of activity mentioned in the old Wobbly pamphlet How to Fire Your Boss. As that pamphlet argues, the conventional strike in its current form is about the least effective form of action available to organized labor.
The bosses, with their large nancial reserves, are better able to withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers.... And worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce. Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss prots while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by denition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers.2

Instead of conventional strikes, How to Fire Your Boss recommends such forms of direct action as the slowdown, the work to rule strike, the good work strike, selective strikes (brief, unannounced strikes at random intervals), whistleblowing, and sick-ins. These are all ways of raising costs on the job, without giving the boss a chance to hire scabs. P.J. Passmore, London organizer for the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, addressed a branch meeting of the Amalgamated Society of Railroad Servants: How foolish it is to go on strike, thus placing ourselves in the power of the companies, who can starve us into subjection, when, by a little intelligent use of sabotage, &c., on the job, we could obtain our ends."3 A radical British workers daily, the Daily Herald, coined the apt phrase Staying in on Strike as an alternative to going out on strike to be starved.4
2 How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action <http://home.interlog.com/gilgames/boss.htm>. It should be noted that the I.W.W. no longer endorses this pamphlet in its original form, and reproduces only a heavily toned down version at its website. It has disavowed portions of the pamphletparticularly, perhaps understandably given the potential use of counter-terrorism powers against radical unions, the section on industrial sabotagein recent years. 3 Quoted in Geoff Brown, Sabotage: A Study of Industrial Conict (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1977), p. 28. 4 Ibid., p. 36. Here sabotage is used in the broad sense of deliberate withdrawal of efciency."

273 Networked resistance isnt a replacement, but a complement to these earlier forms of direct action. The networked asymmetric warfare model can incorporate such earlier forms of direct action into a higher synthesis. Minority Unionism. The tactics used by workers before Wagner included what former I.W.W. General Secretary-Treasurer Alexis Buss called minority unionism.
...[W]e need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difcult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-le on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force.... Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition.... The labor movement was not built through majority unionismit couldnt have been.5 How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing.... We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for It.6

Joel Rogers and Richard Freeman argue for minority unionism under the term Open Source Unionism":
The rst constitution of the American Federation of Labor, adopted at its founding in 1886, declared the new organization open to the membership of any seven wage workers of good character, and favorable to Trade Unions, and not members of any body afliated with this Federation. Tens of thousands of such groups applied for and received direct afliation with the national federation--afterward, though sometimes long afterward, typically migrating to one or another international union. The tactic was particularly prevalent during peak periods of union organization, such as the turn of the twentieth century and again in the 1930s, when workers who did not t well into their established forms sought to join unions. During these periods another union formation was also widespread: minority or members only unions, which offered representation to workers without a demonstrated pro-union majority at their worksite. Such nonmajority unions were critical to organizing new sectors of American industry, providing a union presence in the workplace well before an employer recognized a collective-bargaining unit. Most of the early organizing of the industrial trades, for example, and of early industrial unions like the mineworkers and steelworkers, was achieved through such minority unions.
5 Alexis Buss, Minority Report, Industrial Worker, <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/ AlexisBuss102002.shtml>. 6 Buss, Minority Report, Industrial Worker, <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/ AlexisBuss122002.shtml>.

October December

2002 2002

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After World War II, however, unions effectively abandoned both direct afliation and minority unionism as common practices. Over the past half-century, union membership has come to mean membership in an organization that has demonstrated majority support among workers at a particular worksite, recognized by an employer as the exclusive representative of workers for purposes of collective bargaining.... After World War II, however, unions effectively abandoned both direct afliation and minority unionism as common practices. Over the past half-century, union membership has come to mean membership in an organization that has demonstrated majority support among workers at a particular worksite, recognized by an employer as the exclusive representative of workers for purposes of collective bargaining.... Opening up to these new members would entail some administrative challenges. Many unionists will worry about the cost of servicing workers outside union security clauses and regular dues collection by employers. But the economics of the Internet have changed this cost equation in fundamental ways. At essentially zero marginal cost, unions can communicate with an ever-expanding number of new members, and they can deliver all manner of services to them through the Internet. A labor movement that embraced this visiontaking its own historical lessons with diversied membership seriously and relying more heavily on the Internet in membership communication and servicingwould be practicing what we call open-source unionism (OSU).... What is needed is a larger transformation in strategy that would change the broader balance of forces in the organizing equation by getting a lot more workers into the labor movement, and spreading labors inuence more widely in society. Labor needs to open itself up. OSU would accomplish that, while complementing the traditional powers that labor still retains. To clarify the direction we believe labor should go, lets contrast the proposed open-source union model more explicitly with the existing one. Under the current model, workers typically become union members only when unions gain majority support at a particular workplace. This makes the union the exclusive representative of those workers for purposes of collective bargaining. Getting to majority statusin the trade, 50 percent + 1is a struggle. The law barely punishes employers who violate it, and the success of the union drive is typically determined by the level of employer resistance. Unions usually abandon workers who are unsuccessful in their ght to achieve majority status, and they are uninterested in workers who have no plausible near-term chance of such success. Under open-source unionism, by contrast, unions would welcome members even before they achieved majority status, and stick with them as they fought for it--maybe for a very long time. These premajority workers would presumably pay reduced dues in the absence of the benets of collective bargaining, but would otherwise be normal union members. They would gain some of the bread-and-butter ben-

275
ets of traditional unionism--advice and support on their legal rights, bargaining over wages and working conditions if feasible, protection of pension holdings, political representation, career guidance, access to training and so on. And even in minority positions, they might gain a collective contract for union members, or grow to the point of being able to force a wall-to-wall agreement for all workers in the unit. But under OSU, such an agreement, which is traditionally the singular goal of organizing, would not be the dening criterion for achieving or losing membership. Joining the labor movement would be something you did for a long time, not just an organizational relationship you entered into with a third party upon taking some particular job, to expire when that job expired or changed. OSU would engage a range of workers in different states of organization rather than discrete majorities of workers in collectivebargaining agreements. There would be traditional employer-specic unions, but there would likely be more cross-employer professional sorts of union formations and more geographically dened ones. Within any of these boundaries, the goal of OSU would not be collective bargaining per se but broader worker inuence over the terms and conditions of work and working life. Because OSU unions would typically have less clout inside rms or with particular employers, they would probably be more concerned than traditional unionism with the political and policy environment surrounding their employers and employment settings. They would be more open to alliance with nonlabor forces--community forces of various kinds, constituencies organized around interests not best expressed through work or even class (here think environmental, feminist, diversity or work/family concerns)-that might support them in this work. As a result, labor as a whole would likely have a more pronounced social face.7

Unions existed before the NLRB was even a gleam in FDRs eye, and can function in the workplace as bargaining agents exactly the same way they did then without NLRB certication. The kinds of networked labor organization made possible by the Internet and following the Netwar model described by Arquilla and Ronfeldte.g. The Wal-Mart Workers Association and the Coalition of Imolakee Workersis a perfect complement to non-certied, informal minority locals in the workplace. The networked organization can provide platforms, toolkits and support for the locals. The Social Services Model. Another idea, associate membership, is closely related to minority unionism, and offers to realize its full potential when mated to network organization. Associate membership
is a mechanism for delivering some services to workers who are not in a bargaining unit represented by a union. It has been made available to prounion workers in a failed election, former union members who want to continue their afliation with the union, and workers in antiunion settings who want some personal afliation with or7 Joel Rogers and Richard B. Freeman, A Proposal to American Labor, The Nation, June 6, 2002 <http://www.thenation.com/article/proposal-american-labor?page=full>.

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ganized labor.8

CHAPTER 8. THE OPEN SOURCE LABOR BOARD

Organized labor, under this model, would shift from seeing the dwindling and increasingly marginalized industrial workforce (those in formal, full-time paid employment) as its primary constituency, to including the so-called precariat in its membership and offering services that are valuable to workers whether they are currently employed or unemployed. Under the present conventional model, unionism pursues a model of retreat and encirclement, defending an ever-shrinking portion of the workforce in the face of continued downsizings and plant closings. A model of unionism that served the much larger constituency of unemployed and members in non-unionized workplaces, on the other hand, might credibly threaten employers with encirclement. Some novel approaches in this direction might include organizing unions of freelance workers and the self-employed, as well as using direct-marketing techniques to appeal directly to workers outside of existing certied locals.9 When combined with the networked or socially-based organization model discussed below, associate membership encourages workers to think of labor as a social support movement or a citizens movement.... It is also a step back toward a preindustrial concept of unions as fraternal and benet organizations.10 The social services model might include offering cheap mutual health insurance not only to job-based union members, but to individual, socially-based members in workplaces without certied union locals. Charles Johnson stresses the importance, from the standpoint of worker independence and bargaining strength, of such self-organized mutual aid:
Its likely also that networks of voluntary aid organizations would be strategically important to individual ourishing in a free society, in which there would be no expropriative welfare bureaucracy for people living with poverty or precarity to fall back on. Projects reviving the bottom-up, solidaritarian spirit of the independent unions and mutual aid societies that ourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the rise of the welfare bureaucracy, may be essential for a ourishing free society, and one of the primary means by which workers could take control of their own lives, without depending on either bosses or bureaucrats.11

One possibility is the resurrection of the guild as a basis for organizing mutual aid. Some writers on labor issues have argued that unions should shift their focus to attracting memberships on an individual basis, whether it be in bargaining units with no certied union or among the unemployed; they would do so by offering insurance and other services.
8 Hoyt Wheeler, The Future of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 76-77. 9 Peter Hall-Jones, Precariat meetngreet, New Unionism Blog, November 22, 2009<http://newunionism.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/precariat/>. 10 Wheeler, The Future of the American Labor Movement, p.. 77. 11 Charles Johnson, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008). Quoted from textle provided by author.

277 Thomas Malone discusses such possibilities at considerable length in The Future of Work, in exploring the implications of a free-agency economy of independent contractors. His proposals involve providing a stable organizational home for workers, with continuity in meeting their needs as they move from job to job and project to project. He bases his proposal for fraternal organizations or associations on the medieval guild, which offered loans and training to their members and as well as arrangements for pooling risk and income as a hedge against contingencies like unemployment, underemployment, sickness and death. As a contemporary example he takes the Screen Actors Guild, which offers full health benets even to unemployed members, generous pensions, professional training, etc., in exchange for a benets fund premium amounting to 30 percent of base pay.
Imagine an extended version of this arrangement, in which members pay a fraction of their income to a guild in good times in return for a guaranteed minimum income in bad times.... Companies have also traditionally helped their employees learn skills and, by assigning job titles and other kinds of credentials, signify to the world the capabilities of their workers. These kinds of services could also be provided by guilds. Lawyers and doctors, for instance, have professional societies that establish and monitor the credentials of practitioners and provide continuing educational opportunities. Unions have also had similar functions for years, helping craft workers progress from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman.12

Malone sees the modern-day guilds arising from professional societies, labor unions, temp agencies, and alumni associations, among other existing organizations.13 The kinds of income-pooling and risk-pooling functions that Malone proposes for guilds are likely to take on growing importance in a time of increasing unemployment and underemployment, as we shall see in the section below on worker cooperatives. Restaurant Opportunities Centers as example of guild organization for precariat.
In some ways, it is an old idea: Workers in the same eld, whether they be doctors in the American Medical Association or Windows on the World dishwashers joining something called the Restaurant Opportunities Center, banding together to improve their working conditions. For doctors, improved conditions might mean higher reimbursements from health insurers. Dishwashers might want a minimumwage increase and paid sick leave. In other ways, it is a new twist on worker advocacy, related to the mission of labor unions, but in an age of declining union membership.
12 Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), pp. 84-87. 13 Ibid., pp. 87-88.

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"I think it is the future of the labor movement, said Fabricio Rodriguez, co-coordinator of Philly ROC, the Philadelphia Restaurant Opportunities Center, which began in March and now has about 30 members. The group immediately joined the effort to pass a paid sickleave law in Philadelphia. Rodriguez could be described as a labor entrepreneur. He founded the union that now represents security guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Next month, Philly ROC will begin classes to teach members the skills they need to move from low-paying kitchen work to higher-paid front-of-the-house jobs such as serving or bartending. Classes will be free to Philly ROC members, who, if they are employed in the restaurant business, pay $5 monthly membership dues. Rodriguez and co-coordinator Andrea Lemoins, a former sous chef in various Stephen Starr restaurants, hope to also line up discounted medical and legal services for members. In the lexicon of labor studies, organizations such as Philly ROC are known as worker centers. They are not tied to a specic employer, the way a union might be through a collective-bargaining contract. Unions tend to represent restaurant workers in larger entities, such as Windows, which employed hundreds. But many restaurants have just a handful of employees. "Its really tough for unions to organize these workplaces that are really small and where theres a lot of turnover, said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economic and labor studies at Pennsylvania State Universitys Abington campus. "The alternative is to negotiate a oor for the whole occupation, he said. That became the goal of Windows workers who survived the terrorist attacks. Initially, the 350 surviving Windows employees, suddenly jobless, were helped by their union. But, after about six months, that assistance ended. After all, these workers were no longer employed in a union restaurant. Instead Unite Here Local 100, helped them organize their own group, the Restaurant Opportunities Center, the organization that now runs Colors as a worker-owned restaurant. The group protested when the former Windows owner tried to open a nonunion restaurant. After the news media picked up the story, the edgling organization was ooded with calls from restaurant employees who wanted help with their work issues. Then, in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina blew away New Orleans tourist industry, workers from there contacted New Yorks ROC to help them build a similar organization in the Big Easy. Now there are ROCs in Washington and Detroit, among other cities. Funding comes from dues, from foundations, and in New York, from government workforce training grants. The national organiza-

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tion is bankrolling the Philadelphia operation for a few years....14

The guild model is ideal for the exercise of bargaining rights by the precariat. In New Zealand, the Together movement enlists workers from the precariat who are not represented in conventionally organized workplaces.
In the NZ Council of Trade Unions own words: Together aims to connect workers in un-unionised work places with the union movement and the union experience. In order to do this, it provides . . . help with issues like workplace bullying, sick leave, holiday pay, employment agreements and sexual harassment. Together is a national service that is being developed for the precariat that rapidly growing cohort of workers who do not t into the standard labourist model of industrial capitalism. Because it is being developed at the national level, with afliates buy-in, it cuts across regional, sectoral and strategic lines. In particular, it aims to bring together:

People on casual contracts; Those in industries like IT, tourism or in small shops, or driving taxis; Contractors and workers in remote areas and small towns who dont currently have access to a union; The families of current union members.
Membership costs just $NZ 1 per week, which is roughly 20% of typical union fees in New Zealand. (One kiwi dollar is equivalent to about $US0.87 or UK0.53 or 68). Family membership is also on offer, bringing a still larger audience back into unionisms traditional orbit. In fact, the word they use here is whnau, which is a Maori word a suggesting something more like extended family. So, for instance, if mum or dad is a union member, they can also arrange union support for their children, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces and grandchildren.15

Worker Cooperatives. The mainstream organized labor model, which emerged from the Wagner regime and the Consensus Capitalism of the mid-20th century, was focused on jobs as the normal means of support, with the establishment unions and the progressive state together guaranteeing universal employment, productivity-based wage increases, and an employer-based welfare state. But increasing trends toward permanent structural unemployment, underemployment and a two-tier labor force cast doubt on the continuing relevance of this model. The labor movement needs to broaden its focus beyond jobs to encompass all means of strengthening labors bargaining power against
14 Jane M. von Bergen, Workers nd a new way to organize, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 2011 <http://articles.philly.com/2011-07-24/business/29810007_1_labor-studies-unionmembership-restaurant-workers>. 15 <http://www.together.org.nz/>; Together at Last, New Unionism Blog, July 26, 2011; <http://newunionism.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/together/>.

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capitalespecially increasing the share of subsistence needs labor can meet independently of wage employment. One possible means of doing this is for radical networked unions to organize worker cooperatives, and to encourage production for barter networks among unemployed workers. The use of the social economy as a base for independence from wage employment has a venerable history. According to E. P. Thompson, [n]ot only did the benet societies on occasion extend their activities to the building of social clubs or alms-houses; there are also a number of instances of pre-Owenite trade unions when on strike, employing their own members and marketing the product."16 The rst major wave of worker cooperatives in the United States, according to John Curl, was under the auspices of the National Trades Union in the 1830s.17 Like the Owenite trade union cooperatives in Britain, they were mostly undertaken in craft employments for which the basic tools of the trade were relatively inexpensive. From the beginning, worker cooperatives were a frequent resort of striking workers. In 1768 twenty striking journeyman tailors in New York, the rst striking wage-workers in American history, set up their own cooperative shop. Journeyman carpenters striking for a ten-hour day in Philadelphia, in 1761, formed a cooperative (with the ten-hour day they sought) and undercut their masters price by 25%; they disbanded the cooperative when they went back to work. The same was done by shoemakers in Baltimore, 1794, and Philadelphia, 1806.18 This was a common pattern in early labor history, and the organization of cooperatives moved from being purely a strike tactic to providing an alternative to wage labor.19 It was feasible because most forms of production were done by groups of artisan laborers using hand tools. By the 1840s, the rise of factory production with expensive machinery had largely put an end to this possibility. As the prerequisites of production became increasingly unaffordable, the majority of the population was relegated to wage labor with machinery owned by someone else.20 The worker cooperatives organized in the era of artisan labor paralleled, in many ways, the forms of work organization that are arising today. Networked organization, crowdsourced credit and the implosion of capital outlays required for physical production, taken together, are recreating the same conditions that made artisan cooperatives feasible in the days before the factory system. In the artisan manufactories that prevailed into the early 19th century, most of the physical capital required for production was owned by the work force; artisan laborers could walk out and essentially take the rm with them in all but name. Likewise, today, the collapse of capital outlay requirements for producMaking of the English Working Class, p. 790. Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), p. 4 18 Ibid., p. 33. 19 Ibid., p. 34. 20 Ibid., pp. 35, 47.
17 John 16 Thompson,

281 tion in the cultural and information elds (software, desktop publishing, music, etc.) has created a situation in which human capital is the source of most book value for many rms; consequently, workers are able to walk out with their human capital and form breakaway rms, leaving their former employers as little more than hollow shells. The growing importance of human capital relative to physical capital as a source of equity and revenue streams, and the shift from expensive machinery back to affordable general-purpose tools as the primary form of physical capital, open possibilities for reviving worker cooperatives as a tool of labor resistance that existed before the triumph of the factory system. Current technological changes amount to a singularity in which it is becoming impossible for capital to prevent a shift in the supply of an increasing proportion of the necessities of life from mass produced goods purchased with wages, to small-scale production in the informal and household sector and in low-overhead microenterprises of all kinds. Organization of production for barter by the unemployed or underemployed, perhaps within union-sponsored networks, is another idea that falls under the headings of both social services and worker cooperatives. Unions might sponsor small, independent workshops, equipped with affordable tools, in which laid-off or unemployed workers could reduce their dependence on wage labor by producing directly for consumption or barter. They might also put household producers in touch with one another to match up skills with consumption needs within barter networks. Most households possess producer goods like kitchen appliances, garage power tools, sewing machines, rototillers and gardening implements, and cars which might provide transportation to neighbors, as well as members with cooking, sewing, babysitting, hairdressing, woodworking or metal shop skills. And the productive capacity of such machinery and skills is typically far beyond the consumption needs of the individual household. If the spare capacity of such machinery and skills were used for production for barter with other households, a major part of what we consume could be produced using the spare capacity of producer goods and skills already possessed in the households of the unemployed and underemployed. So the network effects of association for barter would increase the total value of household production capability. And labor unions are a promising platform for organizing such network effects. The effect on the bargaining power of workers vis-a-vis wage employers should be obvious. Workers who barter babysitting time with the neighbor need a lot less work time than those who spend half their paychecks on daycare.

8.0.2

Networked Labor Struggle

Broad-based coalitions have been employed by various social justice movements for decades. Saul Alinskys community organizing model is a good example. Networked organization of the sort described by Arquilla and Ronfeldt, made possible by the Internet, is simply the same phenomenon on steroids. When

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integrated into earlier models of direct action, it offers to increase their impact enormously. The other models mentioned aboveminority unionism, the social services model, worker cooperativescan all achieve a higher synergy by coordinating their mutual support through networked organizations and using platforms based on such organizations. Networked organizations can offer support services to a variety of minority locals and cooperatives on a modular basis. The networks can serve as the vehicle for offering standard packages of low-cost insurance to afliated locals and cooperatives and small workshops, providing specialized help to startup cooperatives, organizing barter networks and currency systems for trade between members, negotiating with suppliers and providing marketing outlets, etc., as well as coordinating media swarming in support of local struggles. One partial suggestion for the form a networked labor movement might take is the French model of unionism, which is at least as much socially-based as workplace-based. Charles Derber wrote, over a decade ago: The real constituency of the new labor movement [AFL-CIO chief John] Sweeney envisions is the American public as a whole, as well as workers throughout the world. As the old social contract unravels, the great majority of those in jeopardy are not American union members but unrepresented American workers, as well as workers in the third world. Beyond organizing new members, labor must transform itself into a voice speaking mainly for these expansive constituencies who are not already American union members. Ironically, this will be the most effective way to service its own dues-paying members. In France, for example, less than 10 percent of the workforce is in unions, but the French people as a whole support union work stoppages to protect wages or benets. In 1997, a majority of the French population virtually closed down the country in support of transportation workers efforts to protect retirement and vacation benets.21 Parallel to the social services model of serving members who are not part of a certied union in their workplace, unions can organize outside the workplace and network with other organizations in society at large in order to bring pressure to bear on employers. In this model, the union uses the community as a whole as its power base. 22 Hoyt Wheeler, in The Future of the American Labor Movement, treats the Knights of Labor as the paradigmatic case of this form of organization. If a union is a collection of local bodies comprising the majority of workers in their workplaces, and having as their main purpose collective bargaining with their employers, then the Knights were less than a union. But they were also more. Their Local Assemblies served as umbrella organizations for social justice and reform movements in each community.23 Their motto, An injury to one is the concern of all, is especially meaningful in this light.
21 Charlers Derber, Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives and What We Can Do About It (New York: St. Martins Grifn, 1998), p. 291. 22 Ibid., p. 59. 23 Hoyt Wheeler, The Future of the American Labor Movement, p. 101.

283 Although the Wobblies, who borrowed the K. of L. motto, put more emphasis on workplace organizing, they also began as an umbrella organization of labor and social justice groups. When Big Bill Haywood gaveled the I.W.W. founding convention to order in 1905, he referred to it with some justication as the Continental Congress of the working class. It included representatives of the American Railway Union, the Western Federation of Miners, the Socialist Party USA, the Socialist Labor Party, the radical priest Fr. Thomas Haggerty, and the all-around moral authority Mary Mother Jones. Today, unions might augment their power within the workplaceor exert power which they altogether lack within workplaces with no certied bargaining agentby putting together a coalition of civil rights and social justice organizations, clergy, the larger labor movement, etc., in the employers community.24 At a time when only a small fraction of private sector workers still belong to certied workplace unions, the mutual moral support of a number of highprole community organizations may be of inestimable value. The kinds of open mouth sabotage we consider later on in this chapter are especially well suited to networked organization. For example, although Wal-Mart workers are not represented by NLRB-certied unions, in any bargaining unit in the United States, the associates have been quite successful at organized open-mouth sabotage through Wake Up Wal-Mart and similar activist organizations. We will see below, for instance, how effective the public information campaign was against Wal-Marts open availability policy. This is sometimes referred to as the corporate campaign. Its essentially the culture jamming used by activists like Charles Kernaghan, but specically in support of labor disputes. It was used by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in their 1976 campaign against J.P. Stevens. Corporate campaigns can be used in conjunction with an organizing campaign, in support of a strike, or in place of a strike.25 The third item is of special relevance to us today, when organizing a conventional union is more difcult than its been in decades. Like the isolated individual worker or group of workers within the workplace planning a campaign of open-mouth sabotage against their employer, the corporate campaign is based upon extensive research on a company to identify fruitful pressure points. Directors, lenders, and other business associates are targeted with a view to inicting maximum public embarrassment.26 Ironically, Wheeler wrote in 2002 that the corporate campaign had declined in importance.27 This was at a time when campaigns like Kernaghans were in their early ascendancy, before the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and before the Coalition of Imolakee Workers conducted one of the most effective corporate campaigns in history. Workers main bargaining agent may not be a certied union in their own
24 Ibid., 25 Ibid.,

pp. 60-61. pp. 78-79. 26 Ibid., p. 79. 27 Ibid., p. 79.

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workplace at all, but what Wheeler calls a workers rights group.28 Such labor advocacy groups, while they may not meet the standards for an NLRB-certied union, are for all intents and purposes unions if one denes a union as an organization of wage-earners who seek to improve their working lives.
However, they do not do what we usually think of unions as doingengage in collective bargaining. Neither do they ordinarily strike. Their weapons are much more likely to be political pressure, social protest, and publicity.29

Although the Wal-Mart Workers Association was not in existence at the time he wrote, Wheeler might as well have had them specically in mind. The Wal-Mart Workers Association acts as an unofcial union, and has repeatedly obtained concessions from store management teams in several publicity campaigns designed to embarrass and pressure the company.30 As Ezra Klein noted,
This is, of course, entirely a function of the pressure unions have exerted on Wal-Martpressure exerted despite the unions having almost no hope of actually unionizing Wal-Mart. Organized Labor has expended tens of millions of dollars over the past few years on this campaign, and while it hasnt increased union density one iota, it has given a hundred thousand Wal-Mart workers health insurance, spurred Wal-Mart to launch an effort to drive down prescription drug prices, drove [sic] them into the Divided We Fail health reform coalition, and contributed to the companys focus on greening their stores (they needed good press to counteract all the bad).31

Charles Johnson points to the Coalition of Imolakee Workers as an example of an organizing campaign outside the Wagner framework, relying heavily on the open mouth:
They are mostly immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; many of them have no legal immigration papers; they are pretty near all mestizo, Indian, or Black; they have to speak at least four different languages amongst themselves; they are often heavily in debt to coyotes or labor sharks for the cost of their travel to the U.S.; they get no benets and no overtime; they have no xed place of employment and get work from day to day only at the pleasure of the growers; they work at many different sites spread out anywhere from 10100 miles from their homes; they often have to move to follow work over the course of the year; and they are extremely poor (most tomato pickers live on about $7,500$10,000 per year, and spend months with little or no work when the harvesting season ends). But in the face of all that, and across lines of race, culture, nationality, and language, the C.I.W. have organized themselves anyway, through efforts that are nothing short of heroic, and they have done it as a wildcat union with no recognition from the federal labor bureaup. 63. p. 64. 30 Nick Robinson, Even Without a Union, Florida Wal-Mart Workers Use Collective Action to Enforce Rights, Labor Notes, January 2006. Reproduced at Infoshop, January 3, 2006 <http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060103065054461>. 31 Ezra Klein, Why Labor Matters, The American Prospect, November 14, 2007 <http://www.prospect.org/ csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=11&year=2007&base_name=why_labor_matters>.
29 Ibid., 28 Ibid.,

285
cracy and little outside help from the organized labor establishment. By using creative nonviolent tactics that would be completely illegal if they were subject to the bureaucratic discipline of the Taft-Hartley Act, the C.I.W. has won major victories on wages and conditions over the past two years. They have bypassed the approved channels of collective bargaining between select union reps and the boss, and gone up the supply chain to pressure the tomato buyers, because they realized that they can exercise a lot more leverage against highly visible corporations with brands to protect than they can in dealing with a cartel of government-subsidized vegetable growers that most people outside of southern Florida wouldnt know from Adam. The C.I.W.s creative use of moral suasion and secondary boycott tactics have already won them agreements with Taco Bell (in 2005) and then McDonalds (this past spring), which almost doubled the effective piece rate for tomatoes picked for these restaurants. They established a system for pass-through payments, under which participating restaurants agreed to pay a bonus of an additional penny per pound of tomatoes bought, which an independent accountant distributed to the pickers at the farm that the restaurant bought from. Each individual agreement makes a signicant but relatively small increase in the workers effective wages...[,] but each victory won means a concrete increase in wages, and an easier road to getting the passthrough system adopted industry-wide, which would in the end nearly double tomato-pickers annual income.

Burger King held out for a while after this, following Taco Bells earlier successive strategies of ignoring, stonewalling, slick PR, slander (denouncing farm workers as richer than most minimum-wage workers, consumer boycotts as extortion, and C.I.W. as scam artists), and nally even an attempt at federal prosecution for racketeering.32 As Johnson predicted, the dirty tricks were of no avail. He followed up on this story in May 2008, when Burger King caved in. Especially entertaining, after the smear campaign and other dirty tricks carried out by the Burger King management team, was this public statement by BK CEO John Chidsey:
We are pleased to now be working together with the CIW to further the common goal of improving Florida tomato farmworkers wages, working conditions and lives. The CIW has been at the forefront of efforts to improve farm labor conditions, exposing abuses and driving socially responsible purchasing and work practices in the Florida tomato elds. We apologize for any negative statements about the CIW or its motives previously attributed to BKC or its employees and now realize that those statements were wrong.33

Hoyt Wheelers associative model of unionism among white collar workers

Johnson, Coalition of Imolakee Workers marches in Miami, Rad Geek Peoples Daily, November 30, 2007 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/11/30/coalition_of/>. 33 Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Burger King Corp. and Coalition of Immokalee Workers to Work Together, May 23, 2008 <http://www.ciw-online.org/BK_CIW_joint_release.html>. Charles Johnson, S, Se Puede! Victory for the Coalition of Imolakee Workers in the Burger King penny-per-pound campaign, Rad Geek Peoples Daily, May 23, 2008 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/23/si_se/>.
32 Charles

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links the network model with the social services model we discussed earlier. As much a professional association as a conventional union, it focuses on providing benets to members as much as a collective voice against the employer. As a bargaining unit it is loose and relatively non-bureaucratic, and tends to negotiate minimum standards with the employer while leaving members free to negotiate better terms individually. When it is necessary to promote the members collective interests against the employer, the hybrid white collar union/association does so more through negative publicity to pressure the employer than through conventional strikes.34 To the extent that the institutional labor movement is locked into path dependencies in following the Wagner model, it is becoming increasingly powerless. The Wagner model was originally created by the state in the primary interest of employers, in order to procure social control of the production process, and then sold to workers by appealing to benets like job security, grievance procedures and productivity-based wage increases. But those benets held good only at the height of the Consensus Capitalism labor accordthrough the 1970s or soand have eroded since the corporate ruling class decided it was no longer in its interest to reach an accommodation with the labor establishment. Since then, establishment unions have faced one assault after another, from Reagans breaking of the PATCO strike on. The labor establishment, when ghting by Wagner rules, nds itself at best ghting an organized retreat. And at a time when the Wagner rules no longer work, being locked into the Wagner system means labor is foreclosed from the most effective means of struggle. Whats more, the conventional union leadership takes an eat me last approach to seeking accommodation with employers, avoiding any radical action like alliance with foreclosed homeowners and downsized workers that might cut off their supply of crumbs from the table. For that reason, networked resistance movements operating outside the established labor movement can be seen as taking up the slack for an increasingly ineffective labor movement. Thats what Steven Lerner of the SEIU argues.
Unions with hundreds of millions in assets and collective bargaining agreements covering millions of workers wont risk their treasuries and contracts by engaging in large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures. This isnt an abstract or theoretical problem; we are already living it every day:

In city after city, a project labor agreementor a collective bargaining agreement covering a small percentage of a corporations total workforcecan make a union want to veto any demonstrations and actions that might upset its relationship with a particular employer. A recent demonstration in the Northeastagainst corporations that damage the economy by not paying taxesended up taking place in an iso34 Wheeler,

The Future of the American Labor Movement, p. 57.

287 lated area, where nobody could see it, because a number of unions feared that a more visible site would offend an employer. In Ohio, a set of unions actively worked against a recent multi-state mobilization at a JP Morgan Chase shareholder meeting. The unions said the planned demonstrations seemed too anti-corporate, with the potential to turn off independents and buoy conservative fundraising efforts. They feared all of this would undercut the passage of a ballot initiative to regain bargaining rights for public employees.
And what was so anti-corporate? In the case of the Ohio demonstrations it was the demand that JP Morgan and other big banks stop foreclosures, pay their fair share in taxes, and renegotiate toxic loans that are bankrupting cities and states. These issues are critical to building a broader movement that engages tens of millions of people from across the political spectrum. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to connect efforts to destroy public employee unions with the broader economic problems caused by the Big Banks (and the resulting loss of jobs and revenue in Ohio), the unions unnecessarily chose a narrow path that weakens them in the short and long term. If our goal is to offend no one, were in danger of doing next to nothing. It is understandable that unions dont want to risk their own relationships with certain employers or politicians. But that shouldnt restrain a broader effort to hold those corporations and politicians accountable. Unions continue to act as though they represent 30 percent of the private sector workforce and that bargaining for those workers drives wages for the whole economy. Decisions are made based on how to protect the 7 percent of private sector workers who are unionized (instead of the 93 percent of private sector workers who arent in unions). The last thirty years prove that this strategy doesnt make sense for the remaining unionized workers or the overwhelming majority of workers who arent in unions. As the stakes are raised and the intensity of campaigns increases, these problems will be magnied. The solution isnt to try to defy institutional gravity by convincing people to do something they arent willing to do. Instead, we need a different model. We need to develop a movement-based organizational model that taps into and builds on union resourcesboth nancial and organizationalbut denies unions veto power over campaign activities. Unions should support, help set up, launch, nance, and ultimately engage directly in campaigns based on their comfort levelbut they shouldnt have the ability to control or shut down activity because of legal risk or pressure from an employer or politician. If our strategy is to turn the tables so workers and regular people feel more secure, hopeful, and powerfuland so the elite feels less sure of its control over the countrys politics and the economywe cant tamp down momentum when someone wins a victory or gets pressured to back off. As a practical matter, if unions cede control and are not able to exercise veto rights, they are able to resist political and employer pressure. Taking it a step further, if unions have contributed

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money in advance to community organizations, they lose the ability to shut down activity later. Far from being a threat to winning smaller ghts and victories, open-ended escalating activity that cant be shut down is exactly what will force powerful corporate interests to make real concessions. This doesnt mean individual unions or organizations shouldnt make settlements that arise in the context of bigger battles; they just cant shut down the broader ght.35

8.0.3

Open-Mouth Sabotage

In particular, network technology creates previously unimaginable possibilities for the Wobbly tactic of open-mouth sabotage. As described in How to Fire Your Boss":
Sometimes simply telling people the truth about what goes on at work can put a lot of pressure on the boss. Consumer industries like restaurants and packing plants are the most vulnerable. And again, as in the case of the Good Work Strike, youll be gaining the support of the public, whose patronage can make or break a business. Whistle Blowing can be as simple as a face-to-face conversation with a customer, or it can be as dramatic as the P.G.&E. engineer who revealed that the blueprints to the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor had been reversed. ... Waiters can tell their restaurant clients about the various shortcuts and substitutions that go into creating the faux-haute cuisine being served to them. Just as Work to Rule puts an end to the usual relaxation of standards, Whistle Blowing reveals it for all to know.36

A central theme of The Cluetrain Manifesto was the potential for frank, unmediated conversations between employees and customers as a way of building customer relationships and circumventing the consumers ingrained habit of blocking out canned corporate messages.37 It characterized the typical corporate voice as sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence," the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and yourcall-is-important-to-us busy signal."38 When employees engage customers frankly about the problems they experience with the companys product, and offer useful information, customers usually respond positively. Cluetrain is full of anecdotes, many from the authors experience, of employees acting as customer advocates and thereby defusing
35 Stephen Lerner, A New Insurgency Can Only Arise Outside the Progressive and Labor Establishment, New Labor Forum, Fall 2011 <http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/Current/2011/FAll/Article2.aspx?id=1>. 36 How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/strikes.shtml> (originally a Wobbly Pamphlet, it is reproduced in all its essentials at the I.W.W. Website under the heading of Effective Strikes and Economic Actionsalthough the Wobblies no longer endorse it in its entirety). 37 "Markets are Conversations, in Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Perseus Books Group, 2001) <http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html>. 38 "95 theses, in Ibid.

289 situations in which customers were frustrated to the point of going ballistic by ofcial arglebargle and runaround. What the Cluetrain authors dont mention is the potential for disaster, from the companys perspective, when disgruntled workers see the customer as a potential ally against a common enemy. What would happen if employees decided, not that they wanted to help their company by rescuing it from the tyranny of PR and the ofcial line and winning over customers with a little straight talkbut that they hated the company and that its management was evil? What if, rather than simply responding to a specic problem with what the customer had needed to know, theyd aired all the dirty laundry about managements asset stripping, gutting of human capital, hollowing out of long-term productive capability, gaming of its own bonuses and stock options, self-dealing on the job, and logrolling with directors? As the Cluetrain authors said, customers talk. But even more important for our purposes, employees talk. Its just as feasible for the corporations workers to talk directly to its customers, and for workers and customers together to engage in joint mockery of the company, as it is for customers alone to do so. In an age when unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector workforce, and downsizings and speedups have become a normal expectation of working life, the vulnerability of employers public image may be the one bit of real leverage the worker has over himand its a doozy. If they go after that image relentlessly and systematically, theyve got the boss by the short hairs. Web 2.0, the writeable web, is fundamentally different from the 1990s vision of an information superhighway (one-way, of course). The latter was just a more complex version of the old unidirectional hub-and-spoke architecture of the broadcast eraor as Tapscott and Williams put it, one big content-delivery mechanisma conveyor belt for prepackaged, pay-per-use content in which publishers... exert control through various digital rights management systems that prevent users from repurposing or redistributing content.39 Most large corporations still see their websites as sales brochures, and Internet users as a passive audience. But under the Web 2.0 model, the Internet is a platform in which users are the active party. We can talk back. Given the ease of setting up anonymous blogs and websites (just think of any company and then look up the URL EmployerNameSucks.com), the potential for using comment threads and message boards, the possibility of anonymous saturation emailing of the companys major suppliers and customers and advocacy groups concerned with that industry, and the ability to engage in search engine pessimization through creative use of semantic tagging.... well, lets just say the potential for swarming and netwar is corporate managements worst nightmare. Its already become apparent that corporations are quite vulnerable to bad publicity from dissident shareholders and consumers. For example, Luigi Zingales writes,
39 Tapscott

and Williams, p. 271.

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shareholders activist Robert Monks succeeded [in 1995] in initiating some major changes at Sears, not by means of the norms of the corporate code (his proxy ght failed miserably) but through the pressure of public opinion. He paid for a full-page announcement in the Wall Street Journal where he exposed the identities of Sears directors, labeling them the non-performing assets of Sears.... The embarrassment for the directors was so great that they implemented all the changes proposed by Monks.40

Theres no reason to doubt that management would be equally vulnerable to embarrassment by such tactics from disgruntled production workers, in todays networked world. For example, although Wal-Mart workers are not represented by NLRBcertied unions, in any bargaining unit in the United States, the associates have been quite successful at organized open-mouth sabotage through Wake Up Wal-Mart and similar activist organizations. Consider the public relations battle over Wal-Mart open availability policy. Corporate headquarters in Bentonville quickly moved, in the face of organized public criticism, to overturn the harsher local policy announced by management in Nitro, West Virginia.
A corporate spokesperson says the company reversed the stores decision because Wal-Mart has no policy that calls for the termination of employees who are unable to work certain shifts, the Gazette reports. "It is unfortunate that our store manager incorrectly communicated a message that was not only inaccurate but also disruptive to our associates at the store, Dan Fogleman tells the Gazette. We do not have any policy that mandates termination."41

Another example is the IWW-afliated Starbucks union, which publicly embarrassed Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. It organized a mass email campaign, notifying the Co-op Board of a co-op apartment he was seeking to buy into of his union-busting activities.42 In late 2004 and 2005, the phenomenon of Doocing (the ring of bloggers for negative commentary on their workplace, or for the expression of other nonapproved opinions on their blogs) began to attract mainstream media attention, and exemplied a specialized case of the Streisand Effect. Employers, who red disgruntled workers out of fear for the bad publicity their blogs might attract, were blindsided by the far worse publicityfar, far worsethat resulted from news of the ring (the term Doocing itself comes from Dooce, the name of a blog whose owner was red). Rather than an insular blog audience of a few hundred reading that it sucks to work at Employer X, or Employer X gets away with treating its customers like shit, it became a case of tens of millions
40 Luigi Zingales, In Search of New Foundations, The Journal of Finance, vol. lv, no. 4 (August 2000), pp. 1627-1628. 41 "Wal-Mart Nixes Open Availability Policy, Business & Labor Reports (Human Resources section), June 16, 2005 <http://hr.blr.com/news.aspx?id=15666>. 42 "Say No to Schultz Mansion Purchase, Starbucks Union <http://www.starbucksunion.org/node/1903>.

291 of readers of the major newspapers of record and wire services reading that Employer X res blogger for revealing how bad it sucks to work at Employer X. Again, the bosses are learning that, for the rst time since the rise of the giant corporation and the broadcast culture, workers and consumers can talk backand not only is there absolutely no way to shut us up, but we actually just keep making more and more noise the more they try to do so.43 Theres a direct analogy between the Zapatista netwar and asymmetric warfare by labor and other anti-corporate activists. The Zapatistas turned an obscure and low-level military confrontation within an isolated province into a global political struggle. They waged their netwar with the Mexican government mostly outside Chiapas, isolating the authorities and pitting them against the force of world opinion. Similarly, networked labor activists turn labor disputes within a corporation into society-wide economic, political and media struggle, isolating corporate management and exposing it to swarming from an unlimited number of directions. Netwarriors choose their own battleeld. Whether it be disgruntled consumers, disgruntled workers, or networked public advocacy organizations, the basic principles are the same. Jon Husband, of Wirearchy blog, writes of the potential threat network culture and the free ow of information pose to traditional hierarchies.
Smart, interested, engaged and articulate people exchange information with each other via the Web, using hyperlinks and web services. Often this information... is about something that someone in a position of power would prefer that other people (citizens, constituents, clients, colleagues) not know.... The exchanged-via-hyperlinks-and-web-services information is retrievable, re-usable and when combined with other information (lets play connect-the-dots here) often shows the person in a position of power to be a liar or a spinner, or irresponsible in ways that are not appropriate. This is the basic notion of transparency (which describes a key facet of the growing awareness of the power of the Web).... Hyperlinks, the digital infrastructure of the Web, the lasting retrievability of the information posted to the Web, and the pervasive use of the Web to publish, distribute and transport information combine to suggest that there are large shifts in power ahead of us. We have already seen some of that .. we will see much more unless the powers that be manage to nd ways to control the toings-and-froings on the Web. ....[T]he hoarding and protection of sensitive information by hierarchical institutions and powerful people in those institutions is under siege....44

Of course corporations are not entirely oblivious to these threats. The corporate world is beginning to perceive the danger of open-mouth sabotage, as well. For example, one Pinkerton thug almost directly equates sabotage to the open
43 Todd Wallack, Beware if your blog is related to work, San Francisco Chronicle, January 25, 2005 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin.article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/24/BIGCEAT1l01.DTL>. 44 Jon Husband, How Hard is This to Understand? Wirearchy, June 22, 2007 <http://blog.wirearchy.com/blog/ _archives/2007/6/22/3040833.html>.

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mouth, to the near exclusion of all other forms of direct action. According to Darren Donovan, a vice president of Pinkertons eastern consulting and investigations division,
[w]ith sabotage, theres denitely an attempt to undermine or disrupt the operation in some way or slander the company.... Theres a special nature to sabotage because of the overtness of itand it can be violent.... Companies can replace windows and equipment, but its harder to replace their reputation.... I think thats what HR execs need to be aware of because it is a crime, but it can be different from stealing or fraud.45

As suggested by both the interest of a Pinkerton thug and his references to crime, there is a major focus in the corporate world on identifying whistleblowers and leakers through surveillance technology, and on the criminalization of free speech to combat negative publicity. And if Birmingham Wragge is any indication, theres a market for corporations that seek to do a Big Brother on anonymous detractors.
Birminghams largest law rm has launched a new team to track down people who make anonymous comments about companies online. The Cyber Tracing team at Wragge & Co was set up to deal with what the law rm said was a rising problem with people making anonymous statements that defamed companies, and people sharing condential information online. And Wragge boasted the new team would ensure there was nowhere to hide in cyberspace. The four-strong team at the Colmore Row rm is a combination of IT litigation and employment law specialists. One of the members of the team said redundancies and other reorganisations caused by the recession meant the numbers of disgruntled employees looking to get their own back on employers or former employers was also on the rise. Adam Fisher said: Organisations are suffering quite a lot from rogue employees at the moment, partly because of redundancies or general troubles. We have had a number of problematic cases where people have chosen to put things online or have shared information on their company email access. He said much of the job involved trying to get Internet Service Providers to give out details of customers who had made comments online.... A spokeswoman for Wragge said: Courts can compel Internet Service Providers or telephone service providers to make information available regarding registered names, email addresses and other key account holder information.46
45 Jennifer Kock, Employee Sabotage: Dont Be a Target! <http://www.workforce.com/archive/features/22/20/88/mdex-printer.php>. 46 Tom Scotney, Birmingham Wragge team to focus on online comment defamation, Birmingham Post, October 28, 2009 <http://www.birminghampost.net/birmingham-business/birminghambusiness-news/legal-business/2009/10/28/birmingham-wragge-team-to-focus-on-online-

293 The eBossWatch Bosss Tip of the Day for August 11, 2010 warned against the possibility of employees using the Internet for cyberlibel":
Cyberlibel: Disgruntled employees vent their anger by making false and harmful statements about their employers and disseminate them using the Internet. A former CFO was accused of posting messages that his employers future was uncertain and unstable on an investment message board. An Internet post falsely claimed that electronic greeting cards made by Blue Mountain Arts contain a virus that destroys the recipients computer system when theyre opened.47

But a much more serious threat to employers is when disgruntled employees vent their anger by making true statements about their employers and disseminate them using the Internet. Its also starting to dawn on employers that the Wikileaks model, specically, can be used against them just as easily as against the national security state. Jaclyn Jaeger, in an article tellingly called Wikileaks: The Other Whistleblower Problem, wrote:
WikiLeaks pose a new threat for employers that worry about employees taking their private information public U.S. embassies are still reeling from the massive leak of condential documents revealed by WikiLeaks last November, containing embarrassing and sensitive details on dealings with world leaders and governments. So why should corporate compliance ofcers be concerned? Because Julian Assange, the man at the center of the controversial Website, says that the next target is Corporate America. In numerous interviews Assange has hinted that the site has reams of documents that could be devastating to BP, an unnamed large U.S. bank, and hundreds of other companies. And he says they could be released to the public en masse this spring or summer. If compliance ofcers nd the Securities and Exchange Commissions plans to pay a bounty to corporate whistleblowers disconcerting, the threat from WikiLeaks is downright terrifying. If a whistleblower goes to the SEC, the rst notice of a problem will be when a government investigator comes knocking. If a whistleblower turns to WikiLeaks, the st indication of a problem is likely to be splashed across the pages of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. "We need to recognize that this is, in fact, an age of revolution, says Keith Darcy, executive director of the Ethics Compliance and Ofcer Association. There is no stopping what is becoming an increasingly transparent world." More than anything, WikiLeaks underscores the ease at which employees can expose massive amounts of internal documents to the public anonymously, with a simple click of the mouse. Instead of stealing boxes of paper documents, employees today only need a thumb drive, which they can easily slip in their pocket and walk out the door. Worse still, they can upload several gigabytes of sensitive data to online
comment-defamation-65233-25030203/>. 47 Bosss Tip of the Week #28: The Internet: How to Keep an Asset from Becoming a Liability (or a Lawsuit), eBossWatch, August 11, 2010 <http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2010/08/boss-tip-of-theweek-28-the-internet-how-to-keep-an-asset-from-becoming-a-liability-or-a-lawsuit/>.

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storage sites or remote computer servers without ever leaving their desks.... Bill Prachar, a partner with the law rm Compliance Systems Legal Group, says he worries that sites like WikiLeaks will start to dictate the way companies operate for fear that the public may perceive certain decisions the wrong way. One hopes that companies can operate without the paranoia of how it may appear on WikiLeaks, says Prachar. But theres always the risk that something will be taken out of context, he says.

Or that theyll change the way they operate, rather, out of fear the public may perceive their decisions entirely correctly. Interestingly, Keith Darcy suggests that one way for organizations to immunize themselves against the Wikileaks threat is to create a culture of trust, one in which employees feel a sense of shared ownership in the reputation and the brand of the organization. In other words, the corporation needs to behave in a less authoritarian manner -- change the way it operatesto reduce the threat of having its public image destroyed by disgruntled workers. Even more interestingly, Darcy mentions responding quickly and fairly to internal whistleblower complaints as part of that culture of trust:
Companies should also communicate that whistleblowers will be protected and treated with respect. Whistleblowers will often report a problem internally before they go to authorities if they feel like the company wont retaliate against them. The burden is on us to make sure when people speak to us internally that we act as quickly as possible to resolve and settle those investigations, Darcy says.48

This is another example of the general phenomenon, described earlier, by which competition with networks either destroys hierarchies or forces them to become less hierarchical and authoritarian. The problem with authoritarianism like that of the Pinkertons and Birmingham Wragge, from the standpoint of the bosses and their state, is that before you can waterboard open-mouth saboteurs at Gitmo youve got to catch them rst. And as we saw earlier in reference to the Streisand Effect, attempts to suppress negative speech are the best way to guarantee a much wider audience for it. If the litigation over Diebolds corporate les and emails teaches anything, its that court injunctions and similar expedients are virtually useless against guerrilla netwar. The era of the SLAPP lawsuit is over, except for those cases where the offender is considerate enough to volunteer his home address to the target. Even in the early days of the Internet, the McLibel case turned into the most expensive and most disastrous public-relations exercise ever mounted by a multinational company."49 As we already noted, the easy availability of web anonymity, the writeable web in its various forms, the feasibility of mirroring shut-down websites, and the ability to replicate, transfer, and store huge
48 Jaclyn Jaeger, Wikileaks: The Other Whistleblower Problem, AllBusiness.com, April 1, 2011 <http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-ofces-us-federalgovernment/16400952-1.html>. 49 270-day libel case goes on and on..., Daily Telegraph, June 28, 1996 <http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/thisweek/jul3.html>.

295 volumes of digital information at zero marginal cost, means that it is simply impossible to shut people up. The would-be corporate information police will just wear themselves out playing whack-a-mole. They will be exhausted and destroyed in exactly the same way that the most technically advanced army in the world was defeated by a guerrilla force in black pajamas. Folks in the corporate C-suites who think using Birmingham Wragge or the Pinkertons as Gestapo is an effective tactic should take a look at the effectiveness of the RIAAs strategy against le-sharers. Such practices have only resulted in the rapid mainstreaming of proxy servers and encryption. And corporate harassment of critics, including disgruntled employees, will only drive critical speech into vectors beyond their control. [Draft last updated January 18, 2012]

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Chapter 9

Open Source Civil Liberties Enforcement

Protection Against Non-State Civil Rights Violations. In May 2010 Republican Senatorial candidate Rand Paul managed to get his tit in the wringer during an appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, when he confessed hed have voted against the private discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act. Maddows response was revealing:
Maddow was bafed: But isnt being in favor of civil rights, but against the Civil Rights Act like saying youre against high cholesterol but in favor of fried cheese? Shes begging the question; you may as well ask how someone could be for patriotism but against the PATRIOT Act. But while mistaken, the question isnt cheap rhetoric. Its revealing of Maddows premises about law and social progress. As she insisted later, Lets say theres a town right now. . . . [T]he owner of the bowling alley says, were not going to allow black patrons. . . . You may think thats abhorrent and you may think thats bad business. But unless its illegal, theres nothing to stop thatnothing under your worldview to stop the country from resegregating. Unless its illegal anything could happen; nobody can stop it; a just social order can only form through social control. Private segregation should stop and only government can stop it; hence, Title II.1 But Sheldon Richman challenges these assumptions: Why assume that legislation was the only way to stop segregation and today is the only thing preventing resegregation? We can easily imagine scenarios in which private nonviolent action could pressure bigots into changing their racial policies. But we dont need to imagine it. We can consult history. Lunch counters throughout the South were integrating yearsyears!before
1 Charles Johnson, Opposing the Civil Rights Act Means Opposing Civil Rights? The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, September 2010 <http://www.thefreemanonline.org/departments/it-justaint-so/opposing-the-civil-rights-act-means-opposing-civil-rights/>.

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the civil rights bill was passed. It happened not out of the goodness of the racists heartsthey had to be dragged, metaphorically, kicking and screaming. It was the result of an effective nongovernment social movement. Starting in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, lunch counters throughout the South began to be desegregated through direct but peaceful confrontationsit-insstaged by courageous students and others who refused to accept humiliating second-class citizenship. Four years before the Civil Rights Act passed, lunch counters in downtown Nashville were integrated within four months of the launch of the Nashville Student Movements sit-in campaign. Students were beaten and jailed, but they won the day, Gandhistyle, by shaming the bigots with their simple request to be served like anyone else. The sit-ins then sparked sympathy boycotts of department stores nationwide. The campaign wasnt easy, but people seized control of their own lives, shook their communities, and sent shockwaves through the country. State and city governments were far slower to respond. Why is this inspirational history ignored in the current controversy? I can think of only one reason. So-called progressives at heart are elitists who believeand want you to believethat nothing good happens without government. To acknowledge that young people courageously stood down the bigots long before the patronizing white political elite in Washington scurried to the front of the march would be to confess that government is not the source of all things wonderful. Recall Hillary Clintons belittling of the grassroots civil rights movement when she ran against Barack Obama: Dr. Kings dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. . . . It took a president to get it done.2 History says she is wrong. People were realizing the dream directly.

Or as he writes elsewhere: The libertarian answer to bigotry is community organizing.3 Charles Johnson, similarly, posed the rhetorical question and answer: In a freed market, with no government anti-discrimination laws, what will stop bigoted business owners from resegregating America? A. We will.4 [Kirkpatrick Sale on Civil Rights Act ratifying achievements of self-organized protesters. ] John Keane traces the beginnings of the civil rights movement, in large part, to two actions by private individuals and associations of private individuals.
2 Sheldon Richman, Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: Was He Right? Christian Science Monitor, May 26, 2010 <http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0526/Rand-Pauland-the-Civil-Rights-Act-Was-he-right>. 3 Sheldon Richman, Context Keeping and Community Organizing, Cato Unbound, June 18, 2010 <http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/18/sheldon-richman/context-keeping-andcommunity-organizing/>. 4 Charles Johnson, In a freed market, with no government anti-discrimination laws, what will stop bigoted business owners from resegregating America? Rad Geek Peoples Daily, June 18, 2010 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/06/18/in-a-freed-market-with-no-government-antidiscrimination-laws-what-will-stop-bigoted-business-owners-from-resegregating-america>.

299 The rst was the decision by the mother of Emmett Till, a teenage boy who was abducted and tortured to death for whistling at a white woman during a visit to Mississippi, to display his badly mutilated body in an open casket at his funeral in Chicago. Around fty thousand mourners attended, and subsequent outrage over the acquittal of his murderers by an all-white jury blossomed into a protest movement. The second was Rosa Parks arrest for refusing to vacate her seat to a white person on a bus, which led to the famous Montgomery bus boycott. The boycott was organized by a loose coordinating committee of likeminded citizens, which inspired similar coordinating committees in cities across the United States. The coordinating committee became an important organizational model for the civil rights movement in subsequent boycott and civil disobedience campaigns like the sit-ins; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating committee was itself an application of that model on a national scale. Some direct action tactics, in particular the use of jail no bail pledges as a swarming technique to overwhelm the capabilities of local police and jails, were reminiscent of earlier free speech campaigns by the Wobblies.5 Historically, activists have successfully fought for liberties in cases where even progressives in the state hesitated to act.
It was June 22 1963, when Kennedy met with the nations civil rights leaders. Just one month before, segregationists in Birmingham, Alabama had turned hoses and dogs on black teenagers. Only a few days later the president went to Germany where he slammed Soviet repression at the Berlin Wall, calling for freedom abroad that he could not secure for black people at home. The state of Americas racial politics had reached the stage of domestic crisis and international embarrassment. Plans for a march on Washington for jobs and freedom on August 28 organised by the black union leader A Philip Randolph, were already under way. Kennedy was preparing a civil-rights bill that would antagonise white southerners in his own party who were opposed to integration. I may lose the next election because of this, he told them. I dont care." The truth is that he cared very deeply. He asked them to call the march off. We want success in Congress, said Kennedy. Not just a big show at the Capitol. Randolph refused. The negroes are already in the streets, he told Kennedy. King, who deferred in age and experience to Randolph did not speak until the end of the meeting. It may seem ill-timed, he said. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. The march went ahead. By the time Kennedy came back from Europe he had decided that he would try to co-opt what he could not cancel. He declared his support for the march, hailing it as a peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances".6

When the State is the Civil Liberties Violator. So much for the question of how to defend peoples civil rights without the state. But the very way the question is
5 John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), pp. 722-725. 6 Gary Younge, I have a dream: Forty years on, The Guardian, August 21, 2003 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2003/aug/21/usa.comment>.

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phrased is misleading; it implicitly limits the issue of the states current role to one of whether or not the state prevents civil rights violations by private actors. But what if the state, under the present system, is itself an active violator of rights? Considering that so much of this book is addressed to concerns about the effectiveness of voluntary organizations in providing protections that are now supposedly provided by the state, it seems appropriate to raise the rather awkward counter-question of what to do when the state itself is the danger to be protected against. Charles Johnson points out the difference,
....aside from the gang colors, ...between an ofcial armed robbery like this one [a raid on a med pot dispensary, followed by civil forfeiture, as described in a Radley Balko column], and the stereotypical armed robbery carried out by freelancers. ....[W]hen gangsters without badges rob you, you could in principle go to the police about it and try to get the robbers arrested. But when the gangsters who robbed you are the police, and are happy to arrest you if you complain about the robbery, then who do you go to?7

We are ostensibly protected from the states abuses of its own power (stipulating for the sake of argument that the initiation of force can ever be non-abusive) by all sorts of formal legal restraints: federal and state bills of rights, local police commissions, whistleblower protection laws, freedom of information laws, etc. The problem is, such legal restrictions are not self-enforcing. Restrictions on government abuses of power depend on government functionaries for their enforcement. The rst line of defense is self-restraint by apparatchiks in the agency ostensibly subject to a given legal protectionthe cover-your-ass instinct may be sufcient to deter the most egregious abuses by bureaucratic drones, if there is a signicant possibility that a citizen customer may become a squeaky wheel. But how many of us have dealt with a petty bureaucratic functionary who, despite the most supercial knowledge of her agencys actual policy, condently told us we werent allowed to do this or that because its just policy, or that we had to get this or that additional form and then get back in line in another ofce in another buildingonly to be told by the petty functionary in the other ofce that the rst bureaucrat was wrong? Its clearly legal in most jurisdictions to record alleged public servants in a public place, in the performance of their ofcial tax-funded duties; but actually doing it (as regularly recounted by Radley Balko in appalling detail) is usually a good way to get your camera broken and yourself behind bars if the cops see you. And James Bovard recounts, in appalling detail, the experiences of many people who have been unfortunate enough to fall afoul of petty functionaries in the enforcement apparatuses of the IRS and assorted regulatory agencies. In their rabbit warren of administrative law tribunals, basic common law protections like the presumption of innocence dont even apply. [cite]
7 Charles Johnson, Dr. Anarchy Answers Your Rhetorical Questions, Rad Geek Peoples Daily, January 24, 2011 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/01/24/dr-anarchy-answers-yourrhetorical-questions/>.

301 The second line of defense is review by bureaucratic superiors who, ideally, are afraid of public embarrassment, or outside review agencies like police commissions. But how often has (say) a police commission, after reviewing the most egregious violations, found that all policies were followed and there is no evidence of wrongdoing, and restored the cop (on paid administrative leave) to duty? The third, and last, ofcial line of defense is the courts, if you have the enormous sums of time and money required to ght a case through the legal system. You knowthe same courts that have found, time and time again, that Congress shall make no law doesnt really mean Congress shall make no law, if there happens to be a compelling state interest in making such a law. Or that the plain words of the Fourth Amendment dont really mean what they say because theres no reasonable expectation of privacy. Or that an assumption of dictatorial power by the President is a political question on which they refuse to rule. For those who cant afford to pay for justice, there are alternatives like the plea bargain (to escape the enormous stack of frivolous charges thrown at the defendant to make sure she accepts the deal), SLAPP lawsuits, and the loser pays provisions included in most so-called tort reforms. As we saw in Chapter Two in regard to regulatory state functions, its sometimes hard to distinguish the state from the bad guys its ostensibly regulating. The same is true in the case of civil liberties violations. For hundreds of millions of people in the world, the question what will we do when the United States government no longer protects us from violations of our rights? would evoke nothing but bitter laughter. The question, for those people, is how to stop the United States government from supporting the dictators and death squads that violate their rights. One of the services for which Wikileaks deserves the most credit is exposing collusion between the United States government and some of the worst oppressors worldwide. [C4SS: public ofcial on Wikileaks undermining U.S. attempts to promote open government] According to Rudolf Rocker, states have never granted or recognized civil liberties out of their own generosity, but rather have been forced to recognize them by pressureoften violentfrom below. [Rocker quote] There are two viable ways of forcing the state to recognize our liberties. The rst is by circumventing its enforcement capabilities, so that its claims of authority and threatened sanctions for disobedience become a paper tiger. The second is to subject it to public scrutiny and pressure from outside, so that the political cost of enforcement becomes more than its worth. Circumventing the Law. Youll notice I didnt list change the law or change the government among my viable alternatives. Kim Stanley Robinson, in the second volume of his Mars trilogy, made some interesting comments (through the mouth of one of his characters) on the drawbacks of traditional models of revolution:
...[R]evolution has to be rethought. Look, even when revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and ha-

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tred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. Its inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so that when the war is over theyre in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced.8

Arthur Silber, in similar vein, wrote that with no exception in history that I can think of, violent revolutions on any scale lead to a state of affairs which is no better and frequently worse than that which the rebels seek to replace.9 But for all its drawbacks, a revolution at least offers the virtue of simplicity, by cutting the Gordian knot and removing all obstacles at once. Reformist politics, in contrast, requires navigating a series of procedural hurdles rigged in favor of the interests with the most money and lobbyists. Thus, for example, the endless series of mostly unsuccessful pot decriminalization initiatives over the past three decades. Each time such an initiative almost passes, after the enormously tedious effort of once again collecting signatures and organizing a press campaign, the postmortems ensue: It didnt pass this time because it was an off-year election and the young voters didnt show up. The Republican coat tails were too long this election. And once again Sisyphus resumes rolling the rock uphill: the painstaking process of collecting signatures, making it through the challenges, getting on the ballot again, and losing again is repeated. Next year in Amsterdam! And then theres the fruitless effort to liberalize in some small way the draconian new copyright legislation being railroaded through by the Copyright Nazis of the proprietary content industries. Endless hearings, mostly closed to the public and announced as a fait accompli. Representatives of public advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation show up for hundreds of hours of meetings, only to see a bill or treaty which was actually drafted by RIAA/MPAA lobbyists get passed essentially unchangedin many cases rubber-stamped by national parliaments with nobody outside a few committee leaders even allowed to read it. At best, the advocates of sanity can argue whether a change in wording of one line in a paragraph of Subsection D of Chapter III of the law had a positive effect that was innitesimal, or just tiny. To the extent that it does focus on inuencing the state, a political movement is useful mainly for running interference, defending safe spaces in which we can build the real revolutionthe one that matters. If the goal is to inuence the state so as to create breathing room for counter-institutions, theres a lot more bang for the buck in mobilizing popular pressure from outside through deft propaganda and framing, than actually trying to participate in the policy process from inside. If violence is used at all, it should not be perceived by the public at large as a way of conquering anything, but as defensive force that raises the cost of government attacks on the counter-economy in a situation where the
8 Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1994), p. 309. 9 Arthur Silber, An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State, Once Upon a Time, April 20, 2010 <http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/04/evil-monstrosity-thoughts-ondeath.html>.

303 government is clearly the aggressor. Whether violent or nonviolent, any form of public effort can benet from the example of Martin Luther Kings masterful framing in the Birmingham demonstrations. The movement should strive to be seen as a ght to enable everyone to live their own lives the way they want. The state should be framed, as incontrovertibly as possible, as the aggressors or bad guys. To the greatest extent possible, the states functionaries should be cast in the role of Bull Connor. And even in such cases, non-cooperation and civil disobediencewhile taking advantage of the possibilities of exposure that networked culture provideare likely to be more effective than violent defense. Rather than focusing on ways to seize control of the state, or to shift the correlation of forces between the states capabilities for violence and ours, it makes far better sense to focus on ways to increase our capabilities of living how we want below the states radar. We undermine the old corporate order, not by the people we elect to Washington, or the policies those people make, but by how we do things where we live. A character in Marge Piercys Woman on the Edge of Time, describing the revolution that led to her future decentralist utopia, summed it up perfectly. Revolution, she said, was not uniformed parties, slogans, and mass-meetings. Its the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. Its all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school! ....Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.10 The individual superempowerment resulting from networked forms of organization is key to this process. The focus on securing liberty primarily through political organizationorganizing one big movement to make sure everybody is on the same page, before anyone can put one foot in front of the otherembodies all the worst faults of 20th century organizational culture. What we need, instead, is to capitalize on the capabilities of network culture. The best way to change the laws, in practical terms, is to make them irrelevant and unenforceable through counter-institution building and through counter-economic activity outside the states control. States claim all sorts of powers that they are utterly unable to enforce. It doesnt matter what tax laws are on the books, if most commerce is in encrypted currency of some kind and invisible to the state. It doesnt matter how industrial patents enforce planned obsolescence, when a garage factory produces generic replacements and modular accessories for proprietary corporate platforms, and sells to such a small market that the costs of detecting and punishing infringement are prohibitive. It doesnt matter that local zoning regulations prohibit people doing business out of their homes, when their clientele is so small they cant be effectively monitored. One benet of the implosion of capital requirements for manufacturing is that the number of producers increases and the average market size shrinks to the point that they are operating below the regulatory states radar. Traditionally, patent law (and other regulatory) enforcement depended on the low transaction costs resulting from a small number of large producers marketing a
10 Marge

Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1976), p. 190.

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relatively small number of goods through a small number of nationwide retailers. Without the ability of governments to enforce their claimed powers, the claimed powers themselves are about as relevant as the edicts of the Emperor Norton. Thats why Charles Johnson argues that its far more cost-effective to go directly after the states enforcement capabilities than to try to change the law.
In point of fact, if options other than electoral politics are allowed onto the table, then it might very well be the case that exactly the opposite course would be more effective: if you can establish effective means for individual people, or better yet large groups of people, to evade or bypass government enforcement and government taxation, then that might very well provide a much more effective route to getting rid of particular bad policies than getting rid of particular bad policies provides to getting rid of the government enforcement and government taxation. To take one example, consider immigration. If the government has a tyrannical immigration law in place..., then there are two ways you could go about trying to get rid the tyranny. You could start with the worst aspects of the law, build a coalition, do the usual stuff, get the worst aspects removed or perhaps ameliorated, ght off the backlash, then, a couple election cycles later, start talking about the almost-asbad aspects of the law, build another coalition, ght some more, and so on, and so forth, progressively whittling the provisions of the immigration law down until nally you have whittled it down to nothing, or as close to nothing as you might realistically hope for. Then, if you have gotten it down to nothing, you can now turn around and say, Well, since we have basically no restrictions on immigration any more, why keep paying for a border control or internal immigration cops? Lets go ahead and get rid of that stuff. And then youre done. The other way is the reverse strategy: to get rid of the tyranny by rst aiming at the enforcement, rather than aiming at the law, by making the border control and internal immigration cops as irrelevant as you can make them. What you would do, then, is to work on building up more or less loose networks of black-market and grey-market operators, who can help illegal immigrants get into the country without being caught out by the Border Guard, who provide safe houses for them to stay on during their journey, who can help them get the papers that they need to skirt surveillance by La Migra, who can hook them up with work and places to live under the table, etc. etc. etc. To the extent that you can succeed in doing this, youve made immigration enforcement irrelevant. And without effective immigration enforcement, the state can bluster on as much as it wants about the Evil Alien Invasion; as a matter of real-world policy, the immigration law will become a dead letter.11
11 Charles Johnson, In which I fail to be reassured, Rad Geek Peoples Daily, January 26, 2008 <http://radgeek.com/gt/ 2008/01/26/in_which/>.

305 Its a principle anticipated over twenty years ago by Chuck Hammill, in an early celebration of the liberatory potential of network technology:
While I certainly do not disparage the concept of political action, I dont believe that it is the only, nor even necessarily the most costeffective path toward increasing freedom in our time. Consider that, for a fraction of the investment in time, money and effort I might expend in trying to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all forms of censorshipI can teach every libertarian whos interested how to use cryptography to abolish them unilaterally.... ....Suppose this hungry Eskimo never learned to sh because the ruler of his nation-state had decreed shing illegal....

....However, it is here that technologyand in particular information technologycan multiply your efcacy literally a hundredfold. I say literally, because for a fraction of the effort (and virtually none of the risk) attendant to smuggling in a hundred sh, you can quite readily produce a hundred Xerox copies of shing instructions....
And thats where Im trying to take The LiberTech Project. Rather than beseeching the state to please not enslave, plunder or constrain us, I propose a libertarian network spreading the technologies by which we may seize freedom for ourselves.... So, the next time you look at the political scene and despair, thinking, Well, if 51% of the nation and 51% of this State, and 51% of this city have to turn Libertarian before Ill be free, then somebody might as well cut my goddamn throat now, and put me out of my miseryrecognize that such is not the case. There exist ways to make yourself free.12

This coincides to a large extent with what Dave Pollard calls incapacitation: rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive."13
But suppose if, instead of waiting for the collapse of the market economy and the crumbling of the power elite, we brought about that collapse, guerrilla-style, by making information free, by making local communities energy self-sufcient, and by taking the lead in biotech away from government and corporatists (the power elite) by working collaboratively, using the Power of Many, Open Source, unconstrained by corporate allegiance, patents and shareholder expectations?14

Incapacitation, in particular, includes undermining the publics willingness to obey the corporate state: what Gene Sharp calls cutting off sources of political power:
Is there a single mistake you see over and over again? Yes. The failure to properly analyze political power; nobody understands political power. All power has its sources. And if you can
12 Chuck Hammill, From Crossbows to Cryptography: Techno-Thwarting the State (Given at the Future of Freedom Conference, November 1987) <www.csua.berkeley.edu/ranga/papers/crossbows2crypto/crossbows2crypto.pdf>. 13 David Pollard, All About Power and the Three Ways to Topple It (Part 1), How to Save the World, February 18, 2005 <http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/02/18.html>. 14 Pollard, All About PowerPart Two, How to Save the World, February 21, 2005 <http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/// 2005/02/21.html>.

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identify the sources you can cut them off. Its a fundamental distinction that leads to a totally different approach to waging political struggle.

What do these sources of power look like?

There is moral authority: Do the people giving the orders have the right to give them? There is economic power. There is control of the masses. Hitler didnt have three brains, you know; he got other people convinced that what he was doing was important and that they should help. Rather than protest the actions of those with political power, you can cut off the sources of their powerand this is rarely understood.

This seems like an approach that demands strategy.

Well, it should, but not everybody who uses nonviolent action knows a thing about strategy. People often think that if they can just show the world how terrible an opponent is, theyll be able to get rid of the opponent. Thats nonsense.

And the opposite of identifying the sources of power.

Thats a totally different trip. Theres also a big issue [in nonviolent movements] of how people dene success and failure. I remember cases where people didnt succeed at all in achieving their objectives but say they felt better afterward. Thats not success. Its important to feel that youve done something worthwhile, but it isnt good enough. You have to learn as much about nonviolent struggle as possible; know your own situation as well as possible; and know your opponents objectives, needs, and weaknesses as well as possibleand then make a plan. You shouldnt have an objective like total justice or complete peace. You have to think in smaller bites. Work out a plan that will weaken your opponent, but also strengthen your people and give them the capacity to carry on the struggleto achieve the next objective.15

What Sharp describes as moral authority is closely related to what John Robb calls the states plausible promise: the credibility of its claims to offer benets in return for allegiance as well as punishment, and specically to serve the material interests of the average person. [Sharp on Egypt from interviewlack of fear] In Robbs terminology, the states enforcement capability is its Systempunktits weak pointin a systems disruption strategy. Its based on the term Schwerpunkt from the theory of Blitzkrieg warfare. The Schwerpunkt was
the point of greatest emphasis..., where the enemy front lines may be pierced by an explosive combination of multiple weapons systems (tanks, artillery, airpower, and so forth). Once the line is pierced, armored forces can drive deep into enemy territory to disrupt command, control, and logistical systems. When these systems are disrupted, the
15 Jeff Severns Guntzel, Lessons from the Godfather: Interview with Gene Sharp, Utne Reader, July-August 2010 <http://www.utne.com/Politics/Gene-Sharp-Interview-Power-ofNonviolence.aspx>.

307
top-heavy military units they support collapse in confusion.16

Just as important, the majority of the enemys combat forces can be bypassed and rendered ineffective by systems disruption, without the attrition cost of defeating them piecemeal. And the Systempunkt
is the point in a system (either an infrastructure system or a marketplace), usually identied by one of the many autonomous groups operating in the eld, that will collapse the target system if it is destroyed. Within an infrastructure system, this collapse takes the form of disrupted ows that result in nancial loss or supply shortages. Within a market, the result is a destabilization of the psychology of the marketplace that will introduce severe inefciencies and chaos.17

According to Robb, traditional strategic bombing of the kind used in WWII measured success by a metric based on the total percentage of an infrastructures capacity which was destroyed. But by that standarddestroying a majority of the actual miles of transmission lines or rails within a networksuccess was extremely costly. Al Qaeda Iraq, in contrast, achieves enormous force multipliers by disabling entire networks at the cost of attacking a few key nodes. A small attack on a single critical oil pipeline out of an entire network, at a cost of $2000, cost the Iraqi government $500 million in lost oil revenue.18 In addition, the $8/barrel terror premium it added to the price of oil cost the global economy $640 million.19 An attack on Shell Oils Forcados loading dock platform in Nigeria, which cost roughly $2000 to execute, cost Shell $400,000 in lost oil exports and another $50 million from the shutdown of an adjacent oil eld.20 In the case of an electrical power grid, attacks on two percent of the high-load nodes can shut down 60% of an infrastructures capacity, and attacks on one percent can shut down 40% of capacity.21 Small attacks on the Systempunkt of any complex system can generate ROIs of several million percent.22 A system can be put out of operation, as if its entire physical infrastructure were destroyed, at the cost of destroying only a tiny fraction of its actual physical assets. The key is to nd the key nodes whose destruction will disable the entire system. Likewise, actually taking control of the states policy-making apparatus, through conventional politics, is extremely costly. Remember our earlier examples of immigration, copyright law and pot decriminalization? Every single step in that process involves an uphill battle, with endless legislative hearings and ballot initiatives, in which the forces of reform are outgunned many times over by lobbyists in terms of money and access. But by attacking the state at its Systempunktenforcementwe can render it ineffective against us at a tiny fraction of the cost:
16 John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 96. 17 Ibid., p. 96. 18 Ibid., p. 7. 19 Ibid., p. 13. 20 Ibid., p. 99. 21 Ibid., p. 105. 22 Ibid., p. 15.

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A law that cannot be enforced is as good as a a law that has been repealed.... If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, and if you put all your faith for legal reform in maneuvering within the political system, then to be sure you will nd yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politicswith just about none of the reform coming out on the other end. But if you put your faith for social change in methods that ignore or ridicule their parliamentary rules, and push forward through grassroots direct action if your hopes for social change dont depend on reforming tyrannical laws, and can just as easily be fullled by widespread success at bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life then there is every reason to hope that you will see more freedom and less coercion in your own lifetime. There is every reason to expect that you will see more freedom and less coercion tomorrow than you did today, no matter what the law-books may say.23

One of the benets of stigmergic organization, as we saw in earlier discussions of it, is that individual problems are tackled by the self-selected individuals and groups best suited to deal with themand that their solutions are then passed on, via the network, to everyone who can benet from them. DRM may be so hard to crack that only a handful of geeks can do it; but that doesnt mean, as the music and movie industries had hoped, that that would make piracy economically irrelevant. When a handful of geeks gure out how to crack DRM today, thanks to stigmergic organization, grandmas will be downloading DRMfree pirated music and movies at torrent sites next week. What is the cost of systems like bittorrent, encryption and Web anonymizers, compared to the cost of ghting the RIAAs lobbyists in Washington? What is the cost of publicizing ideas of jury nullicationuntil the risk of a hung jury from a single rogue juror becomes so common that prosecutors decide that prosecuting simple pot possession is not worth itcompared to the cost of ghting decriminalization and medpot battles on the ballots year after year after year? Each individual innovation in ways of living outside the control of the corporatestate nexus, of the kind mentioned by Pollard and Piercy, creates a demonstration effect: You can do this too! Every time someone gures out a way to produce pirated knockoff goods in a microfactory in deance of a massproduction corporations patents, or build a cheap and livable house in deance of the contractor-written building code, or run a microbakery or unlicensed hair salon out of their home with virtually zero overhead in deance of local zoning and licensing regulations written by incumbent brick-and-mortar businesses, theyre creating another hack to the system, and adding it to the shared culture
23 Johnson, Counter-economic optimism, Rad Geek Peoples Daily, February 7, 2009 <http://radgeek.com/gt/ 2009/02/07/countereconomic_optimism/>.

309 of freedom. And the more theyre able to do business with each other through encrypted currencies and organize the kind of darknet economy described by John Robb and Daniel Suarez, the more the counter-economy becomes a coherent whole opaque to the corporate state. In light of all this, the most cost-effective political effort is simply making people understand that they dont need anyones permission to be free. Start telling them right now that the law is unenforceable, and disseminating knowledge as widely as possible on the most effective ways of evading it. Publicize examples of ways we can live our lives the way we want, with institutions of our own making, under the radar of the states enforcement apparatus: local currency systems, free clinics, ways to protect squatter communities from harassment, home-based microenterprises quietly trading with friends and neighbors in deance of zoning and licensing laws, micromanufacturers producing knockoffs on such a small scale that patent enforcement costs more than its worth, and so on. Educational efforts to undermine the states moral legitimacy, educational campaigns to demonstrate the unenforceability of the law, and efforts to develop and circulate means of circumventing state control, are all things best done on a stigmergic basis. Thomas Knapp provides a good practical example of Eric Raymonds Bazaar in operation when it comes to techniques of resistancethe G-20 protests in Philadelphia:
During the G-20 summit in the Pittsburgh area last week, police arrested two activists. These particular activists werent breaking windows. They werent setting cars on re. They werent even parading around brandishing giant puppets and chanting anti-capitalist slogans. In fact, they were in a hotel room in Kennedy, Pennsylvania, miles away from unsanctioned protests in Lawrenceville . . . listening to the radio and availing themselves of the hotels Wi-Fi connection. Now they stand accused of hindering apprehension, criminal use of a communication facility and possessing instruments of crime. The radio they were listening to was (allegedly) a police scanner. They were (allegedly) using their Internet access to broadcast bulletins about police movements in Lawrenceville to activists at the protests, using Twitter.... Government as we know it is engaged in a battle for its very survival, and that battle, as Ive mentioned before, looks in key respects a lot like the Recording Industry Association of Americas ght with peer-to-peer le-sharing networks. The RIAA can and is cracking down as hard as it can, in every way it can think of, but it is losing the ght and theres simply no plausible scenario under which it can expect to emerge victorious. The recording industry as we know it will change its business model, or it will go under. The Pittsburgh Two are wonderfully analogous to the P2P folks. Their arrest boils down, for all intents and purposes, to a public debugging session. Pittsburgh Two 2.0 will set their monitoring stations further from the action (across jurisdictional lines), use a relay system to get the information to those stations in a timely manner, then retransmit that information using offshore and anonymizing proxies.

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The cops wont get within 50 miles of nding Pittsburgh Two 2.0, and anything they do to counter its efcacy will be countered in subsequent versions.24

Two more recent examples are the use of Twitter in Maricopa County to alert the Latino community to raids by Sherrif Joe Arpaio, and to alert drivers to sobriety checkpoints.25 One especially encouraging development is the stigmergic sharing of innovations in the technologies of resistance between movements around the world, aiding each other across national lines and bringing combined force to bear against common targets. The Falun Gong has played a central role in this effort:
When these dissident Iranians chatted with each other and the outside world, they likely had no idea that many of their missives were being guided and guarded by 50 Falun Gong programmers spread out across the United States. These programmers, who almost all have day jobs, have created programs called Freegate and Ultrasurf that allow users to fake out Internet censors. Freegate disguises the browsing of its users, rerouting trafc using proxy servers. To prevent the Iranian authorities from cracking their system, the programmers must constantly switch the servers, a painstaking process. The Falun Gong has proselytized its software with more fervor than its spiritual practices. It distributes its programs for free through an organization called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), sending a downloadable version of the software in millions of e-mails and instant messages. In July 2008, it introduced a Farsi version of its circumvention tool. While it is hardly the only group to offer such devices, the Falun Gongs program is particularly popular thanks to its simplicity and relative speed.... For all their cleverness, [Falun Gong] members found themselves constantly outmaneuvered. They would devise a strategy that would break past Chinas ltering tools, only to nd their new sites quickly hacked or stymied. In 2002, though, they had their Freegate breakthrough. According to David Tian, a programmer with the GIFC and a research scientist at nasa, Freegate was unique because it not only disguised the ISP addresses, or Web destinations, but also cloaked the trafc signatures, or the ways in which the Chinese lters determined whether a Web user was sending an e-mail, navigating a website, sending an instant message, or using Skype. In the beginning, Freegate was rudimentary, then the communists analyzed the software, they tried to gure out how we beat them. They started to block Freegate. But then, we started hiding the trafc signature, says Mr. Tian. They have not been able to stop it since.....
24 Thomas L. Knapp, The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, Center for a Stateless Society, October 5, 2009 <http://c4ss.org/content/1179>. 25 Katherine Mangu-Ward, The Sheriff is Coming! The Sheriff is Coming! Reason Hit & Run, January 6, 2010 <http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/06/the-sheriff-is-coming-the-sher>; Brad Branan, Police: Twitter used to avoid DUI checkpoints, Seattle Times, December 28, 2009 <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/ 2010618380_twitterdui29.html>.

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The Falun Gong was hardly alone in developing this kind of software. In fact, theres a Coke-Pepsi rivalry between Freegate and the other main program for skirting the censors: The Onion Router, or TOR. Although TOR was developed by the U.S. Navyto protect Internet communication among its vesselsit has become a darling of the libertarian left. The TOR project was originally bankrolled, in part, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the group that rst sued the U.S. government for warrantless wiretapping. Many libertarians are drawn to TOR because they see it as a way for citizens to shield themselves from the prying eyes of government. TOR uses an algorithm to route trafc randomly across three different proxy servers. This makes it slow but extremely secureso secure that both the FBI and international criminal gangs have been known to use it. Unlike the Falun Gong, the TOR programmers have a fetish for making their code available to anyone. Theres an irony in the EFFs embrace of TOR, since the project also receives signicant funding from the government. The Voice of America has contributed money so that its broadcasts can be heard via the Internet in countries that have blocked their site, a point of envy for the GIFC. For the past four years, the Falun Gong has also been urging the U.S. government to back Freegate nancially, going so far as to enlist activists such as Michael Horowitz, a Reagan administration veteran, and Mark Palmer, a former ambassador to Hungary, to press Congress. (Neither was paid for his work.) But, when the two nally persuaded Congress to spend $15 million on anti-censorship software last year, the money was redirected to a program for training journalists. Both Palmer and Horowitz concluded that the State Department despised the idea of funding the Falun Gong. Thats a reasonable conclusion. The Chinese government views the Falun Gong almost the way the United States views Al Qaeda. As Richard Bush, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, puts it, An effort to use U.S. government resources in support of a Falun Gong project would be read in the worst possible way by the Chinese government. Still, there will no doubt be renewed pressure to direct money to the likes of the GIFC and TOR. In the wake of the Iran demonstrations, three bills to fund anti-censorship software are rocketing through Congress, with wide support. Tom Malinowski, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, argues that such software is to human rights work today what smuggling mimeograph machines was back in the 1970s, except it reaches millions more people.26

The last three paragraphs are suggestive concerning the internal contradictions of state capitalism and its IP regime. The desire of would-be hegemons to aid each others internal resistance often leads to the creation of virally replicable technologies of benet to their own internal resistance; on the other hand, this danger sometimes sparks a sense of honor among thieves in which competing hegemons refrain from supporting each others resistance. But overall, global
26 Eli Lake, Hacking the Regime, The New Republic, <http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/hacking-the-regime>.

September

3,

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interstate conict is a source of technologies that can be exploited by non-state actors for internal resistance against the state. Of course the conict continuesbut the resistance seems to be capable of developing counter-countermeasures before the states counter-measures are even implemented.
And, while the Falun Gong has managed to win the upper hand in its battle with the Chinese government, it has reason to be less sanguine about the future. The Chinese have returned to the cybernanny model that U.S. libraries have deployed. This notorious project is called the Green Dam, or, more precisely, the Green Dam Youth Escort. Under the Green Dam, every new Chinese computer is required to come with a stringent lter pre-installed and, therefore, nearly impossible to remove. As the lter collects data on users, it relies on a government database to block sites. If anything, the Green Dam is too comprehensive. In its initial run, the software gummed up computers, crashing browsers and prohibiting virtually every Web search. In August, Beijing announced that it would delay the project indenitely. Still, China had revealed a model that could, in theory, defeat nearly every Web-circumvention tool. When I asked David Tian, the GIFC programmer, about Green Dam, he spoke about it with a mix of pride and horror. The pride comes from the fact that the GIFCs successes have placed the Chinese on the defensive. One of the reasons they started this Green Dam business and moved the lter to the computer is because they cannot stop our products with the current lters, he said. But he conceded that Green Dam will render Freegate useless. In the world of product developmentand freedom ghtingyou innovate or die. The Falun Gong is determined not to go the way of the Commodore 64 into technological irrelevance. It has released a beta version of a new piece of software to overcome the Green Dam. Without a real chance to test it, its hard to tell whether it will work. But it has overcome the rst hurdle of product development. It has marketed its product with a name that captures the swagger of the enterprise. It is called Green Tsunami.27

Statism will ultimately end, not as the result of any sudden and dramatic failure, but as the cumulative effect of a long series of little things. The costs of enculturing individuals to the states view of the world, and of dissuading a large enough majority of people from disobeying when theyre pretty sure theyre not being watched, will result in a death of a thousand cuts. More and more of the states activities, from the perspective of those running things, will just cost more (in terms not only of money but of just plain mental aggravation) than theyre worth. The decay of ideological hegemony and the decreased feasibility of enforcement will do the same thing to the state that le-sharing is now doing to the RIAA. Circumvention: Privacy vs. Surveillance. The offensive-defensive technological arms race between the surveillance state and individual privacy is a special case under the general heading of circumvention. [Encryption, anonymization.]
27 Ibid.

313 The nonprot that distributes the Tor encryption system is testing a home router with the Tor softwarewhich masks Web trafc by encrypting network messages and passing them through a series of relaysbuilt in.
....But using Tor has typically meant installing the software on a computer and then tweaking its operating system to ensure that all trafc is routed correctly through the program. We want to make anonymity something that can happen everywhere, all the time, says Jacob Appelbaum, a Tor project developer. When you are connected to a router with Tor inside, all your trafc goes through Tor without you changing your system at all. It makes it simple to use." Appelbaum says volunteers are already testing a small number of modied routers with Tor installed. The prototypes were made by installing new software onto a popular low-cost wireless router made by Buffalo Technology. The software was developed by Appelbaum and colleagues at Tor and is based on the work of the OpenWrt project, which offers open source code for networking equipment. The nished routers can be congured to pass all trafc through Tor, or only some kinds of communications. You might want to run your VOIP device through Tor but not your other trafc, Appelbaum explains. They will also be capable of simultaneously offering Tor-protected and conventional wireless networks. If we nd that these routers are useful [in the trials], he says, we could partner with OpenWrt and Buffalo to offer a version for sale that helps support the Tor and OpenWrt projects. The software will also be made available for people to install on routers they have bought themselves, Appelbaum says.... Generally, the process results in lag and restricts bandwidth, which deters some people from using Tor, says Chris Palmer, technology director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The primary way to address that problem is to have more Tor relays in more places, connected to high-bandwidth, low-latency lines, he explains. Wireless routers may t the bill well, if they can be built with the computational resources necessary to run a Tor relay of decent capacity. Although consumer-grade routers are necessarily relatively low-powered, their capabilities have grown markedly in recent years, Palmer notes. Tor routers could also make the entire Tor system better able to resist government attempts to block its use. An individual installation of Tor software hooks into the network by referring to a list of relays in a directory maintained by the Tor project. It is possible to block Tor by checking the same directory and preventing connections to the servers listeda tactic apparently used by the Chinese authorities. It is possible to get around such a block, however, by conguring the Tor software to act as a bridge, or a private relay, that can only be discovered by word of mouth. A Tor router can also act as a bridge, and Appelbaum is considering making that a default setting.28
28 Tom Simonite, Home Internet with Anonymity Built In, Technology Review, December 22, 2010 <http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26981/>.

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Evgeny Morozov, in The Net Delusion, almost exclusively emphasizes the Internets potential for ubiquitous surveillance by authoritarian states. Activists who use Facebook and Twitter to coordinate their subversion, he argues, are just lumping themselves into a single target for easy identication and arrest. But Morozov writes as though it were a static situation in which only the state is capable of reacting to ongoing events; in so doing, he ignores one of the most important benets of network organization: the way it facilitates rapid response to and circumvention of state attempts at surveillance and repression. In this regard he closely resembles people like Andrew Keen who complain of the Library of Babel problem, as though people were unable to respond to information gluts with new and better ways of indexing information (in fact Morozovs book includes similar complaints in almost identical language). And like many mainstream liberal critiques of the Web for its absence of fact-checking functions, he implicitly adopts the industrial age assumption that fact-checking can only be a function of institutional gatekeepersas opposed to the adversarial process of hyperlinking and Fisking (I know, I know, nobody uses that word any more). As Cory Doctorow writes: Some of the worlds most ingeniously paranoid experts have spent 20-plus years thinking up plausible technological nightmare scenarios, all of which are more frightening than Morozovs efforts... And these people have spent the same 20-plus years developing countermeasures.
This failure to engage with the best thinking and writing on the subject of the internets special power to connect and liberate is Net Delusions most serious demerit. When Morozov talks about the security risks arising from dissidents use of Facebookwhich neatly packages up lists of dissidents to be targeted by oppressive nations secret policehe does so without ever mentioning the protracted, dire warnings of exactly this problem that have come from the cyber-utopian vanguard as embodied by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NetzPolitik, Knowledge Ecology International, Bits of Freedom, Public Knowledge, and dozens of other pressure groups, activist organisations and technical projects around the world. Indeed, there is hardly any mention at all of historys most prominent internet freedom ghters, such as the venerable cypherpunks movement, who have spent decades building, disseminating and promoting the use of cryptographic tools that are purpose-built to evade the kind of snooping and network analysis he (rightly) identies as being implicit in the use of Facebook, Google and other centralised, private tools to organise political movements. Though Morozov is correct in identifying inherent security risks in the use of the internet by dissidents, his technical analysis is badly awed. In arguing, for example, that no technology is neutral, Morozov fails to identify one crucial characteristic of cryptographic systems: that it is vastly easier to scramble a message than it is to break the scrambling system and gain access to the message without the key. Practically speaking, this means that poorly resourced individuals and groups with cheap, old computers are able to encipher their messages to an extent that they cannot be deciphered by all the secret

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police in the world, even if they employ every computer ever built in a gigantic, decades-long project to force the locks off the intercepted message. In this sense, at least, the technological deck is stacked in favour of dissidentswho have never before enjoyed the power to hide their communiques beyond the reach of secret policeover the state, who have always enjoyed the power to keep secrets from the people. Morozovs treatment of security suffers from further aws. It is a truism among cryptographers that anyone can design a system so secure that he himself cant think of a way of breaking it.... This is why serious information security always involves widespread publication and peer-review of security systems. This approach is widely accepted to be the best, most effective means of identifying and shoring up defects in security technology. And yet, when Morozov recounts the tale of Haystack, a trendy, putatively secure communications tool backed by the US state department that was later found to be completely insecure, he accepts at face value the Haystack creators statement that his tool was kept secret because he didnt want to let Iranian authorities reverse-engineer its workings (real security tools work even if they have been reverseengineered). Instead, Morozov focuses his criticism on the release early, release often approach to free and open source software, and mocks the aphorism with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, though if these had been applied to Haystack, it would have been revealed as a failure long before it got into the hands of Iranian activists. Here, Morozov is as wrong as he could possibly be: if you want to develop secure tools to allow dissidents to communicate beneath the noses of oppressive regimes, you must widely publish the workings of these tools and revise them frequently as your peers identify new vulnerabilities in them.... The picture Morozov paints of information security is misleadingly static. Noting that the web has allowed an alarming amount of surveillance by commercial actors such as ad-networks, Morozov concludes that this kind of tracking will come to the worlds censorious, spying governments. But internet users who perceive a threat from advertisers face few difculties in limiting this spying with ad blockers and the like. Lamentably, relatively few people take advantage of these countermeasures, but to assume that dissidents in oppressive regimes will have the same sanguine trust of their governments that punters have towards Googles tracking cookies is a rather titanic leap. In Morozovs analysis, your vulnerability on the web remains the same whether youre in a friendly or adversarial relationship to the site youre visiting or the snoop youre worrying about. Morozov is also willing to assume an improbable mien of credulity when it suits his argument for example, he worries that the Chinese government proposed to install a mandatory censorware program on every PC called Green Dam, even though this move was ridiculed by security experts around the world, who correctly predicted that it would be a dismal failure (if censorware cant prevent your 12-year-

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old from looking at porn, it wont stop educated Chinese internet users from nding out about Falun Gong).... Everyone I know in this movement from donors to toolsmiths to translators to front-line activists to UN wonks knows that the internet presents a risk as well as an opportunity. But unlike Morozov, these people have a program for minimising the risks arising from internet use (which is why there is so much campaign activity around the privacy and censorship problems arising from proprietary software, social networking services, and centralised data-collection systems such as Google) and maximising its efcacy as a tool for liberation, through the development of software and training that provides better anonymity, better communications security, and even abstract tools like zero-knowledge networking system that allow for the broad dissemination of information among large groups of people without revealing their identities.

Morozovs unconscious agenda seems to have a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwells, as Doctorow observes.
It seems that Morozov wants to see the chaos of popular, grassroots movements replaced with a kind of orderly, top-down style of regimented activism led by intellectuals whose thoughts cant be pithily expressed in 140-character tweets. Whether or not Morozov sees himself as one of those intellectuals is never explicitly stated.29

Elsewhere, Zeynep Tufekci has attempted to list some of the concrete ways in which social media facilitate activism:
1- Social media lower barriers to collective action by providing channels of organization that are intermeshed with mundane social interaction and thus are harder to censor.

2- Social media can help create a public(ish) sphere in authoritarian regimes, thereby lowering the problem of society-level prisoners dilemma in which everyone knows that many people are unhappy but the extent to which this is the case remains hidden as ofcial media is completely censored. 3- Social media helps strengthen communities as it is the antidote to isolating technologies (like suburbs and like televison) and community strength is key to political action. 4- Social media seems to have been key allowing the expatriate and exiled community to mobilize and act as key links between rest of the Arab sphere as well as Francophone parts of Europe and ultimately the rest of the world
5- Social media can be a key tool for disseminating information during a crisis. As we saw in the case of Iran, Burma, Moldova, Tunisia and others, the world had a strong sense of what was happening not because there were many reporters on the ground covering the events but because thousands of citizens armed with basic cell phones could record and transmit in real-time the situation on the ground. Yes, such reports are inevitably chaotic, and yes, the ability to disseminate information is not a sufcient cause for success, but it is surely a necessary
29 Cory Doctorow, We need a serious critique of net activism, The Guardian, January 25, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-delusion>.

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one.30

Seeing Like a State, and the Art of Not Being Governed. The work of James Scott is relevant here. In Seeing Like a State, he develops the concept of legibility: i.e.,
a states attempt to make society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplied the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed map of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to translate what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating. It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplication. In each case, ofcials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored....31 How were the agents of the state to begin measuring and codifying, throughout each region of an entire kingdom, its population, their landholdings, their harvests, their wealth, the volume of commerce, and so on? The obstacles in the path of even the most rudimentary knowledge of these matters were enormous. The struggle to establish uniform weights and measures and to carry out a cadastral mapping of landholdings can serve as diagnostic examples. Each required a large, costly, long-term campaign against determined resistance. Resistance came not only from the general population but also from local power-holders; they were frequently able to take advantage of the administrative incoherence produced by differing interests and missions within the ranks of ofcialdom. But in spite of the ebbs and ows of the various campaigns and their national peculiarities, a pattern of adopting uniform measurements and charting cadastral maps ultimately prevailed. Each undertaking also exemplied a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will nd echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were illegible to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a
30 Zeynep Tufekci, Tunisia, Twitter, Aristotle,Social Media and Final and Efcient Causes, technosociology, January 15, 2011 <http://technosociology.org/?p=263>. 31 James Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 2.

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diversity and intricacy that reected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly ctional, shorthand. The logic behind the required shorthand was provided... by the pressing material requirements of rulers: scal receipts, military manpower, and state security. In turn, this shorthand functioned... as not just a description, however inadequate. Backed by state power through records, courts, and ultimately coercion, these state ctions transformed the reality they presumed to observe, although never so thoroughly as to precisely t the grid.32

Scotts concept of legibility is closely related toand appears to have been inuenced bywhat Michel Foucault called panopticism. Consider how he describes legibility in operational terms:
Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in societyto vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch criminals, start universal schoolingrequires the invention of units that are visible.... Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identied, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. In other words, one might say that the greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it. It was precisely this phenomenon, which had reached full tide by the middle of the nineteenth century, that Proudhon had in mind when he declared, To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about.... To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. From another perspective, what Proudhon was deploring was in fact the great achievement of modern statecraft. How hard-won and tenuous this achievement was is worth emphasizing. Most states, to speak broadly, are younger than the societies that they purport to administer. States therefore confront patterns of settlement, social relations, and production, not to mention a natural environment, that have evolved largely independent of state plans. The result is typically a diversity, complexity, and unrepeatability of social forms that are relatively opaque to the state, often purposefully so.... If the states goals are minimal, it may not need to know much about the society.... If, however, the state is ambitiousif it wants to extract as much grain and manpower as it can, short of provoking a famine or a rebellion, if it wants to create a literate, skilled, and healthy population, if it wants everyone to speak the same language or worship the same godthen it will have to become both far more
32 Ibid.,

p. 24.

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knowledgeable and far more intrusive.33

In the same book he mentioned the concepts of state spaces and nonstate spaces; state spaces are geographical regions with high-density population and high-density grain agriculture, producing a surplus of grain... and labor which was relatively easily appropriated by the state. The conditions of nonstate spaces were just the reverse, thereby severely limiting the possibilities for reliable state appropriation.34 This might have served as the topic sentence for his next book, The Art of Not Being Governed. In that book, Scott surveys the populations of Zomia, the highland areas spanning all the countries of Southeast Asia, which are largely outside the reach of the governments there. He suggests areas of commonality between the Zomians and people in nonstate areas around the world, upland and frontier people like the Cossacks, Highlanders and hillbillies, as well as runaway slave communities in inaccessible marsh regions of the American South. States attempt to maximize the appropriability of crops and labor, designing state space so as to guarantee the ruler a substantial and reliable surplus of manpower and grain at least cost... This is achieved by geographical concentration of the population and the use of concentrated, high-value forms of cultivation, in order to minimize the cost of governing the area as well as the transaction costs of appropriating labor and produce.35 State spaces tend to encompass large core areas of highly concentrated grain production within a few days march from the court center, not necessarily contiguous with the center but at least relatively accessible to ofcials and soldiers from the center via trade routes or navigable waterways.36 Governable areas are mainly areas of high-density agricultural production linked either by at terrain or watercourses.37 In Zomia, as Scott describes it:
Virtually everything about these peoples livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, ...can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arms length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.38

In order to avoid taxes, draft labor and conscription, they practiced escape agriculture: forms of cultivation designed to thwart state appropriation. Their social structure, likewise, was designed to aid dispersal and autonomy and to ward off political subordination.39
pp. 183-184. p. 186. 35 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 40-41. 36 Ibid., p. 53. 37 Ibid., p. 58. 38 Ibid., x. 39 Ibid., p. 23.
34 Ibid., 33 Ibid.,

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The nonstate space is a direct inversion of the state space: it is state repelling, i.e. it represents an agro-ecological setting singularly unfavorable to manpower- and grain-amassing strategies of states. States will hesitate to incorporate such areas, inasmuch as the return, in manpower and grain, is likely to be less than the administrative and military costs of appropriating it.40
The greater the dispersal of the crops, the more difcult they are to collect, in the same way that a dispersed population is more difcult to grab. To the degree that such crops are part of the swiddeners portfolio, to that degree will they prove scally sterile to states and raiders and be deemed not worth the trouble or, in other words, a nonstate space.41

Nonstate spaces benet from various forms of friction that increase the transaction costs of appropriating labor and output, and of extending the reach of the states enforcement arm into such regions. These forms of friction include the friction of distance42 (which amounts to a distance tax on centralized control, to put it in John Robbs terms), the friction of terrain or altitude, and the friction of seasonal weather.43 In regard to the latter, for example, it might be possible to wait for the rains, when supply lines broke down (or were easier to cut) and the garrison was faced with starvation or retreat.44 I suggest that the concepts of state space and nonstate space, if removed from Scotts immediate spatial context and applied by way of analogy to spheres of social and economic life that are more or less amenable to state control, can be useful for us in the kinds of developed Western societies where to all appearances there are no geographical spaces beyond the control of the state. State spaces in our economy are sectors which are closely allied to and legible to the state. Nonstate spaces are those which are hard to monitor and where regulations are hard to enforce. Based on the states preferences for legibility, appropriation, and centralization of control, it will tend to promote institutional arrangements [that] can be readily monitored and directed from the center and can be easily taxed....
The principles of standarization, central control, and synoptic legibility to the center could be applied to many... elds. If we were to apply them to education, for example, the most illegible education system would be completely informal, nonstandardized instruction determined entirely by local mutuality [e.g., me on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other]. The most legible educational system would resemble Hippolyte Taines description of French education in the nineteenth century, when the Minister of Education could pride himself, just by looking at his watch, which page of Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at that exact moment.45
40 Ibid., 41 Ibid.,

p. p. 42 Ibid., p. 43 Ibid., p. 44 Ibid., p. 45 Ibid., p.

178. 196. 51. 61. 63. 219.

321 State spaces, especially, are associated with legible forms of production. That means, among other things, an economy dominated by large business units like oligopoly corporations and large-scale agribusiness. Borrowing an idea from Marx, I have described the staterightfully, I thinkas the executive committee of the ruling class, which is dominated by the leaders of the corporate economy and nance capital. But the relationship is two-way. The large corporation and the state exist in a symbiotic relationship. The state itself, in the narrow sense of the apparatus of functionaries who are actually on the public payroll, has a preference for large-scale units of economic organization because they are most amenable to being used as extensions of the states taxing and enforcement functions. Scott points to the tendency by which large units are favored over small factories or artisanal production, citing Jeffrey Sachs observation that Central planners had no desire to coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of small rms in a sector if one large rm could do the job. A standard strategy, therefore, was to create one giant rm wherever possible.46 [cite Darrington material from Scott paper] More broadly, the state prefers largescale property to small, petty bourgeois property, large farms to small peasant farms, large commercial establishments to small family shops, and formalized economic activity in the cash nexus to informal exchange, barter or gifting.47 The same effects achieved through spatial distance and isolation and the high costs of physical transportation in Scotts Zomia can be achieved in our economy, without all the inconvenience, through expedients such as encryption and the use of darknets. Recent technological developments have drastically expanded the potential for non-spatial, non-territorially based versions of the nonstate spaces that Scott describes. People can remove themselves from state space by adopting technologies and methods of organization that make them illegible to the state, without any actual movement in space. The transaction costs of overcoming opacity and illegibility, and enforcing obedience in an atmosphere of non-compliance, function as a tax in a manner analogous to John Robbs terrorism tax which we discussed in an earlier chapter. It makes some spaces (i.e. sectors or areas of life) more costly to govern than theyre worth. Scott argues that for a ruler, the relevant metric is not GDP but State-Accessible Product (SAP). The greater an areas distance from the center, the higher the concentration of value or value-to-weight ratio a unit of output must have to be worth appropriating and carrying off to the capital. The further from the center an area is, the larger the share of its economy will cost more than its worth to exploit.48 Its somewhat analogous to the concept of EROEI in the eld of energy; if the purpose of the state is to extract a surplus on behalf of a privileged class, the governance tax reduces the amount of surplus which is extracted per input of enforcement effort. As we saw in our earlier discussion of Robbs terrorism tax, anything that reduces the net EROEI of the system, the size of the surplus which the state is
46 Ibid., 47 Ibid.,

p. 402n. 74. p. 220 table. 48 Ibid., p. 73.

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able to extract, will cause it to shrink to a smaller equilibrium scale of activity. The more costly enforcement is and the smaller the revenues the state (and its corporate allies, as in the case of enforcing digital copyright law) can obtain per unit of enforcement effort, the more hollow it becomes and the more areas of life it retreats from as not worth the cost of governing. Our strategy, in attacking the states enforcement capabilities as the weak link of state capitalism, should be to create metaphoric nonstate spaces like darknets, forms of physical production which are so small-scale and dispersed as to present serious surveillance and enforcement costs, etc., and to shift the correlation of forces between nonstate and state spaces. From our standpoint, technologies of liberation reduce the cost and inconvenience of evasion. In Scotts work, for people in state spaces the labor they have sunk into their elds over generations, the more reluctant they are to leave in order to escape the states taxation.49 In Zomia, not being governed frequently entailed adopting subsistence strategies aimed to escape detection and maximize their physical mobility should they be forced to ee again at a moments notice. This could involve a real sacrice in quality of life, in terms of the categories of goods which could not be produced, the categories of food that were unavailable, etc.50 Historically, when not being governed required spatial distance and inaccessibility, creating a nonstate space meant a choice of technologies of living based on the need to be less legible. In many cases this translated into abandoning xed cultivation to take up shifting agriculture and foraging, the deliberate choice of a more primitive lifestyle for the sake of autonomy, and the conscious choice of less productive methods of cultivation and a smaller surplus.51 To put this in Western economic terms, liberatory technologies now offer the potential to eliminate the necessity for this tradeoff between autonomy and standard of living. We want to render ourselves as ungovernable as the people of Zomia, without the inconvenience of living in the mountains and swamps or living mostly on root crops. The more areas of economic life that are rendered illegible to the state through liberatory technology, the less the differential in standard of living between state and nonstate areas. Scott names mobility as his second principle of evasion. Mobility, the ability to change location, renders a society inaccessible through the ability to shift to a more remote and advantageous site. It is a relatively frictionless ability to shift location....52 In terms of our analogous nonspatial nonstate spaces in Western societies, this is mirrored by the agility and exibility of networks. Scotts nonstate spaces overlap considerably with Hakim Beys concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). A TAZ is a space in which we can live the way we want outside the states control, taking advantage of temporary areas of opacity: The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time,
49 Ibid., 50 Ibid.,

p. p. 51 Ibid., p. 52 Ibid., p.

65. 181. 188. 184.

323 of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.53 Unfortunately, Bey frames the TAZ in terms of a false dichotomy, treating it in contrast to revolutionary or insurrectionary strategies of directly confronting the stateand equating all totalizing visions of freedom to the latter.
You will argue that this is a counsel of despair. What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world. I accept this as a fair criticism. Id make two rejoinders nevertheless; rst, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising--but as soon as the Revolution triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed. I have not given up hope or even expectation of change--but I distrust the word Revolution. Second, even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast undertaking. Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry nds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen.54

Bey misses the transformation of quantity into quality: that as change in technological possibilities makes the proliferation of TAZ more feasible and shifts the offensive-defensive arms race between them and the state, there will be a shift in their structural signicance. TAZ will become progressively less temporary. It need be temporary only in the sense that state capitalism is temporary. The particular, local features of state capitalismthe rise and fall of individual corporations, for instanceare temporary. But the structure persists. Likewise, the structure of the counter-society can persist and gradually achieve dominance over the older state-capitalist structure even as its local components are created and destroyed. Beys pessimism is understandable, considering that he wrote at a time when no one imagined the liberatory potential of the Worldwide Web and network culture. At the time he wrote, hyperlinks and an open browser-based Web werent even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lees eye. Internet was synonymous with the ofcial military/university network of the 1980s, populated mostly by government, university or corporate employees with access to institutional mainframes. The most far-sighted mainstream Internet enthusiasts anticipated something like the Information Superhighway vision of Al Gore, Bill Gates and
53 Hakim Bey, T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Autonomedia 1985, 1991) <http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/taz.htm>. 54 Ibid.

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Newt Gingrich: basically a walled-garden system for delivering paid, streaming proprietary content on demand or viewing static institutional websites (or as Paul Verhoeven might say, Would you like to know more?). Bey envisioned the Web as an alternate, secondary shadow-structure operating within the interstices of the ofcial Internet. The unofcial Web at the time he wrote, as he imagined it, consisted of the marginal zine network, the BBS networks, pirated software, hacking, phone-phreakingno ber-optics, no cable.55 It was quite similar to Ivan Illichs earlier vision of learning webs, consisting not only of time-share access to mainframes but of telephone trees and dead-tree notices on community bulletin boards. And to be fair, at times he seems open to the possibility that the Web and TAZs might coalesce into a successor societyhe just downplays the possibility in favor of emphasizing the temporary and lifestylist nature of the TAZ.
Thus the Web, in order to produce situations conducive to the TAZ, will parasitize the Netbut we can also conceive of this strategy as an attempt to build toward the construction to an alternative and autonomous Net, free and no longer parasitic, which will serve as the basis for a new society emerging from the shell of the old. The counter-Net and the TAZ can be considered, practically speaking, as ends in themselves - but theoretically they can also be viewed as forms of struggle toward a different reality.56

Exposure and Embarrassment. One especially important variant of the stigmergic principle is educational and propaganda effort. Even though organized, issue-oriented advocacy groups arguably can have a signicant effect on the state, in pressuring the state to cease or reduce suppression of the alternative economy, the best way to maximize bang for the buck in such efforts is simply to capitalize on the potential of network culture: that is, put maximum effort into just getting the information out there, giving the government lots and lots of negative publicity, and then letting a thousand owers bloom when it comes to efforts to leverage it into political action. That being done, the political pressure itself will be organized by many different individuals and groups operating independently, spurred by their own outrage, without their necessarily even sharing any common antistatist ideology. Exposure of abuses by the state and its functionaries is a longstanding practice. For example, John Keane describes the practice, in oppressive Latin American regimes, of outing suspected murderers or torturers with the use of grafti, barbed wire, and red paint. The outing tactic was known as escrachar, an old Spanish term meaning to break or to destroy, which was invested with the new meaning to strike out publicly at someones reputation for the purpose of shaming them and revealing to others they terrible things they have done in private.57
55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 John Kean, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), p. 787.

325 A good recent example is the role of Wikileaks, which we discuss in detail later in this chapter, in sparking the Tunisian revolt. Wikileaks made the American ambassadors private assessment of the regimes corruption publicly available, and local dissident groups leveraged the information into a revolution. The demonstration effect of the Twitter Revolution in Tunisia started a chain of dominoes throughout the Arab worldmost notably in Egypt. In the case of any particular state abuse of power or intervention into the economy, there are likely to be countless subgroups of people who oppose it for any number of idiosyncratic reasons of their own, and not from any single dogmatic principle. If we simply expose the nature of the state action and all its unjust particular effects, it will be leveraged into action by people in numbers many times larger than those of the particular alternative economic movement we are involved in. Even people who do not particularly sympathize with the aims of a counter-economic movement may be moved to outrage if the states enforcers can be put in a position of looking like Bull Connor. As John Robb says: The use of the media to communicate intent and to share innovation with other insurgent groups is a staple of open source insurgency....58 The state and the large corporations are a bunch of cows oundering around in the Amazon. Just get the information out there, and the individual toothy little critters in the school of piranha, acting independently, will take care of the skeletonizing on their own. Consider, in the eld of civil liberties, what Radley Balko does every day, just through his own efforts at exposing the cockroaches of law enforcement to the kitchen light; or consider the CNN series about gross civil forfeiture abuses in that town in Texas. When Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate, they didnt start trying to organize a political movement to capitalize on it. They just published the info and a restorm resulted. A good example in the networked information era is the Diebold case which we discussed in Chapter Two. Bev Harris simply published the information, and a whole range of advocacy groups made their own use of it. This is an example of what Robb calls self-replication: create socially engineered copies of your organization through the use of social media. Basically, this means providing the motivation, knowledge, and focus necessary for an unknown person (external and totally unconnected to your group) to conduct operations that advance your groups specic goals (or the general goals of the open source insurgency).59 Its because of increased levels of general education and the diffusion of more advanced moral standards that countries around the world have had to rename their ministries of war ministries of defense. Its for the same reason that, in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries, governments could no longer launch wars for reasons of naked Realpolitik on the model of the dynastic wars
58 John Robb, Links: 2 APR 2010, Global Guerrillas, April 2, 2010 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/04/links-2-apr-2010.html>. 59 John Robb, STANDING ORDER 8: Self-replicate, Global Guerrillas, June 3, 2009 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/06/standing-order-8selfreplicate.html>.

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of two centuries earlier; rather, they had to manufacture pretexts based on selfdefense. Hence pretexts like the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in Danzig to justify Hitlers invasion of Poland, and the Tonkin Gulf incident and Kuwaiti incubator babies as pretexts for American aggressions. Thats not to say that the pretexts had to be very good to fool the general public; but network culture is changing that as well, as witnessed by the respective levels of anti-war mobilization in the rst and second Gulf wars. More than one thinker on network culture has argued that network technology and the global justice movements piggybacked on it are diffusing more advanced global moral norms and putting increasing pressure on governments that violate those norms.60 Global activism and condemnation of violations of human rights in countries like China and Iranlike American nationwide exposure and boycotts of measures like Arizonas papers, please laware an increasing source of embarrassment and pressure. NGOs and global civil society are emerging as a powerful countervailing force against both national governments and global corporations. As we saw in our earlier treatment of networked resistance, governments and corporations frequently can nd themselves isolated and exposed in the face of an intensely hostile global public opinion quite suddenly, thanks to networked global actors. This manifests itself, for example, in such operations as Copwatch, which provides a national database of citizen complaints against individual local cops and whose local patrols regularly record police activity. Video footage of police riots at antiglobalization demonstrations, as well as beatings and other malfeasance by individual cops, frequently winds up going viral. The possibilities for recording police and other ofcial misbehavior, in recent years, have exploded thanks to smart phones with video capability. The police, naturally, generally dont take kindly to being recorded. People recording the police, as often as not, can expect to be arrested for interfering with police business or have their cameras seized and footage deleteddespite the fact that its expressly legal in 47 states to record police in the performance of their public duties so long as you dont physically interfere with them. As you might expect, this has simply led to police censorship being treated as damage and routed around. Innovation in technology and techniques is rapidly increasing the difculty of police interference with citizen surveillance. Radley Balko writes:
Twenty years after George Holidays grainy video of Los Angeles police ofcers beating motorist Rodney King spawned worldwide outrage and later incited riots across the city, last years protests in Iran, this years protests all across the Arab world and now the Occupy movements have all demonstrated just how far personal technology has come to empower citizens to combat government abuse. Political leaders, police and security ofcials around the world now crack down on protests with the knowledge that their actions could and
60 Paul Hartzog, Panarchy: Governance in the <http://www.panarchy.com/Members/PaulBHartzog/Papers/Panarchy%20%20Governance%20in%20the%20Network%20Age.htm#_ftn>.

Network

Age,

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quite likely will be beamed around the globe. Its not only altering the balance of power and bringing new transparency and accountability to police and public ofcials, it may even be altering how police and governments react to dissent.... Carlos Miller, who runs the Photography Is Not a Crime blog and has himself been wrongly arrested for recording or photographing police on a number occasions, has been documenting the way technology is moving power to people (and the governments push back) for several years. The amazing thing about these videos is that as soon as the police start to use force, you see 15 cellphone cameras go up in the air, Miller says. Its pretty amazing." Smartphone apps like Qik and UStream now not only allow users to stream video in real time, but they also then archive the video. That means a copy of every users video is preserved off-site. If police or other government ofcials destroy a phone or conscate a memory card, theres still a copy of the video elsewhere. Users can also set up accounts to notify email lists or post updates to their Twitter or Facebook accounts the moment they stream a new video. Which means that even if police are later able to get into a protesters phone, access a Qik or UStream account, and delete an incriminating video, by that time dozens of people may have already downloaded it. The power-shifting nature of cellphone video may be most prominent in the court proceedings that take place after the protests are over. In the past, courts, prosecutors and juries have mostly accepted police accounts of altercations with protesters as the ofcial narrative. Now, in both criminal proceedings of protesters charged with crimes and in civil suits brought by protesters alleging police abuse, its likely that any signicant protest will have independent video shot from multiple angles to ferret out what actually happened.61

Balko, writing elsewhere, reinforces his earlier point about the moral effects of citizen video:
...its hard to overstate the power of streaming and off-site archiving. Prior to this technology, prosecutors and the courts nearly always deferred to the police narrative; now that narrative has to be consistent with independently recorded evidence. And as examples of police reports contradicted by video become increasingly common, a couple of things are likely to happen: Prosecutors and courts will be less inclined to uncritically accept police testimony, even in cases where there is no video, and bad cops will be deterred by the knowledge that their misconduct is apt to be recorded.62 [Emphasis added]

Another project, OpenWatch, is a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority gures. OpenWatch, whose apps secretly record media and then anonymously upload it,
61 Radley Balko, Tech-Savvy Occupy Protestors Use Cellphone Video, Social Networking To Publicize Police Abuse, Hufngton Post, October 29, 2011 <http://www.hufngtonpost.com/2011/10/29/occupy-protesters-armed-withtechnology_n_1063706.html?1319905917>. 62 Radley Balko, How to Record the Cops, Reason, September 20, 2010 <http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/20/how-to-record-the-cops>.

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is the web counterpart to the Cop Recorder and OpenWatch Recorder applications for Android and iPhone.63
BLOCKOpenWatch is a participatory citizen media project aiming to provide documentary evidence of uses and abuses of power. The surveillance state has arrived and it is here to stay. The benet to society in terms of security and justice is too great for it to ever go away. There is a problem, however, and the problem is not the technology. The problem is the lopsided distribution of who is in control of that technology. Surveillance technology is currently only in the hands of those who are already in power, which means it cannot be used to combat the largest problem facing modern society: abuse of power. So the question remains: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"--roughly, Who watches the watchers? This is where OpenWatch comes in. The recent ubiquity of mobile telephones with media recording capabilities and the ability to run any software the users chooses gives the public a very powerful tool. Now, we are all equipped to become opportunistic journalists. Whenever any of us come in contact with power being used or abused, we can capture it and make it become part of the public record. If we seek truth and justice, we will be able to appeal to documentary evidence, not just our word against theirs. Ideally, this will mean less corruption, more open government and a more transparent society. Once upon a time, journalists were limited by the number of words they could print on a page. They would have to highlight the facts that they felt were most important to a story and ignore the facts they felt were less important. This created an immediate power imbalance, as the reader had no way to verify what they were being told. In this age of terabyte storage and bre-optic broadband, there is no reason that every single story cant be accompanied with veriable source material. OpenWatch aims to democratize this theory of scientic journalism championed by Julian Assange and apply it to citizen media. OpenWatch is not only intended to display abuse of power, but also to highlight appropriate use. As we are unbound by technological restrictions, we can aim to record every single time power is applied so that we may analyze global trends and provide a record for future historians. Police, corporate executives, judges, lawyers, private security agents, lobbyists, bankers, principals and politicians: be mindful! We are watching!64

Citizen video has had a revolutionary effect, both on public perceptions of the police and on police self-perception.
[New York ACLU Director Donna] Lieberman noted that video evidence had led to the dismissal of charges against 227 protesters from one location alone during the tumultuous week of demonstrations. Weve already seen that the videos of what happened on the Brooklyn
63 <http://www.openwatch.net/> 64 OpenWatch

philosophy <http://openwatch.net/about/>.

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Bridge are being used to urge dismissal of those hundreds of arrests there, she added. Protesters cameras have created many of the iconic images of this movement: NYPD supervisor Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying several women at point-blank range; a protester later identied as activist Felix Rivera-Pitre being spun around and punched in the face by a cop; a legal observer being run over by a police scooter and then hit with a baton by another cop; a marine and Iraq vet -yelling at befuddled cops that these are American citizens and they have no guns. These images helped propel a small movement into a global phenomenon. Lieberman said of the pepper-spraying incident, I think it was among the many factors that galvanized the public to stop cheering from their computer screens and go down to Wall Street to be part of this protest movement. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told AlterNet that the video of the women writhing on the ground in agony might end up having an effect similar to that of the infamous civil rights-era footage of Bull Connor setting dogs on black protesters in the South. That just changed how Northerners viewed the Southern struggles, he said. And I think well see this as more and more videos emerge of people being beaten, sprayed and unlawfully caged during these protests.... Cameras have become an integral part of activists legal strategy. We just encourage everyone to get out there with their cameras, says Ratner. Let the cops push you around, let them slap you, let them arrest you, but its absolutely crucial to get your cameras out there. Because all the lawsuits we can bring, which we should resolve ve years from now, wont make the same difference as putting that stuff on YouTube and the evening news will do. Cameras arent just shining a light on aggressive crowd control. Videos of police abuse at trafc stops, stop-and-frisk incidents and just about everywhere else litter YouTube, and according to the New York Daily News, the constant scrutiny is having an effect on rank-andle ofcers. The morale in the whole department is in the crapper, a veteran Bronx cop told the paper. You cant be a police ofcer no more, he said. Youre a robot. Youre under the microscope. Youre under video surveillance. We feel like the perpetrators now, the way were being displayed."65

Lets review, from Chapter Two, our discussion of how networked support movements challenged the balance of power between authoritarian governments and social justice movements. Until the rise of networked communications and easy publishing on the Internet, the quiet military suppression of a movement like the Zapatistas, or the campaign against Shell in Nigeria, was just a matter of course. Thanks to the worldwide exposure enabled by the Internet, the downpressors found themselves experiencing one deer-in-headlights moment after another. As a result, Internet surveillance has begun to act as at least a partial
65 Joshua Holland, How Video of Police Behaving Badly Made Occupy Wall Street a Global Phenomenon, Alternet, October 24, 2011 <http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/152856>.

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deterrent. As Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote:

The [Zapatista movement] is a seminal case of social netwar, in which transnationally networked NGOs helped deter the Mexican government and army from attacking the Zapatistas militarily....66

The same is not doubt true of the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and video recorders, many of them with realtime satellite uplink capability, at the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together demonstrations. Most recently, in December 2011, Internet freedom activists launched an allout social media assault on the domain name service GoDaddy for its support of the SOPA Internet censorship bill. Calls to shift domain names to a provider other than GoDaddy were blogged, liked and retweeted far and wide. GoDaddy lost some very prominent accounts--most importantly Ben Huhs Cheezburger, whose one thousand domain names include ICanHazCheezburger.com GoDaddy almost immediately renounced its stand on SOPA--with a lame, pro forma announcement to the effect that we still support IP protections, but now recognize that SOPA went too far. It didnt appear to convince anyone. The funniest part was that GoDaddy customer service reps were calling up customers and begging them not to move their domain names.67 Such public exposure puts the state on the defensive, as they lose the war to control the public perception of events. What Zeynep Tufekci calls the networked public sphere almost certainly played a large role in the release of Egyptian activist Mona Al Tahawy, after she disappeared into Egyptian military custody during a protest in November 2011. In the second wave of Egyptian protests against the new military regime, in Fall 2011, the military took a much more unambiguously hostile stance than they had during the uprising against Mubarak. In the second uprising, Egyptian military and police forces used sexual abuse and humiliation as a tool against demonstrators, both on the public streets and in police custody--much as Milosevic had used rape as a political weapon in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. Al Tahawy managed only a hasty tweet to her network that she was being arrested before she went incommunicado. As Tufekci wrote, At worst, Monas life was in danger. At best, she would likely be subject to beatings, sexual abuse. Given the situation, Tufekci judged that the best course of action was to kick up a big storm. As a prominent dissident, she is in danger from those higher-ups who might want to make an example of her... Mona needed a huge campaign which made it costlier to keep her than to release her." As Tufekci commented, such questions would have been meaningless in the pre-Internet days.
66 Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming & the Future of Conict DB-311 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), iii <http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briengs/DB311/>, pp. 50-52. 67 Drew Olanoff, Cheezburger CEO Threatens to Move GoDaddy Domains, The Next Web, December 22, 2011 <http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/22/cheezburger-ceothreatens-to-yank-1000-domains-from-godaddy-over-sopa-support/>; Drew Olanoff, Go Daddy Now Making Calls Begging You to Stay, The Next Web, December 24, 2011 <http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/24/desperation-go-daddy-calling-customers-beggingthem-to-stay/>.

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A few decades ago, contemplating launching a global campaign like this would require that I own, say, a television station or two. I hadnt even unpacked my television set when I moved to Chapel Hill to take up a position as an assistant professor in University of North Carolina. Heck, I dodnt even have a landline phone. But, I wasnt just an I. Due to my academic and personal interests, I was connected to a global network of people ranging from grassroots activists in Egypt to journalists and politicians, from ordinary people around the world to programmers and techies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. My options werent just cursing at a television set if her arrest had even made the news in the next few days. I could at least try to see what *we* could do, and do quickly. Concise, fast, global, public and connected was what we needed, and, for that, there is nothing better than Twitter. I immediately reached out to Andy Carvin, NPR journalist extraordinaire whos been covering the Middle East uprisings, and a friend of many years going back digital divide efforts, a topic which Ive long studied as a scholar. I was very happy to see he was online and, of course, similarly aghast at Monas situation. One challenge of new media environments is that they scatter attention and consequently tools and channels which can unite and focus attention are key to harnessing their power. Hashtags and trending topics are one way in which people can focus among the billions of tweets oating in cyberspace. In fact, a key dynamic in social media is that it works best when coordinated with focusers: trending topics, Al Jazeera, Andy Carvin (whose stream is widely followed) are all focusers, albeit very different ones.... Hence, the Occupy movement was deeply disappointed when Andy Carvin did not cover them, as his beat was Middle East, and as he already works about seven days a week. Occupy activists knew that without Carvin, they had lost a potential focuser. (Police brutality and overreaction solved that problem for Occupy movement by garnering traditional media coverage which served as a crucial focuser). So, rst, I knew we needed a hasthag. A focuser. Wanting a short one due to Twitters character limits, I proposed #Mona. Andy quickly checked and realized that it was already in use and suggested #freemona. I tweeted out an agreement and opened a column in my Tweetdeck to check only tweets tagged #freemona. In about a minute, the column started owing too quickly for me to read everything. Ok, thats the global campaign, I thought as I marveled at how quickly it had taked off with barely a nudge. In the pre-social media world, it might have taken weeks and a lot of luck to achieve even a sliver of such awareness globally.

The Twitter campaign soon brought together a huge ad hoc network including prominent international journalists, civil liberties and activist groups, and AnneMarie Slaughter and her personal network of State Department insiders. In less

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than a day, Al Tahawy was released.68 By challenging the states control of public perception, networked resistance undermines the narrative on which the states legitimacy is constructed. When the legitimacy of the state and its authority claims declines in the mind of the average citizen, the transaction costs entailed in enforcing authority creep steadily upward. Remember the example, as we saw described by George Lakey earlier, of the otpur or uprising against Milosevic in Serbia. But the strategy isnt merely to expose the states abuses to public scrutiny, although thats a big part of it. Its not even just to undermine the legitimacy of its claims to obedience. Its to create a demonstration effect, to show that evasion of the states enforcement capabilities is possible, that its feasible to live the way you want, and that people are doing it right now. Its to create the impression that doing things in ways disapproved by the state is right and normal, and that the state is laughable and ineffectual in its attempts to prevent it. Or as John Robb puts it, open-source insurgencies are built around a plausible promise: an enemy, a goal, and most importantly: A demonstration. Viability. An attack that demonstrates that its possible to win against the enemy. It deates any aura of invincibility that the enemy may currently enjoy. The demonstration serves as a rallying cry for the insurgency. 69 Consider the increasing unwillingness of courts to enforce laws against personal possession of marijuana:
A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County [Montana] District Court last week. Jurors well, potential jurors staged a revolt. They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they werent about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana.... No, they said, one after the other. No way would they convict somebody for having a 16th of an ounce.... District Judge Dusty Deschamps took a quick poll as to who might agree. Of the 27 potential jurors before him, maybe ve raised their hands. A couple of others had already been excused because of their philosophical objections. I thought, Geez, I dont know if we can seat a jury, said Deschamps, who called a recess. And he didnt.... Public opinion, as revealed by the reaction of a substantial portion of the members of the jury called to try the charges on Dec. 16, 2010, is not supportive of the states marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear available under any circumstances, according to the plea memorandum led by his attorney.
68 Zeynep Tufekci, The #freemona Perfect Storm: Dissent and the Networked Public Sphere, technosociology, November 25, 2011 <http://technosociology.org/?p=566>. 69 John Robb, Open-Source Insurgency: How to Start, Global Guerrillas, March 21, 2008 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/03/starting-an-ope.html>.

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A mutiny, said Paul.... In his nearly 30 years as a prosecutor and judge, Deschamps said hes never seen anything like it.... I think its going to become increasingly difcult to seat a jury in marijuana cases, at least the ones involving a small amount, Deschamps said.... Its kind of a reection of society as a whole on the issue, said Deschamps.70

According to David de Ugarte, network culture makes it feasible to systematically shine a spotlight on the states malfeasance and undermine its legitimacy. He gives the example of the cyberthrongs (citizen uprisings coordinated via social media), which rst emerged with the opposition to Estrada in the Philippines:
We are living in a veritable Spring of the Web, from Serbia to the Ukraine, from Kyrgyzstan to Byelorussia and even Kuwait. This is a global movement in which countries with very different cultural and religious backgrounds are developing citizens movements in network form. These movements allow citizens to oversee democratic processes, denouncing election fraud, corruption, and government abuse. The Spring of the Web is the concrete historical embodiment of the globalisation of democratic freedoms.... This new form of organisation, based on contemporary models of nonviolent civil resistance, owes its success to the diffusion and display of a lifestyle based on the collective and individual strengthening of people as opposed to power. This strengthening takes place through small gestures, jokes, signboards, which in themselves are insignicant, but which taken as a whole undermine the implicit consensus that power relies on.71

Cyberthrongs are only one form of a more general phenomenon. Such spontaneous or near-spontaneous swarming is usually reactive, in response to nearuniversal outrage over some event, like a perceived government malfeasance or misfeasance that goes far beyond the ordinary. In most cases, individual nodes (individuals or small afnity groups) take the initiative in developing plans of action that are picked up and reinforced by other nodes.72 In some cases the aim of the campaign initiated by some particular node is not to take any particular action against an antagonist, but simply a viral marketing campaign to spread some meme.73 But in the long run, this challenge to ofcial consensus reality is perhaps the most fundamental ground on which to attack the present system of power. Weve already seen what The Cluetrain Manifesto had to say about the ability of people to talk to each other, as undermining the ability of marketing departments to control a message unilaterally through one-directional broadcast culture.
70 Gwen Florio, Missoula District Court: Jury pool in marijuana case stages mutiny, The Missoulian, December 19, 2010 <http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_464bdc0a-0b36-11e0-a594001cc4c03286.html>. 71 David de Ugarte, The Power of Networks, pp. 57-58. 72 De Ugarte, The Power of Networks, pp. 88-89. 73 De Ugarte, The Power of Networks, pp. 90-91.

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Of course people have always been able to mock politicians speeches and network news talking heads in bars and in their living rooms, making snide remarks to one another as they watch the show. But with the emergence of a many-to-many medium, the comparative ubiquity of the ofcial version of reality versus the self-organized version has suffered a serious decline. In the old days of broadcast culture, the mockery was marginalized by the very fact of being something that was heard only in tiny islands of physical space occupied by a few other physically present listeners. The private reality of mockery was an isolated phenomenon in a larger public reality dened by ofcial hierarchies. Ofcial reality, as dened by the Presidents press conferences and Walter Cronkite, was a pervasive normative ground, a background against which dissenting opinion stood out as a heretical exception. Mockery and criticism were relegated to the private realm. But as the counter-reality becomes more ubiquitous, as it challenges ofcial statements wherever they appear, as it becomes universally accessible to enormous audiences communicating with each other and hyperlinking the ofcial statement for relentless mockery, the old ofcial reality loses its perceived privileged status as consensus reality. The counter-reality becomes as pervasive as ofcial reality in the public space, and contests it for perceived legitimacy.
The Facebook groups, the Wikileaks cables, the blogs all show that any one person is not alone in a particular set of beliefs about the regime. Another form of common knowledge is allowed to take hold. It is not indubitable, and it may have been inltrated, manipulated and it may in time be switched offas has happened in Egypt. But the reality of the critique of the regime is believed to be commonly shared.74

Zeynep Tufekci, in similar vein, points to the signicance of social media in challenging consensus reality:
1- The capacities of the Internet that are most threatening to authoritarian regimes are not necessarily those pertaining to spreading of censored information but rather its ability to support the formation of a counter-public that is outside the control of the state. In other words, it is not that people are waiting for that key piece of information to start their revoltand that information just happens to be behind the wall of censorshipbut that they are isolated, unsure of the power of the regime, unsure of their position and potential.

2- Dissent is not just about knowing what you think but about the formation of a public. A public is not just about what you know. Publics form through knowing that other people know what you knowand also knowing that you know what they know.... Yes, all those parts of the Web that are ridiculed by some of the critics of Internets potentialthe LOLcats, Facebook, the three million baby pictures, the slapstick, talking about the weather, the food and the trials and tribulations of lifeare exactly the backbone of community, and ultimately the creation of public(s).
74 Tony Curzon Price, Cupids freedom: how the web sharpens the democratic revolution, openDemocracy, January 31, 2011 <http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/tony-curzonprice/cupids-freedom-how-web-sharpens-democratic-revolution>.

335 3- Thus, social media can be the most threatening part of the Internet to an authoritarian regime through its capacity to create a public(ish) sphere that is integrated into everyday life of millions of people and is outside the direct control of the state partly because it is so widespread and partly because it is not solely focused on politics. How do you censor ve million Facebook accounts in real time except to shut them all down? 4- The capacity to selectively lter the Internet is inversely proportional to the scale and strength of the dissent. In other words, regimes which employ widespread legitimacy may be able to continue to selectively lter the Internet. However, this is going to break down as dissent and unhappiness spreads. As anyone who has been to a country with selective ltering knows, most everyone (who is motivated enough) knows how to get around the censors. For example, in Turkey, YouTube occasionally gets blocked because of material that some courts have deemed as offensive to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of Turkey. I have yet to meet anyone in Turkey who did not know how to get to YouTube through proxies. 5- Thus, the effect of selective ltering is not to keep out information out of the hands of a determined public, but to allow the majority of ordinary people to continue to be able to operate without confronting information that might create cognitive dissonance between their existing support for the regime and the fact that they, along with many others, also have issues. Meanwhile, the elites go about business as if there was no censorship as they all know how to use work-arounds. This creates a safety-valve as it is quite likely that it is portions of the elite groups that would be most hindered by the censorship and most unhappy with it. (In fact, I have not seen any evidence that China is trying to actively and strongly shut down the work-arounds.) 6- Social media is not going to create dissent where there is none. The apparent strength of the regime in China should not be understood solely through its success in censorship.... China has undergone one of the most amazing transformations in human history. Whatever else you may say about the brutality of the regime, there is a reason for its continuing legitimacy in the eyes of most of its people. I believe that the Chinese people are no less interested in freedom and autonomy than any other people on the planet but I can also understand why they have, for the most part, appear to have support for the status-quo even as they continue to have further aspirations and desires.
7- Finally, during times of strong upheaval, as in Egypt, dictators dilemma roars. The ability to ensure that their struggle and their efforts are not buried in a deep pit of censorship, the ability to continue to have an honest conversation, the ability to know that others know what one knows all combine to create a cycle furthering dissent and upheaval. Citizen-journalism matters most in these scenarios as there cannot be reporters everywhere something is happening; however, wherever something is happening there are people with cell phone cameras. Combined with Al-Jazeera re-broadcasting the fruits of people-powered journalism, it all comes down to how much force the authoritarian state is willing and able to deploywhich in turn, depends on the willingness of the security apparatus. Here, too, social

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media matters because, like everyone else, they too are watching the footage on Al-Jazeera. Their choice is made more stark by the fact that they know that history will judge them by their actionsactions which will likely be recorded, broadcast and be viewed by their citizens, their neighbors and their children and grandchildren.75

Shifting Public Consciousness and the Terms of Debate. Exposing the states abuses and embarrassing its functionaries if vitally importance. But perhaps even more important is undermining its legitimacy altogether: convincing the general public that, as John Perry Barlow wrote in his 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, that You [governments] have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. [Move some material from previous section] Networked Activism and the Growth of Civil Society. In some cases public protest or resistance may be a way of exposing the state to public censure. When the people who are engaged in building counter-institutions do decide to publicly challenge the state and demand a change in its policies, its best to do it in concert with as many other allied movements as possible and to subject the state to a swarming attack of negative publicity. Fortunately the Internet makes networking between movements for liberty around the world more feasible than ever before.
First, the last decade has witnessed the biggest global cooperation between human liberation movements in world history. In this movement of movements all over the world, various kinds of struggles with different issues and themes have worked together to form global networks and act together. Second, these movements rely on strategies featuring civil resistance. Third, these movements civil resistance has had an impact on the real worldeven though our understanding of how that has become possible is still limited. What we do know is that mass action of ordinary citizens can produce change, that it can force regimes to negotiate and compromise, and even topple authoritarian rulers, e.g. Serbia, South Africa, Nepal or Bolivia. People have seen that the mobilization of ordinary citizens is what state actors are most afraid of, whether they preside in Iran, Venezuela, France, Iceland, Burma, Egypt or Israel/Palestine. Here is something that seems more powerful than the force that grows out of the barrel of a gun. The revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao said, but neither is it a civil war, as he and his followers mistakenly believed. It is the prime fear of all authoritarian leaders: a united people that disobey and practice freedom without fear.76

A wide range of movements, including the so-called color revolutions that have toppled so many authoritarian states, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the landless workers movement in Brazil, assorted movements like the resistance to
75 Zeynep Tufekci, As Egypt Shuts off the Net: Seven Theses on Dictators Dilemma, technosociology, January 28, 2011 <http://technosociology.org/?p=286>. 76 Stellan Vinthagen, People power and the new global ferment, openDemocracy, November 15, 2010 <http://www.opendemocracy.net/stellan-vinthagen/people-power-and-new-globalferment>

337 Shell in Nigeria and various anti-sweatshop campaigns, local rebellions against structural adjustment programs, etc., are coordinated in global civil society networks like the World Social Forum. Cross-national alliances between such local movements subject local repression to levels of scrutiny that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. That means that local repression of such movements, even when they seem to be successful for at least the short term, must operate in a hostile environment of world opinion that saps the morale of the leadership and undermines their legitimacy in the long term. Writing against the backdrop of the UKs late 2010 networked student uprising against tuition increases, Aaron Peters anticipated 2011 as the year political activism and progressive politics goes open source.
It is these networks, such as the student occupation movement and UKuncut that utilise zero-cost social media tools and networks to organise and communicate, that are one of the big political stories of 2010. Along with Wikileaks and Anonymous it is these actors that give credibility to the argument that in 2010 we nally saw the internet and the immense possibilities it brings in terms of undermining all the certainties of the Old Politics. The vast tranche of Wikileaks documents gives credence to the belief of many cyber-activists since Richard Stallman that with these tools and systems, information wants to be free, and that in the words of John Gilmore, the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Just as state censorship in the age of the internet is massively undermined so to the possibilities for social movements engaging in contention at the grassroots level are exponentially increased. One important aspect of this new politics is what one might refer to as its open source nature, just as the Linux operating system and Wikipedia can be built upon by anyone with the capabilities, skills and requisite passion to do so, these movements are constituted in a similar fashion crowdsourcing the skillsets and social networks of anybody who wishes to participate. Hitherto NGOs and social movement organisations have been exactly that, organisations, with centralised bureaucracies and internal hierarchies a coterie of activists who produce activism and a mass membership who consume it. This paradigm can be extended from the trade unions, to the NUS, and might be seen as an equivalent to the closed source approach of Microsoft and the Encyclopedia Britannica where only a small cadre of professionals contribute to the code or add to the content of the encyclopedia. In the new crowdsourced paradigm the distinction between producers and consumers of dissent is dissolved there is no organising or membership structure in place, with instead all individuals being potential participants within a movement. Anyone can contribute, hence we have the rise of what has been termed dissent entrepreneurs with such individuals similtaneously performing the old roles of both producers and consumers of dissentindeed they are much like those who participate in citizen journalism or use content on Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo or Twitter being what Alvin Tofer called Prosumersat once producing dissent, mobilising and facili-

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tating [sic] itwhile also participating in actions facilitated by others....

This new model that is de-centered and networked and possesses the ability to spread virally may well be the big story of 2011a year of immense excitement for grassroots politics in our country. It may well be the genesis of a period where political contention and dissent in general and the anti-cuts movement in particular will broaden to the point where absolutely everyone from kids to students, to parents and trade unionists, will be able to contribute, when opposition to this government, the cuts and systemic tax evasion is no longer conned to Westminster, political parties, the media and political classes, trade union leaders, lobby groups or NGOS but is available to everyone.
A year where the production of this dissent goes truly open source.77

Events in Tunisia and Egypt seem to have borne him out. Interestingly, there seem to be synergies between Wikileaks and the Twitter/Facebookorganized uprising in Tunisia. [I]t appears very likely, Michael Hirsch writes, that last years WikiLeaks cable dump helped to light the spark. The immediate impetus for the rst student protests was leaked cables from U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec about the Maa-like corruption and nepotism in the Tunisian government.78 One cable in June 2009 referred to the president and his siblings as The Family, likening them to a Maa elite who ran Tunisias economy.79 Maha Azzam at CNN online cites the cables description of this quasi-Maas corruption in considerable detail:
Whether its cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President [Zine el Abidine] Ben Alis family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants, gave even greater weight and proof to an already widespread belief that Ben Ali and his wifes family, the Trabelsis, were the quasi-maa often referred to by Tunisians. It added to the long list of grievances against a regime that had been in power for 23 years and had remained unaccountable. With the political and security apparatus under their control, the regime was able to exploit the economic system and the nancial sector to enrich themselves. The Ben Ali clan had a hand in every aspect of the new economy, be it duties on imports and exports, media, internet providers, telecoms, banks, shopping centers or property development. According to WikiLeaks, prime real estate was reportedly expropriated from its owner by the government for use by the water authority, then later granted to Mohamed Sakher El Materi -- Ben Alis son-in-law -- for private use.
77 Aaron Peters, 2011: The year political activism and progressive politics goes open source, Left Foot Forward, December 20, 2010 <http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/12/2011-open-sourcepolitical-activism-progressive-politics/>. 78 Michael Hirsch, The Wikileaks Revolt, National Journal, January 28, 2011 <http://www.nationaljournal.com /nationalsecurity/the-wikileaks-revolt-20110128>. 79 First Wikileaks Revolution: Tunisia Descends into anarchy as president ees, Daily Mail, January 15, 2011 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1347336/First-Wikileaks-RevolutionTunisia-descends-anarchy-president-ees.html>.

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The cables reported: With real estate development booming and land prices on the rise, owning property or land in the right location can either be a windfall or a one-way ticket to expropriation." Privatizations offered a valuable channel. Members of the family would buy at a symbolic price and then sell to entrepreneurs at massive prots. They acquired commissions in foreign investments and were often the go-betweens in the award of public contracts. The leaked U.S. embassy cables cited that: Lax oversight makes the banking sector an excellent target of opportunity, with multiple stories of First Family schemes."80

Its also worth bearing in mind that the main virtue of new networking technologies is not necessarily how they facilitate traditional manifestations of movement politics like organizing mass demonstrations. To a certain extent, the argument between advocates for open source activism and skeptics like Malcolm Gladwell and Jodi Dean is over the extent to which networked technology promotesor does not promotephenomena like the uprisings in Tunisia. Gladwell and Dean present a false dichotomy between the authentic protest of mass demos and facile clicktivism like outraged Tweets and online petitions. But network technology can also be assessed in terms of how stigmergic organization and individual superempowerment reduce the need for such mass activism and make possible third alternatives. These include informational warfare calculated to inict massive public embarrassment on bad actors and paralyze them with swarming, and the stigmergic propagation of means for building counter-institutions and living the way we want while circumventing state interference. To take the case of copyright law, the ability which the Net gives us to live as if copyright did not exist is probably worth more than a hundred mass demonstrations in Washington. [Draft last modied January 18, 2012]

80 Maha Azzam, Opinion: How Wikileaks helped fuel Tunisian revolution, CNN, January 18, 2011 <http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-18/opinion/tunisia.wikileaks_1_tunisians-wikileaksregime?_s=PM:OPINION>.

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Chapter 10

Open Source Fourth Estate

10.0.4

The Industrial Model.

We already saw, in Chapter One, Yochai Benklers description of the industrial model of the old broadcast media: they were a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points, and typied by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the end. This led to a limited range of organizational models for production: those that could collect sufcient funds to set up a hub.1 The broadcast hub-and-spoke architecture, with expensive printing presses and expensive wire service infrastructures as the chokepoints for information and a class of professionals controlling those chokepoints, was a reection of the Industrial Age model of organization: in order to be able to publish ones opinions or views of reality one must have a capital equivalent to that required to set up a factory...2 The result was the pattern of concentrated corporate media ownership described by such writers as Ben Bagdikian and Edward Herman. In cultural terms, the result was a journalistic mindset imbued with the ethos of professional objectivity, which meant in functional terms the propaganda model of Herman and Noam Chomsky.
The idea of journalism as an activity, as a specic ability requiring specic knowledge, was born with the information industry and is really nothing new. In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer predicted that before the 20th century was over journalism schools would be granted the status of higher education institutions, like law or medical schools.... Pulitzer was thinking within the framework of an industrial business model which required workers specialised in writing copy in the same way as engineers were needed to design stabilising systems. Thats why he asked the education system to train them. The time
1 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 179, 188. 2 David de Ugarte, The Power of Networks : An Illustrated Manual for People, Collectives, and Companies Driven to Cyberactivism. Translated by Asuncin lvarez (n.d.) <http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf>, p. 45.

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for people like Mark Twainjournalists cum activists, like the unforgettable editor of the local paper in The Man Who Killed Liberty Valancewas over.... ....Information was a product, exclusively traded by states and by Citizen Kanes.... This is the logic of journalism as a news factory, an irreplaceable and necessary informational mediation. This view generates its own myths: the journalist is no longer an activist but a technician, a necessary mediator upholding the freedom of expression and guaranteeing the collective right to information (the publics right to know).3

In reality, the publics right to know was qualied by the very serious constraints presented by the ideological lters of those who controlled the information checkpoints. These included not only the lter of the individual correspondent who actually reported on events to the wire service or the wire service itself, but the lters of those who owned the broadcast and print outlets. This is the model of corporate media control described by Bagdikian, as we mentioned above, and also the model parodied by the 1998 Conspiracy Theory Rock short on Saturday Night Lives TV Funhouse, in which corporate octopuses labeled GE, Westinghouse and Disney busily snatched up cable TV networks by the armload.4 [Edward S. Herman, Corporate Control, Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976)] The professional ethos of the traditional press was also signicantly skewed toward the perspectives of those in power. In practice, the countervailing power of the press operated very much like that of government regulatory agencies. Just as government regulatory agencies formed constellations of mutually supporting institutions with the corporations they were supposedly charged with regulating, the Fourth Estate usually functioned as part of a complex of related institutions with those over which they were supposed to be exercising a watchdog function. First, the mainstream press relies overwhelmingly on information provided by government, business, and experts funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.5 Most stories rely on ofcial sources and content generated by press secretaries or PR departments. This resulted to a large extent from institutional imperatives, when the press was a capital-intensive industry mediated by a few large bureaucracies.
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. The media need a steady, reliable ow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet. They cannot afford to have reporters and
3 De

Ugarte, The Power of Networks, pp. 44-45.

4 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3JLKw0q4kY>. 5 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 2.

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cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where signicant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity. On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news beats for reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable, scheduled ows. Mark Fishman calls this the principle of bureaucratic afnity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy. Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being recognizable and credible by their status and prestige.... Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be portrayed as presumptively accurate. This is also a matter of cost: taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and costly research.

The Pentagon and other government agencies, large corporations, etc., have public information or media relations ofces whose primary function is to supply news organizations needs for large quantities of pre-digested information.6 In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the medias cost of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news.7 According to Scott Cutlip of the University of Georgia, some 40% of the news in newspapers consists of material generated by press agencies and PR departments, copied almost word for word by objective professional journalists.8 A classic example of this phenomenon is wire service reporters writing stories on foreign events from their hotel rooms, using handouts from the U.S. Embassy. Consider AP coverage of the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela in the spring of 2002. After the removal of Chavez, the White House stuck to the talking point that he resigned, and their doggies at the Associated Press stuck to it faithfully. Indymedia and Narco News Bulletin, meanwhile, reported that Chavez had not resigned, and was being held incommunicado. [See Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).] Second, the conventional model of professional journalistic objectivity discourages independent recourse to the factual realm by the journalist if the material presented by an ofcial source isnt challenged by the other side. Mainand Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 18-20. p. 22. 8 Cited by Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), p. 174.
7 Ibid., 6 Herman

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stream journalism is heavily inuenced by Walter Lippmans model of professional objectivity, which in practice means the journalist pretends to be stupider than he really is. The journalist, in order to project an air of neutrality, deliberately refrains both from drawing obvious conclusions from factual evidence, and from going beyond quotes from the spokesmen for both sides to report factual evidence as to whos telling the truth. Fake objectivity means not drawing obvious conclusions from the facts, and pretending not to notice facts that reect on the truth what one side or the other claims. Appealing independently to an objective factual realm, to present information that doesnt come from either side, would itself be (according to the current institutional mindset) taking sides. But to the extent that the two sides cant both be right at the same time, truth itself is biased. There is no way to maintain a pose of neutrality except by avoiding independent recourse to the factual realm. As Justin Lewis describes it:
The norms of objective reporting thus involve presenting both sides of an issue with very little in the way of independent forms of verication... [A] journalist who systematically attempts to verify facts--to say which set of facts is more accurate--runs the risk of being accused of abandoning their objectivity by favoring one side over another.... ....[J]ournalists who try to be faithful to an objective model of reporting are simultaneously distancing themselves from the notion of independently veriable truth.... The two sides model of journalistic objectivity makes news reporting a great deal easier since it requires no recourse to a factual realm. There are no facts to check, no archives of unspoken information to sort through.... If Tweedledum fails to challenge a point made by Tweedledee, the point remains unchallenged.9 That approach was effectively parodied by this exchange on The Daily Show during the 2004 election campaign: STEWART: Heres what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerrys record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the ofcial records of the US military, and havent been disputed for 35 years? CORDDRY: Thats right, Jon, and thats certainly the spin youll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days. STEWART: Th-thats not a spin thing, thats a fact. Thats established. CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story. STEWART: But that should be -- isnt that the end of the story? I mean, youve seen the records, havent you? Whats your opinion? CORDDRY: Im sorry, my opinion? No, I dont have o-pin-i-ons. Im a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity -- might wanna look it up some day.
9 Justin Lewis, Objectivity and the Limits of Press Freedom, in Peter Phillips & Project Censored, Censored 2000: The Years Top 25 Censored Stories (New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto: Seven Stories Press, 2000), pp. 173-74.

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STEWART: Doesnt objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out whats credible and what isnt? CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well -- sounds like someone wants the media to act as a lter! [high-pitched, effeminate] Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm. Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.10

But parody has a hard time keeping up with the truth, as indicated by this realworld ofcial criticism of a reporter on the Pentagon beat for his inadequate credulity:
In his more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon, is a problem. The Pentagons letter of complaint to Post executive editor Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely as possible and e-mails many people. Details of the complaints were hard to come by. One Pentagon ofcial said in private that Ricks did not give enough credence to ofcial, onthe-record comments that ran counter to the angle of his stories.11

As Lily Tomlin would say, I try to be cynical but I cant keep up. Early in Reagans rst administration, according to Walter Pincus, reporters investigating the accuracy of his factual claims ran up against this standard of objectivity:
WALTER PINCUS: We used to do at the Post something called truth squading. President would make a speech. We used to do it with Ronald Reagan the rst ve or six months because he would make so many factual errors, particularly in his press conference.... And after two or three weeks of it, the public at large, would say, Why dont you leave the man alone? Hes trying to be honest. He makes mistakes. So what? and we stopped doing it.

BILL MOYERS: You stopped being the truth squad.

WALTER PINCUS: We stopped truth-squading every sort of press conference, or truth squading. And we left it then to the Democrats. In other words, its up to the Democrats to catch people, not us. BILL MOYERS: So if the democrats challenged a statement from the President, you could quote both sides. WALTER PINCUS: We then quote both sides. Yeah. BILL MOYERS: Now, thats called objectivity by many standards isnt it? WALTER PINCUS: Well, thats objectivity if you think there are only two sides. And if youre not interested in the facts. And the facts are separate from, you know, what one side says about the other.12

Regarding the Iraq War in particular and the post-9/11 measures of the American national security state in general, journalists were subjected to a great deal
10 Eschaton blog, August 22, 2004 <http://atrios.blogspot.com/ 2004_08_22_atrios_archive.html#109335851226026749>. 11 Harry Jaffe, Pentagon to Washington Post Reporter Ricks: Get Lost, The Washingtonian, December 29, 2003 <http://washingtonian.com/inwashington/buzz/tomricks.html>. 12 April 25, 2007: Buying the War, Bill Moyers Journal: Transcripts <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/ transcript1.html>.

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of pressure from the corporate-owned media to take a pro-government line. According to Jessica Yellins account of her experiences at CNN in the period immediately before the war, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the presidents high approval ratings. The same network red Phil Donohue because he presented a difcult public face for NBC in a time of war . . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administrations motives. MSNBC also demoted and then red Ashleigh Baneld in April 2003 for expressing reservations about the skewed version of the news and the cheerleading atmosphere at that network.13 The journalistic war crimes accomplices defended their collusion in terms of the same ethos of professional objectivity described above. According to David Ignatius,
the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldnt create a debate on our own.14

Of course its nonsense from even a purely factual standpoint that the media would have had to create a debate where there wasnt one. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, there was no shortage of skeptical voices from the Left and Right in the period leading up to the war, challenging the Administrations version of realityincluding a speech from the Senate oor by Ted Kennedy.15 Perhaps the most amusingthat is to say, rupture-inducingly hilariousscene in the whole farce was Judith Millers straight-faced condemnation of Assange as a bad journalist, becausewait for it!he didnt care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone. This is the same journalist who said: [M]y job isnt to assess the governments information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraqs arsenal.16 Its a bit like Hitler chiding Charles Lindbergh for his anti-Semitism. The he said, she said culture of both sides reporting reinforces the nancial incentives to rely on quotes from institutional sources. As Brent Cunningham said,
It exacerbates our tendency to rely on ofcial sources, which is the easiest, quickest way to get both the he said and the she said, and, thus, balance. According to numbers from the media analyst
13 Glenn Greenwald, CNN/MSNBC reporter: Corporate executives forced pro-Bush pro-war narrative, Salon, May 29, 2008 <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/05/29/yellin/print.html>. 14 David Ignatius, Red Flags and Regrets, Washington Post, April 27, 2004 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45001-2004Apr26.html>. 15 Greenwald, CNN/MSNBC reporter. 16 Eric Lach, Judith Miller Criticizes Assange... For Not Verifying His Sources (VIDEO), TPMMuckraker, January 3, 2010 <http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/judith_miller_criticizes_assange_for_not_verifying.php>.

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Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from last September to February, all but thirty-four originated at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. So we end up with too much of the ofcial truth. More important, objectivity makes us wary of seeming to argue with the president -- or the governor, or the CEOand risk losing our access.... The Republicans were saying only what was convenient, thus the he said. The Democratic leadership was saying little, so there was no she said." Journalists are never going to ll the vacuum left by a weak political opposition, says The New York Timess Steven R. Weisman.17

In contrast, actual independent digging into the facts costs time and money. This is reected in the reluctance of most establishment reporters, for example, to examine the written documents (like bills and government reports) which are at the focus of political debate. How many op-ed pieces have you read in which a writer quotes extensively from both sides characterization of the import of some piece of legislation, but quotes no actual provisions of the bill or otherwise indicates shes read it herself? Witness, also, reporters general incompetence at citing written documents when they do deign to read them. Anyone whos tried to track down a government document based on the citation details in a wire service story will understand what Im talking about. As Sam Smith writes:
...I nd myself increasingly covering Washingtons most ignored beat: the written word. The culture of deceit is primarily an oral one. The soundbite, the spin, and the political product placement depend on no one spending too much time on the matter under consideration. Over and over again, however, I nd that the real story still lies barely hidden and may be reached by nothing more complicated than turning the page, checking the small type in the appendix, charging into the typographical jungle beyond the executive summary, doing a Web search, and, for the bravest, actually looking at the gures on the charts.18

Mainstream journalisms reliance on ofcial pronouncements also gives the lie to their self-congratulatory claims, in periodic ts of outrage over the threat from Internet journalism, about all the investigative reporting they do. If the mainstream press just regurgitates ofcial statements, Avedon Carol wonders, why not just read the ofcial statements at the source?
Hm, lets see... I can go to whitehouse.gov and read everything administration ofcials have to say on the record, or I can spend money to buy a newspaper and read a repetition of selected quotes from that said material. What should I do? If thats all newspapers are good for, what are newspapers good for?19
17 Brent Cunningham, Rethinking Objective Journalism Columbia Journalism Review. Alternet, July 9, 2003 <http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/16348/>. 18 Sam Smith, in Censored 2000, p. 60. 19 Avedon Carol, Pilloried Post, August 12, 2004 <http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/08/ pilloried_post.html>.

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Glenn Greenwald raises the question of how the state-run media in a dictatorship would do anything any different from what the folks at CNN typically do on national security stories. In the case of Wikileaks, for example:
Thats CNNs journalism: uncritically passing on one government claim after the nextwithout any contradiction, challenge, or scrutiny. Other than Blitzers anger over the Governments failure to more effectively keep secrets from everyone, what would an overtly state-run media do differently? Absolutely nothing. Its just so revealing that the sole criticism of the Government allowed to be heard is that they havent done enough to keep us all in the dark.20

The reason is that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class....21 A good example is the way the mainstream press largely ignored Trent Lotts comments at Strom Thurmonds birthday party in 2002until the blogosphere rubbed their noses in the story.
...the rst few days after the birthday party at which Lott made his statement saw almost no reporting on the statement. ABC News and the Washington Post made small mention of it, but most media outlets reported merely on a congenial salute and farewell celebration of the Senates oldest and longest-serving member. Things were different in the blogosphere. At rst liberal blogs, and within three days conservative bloggers as well, began to excavate past racist statements by Lott, and to beat the drum calling for his censure or removal as Senate leader. Within about a week, the story surfaced in the mainstream media, became a major embarrassment, and led to Lotts resignation as Senate majority leader about a week later. A careful case study of this event leaves it unclear why the mainstream media initially ignored the story. It may have been that the largely social event drew the wrong sort of reporters. It may have been that reporters and editors who depend on major Washington, D.C., players were reluctant to challenge Lott. Perhaps they thought it rude to emphasize this indiscretion, or too upsetting to us all to think of just how close to the surface thoughts that we deem abominable can lurk. There is little disagreement that the day after the party, the story was picked up and discussed by Marshall on TalkingPoints, as well as by another liberal blogger, Atrios, who apparently got it from a post on Slates Chatterbox, which picked it up from ABC Newss own The Note, a news summary made available on the television networks Web site. While the mass media largely ignored the story, and the two or three mainstream reporters who tried to write about it were getting little traction, bloggers were collecting more stories about prior instances where Lotts actions tended to suggest support for racist causes. Marshall, for example, found that Lott had led a 1981 amicus curiae brief in support of Bob Jones Universitys effort to retain its tax-exempt status. The U.S. government had rescinded that status because the university practiced racial discriminationsuch as prohibiting interracial dating.
20 Greenwald, WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets, Salon, November 30, 2010 <http://www.salon.com/ news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/30/wikileaks>. 21 Greenwald, The merger of journalists and government ofcials, Salon, December 28, 2010 <http://www.salon.com/ news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/28/cnnn/index.html>.

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By Monday of the following week, four days after the remarks, conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and others were calling for Lotts resignation.22

So establishment journalism in reality was just another illustration of the tendency of theoretically countervailing institutions to become in fact parts of the same complexes of clustered institutions as the institution they supposedly checked. The same sort of collusion between the political and journalistic establishments prevails at the local level, where the newspaper in most communities tends to be a part of the very power structure over which it is expected to exercise its watchdog functions. In the colorful language of Michael Bates, of Batesline Blog, the Tulsa World is part of Tulsas Cockroach Caucus:
The World is more than just an observer of the local scene. It is an integral part of the tight social network that has run local politics for as long as anyone can remember. This network... has pursued its own selsh interests under the name of civic progress, with disastrous results for the ordinary citizens of Tulsa and its metropolitan area.... The same small number of connected insiders circulates from one city authority, board, or commission to another, controlling city policy, but beyond the reach of the democratic process.23

Another important lesson from the Lott story is the way in which bloggers and online journalists took advantage of the new journalistic potential of network technology where conventional journalists have largely failed to do so. Online journalists, bloggers and independent scholars quickly began using search engines to examine Lotts past behavior, and to aggregate each others ndings. Ed Sebesta, who tracks and indexes material related to Confederate nostalgia, passed on some old and seemingly buried items to bloggers critical of Lott. One of the most damning was an early 1980s interview in the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan. The simple birthday story began looking like part of a decades-long pattern of saying one thing to the general public and another thing to his supporters.24 Now bear in mind that, under the ethos of professional journalistic objectivity, independently searching for information that bears on the truthfulness of an individuals statementas opposed to reporting that some prominent gure on the other side referred to such informationis a big no-no. If theres not a he said money quote from a spokesman for the other side, examining the record for yourself and reporting on what you nd is taking sides. Thats only for the op-ed page, you know. But once the bloggers had circulated the story enough, it became a news story in its own right. And when Trent Lott was provoked into making a lame response, suddenly the bloggers ndings triggered the he said standard of
The Wealth of Networks, pp. 263-264. Bates, Whirled Threatens Batesline, Batesline, February 15, 2005 <http://www.batesline.com/archives/2005/ 02/whirled-threate-2.html>. 24 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Books, 2008), p. 63.
23 Michael 22 Benkler,

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conventional journalism.25 Another example of the phenomenon was the London Underground bombing of July 2005. In the hours immediately after the bombing, the government put out the story that the death and destruction had been caused by a power surge.
Even a few years earlier, this explanation would have been the only message available to the public, allowing the government time to investigate the incident more fully before adjusting its story to reect the truth. But as [Nik] Gowing notes, Within the rst 80 minutes in the public domain, there were already 1,300 blog posts signaling that explosives were the cause. The government simply could not stick to the story about a power surge when its falsehood was increasingly apparent to all. Cameraphones and sites for sharing photos globally meant that the public could see images of the subway interior and of a double-decker bus whose roof had been blown to piecesevidence utterly incompatible with the ofcial story. Less than two hours after the bombings, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, publicly acknowledged that the explosions had been the work of terrorists.26

The much-vaunted example of the Pentagon Papers is really no exception to the general phenomenon of the establishment presss collusion with the rest of the corporate-state power structure. Consider the difference between the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. Daniel Ellsberg had to persuade the gatekeepers at a giant, capital-intensive corporation that it was worthwhile to publish his leaked documents. The New York Times was very much a key component of the corporate establishment, and its decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was simply part of a larger challenge by one wing of the ruling class against the agenda of the other wing. The position of the Times in the establishment, and its functional relation to the interests of its wing of the establishment, explains the different reactions to the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. [Cf. alt papers and radical parties] One criticism of blogging and online journalism is the lack of a gatekeeping function, like that in the editorial ofces of the major newspapers of record, to vet stories for accuracy before they appear in print. As they surveyed the growing amount of self-published content on the internet, many media companies correctly understood that the trustworthiness of each outlet was lower than that of established outlets like The New York Times. But they failed to grasp the signicance of the lowered capital outlay costs and other entry barriers for Web publishing: the proliferation of many more outlets. In a networked blogosphere, in which any blogger can link to the material she criticizes and provide hyperlinks to corrective information, the corrective function is performed by the networked environment itself.27 The parallel to the battle between Wikipedia and the old-line dead tree encyclopedias, in which the gatekeepers at Britannica were dumbfounded by the
25 Ibid.,

p. 63. Cognitive Surplus, p. 62. 27 Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 65.

26 Shirky,

351 comparable number of errors in the two venuesand Wikipedias record of correcting errors in minutes rather than monthsis obvious. Arguably the gatekeeping functions in professional journalism, as it existed in the 20th century, was itself a side-effect of the increased capital outlays required for publishing and the concentration of the corporate media. Just as the FCC Fairness Doctrine was the product of a time when TV news was controlled by the Big Three, professional gatekeepers were associated with a time when there were two wire services, half a dozen major newspapers of record, and one big newspaper in most towns. With the collapse of entry barriers for Web publishing, the proliferation of sites engaged in the corrective function is an example of individual superempowerment replacing the corrective function of institutional gatekeepers. Open Source Journalism. But this increasingly concentrated corporate control of the information chokepoints is being completely cirvumvented by the Web. The problem is not so much the percentage of the old broadcast-model media thats controlled by corporoate gatekeepers, but that consensus reality is still so closely tied to the corporate legacy media:
...in the early 1980s ninety percent of American media was owned by 50 companies. Today, in 2011, that same ninety percent of broadcast inuence is owned by just six companies. In other words, 232 media executives more or less control the information diet of 277 million Americans," Im not at all convinced that the US media consolidation weve seen has led to substantial cost savings, or improvements in the product offered. It has, however, led to a startling lack of diversity in news coverage. When I rst reported on the NDAA -- which Obama is about to sign into law, and which literally allows for martial law, in the US, according to Rep. Ron Paul and others -- some family and friends who read my article did not believe me They considered me an alarmist and a weirdo in search of pageview trafc. Then, a few days later, The New York Times published an op-ed slamming NDAA and its supporters. The Daily Show did a segment showing the ludicrously un-American nature of the NDAAs indenite detention provisions. After that, those same doubting friends called me and emailed me. I was right! It was insulting. Im a liar until Jon Stewart and the doddering Gray Lady talk about it? The problem here is that we still wait for our cable shows and our newspapers to break stories. During that waiting period, we lose valuable time. (In reality, cable shows mostly run with whatever happens to be the most popular online.) The solution? STOP WAITING for it to appear in The New York Times. The NDAA was as real as cancer weeks before they reported on it. I rst learned about it through my social media accounts, as did many others. We need to elevate people with a good track record of

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reporting news via social media -- bloggers like myself are not confabulators or pageview whores. Were the canary in the coal mine, and the last line of defense when our mainstream media is asleep at the helm. From To Email Sent! You have successfully emailed the post. NDAA, SOPA, Presidential Debates, And Iran: Corrupt Media At Play David Seaman, Credit Card Outlaw | Dec. 26, 2011, 11:43 AM | 2,597 | 3 * AAA * * * * inShare7 * * David Seaman URL David Seaman is the creator of the popular nance blog and credit card deals comparison site Credit Card Outlaw. Follow him on Twitter (new!) and Google+ Recent Posts * Occupy Wall Street: Police Intimidation, Online Misinformation... * The NDAA: Heres The Scariest, Most Outrageous Part * Worthy Bank Account Bonuses RSS Feed * ING DIRECT: Current Bonuses * ING DIRECTs Black Friday 2011 Bonus: $107 * Bank of Americas New $250 Credit Card Promotion (Cash Back Offer) As an illuminating infographic over on Frugal Dad points out, in the early 1980s ninety percent of American media was owned by 50 companies. Today, in 2011, that same ninety percent of broadcast inuence is owned by just six companies. In other words, 232 media executives more or less control the information diet of 277 million Americans, according to the graphic. Consolidation is not a huge problem when the companies involved continue to provide high-quality products to their customers; when consolidation is used to lower costs and realize synergies, rather than to simply crush competitors. Im not at all convinced that the US media consolidation weve seen has led to substantial cost savings, or improvements in the product offered. It has, however, led to a startling lack of diversity in news coverage.

353
When I rst reported on the NDAA -- which Obama is about to sign into law, and which literally allows for martial law, in the US, according to Rep. Ron Paul and others -- some family and friends who read my article did not believe me. They considered me an alarmist and a weirdo in search of pageview trafc. Then, a few days later, The New York Times published an op-ed slamming NDAA and its supporters. The Daily Show did a segment showing the ludicrously un-American nature of the NDAAs indenite detention provisions. After that, those same doubting friends called me and emailed me. I was right! It was insulting. Im a liar until Jon Stewart and the doddering Gray Lady talk about it? The problem here is that we still wait for our cable shows and our newspapers to break stories. During that waiting period, we lose valuable time. (In reality, cable shows mostly run with whatever happens to be the most popular online.) The solution? STOP WAITING for it to appear in The New York Times. The NDAA was as real as cancer weeks before they reported on it. I rst learned about it through my social media accounts, as did many others. We need to elevate people with a good track record of reporting news via social media -- bloggers like myself are not confabulators or pageview whores. Were the canary in the coal mine, and the last line of defense when our mainstream media is asleep at the helm. Start telling your friends to follow people on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ who dont post cat pictures and Tim Tebow-esque religious commentary all day long. Shut out the mainstream medias death grip on the ow of information. Why do you think the despised censorship bill, SOPA, is being crammed down Americas throat? In large part, I believe its to provide a competitive advantage for those dying beasts like CNN and FOX. To shut out the powerful emerging ecosystem of news blogs, social media, and online journalists who provide damn good coverage, and dont have any allegiances to a certain political party, agenda, or the sick ratings game. The mainstream media only has inuence because you give it inuence. As a user on Twitter, @blacksheeprpt, recently tweeted: Over the holiday weekend I told a relative about the #NDAA. She said I was just spouting propaganda, the govt would never pass such a law." But if shed seen it on CNN, I would bet this relative would be shaking in her boots, and calling her Congressman to demand answers. Social media is the newsroom now. Stop pretending it isnt. As this post goes live, Drudge Report has as its headline story: WAR GAMES: IRAN TAUNTS U.S. SHIPS."

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The mainstream media is always playing its game. Im seeing more and more coverage that we need to go to war with Iran, like right now. Wasnt the same said about Iraq? And should we be so quick to trust a media that has steadfastly ignored the vast NDAA and SOPA online outrage? A media that didnt even ONCE mention these radical, highly controversial bills during the presidential debates? Fool me once...28

According to David de Ugarte, the blogger is doing to professional journalism what the free and open-source software movement did to Microsoft and IBM.
As for bloggers, old fashioned media see them as intruders or dilettantes lacking in credibility, in the same way as the great proprietary software companies used to say that free software developers were mere amateurs (that was before most of them, led by old IBM, Sun and Novell, adapted their business models to the new copyleft property systems). For the blogger is nothing but an incarnation, in the domain of information, of the hacker, the bricoleur. Hes the antiprofessional....29

Everything written above about the ability of networked organizations to exercise countervailing power functions over powerful institutions is also true of news, with ever-expanding networks of amateurs in venues like Indymedia, with alternative new operations like those of Robert Parry, Bob Giordano and Greg Palast, and with natives and American troops blogging news rsthand from Iraqall at the very same time the traditional broadcasting networks are relegating themselves to the stenographic regurgitation of press releases and press conference statements by corporate and government spokespersons, and reporting on celebrity gossip.
Six days before protesters shut down Seattle, Matthew Arnison, an activist and programmer from the Catalyst Collective in Sydney, posted the inaugural message on a website he had helped build. Displaying the utopianism that would become characteristic of a generation of digital activists, he declared, The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media . . . With this digital call to arms, Indymedia was born. Within days, Indymedias on-the-ground reports of the lockdown of Seattle had been accessed over a million times. Even mainstream, corporate media were relying on Indymedia for accurate accounts of the protests. Indymedias open-publishing model empowered citizen journalism with an ethos of antiauthoritarianism. For the rst time, anyone could write the news, anyone could be an investigative journalist, anyone could challenge corporate control of information. Within two years, Indymedia sites bloomed in 125 cities and on every continent.30
28 David Seaman, NDAA, SOPA, Presidential Debates, And Iran: Corrupt Media At Play, Business Insiders, December 26, 2011 <http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-sopa-presidential-debatesand-iran-corrupt-media-at-play-2011-12#ixzz1ho0G24TN>. 29 de Ugarte, The Power of Networks, p. 43 30 Micah M. White, To the Barricades, Adbusters,

355 Even conceding that the vast majority of shoe-leather reporting of original news is still done by hired professionals from a traditional journalistic background, blogs and other news aggregators are increasingly becoming the new newspapers, making better use of reporter-generated content than the old, highoverhead news organizations. But in fact most of the traditional medias original content consists of verbatim conveyance of ofcial press releases, which could just as easily be achieved by bloggers and news aggregators linking directly to the press releases at the original institutional sites. Genuine investigative reporting consumes an ever shrinking portion of news organizations budgets. To the extent that the traditional media still do genuinely independent, investigative reporting, its true that most journalistic content is still generated by conventional reporters writing for traditional newspapers. Its true that Internet journalism, to a large degree, lacks such resources as dedicated full-time reporters and contacts with politicians who need media to survive....31 But Internet journalism makes far better use of the content generated by conventional reporters than do the traditional media. In the new model of networked journalism, traditional reporters are increasingly relegated to the role of providing raw content. Their analytical functionwhich they were never very good at anyway, by and largeis being picked up by networked aggregators and commentators.
By contrast, in the digital creeper sources appear in a hypertextual way and practically in real time, as they are provided by participants themselves. Thats why in the new reticular structure of information the centre of journalism is no longer the writing of copy, the conversion of information from fact into news which used be the purpose of journalists. Rather, what matters now is the selection of sources which are anyway immediately and directly available to the reader. This is what most blogs do, as do, by denition, press clipping services. Their contribution consists in selecting sources from a certain point of view. In the same way as it makes no longer sense to understand newspapers as newsmakers, so opinion is no longer based on the best information attributed to an individual, as the network makes sources available to everyone. What is important now is interpretation and analysisthat is, the deliberative component which signals the appearance of a truly public, nonindustrially mediated, citizens sphere. This is one more aspect of the most characteristic result of the development of the distributed network society: the expansion of our personal autonomy with respect to the establishment. We become more autonomous, for instance, when we can write our own blog and establish a medium-and-source relationship with others, becoming a part of that collective newspaper which we all make every morning with our web browser tags. That is, the network allows us to act socially on a certain scale, bypassing the mediation of external institutionsin fact, it allows us to act as individual institutions and, in that sense, to become much freer and to acquire many more
31 Benkler,

The Wealth of Networks, p. 264.

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options.32

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And the use that networked journalism makes of the content generated by conventional journalism is entirely different from that of the mainstream press.
Common to all these Web-based toolsboth static and dynamic, individual and cooperativeare linking, quotation, and presentation. It is at the very core of the hypertext markup language (HTML) to make referencing easy.... Around these easy capabilities, the cultural practice has emerged to reference through links for easy transition from your own page or post to the one you are referring towhether as inspiration or in disagreement. This culture is fundamentally different from the mass-media culture, where sending a ve-hundred-page report to millions of users is hard and expensive. In the mass media, therefore, instead of allowing readers to read the report alongside its review, all that is offered is the professional review in the context of a culture that trusts the reviewer. On the Web, linking to original materials and references is considered a core characteristic of communication. The culture is oriented toward see for yourself. Condence in an observation comes from a combination of the reputation of the speaker as it has emerged over time, reading underlying sources you believe you have some competence to evaluate for yourself, and knowing that for any given referenced claim or source, there is some group of people out there, unafliated with the reviewer or speaker, who will have access to the source and the means for making their disagreement with the speakers views known. Linking and see for yourself represent a radically different and more participatory model of accreditation than typied the mass media.33

To the extent that the power of the political hierarchy and the moral authority of our representatives was reinforced by a mutually supporting relationship between political and media hierarchies, the authority of the political system is undermined by network culture. The authority of the state and its policies depends, to the large extent, on a shared consensus reality (the Matrix) common to the overwhelming majority of the population. And the old broadcast model described by Herman and Chomsky was central to the manufacture of Matrix reality. Anything that undermines consensus reality also undermines the structure of authority. Yochai Benkler wrote:
...at a minimum we can say that individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a legally dened class of othersthe owners of communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby offer to affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do. Moreover, the diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for any given individual is qualitatively increased.34
32 De

Ugarte, The Power of Networks, p. 46. The Wealth of Networks, pp. 218-219. 34 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 9.
33 Benkler,

357 The blogosphere, de Ugarte writes, will not only threaten the media.
Every information structure is underpinned by a power structure. Changes in the structure of the information sphere threaten the system of political representation. If the blogosphere actually manages to erode media representation, how could the representation of professional political mediators remain intact?35

In place of the old public sphere dominated by one-way broadcast hubs, with communications dominated by gatekeeper institutions with the means to own such hubs, we see the emergence of what Benkler calls the networked public sphere.36 The public sphere, as opposed to the private one, is the set of practices that members of a society use to communicate about matters they understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective action or recognition.37 The public is linked to itself, without mediation by nodes controlled by the state and corporate media, and capable of concerted action as a public without the need to coordinate action through the state or other hierarchical organizations.
The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of nished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be the media... and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as nished goods.38

Although some have noted a power law distribution of attention in the networked public sphere of the Worldwide Web, this does notas many of them suggestimply the reemergence of the old mass-media model. Since the power law distribution of readership reects only interest, rather thanas with the old broadcast mediathe high material cost of hubs, the material entry barriers for a low-volume node to become a high-volume one are nonexistent. And the Web is governed by an extremely long-tail pattern of distribution. To quote Benkler again, at length:
The networked public sphere has also begun to respond to the information overload problem, but without re-creating the power of mass media at the points of ltering and accreditation. There are two core elements to these developments: First, we are beginning to see the emergence of nonmarket, peer-produced alternative sources of ltration and accreditation in place of the market-based alternatives. Relevance and accreditation are themselves information goods, just like software or an encyclopedia. What we are seeing on the network is that ltering for both relevance and accreditation has become the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of pointing to original sources of claims, and its complement, the social practice that those who have some ability to evaluate the claims in fact do comment on them. The second element is a contingent but
35 De

Ugarte, The Power of Networks, p. 48. p. 10. 37 Ibid., p. 177. 38 Ibid., p. 180.
36 Benkler,

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empirically conrmed observation of how users actually use the network. As a descriptive matter, information ow in the network is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information ow would suggest, and signicantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others. This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster. Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media-the dominance of the few visible sites. But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere. Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian re brigades tend to link to other Australian re brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still signicant extent, to liberal political blogs. In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. Local clusters-communities of interest-can provide initial vetting and peer-review-like qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster. Observations that are seen as signicant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters. This continues until an observation makes its way to the superstar sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use. This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention. It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge. Users tend to treat other peoples choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users-say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specic television program-are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them. The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difcult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of

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money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly.39

There is a fundamental difference in how the Internet organizes information, compared to the old hub-and-spoke architecture of the broadcast media. The majority of information which makes it through the ltering mechanisms of the gatekeeper press, as we saw above, tends to be content which is generated and shaped by powerful institutions. Newspapers tend to be lled with content generated by public spokespersons and PR departments. Compare this to the results of a Google search for Barbie, as described by Benkler, which produces listings for AdiosBarbie.com and the Barbie Liberation Organization on the rst page of results alongside Mattels ofcial sales-related site.40 At the time I wrote the rst draft of this passage, February 9, 2011, a highly critical and snarky old blog post of mine showed up on the rst page of results for a Google search on Fish! philosophy, appearing directly under the ofcial Charthouse site and the Wikipedia entry.41 Open Source Journalism and the Stigmergic Principle. Network technology not only permits open source journalists to compete with conventional ones in doing what the latter should be doing, by putting a cheap printing press within easy reach. It also lowers the transaction costs of doing so, by permitting the near-effortless aggregation of information. One of my favorite Jon Stewart bits was a long video collage of GOP spokespersons and pollsters and strategists on the network talking head shows, in late 2003, regurgitating critiques of Howard Dean in almost identical language: too angry, too extreme to represent average Americans, etc. After showing brief clips of the same exact words coming out of twenty different mouths, Stewart commented: Talking pointstheyre true because theyre said a lot! Thats something a real journalist should have done, if the rules of professional objectivity didnt outlaw real journalism. But even for someone like Stewart to do it carried enormous transaction costs. Stewart had to persuade some media company executive, representing the enormous aggregation of capital necessary to set up a cable network like The Comedy Channel, that there was a large enough audience for what he did to justify the costand then go through all the effort of putting together a staff and doing all the other stuff that goes into producing a TV show. But thanks to the Web, anyone who knows how to search Google for iterations of the talking points and publish them with a free Blogger or Wordpress blog can be Jon Stewart. The low cost of aggregating information, along with the overlapping phenomenon of lowered cost of bringing together people in possession of disparate bits of information, makes the whole available to everyone for the rst time.
The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing among people tracking priestly abuse. BishopAccountability.org, launched a year after ghe Geoghan case, collated
The Wealth of Networks, pp. 12-13. p. 277. 41 Kevin Carson, More On (Moron?) Fish! Philosophy, Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, April 26, 2006 <http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-on-moron-shphilosophy.html>.
40 Ibid., 39 Benkler,

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accusations of abuse, giving a permanent home to what in the past would have been evanescent coverage. David Clohessy, the director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), credits the ability to collect and share information with the change in public perception: What technology did here was help expose the lie in the two greatest PR defenses of this kind of abuse: This is an aberration and We didnt know. When you can send a reporter twenty links to nearly identical stories, then that reporter obviously approaches his or her own bishop with greater skepticism and much more vigor.42

Criticism of Networked Journalism. Believe it or not, some people see the loss of gatekeeping functions by old hierarchical institutions as a bad thing. [Material from Thermidor of the Progressives] The Progressivism of the turn of the 20th century and the dominant strain of liberalism that emerged from it were very managerialist, very Schumpeterian, ideologies. Richard Telofski, a corporate consultant who specializes in defending his clients against open-mouth sabotage and cybersmear, and whose work we have considered in previous chapters, laments the loss of Strangeloves hegemonic construction of reality. He refers, in tones of evident nostalgia, to the days (the days of the industrial model we described in the rst part of this chapter) before the Internet crept its way into everyones homes, when
this privilege of reality packaging and meaning change belonged to those with the nancial resources to support the communications effort necessary to achieve such things. The mainstream media, large corporations, and governments were generally the only entities who could package and dene reality for us on a large scale.43

The likelihood that he views the days of institutional gatekeeping as a Golden Age is reinforced by his memoriesas a confessed news junkieof the days back when he couldnt get enough of Huntley and Brinkley:
I recall that back in those days, when people selected from their much smaller media menu, what they got was a more middle-of-theroad experience-perception-knowledge viewing diet than what is being offered up today. There were fewer choices of medium, and because there were fewer choices, in order for the broadcasters to capture the widest audience, they had to make each of those program choices middle-of-the-road, and with little topical diversity. Broadcasters then did not have multiple media channels through which to skew programming in one direction or the other and collectively capture a market large enough to impress advertisers. So by default, and ironically through the limited availability of media channels, the media experience I had then, and its resulting perceptions, was more balanced than what we see today.44
Here Comes Everybody, pp. 150-151. Telofski, Insidious Competition: The Battle for Meaning and the Corporate Image (New York and Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2010), p. 51. 44 Ibid., p. 101.
43 Richard 42 Shirky,

361 In the degraded times we live in, in contrast, everyone with an Internet connection can play in this game.45 Regardless of how accurately the mainstream media may portray realitya question Telofski raises only to dismiss as he continuesthe fact remains that to have a view of whats happening around us, there needs to be a reference point.46 He cites David Denby, in Snark (2009), on the possibility that the authority of agreed upon facts and central narrative of the world could dissolve....47 The result is the collapse of objective realitymeaning a reality mediated by institutional gatekeepers, in Telofskis schemaas a reference point. Of course Telofski drags up the managerialists favorite analogy of automobile licensing, which never fails to annoy me though I should be used to it by now:
People need training and a license to operate a motor vehicle. The reason for this is that the improper operation of a motor vehicle can result in injury, destruction, or death. To operate social media tools, no similar training or license is required yet I maintain that injury, destruction, and death can be caused through the use of social media. Social media... enable anyone with a pulse to either report or opine about reality and have that message shared with countless others, from only a few to a few million.48

Or as Bill OReilly once complained, anyone with some crazy website is allowed (!) to just say anything they want. Although Telofski grasps the institutional signicance quite realistically, I think he misses the epistemological signicance. The main change has been, not the loss of objective reality, but the replacement of institutions as the mediators of this reality by an adversarial process for approaching it dialectically. We have lost, as Telofski puts it, the hegemonic construction of reality, but that doesnt equate to a loss of objective truth. Indeed, it may be that the dialectic will give us a closer approximation to objective reality than the previous view which was obscured (through a glass darkly) by the mediation of institutional power. It never seems to occur to him that the authorized, ofcial version of reality presented by Huntley and Brinkley was subjective, and constructed to serve an interest. The middle-of-the-road picture of reality his contemporaries got back then represented the mindset of the dominant institutions that ran society. The ofcial reality he lionizes was the same false construct celebrated in The Crisis of Democracy by Samuel Huntington, who longed for a return to the days when the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of world order, which was possible only because the country was governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive ofce, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more impor45 Ibid., 46 Ibid.,

p. p. 47 Ibid., p. 48 Ibid., p.

51. 52. 53. 54.

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tant businesses, banks, law rms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment. In the words of a snippet Telofski quotes from SocialMediaToday.com, we live in a world polarized between MSNBC and Fox, in which facts are mere debating points, to be won or lost by those who make the loudest or most persuasive arguments.49 Telofski displays at least some supercial familiarity with the apparatus of academic philosophy, as evidenced by his repeated use of the term epistemology. Given that the phrase he quotes here could have come directly from Socrates critique of the sophists approach of carrying people away with force of rhetoric rather than persuasion, its odd that he doesnt consider the possibility of Socrates alternativedialecticas a means of arriving at the truth. For Telofski there are only two alternatives: the monistic mediation of truth by authoritative institutions, and a Babel of competing subjective voices trying to outscream each other. The ideas that we might arrive at truth by rational persuasion, that persuasion requires a multitude of independent voices, and that the interaction of voices might lead in some direction, all seem to escape him. But our only real salvation from the partial and subjective is cross-examination: the dialectic. As much as his view of corporate power differs from ours, I suspect his view of the nature of truth differs even more. Telofski, quite oddly, sees the packaging of reality by instititutions including the corporate images and branding he makes his living defending as a more dependable source of truth than the network model. For him institutions, not process, are the source of authenticity and certainty. By way of background, we might consider the history of science as the result of a process rather than of institutional authority. Consider the way he equates the mangling of meaning to the repackaging of reality to redening the corporate image. Apparently, if we try to extract a syllogistic argument from this, the corporate image = reality. And he himself later directly equates them in warning that anti-corporate propagandists corrupt the system of knowing and threaten the corporate image. Telofski dismisses as subjective anti-corporate propagandists objections to corporate power, but fails to acknowledge that the image of the world promoted by corporations is equally subjective. Internet journalism is also criticized for its allegedly derivative or parasitic nature. A good example is this quote from Rusty Turner, the previous editor of my local newspaper (local is a comparative term, considering its a two-country regional paper amalgamated from several genuine town papers):
A lot of people say they get their news exclusively online, that they no longer rely on the printed word, or even broadcast news, for information. But, when you consider where most original reporting develops (that would be the printed pages and Web sites of newspapers wire services, televisions and other traditional news-gathering operations, then, really, most people still depend on us dinosaurs. Theyre
49 Ibid.,

p. 80.

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just consuming our work in a different form.

In general, I dont think anyone will dispute that print journalism has an advantage over Internet journalism, by one or two orders of magnitude, in the number of personnel engaged in shoe-leather reporting. Nobody will dispute that the vast majority of content that appears in online journalistic venues comes from reporters working in traditional print media. These facts are not in dispute. The problem is with the conclusions people like Mr. Turner draw from them, which manage to miss the fundamental signicance of network organization. The revolutionary signicance of Internet journalism lies not in how it generates content, but in the use it makes of existing content. Bloggers make better use of the dead tree medias own content than the dead tree media itself does. To repeat yet again, nobody disputes that print journalism has an enormous army of reporters on the ground, far beyond the resources online journalism has at its direct disposal. But as Lincoln once said to General McClellan, If youre not going to use that army, may I borrow it? I dont think Mr. Turner and those of like mind fully understand the implications of their own argument. For example, most of what Mr. Turner himself does is not direct reporting, but ltering, selecting, editing and combining the content of reporters working for The Morning News. Aside from the fact that both he and the reporters are within the imaginary walls of the same corporate entity, how is what he does any different from what a blogger does in using content generated by other people, and using his own critical intelligence to decide what is useful and relevant and what is not, and exactly how to combine it? Even worse for Mr. Turners position, a major part of the content he includes in his newspaper is not generated internally at all, but from reporters working for other organizations. A considerable portion of the state, national and international news that appears in The Morning News is generated by the Associated Press. The phrase hoist by his own petard comes to mind. As Matt Yglesias put it:
Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, Im a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then thats journalism.50

The formal difference between what Mr. Turner does and what a blogger does consists primarily of Mr. Turners limitation by the legal ction of corporate boundaries. The blogger or other online journalist is every bit as much an editor as Mr. Turner, in the sense of editing and recombining content generated almost entirely by other people. But while Mr. Turner is limited to the stable of reporters available to him in-house, supplemented by syndicated material from the wire services, for the blogger the entire world of journalism is in-house. More importantly, while both traditional editors and bloggers make use of second-hand material they did not themselves write, bloggers make better use
50 Matthew Yglesias, Journalists, Bloggers, and Status Anxiety, Yglesias, January 14, 2009 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/01/journalists_bloggers_and_status_anxiety/>.

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of it. Most bloggers may be unoriginal, in the sense that they only link to whats already out there rather than reporting new information. But they use whats out there in ways that most traditional newspapers refrain from doing. That is, they put it together. They quote a factual claim from one source, and then immediately provide a hyperlink to information that provides a factual context to the claim. They take bits and pieces of news from different sources, aggregate it, and draw conclusions as to its meaning. In other words, they analyze material from various sources in light of each other and in light of independent research into the factual realm, in exactly the ways which weve seen are prohibited by the establishment journalisms ethos of professional objectivity. Watching the Watchdog. One example of how the Web can subject conventional, industrial-model journalism to critical analysis is Churnalism.com, a website that lets readers paste in articles and check to see how much of their content comes from press releases.
A new website promises to shine a spotlight on churnalism by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases. The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.51

[Draft last modied January 18, 2012]

51 Paul Lewis, Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media, The Guardian, February 23, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/23/churnalism-pr-media-trust>.

Chapter 11

Open Source National Security

The question remains of how networked, stateless society is to respond to attacks from outside: attacks from what are conventionally regarded as foreign enemies, like military forces or terrorists. To begin, by way of caveat, I cant overemphasize how vital it is that we compare apples to apples. That is, our basis of comparison for networked alternatives is not what the state proclaims as its mission, but what the state actually accomplishes. For example, most of the U.S. governments responses to terrorist attacks have been what security analyst Bruce Schneier calls security theater. A large part of the government response to 9/11 was knee-jerk reactions to the news of the day, measures that may enhance our feeling of security, but would actually make us less safe.1 As we saw in Chapter Two, the government has reacted in ways that are directly counterproductive and make the system more centralized and brittle.
The sad truth is that bad security can be worse than no security; that is, by trying and failing to make ourselves more secure, we make ourselves less secure. We spend time, money, and energy creating systems that can themselves be attacked easily and, in some cases, that dont even address the real threats. We make poor trade-offs, giving up much in exchange for very little security. We surround ourselves with security countermeasures that give us a feeling of security rather than the reality of security.2

The simple fact of the matter is that even competently organized security policies wont be 100% effective. No matter whos in charge, there will occasionally be people killed by terrorism when preventative measures failand all the cries of dont just stand there and for the children in the world wont change this
1 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003), p. 3. 2 Ibid., p. 14.

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fact. Counter-terrorism measures often simply shift the risk of attack. Increased airport security increases the likelihood that terrorists will decide an attack on a high-casualty soft target like a shopping mall is more cost-effective. In fact, as Schneier noted, more stringent TSA passenger screening just shifted vulnerability within the airport: from onboard passengers to the large, concentrated masses of people waiting in line to be scanned. Instead of trying to smuggle an explosive through the passenger processing area, a terrorist might simply decide to detonate it in front of the security checkpoint.3 One reason bureaucratic counter-terrorism efforts are so ineffective is that agile networks like Al Qaeda can quickly respond by shifting to a weaker link, while the TSA spends countless bureaucratic man-hours ponderously grinding out a policy for preventing the previous attack. The TSA bureaucracy seems to largely ignore the possibility that its adversary might take countermeasures or adapt. In any case, the very fact that nobody has carried out such a suicide bombing in an airport processing areaor in a shopping mall, for that matteris probably an indication that the personnel pool for terror attacks in the U.S is quite limited. In light of such evidence, as well as the half-assed nature of attempted air attacks since 9/11, it seems likely that 9/11 was simply a case of picking low-hanging fruit. There is no such thing as absolute security. Any attempt to prevent terrorism will involve a tradeoff of some sort, and some options will require tradeoffs that most people simply regard as too costly.4 We are unwilling to ban cars and lock ourselves in our homes to eliminate 100% of trafc fatalities. The same principle applies to terror attacks. Regardless of politicians posturing that we cant put a price on human life, in fact we do just that. There will inevitably be some tacit understanding of the amount of death and destruction we are willing to tolerate rather than bankrupt ourselves for the unattainable goal of absolute security.

11.0.5

The State as Cause of the Problem: Blowback.

Chalmers Johnson, William Blum. 9/11 as blowback from Afghanistan and Gulf War. Gulf War as blowback from backing Saddam against the Great Iranian Menace. Great Iranian Menace as blowback from overthrow of Mossadegh and support of the Shahs dictatorship. Libertarians, when talking about the welfare state, sometimes say that government is great at breaking your legs and then giving you crutches. The same principle applies to the national security state.
3 Ibid., 4 Ibid.,

p. 113. p. 13.

367 If the vast majority of a states so-called defense efforts actually involve force projection on the other side of the globe against states barely capable of projecting force a few hundred miles outside their own borders, and most actual attacks on the territory of the U.S. itself are blowback from such foreign operations, it follows that most so-called national security is a manufactured problem. Meta-Organization. There is a substantial body of literature on how a stateless society would conduct an organized defense against large-scale foreign attacks: how it would fund defense of an entire contiguous territory without recourse to a coercive taxing authority, how it would overcome the free rider problem, etc. This body of literature includes the work of Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Linda and Morris Tannehill, Stringham [works cited by Chartier]. We will not rehash this literature and the questions it deals with, in its own right, in this chapter. Our primary concern is with institutions for collective defense as such in a stateless society, only to the extent that network technology creates new synergies with such institutions as envisioned in traditional literature, or that new technologies enable networked individuals and small groups to perform functions that previously required a state. The classical anarchist literature of the nineteenth century, as well as of the communist and syndicalist anarchisms of the twentieth, has treated social defense as a function of federated communities. In contrast, most market anarchist literature on the organization of defense in a stateless society tends to focus almost exclusively on the protection services agency or security rm as the primary unit of defense. I believe market anarchists disproportionate focus on the organization of security as a commercial business, via the cash nexus, is a blind spot.5 Most conventional libertarian portrayals of an ideal free market society, and particularly the standard anarcho-capitalist version of the conceptual framework of individual self-ownership and non-aggression, implicitly assume an atomized society of individuals living (at most) in nuclear families, with fee-simple ownership of a house and quarter-acre lot, and with most essentials of daily living purchased via the cash nexus from for-prot business rms. But it seems to me that the libertarian concepts of self-ownership and nonaggression are entirely consistent with a wide variety of voluntary social frameworks, while at the same time the practical application of those concepts would vary widely. Imagine a society on the neolithic pattern, shared by most of the world before the rise of the centralized territorial state, where most ultimate (or residual, or reversionary) land ownership was vested in village communes, even though there might be a great deal of individual possession. The evidence is overwhelming that the form of social organization dimly reected in the Russian mir, the English open eld system, the pattern of communal village tenure in India under what Marx called the Asiatic mode of production, and the Jubilee system
5 Much of the immediately following discussion is based on material in Chapter Six of Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (Booksurge, 2010).

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in Israel under the judges, was the typical neolithic pattern before the rise of the state. Or imagine a society like the free towns that Kropotkin described in the late Middle Ages, where people organized social safety net functions through the guild or other convivial associations. Now, it might be entirely permissible for an individual family to sever its aliquot share of land from the peasant commune, and choose not to participate in the cooperative organization of seasonal labor like spring plowing, haying or the harvest. It might be permissible, in an anarchist society, for somebody to stay outside the guild and take his chances on unemployment or sickness. But in a society where membership in the primary social unit was universally regarded as the best form of insurance, such a person would likely be regarded as eccentric, like the individualist peasants in anarchist Spain who withdrew from the commune, or the propertarian hermits in Ursula LeGuins The Dispossessed. Let me enumerate some basic starting assumptions about the conditions under which networked alternatives will gradually supplant the state. First, we will experience a period characterized by hollowed-out states, in which the eroding tax base coupled with rising unemployment means that states obligations in the realms of public services (re, police, schools, streets, utilities, etc.) and the social safety net will far outstrip their revenues. As a result, states will steadily retreat from the social eld and take an increasingly minimalist approach to public services. We see early indications of this scenario in California, in particular. Second, total work hours per capita will gradually decline and rates of unemployment and underemployment will (even if partially hidden from ofcial metrics by dropouts of discouraged workers from the labor force) creep slowly upward. Third, as a matter of necessity, the unemployed and underemployed will shift a growing share of their needs from purchases with wages to self-provisioning, gifting and barter in the household and informal sectors. Fourth, as both the government and employer-based welfare states erode, the informal sector will of necessity evolve mechanisms for pooling income and risks and spreading costs. This is likely to take the form, specically, of people coalescing into primary social units at the residential level (extended family compounds or multifamily household income-pooling units, multi-household units at the neighborhood level, coordinated self-provisioning in micro-economies organized on residential blocks or cul-de-sacs, urban communes and other cohousing projects, squats, and stand-alone intentional communities), as a way of pooling income and reducing costs. As the states social safety nets come apart, such primary social units and extended federations between them are likely to become important mechanisms for pooling cost and risk and organizing care for the aged and sick. A good ctional example is the Northwest Federation in Poul Andersons Maurai stories, a comparatively decentralized and libertarian polity that stretched from British Columbia to northern California. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, the new society coalesced around friendly societies and fraternal lodges as providers of public utilities and the social safety net. One early sign of a trend in that direction: multi-generational or extended family households are at a fty-year high, growing ve percent in the rst year

369 of the Great Recession alone.6 The phyles we considered in Chapter Twonetworked civil societies decoupled to a greater or lesser extent from geographymay also take over some public service and welfare state functions. In a society where a major share or even a majority of people voluntarily participate in such primary social units, most of the social regulations that governed peoples daily lives would be largely orthogonal to the distinction, in the conventional market anarchist conceptual framework, between self-ownership and coercion. By way of comparison, the kinds of mainstream free market libertarians conventionally assigned to the Right treat the currently predominating model of employment in a business rmand all the associated forms of command and submission it impliesas the norm. For them, the whole self-ownership vs. aggression paradigm is irrelevant to life within the corporate organizational framework, so long as participation in the framework is itself voluntary. Aha! But by the same token, when people are born into a framework in which they are guaranteed a share in possession of communal land and are offered social safety net protections in the event of illness or old age, in return for observance of communally dened social obligations, the same principle applies. If anything, the members status as an equal participant in such a community, and position of equality with the other parties, is apt to be more realin a de facto as opposed to a de jure sensethan in the case of corporate employment. And in a society organized predominantly on this model, with social services provided mainly through primary social units (albeit with total freedom of secession), and with the collection of benets tied to the performance of dened social obligations, I believe most of the free rider problems with which so much market anarchist literature is preoccupied would fade into comparative insignicance. Service in a militia unit, or payment to support full-time defense personnel, would in that scenario be a condition for the use of libraries and public utilities, participation in public pension or sickness and unemployment insurance, and the like. Anarcho-Georgist Fred Foldvary depicts a hypothetical voluntary Georgist community in which public services are funded by membership fees assessed on the site value of land. Such communities would include
land trusts, condominiums, residential associations, proprietary communities (such as shopping centers and hotels), and apartment buildings. Membership in a community would be voluntary. These communities would associate together in networks and leagues. The members would share the belief that the land rent should be collected and distributed to all members equally or else used for public goods. Under geo-archy, communities would create higher-level associations to provide public goods with a wide scope such as defense. Most communities would be members of the greater association, which would provide for a uniform rule of law at the highest level of associ6 Donna St. George, Pew report shows 50-year high point for multi-generational family households, Washington Post, March 18, 2010 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031804510.html>.

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ation. Individuals and communities who are members would receive a package of goods, including security and access to public works, which makes membership advantageous. Members could secede, but would lose the package, so secession would be limited. Folks would therefore have the advantages of a state, but without the tyranny.7

In the event a member failed to pay the land value tax, the voluntary association would declare the defaulting party to be
not subject to the protection of the governing agency, nor entitle [sic] to any of the agencys services. The governing agency would not respond in the case of theft, trespass, re, or assault. His outlaw status would be known to the public, and he would be prohibited from using civic services such as libraries, streets, schools, parks, and governmental public transit.8

I argue later in this chapter that a decentralized, stateless society is less vulnerable to foreign conquest insofar as it presents a much wider array of lower-prole, lower-value targets and there is no single center of authority to surrender after it is captured. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Peter M. Lawrence, there are historical models for bringing a decentralized society under subjection. One of the most plausible scenarios by which a stateless society might be brought under subjection, and by which peasant communities were in fact brought under subjection historically, according to Lawrence, is by some combination of armed marauders raiding the populace from fortied strongholds, and/or condottieri offering their services for hire against such marauders. S. M. Stirlings scenario at the outset of the Emberverse series is a good ctional example of this model. Men at arms established fortied strongholds from which they raided surrounding villages, demanding tribute in return for protection. Those who refused tribute were subject to punitive raids, with houses burned and crops and movables carried away. But there were some differences between Stirlings scenario and what actually happened in the Dark Ages.
The big difference from the typical scenarios that actually happened as the feudal system emerged at the end of the Dark Ages was, he [Stirling] was applying a maa protection money model, creating the menace he offered protection from. But the usual thing was much more like the Seven Samurai/Magnicent Seven scenario, in which people much like the threateners help the villagers instead of just doing their own raids etc. Imagine that happening on a regular basis rather than as a one off, i.e. with the rescuers sticking around for a retainer rather than a reward, and in lots of similar places at the same time: its still like the maa protection money offers of protectionthe threatened can get any protector. Its much like the unlevel playing eld of todays capitalism, that wayfeudal structures are just as fair as ideal free markets, in themselves, but the unfairness comes in from the settings from outside (exogenous parameters, boundary conditions). Back then, it was the uneven bargaining position of war7 Fred E. Foldvary, Why Arent You an Anarchist? Free Liberal, February 14, 2006 <http://freeliberal.com/archives/ 001869.php>. 8 Foldvary, What Penalty For Not Paying LVT? Free Liberal, March 7, 2006 <http://freeliberal.com/archives/ 001923.php>.

371
lords and peasants.9

Compare this to Pyotr Kropotkins account of the origins of feudal domination in the scholae of the early Dark Ages:
These barbarians covered the country with villages and farmhouses; they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited wilderness; and the left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, scholae, or trusts of unruly men, gathered around temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace.... The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection to the military chieftains. It is evident that the very mode of life of the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could nd in their agricultural communities.... Droves of cattle, iron..., and slaves were appropriated [through armed raids].... There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men to till it, if only they could obtain the necessry cattle and implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, res, or raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes.... And if one of the hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when, after a hard ght with bad crops, inundations and pestilences, these pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory.10

By this process, populations, once free, and simply agreeing to feed a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors....11 [Check Wikipedia on early origins of feudalism] Lawrence also suggested some historical models for resisting such strongarm tacticsincluding military orders of knightswhich amounted in many ways to resisting enslavement by a mirror image of the scholae:
Responsibilities against raids were decentralised and handed off to frontier units, including privileges and tax breaks to encourage soldier-settlers (drawing on eeing refugees, among others) like the Fencibles of Canada and New Zealand, and (in Spain and Portugal, and the Baltic) semi-monastic military orders with local holdings organised into commandries analogous to monasteries.12

This is illustrated ctionally, in Stirlings Emberverse scenario, by the Dunedain Rangers, an order of frontier guards and rangers that maintains its own chain of
M. Lawrence, private email, December 17, 2010. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909), pp. 154-157. 11 Ibid., p. 162. 12 Lawrence, private email, December 21, 2010.
10 Pyotr 9 Peter

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fortied outposts and is supported by assessed contributions from the federated communities under its protection. The question weve considered in this section so far is whether such a function can be organized in an anarchist society, and consistently with its basic principle of voluntary association, as stated by Kropotkin: that is, based on free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption...13 Could it be carried out by free federations of voluntary primary associations without taxing power by a territorial state or other imposition of coercive authority on non-consenting third parties? As already suggested above, I believe it could. Lawrence argues that it would be possible to fund such functions through voluntary membership dues. But, he continues, such a funding system can only work when a number of services are interlocked in the same funding system, and a history of payments is required to qualify.
On their own, membership dues cant work any more than health schemes you can put off joining until you get sick, and public shaming is a complete nonsenseits only effective on those you dont need it for (think if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have gunsyou reward the shameless by hampering the rest).... Interlocking is what happens with health schemes that do work, by interlocking entitlements with a history of payments. Its what makes clan systems work, since young men dont get land (read: other resources) until they have put in their time helping their elders, e.g. on a sharecropping basis in which a cut goes to the chiefs household (which supports widows and orphans, if it wants to maintain legitimacy...); the chief gets to allocate lifetime holdings to clan members during good behaviour, and is generally elected for life from among descendants of chiefs by older clan members (Roman patron-client systems resemble the institution of dash among Nigerias Yoruba, and so on). This can beand has beengeneralised to guild structures (apprentice to journeyman to master, with rostered grand masters), though those were under an outer authority structure; the point for rulers was, they did not form a drain on that structure, unlike modern forms, so proto-states could afford them where they couldnt afford tax and spend methods. All these things work through interlocking privileges, in which everybody has some privileges and so has a stake, just different privileges so there is an inter-dependency; age structuring makes it more equitable over a whole life.14

He followed up with yet more historical erudition on interlocking systems by which social services and benets were tied to military service.
Age related interlocking made the French invention of mass conscription viable. Once they got it started using the dragooning/billeting of soldiers method condemned in the American Declaration of Independence, it was stable because only a small percentage of Frenchmen faced conscription even though most went through it; most already
13 Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism, Encyclopedia Britannica (1910) . Reproduced at Anarchy Archives <http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html>. 14 Lawrence, private email, May 17. 2011.

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had been through it, and no longer faced its burden but still gained the benets of the defence it supported.... That was integral to Celtic clans [in the Scottish highlands]. Good behaviour for continued land tenure and for receipt of patronage gifts included having to turn out to ght as part of the clan levy, e.g. when summoned by the ery cross being carried through the land. Typically one in ve or six stayed behind to maintain the farms while the rest went to war (I forget the precise traditional ratio just now).15

Such questions are necessarily largely theoretical, addressing as they do questions of the organization of society as a whole in a hypothetical stateless order. As such, they are considerably more large-scale and theoretical than the overall focus envisioned for this book. As Chris Sciabarra pointed out in Total Freedom, totalizing visions of a free society organized according to some grand libertarian philosophy are of necessity unrealistic. This is so for the same reason that utopian visions of a society organized in keeping with any ideology are unrealistic. Transitions from one system of social organization to another, in the real world, are piecemeal and partial, with a considerable variety of subjective visions and motives among those involved. So Murray Rothbards vision of a stable majority of an entire society converted to the nonaggression principle, operating according to essentially the same libertarian law code, and with some set of model libertarian institutions, is probably as close to the literal meaning of utopianowhereas we could imagine. Its about as unrealistic as the similar vision of the World Socialist Movement and the Socialist Party of Great Britain, of the entire world being converted by democratic agitation to their capital-S version of Socialism and instituting it near-simultaneously across the planet through parliamentary action. So as irresistible as it was for me to engage in the broad speculations above about society-wide organization above, we need to get back to the question of security as it relates to the overall theme of this book: measures that are within the capabilities of individuals and networked groups to protect themselves in ways that previously required a territorial state. Given this constraint, our primary emphasis will be at the micro rather than macro level. What can individuals and self-organized networks do, at the micro level, to secure themselves from the danger of attack and minimize the damage that does occur? Active Defense, Counter-Terrorism, and Other Security Against Attack. So we returnagainto the question of how defense against terrorism and other external attacks would be provided for in a society of self-organized networks. Eric Raymond sees the phase transition between forms of social organization as a response to insupportable complexity. The professionalized meritocracies that managed the centralized state and large corporation through the late-middle 20th century were an attempt to manage complexity by applying Weberian and Taylorist rules. And they did a passable job of managing the
15 Lawrence,

private email, May 22, 2011.

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system competently for most of that time, he says. But in recent years weve reached a level of complexity beyond their capacity to deal with.
The educated classes are adrift, lurching from blunder to blunder in a world that has out-complexied their ability to impose a unifying narrative on it, or even a small collection of rival but commensurable narratives. Theyre in the exact position of old Soviet central planners, systemically locked into grinding out products nobody wants to buy.

The answer, under these conditions, is to [a]dapt, decentralize, and hardeni.e., to recongure the system along the stigmergic lines he described earlier in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
Levels of environmental complexity that defeat planning are readily handled by complex adaptive systems. A CAS doesnt try to plan against the future; instead, the agents in it try lots of adaptive strategies and the successful ones propagate. This is true whether the CAS were speaking of is a human immune system, a free market, or an ecology. Since we can no longer count on being able to plan, we must adapt. When planning doesnt work, centralization of authority is at best useless and usually harmful. And we must harden: that is, we need to build robustness and the capacity to self-heal and self-defend at every level of the system. I think the rising popular sense of this accounts for the prepper phenomenon. Unlike old-school survivalists, the preppers arent gearing up for apocalypse; theyre hedging against the sort of relatively transient failures in the power grid, food distribution, and even civil order that we can expect during the lag time between planning failures and CAS responses. CAS hardening of the nancial system is, comparatively speaking, much easier. Almost trivial, actually. About all it requires is that we restigmatize the carrying of debt at more than a very small proportion of assets. By anybody. With that pressure, there would tend to be enough reserve at all levels of the nancial system that it would avoid cascade failures in response to unpredictable shocks. Cycling back to terrorism, the elite planners response to threats like underwear bombs is to build elaborate but increasingly brittle security systems in which airline passengers are involved only as victims. The CAS response would be to arm the passengers, concentrate on elding bomb-sniffers so cheap that hundreds of thousands of civilians can carry one, and pay bounties on dead terrorists.16

The militarys Fourth Generation Warfare doctrines are an attempt to take advantage of network communications technology and cybernetic information processing capabilities in order to replicate, within a conventional military force, the agility and resilience of networked organizations like Al Qaeda. The problem, as we saw in Chapter 2, is that interference from the militarys old bureaucratic hierarchies systematically impedes all the possibilities offered by network technology. The basic idea behind the new doctrines is, through the use of net16 Eric Raymond, Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority, Armed and Dangerous, January 5, 2010 <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1551>.

375 worked communications technology, to increase the autonomy and reduce the reaction time of the boots on the ground directly engaged in a situation. But as John Robb suggested, military hierarchies wind up seeing the new communications technologies instead as a way of increasing mid-level commanders realtime control over operations, and increasing the number of sign-offs required to approve any proposed operation. By the time those engaged in combat operations get the required eleven approvals of higher-ups, and the staff ofcers have had time to process the information into some kind of unrecognizable scrapple (PowerPoint presentations and all), the immediate situation has changed to the point that their original plan is meaningless anyway. Most people are familiar with the saying that no military plan survives rst contact with the enemy. But in fact the plan has most likely already been rendered obsolete, before contact with the enemy ever occurs, by its passage through the military bureaucracy. Rigid hierarchies and standard operating procedures only work in a predictable environment. When the environment is unpredictable, the key to success lies with empowerment and autonomy for those in direct contact with the situation. A good example is the Transportation Safety Administrations response to the threat of Al Qaeda attacks. As Matthew Yglesias has argued, the key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.17 The U.S. governments labyrinthine system for gathering, processing and coordinating intelligence is so complicated and produces such a high volume of data that it is overwhelmed with information it is incapable of digesting or putting to productive use. According to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, a two-year investigation at the Washington Post found: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for topsecret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildingsabout 17 million square feet of space.
17 Matthew Yglesias, Too Much Information, Matthew Yglesias, December 28, 2009 <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ archives/2009/12/too-much-information.php>.

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Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the ow of money to and from terrorist networks. Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored...
"Im not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities, [retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines] said in an interview. The complexity of this system dees description." The result, he added, is that its impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste, Vines said. We consequently cant effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

The effectiveness of this Rube Goldberg system of counter-terrorism intelligence was illustrated by the systems response to the so-called underwear bomber:
In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States. That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terroristrelated data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further. As military operations in Yemen intensied and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The ood of information into the NCTC became a torrent. Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen. These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as ofcials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred. "There are so many people involved here, NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

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"Everyone had the dots to connect, DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. But I hadnt made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility." And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasnt the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him.18

So when your system for anticipating attacks upstream is virtually worthless, the last mile becomes monumentally important: having people downstream capable of recognizing and thwarting the attempt, and with the freedom to use their own discretion in stopping it, when it is actually made. Our concern here is mainly with those things that are within the reach of individuals, small groups, and self-organized networks, as they are superempowered by the capabilities offered by networked platforms, and are forced of necessity to take on greater responsibility for their own endpoint or last mile defense in the face of states and other centralized systems that are increasingly hollowed out and brittle. Our primary focus is not so much on decentralizing and hardening on a large-scale, society-wide basis, in keeping with some common policy. It is one of individuals, small communities and neighborhoods, business rms, utilities, etc., all doing what is within their own capabilities to minimize the danger of attack and mitigate its damage when it does occur, and taking advantage of whatever ways are feasible to network and federate with one another, in order to maximize their own long-term resilience. The increasing technical capabilities of such endpoints, combined with the increasing brittleness and ineffectiveness of the state and the progressive hollowing out of its resource base, mean that there will likely be a general shift toward decentralizing and hardening, and of the state gradually retreating from the security eld, perhaps on a pattern much like that of the late Roman Empire in the West. And it is likely that as these trends progress, and as hardened endpoints nd larger and more complex ways of networking with one another, that at some point there will be a transformation of quantity into quality that will determine the character of the system as a whole. But the specics will likely clarify themselves only in the emergent system. Whatever the specics of the networked system that emerges, the functional dynamics will probably follow some general principles outlined by security analyst Bruce Schneier. He argues for the importance of defense in depth, which basically means achieving security through more and cheaper redundant countermeasures at multiple echelons of defense, in preference to more expensive, harder countermeasures at one line of defense. Defense in depth is a way of dealing with the fact that a system is only as strong as its weakest link, by en18 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control, Washington Post, July 19, 2010 <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secretamerica/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/>.

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suring that there is no one single point of failure.19 Because of the possibility that networked attackers will simply shift their efforts to a weaker link in response to security measures, last mile exibility takes on supreme importance for dealing with the unexpectedas opposed to attempting to anticipate and develop a written policy for every contingency ahead of time. Along with defense in depth, Schneier recommends dynamic defense. Schneiers concepts of defense in depth and dynamic defense overlap considerably, since the single point of failure in a complex system is likely to be a preset, one-sizets-all policy that includes a limited menu of responses. A dynamic defense is one that can adapt quickly, ...react quickly in several ways, and respond to whatever is happening at the time.20 Dynamism makes it possible to make security decisions on the y.... In a world where attackers can change their tactics, or even their objectives, in mid-attack, dynamic defenses that can react quickly and intelligently are the only answer.21 Flexibility in security rules is important, because it leads to more dynamic security. This means that the person implementing security measures in the last mile is trusted with discretion to apply the rules to novel situations that were unforeseen by the people making the rules. A stereotyped, limited, inexible menu of options is likely to result in the boots on the ground facing a situation which the rules dont cover, and being unable to respond effectively.22 People are dynamic, and better able to react to new threats and respond to new situations...23 They can react to something theyve never seen before: a new attack, a new threat, a new vulnerability.24 Remember the old saw about why the Israelis won the 1967 war? The Egyptians literally obeyed the Soviet eld manuals instructions to retreat into the heartland and wait for the rst snowfall. The TSA has typically responded to attacks by formulating new policies that further limit the discretion of the people in direct contact with the situation. The static, inexible kinds of policies that tend to predominate in bureaucratic organizations are the reason the work-to-rule strike is so devilishly effective: simply obeying the rules, literally, can bring an organization to a halt.
Good security has people in charge. People are resilient. People can improvise. People can be creative. People can develop on-thespot solutions.... People are the strongest point in a security process. When a security system succeeds in the face of a new or coordinated or devastating attack, its usually due to the efforts of people.25

Schneier mentions several components of an in-depth, dynamic defense. Among them is reaction, which is a response directed against the attackers in the form of taking countermeasures during the course of the attack.
Doing this works because attacks are rarely instantaneous; more
19 Schneier, 20 Ibid.,

p. 21 Ibid., p. 22 Ibid., p. 23 Ibid., p. 24 Ibid., p. 25 Ibid., p.

Beyond Fear, pp. 104-105. 122. 123. 123. 145. 146. 133.

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often, they involve multiple steps. Sometimes the best defense is to allow attackers to succeed a little bit, commit themselves, and only then to employ additional defenses. Think of a military compound with fences, motion sensors, and perimeter guards. What generally happens is that an attacker climbs the fence and trips the motion sensors. This alerts the guards, who react to the attack and repel the attacker, even though he has already reached the other side of the fence. Permitting the attacker to climb the fence is not catastrophic, because its not his rst step on his way to achieving his objective. After scaling the fence, he might then have to break into one of the buildings, then break into one of the ofces, and so on. Defenders make use of the lag time between the initial attack and the attacker achieving his objective.

The most cost-effective use of defensive resources, in this illustration, is [a]n adaptive defense that detects and responds to the attackers rst intermediate success, before he manages to do anything else.26 Reaction, as described here, is obviously relevant to the coordinated defense of an entire geographical area, in the face of incursions over a boundary line. Another component of a dynamic defense is mitigation, the portion of response that assumes failure and attempts to minimize the damage. In other words, [t]he system fails securely....27 Although mitigation can be used in coordination with the other components of an active defense, it is also closely relevant to our discussion later in this chapter of passive defense: designing overall structure to be less lucrative as a target set and less vulnerable to attack. Recovery is a form of mitigation, but after the attack is over. The idea is to enable the system to survive the attack.28 Redundant networks that can survive damage by rerouting trafc, infrastructures with easily replaceable or reparable components, and maintaining stockpiles of the most vital components, are all things that can contribute to recovery. Finally, counterattack can be a very effective form of defense.29 Counterattack, strictly speaking, is about retaliation. But since an attack takes place over time, a counterattack may involve enemy forces currently in action, and it may involve attacks on the enemys continued ability to conduct attacks in the future, the lines are blurred with response. But whatever the character of the successor system, as stated above it will be emergent rather than imposed, and at best only dimly imaginable to us. So our theoretical speculations on the general nature of the system as a whole are at an end. Of necessity the measures taken by small groups and localitiesour main concernwill be primarily passive, or focus mainly on risk and damage mitigation. Passive Defense. We saw above that the organization of active defense against outside attack, in an age of what Eric Raymond called insupportable
26 Ibid., 27 Ibid.,

pp. 168-169. p. 170. 28 Ibid., p. 171. 29 Ibid., p. 173.

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complexity, will require defensive organizations that are decentralized and hardened. Empowered last-mile networks will be central to thwarting attacks. But perhaps an even more important arena for decentralizing and hardening will be the overall society, insofar as it constitutes a target, to make its utilities, distribution chains, communications networks, etc., more robust and resilient. Insupportable complexity is not simply an impediment to effective response to an attack. It is a force-multiplier for the attack itself. The more centralized an infrastructure, and the greater its complexity, the more damage the entire systemand its subcomponentswill suffer in an attack. John Robb makes the following observations mainly in the context of the inability of a large-scale system to respond effectively to an attack: Too Big. Simply, the systems scale is far beyond the ability of nationstates, or a community of nation-states, to manage when it suffers a breakdown. In the case of the current nancial collapse, the global shadow banking system (a globally inter-networked collection of unregulated nancial products) is approximately $450 trillion, as compared to a US GDP of $15 trillion or a global GDP of $60 trillion. Put another way, the nancial liabilities of the highly leveraged Deutsche Bank are 80% of Germanys GDP and Barclays liabilities are 100% of the UKs GDP. As the leverage underlying the shadow banking system unwinds and more banks fail, the scale of the loses experienced will rapidly exceed nation-state budgets. Too Fast. The speed at which shocks spread in this globally interconnected system is faster than the response time of governmental institutions (tight coupling). In this nancial crisis, the cascade of failure in the system spreads at the speed of information networks and computer automation in trillion dollar increments. The upshot is that the governments impacted will likely take hasty measures, like the 3 page Paulson plan in the US, without the analysis, orientation, or synthesis necessary to produce high quality results. Too Complex. The systems function is beyond understanding. This is due to a lack of data (opacity either due to the nature of the system or by design as in the shadow banking system), the number of variables or connected systems, a lack of long term historical data on its operation in its current conguration, etc. The result is that efforts to mitigate the systems excesses produces pyrrhic victories (where the corrective action produces negative outcomes, like how efforts to ramp biofuel production impacted food prices). Worse, due to the systems complexity and the lack of an effective means to address its excesses, we are reduced to treating symptoms of failure (as with the Paulson plan) and even then under violent debate.30
30 John Robb, Systemic Shocks, Global Guerrillas, October 1, <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2008/10/systemic-shocks.html>.

2008

381 But the comments apply equally well to the immediate damage caused by the attack itself. The damage from an attack varies in proportion to the complexity of the system. When most of the functional resources of a system are located in the centralized infrastructure rather than in the endpoints, a large attack on the system will result in the end-points being submerged in the tsunami along with the entire system. The wave, as Robb says, breaks at the speed of communications and with a force of multi-trillions of dollars. There is no harbor or breakwater to absorb the force of the attack because the entire system is one big pool. And because the system isnt scalable, a localized collection of nodes cannot function effectively if the back of the centralized infrastructure is broken, because they dont contain the infrastructure they need to function autonomously. An attack on the system will take all the local nodes down with it. In a distributed, scalable system, on the other hand, in which most functional resources are located in the endpoints on a modular basis, an attack on the infrastructure cannot destroy or incapacitate the endpoints. The basic functional infrastructure is replicated in each separate node, just as all the information in an image is encoded at each point of a hologram; so the only way to destroy all the endpoints is to attack them all separately. [Kohr on harbors in The Overdeveloped Nations] The question is not how to organize a defense most effectively in an environment of unsupportable complexity, but how to organize society itself so that an active defense is less necessary, failures of the rst line of defense are less catastrophic, and society can absorb a greater number of attacks without suffering unacceptable levels of damage. Rather than focusing on how to thwart an attack, the idea should be to make society less vulnerable to a successful attack when it does occur (along with the concurrent benet of decentralization, which is to reduce the prole of the highest-prole targets and shift to a wider distribution of lower-value targets in order to make an attack less protable). That means basing security not only on the organization of active defense itself, but on the target structure of civil society. That means a larger number of lower-prole targets and an increase in the resilience and robustness of communications, power and other utility networks. When centralized security systems are no longer subsidized by taxes, society will recongure itself to make itself less dependent on them. As John Robb put it:
Because we are unable to decapitate, outsmart, or defend ourselves against global guerrillas, naturally occurring events, and residual nationalism from causing cascades of failure throughout the global system, we need to learn to live with the threat they present. As we have already seen, this doesnt mean an activist foreign policy that seeks to rework the world in our image, police state measures to ensure state security, or spending all of our resources on protecting everything. It does mean the adoption of a philosophy of resilience that ensures that when these events do occur (and they will), we can more easily survive their impact. By building resilience into the fabric of our daily life, our response to these threats will organically emerge in what seems like an effort-

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less way. Without them, we will suffer the effects of dynamic shocks on a brittle system.31

By way of analogy, the scal resources available for nancing police services from general revenues will probably decline. The likely response is not only decentralized, self-organized security services like neighborhood watches, but also common sense things like using hedges, alarms and spotlights to make houses less attractive to burglars, avoiding high-crime areas at night, being more watchful in public places, and the like. We already discussed the general likelihood that the demonstrated brittleness and periodic breakdown of various centralized public infrastructures would either cause those infrastructures to decentralize and harden in self-defense, or cause those served by them to switch to decentralized and hardened alternatives. Robb makes the same argument regarding passive security in particular. The strikes of the future will be strategic,
pinpointing the systems we rely on, and they will leave entire sections of the country without energy and communications for protracted periods. But the frustration and economic pain that result will have a curious side effect: they will spur development of an entirely new, decentralized security system, one that devolves power and responsibility to a mix of local governments, private companies, and individuals.... Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already.32

Of course he tips his hat to the clich, familiar to readers of cyberpunk dystopias, of the corporate super-rich living in gated communities. But more important (especially given that the corporate super-rich will likely be a dwindling presence when their means of rent extraction collapse),
[m]embers of the middle class will follow, taking matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of securityas they now do with educationand shore up delivery of critical services. These armored suburbs will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency-response systems.... ...Cities, which will be the most acutely affected by the new disruptions, will move fastest to become self-reliant, drawing from a wellspring of new ideas the market will put forward. These will range from building-based solar systems by rms such as Energy Innovations to privatized disaster and counterterrorist responses.... Corporate communications monopolies will crumble as cities build their own emergency wireless networks using simple products from companies such as Proxim.... Perhaps the most important global shift will be the rise of grassroots action and cross-connected communities. Like the Internet, these
31 John 32 Ibid.,

Robb, Brave New War, p. 183. p. 185.

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new networks will develop slowly at rst. After a brief period of exponential growth, however, they will quickly become all but ubiquitous and astonishingly powerful, perhaps as powerful as the networks arrayed against us.33

In the specic example of the electric power grid, Robb proposes to decentralize it and make it less dependent on central high-value nodes. To do this, he suggests making the power system two-way by allow[ing] any individual on the network to become both a producer and a consumer of electricity, and making it plug-dumb so that any small-scale local power generator can sell power to the system simply by plugging into it. The power companies should cease to be primarily the producers of power, and instead become managers of transmission networks connecting producers and consumers. The transmission networks should be opened to outside service providers that provide value-added services, like conditioning power and storing power locally for resiliency against blackouts.34 The Stateless Society as the Ultimate in Passive Defense. In some ways a stateless society represents an ideal in its lack of prominent targets. Its an example of what Schneier calls compartmentalization, in his discussion of defense in depth. If rather than capturing a system as a whole by concentration of force at a strategic vulnerable point, it must capture each point separately, conquest becomes a lot more complicated and costly.35 [Tom Nevins work on Apache. Intro to Helge Ingstad, The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)] In contrast to the Aztecs, who despite an advanced state with centralized controls fell quickly to the Spanish, the Apache successfully wrested control of North Mexico from the Spanish. By the late seventeenth century, the Spanish had lost effective control of northern Sonora and Chihuahua to the Apaches.36 The Apache were able to stave off conquest for centuries because [t]hey distributed political power and had very little centralization.37 The Apache fought wars on something like a p2p basis. An ad hoc, charismatic leader called the Nantan, who had no institutional basis for his authority, would take up arms and lead by example. Geronimo, for example, simply declared war and was joined by volunteers. As described by Brafman and Beckstrom, based on their interview with Nevins:
The idea was, If Geronimo is taking arms, maybe its a good idea. Geronimos been right in the past, so it makes sense to ght alongside him. You wanted to follow Geronimo? You followed Geronimo. You didnt want to follow him? They you didnt. The power lay with each individual.... The Nantans were crucial to the well-being of this open system,
pp. 185-188. p. 175. 35 Schneier, Beyond Fear, p. 105. 36 Nevins interview with by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, quoted in Brafman and Beckstrom, The Starsh and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Portfolio, 2006), p. 18. 37 Ibid., p. 19.
34 Ibid., 33 Ibid.,

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but decentralization affects more than just leadership. Because there was no capital and no central command post, Apache decisions were made all over the place. A raid on a Spanish settlement, for example, could be conceived in one place, organized in another, and carried on in yet another. You never knew where the Apaches would be coming from. In one sense, there was no place where important decisions were made, and in another sense, decisions were made by everybody everywhere.38

When the Spanish killed or captured a Nantan, a new one emerged. The conventional strategy for defeating a state failed in the case of the Apaches because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society.39 The Spanish attempt at conquest failed because there was no one person or node whose capture would effectively disable the system, and no central point of control with the authority to surrender on behalf of the Apache nation. Disaster Relief. Most people are familiar with the mainstream news medias framing of federal disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Katrinathe sheer incompetence and disorganization of FEMAs response, Bushs hands-off approach, etc.even if they dont realize the sheer scale of incompetence. But what theyre not familiar with is the hostility of government, at all levels, to attempts by New Orleans residents to mitigate the disaster to themselves, and to outside relief efforts organized without government authorization. Not only did the state not recognize or support open-source, self-organized relief efforts after Katrina; as we shall see below, it actively suppressed them. Government may have been lax about such things as evacuating the population or getting the enormous stockpiles of trailers to where they were needed. But it was comparatively effective in directing resources to its genuine priorities: protecting food and clean water supplies in abandoned stores from looting by the hungry and thirsty, and maintaining armed checkpoints to turn away refugees attempting to escape the city. Police put a great deal of effort in deterring looters from accessing supplies of safe food and wateralmost all of which retailers would have to write off as a loss anyway.
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the citys historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and ed the city. Outside Walgreens windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The muchpromised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an
38 Ibid., 39 Ibid.,

pp. 20-21. p. 21.

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organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.40

While uniformed public safety ofcers dropped the ball, the real heroes of Katrinaalmost completely ignored by media coveragewere the ordinary people who made extraordinary efforts to help one another.
What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Renery workers who broke into boat yards, stealing boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in ood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded. Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.41

Ordinary residents and tourists carried out their self-organized rescue efforts in the face, not only of ofcial indifference, but of ofcial hostility. Consider this account of the ofcial response to a self-organized evacuation effort by hundreds of tourists and conference attendees staying at hotels in the French Quarter:
ON DAY Two, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them. We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the city. Those who didnt have the requisite $45 each were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food and clothes we had.
40 Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, Trapped in New Orleans, Counterpunch, September 6, 2005. 41 Bradshaw and Slonsky, Trapped in New Orleans.

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We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the imminent arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military. By Day Four, our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that ofcials had told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we nally encountered the National Guard. The guard members told us we wouldnt be allowed into the Superdome, as the citys primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us that the citys only other shelterthe convention centerwas also descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police werent allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, If we cant go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative? The guards told us that this was our problemand no, they didnt have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile law enforcement." *** WE WALKED to the police command center at Harrahs on Canal Street and were told the same thingthat we were on our own, and no, they didnt have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city ofcials. The police told us that we couldnt stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city. The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, I swear to you that the buses are there." We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didnt dampen our enthusiasm.

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As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began ring their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd eeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and the commanders assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move. We questioned why we couldnt cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little trafc on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans. *** OUR SMALL group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expresswayon the center divide, between the OKeefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet-to-be-seen buses. All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned awaysome chased away with gunre, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot. Meanwhile, the only two city shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become. Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Lets hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Nowsecure with these two necessities, food and watercooperation, community and creativity owered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!). This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to ght to nd food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to nd water for

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your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community. If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the rst two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in. Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people. From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations [sic] saw us on their way into the city. Ofcials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The ofcials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. Taking care of us had an ominous tone to it. Unfortunately, our sinking feeling... was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, Get off the fucking freeway. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our imsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of victims, they saw mob or riot. We felt safety in numbers. Our we must stay together attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups. [Emphasis added] In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and denitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies. [Emphasis added] The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.42

To add insult to injury, police invaded self-organized neighborhood shelters with the demeanor of soldiers securing a neighborhood in occupied enemy country. Allen Sarge Smith, a Gulf War veteran who remembered his school being used as a neighborhood shelter after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, organized a group of forty residents on the second and third oors of the Samuel J. Green school. Among them were housebound elderly rescued from their homes. The residents were maintained in relative comfort with canned food and bottled water, blankets and a radio, and organized board games to pass the time. In addition, Smith and other volunteers made regular trips to take food and water to elderly
42 Bradshaw

and Slonsky, Trapped in New Orleans.

389 residents still in their homes.

Clad in a white apron and plastic gloves, Greg Avery, a 53-year-old photographer on normal days, scooped hot beans onto a plate. Sierra Smith, an 8-year-old boasting a head of perfectly combed ponytails, handed them out to her neighbors with a smile. She had been Averys helper all weekbetween card games of Old Maid and Crazy Eights with her grandmother. She arrived at the school with her mother, grandmother and grandfather. Her mother was airlifted earlier in the week, to nd lost relatives. Sierra could have gone with her, but she wanted to stay with her grandmother and the community of exiles in the school. "I eat food, I play games, I have fun here and I have people to take care of me, she said. I get to pick out my own clothes and I take a bath every day, with some water and baby wipes and lotion and powder." None of that mattered to the ofcers who nally showed up, with the tact typical of unformed gun-toting thugs everywhere, to evacuate the building. A group of armed ofcers entered the school, demanding that everyone leave. The group included a couple of sheriffs deputies from New Mexico wielding M-16s, New Orleans police ofcers and some volunteers. The scene quickly turned chaotic. "They coming, they cussin, they got guns, Sierra whimpered, alerting a reporter. The authorities search the school, demanding everyone round up their possessions. "You have to leave now, an ofcer yelled at no one in particular. I cant believe you had this child in here like this. Lets go.".... When Anthion began to explain how the group had sustained elderly people in the community, the ofcer yelled: Shut up. I dont want to hear you talking [expletive] no more."... "The thing about this here is they are embarrassed, Sarge said. They all know we did a better job than [the shelters] did. We took care of ourselves. We survived."43

Self-organized evacuation attempts before the storm hit New Orleans, and unofcial attempts at evacuation or aid organized from outside, met with similar ofcial hostility. As we already saw, people attempting to distribute safe food and water supplies from retail stocksstocks that would be written off as lost in any casewere treated as looters by police enforcing a shoot to kill policy. New Orleans residents were prosecuted for commandeering empty schoolbuses from eets of such idle vehicles to evacuate refugees ahead of the stormsomething that apparently never occurred to government to do.
Malik Rahim addressed the audience with an analysis and an attitude that the mainstream corporate media refuses to transmit across its airwaves. He pointed out how Black doctors had been turned away from the devastated areas and how surrounding parishes had refused
43 Kelly Brewington, A do-it-ourselves shelter shines, Baltimore Sun, September 7, 2005 <http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.community07sep07,1,1097093,full.story>.

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to help the predominantly poor and Black communities of New Orleans. He pointed out the hypocrisy of the state, which employed a shoot-to-kill order for young black men looking for food, but permitted armed, white vigilantes to roam the streets of New Orleans. He revealed that there are many so-called looters who are still in jail for attempting to commandeer empty buses and transport people out of New Orleans. Many of these unjustly imprisoned individuals have yet to see their day in court.44

Consider the long list of outside volunteers who were turned away:
Wednesday, August 31, 2005... A group of doctors in Prince William County with experience in violence-racked international missions told FEMA that they were eager to send a team to hard-hit areas. FEMA passed them to the Red Cross, which said it referred them back to federal health ofcials. The group and its emergency medical trailer remain in Manassas as of 9/3. [WashingtonPost] A rescue team with 1000 citizens from Lafayette, LA with 500 boats and a police escort are turned away from the edge of new Orleans by FEMA. The group was organized by State Senator Nick Gautreaux and was composed of experienced shermen and outdoorsmen. The group then offered to evacuate people from hospitals but were ordered home by FEMA. They were then directed to a launch area where they watched over 200 FEMA controlled DWF agents stand around for several hours doing nothing. They were sent home that evening without being allowed to serve. [DailyKOS] Thursday, September 1, 2005 Three Duke University students, Hans Buder, Sonny Byrd and David Hankla, decided to help. They jumped in their Hyundai Allantra and drove to New Orleans. They had to forge press credentials to get past the National Guards but once past it only took 20 minutes to drive easily to the Super Dome where thousands awaited evacuation. Says Buder, We saw 150 empty buses driving the other way on I-10 as we were going into the city. In their video you can see one after another empty school bus on the freeway. Local ofcials cannot explain this. Federal ofcials said they were frantically looking for busses and couldnt nd them. This is documented in a CNN website video titled Duke students beat feds in aiding stranded victims published Sept 7, 2005. [CNN transcript] Twenty-two Loudoun County sheriffs deputies and six medical personnel leave for the New Orleans area but are turned away because of poor communication between military FEMA ofcials in Louisiana and Virginia that left the team without required approvals. The Loudoun deputies have shelved their mission until the bureaucratic wrangling has been resolved. [WashingtonPost] Uri Bar Zemer, owner of a satellite phone company in Rhode is44 ANSWER: October 23: Katrina survivors struggle for justice, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, October 24, 2005 <http://www2.answercoalition.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=6935>; Jeff Taylor, Jabbor Gibson, American Hero, Reason, September 2, 2005 <http://reason.com/blog/2005/09/02/jabbor-gibson-american-hero#010810>

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land, offered a satellite phone network capable of handling 5000 phone calls at once. The New Orleans Police and other agencies have been complaining that their work is seriously hampered by the complete lack of communications capability. Zemer has been unable to get permission as of 9/8, a week later. [CNN Video 9/8]... Saturday, September 3, 2005 U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La said I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the res raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate signicant numbers of victims far more efciently than buses FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to ow in, only to be ignored by the agency. [NewsChannel6].... Sunday September 4, 2005.... ....We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didnt need them.... Saturday September 10, 2005 It didnt take long for Bush to begin handing out cash to his cronies. Shaw Group and Halliburton have already received over $100M for reconstruction. Both companies have close ties to the White House. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton between 1995 and 2000 when he left for the White House..... Meanwhile, construction workers who live in New Orleans are being evacuated against their will. [CNN]45

Add this to the list: ve hundred Florida airboat pilots who volunteered to help evacuate refugees, but were turned away by ofcials.46 The same thing happened more recently. Consider Mike Haeges surreal experience in Minneapolis, following a tornado there:
On the news he saw trees strewn about lawns and streets. Then inspiration struck. He wanted to help. His schedule for Monday, May 23, was wide open. And, since he operates Custom Cut, a tree trimming business here, he gured his services could be put to good use.

I thought it would be the perfect chance to help, he said. I knew there would be people needing help.
...By 10:30 a.m. Monday, he was signing paperwork with the Urban League to be a volunteer. He signed a waiver, hopped back into his truck and headed off to help out. The Urban Homeworks sent along a couple volunteers with him, too. Tree trimmers who work in Minneapolis need to be licensed with the city. Its a regulation in place throughout many cities, and something Haege knows all about. Hes licensed in Hastings and several area cities. Since he doesnt work in Minneapolis, he isnt licensed there. All that was moot, of course. He was just going to volunteer and was not charging residents for his services.
45 Hurricane Katrina Timeline, ImpeachBush.tv <http://www.impeachbush.tv/news/katrina_timeline.html>. 46 Nancy Imperiale, Airboaters stalled by FEMA, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 2, 2005 <http://web.archive.org/web/20050907092719/http://www.sunsentinel.com/news/local/orida/orl-caneboats0205sep02,0,4766048.story>.

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He had brought a bucket truck to get high if needed, and he brought a wood chipper to dispose of fallen trees. He and the volunteers got to work on homes where the resident didnt have insurance. We were removing stuff so people could get out of their driveways and out of their doors, he said. The place was a pretty big disaster. What happened next shocked Haege. A city inspector arrived at the scene. She told Haege he had to leave. Immediately. You have to leave right now, the inspector told Haege. Youre not licensed to be here. I said, Im just a volunteer, and she didnt believe me. Haege went back to his truck and got his volunteer paperwork. Still, that did little to get the inspector off his back. I dont want to see you up here, she told him.... A volunteer from the Urban Homeworks, who had been with Haege since he signed up to volunteer that morning, did his best to convince the inspector that Haege wasnt charging for his services. Residents then came out of their doors in his defense, telling the inspector that he had just performed work at their house and hadnt charged them a dime. Still, the defense fell on deaf ears. The inspector told him to get out of the city, so Haege left with the volunteer. As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them. Haege had no idea police ofcers were behind him in a sort of unofcial escort out of town. He said they stopped trafc for about two hours while they gured out what to do with him. At one point, ofcers threatened to throw him in jail, he said. All the while, residents continued defending him, screaming in his defense. Ofcers told him to leave. They told him he was going to receive a hefty ne in the mail, and that if he stopped on the way out, the ne would be doubled.47 The citys damage control response to the second storm of bad publicity was better coordinated than its response to damage from the tornado. According to the City of Minneapolis, Hastings tree trimmer Mike Haege was asked to leave the citys tornado-damaged areas because he was performing work in unsafe areas. It was a very dangerous situation, said Henry Reimer, the citys assistant director of regulatory services. Mr. Haege was found in unapproved zones on two occasions, and warned twice to go back to the area that had been cleared to resume his volunteer work there. He failed to heed those warnings twice. Reimer understands the city looks like the bad guys for kicking out a volunteer, but said that such steps are necessary to ensure everyone is safe.

47 Chad Richardson, Kicked out for doing good: Hastings man who volunteered on scene of north Minneapolis tornado was thrown out, The Hastings Star-Gazette,

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We very much appreciate the spirit of volunteerism and help, and that our community comes together in times of need, he said. Those are all very good things.... We did have downed, live, electrical wires. Tree cutting is a dangerous activity, and its fantastic that people want to help, but volunteers have to follow the directions.... Reimer said Urban Homeworks had designated an area for Haege to work in, and he wasnt within those boundaries when approached by the city inspector. Ben Post, the associate director with Urban Homeworks, said Haege was working in a zone that hadnt been cleared yet by the city and the police.... All of this is news to Haege. He said he was out trying to help and went to the location drawn on the back of the map provided by Urban Homeworks. He hadnt heard anything about potential safety concerns until Thursday of this week, when the story started to spread [emphasis added]. He is working this week in another state and has limited access to his phone and the internet. He said he was stopped initially because he didnt have a permit, and that the inspector didnt believe that he was doing the work for free. He also contends the zones that were off limits werent marked well, so determining what was an approved zone and what wasnt was challenging. He said the entire matter began when he was in an approved zone and while he was with a staff member from Urban Homeworks named Vinny. After being asked to leave, he was driving to drop off Vinny, and thats when he was agged down by residents who had a tree blocking their driveway. He got out to help, not knowing, he said, that he was now in a restricted zone. Police stopped him there, too. His wife Kari spoke on his behalf today. I believe the city is trying to save face after the mayors ofce was bombarded with emails regarding Mikes character and motives for helping, Kari Haege said. They had to nd another excuse....48

The New Orleans pattern is typical in disasters throughout history, according to Jesse Walker. Self-organized relief and recovery efforts have typically dwarfed state contributions, and the vast majority of the rescues [were] accomplished by the real rst respondersthe victims themselves. When an earthquake hit Tanghsan, China, in 1976, it was probably the worst peacetime disaster of the century, Dr. Erik Auf der Heide, a medical ofcer with the Centers for Disease Control, writes in his contribution to the 2004 book The First 72 Hours: A Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness. About 250,000 people were killed, and almost every building in the city was destroyedbut 200,000 to 300,000 victims rescued themselves and then carried out 80% of the rescue of others. Such
48 Chad Richardson, City of Minneapolis says Hastings volunteer trimmer was in unsafe area, The Hastings Star-Gazette, June 3, <http://www.hastingsstargazette.com/event/article/id/25043/>.

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CHAPTER 11. OPEN SOURCE NATIONAL SECURITY proportions were neither an aberration nor peculiar to earthquakes: Auf der Heide cites similar patterns following ash oods, tornadoes, and a deadly gas explosion.

The Kobe quake of 1995, which killed 6,279 people, produced a reaction that wasto quote Emergency Response: Lessons Learned from the Kobe Earthquake, a 1997 paper by Kathleen Tierney and James D. Goltz"without precedent in Japanese society. Although volunteerism isnt nearly as widespread in Japan as it is in the United States, most search and rescue was undertaken by community residents; ofciallydesignated rescue agencies such as re departments and the Self Defense Forces were responsible for recovering at most one quarter of those trapped in collapsed structures. Spontaneous volunteering and emergent group activity were very widespread throughout the emergency period; community residents provided a wide range of goods and services to their fellow earthquake victims, and large numbers of people traveled from other parts of the country to offer aid. Quarantelli says there wasnt a single authenticated case of looting. After the San Francisco quake of 1989, Stewart Brand wrote in Whole Earth Review that Volunteer rescuers in San Franciscos Marina District...outnumbered professionals three-to-one during the critical rst few hours. (Although, he added, it still wasnt enough.") According to Auf der Heide, most of the tremors fatalities followed the collapse of the Cypress Expresswayand the rescue operation that followed was led by self-organizing volunteers. These volunteers, coming from residences and businesses in the neighborhood or passing by on the street and freeway, performed some of the rst rescues of trapped motorists, the Oakland Fire Department acknowledged in its earthquake report. Using makeshift ladders, ropes, and even the trees planted beside the freeway, these volunteers scrambled up onto the broken structure to render rst aid and help the injured and dazed to safety."49 Despite the popular image of looting and assault and a generally Hobbesian reversion to the war of all against all, the tendency toward cooperation and mutual aid also generally dwarfs anti-social behavior. After the cataclysm, Walker wrote, social bonds will strengthen, volunteerism will explode, violence will be rare, looting will appear only under exceptional circumstances.... The exceptions to the rule tend to be cases in which social cohesion was largely absent at the outset. Walker cited sociologist E. L. Quarantelli, a cofounder of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware:
When looting does occur, most of it is done covertly by individuals or small groups snatching something when they think no ones looking, not by mobs acting openly. According to Quarantelli, research has revealed only four American exceptions: during the blackout of 77; in
49 Jesse Walker, Nightmare in New Orleans, Reason, September <http://reason.com/archives/2005/09/07/ nightmare-in-new-orleans/print>.

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St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands following 1989s Hurricane Hugo; in and around Homestead, Florida, after 1992s Hurricane Andrew; and in New Orleans this year. What happened after Hugo seemed so unusual that Quarantelli visited the island three times to investigate the chain of events. If youve been following the news from New Orleans, the variables at work in St. Croix should sound familiar. First, its a tourist area, and one thing that stood out is that the tourists that come there are very wealthy while the native population is very, very poor. Second, theres an underclass that engages in a lot of petty crime, and it includes juvenile gangs who launched the looting and in a sense were simply acting on a larger scale than they normally do. Third, the police department was ineffective, corrupt, and full of nepotism, and many ofcers joined in the larceny themselves. Put those factors together with the massive impact of the hurricane and the relative isolation of the island, and you had a recipe for riots. Indeed, while events in New York, St. Croix, Homestead, and New Orleans differ radically from the usual behavior seen after catastrophes, they do resemble the sort of angry urban disorder that emerges not from without but from within. In riots, says Quarantelli, looting is overt, its socially supported, its engaged in by almost everyone, and also its targeted looting, in the sense that people break into alcohol stores and drug stores and things of that kind. That, he discovered, is what happened in St. Croix; and it essentially occurred in the other three examples as well. You could make the argument, he says of the 77 blackout, that what happened there was less a technological disaster than simply the breakout of another riot": another Watts in another long, hot summer. The disparity between 77 and 65 reected different social and economic conditions, just as St. Croix broke out in looting while other places battered by HugoPuerto Rico, the Carolinasmaintained social order. And even in these exceptional cases, cooperative behavior still far outweighed anti-social: "But even thats got to be put in context, Quarantelli concludes. When all is said and done, while people paid attention to the looting and it certainly did occur, the pro-social behavior [in St. Croix] far outweighed the anti-social behavior. In fact, in every disaster hes studied, the height of the emergency is when people are nicest to one another. In St. Croix, residents rescued their neighbors, gave shelter to the homeless, and shared their supplies; even the looting itself was often a matter of desperate but nonviolent citizens taking survival necessities, not gangs seizing luxury goods. (Its not even clear that its properly theft to take, say, food thats bound to spoil before its owner can return to reclaim it.) Rumors of murders, armed robbery, and the like generally turned out to be unveried, exaggerated, or simply inaccurate. In New Orleans there have been some genuine rst-hand accounts of violent assaults, but as Matt Welch has reported in Reason, the rumor mill has been working overtime as well. Meanwhile, were also

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starting to hear stories of spontaneous cooperation on the ground -notably the heroic tales of Deamonte Love, the six-year-old boy who led ve toddlers and a baby out of the ood zone, and Jabbar Gibson, the young man who commandeered an abandoned school bus, drove it to Houston with around 100 people aboard, and arrived there well in advance of the ofcial convoy. Neighbors saved neighbors from the rising waters, volunteers patrolled their communities, and evacuees who owned vehicles gave lifts to people who didnt. Quarantelli is almost certain well learn that such cooperation and initiative greatly outnumbered the widely reported thefts.

[Scott Crow on Katrina] Keith McHenry, a participant in the Food Not Bombs operation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, describes his experience at the site:
I helped coordinate the Food Not Bombs relief effort after Katrina. The out pouring of support was wonderful. Our ofce was ooded with calls and emails from Food Not Bombs volunteers and supporters wanting to help. I had about four hours of sleep each night for the rst eight months after Katrina. As you may know we organized kitchens in about 20 cities and worked closely with Common Ground in setting up kitchens in New Orleans. Chuck Munson helped us by listing our www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html site on his website.50

[Cf. Kropotkin on suppression of self-organized mutual aid, all forms of intermediate association] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt. STARTIDE. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/10/fastcheap-and/] When Our State Colludes with the Foreign Enemy. As in previous sections of the book, we nd ourselves confronted not only with the question of how a stateless society would cope with malfeasance by actors against which the state allegedly protects us, but how a stateless society can protect us when the state actually colludes with such actors. The question of who guards the guardians seems to keep coming up again and again. Consider, for example, the various Middle Eastern states whose governments secretly collude with United States foreign policy against the overwhelming sentiment of their own populations. [Wikileaks exposures re Saudi Arabia, Yemen]. Wikileaks is not the only major player engaged in open-mouth sabotage of such government duplicity. The so-called Palestine Papers, a cache of 1600 or so internal documents of the Palestinian Authority from a decade of negotiations with Israel, were leaked by an inside party to Al Jazeera. They expose endless cases of secret collusion with Israel by the Authoritys representatives, such as offering to give a way huge tracts of the West Bank on which illegal Israeli settlements currently sit, and offering to cede most of East Jerusalem to Israel.51 [Draft last modied January 20, 2012]
McHenry, personal email, December 25, 2011. Carlstrom, Introducing the Palestine Papers, The Palestine PapersAl Jazeera English, January 23, 2010 <http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112214310263628.html>.
51 Greg 50 Keith

397 Appendix 1 Diebold and Sinclair Media: Two Case Studies in Informational Warfare The power of self-organized informational warfare to perform the functions traditionally reserved to the regulatory state was demonstrated by two campaigns in 2003 and 2004. The rst was the informational campaign against Diebold, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines.
Electronic voting machines were rst used to a substantial degree in the United States in the November 2002 elections. Prior to, and immediately following that election, there was sparse mass-media coverage of electronic voting machines. The emphasis was mostly on the newness, occasional slips, and the availability of technical support staff to help at polls.... Given the centrality of voting mechanisms for democracy, the deep concerns that voting irregularities determined the 2000 presidential elections, and the sense that voting machines would be a solution to the hanging chads problem (the imperfectly punctured paper ballots that came to symbolize the Florida asco during that election), mass-media reports were remarkably devoid of any serious inquiry into how secure and accurate voting machines were, and included a high quotient of soothing comments from election ofcials who bought the machines and executives of the manufacturers who sold them. No mass-media outlet sought to go behind the claims of the manufacturers about their machines, to inquire into their security or the integrity of their tallying and transmission mechanisms against vote tampering. No doubt doing so would have been difcult. These systems were protected as trade secrets. State governments charged with certifying the systems were bound to treat what access they had to the inner workings as condential. Analyzing these systems requires high degrees of expertise in computer security. Getting around these barriers is difcult. However, it turned out to be feasible for a collection of volunteers in various settings and contexts on the Net. In late January 2003, Bev Harris, an activist focused on electronic voting machines, was doing research on Diebold, which has provided more than 75,000 voting machines in the United States and produced many of the machines used in Brazils purely electronic voting system. Harris had set up a whistle-blower site as part of a Web site she ran at the time, blackboxvoting.com. Apparently working from a tip, Harris found out about an openly available site where Diebold stored more than forty thousand les about how its system works. These included specications for, and the actual code of, Diebolds machines and vote-tallying system. In early February 2003, Harris published two initial journalistic accounts on an online journal in New Zealand, Scoop.comwhose business model includes providing an unedited platform for commentators who wish to use it as a platform to publish their materials. She also set up a space on her Web site for technically literate users to comment on the les she had retrieved. In early July of that year, she published an analysis of the results of the discussions on her site, which pointed out how access to the Diebold open site

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could have been used to affect the 2002 election results in Georgia (where there had been a tightly contested Senate race). In an editorial attached to the publication, entitled Bigger than Watergate, the editors of Scoop claimed that what Harris had found was nothing short of a mechanism for capturing the U.S. elections process. They then inserted a number of lines that go to the very heart of how the networked information economy can use peer production to play the role of watchdog:

We can now reveal for the rst time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of these les and to make them available on websites and le sharing networks: http:// users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/. As many of the les are zip password protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available at the following URL works well: http://www.lostpassword.com. Finally some of the zip les are partially damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at: http://www.zip-repair.com/. At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data; i.e., there is no reason to believe that the security aws discovered so far are the only ones. Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we encourage you to le your ndings at the forum HERE [providing link to forum].
A number of characteristics of this call to arms would have been simply infeasible in the mass-media environment. They represent a genuinely different mind-set about how news and analysis are produced and how censorship and power are circumvented. First, the ubiquity of storage and communications capacity means that public discourse can rely on see for yourself rather than on trust me. The rst move, then, is to make the raw materials available for all to see. Second, the editors anticipated that the company would try to suppress the information. Their response was not to use a counterweight of the economic and public muscle of a big media corporation to protect use of the materials. Instead, it was widespread distribution of informationabout where the les could be found, and about where tools to crack the passwords and repair bad les could be foundmatched with a call for action: get these les, copy them, and store them in many places so they cannot be squelched. Third, the editors did not rely on large sums of money owing from being a big media organization to hire experts and interns to scour the les. Instead, they posed a challenge to whoever was interestedthere are more scoops to be found, this is important for democracy, good hunting!! Finally, they offered a platform for integration of the insights on their own forum. This short paragraph outlines a mechanism for radically distributed storage, distribution, analysis, and reporting on the Diebold les. As the story unfolded over the next few months, this basic model of peer production of investigation, reportage, analysis, and commu-

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nication indeed worked. It resulted in the decertication of some of Diebolds systems in California, and contributed to a shift in the requirements of a number of states, which now require voting machines to produce a paper trail for recount purposes.... Meanwhile, trouble was brewing elsewhere for Diebold. In early August 2003, someone provided Wired magazine with a very large cache containing thousands of internal e-mails of Diebold. Wired reported that the e-mails were obtained by a hacker, emphasizing this as another example of the laxity of Diebolds security. However, the magazine provided neither an analysis of the e-mails nor access to them. Bev Harris, the activist who had originally found the Diebold materials, on the other hand, received the same cache, and posted the e-mails and memos on her site. Diebolds response was to threaten litigation. Claiming copyright in the e-mails, the company demanded from Harris, her Internet service provider, and a number of other sites where the materials had been posted, that the e-mails be removed. The e-mails were removed from these sites, but the strategy of widely distributed replication of data and its storage in many different topological and organizationally diverse settings made Diebolds efforts ultimately futile. The protagonists from this point on were college students. First, two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and quickly students in a number of other universities in the United States, began storing the e-mails and scouring them for evidence of impropriety. In October 2003, Diebold proceeded to write to the universities whose students were hosting the materials. The company invoked provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that require Web-hosting companies to remove infringing materials when copyright owners notify them of the presence of these materials on their sites. The universities obliged, and required the students to remove the materials from their sites. The students, however, did not disappear quietly into the night. On October 21, 2003, they launched a multipronged campaign of what they described as electronic civil disobedience. First, they kept moving the les from one student to anothers machine, encouraging students around the country to resist the efforts to eliminate the material. Second, they injected the materials into FreeNet, the anticensorship peer-to-peer publication network, and into other peer-to-peer le-sharing systems, like eDonkey and BitTorrent. Third, supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the primary civil-rights organizations concerned with Internet freedom, the students brought suit against Diebold, seeking a judicial declaration that their posting of the materials was privileged. They won both the insurgent campaign and the formal one. As a practical matter, the materials remained publicly available throughout this period. As a matter of law, the litigation went badly enough for Diebold that the company issued a letter promising not to sue the students. The court nonetheless awarded the students damages and attorneys fees because it found that Diebold had knowingly and materially misrepresented that the publication of the e-mail archive was a copyright violation in its letters to the Internet service providers.

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Central from the perspective of understanding the dynamics of the networked public sphere is not, however, the court case... but the efcacy of the students continued persistent publication in the teeth of the cease-and-desist letters and the willingness of the universities to comply. The strategy of replicating the les everywhere made it impracticable to keep the documents from the public eye..... The structure of public inquiry, debate, and collective action exemplied by this story is fundamentally different from the structure of public inquiry and debate in the mass-media-dominated public sphere of the twentieth century. The initial investigation and analysis was done by a committed activist, operating on a low budget and with no nancing from a media company. The output of this initial inquiry was not a respectable analysis by a major player in the public debate. It was access to raw materials and initial observations about them, available to start a conversation. Analysis then emerged from a widely distributed process undertaken by Internet users of many different types and abilities. In this case, it included academics studying electronic voting systems, activists, computer systems practitioners, and mobilized students. When the pressure from a well-nanced corporation mounted, it was not the prestige and money of a Washington Post or a New York Times that protected the integrity of the information and its availability for public scrutiny. It was the radically distributed cooperative efforts of students and peer-to-peer network users around the Internet..... There was no single orchestrating powerneither party nor professional commercial media outlet. There was instead a series of uncoordinated but mutually reinforcing actions by individuals in different settings and contexts, operating under diverse organizational restrictions and affordances, to expose, analyze, and distribute criticism and evidence for it.... Instead of iconic representation built on the scarcity of time slots and space on the air or on the page, we see the emergence of a see for yourself culture. Access to underlying documents and statements, and to the direct expression of the opinions of others, becomes a central part of the medium.52

The other was the boycott campaign against Sinclair Media for its airing of an anti-Kerry documentary shortly before the 2004 election, and Sinclairs unsuccessful attempt to suppress the boycott through legal action.
Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 electionincluding Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowainformed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections. The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerrys Vietnam War service.... The story of Sinclairs plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, ofcial responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as
52 Benkler,

The Wealth of Networks, pp. 226-233.

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an undeclared in-kind contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was ling a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode. Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogsJosh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo. com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A boycottSinclair site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs. Chris Bowers on MyDD provided a complete list of Sinclair stations and urged people to call the stations and threaten to picket and boycott. By Sunday, October 10, the dailyKos posted a list of national advertisers with Sinclair, urging readers to call them. On Monday, October 11, MyDD linked to that list, while another blog, theleftcoaster.com, posted a variety of action agenda items, from picketing afliates of Sinclair to suggesting that readers oppose Sinclair license renewals, providing a link to the FCC site explaining the basic renewal process and listing public-interest organizations to work with. That same day, another individual, Nick Davis, started a Web site, BoycottSBG.com, on which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers was the way to go.... Later on Monday, TalkingPoints posted a letter from a reader who suggested that stockholders of Sinclair could bring a derivative action. By 5:00 a.m. on the dawn of Tuesday, October 12, however, TalkingPoints began pointing toward Daviss database on BoycottSBG.com. By 10:00 that morning, Marshall posted on TalkingPoints a letter from an anonymous reader.... This reader... outlined a plan for how to watch and list all local advertisers, and then write to the sales managersnot general managersof the local stations and tell them which advertisers you are going to call, and then call those.... By the morning of Wednesday, October 13, the boycott database already included eight hundred advertisers, and was providing sample letters for users to send to advertisers. Later that day, BoycottSBG reported that some participants in the boycott had received reply e-mails telling them that their unsolicited e-mail constituted illegal spam. Davis explained that the CANSPAM Act, the relevant federal statute, applied only to commercial spam, and pointed users to a law rm site that provided an overview of CANSPAM. By October 14, the boycott effort was clearly bearing fruit. Davis reported that Sinclair afliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled advertisements with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. Within a brief

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period, he collected more than a dozen volunteers to help the advertisers. Later that day, another blogger at grassroots nation.com had set up a utility that allowed users to send an e-mail to all advertisers in the BoycottSBG database. By the morning of Friday, October 15, Davis was reporting more than fty advertisers pulling ads, and three or four mainstream media reports had picked up the boycott story and reported on it. That day, an analyst at Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. Mainstream news reports over the weekend and the following week systematically placed that report in context of local advertisers pulling their ads from Sinclair. On Monday, October 18, the companys stock price dropped by 8 percent (while the S&P 500 rose by about half a percent). The following morning, the stock dropped a further 6 percent, before beginning to climb back, as Sinclair announced that it would not show Stolen Honor, but would provide a balanced program with only portions of the documentary and one that would include arguments on the other side. On that day, the companys stock price had reached its lowest point in three years. The day after the announced change in programming decision, the share price bounced back to where it had been on October 15....53

[Last modied March 6, 2012] Appendix 2 A Case Study in Networked Resistance: From Wikileaks to Occupy Wall Streetand Beyond David Graeber, an anarchist who played a major part in the Occupy movement, puts the networked movements of the nineties and 2000s in context:
In recent years we have seen a kind of continual series of tiny 68s. The uprisings against state socialism that began in Tiananmen Square and culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union began that way, though they were quickly diverted into the culmination of that capitalist recuperation of the spirit of 60s rebellion that has come to be known as neoliberalism. After the Zapatista world revolutionthey called it the Fourth World Warbegan in 94, such mini-68s began happening so thick and fast the process almost seemed to have become institutionalized: Seattle, Genoa, Cancun, Quebec, Hong Kong ... And insofar as it was indeed institutionalized, by global networks the Zapatistas had helped set up, it was on the basis of a kind of smalla anarchism based on principles of decentralized direct democracy and direct action. The prospect of facing a genuine global democratic movement seems to have so frightened the US authorities, in particular, that they went into veritable panic mode. There is of course a traditional antidote to the threat of mass mobilization from below. You start a war. It doesnt really matter who the war is against. The point is just to have one; preferably, on as wide a scale as possible. In this
53 Ibid.,

pp. 220-223.

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case the US government had the extraordinary advantage of a genuine pretext a ragtag crew of hitherto largely ineffective right-wing Islamists who, for once in history, had attempted a wildly ambitious terrorist scheme and actually pulled it off. Rather than simply track down those responsible, the US began throwing billions of dollars of armament at anything in sight. Ten years later, the resulting paroxysm of imperial overstretch appears to have undermined the very basis of the American Empire. What we are now witnessing is the process of that empires collapse.54

Wikileaks. Wikileaks had signicant domestic effects on American vested interests, both domestically and abroad. The Wikileaks Cables included embarrassing revelations about the process by which the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was negotiated.55 [Look up material in C4SS columns. Drones in Yemen, etc.] In August 2011, Wikileaks released another 23,000 diplomatic cables, including documents on American construction companies receiving billions of dollars in contracts thanks to their close political relations with the Libyan government.56 The Arab Spring. Perhaps the most important effect of Wikileaks was its role in sparking the arc of protests from Tunisia and Tahrir Square, to Libya, to Spain, to Madison, to Greece and Israel, to Occupy Wall Street, and outward back to the rest of the world again. These networked, horizontal movements, and their predecessors kicked off a decade ago by the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations, are another example of the phenomenon we saw Tom Coates describe: work that once required large institutions, that now can be produced with equal quality in the home. As Pirate Bay co-founder Rick Falkvinge writes:
A Swarm is a new kind of organization, made possible by available and affordable mass communication. Where it used to take hundreds of full-time employees to organize 100,000 people, today that can be doneand is doneby somebody in their spare time from their kitchen.57

A swarm is run by the same stigmergic model of cooperation and division of tasks as Eric Raymonds Bazaar:
If you want leadership in a Swarm, you stand up and say Im going to do X, because I think it will accomplish Y. Anybody who wants to join me in doing X is more than welcome. Anybody in the Swarm can stand up and say this, and everybody is encouraged to. This quickly creates an informal but tremendously strong leadership
54 David Graeber, Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary Past, InterActivist Info Exchange, December 4, 2011 <http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/36685>. 55 Wikileaks Cables Shine Light on ACTA History, La Quadrature du Net, February 3, 2011 <http://www.laquadrature.net/en/wikileaks-cables-shine-light-on-acta-history>. 56 Rob Beschizza, Wikileaks releases new batch of diplomatic cables, Boing Boing, August 23, 2011 <http://boingboing.net/2011/08/23/wikileaks-releases-new-batch-of-diplomaticcables.html>. 57 Rick Falkvinge, Swarmwise: What Is A Swarm? Falkvinge on Infopolicy, August 8, 2011 <http://falkvinge.net/2011/ 08/01/swarmwise-what-is-a-swarm/?>.

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structure where people seek out roles that maximize their impact in furthering the Swarms goalsall happening organically without central planning and organization charts.58

We argued earlier that networked or stigmergic organizations undergo generational innovations with the speed of replicating yeast, because members are free to innovate on a modular basis and their contributions are immediately free to anyone in the network who wants to adopt them. Falkvinge applies this general rule to the networked protest movements that began in January 2011:
At the bottom line, what sets a Swarm apart from traditional organizations is its blinding speed of operation, its next-to-nothing operating costs, and its large number of very devoted volunteers. Traditional corporations and democratic institutions appear to work at glacial speeds from the inside of a Swarm. Thats also why a Swarm can change the world: it runs in circles around traditional organizations, in terms of quality and quantity of work, as well as in resource efciency.59

[Tunisia. Mohamed Bouazizi] The Egyptian uprising had its own Mohamed Bouazizi, as recounted by Kurt Andersen.
The Egyptians had their own Mohamed Bouazizi: an underemployed middle-class 28-year-old named Khaled Said. One day last year, after apparently hacking a police ofcers cell phone and lifting a video of ofcers displaying drugs and stacks of cash, he was arrested and beaten to death. Wael Ghonim, then a 29-year-old Google executive, created a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said to memorialize him. It went viral, and in January, Ghonim returned from Dubai to Egypt to help plan a protest set for Jan. 25: a day of rage in Tahrir Square. Maher and other activists were invited to collaborate. They met online and face to face to work out the details. Brinjy told me she was terried. I thought wed try but run away if necessary. Then we ran into huge crowds heading to Tahrir, and I knew it was going to be big."60

Steven Colatrella depicts the lessons of Tahrir Square against the background of the previous thirty years. The real Iranian revolution was suppressed by the Ayatollahs. The Reagan administration, between the PATCO strikes and Volkers interest rate hikes, broke the back of the American labor movement. The neoliberals emasculated Solidarity and the ANC. The Chinese states Tienanmen Square massacre left a free hand for neoliberal policy. The entire global working class has lived under the shadow of these defeats, with the exception of Hugo Chavezs defeat of the U.S.-backed coup attempt in 2002. Tahrir Square undermined this narrative and established a counter-narrative of empowerment.
So, three of the pillars are in danger at oncecontrol of oil, global governance imposition of austerity and neoliberalism in the Third World, and the horror of Tiananmen Square for any working class
58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Kurt Andersen, The ProtesterTIMEs People Who Mattered in 2011, Time, December 14, 2011 <http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373,00.html>.

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ready to challenge its fate as cheap labor in the global economy. That is the meaning of Tahrir Square it is the end of the era of Tiananmen Square that has already begun with the strikes and labor organizing in China itself. It is a threat to the world capitalist order.61

Social media drastically undermined the transaction costs of aggregating isolated and atomized popular discontent into a coherent movement,
The Egyptian activists didnt use Twitter or Facebook to organize the machinery and tactics of their protestsin fact, they explicitly warned against doing so in the manuals they distributed. Twitter and Facebook werent the ame of the revolution. They were its fuel. Imagine that you are Egyptian. You are thirty years old and the same man has ruled your country since before you were born. Your world is small, not least because your government censors and monopolizes the media. Ofcial corruption, incompetence, and brutality are endemic. While the ruling class enriches itself, 40% of your people live on less than $2/day, and most peoples lives are steadily getting worse. Do you rise up to ght the government? Of course you dont. Your rage is drowned out by fear and despair, a fatalistic sense that nothing can be done, that this is just how things are and ever will be, and whoever rises or even speaks against it is doomed. Take Khaled Said, an honest man beaten to death by police he refused to bribe. Egyptians are outraged, but what can they do? Nothing. A Facebook page is created in his memory. Malcolm Gladwell can tell you how irrelevant and inconsequential an act that is. . . . Six months later, that Facebook page has accumulated more than half a million followers, and has become an online gathering place for activists. After Tunisia erupts, an online group called the April 6 Movement reaches out to one of that pages administrators, Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, to ask for help organizing a day of protest. Another administrator asks the pages followers what they should do. Ideas and plans erupt and snowball. And the rest, as they say, is history. The great paradox of tyranny is that a very small group of people brutalizes, tortures and steals from millions who, if they rose en masse, could shake off their oppressors. Revolution is simply the realization of this fact. Why did the protestors march to Tahrir Square? To show their strength in numbers. They already knew beforehand, despite the Egyptians governments ongoing attempt to divide and blindfold its people, that the numbers were on their side. They only had to look at the sidebar and comment counts of Khaled Saids memorial page. The Internetin this case, though I hate to admit it, Facebooklets oppressed people join in outrage, in shared fury and humiliation, in the sense of being part of a single mass of people with a single intent. Where else can you get that, in a blindfolded, fragmented nation? Censored television? Empty newspapers? How else can you look be61 Steven Colatrella, From Tiananmen to Tahrir Square, Counterpunch, February 8, 2011 <http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/02/08/from-tiananmen-to-tahrir-square/>.

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yond your own life and your own cramped horizon, and realize that youre part of a movement?... Simply by linking the oppressed and creating connections, Twitter and Facebook help to stoke the res of change everywhere.... ...[The] lesson of Egypt is that dictators can no longer rely on their victims fatalism and despair. Untrammeled Internet accessby which I mean, in practice, Twitter and Facebookwill make blatant tyranny impossible, by revealing the simple frailty of tyrants. Egypt has a mere 4 million Facebook users, only 5% of the population; even if the Mubarak regime survives Mubaraks departure, imagine what happens when that number hits 50%. It will no longer be possible to convince the oppressed that they are powerless.

Zeynep argued, against the dismissals of theorists like Evgeny Morozov:

1- The capacities of the Internet that are most threatening to authoritarian regimes are not necessarily those pertaining to spreading of censored information but rather its ability to support the formation of a counter-public that is outside the control of the state. In other words, it is not that people are waiting for that key piece of information to start their revoltand that information just happens to be behind the wall of censorshipbut that they are isolated, unsure of the power of the regime, unsure of their position and potential. 2- Dissent is not just about knowing what you think but about the formation of a public. A public is not just about what you know. Publics form through knowing that other people know what you knowand also knowing that you know what they know.... Yes, all those parts of the Web that are ridiculed by some of the critics of Internets potentialthe LOLcats, Facebook, the three million baby pictures, the slapstick, talking about the weather, the food and the trials and tribulations of lifeare exactly the backbone of community, and ultimately the creation of public(s). 3- Thus, social media can be the most threatening part of the Internet to an authoritarian regime through its capacity to create a public(ish) sphere that is integrated into everyday life of millions of people and is outside the direct control of the state partly because it is so widespread and partly because it is not solely focused on politics. How do you censor ve million Facebook accounts in real time except to shut them all down? 4- The capacity to selectively lter the Internet is inversely proportional to the scale and strength of the dissent. In other words, regimes which employ widespread legitimacy may be able to continue to selectively lter the Internet. However, this is going to break down as dissent and unhappiness spreads. As anyone who has been to a country with selective ltering knows, most everyone (who is motivated enough) knows how to get around the censors. For example, in Turkey, YouTube occasionally gets blocked because of material that some courts have deemed as offensive to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of Turkey. I have yet to meet anyone in Turkey who did not know how to get to YouTube through proxies. 5- Thus, the effect of selective ltering is not to keep out information out of the hands of a determined public, but to allow the

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majority of ordinary people to continue to be able to operate without confronting information that might create cognitive dissonance between their existing support for the regime and the fact that they, along with many others, also have issues. Meanwhile, the elites go about business as if there was no censorship as they all know how to use work-arounds. This creates a safety-valve as it is quite likely that it is portions of the elite groups that would be most hindered by the censorship and most unhappy with it. (In fact, I have not seen any evidence that China is trying to actively and strongly shut down the work-arounds.) 6- Social media is not going to create dissent where there is none. The apparent strength of the regime in China should not be understood solely through its success in censorship. (And this is the kind of Net-centrism Morozov warns against but that I think he sometimes falls into himself). China has undergone one of the most amazing transformations in human history. Whatever else you may say about the brutality of the regime, there is a reason for its continuing legitimacy in the eyes of most of its people. I believe that the Chinese people are no less interested in freedom and autonomy than any other people on the planet but I can also understand why they have, for the most part, appear to have support for the status-quo even as they continue to have further aspirations and desires. 7- Finally, during times of strong upheaval, as in Egypt, dictators dilemma roars. The ability to ensure that their struggle and their efforts are not buried in a deep pit of censorship, the ability to continue to have an honest conversation, the ability to know that others know what one knows all combine to create a cycle furthering dissent and upheaval. Citizen-journalism matters most in these scenarios as there cannot be reporters everywhere something is happening; however, wherever something is happening there are people with cell phone cameras. Combined with Al-Jazeera re-broadcasting the fruits of people-powered journalism, it all comes down to how much force the authoritarian state is willing and able to deploywhich in turn, depends on the willingness of the security apparatus. Here, too, social media matters because, like everyone else, they too are watching the footage on Al-Jazeera. Their choice is made more stark by the fact that they know that history will judge them by their actionsactions which will likely be recorded, broadcast and be viewed by their citizens, their neighbors and their children and grandchildren.62

As Nicholas Kulish argued in a later article written after the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, the series of movements from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement reected a different youth consciousness about the value of electoral politics and pressure campaigns, coupled with the availability of new networked communications technologies:
Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Indians cheer a rural activist on a hunger strike. Israel reels before the largest street demonstrations in its history. Enraged young people in Spain and Greece
62 Zeynep, As Egypt Shuts off the Net: Seven Theses on Dictators Dilemma, technosociology, January 28, 2011 <http://technosociology.org/?p=286>.

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take over public squares across their countries. Their complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over. They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box. Our parents are grateful because theyre voting, said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. Were the rst generation to say that voting is worthless.... Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web. In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite. The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable. Youre looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing, said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they arent anymore. Yonatan Levi, 26, called the tent cities that sprang up in Israel a beautiful anarchy. There were leaderless discussion circles like Internet chat rooms, governed, he said, by emoticon hand gestures like crossed forearms to signal disagreement with the latest speaker, hands held up and wiggling in the air for agreement the same hand signs used in public assemblies in Spain. There were free lessons and food, based on the Internet conviction that everything should be available without charge. Someone had to step in, Mr. Levi said, because the political system has abandoned its citizens.63

To quote Kevin Kelly, it was inevitable that decentralized socialism on the net would spill over into the other realms of life. You cant spend all day in an opensourced, all-sharing, peer-to-peer network and not begin to think that the rest
63 Nicholas Kulish, As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe, New York Times, September 27, 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/world/as-scorn-for-votegrows-protests-surge-around-globe.html>.

409 of your world should also operate in the same way.64 Orsan Senalp sees this as a Global P2P Revolution taking place from Tahrir Square on, but with its roots in the rst networked activism of the 1990s:
The time table can also be read as the crystallisation of a P2P revolutionary work which can also be linked back to feminist uprising, environmentalist awakening, Zapatistas, the Battle of Seattle, Social Forums, the anti-war movement and others. Yet the process of global rising up has been accelerated by besides the Icelandian and Tunisian events, the Egyptian, Spaniard, Greek and UK city square occupations. The 2011 International Road to Dignity reects this momentum of taking over the city centres. So we are moving from a war of position to the war of manoeuvre. The peer to peer processes are at the core of this rising revolutionary agency, as well as to the structural changes we have been experiencing since the late 60s. These two dialectically shape each other within the process. Against this backdrop the precariat, peer labour and immaterial labour [including social justice activists working for the NGO sector] are forming a constellation of alter forces, towards a grand alliance without the consciousness of a class. The formation of this new global historic bloc of alter forces can be indicating the rise of a New Transnational Labour Class [so in formation]. The underlying shift is in the nature of the productive forces and productive relationsthe shift in telecommunication and transportation infrastructure and the rise of the internetmight be providing us a possibility to overcome not only the new contradiction between the sub structure and super structure of the world economy and politics, but also the organisational and leadership problems. The 17th September Occupations of Paris and Wall Street and occupations of Washington DC and Brussels can be compared to the offensive of the forces of Spartacus to the Rome, in this sense.65

Michael Gurstein, in an argument which would be developed further in regard to Occupy Wall Street, made a case that the methods of struggle in the Arab Spring foreshadowed the model of organization in the successor society. Not only do such network technologies enable resistance to the existing regime, but they also offer new weapons for undermining the kinds of neoliberal reform regimes that have until recently succeeded Color Revolutions in the past. In Egypt, for example, the Tahrir Square movement has shown no signs of intent to conveniently pack up and go home under the post-Mubarak military regime. And in addition, the horizontalism of the resistance movement pregures the horizontalism in organizing the successor society.
It may be more useful however, to look forward rather than back; to identify what, from the experience of these revolutions and interwoven as they were (to a greater or lesser degree) by social media and information technology, might be of value as these countries go forward.
64 Kevin Kelly, The Technology of Global Unrest, The Technium, September 28, 2011 <http://www.kk.org/ thetechnium/archives/2011/09/the_technology.php>. 65 Orsan Senalp: Global Class Warfare, WilliamBowles.info, September 29, 2011 <http://williambowles.info/2011/09/ 29/ orsan-senalp-global-class-warfare/>.

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What have they learned from their recent experiences that can be applied as respond to the very real social and economic issuesyouth and adult unemployment, poor quality and limited access to public services, rising food costs, lack of opportunities for democratic participationwhich ultimately provided the motivation for the masses whose commitment to the movement ensured its success. Once the dust settles, and perhaps even before, Egypt and Tunisia and whichever other countries achieve a degree of regime change, will suffer an invasion of think tankers, foundation funded consultants, World Bank and IMF analysts and so on all offering solutions to the countrys problems. These offers will be presented without irony even though it was the formulations of these same consultants, analysts etc. etc. who, reporting to the previous regimes, in many cases bear primary responsibility for creating the problems which brought so many out onto the streets. It was they who were advising the progressive elements in those regimes as they individually strove to nd a World Economic Forumacceptable means to manage their transition into the 21st century, or to put it another way, were carrying forward the message from their Western clients on how these countries should move themselves from the hard tyranny of the gun to the soft tyranny of the market (cf. the very interesting discussion in Al Jazeera on this issue )... Privatized public services, nancial starvation of the public sector, radically skewed taxation practices favoring the rich, conventionally centralized (and thus highly stratied) approaches to education and health care, World Bank fueled opening of markets to foreign competition and so on can be seen as the partial causes of the problems to which the Egyptian and Tunisian masses (and particularly the youth) were responding. The revolts in Egypt and Tunis (in contrast to those in the Former Soviet Union) are as much renunciations of the neoliberal solutions which underpinned the rapacious crony capitalism of the regimes, as they are renunciations of the tyrants who rather passively oversaw the implementation of these policies by their western elite educated sons and their similarly western educated and ideologically imbibed cronies. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia will have very great challenges in nding alternative paths to replace the discredited ideologies (the capitalism side of crony capitalism) in order to satisfy the large but not unreasonable expectations of their populations for decent health care, decent education, employment for skilled and trained young people and living wages for working people. Repatriating the wealth of embezzlers from the national purse will provide some short term resources but there will be a need for longer term solutions. Given the evident bankruptcy of the existing solutions and those sibling solutions that will almost certainly be put on offer, the need for the social movement to nd ways to address the outstanding national issues will mean that they will need to look inward to themselves for the resources and the approaches that can provide the basis for moving forward.

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In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that isthe Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends. Earlier and similar social movements, in attempting to translate their experience and practice into processes of social and economic rebuilding, have come afoul of the simple mechanics of maintaining the spirit and the structures of the forces that they have unleasheddifculties in communication over long distances leading to misunderstanding and mistrust and the need to introduce and exert discipline; difculties in managing diversity of response to local conditions (and thus being unable to continue to be truly bottom up movements); difculties in balancing the need to make decisions with the desire to maintain structures of spontaneity and equality; and overall the challenge of ensuring that power is not simply transferred from one tyrant to another or to an authoritarian structure or party but rather is founded in effective on-going and responsive democratic, transparent and accountable processes. Each of these challenges were overcome on the y during the few short days as the movement evolved on the street and ultimately conquered. Ways will now need to be found for translating this hard won knowledge into the practices of governance in a manner as effective and with as broad a base of legitimacy as they were able to achieve in the practice of revolt. The use of the technologiescell phones, Facebook, twitter, the Internetall made a contribution to the success of the movements although the amount of contribution is the subject of considerable dispute. Certain lessons were no doubt learned from this. The challenge is to take those lessons and apply them to the much more intransigent but equally important issues of rebuilding Egypt with a success similar to that achieved in the removal of the despot. It is of course, for those directly involved to identify what those lessons might be but perhaps one could anticipate some of those lessons:

Enabling solidarity. The technology enabled processes of creating and maintaining solidarityas a combination of trust, ascribed legitimacy, and a sense of unity and common purpose. It allowed for solidarity to be developed and maintained over time, to be extended over space and between those who had only very limited or in some cases no physical interaction. Translating this into a sense of common purpose going forward is not a given but however much it can be maintained (the mass clean up of Tahrir Sq. following the departure of Mubarek is an indication that some is at least possible) will allow the movement to avoid the multiple costs and risks of simply assigning the mandate and future of the revolution to a party or to existing administrative structures and elites al la the Russian Revolution or the overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa. Aggregating social action. To accomplish what it did the movements in

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CHAPTER 11. OPEN SOURCE NATIONAL SECURITY Tunisia and Egypt had to aggregate and consolidate the actions of multiple individuals and as time went on, the actions of multiple groups with divergent interests towards a common purpose. How much the Internet or social networking might have contributed to this is still unclear, but parallel processes of group sourcing and open development in a variety of spheres, suggests that these techniques may be carried over into aggregating social actions towards collaborative problem solving at the local level going from local clean-up campaigns to self-help groups for responding to social needs to building local economic processes through self-sufciency and small enterprise development serving local needs.

Global communication global reach compared to earlier similar revolutions this one was wired not only internally but externally to the world. This means that the movement is able to access the world and its range of expertise and knowledge resources. Equally, the world has the potential for immediate access to certain inner workings and activities and this two way process of knowledge access and transparency for accountability means that many of excesses which so distorted the early days of successful movements in the past may be at least mitigated if not avoided altogether. Equally, the movement will be in a position to link into whatever external resources it chooses and need not simply follow existing lines or traditional paths out of expediency (as for example those prescribed by party, religion or ethnicity) as it moves forward. Overcoming distancethe need for centralization of decision making and control in a post-revolutionary environment stems from the need to counter the ever-lurking forces of the old regime as well as to prevent stabilization and reversion to pre-regime change norms. The difculties of communication and of maintaining solidarity and trust precipitate processes of centralization of decision making, concentration of leadership, and the related formation of hierarchical structures of authority. The now available capacities for exible and content intensive two way communication at a distance relieves the necessity for these processes by allowing for alternatives of peer to peer, horizontal and place independent processes. Enabling transparencythe communication media allow for the transparency of operation, of nancial transactions, and of decision making from which new forms of accountability and democratic participation may be created. Operational exibility and immediacy of responsethe speed of communications and the facility in establishing and modifying communications and information management structures means that the new institutions which need to be established in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia can be structured so as to avoid the rigidication and tendencies towards authoritarianism which traditional processes of institutionalization have almost universally exhibited.

413 Enabling decentralized structures and localized decision makingsocial media enabled processes within the movement demonstrated the capacity for and the strength of ICT-enabled decentralization and localization of decision making and facilitating of local responses to local conditions. These community informatics processes could prove extremely useful in designing, developing and maintaining the range of appropriate public serviceshealth, education, small business support and development which will need to be designed and established in the immediate post-movement period in response to the expressed popular demand. A community approach to enabling and building these services utilizing electronic platforms and leveraging localized social processes will allow for the exibility, responses to localized conditions, and amplication and leveraging of scarce specialized skills that proved so powerful in the democracy movements. It would facilitate the necessary process of the movement being incorporated into new institutional responses. In this way it will be possible to design and develop structures for deploying the range and quality of services while also creating signicant amounts of local employment and allowing for an intensication of service availability and local economic activity rather than the creation of centralized and centralizing structures which contribute little to local employment and development. The robustness, ubiquity and exibility of mobile communicationsenabled the movement to function effectively with tactical rather than institutional leadership. This inhibited the security forces from easily thwarting the movement by targeting individuals. This approach can allow for the decentralization of decision making to local communities utilizing local resources for renewal and regeneration rather than relying on scarce, expensive and frequently ill-informed centralized and specialized leadership and program design while still allowing for larger scale regional and even national coordination. The availability and ease of horizontal peer to peer communication should have the additional effect of mitigating the processes of individual aggrandizement and the medias strong tendency towards the creation of stars/leaders with whom they can interact.
The challenge and the opportunity now is to translate all of this into de-institutionalized institutions, structured decision making without structures, and dynamic frameworks of accountability that work over time and through space while avoiding Robert Michels Iron Law (of Oligarchy). As the rst revolution of the 21st century, and the rst revolution of the Internet ageEgypt and Tunisia and . . . , lack models to draw from and paths to follow. This is as much a liberation as it is a disability. We can only hope that the passion, creativity and energy that went in to throwing out the despots will nd its way into creating the new forms of organization needed for the resolution of the deep seated social and economic issues that confront all of us and not simply those in these corners of North Africa. The measured recognition of the value and limitations opportunities and risks attendant on the new

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technologies is however, a new and profoundly important resource to support those who must, and very quickly, take on these challenges.66

11.0.6

The European Revolution: Spain, Greece and points beyond

The Spanish 15M, or Indignado Movement. The 15M (May 15), or Indignado movement began May 15, 2011, as 150,000 demonstrators assembled in sixty towns all over Spain, taking over public squares and setting up campsites. A powerful theme in the movement was growing disaffection with the political system and a growing perception of the worthlessness of voting and participating in the political process.67
Their posters carry slogans as imaginative as those from May 68 in Paris: Our dreams are too big for their polls, I think, therefore I disturb, No house, no job, no retirement, no fear, Take the street, Read more, I am not against the system, the system is against me, Your booty, my crack.68

The general pattern of organization in the 15M camps was much likeand probably inspiredthat later taken by Occupy Wall Street:
In Sol, the organizers, overwhelmed by the volume of the crowd, quickly started organizing a community by dividing the workload into different commissions (all made up of volunteers): cleaning, security, legal advice, infrastructure, food, external and internal communications. This last one set up a speaker in the middle of the square, so as to communicate between each other and to deliver important messages to the community. The infrastructure commission built large tents, made for shelter and to house each groups ofce, food and blankets were provided, people brought mattresses and sofas from their homes, as well as sleeping bags, tents and cardboard boxes to coat the oor. The legal team held a brief meeting and afterwards communicated basic advice just in case the police were to crackdown on the campers. Meanwhile, external communications organized workshops to prepare volunteers for talking to the media, arranged teams of translators who would start working on social media sites and went about promoting the event on the web. The result was that in a few hours a totally self-governed mass of people, without any visible leaders, was fully functional and able to sustain the main reason behind the whole movement: the formation of public assemblies
66 Michael Gurstein, Egypt: From the Iron Rule of Tyranny to the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Can the ICT Change the Rules? Gursteins Community Informatics, February 23, 2011 <http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/applying-the-ict-lessons-of-revolt-to-theinstitutional-challenges-of-reconstruction-they-overthrew-hosni-mubarek-now-can-they-overthrowrobert-michels/>. 67 Michel Bauwens, Analysis of the May 15 movement in Spain, P2P Foundation Blog, May 22, 2011 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/analysis-of-the-may-15-movement-in-spain/2011/05/22>. 68 Pedro Moreno, quoted in Michel Bauwens, Spain is Ground Zero for the P2P Revolution, P2P Foundation Blog, May 29, 2011 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/spain-is-ground-zero-for-the-p2prevolution/2011/05/29>.

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that were to enunciate the feelings and ideas of everyone present and turn them into proper policies. Slowly, the crowd spontaneously organized itself in open and democratic debate groups that merged throughout the night into a big general assembly that started around 4AM. These assemblies served many purposes and the participants talked about many things: they used them to vote on details regarding the internal workings of the new system; they used them to express their feelings of anger without any coherence (not that it was necessary) making them the direct way of participation in the growing movement. In this sense they worked very well, knitting the community tightly around ideals and ideas that grew out of popular debate. The general assembly, however, failed, mainly because the lack of leadership made it difcult for them to concentrate on the real issue, that is, reaching a consensus large enough for a real manifesto or proposals for reform. Instead, in this rst large assembly, the internal workings were discussed, maps were planned and an order of the day was voted and approved, it was intensely democratic in the sense that whenever one of the speakers said something they deemed was unacceptable, he/she was immediately removed and someone else was given the microphone. Acceptance, on the other hand, was greeted with a shaking of open palms, no applause. The meeting ended at 6AM with some serious doubts. First of all no real proposals emerged and it seemed that they would be hard to achieve without real leadership, after all, in most cases protests are held with a manifesto already prepared. How would one emerge from a crowd that was so individualistic and resentful towards anything that sounds like authority? It is now Thursday and the camp has lasted for almost ve days without police intervention. Today more than ten thousand people showed up. The square has been entirely occupied, the external communications commission has encouraged people to make their own signs and proposals and hang them around the walls, metro stations and ads. The tents have grown everyday and the facilities are better (for example, private companies have donated portable bathrooms for the camp) and well organized, with maps explaining the location of each commission. The ow of people has gotten progressively bigger, and because the media has nally paid attention, older people are appearing and are very curious about what the younger generations have to say. To their surprise they seem to agree with most of it and are willing to participate actively. Best of all, what seemed to be the problem (the lack of concrete political solutions) is turning out to be the strongest point: the assemblies have started producing, out of popular debate and participatory democracy, solutions for different aspects of life in society. Some of these were already oating about several webpages afliated with the movement (the Proposals section of Democracia Real Ya, for example) but now they have been generated by autonomous popular will and voted for consensus by the general assembly, giving them the power of legitimate ideas. They will be posted here as soon as they are made ofcial.

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This same process is happening in every camp around Spain, and it is a fascinating one to watch. People from many nationalities, immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia and many other European and nonEuropean nations such as Romania or Morocco are participating, something impossible (or contradictory) in a regular democratic election. This is partly because the problems being referred to are global issues, made transparent by Wikileaks revelations and felt by every person living in a major city. The old meanings of democracy and freedom have changed, politicians and corporate managers (specially in the press and media, one of the biggest foes of this movement) are now naked and are being shown in a new light.69

The complaint regarding the indeterminacy of demands was later echoed by critics of Occupy Wall Street. Then, as now, Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives argued that the relative indeterminacy of the Spanish movement is not a bug, but a feature."70 A week later, and in the aftermath of the ruling Socialist coalitions heavy losses to the Conservatives in the May 22 elections, the M15 movement took further steps toward creating its own pregurative institutions. Amaia Arcos writes:
The movement quickly adopted free participatory public assemblies in occupied squares. Creating neighbourhood assemblies in order to give shape and sustain the protest movement quickly took centre stage.... Decentralising the movement and establishing networks of neighbourhood assemblies has been this past weeks objective. The original idea was to dismantle the camps yesterday, Sunday 29th, a week after the elections and two weeks after the initial demonstrations. Yesterday was particularly important: the freshly created neighbourhood and town assemblies in Madrid met, for the rst time, during the day in Plaza del Sol in order to coordinate. Later on that evening, the movement was to collectively decide (every main square in the country held a vote) whether to dismantle the camps or continue for a few more days. Friday had seen the rst, for now, of serious dislodging attempts on the part of Catalan regional police using disproportionate force against Barcelona protestors. Last night, most people felt, and voted, the camps should continue for a few days in order to make a statement of purpose, reject violence against peaceful protestors and have a meeting place until neighbourhood assemblies are properly functioning. Assemblies have been enjoying mass success. Images below are from Barcelona and Madrid. Many other cities in Spain have held similarly packed looking assemblies.... A website has been created to coordinate Madrids assemblies and it is expected other regional assemblies will organise similarly. Madrid is where the movement originated and it has since been considered
69 The #Spanishrevolution starts in Madrid as an experiment in participatory democracy #acampadasol #yeswecamp #democraciarealya, WL Central, May 19, 2011 <http://wlcentral.org/node/1786>. 70 Bauwens, Spain is Ground Zero."

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the referent for the rest of Spain. Barcelona is also networking and compiling freshly created neighbourhood assemblies.... The movement is still in its early stages. Every decision is approved by total consensus, making it a slow and laborious task. The movement is set on achieving complete horizontality and, as such, refuses to adopt leaders and gureheads.... Given the origin of the protests and its close relationship with the Internet, Spains geek community is closely involved. A working group of engineers and programmers is looking to design participatory democracy technical infrastructure in order to aid organisational, voting and consulting processes.... Interestingly enough, #spanishrevolution seems to be evolving towards #europeanrevolution with large protests being organised in Portugal, Greece, Italy and now France. Paris held its rst public assembly, attended by more than a thousand people, in the symbolically charged setting of La Bastille last night. Police dispersed the protesters using violence later on that evening. Solidarity events in front of French embassies around Spain were quickly organised and held as news started appearing on Twitter.71

Greece: The Syntagma Movement. From Spain, the movement spread quickly to Syntagma Square in Athens, with crowds eventually growing to half a million. The leaderless organization of the Greek movement, its lack of ofcial demands or statements, and its self-organized administration of the camps, followed the Spanish pattern:
The open, egalitarian and participatory character of the procedures and ways of organising derives from the will to nd such procedures that can unite all who are affected by the crisis and dissatised with the current political system. The pacist and non-party character of the original call-out was the condition that shaped a common public sphere where everyone would meet without any badges to co-decide by discussing at the same level. The refusal to assign or elect representatives does not only cause unease to the forces of the state who do not know how to deal with this, as it overturns their tactic of manoeuvring, of libelling and destroying popular expressions of rage. More than that, this facelessness as Pretenderis would have it [a well-know reactionary TV journalist trans], is the best way for the movement to safeguard transparency in its organising, as well as the will for whatever is created to express everyone not just its most so-called vanguard or politicised part. And so, the matter of procedures is not simply a matter of organising but a key issue regarding its political essence. An issue of safeguarding the conditions of unity, involvement, free participation to the right of speech and in the decision making process of the peoples assemblies; working groups, thematic assemblies and their immediate
71 Amaia Arcos, quoted in Chris Pinchen, Background to #spanishrevolution #asambleabarrios #europeanrevolution, P2P Foundation Blog, May 30, 2011 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/background-to-spanishrevolution-asambleabarrioseuropeanrevolution/2011/05/30>.

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review and control. This understanding that rejects any kind of representation or mediation, is safeguarded by the constant circulation of revocable positions and runs through all structures and functions born by this movement. In this spirit, the stance of the movement toward Mass Media is also differentiated, with the refusal to engage with them, not even by way of issuing press releases. With the screening of what part of its procedures and organising is photographed or taped, and most importantly, with the creation of the movements own channels of communication with its main website www.real-democracy.gr, being the only medium-voice of its decisions. The daily peoples assembly of Syntagma square (at 9 pm), like the corresponding ones in other cities, is the only one that holds the right to decision-making. The topics in each popular assembly are dened according to discussion, the demands and the proposals submitted in previous assemblies.... The nal resolutions are shaped during the assembly according to the comments of the speakers and are put up for approval, always before midnight, in order not to exclude those who work and those who have to use public transportation to return to their neighbourhoods. Everyone has a right to speak and in the beginning of each assembly, after reading out and approving its topics, tickets are distributed to everyone who wishes to do so; speakers are selected by draw during the assembly. Usually speakers range between 80 and 100 in their number, while more than 2000 people take part in the assembly on a daily basis. Despite this element of chance, experience so far has proven this to be the best way to avoid any phenomena of imposition of specic agendas or the inuencing of the assemblys decisions by organised interventions.... At the moment, there are more than 15 working groups and 12 thematic ones. The working groups comprise the cornerstone of life at the square and their contribution so far has been priceless. Not only because they offer practical solutions and because so far they have responded, despite many problems and delays, to the ever-increasing needs for the shaping, the functionality and the procedures at the square, but most importantly because these groups themselves comprise the spirit of contribution of the people, their will to take life into their own hands and the capacities of their self-organising, without experts and capital, based on their own capacities. Thousands have joined up the group lists and this availability is the driving force of the movement even though it has not been utilised in the most effective of ways so far, partly due to the movements swift growing.... Until now, functioning groups include those of technical support, material supply, artists, cleaning, administrative support, canteen-nutrition, translation, respect (patrol), communication/multimedia, legal support, neighbourhood outreach, health, time bank and service exchange, composure and messengers. Each groups has been divided into subgroups according to each specialist work section. The groups meet in open assemblies every day at 6 pm and the messenger group makes sure that their needs and suggestions are known to all groups in order

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to safeguard the smooth cooperation and solving of any problems that may arise.72

The Syntagma Square movement, like the Plaza del Sol movement before it and the Occupy movement after it, was consciously anti-political and anti-party in nature. And like Occupy, it avoided gratuitous attacks on police and playfully invited them to defect.
For the people gathered in Syntagma, the intense political manoeuvring in the corridors of parliament seems to matter little. Theirs is a mass mobilisation that draws a distinction between representational and grassroots politics. Political parties seem unlikely to come to a halt over developments in the upper echelons of power. For them, the Memorandum is not just a sum of persons or abhorrent policies, but a system of power that has misruled the country for 30 years, bringing it to the edge of collapse. It is a system of beliefs, values, expectations and political roles and identities that cannot be abolished simply by replacing the head or members of the government.... By now, the distance between the people and their representatives might seem unbridgeable; as the old system of government crumbles under the burden of sovereign debt, a new, grassroots system of politics is starting to make itself heard from the ground.73 This protest marks in many ways a turning point. Apart from the use of social media as a vehicle for social mobilisation -which is probably to be expected given their extensive use and prevalence, especially in younger generations- the most obvious new factor is the persistence, the large numbers and the synthesis of the participants. Demonstrators have participated in such great numbers only in rallies of political parties and only after extensive organisation and costs by parties structures. The constantly high and increasing daily numbers of participants were until last the rst Wednesday of the protests unknown to nonpartisan rallies. Even more surprising is perhaps the tenacity of the demonstrators; Greeks have been known for their readiness to go to the streets and demonstrate for their demands but such a steady ow of large numbers of people for so long is utterly new in recent Greek history. Most importantly though the synthesis of the crowds gathering in Syntagma Square is also refreshingly new. The mosaic of Syntagma comprises individuals, of all ages, social and professional backgrounds, with different demands, concerns, professional, social and economic backgrounds, personal aims, or political convictions. This combination of large numbers of participants, perseverance and plurality, makes the daily meetings in Syntagma the rst page of a new form of social mobilisation for Greece. Despite their vast differences, what unites them all is a deep disappointment of their representatives and more broadly of the political
72 Democracy is Born in the Square, Peoples Assemblies Network, June 12, 2011 <http://www.peoplesassemblies.org/2011/06/greece-democracy-is-born-in-the-squares/>. 73 Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis, quoted in Michel Bauwens, Short history of the recent events in Greece, and what they portend, P2P Foundation Blog, June 19, 2011 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/short-history-of-the-recent-events-in-greece-and-what-theyportend/2011/06/19>.

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staff. This phenomenon is certainly not new; Greeks have been used to big and broken promises, along with political requests for sacrices to achieve yet one more political or economic milestone (ie. meeting the Maastricht criteria, entering the Euro-zone, nancing the Olympic Games etc.). The fatigue from the repeated requests for more and more sacrices with insufcient tangible results at the citizens level has been obvious for long, as has been the realisation and acceptance of the widespread corruption. Yet the triggers that brought thousands to the streets have been the recent unquestionable deterioration of the quality of life and, most importantly, the clear lack of future prospects for improvement. The sad realisation of the inadequacy of the political staff, for decades now, in addressing the pressing issues facing Greece, has become the common denominator for the Syntagma mosaic. Such strong disillusionment resulting from a number of cycles of renewed and eventually unfullled hopes and promises has natural difculties in differentiating between the rule of bad politicians and the exceptions of a few decent ones. It tends to generalise and reject the political system as inadequate, opportunistic, unjust, unethical, unpatriotic and solely self-interested. This dismissal of the representatives currently in place, has been demonstrated as a categorically nonpartisan, yet strongly political, character that the demonstrators have claimed and so far preserved for their protests. The protesters have loudly, clearly and repeatedly claimed their independence from any kind of representative body. They have voiced their disapproval for all political parties, political parties youths, unions etc. The change in this regard is monumental. The tradition in Greece has been, for too long, to demonstrate after a call by and under the auspices of some organisation or representative body. This form of social mobilisation of individuals, without the control or guardianship of any formal body is entirely new for Greece. The people meeting in Syntagma every evening have all personal stories to share, stories ranging from economic difculties due to the recession and the new economic measures all the way to sheer desperation. They are very diverse and they are not gathered due to ideology or political guidance. They all have personal stakes that bring them there. This strong sense of personal involvement and interest, as well as of ownership of the protests, is a strong differentiating factor of the Indignants of Syntagma (Apogoitevmenoi tou Syntagmatos) and a signicant reason why attention should be paid to them.... One of the many surprises of the Syntagma phenomenon is the stance of the protesters towards the police force guarding the Parliament. Instead of confronting them verbally and otherwise -as they would have traditionally done-, they have been inviting them to leave their guns and join them. They call the policemen employees in uniform, thus placing them in their ranks rather than against them.74

Madison.
74 Thalia

Tzanetti, quoted in Bauwens, Short history of the events in Greece."

421 Israel. Among the nal outgrowths of the Arab Spring in the late Summer of 2011, before Occupy Wall Street emerged as the second great paradigm of global protest, was the wave of demonstrations in Israel and the Occupied Territories. As early as June, Israeli Defense Forces leadership expressed concern that they had no means of stopping a peaceful protest march of 4500 or more people in the West Bank.
"A non-violent protest of 4,000 people or more, even if they only march to a checkpoint or a settlement, and especially if the Palestinian police does not deter them, will be unstoppable, one IDF ofcer claims. Such a great number of determined people cannot be stopped by tear gas and rubber bullets. Another high ranking IDF ofcial serving in the territories claimed that if we are to face protests similar to those in Egypt or Tunisia, we will not be able to do a thing."75

So Israel was open to a major public embarrassment if Palestinian demands for UN recognition in September were backed up by a mass protest movement. In mid-July, tent cities sprang up all over Israel, protesting a variety of economic evils like the high cost of housing and food, and low wages. The Israeli protest movement was inspired to a considerable extent by the Arab Spring. Uri Avnery noted the prevalence of posters that made explicit reference to Tahrir Square.76 The movement peaked in early August with the largest demonstration in Israeli history: 300,000 participants, or some 4% of the Israeli population.77 In India, the arrest of anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare sparked a nationwide protest movement. His rst hunger strike earlier in 2011, in which he demanded the creation of an independent ombudsmans ofce for monitoring graft and ofcial corruption, led to token Parliamentary legislation. As activists complained of the legislations insufciency, Hazare planned another hunger strike unto death. He also recorded a video, to be released if he were arrested, calling for a second freedom struggle on the same scale as that which threw off British rule. Unless there is change, there is no freedom, there is no actual democracy, there is no true republic, there is no true peoples rule. The protests should not stop. The time has come for no jail in the country to have a free space. The arrest of Hazare and thousands of his followers, and the ensuing release of his video on YouTube, resulted in protests by tens of thousands of people in cities all across India.78 This rst wave of activism from the Arab Spring, which eventually spread to Europe, Madison and Israel, dwarfed the post-Seattle anti-globalization move75 Anshel Pfeffer, IDF has no way of stopping mass non-violent protest in West Bank, Haaretz, June 29, 2011 <http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-has-no-way-of-stoppingmass-non-violent-protest-in-west-bank-1.370322>. 76 Uri Avnery, Tent cities are springing up all over Israel, reproduced at Cryptome.org, August 5, 2011 <http://cryptome.org/0005/il-tent-cities.htm>. 77 David Harris-Gershon, As Netanyahu Panics, an Opportunity Emerges in Israel, Alternet, August 9, 2011 <http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/08/09/as-netanyahu-panics-anopportunity-emerges-in-israel/>. 78 Jason Burke, Anna Hazare: anti-corruption activists arrest sparks protests across India, The Guardian, August 16, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/16/anna-hazarearrest-india-protests>.

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ment, and (at least) rivaled the global protests of 1968. And, as Pankaj Mishra argued, the common denominator in this unprecedented wave of activism was global opposition to neoliberalism by the working and middle classes, exacerbated by the global economic downturn since 2007.79 Joel Kotkinof Forbes, no less!saw the London riots of early August as part of a looming global class war, a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself. Among its root causes are globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; [and] technology, which has allowed the eetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale.... Members of both the Tea Parties and the Left share a perception that the power structure, corporate and government, work together to screw the broad middle class.80 Occupy Wall Street. In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the global Occupy movement it sparked emerged as a second wave of activism on the same scale as the rst wave of global activism associated with the Arab Spring. Until it actually got underway, Occupy Wall Street showed every sign of being simply another top-down protest. In fact it came very close at the beginning to being coopted by the Workers World Party, the organization behind the International A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition that dominated the earlier movement against the Iraq War. That it wasnt is in considerable part thanks to David Graeber, an anarchist professor of sociology who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. On July 13, 2011 Adbusters magazine put out a callreally more of a trial balloonfor an occupation of Wall Street two months later, on September 17.
Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there, A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the rst step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people." Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, Spain
The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual peoples assemblies . . . we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future . . . and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic signicance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
79 Pankaj Mishra, The dead end of globalisation looms before our youth, The Guardian, August 25, 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/25/dead-end-globalisationyouth-rage>. 80 Joel Kotkin, The U.K. Riots and the Coming Global Class War, Forbes, August 15, 2011 <http://www.forbes.com/ sites/joelkotkin/2011/08/15/u-k-riots-global-class-war/>.

423
The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the nancial Gomorrah of America. On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people ood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices. Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum that Mubarak must go over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand? The most exciting candidate that weve heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the inuence money has over our representatives in Washington. Its time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, were doomed without it. This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations. This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and youre out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand a presidential commission to separate money from politics we start setting the agenda for a new America.81

The magazines involvement began and ended with that action. The rst steps toward implementation were taken by New Yorkers Against Budget Cutsa coalition of student activists and community leaderswho had camped out across from City Hall (in a tent city called Bloombergville) to protest city budget cuts. They found the idea of a similar occupation of Wall Street appealing, and attempted to take charge of planning for the September event. They called a General Assembly, to be held on August 2 at Bowling Green Park, to plan the occupation. But despite the general assembly language, what they had in mind was a lot closer to the model of a pack of wolves under an alpha male than to a swarm. As Graeber observed:
A general assembly means something specic and special to an anarchist. In a way, its the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements
81 #Occupy Wall Street: A Shift in Revolutionary Tactics, Adbusters blog, July 13, 2011 <http://www.adbusters.org/ blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html>.

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relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies. A GA is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are madenot by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands. It can be an arduous process. One of the things Occupy Wall Street has done is introduce the GA to a wider audience, along with the distinctive sign language participants use to raise questions or express support, disapproval, or outright opposition. When Graeber and his friends showed up on Aug. 2, however, they found out that the event wasnt, in fact, a general assembly, but a traditional rally, to be followed by a short meeting and a march to Wall Street to deliver a set of predetermined demands (A massive public-private jobs program was one, An end to oppression and war! was another). In anarchist argot, the event was being run by verticalstop-down organizationsrather than horizontals such as Graeber and his friends. Sagri and Graeber felt theyd been had, and they were angry.82

As Graeber recalled, the movement as it had evolved to that point gave every indication of being a conventional protest that would zzle out with little notice.
...[A] local anti-budget cut coalition top-heavy with NGOs, unions, and socialist groups had tried to take possession of the process and called for a General Assembly at Bowling Green. The title proved extremely misleading. When I arrived, I found the event had been effectively taken over by a veteran protest group called the Workers World Party, most famous for having patched together ANSWER one of the two great anti-war coalitions, back in 2003. They had already set up their banners, megaphones, and were making speechesafter which, someone explained, they were planning on leading the 80-odd assembled people in a march past the Stock Exchange itself.83

But Graeber, noticing that most of the people who showed up werent all that happy with the professional activists self-appointed leadership, wound up playing a role comparable to triggering the crystallization of a supersaturated solution around a random particle. The demonstration that was set up to be just another cookie-cutter effort of the institutional Leftthe old fashioned vertical politics of top-down coalitions, charismatic leaders, and marching around with signsinstead emerged as a leaderless, horizontal movement.
But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something. To adopt activist parlance: this wasnt really a crowds of verticalsthat is, the sort of people whose idea of political action is to march around with signs under the control of one or another top-down protest movement. They were mostly pretty obviously horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, non-hierarchical forms of
82 Drake Bennet, David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street, BusinessWeek, October 26, 2011 <http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-ofoccupy-wall-street-10262011.html>. 83 David Graeber, On Playing By The RulesThe Strange Success of OccupyWallStreet, Countercurrents.org, October 23, 2011 <http://www.countercurrents.org/graeber241011l.htm>.

425
direct democracy, and direct action. I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple whod been involved with the indignados in Madrid. . . I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual Id known for years. . . My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing: Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter things and go home?though I think the way we put it was more like, You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a general assembly. Lets hold one. So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and tried to get everyone else to join us. Almost immediately people appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, calling us back with promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the podium. We complied. It didnt happen. My Greek friend made an impassioned speech and was effectively shooed off the stage. There were insults and vituperations. After about an hour of drama, we formed the circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the rally and come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would operate by modied consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups. It was difcult to gure out what to do since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major action, let alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required to actually shut down Wall Streetand anyway we couldnt shut down Wall Street on the appointed day, since September 17, the day Adbusters had been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind. Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to put on our rst yer. Adbusters idea had been that we focus on one key demand. This was a brilliant idea from a marketing perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did we represent? Someonethis time I remember quite clearly it was me, but I wouldnt be surprised if a half dozen others had equally strong memories of being the rst to come up with itsuggested, well, why not call ourselves the 99%? If 1% of the population have ended up with all the benets of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the wealth, own the politicians. . . why not just say were everybody else? The Spanish couple quickly began to lay out a We Are the 99% pamphlet, and we started brainstorming ways to print and distribute it for free. Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape.... We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a

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public space to create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as democracy by the US government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. Still, it was almost impossible to predict what would really happen on the 17th. There were supposed to be 90,000 people following us on the internet. Adbusters had called for 20,000 to ll the streets. That obviously wasnt going to happen. But how many would really show up? Whats more, we were keenly aware that the NYPD numbered close to 40,000; Wall Street was, in fact, probably the single most heavily policed public space on the face of Planet Earth. To be perfectly honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and legal trainings, lessons on how to organize afnity groups and do non-violent civil disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings and the like, for most of us, the greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldnt turn out a total asco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten, arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply looked the other way. Wed certainly seen it happen before. This time it didnt.... On September 17th itself, I was troubled at rst by the fact that only a few hundred people seemed to have shown up. Whats more the spot wed chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut down by the city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee however had scouted out other possible locations, and distributed maps: around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to location #5Zuccotti Parkand by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by at least two thousand people. The real credit for what happened after thatwithin a matter of weeks, a movement that had spread to 800 different cities, with outpourings of support from radical opposition groups as far away as Chinabelongs mainly to the students and other young people who simply dug themselves and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many cases, obviously illegal) acts of police repression designed to intimidate....84

One reason for the totally unexpected success of the Occupy movement, Graeber suspects, is the collapse of so many peoples hopes for change through the political system:
But in a way, this feeling of personal betrayal is pretty much inevitable. It is the only way of preserving the faith that its possible for progressive policies to be enacted in the US through electoral means. Because if Obama was not planning all along to betray his Progressive base, then one would be forced to conclude any such project is impossible. After all, how could there have been a more perfect alignment of the stars than happened in 2008? That year saw a wave election that left Democrats in control of both houses of congress,[5] a Democratic president elected on a platform of Change coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical mea84 Ibid.

427
sures of some sort were unavoidable, and at a time when popular rage against the nations nancial elites was so intense that most Americans would have supported almost anything. If it was not possible to enact any real progressive policies or legislation at such a moment, clearly, it would never be. Yet none were enacted.... Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isnt going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded. Say what you will about Americans, and one can say many things, this is a country of deeply democratic sensibilities. The idea that we are, or are supposed to be, a democratic society is at the very core of what makes us proud to be Americans. If Occupy Wall Street has spread to every city in America, its because our nancial overlords have brought us to such a pass that anarchists, pagan priestesses, and tree-sitters are about the only Americans left still holding out for the idea that a genuinely democratic society might be possible.85

So those on the traditional Left who call on Occupy to do it rightto appoint ofcial spokesmen, issue a list of demands, endorse candidates, etc.are really missing the point. As Graeber pointed out, the movement very nearly started out that wayand had it done so, it would have failed. From its beginning, Occupy Wall Street was heavily inuenced by the horizontalism of the Spanish Indignados, and before that of the Argentinian movements of 2002. Marina Sitrin describes the origins of the horizontalism concept:
The term comes from Argentina. I would mark the history going back to the mid-1990s when the Zapatista uprising sparked peoples imagination as to a different way of organizing and a different relationship to power and to the state. They were not organizing in relationship to the state, but rather in relationship to each other. Not making demands on the state, but saying, Were going to create something different, leave us alone to do that. And also organizing in assembly-based forms. In 1999 we had the Seattle [World Trade Organization] protests in the U.S. and globally all kinds of groups organized. I was in the direct action group in New York, for example, after 1999. That was also organized in assemblies, similar to the general assembly that were now using in Liberty Plaza. There were working groups that were generally autonomous, but if a working group was making a decision that would affect the whole body, a proposal would have to come before the body. The working groups were run by a consensus or consensus-based process. That means rather than just taking up or down votes, you strive to come to some kind of agreement, even if imperfect. So even if some people dont feel fabulous about a decision, the vast majority of people will at least feel decent about it instead of having 40 percent of the people hating the decision. There is also sometimes a facilitator who pays attention to power dynamics in the group: gender, marginalized voices, race and class.
85 Ibid.

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Another important moment was 2001, when there was a building economic crisis in Argentina, and the government, fearing a run on banks, closed down bank accounts. In response, people went out into the streets banging pots and pans. It was not organized by political parties. It was not organized in a hierarchical way. People describe it as just going out into the streets and nding each other. This is the rst time anyone knows of the word horizontalidad which is where the term horizontalism comes from being used. People went into the streets by the tens and hundreds of thousands and formed neighborhood assemblies rst to just meet their basic needs, but then it got more sophisticated. Unemployed workers were also creating horizontal assemblies; in workplaces that had generally been abandoned by the owners, workers went in and recuperated them.86

Go back, if you will, and reread that extended passage from Michael Gurstein about the horizontalism of the Arab Spring resistance movement, and about it preguring the horizontalism by which the successor society will be organized. The real signicance of Occupy is not as a political movement or a pressure group, but as a school or a fair. Graeber, in an interview with Ezra Klein, referred to it as an example of pregurative politics:
DG: Its very similar to the globalization movement. You see the same criticisms in the press. Its a bunch of kids who dont know economics and only know what theyre against. But theres a reason for that. its pre-gurative, so to speak. Youre creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And its a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces youre protesting. If you make demands, youre saying, in a way, that youre asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem. EK: So if you say, for instance, that you want a tax on Wall Street and then youll be happy, youre implicitly saying that youre willing to be happy with a slightly modied version of the current system. DG: Right. The tax on Wall Street will go to people controlled by Wall Street. EK: By which you mean government. DG: Yes. So we are keeping it open-ended. In a way, what we want is to create spaces where people can think about questions like that. In New York, according to law, any unpermitted assembly of more than 12 people is illegal in New York. Space itself is not an openly available resource. But the one resource that isnt scarce is smart people with ideas. So were trying to reframe things away from the rhetoric of demands to a questions of visions and solutions. Now how that translates into actual social change is an interesting question. One way this has been done elsewhere is you have local initiatives that come out of the local assemblies.87
86 Justin Elliott, Process is politics at Occupy Wall Street, Salon.com, October 18, 2011 <http://www.salon.com/2011/ 10/19/process_is_politics_at_occupy_wall_street>. 87 Ezra Klein, Youre creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature, The Washington Post, October 3, 2011 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-

429 Tiberius Brastaviceanu of the Multitude Project describes the Occupy camps as embryos of the new world:
The Occupation camps across the world are not just protest sites. They are not just new political spaces. They are in fact embryos of the emergent new world. They are emergent cities If you go to the nearest camp youll nd in there everything youd need to survive, even during a Canadian winter. For example, only two days after its initiation the Montreal camp had already a health center, a kitchen that fed easily over 500 people the very rst evening, a center of communication and coordination, an information and donation center, a political space (where the assemblies take place), a cultural space (where people play drums, dance, paint...), and obviously a housing space. Believe it or not, we even have the protection of the militia (the Quebecois patriots), who put their tent across the street from the main camp, having great visibility over the area. During the rst hours of the encampment I joined the kitchen and I experienced rst-hand how a very complex food processing system self-organized in no time. The other centers were also keeping the pace. It was cold and very windy. While the kitchen was continuously serving all kinds of snacks, beverages, fresh fruits and vegetables, while we were reinforcing the tent to withstand the strong wind, transporting water from a nearby hotel, processing garbage, washing dishes, by 5:30pm we were ready to receive the hungry wave of protesters with hot meals. They formed a huge line and in an orderly fashion they came, one-by-one, with a big smile on their tired faces to get their bowl of rice with spicy potato curry and coconut milk, and baked pumpkin. And soon it was dark. Flashlights just appeared from nowhere, and by the end of the night the entire kitchen was illuminated by construction lights connected to a large power supply. The kitchen stayed open around the clock, and still operates 24 hours per day. ... Did I mention that there was no boss? Yesterday I passed by the camp and I was again surprised by how fast the infrastructure of this emergent city was growing. Toilets are coming, a large power generator was already there waiting to be connected, the WiFi infrastructure was only waiting for power, the kitchen had a very large tank of water, gas burners, a BBQ and a new large shelf for storage (food is never a problem). Let me tell you something, the occupiers are getting ready for the winter! But again, this new city within the city has no mayor. Its governance is decentralized, distributed. They are embryos of the new world The camps are incubators for new systems of governance (watch the Consensus movie), for open and decentralized economical systems with alternative channels of value exchange (currencies), for a new culture, for new education systems... These new institutions are taking shape in these spaces and are now starting to diffuse throughklein/post/youre-creating-a-vision-of-the-sort-of-society-you-want-to-have-inminiature/2011/08/25/gIQAXVg7HL_blog.html>.

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out society. It is a global phenomenon. The world is going through a profound metamorphosis process. Yes,... some people may think that we cant apply this to the entire society. They are dead wrong. The new technology enables the scaling of these systems, this is in fact the essence of what weve been saying form the beginning.88

The Occupy movement has functioned as a teach-in, with speakers like Michel Bauwens and Juliet Schor appearing at Zuccotti Park. Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives appeared on November 2:
To succeed in social change, you need 3 things.

a genuine mass movement. As the rst native movement and great hope of the digital age that is what #ows is all about. concrete alternatives that can change our lives and allow us to live our values right now. This is what commons-based peer production provides a new way of producing value. the ability to be able to stop bad policies, and propose new ones that allow alternatives to survive and thrive, for which we need true democratic processes.
A commons rather than market state orientation is a fruitful way to think about solving humanitys problems in a new way. Michel Bauwens is founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, a global collaborative researching peer production that maps the thousands of p2p projects being created to achieve mutual alignment and a growing counter economy that can co-exist and perhaps even supersede the todays dysfunctional one. He is also a partner of the Commons Strategies Group which seeks to seed conversations around the new commons paradigm.89

And Schor spoke November 4 on the principles of Plenitude.90 If anything, the shutdowns in Oakland, Portland, New York and across the country removed an impediment to this new phase of the revolution. The nationwide wave of Occupation camp shutdowns in November marked, not the dissolution of the movement, but a phase transition.
Weve witnessed surface waves in the past, starting with the End the Fed movement in 2008, which sparked the TeaParty movement, to the so-called Twitter revolution in 2009 in the Republic of Moldova, to the 2009-2010 Green Revolution in Iran, to the Arab Spring, and to the 15-M movement in Spain. Is the #occupy everywhere the last wave able to tip the establishment over? I dont think so. But every one of these waves leaves permanent marks, which will affect the next wave, and the way the establishment will react to it. If we are not at
88 Tiberius Brastaviceanu, What are the #occupy camps? Multitude Project, October 18, 2011 <http://multitudeproject.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-are-occupation-camps.html>. 89 Michael [sic] Bauwens on peer to Peer, New York City General Assembly <http://www.nycga.net/events/event /michael-bauwens-on-peer-to-peer/>. 90 Juliet Schor at Occupy Wall Street on Vimeo <http://vimeo.com/31842979>.

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the tipping point yet, it doesnt mean that change will not happen. The transformative forces introduced by the new technology are extremely powerful. Change will eventually happen, but when and how? Almost all occupation camps around the world have been dismantled. The energy they had concentrated within them is now diffusing into society, operating these permanent changes that will pave the way for the next wave to come. Neighborhoods are now organizing using new methods that emerged during the occupation. New economical initiatives are taking shape, establishing open and decentralized means of production and distribution of value, establishing new institutions based on a new paradigm, almost entirely outside of the system.91

Marina Sitrin and Luis Mareno-Caballud compare the phase transition in Occupy to that in the Spanish indignado movement:
This phase is characterized by the gradual shift from a focus on acts of protest (which nonetheless continue to have a crucial role, as we must confront this system that creates crisis) to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole. The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, rst through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation ofor collaboration withgroups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources. For example, Occupy Harlem is using direct action to prevent heat from being shut off in a building in the neighborhood (this action has been coordinated with OWS and Occupy Brooklyn). In the case of Spain, this expansion began in June, when the movement decided to focus its energy more on the assemblies and the working groups than on maintaining the encampments themselves. To maintain the miniature models of a society that the movement wished to create did not necessarily contribute to the actual changes that were needed in the populations that needed them the most. Which is why the decision to move away from the encampments was nothing more than another impulse in the constructive aims of the movement: the real encampment that has to be reconstructed is the world.92

From the outset, the Occupy movement has generated innovations using the same Bazaar model John Robb has noted in Al Qaeda and the le-sharing movement. Robb calls it an open source protest:
Open source protest is an organizational technique. Probably the only organizational technique that can assemble a massive crowd in todays multiplexed environment. Essential rules of open source protest include:

A promise. A simple goal/idea that nearly everyone can get behind. Ad91 Tiberius Brastaviceanu, The multitude movement limited by the pace of cultural change and of general understanding of open movements, The Multitude Project, December 7, 2011 <http://multitudeproject.blogspot.com/2011/12/multitude-movement-limited-by-pace-of.html>. 92 Marina Sitrin and Luis Mareno-Caballud, Occupy Wall Street, Beyond Encampments, Yes!, November 21, 2011 <http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/occupy-wall-street-beyondencampments>.

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CHAPTER 11. OPEN SOURCE NATIONAL SECURITY busters did pretty good with occupy wall street. Why? Nearly everyone hates the pervasive corruption of banks and Wall Street. Its an easy target.

A plausible promise. Prove that the promise can work. They did. They actually occupied Wall Street and set up camp. They then got the message out. A big tent and an open invitation. It doesnt matter what your reason for protesting is as long as you hate/dislike Wall Street. The big tent is already in place (notice the diversity of the signage). Saw something similar from the Tea Party before it was mainstreamed/diminished. Let everyone innovate. Dont create a leadership group. The general assembly approach appears to work. Support anyone in a leadership role that either a) grows the movement or b) advances the movement closer to its goal. Oppose (ignore) anybody that proposes a larger, more complex agenda or those that claim ownership over the movement. If a new technique works, document it, use it again, and share it with everyone else. Copy everything that works. Spread the word of the movement as widely as possible.
Thats the gist of it.... Whats the big picture? Global guerrillas are getting better at building open source protests. We are going to see more and they are likely to become a prominent feature of the geopolitical landscape. It will also be interesting to see if open source protests could end up taking down a Too Big To Fail bank (i.e. Goldman) or a US President in the next 5 years. That would be very cool to see.93

Goddamn straight. The beauty of the lack of any specic demandsaside from a general sentiment against Wall Street, crony capitalism and the concentration of wealthis that it leaves the movement open to issue-oriented activism by component movements in a stigmergic, DIY basis. Hence the coexistence of Marxists, Social Democrats, anarchists, and Paulistas calling for an audit of the Fed. And Occupy as a common platform energizes all of them, empowering them to promote more specic anti-Wall Street agendas in their own constituencies. Whats more, its modular: a self-organizing, self-replicating node.
Occupy is an interesting example of the self-organizing, replicating nodal network similar in nature to Transition town, United Religions Initiative, Food not Bombs etc. . . Self-organizing, replicating movements have the ability to spread very fast, because they tap into the ability of everyone to participate
93 John Robb, OCCUPY WALL STREET (the theory), Global Guerrillas, October 3, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-thetheory.html>.

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and organize. There isnt a hierarchical bottleneck that the movement has to go through. And the system doesnt have to go through a hiring process, people swirl themselves into the mix. The Transition town process has spread around the world very quickly in just 4 or 5 years. The Occupy movement has spread even faster. The Occupy movement has a been a protest movement so far. It could also become a movement which builds a new socio-economicpolitical system. It could model what a new system would look like. If it did that then it would become autopoetic/self-creating. A virus replicates by tapping into the DNA of another cell. The Occupy movement is operating like a virus in the sense that its tapping into the dissatisfaction with the current system. A virus replicates but it is not autopoetic. For the Occupy movement to become autopoetic it needs to model new socio-economic-political methods which it itself uses to run itself. However it is not quite autopoietic, not quite self-creating. If it was self-creating then it would survive even if there was nothing to protest. The Occupy movement so far knows what it is against, there is a great opportunity for it to create what is for. That can happen at Occupy nodes if there is room for facilitated discussion of what are the best solutions. These solutions can then be modeled there. And replicated elsewhere.94 Shlok Vaidya describes the modular/stigmergic principles of organization in the Occupy movement quite well: OWS currently consists of thousands/millions/hundreds of millions of cognitive nodes:

Connecting/infecting new nodes. As part of this, the organization is generating memes, testing against live audiences, and dropped if counterproductive. Trying to build sufcient capacity before. . . Probing attack vectors. A botnet, like a storm, emphasizes growth of its own capacity before attacking (or raining). Mild DDoS on the Brooklyn bridge or around the Bank of America in SF. Anonymous phishing for corruption, etc. This is enabled by. . . Decentralized command and control. Perhaps more specically, modular design. Each protest in each city is led by independent afliates (if not further broken down). Crashing a protest in Ohio has no impact on the rest of the network.95
94 Occupy as Self-Organizing, Self-Replicating Node, Open Collaboration, October 13, 2011 <http://opencollaboration.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/occupy-as-selforganizing-self-replicating-nodet>; taken down, but quoted at Occupy as Self-Organizing, Self-Replicating Node, Networked Activism and Asymmetric Conict Study Group, LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Occupy-as-selforganizing-replicating-node4129775.S.79291616>. 95 Shlok Vaidya, Occupy Wall Street, Botnets, and Thousand-Year Storms, Shlok Vaidya, October 5, 2011 <http://shloky.com/?p=3609>.

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Alexis Madrigal compares the platform/module architecture of OWS to Twitters Application Programming Interface:
The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence thats surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no ofcial institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied. ....Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers dont have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).96

Those who criticize Occupy Wall Street for its lack of structure and leadership, for its lack of clear demands, Douglas Rushkoff writes, are unable to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.
In fact, we are witnessing Americas rst true Internet-era movement, whichunlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaigndoes not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint. Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same systemand they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem [emphasis mine]. Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Streets many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the
96 Alexis Madrigal, Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS is So Useful, The Atlantic, November 16, 2011 <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/a-guide-to-the-occupy-wall-streetapi-or-why-the-nerdiest-way-to-think-about-ows-is-so-useful/248562/>.

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creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud. Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets bankings defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns. Thats because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in ofce and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet. Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken. But unlike a traditional protest, which identies the enemy and ghts for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It models a new collectivism, picking up on the sustainable protest village of the movements Egyptian counterparts, with food, rst aid, and a library.97

Take another look at the sentence I highlighted above. Were backonce againto our theme of open-source protest, back to stigmergic organization. Occupy Wall Street itself is a platform. Its their lack of specic demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, its hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state. That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specic agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed. Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movements source of power.
97 Douglas Rushkoff, Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You dont get it, Rushkoff, October 5, 2011 <http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/10/5/think-occupy-wall-st-is-a-phase-youdont-get-it.html>.

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Thats the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community. The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers. In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs permission from leadership to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. Occupy Our Homes, which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like ash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a laboratory of democracy. Theres a shared perception of the evil, but as many emphases and agendas as there are people whove subjectively experienced the evil. In my fathers house are many mansions. John Robb explains it in pointed language:
Occupy is an open source protest. That means it doesnt have a specic message. It is a container for may groups/motivations/passions held together by simplest of ideas: it is possible to permanently occupy of places of power. Anyone that tells you it needs to have a specic policy agenda is a) not an expert and b) still living in the 20th Century.98

In the cities outside New York, the protests are less about occupying symbolic targets related to the national banking system, to occupying targets of signicance to the daily lives of people in those communities. For example Aaron Bady of Occupy Oakland writes that the movement in Oakland is asserting ordinary peoples control of the city:
This is why it has meant something very different, from the beginning, to Occupy Oakland. In a just worldin the world the occupiers are trying to usher into existencethere might be no such thing as Wall Street at all, and certainly not in its current form. But Oakland is not a center of nance and power or a locus of political privilege. There is a here here. No one really lives in Wall Street, but those who Occupy Oakland do so because they already did. As a result, when we Occupy Oakland, we are engaged much less in a symbolic protest against the banks or the 1%political actions which are given their shape by the political terrain of protesting abstractionsand much more in a very concrete struggle for a right to the city. After all, the police who dispersed occupiers with tear gas were only doing the sort of thing they had long been accustomed to doing to the poor, transient, and/or communities of color that make up a great majority of Oaklands humanity. They used inhuman means of regulat98 John Robb, OCCUPY NOTE 11/17/11 Contagion, Global Guerrillas, November 17, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/11/occupy-note-111711-contagionows.html>.

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ing human bodiesthe declaration of unlawful assemblybecause the city is accustomed to having the power to do so, the effective right to assemble and disassemble Oakland as they see t. Its that power thats being contested. When a body calling itself the Oakland Commune renames the front yard of city hall after a police shooting victim, sets out to feed and house anyone who stands in line, and refuses to allow the states purveyors of violence to police them, the challenge is quite direct and legible, a peaceful revolution.... This is why putting up tents in Oakland was not a symbolic protest, not a part of the movement that can be allowed to die. To put up a tent and sleep in it, in violation of city ordinances, is a tiny way to claim the right to make the city ourselves.... The construction of a thing called The Oakland Commune at a plaza that was re-named after Oscar Grant was, in this sense, not a franchise of Occupy Wall Street but a revolutionary defense of that particular space, the demand that we who occupy it have the right to decide what will be made of it.99

A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of progressive politicsgetting out the vote and organizing pressure groupsdoesnt work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most progressive president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street. Activists involved in the Tahrir Square movement, in response to offers to send election observers to Cairo, sent this bit of comradely advice to the Wall Street Occupiers:
It seems to us that you have taken to the streets and occupied your parks and cities out of a dissatisfaction with the false promises of the game of electoral politics, and so did our comrades in Spain, Greece and Britain. Regardless of how one stands on the efcacy of elections or elected representatives, the Occupy movement seems outside the scope of this; your choice to occupy is, if nothing else, bigger than any election. Why then, should our elections be any cause for celebration, when even in the best of all possible worlds they will be just another supposedly representative body ruling in the interest of the 1% over the remaining 99% of us? This new Egyptian parliament will have effectively no powers whatsoever, andas many of us see itits election is just a means of legitimating the ruling juntas seizure of the revolutionary process. Is this something you wish to monitor? We have, all of us around the world, been learning new ways to represent ourselves, to speak, to live our politics directly and immediately, and in Egypt we did not set out to the streets in revolution simply to gain a parliament. Our strugglewhich we think we share with youis greater and grander than a neatly functioning parliamentary democracy; we demanded the fall of the regime, we demanded
99 Aaron Bady, The Oakland Commune, Possible Futures, <http://www.possible-futures.org/2011/ 12/05/oakland-commune/>.

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dignity, freedom and social justice, and we are still ghting for these goals. We do not see elections of a puppet parliament as the means to achieve them.... ....We think that activists or as people committed to serious change in the systems we live in, there is so much more that we can do together than legitimizing electoral processes (leave that boring job to the Carter Foundation) that seem so impoverished next to the new forms of democracy and social life we are building. It should be neither our job nor our desire to play the game of elections; we are occupying and we should build our spaces and our networks because they themselves are the basis on which we will build the new. Let us deepen our lines of communication and process and discover out what these new ways of working together and supporting one another could be.100

Les Leopold deserves two cheers for his article on the lessons for Occupy Wall Street from the Populist movement. Leopold distilled his lessons down into four bullet points:
1. Shared Movement Experiences: The populist cooperatives provided the day-to-day shared experiences that bound the movement together on a local, state, and national level. People worked together and struggled together against powerful opponents, often having to suffer vigilante violence to protect their budding cooperatives that stored produce and livestock, and that sold food, supplies, and farm implements. These shared experiences built up the courage and selfrespect of millions of participants. They felt part of something big and important. They shared the common identity of populism. And today? While there are thousands of cooperatives and progressive nonprot organizations in the country today, they are not linked in substantial ways. Its also not clear if they are creating the common experiences necessary for movement building. The Occupy Wall Street encampments certainly are (or were) creating such communities, but as currently conceived and constructed, they just arent suitable for those who dont want to encamp. Also its not clear if the encampments will survive the current round of evictions.... 2. Systematic Education: The populist lecturing system also was key to movement building as it developed a dialogue with everyday farmers about how the economic system really worked and what the movement should stand for. The base of the movement, not just the leadership, became nancially literate as it debated and understood the need for a radical restructuring of the nancial system based on the sub-treasury plan. And today? We dont as yet have anything like a lecturer system to engage the American public in an educational discussion. But one could be built in a hurry. There are plenty of us who could link together to build a Economics for the 99 Percent program. But it may
100 Statement by Comrades from Cairo in Response to OWS Proposal to Send Election Monitors, Jadaliyya, November 13, 2011 <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3113/statementby-comrades-from-cairo-in-response-to-ow>.

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need something larger to get it going and give it purpose. 3. Independent Media: The populist movement was well-supported with a rag-tag collection of small, but vital newspapers and journalsabout 100 of themthroughout the country. These media outlets provided continual news about the key economic and political issues of the day. Its editors ran their journals on a shoestring in order to maintain their independence and the clarity of their message. And today? We do indeed have our rag-tag newsletters, journals, and thousands of websites, with Alternet.org being one of the best. Running on a shoestring is nothing new to them. But at the moment, there is little coordination or shared identity. But that could come as a movement grows. 4. The Peoples Government: And nally the populist movements base and its leadership truly believed that the American government belonged to themthey should be able to run political institutions just like the founding fathers had promised. As true democrats, they were not intimidated by money or power. They were decidedly not anti-government. And today? We are much more ambivalent about our relationship to governing than our forefathers ever were. Do we still feel capable of collectively exercising power to stop the nancial predators from running the country? The jury is out.101

It strikes me that the fourth point is superuous; the rst three, in themselves, constitute a peoples government. Theres a good reason people today are more ambivalent about governing. The idea that there ever was popular government, that government ever served as anything but the instrument of a ruling class, is an ahistorical myth comparable to the Russian peasantrys belief that the Little Father would dry his peoples tears if only he were freed from the pernicious inuence of his wicked counselors. [Material from C4SS on OWS stigmergy] One early example of stigmergic innovation occurred during the rst eviction threat from New York City Mayor Bloomberg. Bloomberg threatened to evict the occupiers because they allegedly impeded regular cleaning of the park by city public works staff. John Robb speculated on new methods the movement might adopt, if they were severed from Zuccotti Park as a base.
Lets start off with an assumption. This is Bloomberg vs. Occupy. One mind vs. many minds. The goal is to coerce him into changing his mind. Dissuade him. Get inside his OODA loop.

Go straight for him. Maximize the evictions taint on Bloombergs personal brand. Personalize the protest/eviction by attaching the blame to him personally. Pierce his shield of bureaucratic impersonality. Brand the eviction with the name: Bloomberg. This is/will be a global stage, use it.
101 Les Leopold, Dont Occupy the Democratic PartyFour Lessons From the Populist Movement, Alternet, December 13, 2011 <http://www.alternet.org/story/153354/don%27t_%27occupy_the_democratic_party%27_-_four_lessons_from_the_populist_movement>.

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Confuse him. Lots and lots of Flash Mobs. Shut down bridges and major streets. Overwhelm with volume/speed. Non-violent disruption. As soon as police arrive in force, disperse and reassemble at new location. Bikes + Kids. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. More ashmobs = more disruption. As long as the square is under attack, keep the city tied in knots. NOTE: If they lock down the area, ashmobs are the best way to participate (and get some exercise). Connect with more people than him. Best way to do this: Eyes in the sky. Get a camera/cameras above Liberty Square. Stream the feed. The better the quality the more impact it will have. It will play across the world. Think about how important AJs video feed over Tahrir was when things got hot. Better yet, get AJ to cover it and stream it....
Hoisted from the comments: The ashmob tactic was tried here in Panama couple of years ago by the SUNTRACS construction workers union, and with very small groups pre-planted all over the city they drove the police absolutely crazy. Police would show up at location A, mob would disperse immediately, two text messages and now TWO ashmobs would block streets at different locations. They never followed up with it (preferring massive marches to display force) but it worked very well and with much less people than #ows has available. [courtesy: Okke]102

In the midst of the same standoff, Daniel Denvir offered a similar prescription: funnel the mass movement and zeal for direct action into ongoing and roving occupations of 1 percent targets to win victories and sustain the movement through the winter.
Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide can form a variety of distinct groups to mobilize a newly politicized public for ongoing, cascading occupations to demand economic justice from the plutocrats. Imagine if there were a new major action every month, in every major American city, targeting a greedy Wall Street bank or defending a family ghting foreclosure? Why not occupy everything, as need be, and on a roving basis?... Hypothetically, the movement could:

Occupy one of the many troublemaking banks, whether it be Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan or whichever, until it agrees to let people ghting foreclosure stay in their homes and offer meaningful debt forgiveness. Or target a bank whose casino capitalism deals left municipal coffers broke, demanding that they cut indebted cities and counties some slack. Occupy a home where a family is ghting eviction. Millions of American homes have been foreclosed upon, and another wave of foreclosure is now upon us.
102 John Robb, Bloomberg vs. Occupy, Global Guerrillas, October 13, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ globalguerrillas/2011/10/bloomberg-vs-occupy.htm>.

441 Occupy an exploitative company and demand they stop funding the rightwing U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or link up with a labor struggle like that of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) against Verizons attempt to roll back benets and retirement. Unions across the country are ghting anti-worker lawmakers and businesses that say America can no longer pay decent wages and benets for a hard days work. Occupy Wall Street should join that ght, and ask workers how they can help.... Occupy where the 1 percent live, work and play. The super rich all belong to country clubs and other exclusive institutions. If the movement is targeting a specic bank, a picket of the CEOs country club will hit them one place it hurts: their easy comfort amongst high society.103 So Bloombergs rst threat to shut down the Liberty Square encampment coincided with the rst wave of proposals for transitioning from static geographical bases to swarming. As it was, that rst eviction crisis was defusedin part by Occupy Wall Streets preemptive resort to a variant of the very take it to the enemy approach Robb recommended: In recognition of the threat, the Occupy movement gathers its strength. It makes a widely reported call to come to the park on the morning of the 14th to block the eviction. Occupy then rapidly delegitimizes the complaint. It starts to deep clean Liberty Square with powerwashers, brooms, and mops (they even hired a dump truck). It even offers to let cleaners into the square to clean 1/3 of it at a time. With the complaint delegitimized, the Occupy movement goes on the offensive. It personalizes the eviction move (already inside Bloombergs OODA). It nds Bloomberg. Hes at a gala dinner at Ciprianis (a Wall Street restaurant). They surround the restaurant and try to enter it to deliver a petition with 310,000 signatures. Bloomberg hides, departs from the rear.104 In response to a later eviction crisis, Occupy Oakland responded with a General Strikeagain, a form of swarming supplanting the static encampment model.
We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%. We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city.
103 Daniel Denvir, 6 Places to Occupy Next: Protest the 1% Where They Live, Work and Play, Alternet, October 13, 2011 <http://www.alternet.org/economy/ 152721/6_places_to_occupy_next:_protest_the_1_where_they_live,_work_and_play>. 104 John Robb, BLOOMBERG VS. OCCUPY: Round I Occupy #ows, Global Guerrillas, October 14, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/bloomberg-vs-occupy-aknock-out-decision-ows.html>.

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All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them. While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, afnity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of. The whole world is watching Oakland. Lets show them what is possible.105

Other swarming tactics the Occupy movement has experimented with include creating a demonstration effect by squatting vacant buildings and occupying foreclosed homes, and encouraging others to do the same. At the outset of the occupation, on September 17, OccupyWallStreet.org issued a Modest Call to Action that included this plank:
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.106

This was rst actually attempted, so far as I know, by Occupy Oakland, toward the tail end of their General Strike in response to the brutal police attack on their camp. Some participants entered a vacant ofce building near the occupation site and issued an announcement encouraging the homeless to occupy vacant ofces and homes all across Oakland and across the country as well. Unfortunately they did so in a clumsy and ill-advised manneroccupying the building rather abruptly and without warning, and building a bonre in the middle of the streetand provoked brutal repression by the police.
Last night, after one of the most remarkable days of resistance in recent history, some of us within Occupy Oakland took an important next step: we extended the occupation to an unused building near Oscar Grant Plaza. We did this, rst off, in order to secure the shelter and space from which to continue organizing during the coming winter months. But we also hoped to use the national spotlight on Oakland to encourage other occupations in colder, more northern climates to consider claiming spaces and moving indoors in order to resist the repressive force of the weather, after so bravely resisting the police and the political establishment. We want this movement to be here next Spring, and claiming unused space is, in our view, the most plausible way forward for us at this point. We had plans to start using this space today as a library, a place for classes and workshops, as well as a dormitory for those with health conditions. We had already begun to move in books from the library. The building we chose was perfect: not only was it a mere block from Oscar Grant Plaza, but it formerly housed the Travelers Aid Society, a not-for-prot organization that provided services to the home105 Occupy Oakland Calls for a General Strike, Wednesday, November 2, amor mundi, October 27 2011 <http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-oakland-calls-for-general-strike.html>. 106 A Modest Call to Action on this September 17th, OccupyWallSt.org, September 17, 2011<http://occupywallst.org/ article/September_Revolution/>.

443
less but, due to cuts in government funding, lost its lease Given that Occupy Oakland feeds hundreds of people every day, provides them with places to sleep and equipment for doing so, involves them in the maintenance of the camp (if they so choose), we believe this makes us the ideal tenants of this space, despite our unwillingness to pay for it. None of this should be that surprising, in any case, as talk of such an action has percolated through the movement for months now, and the Oakland GA recently voted to support such occupations materially and otherwise. Business Insider discussed this decision in an article entitled The Inevitable Has Happened. We are well aware that such an action is illegal, just as it is illegal to camp, cook, and live in Oscar Grant Plaza as we have done. We are aware that property law means that what we did last night counts as trespassing, if not burglary. Still, the ferocity of the police response surprised us. Once again, they mobilized hundreds of police ofcers, armed to the hilt with bean bag guns, tear gas and ashbang grenades, despite the fact that these so-called less-than-lethal weapons nearly killed someone last week. The city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect one landlords right to earn a few thousand every month. Why is this? Whereas the blockade of the port an action which caused millions of dollars of losses met with no resistance, the attempt to take one single building, a building that was unused, met with the most brutal and swift response. The answer: they fear this logical next step from the movement more than anything else. They fear it because they know how much appeal it will have. All across the US thousands upon thousands of commercial and residential spaces sit empty while more and more people are forced to sleep in the streets, or driven deep into poverty while trying to pay their rent despite unemployment or poverty wages. We understand that capitalism is a system that has no care for human needs. It is a system which produces hundreds of thousands of empty houses at the same time as it produces hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The police are the line between these people and these houses. They say: you can stay in your rat-infested park. You can camp out here as long as we want. But the moment that you threaten property rights, we will come at you with everything we have.107

This logical next step, seemingly abortive, was later revived in the aftermath of the national wave of evictions, which spurred Occupy into a new phase of activism. After the wave of evictions had passed, according to Jules Lobel, there was a great deal of internal discussion about the future course of the movement. Lobel described three possibilities:
Some say that the movement now should evolve into the political arena, supporting policy ideas, running candidates for ofce, and putting pressure on politicians and corporations. Similarly, others argue that the next step is to develop a specic list of demands, which presumably could further policy initiatives and protests.
107 Statement on the Occupation of the former Travelers Aid Society at 520 16th Street, Indybay.org, November 3, 2011 <http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/11/03/18697018.php>.

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A different tactical response is to create what essentially would be a non-violent guerrilla movement in American cities. For example, Kalle Lasn, the Adbuster magazine publisher and originator of the Wall Street encampment idea, reportedly urged a new swarming strategy of surprise attacks against business as usual. The Chicago occupiers have resolved to have an event a day throughout the winter, such as defending foreclosed homes, sit-ins, banner drops, building parks, providing supplies to the homeless, or guerrilla theater and art. In the same vein, longtime social movement scholar and activist Francis Fox Piven foresaw some time ago that the movement would develop new phases, utilizing other forms of disruptive protests that are punchier than occupying a square, or rolling occupations of public space. This article suggests another alternative, one that focuses on creating sustainable alternative decentralized institutions that reect in microcosm the egalitarian, democratic vision of society that the Occupy Movement has put forth.... Perhaps the most critical component of OWS is its creation of alternative communities which reect the egalitarian, democratic world that its activists seek for the future. Sometimes referred to as pregurative politics, this perspective seeks to create in microcosm the alternative models that reect the future world that the activists support, while at the same time using those institutions to engage in direct action to change the current reality.... To me, the long term viability of the OWS movement as a transformative movement lies in the creation of these communities, which not only directly practice what they believe, but seek to reach out and effect the public consciousness through direct action. Perhaps Noam Chomsky said it best in his speech to Occupy Boston: The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash thats already coming. There are many groups which are trying to create alternative models in microcosm: food co-ops, farmer markets, cooperative renewable energy projects. Indeed many of these groups have united in an umbrella formation known as the solidarity economy. But none of these groups have captivated the public as has OWS, and very few combine direct action with community building. Other movements in the past have attempted to create such democratic, egalitarian institutions. As William Greider has pointed out, the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century created a series of ingenious agricultural and credit cooperatives, which were eventually destroyed by the money classes and bankers. He asks, what is it we can build that is parallel to that cooperative movement?108

The Occupy movement has taken primarily the second course, but theres no reason it couldnt combine the second with the third. Weve already seen illustrations of the potential teach-in function of Occupy Wall Streetthe appear108 Jules Lobel, The Future of the Occupy Movement, The Future of Occupy, December 6, 2011 <http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2011/12/15/the-future-of-the-occupy-movement/>.

445 ances by Michel Bauwens and Juliet Schor among themserving as a far for exchanging practical tools for resilient local communities operating outside the corporate state. An important next step will be for Occupy groups to network with local micromanufacturing movementshackerspaces and Fab Labsand other practitioners of decentralist economics, on ways of integrating such techniques into the local Occupy movement, building the horizontal framework of a resilient economy that can provide its members subsistence needs independently of wage employment. Such horizontal associations can also include mechanisms for pooling income and risk in return for mutual service, in order to reduce the level of individual dependence on employment and the severity of the shock of unemployment. One hopeful sign, as of February 2012, is the Occupy Wall Street Sustainability project, with workshops on alternative energy, rooftop gardening, composting, permaculture, and the capital assets for putting them into practice.
Occupy Wall Street Sustainability will be undertaking a number of ventures in Spring 2012, including a mobile education lab, monthly skillshare and workshop events, an Eco-Summit, and a rooftop farm!!! We support projects in sustainability, environmental awareness, food justice, permaculture, alternative energy & much more!! We thank you sincerely for your contributions, which will primarily be used to fund educational workshops for the public. Contributions will be invested in our programming, as well as the construction of our newest venture, ROOFTOP FARMING!!! At two locations in Brooklyn, NY we will be establishing Rooftop Farms, as a platform to expand rooftop farming in NYC. We seek to reach under served communities, who have been traditionally labeled as food deserts, to provide fresh, nutritious produce!!!109

At any rate, the rate of innovation in Lobels second alternative, swarming, has been kicked up several notches since the coordinated national wave of evictions was kind enough to end Occupys status as a one-trick pony. On December 1, 2011 OccupyWallSt.org announced plans to re-occupy a foreclosed home on the 6th as a national kick-off for a new frontier for the occupy movement: the liberation of vacant bank-owned homes for those in need.110 The re-occupation is intended as part of a national day of action, including eviction defense at foreclosed properties, takeovers of vacant properties by homeless families, and foreclosure action disruptions, ...in more than 25 cities across the country. In fact the day of action on December 6 saw real estate occupations in more than twenty cities. New York organizer Sean Barry said:
Were here because [there are] a lot of empty buildings owned by Wall Street banks and were going to liberate them. Tasha Glasgow, the single mother of a 9-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, was expected to be one of the rst occupants of a
109 Occupy Wall Street Sustainability, WePay <https://www.wepay.com/x2e7mcl/donations/ occupy_wall_street_sustainability>. 110 Occupy Wall Street Goes Home, OccupyWallStreet.org, December 1, 2011 <http://occupywallst.org/article/occupy-wall-street-goes-home/>.

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reclaimed home. Barry said that Glasgow, who had been in and out of the shelter system in New York City, had been slated to get a Section 8 voucher before budget cuts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg put an end to that promise. Weve gained access to the home, and weve got the support of the neighbors, Barry explained. Theyre going to start occupying it. . . . And then, theres going to be 24/7 eviction defense by Occupy Wall Street. There were over 40 events planned in more than 20 cities Tuesday, but that is just the beginning. 111 December 6 was the result of weeks of careful planning and alliance building, a sign in itself that the Occupy movement is evolving in exciting ways. In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of more than forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming unemployed while another group held a barbeque at a property owned by Fannie Mae. Over twenty cities hosted protests, all told. In New York, Occupy activists worked with community organizations and other allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the liberation and re-occupation of a vacant bank-owned property in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the foreclosure rate is estimated to be ve times the state average. Around 11 am, three hours before the tour was set to start, I made my way to Atlantic Terminal Plaza in Brooklyn to join up with a group planning to use the subway as a storytelling and outreach platform. As we waited for a critical mass of people to arrive before heading into the station, a young security guard came over and said a few words to the protesters. A middle-aged passerby wasted no time rallying to occupiers defense. Dont mess with them, son! he shouted, hardly breaking his stride. Theyre ghting for you!112

Ironically, David Ronfeldt wrote this at the outset of the swarming campaign against foreclosed properties:
So far, the Occupy movement has generated no major incidents that fully manifest swarming. But a lot of statements... speak to its attractiveness; and swarming is implicit in the efforts at multiple occupations a swarm of occupations. By some accounts, the swarming phase of the Occupy movement is just beginning; if so, it may take the movement in new directions against new targets, perhaps especially if the physical occupations of parks and other sites are ended.113
111 David Edwards, Occupy protesters reclaiming foreclosed homes in 20 cities, The Raw Story, December 5, 2011 <http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/06/occupy-protestersreclaiming-foreclosed-homes-in-20-cities/>. 112 Astra Taylor, Occupy Wall Street on Your Street, The Nation, December 7, 2011 <http://www.thenation.com/article/ 165024/occupy-wall-street-your-street>. 113 David Ronfeldt, What the Occupy Protests Mean: A TIMN Interpretation (Part Two), Visions from Two Theories, December 6, 2011 <http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-occupy-

447 And in the aftermath of Occupy Our Homes, Nathan Schneider writes, this is our best glimpse yet of what Occupy Phase II will look like. Nationwide, autonomous local groups have introduced yet another wave of stigmergic innovation on the common platform, independently taking up the idea of occupying independent real estate for the use of the evicted and homeless. Along the way, staffers of groups that were once waiting-and-seeing from afar what Occupy Wall Street would do were now busily coordinating the action; among these are Van Jones Rebuild the Dream, New York Communities for Change, and Organizing for Occupation.114 The last-named group, in particular, sounds promising:
December 6th is just the beginning. Join us and bring your skills, talents. . . all of yourselves to bear on building a better future: Join O4O at our next general meeting: Dec. 19th at 7PM at the Catholic Worker, 55 E 3rd St, New York, NY Join a team and get to work!

Eviction Watch mobilize support to prevent evictions at foreclosed homes and squats http://www.o4onyc.org/eviction-watch/ Construction help secure and renovate both foreclosed and occupied vacant housing, and train or be trained by occupants in construction skills construction@o4onyc.org Research identify, through on-site and on-line capabilities, vacant housing that could and should be transformed into homes research@o4onyc.org. Admin/Fundraising raise funds to secure tools and construction materials to support our construction team admin@o4onyc.org Media/Communications help O4O broadcast its message, make media and craft a different narrative for housing as a human right media@o4onyc.org Arts create art in various media that supports, expresses, and enhances the campaign and work of O4O arts@o4onyc.org
protests-mean-timn.html>. 114 Nathan Schneider, Occupy Moves to the Home Front, Yes!, December 8, <http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/occupy-moves-to-the-home-front>. 2011

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Intake/Screening outreach to and interview prospective homesteaders in need who are seeking a place to live, identifying capabilities and special requirements and matching them up to suitable venues for occupation screening@o4onyc.org Legislative/Legal help support O4O in its direct actions by providing legal support and build support for legislative efforts which help to facilitate the mission of O4O, e.g., mandated vacant building counts, sweat equity legislation, moratorium on evictions legislation, legislative@o4onyc.org Academic o4o@o4onyc.org Religious organize support for the mission of O4O within the wider religious community and offering public spiritual support and witness to those engaged in the O4O campaign o4o@o4onyc.org115 Anna Betz recommends this as the primary form of Occupy action in the new year:
Its not as though the banks are doing anything with a lot of these properties. There are blocks and blocks of abandoned housing all over this country. At the same time, there are people who have nowhere to live. Those left in the heavily abandoned neighborhoods live in increasingly dangerous and unhealthy circumstances. So why shouldnt people take control of these spaces and turn them to positive social uses? (And politicize them!) These kinds of actions have a long history in the U.S. Neighborhood activists and labor activists moved evicted tenants back into apartments or homes in the 1890s, in the 1910s, during the Great Depression. Before you had a labor movement that was legalized, there was the Neighborhood Council of Working-Class Women moving evicted families back into their homes.116

Another major development was the Occupy movements action to shut down major ports all along the West Coast. The overall size of the actions was smaller than that of November 2 in Oakland, but managed to shut down several terminals. Two months after the initial port shutdown, undertaken in response to the police assault on Oscar Grant Plaza, Occupy Oakland again marched on the citys port. On December 13, companies operating the 26 berths at the port told employees not to show up for workbefore the march had even started.117 Occupy LA protestors tried unsuccessfully to shut down Terminal J at the Long
115 December 6 is Just the Beginning, Organizing for Occupation, December 6, 2011 <http://www.o4onyc.org/2011/12/ 06/december-6th-is-just-the-beginning/>. 116 Anna Betz, Next Move: Occupy Foreclosed Homes? The Future of Occupy, December 29, 2011 <http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2011/12/29/next-move-occupy-foreclosed-homes/>. 117 Justin Berton, Kevin Fagan,Demian Bulwa, Oakland port workers stay home as protestors rally, San Francisco Chronicle, December 13, 2011 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/12/ BAJK1MBE5E.DTL&tsp=1>.

449 beach port (because it houses shipping agent SSA Marine, which is partially owned by investment bank Goldman Sachs), but were cleared away when they attempted to obstruct truck access to the terminal.118 Although the ofcial longshoremens union leadership did not endorse the shutdowns, many members stayed home in support of the occupiers. And an ad hoc committee elected by port truck drivers serving the major ports of the West Coast endorsed Occupy port shutdowns.
We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day. We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the ve of us we have 11 children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for Americas stores. We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you 99 Percenters for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.... Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as people while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as thugs. But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are ghting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here. We drivers have a saying, We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one. The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our sts and together declare: No one could stop us from forming a union.119

Another innovation just came out of Oaklandthe discovery of how to capitalize on the lightness and agility of protesters compared to the cops:
The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces. This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media. On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didnt report is that we re-took the park later
118 Occupy Ports: Occupy Protesters Demonstrate at Port of Los Angeles, KTLA.com, December 12, 2011 <http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-occupy-ports,0,2198544.story>. 119 An Open Letter from Americas Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports, Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, December 12, 2011 <http://cleanandsafeports.org/blog/2011/12/12/an-open-letterfrom-america%E2%80%99s-port-truck-drivers-on-occupy-the-ports/>.

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that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction. The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance. Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Heavy infantry function as a unit, not individual soldiers. Their operational strength is dependent upon maintaining the integrity of that unit. Riot police are heavy infantry. They will always form a line and advance as a unit.... The lack of weaponry on the part of the protesters grants them the luxury of opposing riot cops at close quarters, or remaining at long range in a refusal to engage the heavy infantry riot police at all. They have the advantage of the retreat, they can quickly move away, or in any direction, and the heavy infantry riot cops lack the swiftness to respond. So far, all the occupations have, in a grave tactical error, agreed to engage the riot cops when they march in to clear parks. This has been a show of bravado that has the tactical benets of providing media coverage of the brutal methods of police and the benet of draining the resources of the oppressor by forcing them to incur the expense of arresting and prosecuting people for trivial offenses. Now, to move on to the actual application of these tactical principles (that evolved by accident rather than conscious thought), we can take the example of Shemanski park on the 3rd. We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking trafc the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us, as was the truck with the giant speakers on the top repeatedly announcing This street is open to trafc, individuals blocking trafc will be subject to arrest. Announcing this repeatedly was useless. One principle of nonviolent resistance is this: one person has to walk on the sidewalk, 500 people can walk wherever they please. The riots cops had no place to form a line, so they were crippled. Since we had no clear destination, the police were unable to get ahead of us and set up roadblocks. They were helpless to do anything but trail along as an escort to the march. The only other response they could have had was for the riot cops to charge into the marching

451
crowd and attempt to disperse it by brutality, which would have been mayhem that could have only resulted in a PR loss by the police department as the images of beatings and brutality hit the airwaves the next day.... After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that wed been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to trafc (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to trafc). In summary: when the cops come to clear the park, dont resist. As they are preparing for their military maneuver and use of force that the Occupiers cannot reasonably be expected to resist, the occupiers should be packing up their tents and baggage and loading them into wagons, bicycles, backpacks, etc. Force the cops to clear the park inch by inch, but try to avoid arrest in so doing. Once they have cleared the park, rouse the crowd through loud amplication announcing that you intend to march (any destination will do). Get the music blaring and then march aimlessly, blocking trafc the whole way, for hours. The crowd will be energized and willing to march for a long time, being spurred on by energetic music and chants. The police will eventually trim down their entourage because they realize that they are helpless. Eventually, work your way back to the park. Or, if the police have fenced off the park, head to another park. If the police force you out, march again and they will be forced to follow. Eventually, they will inevitably come to the conclusion that they would rather have you in a park than disrupting trafc. The police have no response to this tactic, other than resorting to brutality. And if they do that, we win whether they clear the park or not.120

When discussing the nature of Occupy as a fair or a school, we cant go without mentioning the way the stigmergic organization of the movement itself facilitates collaboration with innovators, and the rapid adoption of new skills and technology. For example the New York City General Assembly Technology Operations Group
supports the online communication and organization needs of OWS and the New York City General Assembly. We seek to provide online tools that promote participation among occupiers and beyond by extending communication streams and promoting the exchange of in120 Lester MacGurdy, Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police Creating Blueprint for Other Occupations, Portland Occupier, December 15, 2011 <http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creatingblueprint-for-other-occupations/>.

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formation. We do not editorialize, but rather support and reect the structure and decisions of the GA, not guide them or alter them. Although we promote the use of Open Source solutions, we intend to use whatever technology will best meet the needs of the communities we serve.121 ...[The group] seeks to bring the Occupy and Free/Libre/Open Source movements together through the development, deployment and documentation of the tools and techniques people need to create the world they want.122

We already saw, in Chapter Two, the rapid series of innovations in encrypted routers and meshwork technologies designed to survive government shutdowns, since the Egyptian governments attempted shutdown of the Internet during the Tahrir Square uprising. And there are equally signicant forms of innovation other than secure communications systems. Vinay Gupta, designer of the Hexayurt refugee and disaster housing unit, has designed a set of cheap protective gear to protect protestors from punitive chemical assault by police.123 From the beginning, the threat of cooptation has been a problem: there have been fears the Occupy movement would be hijacked by an inux of allies, professional activists from the Institutional Left. No doubt a lot of centerleft Democrats would love to turn Occupy into a mass base for Obamas jobs program, or an arm of the Coffee Party movement. But thats pretty hard to do with a leaderless movement, as Congressman John Lewisan extreme test case if there ever was one, given his heroic credentials in the Civil Rights movementlearned to his chagrin. As John Robb points out:
Fortunately, the Occupy movement is organized in a way that makes taking control difcult. Here are some of them:

Consensus decision making (blocks leadership as per the above). Geographic Decentralization. Not many people in any one location. No hieararchy or bureaucracy. A coup detat requires a bureaucratic hierarchy. To seize control, all you need to do get the bureaucracy to accept your orders. If it does, you are now in control. Occupy doesnt have a bureaucracy to seize control of. No behind the scenes space. Everything is out in the open/transparent. How do you cut a deal in a smoke lled room when there isnt one?124
121 Technology Operations Group, Occupy.Net wiki <http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/Technology_Operations_Group>.

Page, Occupy.Net wiki <http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/Main_Page>. Gupta, Protecting democratic protest from suppression by use of sublethal chemical weapons, The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution, December 11, 2011 <http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/protecting-democratic-protest-from-suppressionusing-sublethal-chemical-weapons-2918>. 124 John Robb, LEADERSHIP & OPEN SOURCE PROTEST, Global Guerrillas, October 11, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/leadership-open-sourceprotest-ows.html>.
123 Vinay

122 Main

453 Like the Arab Spring before it, the Occupy movement went globalreturning, in fact, to many of the same countries whose earlier protest movements had provided its inspiration. According to Francesca Rheannon, it spread to 1500 cities in 82 countries.125 And, Marcia Stepanik writes,
the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per citymore, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined."126

Wukan. The Wukan uprising occurred against the background of a corrupt land deal, in which local ofcials gave away villagers common land away to a private developer. In itself, it probably wouldnt have sparked such an uproarthat sort of thing happens all over China, in villages too numerous to count. But there were aggravating circumstances. As with previous instances in the Long Revolution that started in Tunisia, the Wukan uprisings ability to leverage media was a source of power.
Revolt or not, the protest over land sales here, which began months ago, was sustained in its nal and most perilous phase by the villagers canny interactions with journalists from foreign and Hong Kong news organizations. Mainland Chinese news media were barred from reporting on Wukan, but dozens of reporters for foreign publications arrived here last week after being alerted to the protest by an article in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. They slipped through a police cordon by traveling on motor rickshaws along winding dirt roads and, in one case, by hiring a boat to reach the harbor. The villagers threw open their doors. They now had the means to wage a propaganda war. The presence of international journalists may have kept the local authorities from sending in security forces after an initial assault failed. And the pressure of continuous news reports from Wukan no doubt helped spur the leader and party secretary of Guangdong Province, Wang Yang, to send senior ofcials here on Wednesday to negotiate with the protesters. After the meeting, village leaders said that they had obtained some concessions and they called a halt to the protest, even though the dispute over the land sales remained unresolved. They held additional talks with provincial ofcials on Thursday.127

11.0.7

Anonymous and other Hacktivists.

Anonymous. The Anonymous group originally grew out of the 4chan/b/ discussion community. Given the common quality of discussion among its membership
125 Francesca Rheannon, Occupy Goes Global: Is Another World Possible? CSRwire, October 18, 2011 <http://www.csrwire.com/blog/posts/178-occupy-goes-global-is-another-world-possible>. 126 Marcia Stepanek, Wirearchy, Cause Global: Social Media for Social Change, October 17, 2011 <http://causeglobal.blogspot.com/2011/10/wirearchy_17.html>. 127 Edward Wong, Canny Wukan Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen Chinas Muzzle, New York Times, December 22, 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/world/asia/canny-wukan-villagersgrasp-keys-to-loosen-chinas-muzzle.html>.

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of hackers and anime enthusiastsdiscussion ranging from the decidedly politically incorrect (constant references to niggers and fags) to the apparently sociopathicits not the sort of venue from which youd ordinarily expect social justice activism to emerge. But on closer inspection, the deliberate recourse to forbidden words is motivated not so much by racism or homophobia as by revelry in their very forbiddenness. Its a way of signaling that theyve cast off the socialization of the junior high schoolmarms, and that /b/ isnt a hospitable place for good, pink little citizens who have their minds right. You can get a pretty good feel for the culture just by looking at Encyclopedia Dramatica, whose content comes mainly from 4chan participants. In fact the rst Anonymous pranks, like the /b/ membership, seemed to be motivated mainly by the lulz4chan slang for mindless laughter at the stupidity or misfortune of others. One suspects a lot of /b/ participants (/b/tards in the parlance), like Tom Greene, arent so much malicious as just unable to realize when the jokes gone too far. Anonymous itself is simply a brand, a common label under which self-organized projects operate. Operations under the Anonymous brand are organized virally, often spurred by something as random as an individual tweet that inspires others to get up to deviltry.128 Anonymouss rst prominent appearance in the news, and for all intents and purposes its emergence as a movement with a social conscience, was the Anonymous attack on the Church of Scientology. Before then, its attacks were capricious and seemingly unmotivated by any coherent ideology.
...Anonymous had a vigilante streak, and it could be downright mean. Theyd d0x someone who abused a cat. In particular they went after abusers of cats, because Anonymous loves cats and pictures of cats. They blocked the pool at the online kids game Habbo Hotel with black, generously frod avatars declaring Pool is closed due to AIDS as a protest to perceived racism on the part of Habbos admins. But Anonymous was never particularly focused. Raids could be devastating or funny, but either way they came and went quickly, the nets own little tornado system. Anonymous was never anyones personal army, and never stayed on any one topic for very long. It took Tom Cruise to change all that and give Anonymous a political consciousness. Specically, Tom Cruise as cringe-worthy Scientologist. A video of a disturbingly manic Cruise leaked out of Scientology in January 2008, and the notably litigious church tried to force hosting services and Gawker to take it down with legal nastygrams. But the video contained some truly epic lulz, and Anonymous wouldnt let it die. The churchs effort to kill it off so enraged Anons they decided to destroy the church itself. By enraged, I mean a pissy kind of laughing and spitting at once. For Anonymous being mad meant wanting to troll the church very hard, but it was never to get serious, because getting serious for Anons meant losing.
128 Meghan Kelly, Anonymous is all about privacy, VentureBeat, <http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/18/ anonymous-is-all-about-privacy/>.

August 18,

2011

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To accomplish this op (short for operation), Anons created Project Chanology, which arguably marked both the birth of political consciousness for Anonymous, and the development of its methods of taking mass action. Destroying the church was going to be aggro funny, as well as require a lot of dancing. Many have wondered since then, were they serious about destroying the church, or was it all a joke? The answer is yes, and understanding that is vital to understanding Anonymous.129

As Norton argues, Anonymous was in one sense a major departure from the /b/ ethos. That ethos was captured by the phrase getting serious for Anons meant losing. Anon was originally in it for the lulz; those who acted out of serious motivations like social justice were dismissed as moralfags.
But Anons caring about doing the right thing is about morality, and morality, at least straight morality, is not the lulz. Many veterans saw this as a corruption of the purity of Anonymous the cancer that was killing /b/. On February 10, 2008, the moralfags took the whole thing to a new level. They set up meeting times and places in cities around the world, bought masks and made signs. Anons left the internet by the thousands and showed up in front of church locations and Scientology centers around the world, many wearing their new Guy Fawkes masks, V for Vendetta movie merchandise sold by Warner Brothers, to obscure their identities. They played music and walked around with signs that both accused Scientology of crimes and referenced obscure internet memes. They met each other in meat space for the rst time. They partied with their own in front of aghast Scientologists in more than 90 cities. For the rst time, the internet had shown up on the real street, en masse.130

So in a sense, Anonymous after Chanology became a sort of heretical moralfag offshoot of 4chan/b/.
In the beginning, there were lulz, pranks and a culture of trolling just to get a rise out of anyone. But despite many original Anons best efforts, Anonymous has grown up to become the nets immune system, striking back whenever the hive mind perceived that the institutions that run the world crossed the line into hypocrisy. The fall and winter of 2010 started a pattern that persists; when the use of power gets suspect, people join Anonymous. But this immune response changed Anonymous as well. The lulz had to make room for righteous indignation, and not even a pretend indignation. The empowerment anons felt from vigilantism had swung the movement to moralfaggotry permanently, and many anons liked it that way. Scientology tried to fuck with our internet, attempting to shut down the Cruise video. It was punished, hard, and continues to be punished nearly four years later, said an anon on whyweprotest.net
129 Quinn Norton, Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz, Wired.com, November 8, 2011 <http://www.wired.com/ threatlevel/2011/11/anonymous-101/all/1>. 130 Ibid.

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in response to a question posed by Wired. Anonymous was born out of a need to exact retribution. . . . The targets may have broadened but the essential message is the same. 131

Since then Anonymous has gravitated into an activist movement centered on combating Internet censorship and other aspects of the police state, as well as randomly motivated action on behalf of perceived underdogs (another notable early Anon action, to which Norton alluded above, was tracking down and publicizing the identity of an English woman caught on video dumping a cat in a trash bin). And in the atmosphere of moral panics over cyberwar since the Wikileaks cable dump, the media has reported their activities in increasingly alarmist terms.
Last week the net and the media were ablaze with the news that Anonymous might be taking on the Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, a story that has morphed into a wider drug corruption story, and led to one American law enforcement ofcial in North Carolina being named as a gang conspirator. Also this year, Anons released documents on, or d0xed, several police organizations and one prominent police vendor in retaliation for heavy-handed law enforcement reaction to occupations associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Theyve fought with child pornographers, hacked Sony repeatedly, and even tried to release compromising pictures to blackmail Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman Linton Johnson into resigning. (Johnson claimed to have authored and then defended BARTs controversial decision to shut off mobile phone service in BART stations to pre-empt an anti-police brutality protest.) Theyve created law enforcement excitement thats verged on panic, given net and media pundits hyperbolic logorrhea about cyber terrorism and cyber freedom, and happily skipped between damn funny, deeply disturbing, and self-aggrandizing, depending on the mood of the hive mind at the moment.132

From Chanology on, Anonymous continued to rene its arsenal of tactics. From then til now, its operations have become increasinly more sophisticated and more devastating to the organizations targeted. The rst wave of major attacks, using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, had more of an effect on public consciousness, through a technologically illiterate mainstream media, than on the organizations targeted.
The Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a ridiculously named network load testing tool, entered Anonymous collective arsenal in the DDOSing of Scientology websites, but it soon would become the most famous and controversial of the tools of Anonymous. LOIC was made to put load on servers, much as a programmer would do to make sure a website could keep functioning if a lot of web users came by simultaneously. But LOIC was also specically
131 Norton, Anonymous 101 Part Deux: Morals Triumph Over Lulz, Wired.com, December 30, 2011 <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/anonymous-101-part-deux/all/1>. 132 Norton, Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz.

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made with the denizens of 4chan in mind. A single instance of LOIC just sends meaningless UDP and TCP trafc to a target server, which on its own doesnt do much. But when enough people download LOIC and point it at the same target, you have created the human equivalent of a black-hat hackers botnet, and together the action can take down a server with the sheer number of requests. Its as if a site got too popular, except everyone using the LOIC actually hates the site. In the beginning of 2008 LOIC started to get used against Scientology web servers, but the tool was rudimentary, with no way to automate targeting, whats called command and control in the blackhat world of botnets that are comprised of tens of thousands of zombie computer that check in with a central source to get commands to send spam and attack websites. Instead, Anonymous setup page for LOIC simply listed Church server IP addresses and invited anons to copy and paste the addresses and hammer away. The Low Orbit Ion Canon was created by a Norwegian hacker and 4chan regular known as Praetox. Praetox, him or herself, seemed to vanish in 2009, but Praetoxs site remained up, and LOIC and its source code downloadable. Later versions added a way to automate targeting; anons running the LOIC could point it at an IRC channel and the admins could direct and re the LOIC by issuing commands in the channels topic header. While anyone could download the LOIC and point it at anything they wanted, or put it into a slave mode and let it be red from the consensus of an anonops irc channel, there was a big problem. The LOIC didnt hide itself or the attackers IP address, meaning that attackers were logged by servers they attacked, and could be found and prosecuted if the attacked site handed the server logs to authorities. Anons were cavalier about this danger, saying there were too many of them to get them all, which was true, but that still sucked for the few that would eventually face legal consequences. Many naive Anons never understood that they were doing something illegal and traceable, and many of the more knowledgeable kept mum on the dangers, or in some cases, outright lied about the safety of the tool. The LOIC, with its funny name and cannon iconography, had its breakthrough moment with a new target in September of 2010. In early September, an Indian company called AiPlex claimed that it was contracted to send out take down requests to piracy sites, and controversially DDOS those that didnt respond such as the infamous BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay that takes pride in rejecting takedown requests. The story morphed into legend that , AiPlex being hired to perform illegal actions against sites it blasted for illegal activities by the Motion Picture Association of America, instead of the Hollywood/Bollywood joint, Alliance Against Copyright Theft (AACT) . Anons collectively howled. They believed Hollywood studios werent only writing copyright laws that hampered online freedoms (making it illegal, for instance, to tinker with phones and game consoles)

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they were even employing blackhat techniques that anons had gone to jail for, with no fear of punishment.... From 4chan and IRC anons coordinated a new kind of attack; a direct retaliation against a major political player. They loaded up the LOIC and sent out the call to take down the websites of AiPlex and the MPAA: September 19, 2010 To whom it may concern This is to inform you that we, Anonymous, are organizing an Operation called Payback is a bitch. Anonymous will be attacking the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), and their hired gun AIPLEX for attacks against the popular torrent and le sharing site, the Piratebay (sic) (www.thepiratebay.org). We will prevent users to access said enemy sites and we will keep them down for as long as we can. But why, you ask? Anonymous is tired of corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the peoples rights to spread information, but more importantly, the right to SHARE with one another. The RIAA and the MPAA feign to aid the artists and their cause; yet they do no such thing. In their eyes is not hope, only dollar signs. Anonymous will not stand this any longer. We wish you the best of luck. Sincerely, Anonymous, We are legion. The response was tremendous; thousands of people who had never considered themselves Anonymous, or perhaps even knew much about the collective, joined in and became a new generation of moralfag. Though they didnt care about the Church of Scientology or 4chans history of shenanigans, they shared one important quality with their raiding 4chan predecessors. They saw acting as Anonymous, taking up the iconography, and joining the op, as a path to empowerment. They could nally do something more than sign an online petition and give money to the EFF. They took down AiPlex immediately, and the MPAA shortly after, and expanded the attack to the RIAA and rightsholders and enforcement groups around the world. They wrote manifestos and released videos, but more than anything, they got a lot of media coverage. The coverage brought in more people. Anonymous swelled to a crowd of moralfags that likely dwarfed whatever had been in the legion before. As the media conversation continued, Anonymous bounced around different sites, targeting different characters in the controversy over copyright, and retaliating over negative commentary. Attacks expanded to some traditional hacking techniques like SQL injection and website defacement.133

133 Norton,

Anonymous 101 Part Deux.

459 After a brief lull, Anonymous began another major operation in December 2010 in defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
Just when it looked like Anonymous would take a breather in December 2010, the government started an extra-legal crackdown on WikiLeaks in response to the release of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables allegedly leaked to the site by Bradley Manning. Senator Joe Lieberman called Amazon to pressure them, successfully, to stop hosting WikiLeaks les, despite no charges being led against WikiLeaks or its public face, Julian Assange. Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal all blocked payments to WikiLeaks for alleged terms of service violations and Assanges Swiss bank froze his account. Payback sparked to life again, this time as Op Avenge Assange. Anonymous powered up the LOIC, and with channels brimming with even more participants than even Payback had seen, they took down the websites of MasterCard, and Visa (which made for good publicity, even though it didnt touch the payment networks and hardly anyone who has a card issued by those companies has ever visited their websites). The attack also slowed Paypal for a short time in an attack that actually targeted the companys payment processing system. An attack against Amazon was quickly aborted when Anons decided their tools werent likely to work against the companys massive and resilient server architecture. But Anonymous was back in the news. At a moment when it seemed the whole world was turning on WikiLeaks, Anonymous came in like the cavalry, shameless in its support of the controversial site and offering a voice to what turned out to be people online around the world that resented the persecution of the leaking site. With the attacks on both rightsholder companies and those who abandoned WikiLeaks on the imsiest of pretenses, Anonymous was reacting to heavy-handed actions where institutions were exceeding their mandate. Visa and MasterCard would let you make donations to Neo-Nazis, but not WikiLeaks, and it was clear that power was conspiring behind the scenes. And the hive mind, with a newfound morality, wasnt content anymore to just complain in the comment section. Anonymous fundamentally produces two things: spectacle and infrastructure hacking. They create scenes the media often cant resist, but they also tend to be ones that the media isnt very good at understanding. The rest of the time they create or destroy online infrastructure, much of which never directly gets noticed. Op Payback & Assange combined the two, but were mainly spectacle. None of the attacks disrupted the function of the targeted entities for long, if at all, but that was missed by much of the media, who instead confused people into believing that they wouldnt be able to use their Visa or MasterCards to buy gas or groceries, thanks to Anonymous. Capitalizing, Anonymous made bold proclamations of victory, which made their way into an uncritical media narrative, and continued the snowball through December. Some anons did notice that they hadnt really damaged the people theyd attacked, and that despite their numbers, they couldnt. They

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started Op Leakspin, which called for participants of Anonymous to read, analyze, disseminate and protect the dissemination of the diplomatic cables that had caused so much trouble. Like WikiLeaks original intent to have citizens analyzing leaked documents as a sort-of crowdsourced CIA, Leakspin didnt seem to go very far. The new moralfags far preferred hitting targets with LOIC to becoming reference librarians. But they did live up to a commitment to keep the cables available all over the world by mirroring them on servers, even as different governments sought to censor the often embarrassing American diplomatic discussions. And they kept track of where they were being censored.134

The rst real upward ratcheting in the severity of Anonymous attacks grew out of the Wikileaks support campaign. Sacramento-based security rm HBGary Federal formulated an online attack plan against Wikileaks supporters like Glenn Greenwald; HBGary CEO Aaron Barr boasted to the Financial Times that hed pwned Anonymous. HBGary
put together proposals for Hunton & Williamswhich represents conservative corporations like Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industriesthat would scrape the internet, including social networking outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn and Classmates.com, for informational dirt that could be distilled into disinformation attacks that could potentially to bring down supporters of Anonymous and Wikileaks,

As it turns out, Barr hadnt pwned Anonymous quite so effectively as hed thought. Anonymous quickly retaliated
by raiding his drives, releasing 40,000 HBGary Federal emails, remotely wiping his iPad and engendering a scathing public disconnection from those who have known and employed him. Evidently, if you fuck with the Internet bull, you still get the real-time horns. "Rarely in the history of the cybersecurity industry has a company become so toxic so quickly as HBGary Federal, Andy Greenberg blogged Feb. 15 for Forbes Firewall column. Over the last week, many of the rms closest partners and largest clients have cut ties with the Sacramento start-up. And now its canceled all public appearances by its executives at the industrys biggest conference in the hopes of ducking a scandal that seems to grow daily as more of its questionable practices come to light. HBGary planned to tag-team Wikileaks and Anonymous with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies, which has publicly admitted that it was asked to develop a proposal analyzing internal security and public relations problems for a law rm, without naming names. Palantir quickly apologized, explaining that the right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a ourishing democracy and personally apologizing to pro-Wikileaks supporters like Glenn Greenwald, who it was planning to personally discredit. For its part, Hunton & Williams hasnt publicly commented on the clusterfuck, although Anonymous data dump featured emails between
134 Ibid.

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Barr and Hunton & Williams partner and corporate investigator John W. Woods. Not so with the much better-known Bank of America, which openly derided HBGarys PowerPoint presentation to Hunton & Williams: Weve never seen the presentation, never evaluated it, and have no interest in it. That categorical denial rings hollow, given Bank of Americas itinerant controversy, which includes inhaling bailout billions in taxpayer cash, purchasing toxic mortgage scammers like Countrywide Financial, nailing loyal customers with skyrocketing interest rates, robosigning foreclosures and even shutting down payment transfers to Wikileaks, lamely claiming reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments. Add it together with the shady competitive intelligence practices of the Chamber of Commercewhich solicited Palantir, Berico and HBGary to scrape the Internet for personal data on Chamber opponents like Brad Blog, Change to Win, CodePink and othersand what is immediately apparent is that all of the included parties are sorry for mostly one thing: Getting caught with their pants down."135

The doxing, or document dump, on HBGary, which foreshadowed a later attack on Stratforanother quasi-private rm in the security-industrial complexexposed internal documents which horried many Americans.
In the course of the trolling and doxing, an enormous amount of detail uncovered in the emails centered on the way HBGary Federal and its afliates proposed to act as agent provocateurs: hired thugs for the purposes of disruption. Some of the leaked emails included a Power Point presentation outlining how HBGary Federal and other companies could help discredit WikiLeaks by submitting fake documents to the site which, when revealed as false, would presumably discredit the organization. They also devised plans to undermine the careers of various gures seen as ideological supporters of WikiLeaks, such as Glenn Greenwald, a writer for Salon.com. The inner workings of a privatized COINTELPRO-type proposal were exposed for the world to see; these details were so shocking, some Congressmen even called for an investigative committee to look into these actions. Between the considerable media attention and the damning information, these hackers were inspiredfor better or worseto carry forth with an extended spate of hacking activity rst under a distinct group called Lulzsec before returning to Anonymous with Operation Antisec.136

In March 2011 Anonymous released a cache of Bank of America emails which it alleged to show wrongdoing. The documents were leaked by
a former Bank of America employee who alleges that a division of the bank was trying to hide damning information on foreclosures.
135 Scott Thill, Anonymous Hacker Group Teaches Shady Cyber-Security Companies a Lesson Theyll Never Forget, AlterNet, February 11, 2011 <http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149943>. 136 Michael Ralph and Gabriella Coleman, Is it a Crime? The Transgressive Politics of Hacking in Anonymous, OWNI.eu News, Augmented, September 29, 2011 <http://owni.eu/2011/09/29/isit-a-crime-the-transgressive-politics-of-hacking-in-anonymous/>.

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In the lead-up to the leak, Anonymous noted that the documents reveal corruption and fraud at the bankthe biggest in the country in terms of assets....

The signicance of the documents, which Anonymous posted to BankofAmericaSucks.com, was stated by the leaker:
My name is (Anonymous). For the last 7 years, I worked in the Insurance/Mortgage industry for a company called Balboa Insurance. Many of you do not know who Balboa Insurance Group (soon to be rebranded as QBE First by Australian Reinsurance Company QBE according to internal communication sent to all Balboa associates) is, but if youve ever had a loan for an automobile, farm equipment, mobile home, or residential or commercial property, we knew you. In fact, we probably charged you money. . . a lot of money. . . for insurance you didnt even need.... How is Balboa able to charge such inated premiums and get away with it? Its all very simple. First, when you call in to customer service, for say, GMAC, youre not actually speaking to a GMAC employee. Youre actually speaking to a Bank of America associate working for Balboa Insurance who is required by their business to business contract with GMAC to state that they are, in fact, an employee of GMAC. The reasoning is that if you do not realize youre speaking to a Bank of America/Balboa Insurance employee, you have no reason to question the validity of the information you are receiving from them. If you call your insurance agent and ask them for the lienholder information for your GMAC/Wells Fargo/etc lien (home or auto) you will be provided with their name, but the mailing address will be a PO Box at one of Balboas 3 main tracking locations (Moon Township/Coreaopolis, PA, Dallas/Ft Worth, TX, or Phoenix/Chandler, AZ)137

In August 2011 Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority shut down wireless communications in the BART system to thwart attempts to organize protestsagainst recent police shootings on the systemvia social media. The organizations next big hack was the publication of a large cache of Texas law enforcement emails.
Hacker collective Anonymous just published 3GB of logs from Texas police ofcers. The project was called Texas Takedown Thursday.... Anonymous blamed the publication on corruption in the Texas police force, saying in a statement on the defaced website, Lewd jokes? Check. Racist chain mails? Check. You lost your radio license? Lulz. Playing on the fears of voters? Check. But we already gured that. For more than a month, Anonymous continues, we have been lurking their emails, law enforcement portals, and records and reporting systems. . . Thousands of documents are available on Tor hidden services and bittorrent and include several dozen FBI, Border Patrol, and counter-terrorism documents.
137 Lauren Kelley, Anonymous Hackers Release Bank of America Allegedly Showing Corruption and Fraud, Alternet, March 14, <http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/newsandviews/527928>.

Emails, 2011

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Anonymous said the emails in the torrent les also include police records, internal affairs investigations, meeting notes, training materials, ofcer rosters, security audits and live password information to government systems. The private chief emails also included several racist and sexist chain email forwards and personal details sure to embarrass, discredit and incriminate several of these so-called community leaders.138

In response to the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2011, with its indenite detention provisions, Anonymous launched an attack on its supporters in Congress.
With the passing of the act almost certain at this point, hackers aligned to the massive collective Anonymous are taking a stab at staking out the politicians that helped put the bill in the presidents hands. On Wednesday, Internet hacktivists gathered on the Web to nd a way to take on the lawmakers, who have allowed for this detrimental legislation to make it all the way to the Oval Ofce desk. Upon discussion of routes to take to show their opposition to the overwhelming number of politicians who voted in favor of NDAA, Anonymous members agreed to begin with Senator Robert J Portman, a Republican lawmaker from the state of Ohio. By Thursday morning, an Anonymous operative released personal information pertaining to the lawmaker, and revealed that not only was Sen. Portman among the politicians to vote aye on the legislation, but it has also been revealed that the senator had good reason to do so. According to a OpenCongress.org, Sen. Portman received $272,853 from special interest groups that have shown support for NDAA. Robert J. Portman, we plan to make an example of you, writes an Anonymous operative. The hacktivist has also released personal data including the senators home address, phone number and social networking accounts in an attempt to further an inltration from the Internet to show the opposition to the bill that colossally impacts the constitutional rights of Americans. According to the information posted by the operative, the nearly $300,000 in special interest monies lobbied at Portman could have helped him purchase around $1.7 million in real estate in Ohio. The next lawmaker to receive anywhere near as much as Sen. Portman is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada and third-ranked ofcial in Congress, who pulled in more than $100,000 less than his Ohio counterpart with $172,635.139

Also in December 2011, Anonymous launched an attackeven more severe than that on HBGaryon private components of the security-industrial com138 Meghan Kelly, Anonymous releases 3GB of Texas police logs, VentureBeat, September 1, 2011 <http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/01/anonymous-releases-3gb-of-texas-police-logs/>. 139 Don Allen, Anonymous attacking creators of indenite detention bill, The Wings of Lyra, December 15, 2011 <http://wingsoyra.blogspot.com/2011/12/anonymousattacking-creators-of.html>; RJ, Anonymous Retaliates: Massive Information dump released on Senators who Passed NDAA, The Daily Attack, December 19, 2011 <http://thedailyattack.com/2011/12/19/anonymous-retaliates-massive-information-dumpreleased-on-senators-who-passed-ndaa/>.

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plex. They included Stratfor, a think tanks that provides independent strategic analysis of world affairs for both private corporations and the state national security apparatus, and a rm that sells military-grade equipment for police work.
Stratfor Global Intelligence is an Austin, Tex.-based security think tank that releases a daily newsletter concerning security and intelligence matters all over the world. The companys clients include the Defense Department, Lockheed Martin and Bank of America. Stratfor claims to provide non-ideological, independent analysis of international affairs and security threats. Many companies and U.S. government agencies have supposedly shared sensitive information with Stratfor to receive threat analyses and advice. So far, Anonymous has not released any data besides credit cards, but it could have WikiLeaks-caliber info that could disrupt companies operations and, potentially, national security. Anonymous hackers broke into web servers of Stratfor and copied 200 gigabytes worth of data. Thus far, it appears that the hackers have details only about Stratfor customers who purchased Stratfors newsletter, but the hackers could easily have more than that. Several reports indicate Anonymous will next release more than 3.3 million client e-mails. An independent analysis by data loss and identity theft prevention service Identity Finder says that, so far, 9,651 active credit cards, 47,680 unique e-mail addresses, 25,680 unique phone numbers and 44,188 encrypted passwords were hacked from the A through M name list. More details will be released in the coming days as Anonymous publishes the N through Z list of names. Stratfor looks especially bad in this instance because the credit card data was not encrypted, which means it was much easier than usual for Anonymous to steal and crack open. Its quite the amateur mistake for a so-called intelligence rm.... Using various Twitter accounts, including @AnonymousIRC and @YourAnonNews, and the site Pastebin, Anonymous has published names, credit card numbers, and encrypted password information. None of what has been posted so far jeopardizes companies or government agencies, but that doesnt mean other types of sensitive data wont be posted in the near future.... So far, nothing that has been released that will compromise military operations or national security. Stolen credit cards will cause headaches for a lot of people but not endanger them. However, if Anonymous releases the 3.3 million client e-mails it claims to have, theres no telling the damage it could cause. When companies and governments provide off-the-record information to Stratfor, they could easily be issuing condential data. Anonymous has said it is now in possession of a smoking gun for a number of crimes, but we will see in the next days if they are just spouting hot air or have something substantial.... Anonymous has thus far published the credit card numbers of Stratfor customers starting with the letter A an ending with M, and

465
it still plans on publishing customers N through Z. It also plans to release the aforementioned client e-mails to shed some light on just how clueless this company really is when it comes to database security. These e-mail spools may have already hit the web, but preliminarily through the darknet or a network originally intended for those who want extra privacy. Those who want to read the exchanges through the darknet need special permissions to gain access.140

Meanwhile, German hackers operating under the Anonymous label shut down numerous neo-Nazi websites and published the identities of customers and subscribers.141 Anonymous new methods of attacking large-scale institutionsas demonstrated in HBGary, Stratfor, and the neo-Nazismake the Low Orbit Ion Cannon look like the Model-T. Indeed, doxing seems to be becoming as much a part of the standard Anonymous toolkit as LOIC was. In early February, in response to a Wylie, Texas policeman being placed on administrative leave for a kiddie porn offense, Anonymous breached the Texas Police Associations website and published the email and snail mail addresses of hundreds of ofcers.142 Around the same time, Anonymous publicized a cache of emails from the website of the military law rm that represented accused American war criminals from the Haditha massacre, in response to their acquittal. A spokesman for the rm, Puckett & Faraj, complained that the attack might completely destroy it.143 At this rate, we can probably expect the equivalent of an Enron or Diebold email release every week before long. LulzSec and AntiSec. LulzSec, or Lulz Security, was an offshoot of Anonymous. It later disbanded and some of its members went on to create AntiSec. LulzSec has taken Anonymouss DOS attacks, which for the most part have failed to take down websites like that of Amazon and PayPal, a step further. Lulzsec launched a wave of six attacks against in which it dumped internal code. Following the U.S. governments declaration of war on cyberterrorism, Lulzsec launched Fuck FBI Friday and hacked the FBI afliate InfraGard, culminating in the anonymous hacking groups publication of InfraGard e-mails, passwords and personal contact information for about 180 members...144
140 Sean Ludwig, 10 things you need to know about Anonymous Stratfor hack, VentureBeat, December 28, 2011 <http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor-hack-10-things-toknow/>. 141 Braden Goyette, Anonymous hackers target neo-Nazi websites, publish private data on nazi-leaks.net, NYDailyNews, January 4, 2012 <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/anonymous-hackers-target-neo-nazi-websitespublish-private-data-nazi-leaks-net-article-1.1000858>. 142 Jason Whiteley, Hackers publish names, addresses of hundreds of Texas police ofcers, wfaa.com Dallas-Fort Worth, February 2, 2012 <http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Hackerspublish-names-address-of-hundreds-of-Texas-police-ofcers-138620174.html>. 143 Sam Biddle, Anonymous May Have Completely Destroyed This Military Law Firm, Gizmodo.com, February 6, 2012 <http://gizmodo.com/5882717/anonymous-may-have-completelydestroyed-military-law-rm>. 144 CovOps, HAHa! Fuck FBI FridayHackers LulzSec Strike FBI Afliate InfraGard, Ancaps

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11.1

Conclusion

Is this the opening skirmish of the nal conict? Who can say, at this point? Who could have answered with any condence at the start of the successful revolutions of the past? We can only examine events to date in light of revolutionary processes in the past, and compare the Revolution 2.0 of the past two years to its unsuccessful predecessors in recent decades. Its clear that the Arab Spring-Occupy movement is far larger in scale than the post-Seattle anti-globalization movement of a decade ago, and it has at least arguably surpassed the scale of the worldwide movement of 1968 (including the French general strike and the Prague Spring as well as the U.S. student, antiwar and civil rights movements). Its also clear that, with higher approval than disapproval ratings, it has far broader middle class support in the United States than either of those movements. And its clear that it derives much of its unprecedented force from coinciding, unlike its two predecessors, with a global economic downturn on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whats more, as John Robb points out, if and when the nancial collapse of the Eurozone periphery sends out global shock waves, it may well turn the current Great Recession into another Depression with unemployment on the scale of the 1930s. Not only will the concurrence of the Tea Parties and the Occupy movement almost certainly make another nancial bailout politically impossiblebut unlike the previous Depression, this one will have a large-scale, organized radical movement in place to capitalize on it. Given existing levels of middle class and working class sympathy with the Occupy movement, the conversion of the Great Recession into Great Depression 2.0 would likely amount to pouring gasoline on a re. Chris Hedges of TruthDig analyzes the Occupy movement in light of Crane Brintons typology of revolution:
The historian Crane Brinton in his book Anatomy of a Revolution laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfullled expectations, a unied solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, nally, a nancial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned,
Super-Forum, June 4, 2011 <http://ancaps.super-forum.net/t20193-ha-ha-fuck-fbi-friday-hackerslulzsec-strike-fbi-afliate-infragard>.

11.1. CONCLUSION
has amply fullled these preconditions. But it is Brintons next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old congurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression. ...George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast millionperson bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us. Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to re on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was nished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisias Ben Ali and Egypts Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to re into crowds. The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quans deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayors legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the rst cracks in the edice. Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators, Siegel tweeted after his resignation.145

467

The inability to respond to basic needs, in Brintons checkoff list, is especially notable. The inevitable retrenchment of nancially strapped, hollowed out states will reduce the prestige of all levels of government when it comes to the ability to provide basic services like mail and trash pickup. No doubt in the near future local neighborhoods will be forced to develop their own workaround expedients for many service cutbacks like trash pickup and security. Occupy Our Homes is a response to record levels of long-term unemployment and homelessness combined with a retrenchment of the social safety net. Either local governments will acquiesce and tacitly hand over such functions to informal social movements, or they will be constantly on live video feed suppressing such self-organized attempts at survival. This is the stuff around which revolutions coalesce.
145 Chris Hedges, This is What Revolution Looks Like, Truthout, November 15, 2011 <http://www.truth-out.org/what-revolution-looks/1321384587>.

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The tipping point may occur abruptly and unexpectedly; it appears to involve the coalescence of only ten percent of the population around a rm belief in the illegitimacy of the existing system.
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutes Network Science and Technology Center created and analyzed various models of networks where a minority strived to overtake the majoritys opinion. They found that three conditions are key: a majority that is exible with their views, a minority that is intractable, and a critical threshold wherein about a tenth of the population advocate the minority opinion. They also saw that the time it takes to reach social consensus drops dramatically as the minority grows past this tipping point, a phenomenon they observed in the growth of anti-government sentiment in Tunisia and Egypt.146

We saw the example, in Lakeys schema in the last chapter, of military repression of Iranian demonstrators creating a positive feedback process of increasing the size of protests and the size of massacres, until the entire population was disaffected and the loyal security apparatus simply collapsed. If the global economy tanks as badly as Robb envisions, and adds fuel to the re, its quite conceivable it would be the tipping point to trigger a positive feedback process of the same kind. The Oakland general strike was one early innovative response to a shutdown, coupled with a poorly planned and abortive occupation of a vacant building. But it was coupled with a public plea that would provide a very powerful demonstration effect, if done more competently: a call for the homeless everywhere to quietly squat bank-owned homes, vacant ofce buildings, and create miniature Christianas in every commercial center in the countryand ready to upload streaming video the second the pigs show up in their kevlar and Darth Vader helmets. And theres the latest innovation of showing up in ash mobs at foreclosed homes to create a public spectacle. As the state has repressed peaceful campouts, the movement has increasingly resorted to irregular tactics like vacant home occupations, random ash mobs, and the like. The more local activist groups loosely afliated with the Occupy brand see the results as positive, the more they will resort to it to goad the state into action so it can be portrayed as the bad guy. There will be an increased tendency to take the war directly to the 1% through swarming on very short notice, ash mobbing the homes, country clubs, and churches of corporate executives. That is, in fact, what OWS did on the eve of Bloombergs rst threatened shutdown: crashed the restaurant where he was eating and presented a petition with thousands of signatures. Imagine if coordinated DDOS attacks on prominent corporate targets of opportunity, doxing of embarrassing corporate emails and memos, and just petty but costly harassment techniques like faxing black paper to use up toner, become a routine weekly or daily phenomenon for the Fortune 500, major banks
146 Hans Villarica, From Sushi to Tunisia: A Guide to Swaying Majority Opinion, The Atlantic, September 9, 2011 <http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/09/from-sushi-to-tunisiaa-guide-to-swaying-majority-opinion/244589/>.

11.1. CONCLUSION

469

and government regulatory agencies. The more this stuff happens, the larger the share of the public that will have a consciousness shift in sympathy. Consider also how powerful the demonstration effect is. Id have thought poisoning food or drugs and returning them to supermarket shelves would be an obvious idea for a psychopath. But when the Tylenol poisoner actually did it, there was a wave of copycats who apparently werent smart enough to think of it on their own. So imagine what happens when the rst positive demonstrations of these swarming attacks create a perceived positive result. It will no longer be a coordinated tactic by some movement. It will be an ad hoc behavior with as many local swarming attacks as there are clusters of uncoordinated people with their own grievances. And the more its seen, the more people will decide to do it on their own. And the problem of internal defection by the security apparatus may be even greater than Hedges suggests. For example, there was a rumor of some two hundred blue-uniformed NYPD ofcers calling in sick on the day of Bloombergs assault on Liberty Plaza. John Robb analyzes Occupy in terms of John Boyds thought on the isolation and internal cohesion of elites:
It appears that Occupys extreme non-violence/passivity has nally generated a social system disruption. Videos and pictures showing policemen using violence against passive protesters have gone viral (UC Berkeley students, Grandma, and open mouth were the leading examples). Stories about this violence are now sweeping the media (7,910 news stories over the last 24 hours). Is this going to have a strategic effect? Lets look at this from the late, great American strategist John Boyds perspective. The dynamic of Boyds strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors. Its very network centric for a pre-Internet theoretician. Heres more detail what disconnection looks like:

Physical isolation is accomplished by severing communications

both to the outside world (ie. allies) and internal audiences (ie. between branches of command and between the command organization and its supporters).

Mental isolation is done through the introduction of ambiguous

information, novel situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy cannot keep up with. A lack of solid information impedes decision making.

Moral isolation is achieved when an enemy improves its well being at the expense of others (allies) or violates rules of behavior they profess to uphold (standards of conduct). Moral rules are a very important reference point in times of uncertainty. When these are violated, it is very hard to recover.

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Was it effective? Using John Boyds framework as a guide, this media disruption did have an effect across all three vectors:

Physical. No isolation was achieved. The physical connections

of police forces remained intact. However, these incidents provided conrmation to protesters that physical lming/imaging of the protests is valuable. Given how compelling this media is, it will radically increase the professional medias coverage of events AND increase the number of protesters recording incidents.

Mental. These incidents will cause confusion within police forces.

If leaders (Mayors and college administrators) back down or vacillate over these tactics due to media pressure, it will confuse policemen in the eld. In short, it will create uncertainty and doubt over what the rules of engagement actually are. IN contrast, these media events have claried how to turn police violence into useful tools for Occupy protesters.

Moral. This is the area of connection that was damaged the

most. Most people watching these videos feel that this violence is both a) illegitimate and b) excessive. Watch this video UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walking from her building after the incident. The silence is eerie.147

[Last modied March 6, 2012]

11.1.1

Appendix 3

A Model Networked Campaign Against a Corporate Malefactor [Last modied March 6, 2012]

147 John Robb, OCCUPY NOTE 11/20/11: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement, Global Guerrillas, November 20, 2011 <http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/11/occupy-note-112011-boydpepper-spray-and-tools-of-compliance-ows.html>.