HYPERPOLITICS

Power on a Connected Planet

Mark Pesce

Copyright 2011, Mark D. Pesce

Released under the Creative Commons 3.0 AttributionShareAlike-NonCommercial license. You are free to use this text in any way you choose, provided you a) do not make a profit from that use, b) acknowledge my work as author and c) share your work with others. Full details about this license can be found at creativecommons.org.

HYPERPOLITICS
Introduction 1 The New Toolkit 5 Mob Rules 17 Hyperpolitics 33 Hyperpolitics American Style 49 All Together Now 59 Network Politics 63 Sharing Power 67 Down the Rabbit Hole 75 That Sinking Feeling 79 The Blueprint 83 Hyperdemocracy 89 Power vs. People 93

Introduction
Politics is the exercise of power. This could take the form of the despotic attacks of an absolute monarch, or the gentle deliberations of a caucus building consensus. In whatever extreme, power is inevitably expressed as action in the human arena. All actions generate equal and opposing forces, rising to meet them. This is the essence of Taoism, as well as Newtons Second Law of Motion. Politics is the art of opposition, hence why von Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Force can be matched with force, or force can be countered strategically, unexpectedly, asymmetrically. Force can be systemic and sustainable, or erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes it takes only the gentlest of touches to work the greatest of changes; in other situations forces can appear so entrenched they seem to represent an eternal reality. Politics is essential to our species, and all of the hominids; chimpanzees do it, bonobos do it, even gorillas do it. The politics of our genetic cousins is more immediate but still nuanced. Much derives from pure physical strength our equivalent to military force but the rest arises from social relations. In this, they, like us, use communication to best advantage. In the steady-state of human communication before the advent of telegraphy, power and communication flowed in seamless union, each reinforcing the other. Even in the hundred and fifty years of the era of massifcation (Toffler), from the telegraph-driven newspaper, then radio and television, a centralized message conformed with the requirements of power, leading to a broader common mind than any ever known in history. At its moment of ultimate expansion during the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the end of the Cold War, and the first Gulf War the mass media gave us a global, continuous experience of power in a
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unipolar world, the completion of a Tower of Babel which really did reach the heavens. Within a few years this unity shattered and our speech became confounded. The Rise of the Network as a multilateral force, no longer simply transmitting from a center point, but engendering a cloud of transmitters, each capable of reaching all points, everywhere, has been the great Fall away from singularity. We live at present in a duality, with the remnants of the that singular world confronting the increasingly numerous and hybridized elements which constellate the new media. Power flows between these dwell-states in a complex series of feedbacks that constantly reconfigure themselves and each of their endpoints. A structural coupling, dissolving all boundaries between professional and amateur, formal and colloquial, normative and exceptional, frames the relationship of two parties increasingly acting as one whole. This is true for power in all of its forms: political, professional, pedagogical, technological, etc. In the new unity of hybridity and multiplicity, the rhizome connects all to all, and overwhelms the simplicities of secrecy and obscurity. New strategies are required if any power wishes to remain coherent unto itself, but no strategy will allow power to successfully deny its connectedness. We have no maps for these territories. They are truly terra nullus. But in its failures, power, seeking always to close the gaps in its smooth functioning, illustrates the topography. Where power falls down we have an opening into another phase-space, which only multiplicity and hybridity can inhabit. This is our present moment. We know power has failed or rather, failed to adapt, and we have yet to find the light switch. The opportunity presented has produced a kind of Cambrian Explosion of different forms of power, some impossibly bizarre, others needlessly complex, a few seeming archetypal in their perfection and elegance.
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The essays collected in this volume represent my own attempt to apprehend and articulate the forms of power within the connected era. I came to this research from earlier work in the studies of communities and the sharing of media; by the middle 2000s it had become clear that not just the distribution of media but the distribution of power itself had begun to decisively shift. As I looked deeper, I began to understand that hyperconnectivity created a platform for the vast transformations in culture appearing with both greater frequency and piquancy. These transformations are detailed in Mob Rules. At the end of 2007, just after the first change in Australias government in a decades time, I gathered my thoughts in my first broad framing of the new politics of power. Simply titled Hyperpolitics, it posited a world where everyone was continuously connected a state of affairs only half true at the time, and more than three-quarters true as of this writing. The connected behave differently, and Hyperpolitics is the beginning of an inventory of effects which was followed by in Hyperpolitics (American Style) and Sharing Power. Along the way Ive written numerous short essays most always for the Australian Broadcasting Corporations opinion website, The Drum on hyperpolitical topics, such as the election of Barack Obama, the rise and fall of Wikileaks, and the fate of Julian Assange. By the end of 2010, my political thinking had advanced sufficiently to craft a short manifesto Hyperdemocracy which framed hyperpolitics from the inside, as an assertion of internal values, rather than something presented in opposition to traditional forms of power. As the Jasmine Revolution and counter-revolutions began to flower across the Arab world, many of the feedbacks between the two forms of power monolithic and multiple were sharply highlighted. Each, in close coupling with its adversary, evolved rapidly. Power vs People captures this dynamic co-evolution through a series of cultural snapshots, moments in time as a nation moves from autocracy into hyperdemocracy.
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Finally, in the first part of 2011, I was ready to commit to paper a coherent theory of how power emerges from the network. The New Toolkit, a chapter from the Wiley-Blackwell New Media Companion gives the basic formula: hyperconnectivity produces hyperdistribution produces hyperintelligence produces hyperempowerment. I believe that this formula can be applied more widely than just within the political domain, and I believe I have moved somewhere toward a basic understanding of our connected world. Because it illuminates so many of the ideas struggling to break through my earlier works, it has been placed first. All of this is just a beginning, and I apologize for any errors, omissions, repetitions or other mistakes that may have made their way into this work. I hope to follow these words and ideas with many more, as we begin the real exploration of our connected world. mark@markpesce.com twitter: @mpesce http://futurest.co

The New Toolkit

Introduction: The Age of Connection Anthropologists have appropriated the word toolkit to describe the suite of technologies that accompanies a particular grouping of humans. Fifty thousand years ago, this toolkit would have encompassed stone implements of various sorts, together with items fashioned from bone, and perhaps some early fabrics. By five thousand years ago, the toolkit had exploded with innovations in agriculture, urbanization, transport and culture. Five hundred years ago, this toolkit begins to look recognizably modern, with the printing press, gunpowder, steel, and massive warships. Fifty years ago we could find much of our common culture within that toolkit, with one notable exception, an innovation that doesnt begin to appear in any numbers until just five years ago. Identified by the decidedly vague words new media (justifying McLuhans observation that the first content of a new medium is the medium it obsolesces1, down to its name) this newest toolkit promises to restructure human cultural relations as broadly as agriculturalization, urbanization, or industrialization. The roots of the current transformation lie within the Urban Revolution, the gathering of humanity into cities, a process nearly ten thousand years old, yet only halfway complete. The tribal model of human organization coeval with the emergence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens likely began to fracture under the stresses introduced by the emergence of agricultural practices. Agriculture leads toward sedentary populations with higher birth rates, producing greater concentrations of humanity than had theretofore been sustainable. These population centers rapidly transcended the human capability for modeling peer behavior as expressed in Dunbars Number2, and in so doing drove innovations in the human toolkit intended to conserve stability and safety within an environment of strangers. Before the Urban Revolution, human culture is ruled by custom; afterward, it is ruled by law, and all that law implies: law-giving authorities, law-enforcing police, courts, jails and lawyers. This gap between custom and law is the most visible discontinuity between hunter-gatherer cultures and agricultural-urban civilization, forming a source of constant irritation between them.
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Marshal McLuhan first noted the retribalizing effect of electric technologies3; they collapse space to a point, effectively recreating the continuous, ambient (aural) awareness of the tribe. The tribe is completely connected. All of its members have direct access to one another; there is little hierarchy, instead, there is an intricate set of social relations. Everyone thoroughly understands ones own place, and that position is constantly reinforced by the other members of the tribe. Tribal society is static, which is to say stable, over long stretches of time at least tens of thousands of years. Urban society is dynamic; the principle actor is the individual (often backed by an extended family unit), who works to build and extend a set of social relations which improve his own circumstances (in the language of sociobiology, selection fitness). As a consequence of the continuous actions of a dynamic network of actors, the history of the city is the history of crisis. Only a very few civilizations have maintained any sort of stability for a period of a more than a few hundred years. Egypt, China, India, Rome, Maya and Inca each experienced dizzying climbs to power and terrifying collapses into ruin. The uncertainties of the Postmodern period, with its underlying apocalyptic timbre, reflect several thousand years of inevitable, unavoidable rise and fall. The Age of Connection now takes its place alongside these earlier epochs in humanitys story. We are being retribalized, in the midst of rising urbanization. The dynamic individuality of the city confronts the static conformity of the tribe. This basic tension forms the fuel of 21st century culture, and will continue to generate both heat and light for at least the next generation. Human behavior, human beliefs and human relations are all reorganizing themselves around connectivity. It is here, therefore, that we must begin our analysis of the toolkit.

One: Hyperconnectivity How many people can any given person on Earth reach directly? Before the Urban Revolution that value had a strict upper bound in
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Dunbars Number. This number sets an functional limit on the troupe (tribe) size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Human units larger than this fragment and bifurcate along lines of relation and communication. One tribe grows from stability into instability, and fissions into two. In the transition to the city, humanity developed other mechanisms for communication to compensate for our lack of cognitive capacity; the birth of writing proceeds directly from the informational and connective pressure of dense communities. The city is as much a network as a residence, perhaps even more so. The city is comprised of neighborhoods recapitulating the tribal within the urban which, grouped together, form the larger conurbation of the metropolis. Each of these neighborhoods are tightly connected (the older the city, the older the neighborhood, the more likely this is to be true), and each maintains connectivity with near neighborhoods and the greater urban whole. Where one might have direct and immediate connectivity to a hundred and fifty members of a tribe, one has some degree of mediated connectivity to thousands or tens of thousands within a city. It is possible to get a message to the other side of town, through a chain of intermediaries, the degrees of separation explored by Stanley Milgram4. Until the modern era, human connectivity stopped at the citys gates. Only a very few powerful individuals or institutions, able to afford their own messengers, could expect to have connectivity beyond the confines of a given urban area. Postal services extended this connectivity within the boundaries of then-emerging nation-states, at a price that made connectivity affordable to the new working classes. The telegraph gave connectivity global reach, and collapsed the time for message transmission from months to minutes. Yet the telegraph was highly centralized; until the widespread adoption of the telephone, about fifty years later, direct and instantaneous person-toperson communication remained impractical. The landline telephone provided direct, instantaneous, global connectivity, but to a place, not a person. If you are not in range of a landline telephone, you gain no benefit from its connectivity. Even so, the lure of that connectivity was enough that it drew the landline into nearly a billion offices and dwellings throughout the 20th century. The landline telephone colonized all of the Earths surface where its
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infrastructure could be afforded. This created a situation (reflective of so many others) where there were connected haves and unconnected have nots. The mobile telephone spreads connectivity directly to the person. The mobile creates the phenomenon of direct human addressability. The mobile is an inherently personal device; each mobile and SIM is associated with a single person. With this single innovation, the gap is spanned between tribal and urban organizational forms. Everyone is directly connected, as in the tribe, but in unknowably vast numbers, as in the city. The last decade has seen an accelerating deployment of direct human addressability. As of June 2011, there are roughly six billion mobile subscribers5. Roughly ten percent of these individuals have more than one subscription, a phenomenon becoming commonplace in the richer corners of the planet. This means that there are roughly 5.4 billion directly addressable individuals on the planet, individuals who can be reached with the correct series of numbers. The level of direct human addressability of the species in toto can be calculated as the ratio of total number of subscribers versus the total world population: 5,400,000,000 / 6,900,000,000 or 0.7826. As we move deeper into the 21st century, this figure will approach 1.0: all individuals, rich or poor, young or old, post-graduate or illiterate, will be directly connected through the network. This type of connectivity is not simply unprecedented, nor just a unique feature in human history, this is the kind of qualitative change that leads to a fundamental reorganization in human culture. This, the logical culmination in the growth in human connectivity from the aural tribe to the landline telephone, can be termed hyperconnectivity, because it represents the absolute amplification of all the pre-extant characteristics in human communication, extending them to ubiquity and speed-of-light instantaneity. Every person now can connect directly with well over three-quarters of the human race. We may not choose to do so, but our networks of human connections overlap (as Milgram demonstrated), so we always have the option of jumping through our network of
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connections, short circuiting the various degrees-of-separation, to make contact. Or we can simply wait as this connectivity, coursing through the networks, brings everyone in the world to us.

Two: Hyperdistribution What happens after we are all connected? For an answer to this, we must look back to the original human network, language. Our infinitely flexible linguistic capability allows us to put words and descriptions to anything real or imagined, transmitting experience from mind to mind. Language allows us to forge, maintain and strengthen social bonds6 in a mechanism analogous to the grooming behaviors of other primates. The voices of others remind us that we belong to a cohesive social unit, that we are safe and protected. Most mammals have a repertoire of vocal signals they use to signal danger. Humans can be incredibly precise, and although this is important in moments of immediate peril, language serves principally as the vehicle of human cultural transmission: dont eat this plant; dont walk across this river; dont talk with your mouth full. This linguistic transmission gives human culture a depth unknown in other animals. Language is a distribution medium, a mechanism to replicate the experience of one person throughout a community. This replication activity confers an enormous selection advantage: communities who share what they know will have increased their selection fitness versus communities that do not, so this behavioral tendency toward sharing becomes an epigenetic marker of the human species, persistent and conserved throughout its entirety. As a consequence, any culture which develops effective new mechanisms for knowledge sharing will have greater selection fitness than others that do not, forcing those relatively less fit cultures to either adopt the innovation, in order to preserve themselves, or find themselves pushed to the extreme margins of human existence. As a result, two selection pressures push humans toward linguistic connectivity: the desire of individuals to connect for their own safety;
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and the desire of the community to increase its group selection fitness7, for its own long-term viability. These twin selection pressures makes humans extraordinarily social, the social instinct part of the essential human template. Humans do not need to be taught to share knowledge of the world around them. This comes freely and instinctively. Socialization places normative constraints around this sharing. Such constraints are both amplified and removed in the presence of hyperconnectivity. Where humans are hyperconnected via mobile, a recapitulation of primate grooming behaviors appears almost immediately. Mizuko Ito, in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, noted the behavior of Japanese teenagers8, sending hundreds of text messages a day to a close circle of friends, messages lacking significant extrinsic meaning, serving simply as a reassurance of presence, even at distance, a phenomenon she termed co-presence. The behavior Ito observed among Japanese teenagers is now ubiquitous among teenagers within the developed world: American teenagers send well over 3000 text messages per month. Hyperconnected via mobile and perhaps via electronic mail, we repeatedly witness a familiar phenomenon: someone new to the medium begins to overshare, sending along bad jokes, cute photographs of furry animals, and the occasional chain letter. This is the sharing instinct, caught up and amplified by hyperconnectivity, producing the capability to send something everywhere, instantaneously: hyperdistribution. Embarrassing photographs and treacherous text messages, sexting and damaging audio recordings, forwarded over and over through all the mechanisms of hyperconnectivity, are examples of hyperdistribution. When any digital artifact encounters a hyperconnected human, that artifact is disseminated through their network, unless it is so objectionable that it is censored, or so pedestrian it provokes no response. The human instinct is to share that which piques our interest with those to whom we are connected, to reinforce our relations, and to increase our credibility within our networks of relations, both recapitulations of the dual nature of the original human behaviors of sharing.

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The instinctual sharing behavior of humans remains as strong as ever before, but has extended to encompass communities beyond those within range of our voices. We share without respect to distance. Our voices can be heard throughout the world, provided what we say provokes those we maintain relations with. Provocation carries with it the threat of ostracism; if a provocation proves unwarranted, relations will be damaged, and further provocations ignored. This functions as a selection pressure on hyperconnected sharing, which over time tends toward ever-greater salience.

Three: Hyperintelligence As far back as we can look into prehistory, concentrated acts of knowledge sharing within a specific domain have been framed by ritual practices. Indigenous Australians continue the Paleolithic traditions of womens business and mens business, which refer to ritually-constrained bodies of knowledge, intended to be shared only within the context of a specific community of ritually purified (and thereby connected) individuals. These domains characteristically reflect gender-specific cultural practices: typically, women communicate knowledge of plants and gathering practices, while men invest themselves in the specifics of navigation and the hunt. These two knowledge domains are strongly defended by taboo; secret womens business is forbidden to men (or ritually impure women), and vice versa. The association between domain knowledge and ritual has persisted through to the present day. From at least the Late Antique period, a system of guilds carefully guarded access to specific knowledge domains. Venetian glassblowers, Japanese bladesmiths, and Chinese silk weavers all protected their knowledge domains and consequent monopolies with a combination of legal and ritual practices, law and custom. In pre-urban cultures, knowledge creates capability; in urban cultures, that capability is multiplied. Those who possess knowledge also hold power. The desire to conserve that power led the guilds to become increasingly zealous in the defense of their knowledge domains, their secrets of the craft.

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The advent of Gutenbergs moveable-type printing press made it effectively impossible to keep secrets in perpetuity. One individual could pen a single, revealing text, and within a few months all of Europe would learn what they knew. Secrets were no longer enough to preserve the sanctity knowledge domains. Ritual cast a longer shadow, and in this guise, as the modern protector of the mysteries, the university becomes the companion to the professional association, indoctrinating then licensing candidates for entry into the professions. The professions of medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc., emerged from this transition from the guilds into modernity. These professional associations exist for one reason: they assign place, either within the boundaries of the organization, or outside of it. An unlicensed doctor, a lawyer who has not passed the bar, an uncredentialed architect all represent modern instances of violations of ritual structures that have been with us for at least fifty thousand years. Hyperconnectivity does not acknowledge the presence of these ritual structures; humans connect directly, immediately and pervasively, without respect to any of the cultural barriers to contact. There is neither inside nor outside. The entire space of human connection collapses to a point, as everyone connects directly to everyone else, without mediation. This hyperconnectivity leads to hyperdistributed sharing, first at random, then with ever-increasing levels of salience. This condition tends to produce a series of feedbacks: hyperdistribution of salient information increases the potential and actual effectiveness of any individual within the network of hyperdistribution, which increases their reliance on these networks. These networks of hyperdistributed knowledge-sharing tend to reify as a given networks constituents put these hyperdistributed materials to work. Both Kenyan farmers and Kerala fishermen9 quickly became irrevocable devotees of the mobile handset that provided them accurate and timely information about competing market prices for their goods. Once hyperdistribution acquires a focal point, and becomes synonymous with a knowledge domain, it crosses over into hyperintelligence: the dedicated, hyperconnected hyperdistribution of domain-specific knowledge.

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In a thoroughly hyperconnected environment, behaviors are pervasively observed. If these behaviors are successful, they will be copied by others, who are also pervasively observed. The behavior itself hyperdistributes throughout the network. This is a behavioral analog to hyperintelligence: hypermimesis. The development of SMS language is one example of hypermimesis; as terms are added to the language (which may be specific to a subculture), they are propagated pervasively, and are adopted almost immediately.

Four: Hyperempowerment A group of hyperconnected individuals choosing to hyperdistribute their knowledge around an identified domain can engender hyperintelligence. That hyperintelligence is not a static actor. To be in relation to a hyperintelligence necessarily means using the knowledge provided by that hyperintelligence where, when and as needed. The more comprehensive the hyperintelligence, the greater the range of possible uses and potential effects. Perhaps the outstanding example of a hyperintelligence, Wikipedia provides only modest advantages in those developed parts of the world with ready access to knowledge. Yet in South Africa or India, where such knowledge resources did not exist, Wikipedia catapults individuals into a vastly expanded set of potential capabilities. Actions which would have been taken in ignorance are now wholly informed by the presence of hyperintelligence, and are, as a consequence, different and likely more effective. This is a perfect echo of the introduction of mobile telephony: in the developed world the mobile remains nice but rarely essential; in the developing world it is the difference between thriving and subsistence. Hyperintelligence is a capability amplifier. Individuals are not alone in their relationship to a hyperintelligence; it is the product of the hyperdistribution activities of a hyperconnected network of people. These activities tend to improve through time, as the network amplifies its own capabilities. These two levels of hyperintelligence, individual and collective, produce radical transformations in both individual power and the power of
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hyperconnected individuals as a network. This hyperempowerment is hyperintelligence in action, the directed application of the knowledge and capabilities provided via hyperintelligence. Hyperempowered individuals and networks are asymmetrically empowered relative to any individual or group of individuals (whether as a collective, an organization, or an institution) not similarly hyperempowered. In any exchange, hyperempowered actors will always be more effective in achieving their aims, because in every situation they know more, and know better how to act on what they know. The existence of hyperempowerment simultaneously creates a new class of selection pressure; as various social and cultural configurations interact with hyperempowered individuals and networks, they will be selected against unless they themselves use the techniques of hyperconnectivity, hyperdistribution and hyperintelligence to engender their own hyperempowerment. Once any one actor achieves hyperempowerment, all who interact with that actor must either hyperempower themselves or face extinction. This leads to a cascading series of hyperempowerments, as hyperempowered networks interact with networks which are not hyperempowered, and force those networks toward hyperempowerment. Hyperconnectivity, hyperdistribution, hyperintelligence and hyperempowerment have propelled human culture to the midst of a psychosocial phase transition, similar to a crystallization phase in a supersaturated solution, a revolution making the agricultural, urban and industrial revolutions seem, in comparison, lazy and incomplete. Twenty years ago none of this toolkit existed nor was even intimated. Twenty years from now it will be pervasively and ubiquitously distributed, inextricably bound up in our self-definition as human beings. We have always been the product of our relationships, and now our relationships are redefining us. March 2011

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Footnotes 1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964). 2. Robin Dunbar, Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates (Journal of Human Evolution 22, June 1992) pp. 469493. 3. Op. Cit., McLuhan. 4. Stanley Milgram, The Small World Problem, (Psychology Today, May 1967) pp 60 67. 5. Wireless Intelligence, Global connections surpass 5 billion milestone, https://www.wirelessintelligence.com/print/snapshot/100708. pdf (June 2010) 6. Robin Dunbar, Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998). 7. The author is aware that group selection is a hotly debated topic within the field of sociobiology, but contends that it is impossible to understand highly social species such as Homo Sapiens Sapiens without the principle of group selection. 8. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, Misa Matsuda (ed.), Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000). 9. The Economist, To Do With The Price of Fish, http://www.economist.com/node/9149142?story_id=9149142 (10 May 2007).

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Mob Rules

Chaos The world has changed. The world is changing. The world will change a whole lot more. We lucky few, we band of coders, bear witness to the most comprehensive transformation in human communication since the advent of language. We are embedded in the midst of this transition; we make it happen with every script we write and every page we publish and every blog we post and every video we upload. For that reason, its hard to see the forest for the trees. No wonder it looks so crazy and chaotic. In the mid 20th century, American philosopher H. Richard Neibur wrote that the first question of ethics is not, What is right?, but rather, What is going on? This arvo, before we retire to the Shelbourne for drinks and conversation, Id like to take you on a tour of our very peculiar present. Somethings happening that is so unexpected, most of us dont even know its going on.

Confusion: Three Billion We begin on the shores of the Indian Ocean, in the south Indian state of Kerala. For at least a thousand years the fishermen of Kerala have sailed their sturdy dhows to sea, lowered their nets, prayed to their gods, and if their prayers were heard hauled in a bountiful catch. Fully laden, the fishermen set their sails to shore, to any one of the many fishing villages and fish markets which dot the Kerala coast. The selection of a port is done more or less at random, so throughout all these thousand years too many boats pulled into one port, leaving the markets oversupplied, and the fisherman selling their catch at a loss, while another market, just a few kilometers away, has no fish for sale at any price. This kept the fishermen poor, and the markets consistently either oversupplied or undersupplied.

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From 1997 through 2001, as Indias rush to industrialization gathered momentum, several of Indias mobile telecoms firms strung the Kerala coast with GSM towers. GSM is a radio signal, and travels in line-of-sight, which means that, out at sea, the signal can reach 25 kilometers, the point where the curvature of the Earth blocks the view of the shore. GSM handsets cost a months wages for a Kerala fishermen imagine if a handset here cost four or five thousand dollars. (Even my first smartphone didnt cost that much.) Yet, some wealthy fisherman, somewhere in Kerala, bought a GSM handset and took it to sea. At some point during a fishing voyage that fisherman had some communication with the mainland perhaps a trivial family matter. But, in the course of that communication, he learned of a village going wanting for fish, at any price. So he made for that port and sold his catch at a tidy profit that day. The next day, perhaps, he called into shore, talking to fish sellers to the various ports, and learned which market needed fish the most and was willing to pay for it. So it began. Fishermen form a tight-knit community; while they might be secretive about their favorite spots to fish, they all trade technique with one another, and within a very short period of time all the other Kerala fishermen had learned of the power of the GSM handset, and each of them brought their own handset to sea, made calls to the markets, and sold their catch for a tidy profit. Today, the fish markets in Kerala are only rarely oversupplied with fish, and are almost never undersupplied. The network of fish sellers and fishermen have created their own bourse, a marketplace which grows organically out of an emergent web of SMS and voice calls which distribute the catch efficiently across the market. The customers are happy theres always fish for sale. The fish sellers are happy they always have fish to sell, and at a good price. And the fisherman are happy and earning so much more, these days, that a GSM handset pays for itself in two months time. None of this was predicted. None of this was expected. None of this was anything but shocking to the legion of economists who are now studying this unprecedented phenomenon. To our Western eyes this doesnt even make much sense. We think of mobile phones as a bit of
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bling, a technological googaw that makes our lives a bit easier something that removes the friction from our social interactions. In the age of the mobile, youre never late, just delayed. You can always call to say youre sorry. (Or text to say youve broken up.) While they can be useful in our economic lives, theyre hardly necessary and, given that the boss can now reach you 24 hours a day, wherever you are on Earth theyre often more of a pain in the arse than a blessing. But at the end of the day theyre extraneous. Nice, but non-essential. Except theyre not. Study after study is confirming something that many were already beginning to suspect: the very poorest people on Earth the five billion of us who earn less than a few thousand dollars a year can benefit enormously from pervasive wireless communications. It seems counterintuitive why would a subsistence farmer in Kenya need a mobile phone? As it turns out, that farmer and farmers in Nigeria, and Bangladesh and Peru will phone ahead to the markets, and learn where their produce will bring the best price. Left to their own devices, human beings with things to trade will create their own markets. When mobile communications enter the mix, their ability to trade effectively increases enormously. Those who serve the poor microfinance institutions like Bangladeshs Grameen Bank have real experience of the power of mobiles to help the poor. So many of Grameen Banks loans went to finance mobile handsets that they recently founded their own telecoms firm Grameen Phone to provide services to the poor. None of this is charity work all of these are profit-making enterprises; but it turns out that helping the poor to communicate is one of the most effective ways to help them to improve their economic effectiveness. That, too, wasnt predicted by anyone. After all, dont the poor need schools, clean water, inoculations and transparent governments? Yes, certainly they need all these things, but they also need the tools that let them help themselves. Near as anyone can tell, a mobile handset pretty much tops that list of tools. And although this
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singular discovery is nearly unknown in the Western world, the poor of the world know it because theyve been snapping up mobiles in unprecedented and unexpected numbers. Sometime in the next 30 days, the telecoms firms of the world will have reached a new milestone three billion subscribers. About ten percent of that number are customers who have multiple accounts, but, somewhere in the middle of 2008, half of humanity will own a mobile handset. In just a decades time, well have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone. Unprecedented. Unexpected. But, given what we now know, perfectly natural. And its not slowing down. It took a decade to get to the first billion mobile subscribers, four years to get to the second billion, and eighteen months to get to three billion. In a year, more or less, well hit four billion, then things will begin to slow, as we reach the ranks of the desperately poor, the two billion who earn less than a dollar a day. Yet these are precisely the people who would most benefit from a mobile. Expect to see some big campaigns in the next few years, from Oxfam and World Vision, asking you to buy mobiles for the poor. Nokia looked at the curves, figured out whats going on, and created a mobile handset targeted directly at the emerging markets of the world the Nokia 1100. Its cheap, simple, has predictive text for just about any language with more than 10 million speakers, and in the four years since its introduction theyve sold well over 200 million of them. By comparison, Nokia sold twice as many 1100s as Apple sold iPods in half the time. The most successful consumer electronics device in history, the 1100 is the Model T of wireless networking. Put an 1100 in someones hands, and theyll use it to improve their life. Its as simple as that. And whats really interesting here these farmers and fishermen and spice traders and so forth didnt need an eBay to help them trade. They dont need fancy services and wouldnt use them. They only need to be connected to other people. That in itself is entirely sufficient. People come fully equipped to provide all the services they need. Nothing else is required. Five thousand years of civilization have seen to that. We know how to organize our own affairs and can do so without any assistance. But now we can do so
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globally and instantaneously. Thats not a power restricted to the billion richest of us; its now within reach of half of us, and improves the lives of the poor far more than it helps us. Our innate capacity for self-organization, now extended and amplified almost infinitely, has itself produced some unpredicted and unexpected effects.

Discord: The Center Will Not Hold In the Jurassic Era of the Internet, before the Web was more than a few hundred pages in size, and still mostly run off a series of servers in Geneva, John Gilmore, who co-founded SUN Microsystems before going off to found Cygnus Support and the EFF, recognized an inherent quality of networks: they promote the sharing of information. This was codified in what I (only half-jokingly) call Gilmores Law: The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it. At the time Gilmore made this statement, he was talking politics. Gilmore is a political animal many of you probably know of his long-running tangle with US Homeland Security over the free right to travel within the States without having to display ID. And, for many years this aphorism was interpreted as a political maxim that political censorship of the net was essentially impossible. As we all know, the Chinese have tried, with their Great Firewall of China, but even theyve given up. Just two months ago, Wang Guoqing, the Vice-Minister for Information in China was quoted as saying, It has been repeatedly proved that information blocking is like walking into a dead end. At around the same time as that shock admission of failure, Australias Minister for Communications Helen Coonan introduced the Australian Governments latest attempt to appease its conservative base by locking down the Australian Internet, because,
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well, Wont somebody please think of the children? Turns out thats just what the children were doing it took a 16 year-old Australian boy 30 minutes to crack through that filter, and another 40 minutes to crack it again, after the filter was upgraded. In that same week, a fifteen year-old in the United States got his hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, photographed the entire text, bound it up as a PDF, and uploaded it to the Pirate Bay so that tens of thousands could use BitTorrent and download their own copy four days before the much-hyped simultaneous international release. Gilmore, it seems, wasnt thinking broadly enough. He assumed that censorship necessarily has a political dimension. It doesnt. Censorship can be driven by a wide range of motives: some are political, some are moral, some are cultural, and some are economic. In the end, it doesnt matter. All censorship inevitably encounters Gilmores Law, and loses. The net finds a way around it. Before we get all hippy-dippy and attribute agency to something that we all know is really just a collection of wires and routing devices, we need to clarify what we mean when we use the word net. The wiring isnt the network. The routers arent the network. The people are the network. We had social networks ten million years before we ever had a telephone exchange; we carry those networks around in our heads, theyre part of the standard kit of our cortical biology. We have been blessed with the biggest and best networking gear of all the hominids, but we all share the same capability. The social sharing of information has played a big part in the success of the hominids, and, in particular, human beings. We are born to plug into the network of other human beings and share information. Its what we do. But just now were facing increasingly frequent collisions between Gilmores Law and old-fashioned and time-tested ways of the world. Weve long known that there are no secrets in a small town; now that same law of interpersonal relationships are being applied to businesses, to governments, to institutions of every shape and description. Consider these examples:
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Encyclopaedia Britannica hides behind a walled garden and is subsequently obsolesced by Wikipedia; Television shows and films end up on BitTorrent before theyre broadcast; the pirated torrent file for Halo 3 was posted a week before the video game was released. A tight group of reporters and bloggers brought down the US Attorney General, who attempted to stonewall all investigations into his politically-motivated firings of eight US Attorneys. And - oh yeah - theres that whole open-source movement which is, ever so slowly and carefully, eating Microsoft.

Whats happening here? What is it about the network that makes it so potent? Simply this: the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. Ive rewritten Gilmores Law to reflect this: The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it. For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has been joined. But this isnt going to be some full-on Armageddon, a battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesnt matter if youre a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob. Unexpected. Unprecedented.
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In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is no center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network, that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of salience (meaning) for that group. The product of that network could be Wikipedia or it could be al Qaeda. Buy the ticket, take the ride. And its not over yet. The network hasnt finished changing, and it hasnt finished changing us.

Bureaucracy: Collapse and How to Profit From It To recap: we know where we are, and we have some idea of what is really going on. But enough of philosophy: lets play! But. Well. One more thing Although the network has done a tidy job of disassembling the hierarchies of the world, there is still one hierarchy which remains stubbornly resistant to change, which retains its top-down, command-and-control hierarchical model of authority and has for well over a hundred years. Telcos. I find this endlessly ironic: the firms which created the network are somehow immune to the effects of the network. And, in consequence, so are the networks themselves. In fact, you can look at any of the networks telephone, broadband, or wireless and see in them the physical embodiment of hierarchy. Its curious. Its damned interesting. Its also over.

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Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for doing it with love) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. Thats where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as wireless mesh networking. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if theres another Mini within distance and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden youve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small and theyre also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. Thats cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more. But what does the Meraki Mini have to do with the end of the telcos? Just this: a mesh network is a network thats been subject to the corrosive effects of a network. There is no center anywhere. Theres no hierarcy or preferred route. Theres no gatekeeper anywhere. You can have one gateway, or twenty. You can have one mesh node or a thousand. Just throw another mesh node into the mix, and itll all work seamlessly. And mesh networks scale: the dynamics of a network of a thousand mesh repeaters arent substantially different from a network with ten. Packets still find their way, with minimal delay. What this means is that we all have the capability to create our own large-scale, low-cost wireless networks within our grasp. Meraki is already proving this in San Francisco, where Google and Earthlink had been fighting the telcos for years to get a city-wide free wireless network installed. Last week, Earthlink pulled out they just couldnt fight the politically power of AT&T. Meanwhile, since February, Meraki has been offering free Meraki Minis to anyone in San Francisco who wanted to donate a little of their own broadband to a free municipal WiFi network. Lately that network has been growing by leaps and bounds no easy feat in a city which effectively broken up by a series of large hills. The Free the Net SF project
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already has almost 14,000 users thats nearly triple the number two months ago and hundreds of nodes. It is proof that us mob can seize control of the spectrum and use it for our own ends. Thats fine and dandy for San Francisco, but what about here in Australia, where were suffering under a decade-old peering agreement which makes us pay and pay and pay for every bit we take out of the cloud? Which costs us tens of dollars an hour if we want to use a public WiFi hotspot, or, in the case of the Sydney Convention Centre, $800 for an hours access? (That was the quote Maxine received when I asked if we could have public WiFi during my talk.) Internet access in Australia has always been about bending over and taking it like a man. Or at least it was. But for the past thirty five minutes, youve all been bathing in WiFi, which Im providing to all of you, free of charge. Youve all got good signal, and (I hope) plenty of bandwidth to blog, or check email, or whatever you might want to do when I get boring. And heres the kicker its all running off batteries. The whole thing is good for at least four hours of fun before someone needs to go find the mains. And, because its both entirely battery powered and entirely wireless, I can drop it anywhere in I like, whether in Australia or America or Namibia. A mesh network node isnt hardware device. Its software which runs on arbitrary hardware. You can mesh network WiFi. Or Bluetooth. Or infrared, if you wanted to be perverse. Its software. Which means that every laptop in this room is potentially another mesh network node, listening to the traffic and passing packets along. Consider the density of laptops and desktops (equipped with WiFi adapters) in Sydney, or Melbourne. Now imagine them as nodes within a vast mesh network. Thats where were going and its just a software update away.

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When I originally composed this section of the talk, I was going to make a prediction: because mesh networks are just software, and because my Nokia N95 has built-in WiFi, I predicted wed soon see mesh networks for mobile phones. But I dont need to make that prediction: Australian startup Project Serval, came onto my television show, The New Inventors, to announce they were doing precisely this. With their software, the mobile doesnt even need the carriers wireless network. Mobiles simply route packets between themselves until they reach their destination. You wonder why the wireless telcos fought so hard and so long to keep WiFi out of mobiles? Was it just to prevent VOIP? Hardly. The telcos have known about mesh networking for a long time. And they know it spells their doom. So watch now, as the network frees itself from the authoritarian forms of those most hierarchical of organizations, the telcos. But I said it was time to play. And it is. Its time to put the mob rules to work for you. Because you all need to earn a living. But this world were entering is so chaotic, so accidental and unplanned for, everything we believe to be absolutely true is about to be severely tested. ONE: The mob is everywhere. There are very few places left on Earth where you cant receive a text. Ulaanbataar to Timbuktu, Tierra del Fuego to Vladivostok, the network is truly global, and now encompasses the majority of humanity. Its interesting to note that within the same year that half of humanity is urbanized, half of humanity will have a mobile handset. Thats not coincidental; theyre two sides of the same process. Just as weve been lured out from our villages into the vitality and opportunity of the city, were being drawn into the unexpected and unpredictable global mob. TWO: The mob is faster, smarter and stronger than you are. William Gibson put this much more elegantly when he wrote, The street finds its own use for things, uses its manufacturers never
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intended. No one set out to create arbitrage markets for the fishermen of Kerala; thats something that emerged from the mob. SMS was meant to be used for emergency messaging; now the world sends several billion texts a day. Just add mobiles, and you get a mob. You cant push a mob any more than you can push a rope; you can pull them, lure them, and, if youre very lucky, dazzle them for a moment or two, but then, inevitably, theyll move along. Thats bad news for anyone building web sites. The world of mob rules isnt about sites; its about services, things that the street uses and permutes indefinitely. The idea of web sites dates from a time before the network ate hierarchy; sites are places where you go and follow the rules laid down by some information architect. Well, theres no way to enforce those rules. The first Google Maps mashup didnt come from Google. Or the second. Or the third. Or the hundredth. Google resisted the mashup. Claimed mashups violated their terms of use. Mashups come from the mob, the street finding its own use for things. The mob pushed on through; Google bowed down and obeyed. The most powerful institution of the Internet era, pushed around like a childs toy. Ponder that. THREE: Advertising is a form of censorship. The Web of 2007 is a house built upon sand. Nearly everything online hopes to fund itself through some sort of advertising and sponsorship. Advertising is a demand that you pay attention a demand which can no longer be enforced. But the mob doesnt like advertisements; it either ignores them or actively filters them away. In just the last few weeks, certain sites have been blocked to Firefox because it frequently incorporates the AdBlock extension. Thats upset some institutions which built their business model on the delivery of ads demanding the attention of the mob. But the mob doesnt like that. Even worse, for those who are raising a hew and cry about the theft of their precious content, the more they scream, the more they thrash about, the stronger the mob becomes. Consider: filesharing has only grown more pervasive despite every attempt of every copyright holder to bring it to heel. Each move has been met with a counter-move. There is no safety in copyright, nor any arguing with the mob. Music and movies are freely and broadly
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available, and will remain so into the indefinite future. Sadly, were now seeing that same, sorry battle repeated in double-time as advertisers and those dependent upon them assert an authority they no longer possess. FOUR: The mob does not need a business model. But what about your precious business models? How do you get paid for all this work youre pouring into your projects? I have to be honest with you: the mob simply doesnt care. The mob doesnt need a business model. Heck, the mob doesnt even need all this lovely wireless technology. If we took the mobiles away from the Kerala fishermen, theyd develop something semaphores, mirrors, smoke signals to maintain the integrity of the network. Once networks are created, they can not be destroyed. Networks are intrinsically resilient against all sorts of failures, and theyll simply find a way to route around them. So if your business goes tits up because you built it around an economic model that is not viable in the era of mob rules, it will make no difference the mob will simply route around you and find another way to do it. So forget your business models, and remember the golden rule, as expressed by Talking Heads, in the song Found a Job: If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If you you folks in this room, who have the mob in your hands, who play with it as if it were a toy if you dont wake up in the morning completely possessed by the knowledge that what youre doing is simply the coolest thing ever, you need to quit that job and find another. You need to reach into that bucket of dreams and ambitions and pull something out to share with us mob, something that will dazzle and excite us. It might only do so for a moment, but, in that moment, your social stock will rise so high that youll never have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the mortgage. You may not retire a millionaire, but youll certainly never go hungry. The mob is a meritocracy admittedly a very perverse and bizarre meritocracy but it is the one place where quality will out. Quality
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only comes from the marriage of craft and obsession. You have the craft. Embrace your obsessions. You will be rewarded. FIVE: Make networks happen. I need to leave you with one concrete example of how this is all going to work, and for this example Ive selected the last bastion of authority and hierarchy after everything else has dissolved into the gray goo of the network, one thing will remain. It wont be government thats half gone already. Its medicine. Medicine is very nearly the oldest of the professions, and has been a closely held monopoly for half a thousand years closer to a guild than anything resembling a modern profession. Why? Medicine is guarded by the twin bulwarks of complexity and mortality: medicine is rich and deep body of knowledge, and, if you screw it up, youll kill yourself or somebody else. While the pursuit of medical knowledge is conducted within the peer-review frameworks of science, that knowledge is closely held. That leaves all of us as patients in a distinctly disempowered position when it comes to medicine. But that is all going to change. In twenty years time, one in four Australians will be 65 or older and Ill be one of them. There is no medical authority big enough to deal with such a mass of gerontology; the system will be overloaded, and it will begin to collapse. Out of that collapse, we will see those of us who grew up within the Network Era and Im among the oldest of that generation begin to work the network to our own ends. We will not be alone. There will be tens of millions of us first in the West, then throughout the world who will be facing the same problems, and searching for the same answers. We might not get to live forever, but well want to die trying. So well set to work, creating a common base of collective intelligence think Wikipedia, but with a depth of medical knowledge that it doesnt even begin to explore together with strong social networking tools that embeds us deep within a network of experts who may or may not be board qualified. Ill probably come to expect that my GP and other specialists are members of this network peers who share their expertise, not experts pronouncing solutions. And this network will never leave me; in fact, it will probably watch every move I make, every breath I take, every calorie I eat, and every heartbeat. It
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sounds Orwellian, but I will want this because I will see it as a profoundly empowering form of surveillance. In other words, my wellness becomes a quality of my network. This is not a website. This is not WebMD or Healtheon or a cancer support group, or anything that looks like anything weve seen yet. This is a self-organizing quality of the mob, painfully aware of their own accelerating senescence, and fully empowered to do something about it. And it represents an enormous opportunity for you. In just the last paragraph Ive dropped a half a dozen strong business ideas onto you; but theyre so different from how were thinking about the network today that it will probably take some time to work it all out. But the mob wont wait forever. Remember: it is smarter and faster and stronger than you. You can try to get in front of it, and get picked up by it Ive given you more than enough clues to do that or you can get run down. That choice is yours. But if Ive learned anything from my study of mob rules, its that the future lies in making networks happen. If you do that, theres a place for you with us mob.

Aftermath We live in increasingly interesting times. Half of humanity has suddenly dropped in uninvited and unannounced crashing our private party, eager to participate in an exploration of the possibilities of human communication. Whatever they want, theyre going to get. Thats the way things work now. Fortunately, they want what we want: better lives for themselves and their families. How they get it thats in their hands. We can assist them, but they dont really need our help. That mob will work it out for themselves. And in the process, everything will change for us, as well. Journalist Norman Cousins wrote, Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. Sound advice, particularly in an time when everything is fluctuating out of control. We cant know what to do theres too much uncertainty and potency in us mob for that but we can know what not to do. For now, that will have to be enough.
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Still, there is one thing I can recommend: have courage and keep moving. Standing still is not an option. The world has changed. The world is changing. The world will change a whole lot more. Good luck. September 2007

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Hyperpolitics

Introduction I want to draw you a new picture of politics, a Theory of Everything, which unites the Right-Left divide within an underlying model of human behavior. This is not a new political philosophy, but rather, the application of current research into sociobiology to sociology. Although sociology has historically stood at some distance from the hard sciences, the same was said of biology less than fifty years ago. When Watson and Crick discovered DNA, back in 1953, they unified biology and the hard sciences of chemistry and physics. We are at the cusp of another such union. At the same time, the study of sociology, ethnology and anthropology has become the most vital area of research in technology. For a decade now, although I have continued to work with and invent new technologies, I have focused my research toward an understanding of how technologies change the people who use them, and how people change the technologies they use. This emergent, or autopoeic, relationship between technology and society is now having a significant impact upon the organization of all aspects of human life and, in specific, the relationships between vast collections of individuals: that is, politics. Let me start with biology, and, as we work our way up, moving from the individual body to the body politic, I will to show you how our technologies have amplified some of our innate capabilities to such a degree that the previously unquestioned truths of political life no longer apply. The political environment of the 21st century bears little resemblance to the mass movements of the 19th and 20th centuries; this is a reality that political institutions are about to confront, and an environment which all of us as political animals must learn to exploit.

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I: Biopolitics In 1871, when Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, he stated that, Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribean advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. This statement has caused no end of trouble, being taken up by those seeking a scientific rationale for the White Mans Burden, which the British, Americans, French and Germans used as rationale for the Great Game of colonization. The European races, seeing themselves as morally superior to the uncivilized barbarian races (even if both India and China had been civilized since time out of mind), used their hundred year head start in technological advancement to trump the highly moral cultures of Asia. It was, they claimed, survival of the fittest. Darwin and all that. The reductio ad absurdum of moral fitness justified the mass slaughter of indigenous Australians, Americans, Africans, and the extinction of the Tasmanians. The jump from Charles Darwin to King Leopold took just twenty years. When biologists realized what Darwin had wrought and certainly Darwin had never intended his words to be twisted toward such malevolent ends the entire idea of moral selection was quietly dropped from the canon of evolution. That presented a problem of its own; Darwin was working as a scientist, and you cant just abandon an idea which has a sound scientific basis. While no one talked about moral selection in the context of human cultures, a new word, altruism, came to take its place. Well come back to that. Meanwhile, over the next hundred years, evolutionary biologists studied the behavior of other social animals specifically, the insects. E. O. Wilson, the Harvard myrmecologist and evolutionary biologist, studied the social behavior of ants. Ants, bees and other social insects flout the hard-and-fast laws of natural selection as laid down by Darwin: they often do not act in their own best interest, instead acting in the best interest of the colony or nest or hive. The individual selfishness predicted by natural selection has simply been written out of their repertoire of behaviors. Worker ants and worker bees simply toil until they drop dead from exhaustion; they do not
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breed, and do not pass their genes along to the next generation. In evolutionary terms, they do not succeed. Yet ants and bees are wonderfully successful life forms, found all across the habitable regions of the Earth. This behavioral altruism has been a thorn in the side of evolutionary biologists; selfishness is considered an essential feature of natural selection after all, the most selfish animals should, on the whole, do better than their less-selfish peers. This seems true on its face, but other social animals the lions of Africa, who live in prides of up to fifteen females and children also practice altruistic behaviors. Some females will forego breeding and the chance to pass their genes along instead, investing their energy in protecting and providing for the new mothers and their young. In other words, a pride which practices some degree of altruism will be more successful, in the long run, than a pride where its every lion for herself. This phenomenon has been recognized for some years, but, because it did not fit the existing theory, its been ignored. Forty years ago, a consensus developed in the community of evolutionary biologists that natural selection occurred only at the level of the individual. That is, evolution would only select for traits useful in a single individual. The idea that traits such as altruism might be selected for within a social collection of individuals was declared heterodox. To the evolutionary biologists, there was no such thing as a social collection despite some rather obvious evidence, from the insects and higher animals, that social collections are fairly common. As a consequence, evolutionary biologists have spent the last forty years developing some rather weird theories to explain away altruistic behavior, that is, trying to describe how unselfishness could emerge from selfishness. The lovely thing about science is that the truth eventually triumphs. Just this year a number of papers including a few by E. O. Wilson describe what biologists are now calling multi-level selection; that is, a process of natural selection which includes both the individual and groups of individuals. Within the individual, selfish behaviors are selected for, but with social groups, altruistic behaviors can be just as strongly selected for. Consider two prides of lions, one of which has a number of females who have opted-out of breeding,
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while another has an assemblage of selfish individuals, all of whom are breeding. When each pride is threatened, or needs food, the pride with the altruistic individuals will tend to succeed, while the pride with only selfish individuals will tend to fail. The pressures of natural selection will tend to select altruism over selfishness when selecting between groups, but tends to select selfish individuals within either group. This basic tension is at the core of what I want to explore this morning. Social animals do better for themselves and their children if they are selfish; but they do better against other similar groups if they are altruistic. Both of these selection pressures are acting simultaneously, both within the individual and within social groupings. If this is true for prides of lions, why would it be less true for the hominids? Neither altruism nor selfishness are extraordinary behaviors for social animals; they are both strongly selected for. All social animals, ourselves included, must display both of these behaviors to be successful. And, as we all know, humans have been very successful. Lets cross the tiny chasm that separates us from the lower animals. Were less than two hundred thousand years away from the animal state ourselves, and we know that we havent evolved very much in that period of time. Were remarkably similar to early modern humans found in South Africa. These early humans contained within them the same drives toward selfishness and selflessness; the selfish individuals within a tribal grouping would receive the lions share of the calories, and would raise healthy children. At the same time, starving your fellow tribespeople would leave you (in the plural, social sense) fatally weakened. Food sharing is an antique behavior, common across the hominids, strongest in humans, and is a signifier of altruism. Consider the emphasis we place on teaching children to share an emphasis which is common across human cultures. Somewhere in our deepest roots, we understand that sharing is essential to survival. Now, lets step across a a larger chasm, and come forward two thousand centuries. In just the last ten thousand years, weve gone from tribal groupings driven by the Dunbar Number, which limits the effective size of human social networks to roughly 150 people, to
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urban groupings. Cities of a few thousand were commonplace at least eight thousand years ago, at atal Hyk in Anatolia, and Jericho in Palestine, social assemblages of humanity which far surpassed the ability of any human to contain all those other humans in their heads. As numbers grew, the basic human drives of selfishness and altruism, selected for over tens of millions of years of evolution, did not fade away. Instead, we see the emergence of differing ideals for human social organization that is, political models. Each human culture of the past ten thousand years found its own balance point between selfishness and selflessness often coded into the laws and moral teachings of religion. By the nineteenth century, in the first city to pass a million inhabitants, London, we saw the emergence of two mutually exclusive political philosophies that are the absolute embodiment of these fundamental selection pressures. On the one hand, Hobbes in Leviathan announced the bellum omnia contra omnes, the War of all against all, and John Stuart Mill, with his philosophy of Libertarianism, asserted the absolute right of the selfish individual to make his own way in the world. On the other, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels distilled the essence of altruism: From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The polar play of Libertarianism and Socialism stand outside the Left/Right divide of politics: Libertarianism is a philosophy of both the Left (anarcho-communism) and the Right (Objectivism), while Socialism can be Kropotkins anarchism, or authoritarian Marxist-Leninism. The important thing to note here is that both philosophies emerge from natural selection pressures. Libertarianism springs from the selfishness of the individual, Socialism from the altruism of the group. Neither is superior to the other. Both are natural and both are necessary. Yet so much of the tragedy of the last two hundred years has grown from one innate and natural drive asserting its primacy over its mirror twin. Despite the fighting, the deaths and proclamations of the absolute, unquestionable truth from both camps, reality lies somewhere in the middle. Its the mixture of selfish and altruistic tendencies which the body politic expresses; only in some very rare instances of revolution does one tendency achieve any lasting dominance over the other, and that invariably ends in debacle, because pressures selecting for both are never removed. Soviet Marxist-Leninism collapsed because it
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could not honestly incorporate individual selfishness; it was replaced by its opposite, a form of Crony Capitalism (the Age of the Oligarchs) which, in its own way, was just as noxious. China since Deng Xiaoping has moved from collectivism toward a mixed socialism which looks a lot more like American capitalism than Marxist-Leninism. This is not, as Francis Fukuyama would have it, The End of History, the triumph of neo-Liberalism. Far from it. Australians have overwhelmingly rejected neo-Liberalism as too radical, too far from the mixture of selfishness and altruism which must be maintained in order to prevent catastrophe. There is a moral cost in adhering to selfishness, just as there is an opportunity cost inherent in altruism. Only in a mix can a healthy, vital balance be maintained. Although you might assume that I am advocating a moderate, middle-of-the-road approach to politics, I should say that this model works only with respect to politics as they existed before the network era. When looking toward a comfortable median in the behaviors and drives of thirteen million voters, a Government that mixes economic conservatism with a degree of socialism would seem to be as near to the ideal as can be achieved in the real world and this is precisely the government Australians tend to elect. But the Australian body politic is now, suddenly, connected in entirely new ways, and, as a result, the political formations and pressures which characterized centrist politics will be increasingly destabilized by radically empowered polities within the larger body politic. These forces, too, are driven by the same essential selection pressures that characterize all social groupings, but these pressures have now accelerated to the speed of light, and amplified beyond all recognition.

II: Hyperintelligence: Or, What I Learned From The Poll Bludger For the past three years, I have been intently studying the new digital social networks which have become such a prominent feature of life online. This study led me to a more complete understanding of all human social networks. We are all, all the time, immersed in social networks. It is a basic, essential part of human biology, and the one which takes the longest to mature. The cognitive apparatus which
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manages our social networks doesnt come into its own until the midto-late teenage years, and is a big reason why teenagers, as a population, are so miserable: learning the rules of social networks is perhaps the most challenging of all human tasks. A human isnt completely human in the absence of our social networks. As a social species, we are not defined solely as individuals, but as members within some grouping. We do not end at our skin. Here too, we can see the echo of the selfish vs. altruist tugof-war; the selfish bits of our biology seek to be self-contained; the drive to altruism ensures that this is never so. We are all actors within dynamic, evolving networks of individuals, gathered together around some shared goal. For tens of thousands of years, survival was the only goal of these human networks. While improvement in survival fitness remains the core goal of our participation within any social network, we now have many ways of reaching that goal. The explosion of cultural forms which define modernity is proof of this. In the network era, social networks remain ubiquitous, but have become instantaneous and global. Furthermore, they can capture their activity in a persistent form which lies outside of any one head: collective intelligence. It is now possible for a global human social network to pool its energies around a single effort, and in the process create something with value that far exceeds the contributions of any single member of the network. In the network era, the benefits of altruism can disproportionately outweigh the selection pressures of selfishness. Consider Wikipedia. There are, globally, approximately 2000 Wikipedians, that is, core members of the global social network who create, maintain, arbitrate and improve upon the globally accessible, freely available and openly editable encyclopedia. The efforts of these Wikipedians (and additional contributions by millions of fellow travelers, who loosely affiliate themselves with the Wikipedians around a specific topic of interest) have completely redefined our understanding of knowledge formation. It is now clear, in the aftermath of the Britannica vs. Wikipedia Wars, that knowledge formation is not the exclusive province of
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elites: anyone, however marginalized, can make a meaningful contribution to the common font of human knowledge. Furthermore, every literate person can benefit from Wikipedia. As Wikipedia becomes ever-more-ubiquitous, as it extends its entries into every factual category, in every language with more than a million speakers, it should help us make better decisions: we have immediate access to (reasonably) accurate information in a way that no human has ever had before. If knowing the facts is a necessary precondition to good decision making, Wikipedia has already increased the selection fitness of all of its users. Anyone who uses Wikipedia has an enormous advantage over anyone who does not. This, in itself, is driving us all toward using Wikipedia. In her book Continuities in Cultural Evolution, anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. The Wikipedians, a 21st-century digital social network, have indeed changed the world not just for themselves, but for all of us. Their single-minded dedication to an activity of nearly unalloyed altruism (Wikipedians are not paid, and, moreover, frequently confront powerful disapproval for their efforts) has had a profound and continuing influence on human culture. This is not just Wikipedia in itself, but the idea of Wikipedia. Collective intelligence, harnessed, recorded and shared, leads to what I have termed hyperintelligence, a social network that is vastly more intelligent than the sum of its parts. Wikipedia is only one model for how this works; there are others, and there will be many, many more to come. Most of you are already familiar with the example of Wikipedia; while it is the archetype of hyperintelligence, many believe that lightning will not strike twice, that this revolution begins and ends with Wikipedia. This is not the case. There are examples of hyperintelligence emerging everywhere we care to look. Having just returned from an encounter with another emerging hyperintelligence, I want to share with you one such example, as I believe that in this example we can locate the definitive features of a generalized model which then can be put to work. As a subscriber to Crikey, a daily Australian current affairs newsletter, Ive kept careful note of links to other Australian political
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blogs when published in the newsletter. Among the most interesting of these are Possums Politics, run by the anonymous and mysterious Possum Commitatus, and The Poll Bludger, run by William Bowe, a 36 year-old PhD student at the University of Western Australia. Both Possum and Bowe are psephologists students of the statistics of polls and elections. A few months ago, I hadnt ever heard the word psephologist. Now I have something of an understanding of what they do, and how they do it. Psephologists use statistical tools to determine the accuracy of polls, the trends indicated by polls, and attempt insofar as it is possible to remove the noise from the soundings received from the electorate, to predict the outcome of elections. As with anything statistical, its not a precise science, but a psephologist can give you a margin of error for his predictions. In fact, I can now give you the formula for the margin of error associated with any statistical sample (formula from Wikipedia):

With this formula I can tell you that with a random poll of 2701 voters such as in the last Newspoll taken before the 2007 Australian federal election the margin of error is about 1.9%, with a confidence level of 95%. I can tell you what a confidence level is. I can also tell you that Newspoll misallocated their preferences, based on an assumption, now shown to be erroneous, that preference distributions from 2004 would remain an accurate guide to preference distributions in 2007. The final Newspoll of the Federal election yielded a surprisingly low value for the two-party-preferred result for the ALP, which showed the race narrowing at its close, while, in fact, very little narrowing took place. How do I know all this? I am not a psephologist, and I assure you that I have never in my life taken a statistics course. I know all of this because, for the last several weeks, and, in particular, for the two weeks leading up to the Federal election, I was deeply immersed in The Poll Bludger. I wasnt the only one. From serious psephologists such as Bowe and Possum and the rock-star-like Antony Green, to tens of knowledgeable amateurs, through to complete newbies like
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myself, we opened up the entrails of the electorate and augured its meaning. We knew that the final AC Neilsen poll, showing a 57-43 two-party-preferred result couldnt possibly be right, because it swung to the top of the range of the earlier AC Nielsen polls; for the same reason, the much-touted narrowing in the final 48 hours was nothing but bad statistics, assumptions, and wishful thinking. We knew this, because those of us with knowledge shared it freely with those eager to learn. And I, being very eager indeed, spent hours and hours reading through the postings, ignoring the ever-increasing noise of various partisans as the campaign grew more heated and more desperate, focusing on the raw meat of poll data. This was doubly an education for myself: as someone familiar only with the American electoral system, the concept of electoral swings was entirely alien. But, because I listened intently, and regarded each post from Possum and Bowe and Antony Green as pure psephological gold, I learned. I was hardly alone in this. Many of the individuals posting on Poll Bludger knew as little as I did but we all learned together, and grew confident enough to share what we little we knew with each other. At this point, it feels as though Ive been through a crash undergraduate programme in psephology, statistics and Australian politics. I know far too much about many of the 150 electoral divisions in the House of Representatives, their voting histories and their members. I know how the Latham swing artificially distorted the preferences of the 2004 election. It may even be, when all the votes are counted, that I have correctly predicted the number of ALP seats (84) in the House of Representatives. (The final result was 83 not a bad prediction for an amateur.) I am, in short, a wholly qualified amateur psephologist, because other individuals in the blogging community freely and altruistically shared their knowledge with me in a way that allowed me to analyze, dissect and meditate upon their pedagogy. A blog is a mechanism not just for conversation, but for knowledge capture. It is not as neat and accessible as a wiki, insofar as the blog must be read in its entirety, but it does represent the collective intellectual output of a social network. Some of that is opinion, and some of that is factual; as I spent more time on Poll Bludger, it
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became easier to discern one from another. Raw knowledge, through experience, translated into understanding. That understanding, once gained, was also captured. It is impossible to translate one persons understanding directly into anothers head, but captured understanding is a necessary prerequisite for hyperintelligence. Wikipedia captures its understanding through its still-evolving processes; its standards, and more significantly its practices represent the embodied understandings of the Wikipedians, as they have evolved from possibility through viability and into ubiquity. The Poll Bludgers learned very quickly not to feed the trolls, learned to detect and expose the concern trolls, and, over time, have grown into a community. Over the last four weeks, The Poll Bludger has become the place for political tragics to come and learn about and (perhaps) discuss the hot topics of the election. In that, The Poll Bludger is filling a very obvious void in Australian political life; the US has Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, Little Green Footballs, and countless other politically-focused blogs; before this electoral cycle, Australias political blogs were mostly personal sites, or professional journalistic endeavors. Possums Politics and The Poll Bludger mark the emergence of a political blogging community which, through shared, altruistic effort, are producing the first hallmarks of hyperintelligence. Assuming that the community of Poll Bludgers hangs together past the fag-end of this electoral cycle (there are signs that Bowe intends the site to transition into broader discussions of the political affairs of the nation) there is now a highly knowledgeable and reasonably strong digital social network of politically-aware Australians. How the hyperintelligence of this community translates into a transformation of the Australian political landscape is, as yet, an open question. What we now know, from Wikipedia and now The Poll Bludger, is that a community can share its wealth of knowledge from each according to his ability, to each according to his need and produce a highly disproportionate, asymmetric result. A small but motivated group of citizens can change the world. We need only to dissect the mechanics of this process, and abstract a model which can be put to

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work. This model will form the template for 21st-century political activism.

III: Nothing Like Democracy Earlier this year, I was privileged to go on tour with Jimmy Jimbo Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, as we crisscrossed the nation, talking to educators in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Everywhere we went, people asked the same question: why is Wikipedia such a success, while my wiki languishes? What do you need to achieve critical mass? The answer, Wales said, is five people. Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia. Wales has learned, through experience, that the minor language versions of Wikipedia (languages with less than 10 million native speakers), need at least five steady contributors to become selfsustaining. In the many wikis Wales oversees through his commercial organization, Wikia, hes noted the same phenomenon time and again. Five people mark the tipping point between a hobby and a nascent hyperintelligence. Five people is not a very big ask. Anything that people are passionate about should be able to gather together that many dedicated altruists. Since we are now constrained neither by location nor synchronous activity, the barrier to entry has become nearly nonexistent. Just five people can easily enter into a pact to change the world. As their work catches on and catches fire, as they capture their collective intelligence, and as the social network forms, hyperintelligence will emerge. Everyone involved in the social network benefits from it, and every member of the network increases their own selection fitness by pursuing an altruistic end. They will be more effective in pursuit of their ends (insofar as those ends are those of the network), because of their participation within the network.

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It should be noted here that effectiveness is a highly reinforcing reward. If, through participation within a social network, an individual can pursue his or her goals with greater effectiveness, those individuals are more likely, through time, to become more deeply involved in the network, further increasing their effectiveness. Thus, altruism that is, investment in the network reaps the selfish reward of increased effectiveness. Both basic biological drives are simultaneously served; this marks the difference between the network era and the politics which came before it. In the era of hyperpolitics, altruistic investment yields selfish results, and does so in such a disproportionate manner that the drive toward altruistic behavior is very strongly reinforced. Hyperpolitics has completely scrambled the neat continuum from selfishness to altruism which provided the frame for a hundred centuries of human civilization. We are entering uncharted territory. It is now almost impossibly easy for networks of individuals to appear out of nowhere, harnessing hyperintelligence to achieve their ends. This phenomenon, known as hyperempowerment (Robb, 2007), is a radically destabilizing force. Wikipedians have put hyperintelligence to work for the benefit of all humanity, but the hyperempowerment created by Wikipedia has unintentionally destabilized educational, informational and governmental elites throughout the entire world. Daily Kos has put its social network to work for the benefit of progressive politicians throughout the US: for the next decade, psephologists will be debating the impact of the Kossaks on the 2006 US Congressional elections; there is no doubt that these Kossaks strongly influenced candidate pre-selection. Hyperempowerment means you punch far above your weight; institutions all institutions formed during an earlier period, are ill-prepared for this. The 21st century is seeing the balkanization of a single body politic into a mass of hyperempowered polities, each leveraging its own resources of social networks and hyperintelligence to achieve its own ends. This is where we see the ageless conflict of selfishness against altruism emerge again, but on a different scale. Within the network, altruism is strongly rewarded; when working against the aims of a similarly hyperempowered network, selfishness will rule the day. Of
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course, these polities are likely to recognize the advantages of cooperation as well as competition, so we will see meta-polities, and mega-polities. Political life will not re-integrate into the singular political blocks of the 19th and 20th centuries, but massive if inchoate forces will emerge periodically before melting back into the chaos. None of this involves voting. None of this involves government as we currently conceive of it. The Reassurance Ritual which Alvin Toffler wrote about in The Third Wave, the biennial or triennial or quadrennial trip to the polling booth to assert your continuing belief in and respect for the institutions of representative democracy simply doesnt apply. Political pressure will be applied directly to the institutions of influence, and these institutions are already deforming due to the informational stresses placed upon them. They simply cant respond fast enough to hyperempowered polities. There is little doubt that they will rapidly disintegrate as the number of hyperempowered single-interest and special-interest and metainterest groups begins to climb. We will be left with the hollowedout remains of the institutions of government, but with nothing that looks anything like democracy. I know that all of this sounds a bit hyperbolic. But this is already going on. Most of you are already engaged in these kinds of tasks. And its a little late to reform our ways; these transformations emerge naturally from our interactions with each other through the network. Wed need to junk the infrastructure of the last forty years of development everywhere in the world to prevent this process from happening. Yet there are dangers, great dangers. Turn hyperempowerment one way, and you get Wikipedia. Turn it another way, and you get Al Qaeda, which is the very definition of a hyperempowered social network: loosely joined, knowledge sharing, altruistically focused on bringing a Wahabist Caliphate to the entire Muslim world. Al Qaeda will not surrender its network. It is its network. And that network has proven incredibly resilient, despite every attempt from a nearly universal collection of institutional powers to extinguish it. (The same can be said about the file-sharing networks which have become the permanent bane of institutional media interests.)

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For this reason, we dont have any easy options. We must understand how the processes of hyperintelligence, hyperempowerment and hyperpolitics work, and make them work for us. Because someone will make it work for them, and unless hyperempowerment is met with hyperempowerment, in a new balance of power, we will simply be pushed around more effectively than ever before, by forces which, acting selfishly, are unlikely to have our own best interests in mind. So, as we sit and talk pleasantly about blogging and conversational media and Web 2.0, discussing their impacts on Australias political system, please realize this: we are sitting on a bomb, now halfexploded. Everything we know about how institutions behave is likely to be proven hilariously wrong. We are the institutions now, and we bear full responsibility for our actions. This is the between time, the time when anything can happen. As we rise into hyperempowerment, we need to be mindful of what we want to share, and to what end. Sharing is the shape, the promise, and the danger of our common future. 28 29 November 2007

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Hyperpolitics (American Style)

Part One: Hyperconnected We have been human beings for perhaps sixty thousand years. In all that time, our genome, the twenty-five thousand genes and three billion base pairs which comprise the source code for Homo Sapiens Sapiens has hardly changed. For at least three thousand generations, weve had big brains to think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence. Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent and conservative. This posed a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, long known as the sapient paradox: if we had the kit for it, why did civilization take so long to arise? Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew (more formally, Baron Renfrew of Kamisthorn) recently proposed an answer. We may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it. We had to pass through symbolization, investing the outer world with inner meaning (in the process, creating some great art), before we could begin to develop the highly symbolic processes of cities, culture, law, and government. About ten thousand years ago, the hidden interiority of humanity, passed down through myths and teachings and dreamings, built up a cultural reservoir of social capacity which overtopped the dam of the conservative patterns of humanity. We booted up (as it were) into a culture now so familiar we rarely take notice of it. In Guns, Germs and Steel, evolutionary biologist and geographer Jared Diamond presented a model which elegantly explains how various peoples crossed the gap into civilization. Cultures located along similar climatic regions on the planets surface could and did share innovations, most significantly along the broad swath of land from the Yangtze to the Rhine. This sharing accelerated the development of each of the populations connected together through the material flow of plants and animals and the immaterial flow of ideas and symbols. Where sharing had been a local and generational project
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for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet. Cities emerged in Anatolia, Palestine and the Fertile Crescent, and civilization spread out, over the next five hundred generations, to cover all of Eurasia. Civilization proved another conservative force in human culture; despite the huge increases in population, the social order of Jericho looks little different from those of Imperial Rome or the Qin Dynasty or Medieval France. But when Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable type, he led the way to another and even broader form of cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe published their insights, sharing their own expertise, producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial Age. The conservative empires fell, replaced by demos, the people: the cogs and wheels of a new system of the world which allowed for massive cities, massive markets, mass media, massive growth in human knowledge, and a new type of radicalism, known as Liberalism, which asserted the freedom of capital, labor, and people. That Liberalism, after two hundred and fifty years of ascendancy, has become the conservative order of culture, and faces its own existential threat, the result of another innovation in sharing. In May 2009, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed humanity halfway there. Half the population of the planet had become mobile telephone subscribers. In a decades time wed gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile. It took nearly a decade to get to the first billion, four years to the second, eighteen months to the third, and sometime during 2011 over five billion of us will be connected. Mobile handsets will soon be in the hands of everyone except the billion and a half extremely poor; microfinance organizations like Bangladeshs Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that even this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why?

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Mobiles may be the most potent tool yet invented for the elimination of poverty. To those of us in the developed word this seems a questionable assertion. For us, mobiles are mainly social accelerants: no one is ever late anymore, just delayed. But, for entire populations who have never had access to instantaneous global communication, the mobile unleashes the innate, inherent and inalienable capabilities of sociability. Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead. Until recently, wed seen little to correlate mobiles with human economic development. But, here again, we see the gap between raw hardware capabilities and their expression in cultural software. Handing someone a mobile is not the end of the story, but the beginning. Nor is this purely a phenomenon of the developing world, or of the poor. We had the Web for almost a decade before we really started to work it toward its potential. Wikis were invented in 1995, marking it as an early web technology; the idea of Wikipedia took another six years. Even SMS, the true carrier tone of the human network, had been dismissed by the telecommunications giants as uninteresting, a sideshow. Last year we sent forty three billion text messages. We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the hyperconnectivity engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty. This is coming as a bit of a shock.

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Part Two: Hypermimesis I have two nephews, Alexander and Andrew, born in 2001, and 2002. Alexander watched his mother mousing around on her laptop, and from about 18 months reached out to play with the mouse, imitating her actions. By age three Alex had a fair degree of control over the mouse; his younger brother watched him at play, and copied his actions. Soon, both wrestled for control of a mouse that both had mastered. Children are experts in mimesis learning by imitation. Its been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to ape behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers. Our peers now number three and a half billion. Whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces hypermimesis, the unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously. Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now hyperdistribute themselves via the human network. We all learn from each other with every text we send, and each new insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization. We still do not know much about this nascent cultural form, even as its pieces pop out of the ether all around us. We know that it is fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. We know that it does not allow for the neat proprieties of privacy and secrecy and ownership which define the fundamental ground of Liberal civilization. We
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know that, even as it grows, it encounters conservative forces intent on moderating its impact. Yet every assault, every tariff, every law designed to constrain this Human Network has failed. The Chinese, who gave it fair go, have conceded the failure of their Great Firewall, relying now on self-censorship, situating the policeman within the mind of the dissident netizen. Record companies and movie studios try to block distribution channels they can not control and can not tariff; every attempt to control distribution only results in an ever-more-pervasive and ever-moredifficult to detect Darknet. A band of reporters and bloggers (some of whom are in this room today) took down the Attorney General of the United States, despite the best attempts of Washingtons political machinery to obfuscate then overload the processes of transparency and oversight. Each of these singular examples would have been literally unthinkable a decade ago, but today they are the facts on the ground, unmistakable signs of the potency of this new cultural order. It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a postmodern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to find the others, for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the human network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule. This shows up, at its most complete, in Wikipedia, which (warts and all) represents the first attempt to survey and capture the knowledge of the entire human race, rather than only its scientific and academic elites. A project of the mob, for the mob, and by the mob, Wikipedia is the mob rule of factual knowledge. Its phenomenal success demonstrates beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside out: the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes. These newly disproportionate

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returns on the investment in altruism now trump the virtue of selfishness. Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both. Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other media outlets have shown that the encyclopedia anyone can edit is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of hyperconnected peers, the Wikipedians. This premise is borne out by the unpleasant fact that article submissions to Wikipedia are being rejected at an everincreasing rate. Wikipedias growth has slowed, and may someday grind to a halt, not because it has somehow encompassed the totality of human knowledge, but because it is the front line of a new kind of warfare, a battle both semantic and civilizational. In this battle, we can see the tracings of hyperpolitics, the politics of era of hyperconnectivity. To outsiders like myself, who critique their increasingly draconian behavior, Wikipedians have a simple response: We are holding the line against chaos. Wikipedians honestly believe that, in keeping Wikipedia from such effluvia as endless articles on anime characters, or biographies of living persons deemed insufficiently notable, they keep their resource pure. This is an essentially conservative impulse, as befits the temperament of a community of individuals who are, at heart, librarians and archivists. The mechanisms through which this purity is maintained, however, are hardly conservative. Hyperconnected, the Wikipedians create sock puppet personae to argue their points on discussion pages, using back-channel, non-transparent communications with other Wikipedians to amass the support (both numerically and rhetorically) to enforce their dictates. Those who attempt to counter the fixed opinion of any network of Wikipedians encounter a buzzsaw of defiance, and, almost invariably, withdraw in defeat. Now that this Great Game has been exposed, hypermimesis comes into play. The next time an individual or community gets knocked back, they have an option: they can choose to go nuclear on Wikipedia, using the tools of hyperconnectivity to generate such a
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storm of protest, from so many angles of attack, that the Wikipedians find themselves overwhelmed, backed into the buzz-saw of their own creation. This will probably engender even more conservative reaction from the Wikipedians, until, in fairly short order, the most vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our species becomes entirely fossilized. Or, just possibly, Wikipedians will bow to the inevitable, embrace the chaos, and find a way to make it work. That choice, writ large, is the same that confronts us in every aspect of our lives. The entire human social sphere faces the increasing pressures of hyperconnectivity, which arrive hand-in-hand with an increasing empowerment (hyperempowerment) by means of hypermimesis. All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw. Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Part Three: No Governor On my way to deliver this address, as I waited at San Francisco International Airport for a flight to Bostons Logan Airport, I used my mobile to snap some photos of the status board (cheerfully informing me of my delayed departure), which I immediately uploaded to Flickr. As I waited at the gate, I engaged in a playful banter with two women dun certain age, that clever sort of casual conversation one has with fellow travelers. After we boarded the flight, one of the women approached me. I just wanted you to know, that other woman, she works for the Treasury Department. And you were making her nervous when you took those photos. Now heres the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my journey with my many friends, both in Australia and America, who
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track my comings and goings on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Sharing makes the unpleasant endurable. In that moment of confrontation, I found myself thrust into a realization that had been building over the last four years: sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder shes nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence. We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds economic, academic, cultural will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different. Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, dont believe a word of it. Its whistling past the graveyard. Its clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isnt a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the Republic. For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election. Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused before responding, as if hed never given the question any thought, before answering, I dont know. I dont believe anyones thought that far ahead. There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what hed like to
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see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the Kings horses and all the Kings men. And yes, thats scary. Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes war of all against all. A hyperconnected polity whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war. Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces. We will learn that even though we can push the button, were far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of thousands of little conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and rebooting them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him. Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed
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individuals to change the world. Mead spoke truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively translate the force of our commitment and passion into power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours. And now, the worlds going to move for all of us. June 2008

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All Together Now

Sometime in the last two weeks I stopped believing in government. I dont mean that Ive lost faith in representative democracy; this feels a more like the moment when, after reading through the jolly old elfs entry in the World Book encyclopedia, a precocious six-year-old stopped believing in Santa Claus. A subtle shift, a rearrangement of neurons, moved government from real to mythical. This made watching Insiders a very odd affair as if all the pollies and commentators were discussing Australian Football League Round 14 results, every one of them just enjoying the play. All of this against a very real backdrop: a hundred-year drought; the death of the Murray-Darling river system; TAPIS at US$150/bbl; and oh yeah the Garnaut Report on Climate Change. The pollies offered up their opinions, from Danger Will Robinson! (Shadow Deputy PM Julie Bishop), to Under Advisement (Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong), to Its hard (Prime Minister Kevin Rudd), all of them dancing around a topic so fraught, so laden with the possibility of turning the electorate decisively against them, they seem to be hoping this is some sort of nightmare from which theyll soon awake. My advice: ignore the lot of them. They dont matter anymore, and its unclear they ever did. This is a problem so big that it actually transcends government. The distillation of popular will into representative democracy somehow loses an ingredient vital to the mass action needed to confront the magnitude of the change required. Government has allowed us to hand-wave this problem away. Well wait for the government to do something about it, we say, and continue driving and powering and watering our way into climatic apocalypse. But the government isnt going to do something about it. The Prime Minister, in his ever-more-frequent schoolmarm pose, will purse his lips and tut-tut us into better behavior, but the government can not act quickly enough, or comprehensively enough, to dig us out of this carbon-lined ditch. Colonized by massive industrial and economic forces intent on fettering the transition to a low-carbon lifestyle, the
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government falls back on platitudes, treaties, and unproven technologies. Let me repeat: ignore the government. They are not leading us. Fortunately, theyre so busy avoiding action theyve left the space wide open for us to act. We are equally fortunate to live in a time when collective action has suddenly become easier than any time in history. Where governments once had monopoly control over the mass action of mass numbers of people, we can use our many-and-multiplying communications technologies to achieve the same end. We can conspire in the sharing of knowledge to create Wikipedia; pool onthe-ground observations to create crowdsourced reviews of hotels, or restaurants, or university professors; gather together in great numbers to buy and sell things; or simply share our expertise with anyone who might benefit from it. All these commonplace events of 2008 were almost impossibly difficult just a few years ago. All of them (and more) will be needed to confront climate change. An example will help to explain what I mean. Lets say that I want to have my electricity generated via a 100% renewable resource sunlight. Solar thermal electric generation costs in the range of 15 cents per kilowatt-hour (and coming down) when provided by a company like AUSRA (which, two years ago, moved headquarters from Sydney to Silicon Valley because of the profound indifference of the Commonwealth and New South Wales governments). A promising young entrepreneur offers to build a plant, using AUSRA technology, to provide enough electricity to power 5,000 homes, if he can get guaranteed multi-year purchase contracts from 5000 buyers. (Like a mobile contract, but for electricity.) With these contracts in hand, he can secure the financing from a big investment bank or VC fund to build the plant, plug into the grid, and provide that clean green power. All of this can be managed using nothing more than a website and the goodwill of citizens who want to do something anything to slow down global warming. Whats more, these customers, flush with their clean, green power, connect to one another, using the website to trade their best tips for cutting energy usage. Since solar power is generated during the daytime, the normal restrictions about running energy-intensive appliances during the day would be abandoned. Theyd use an
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electric space heater, not gas, and an electric water heater, set to heat the tank during the day, letting it cool during the evenings. They will have fancy energy-monitors installed in their households paying for them in installments, along with their electric bill optimizing their usage around the availability of power. They will form a buyers cooperative (like a private eBay) to negotiate wholesale prices on LED lighting (highly efficient), or plug-in hybrid cars (available in 2010), or almost anything else that helps their investment go further. In very short order, 5000 Australian households will cut their carbon emissions dramatically, and guarantee themselves a stable, consistently priced source of energy something that no fossil fuelbased electricity generator can promise. And all of this without any intervention from any governmental authority. None of this is rocket science; its economics and technology working hand-in-hand with the power of the human network our incredible ability to share the best of ourselves with one another amplified by our hyperconnectivity. Once its proven to work well, such an idea will spread like wildfire as the fossil-fueled generators struggle to get into the game, spending their own resources to build solar thermal, geothermal and wind generation systems (wind is even more economic than solar thermal), and, in perhaps a decades time, the nation will have abandoned its carbon-intensive economy for one which looks almost exactly the same to the consumer, but which runs almost entirely on renewable resources. At no point would the government be involved in this transformation. No tax credits are required, nor massive and pointless investments in carbon capture and sequestration research although the clean electricity generators could easily earn extra revenue from a carbon trading scheme. It all happens because we want it to happen and because government is actually meaningless in driving this change. But we have to want it. We have to be willing to raise our hands to pay the few extra dollars a month in the short term to secure a stable future for ourselves, our children, and our nation. My hand is raised. Im ready. How about you? July 2008
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Network Politics
In 2008, the net entered politics. The rise and eventual election of Barack Hussein Obama as 44th President of the United States proved that point beyond any question. During the endless and hard-fought primary race between Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaigns consistent advantage lay in its ability to reach out to millions of individuals for fundraising, for neighborhood canvassing, to show up in unprecedented numbers at campaign rallies. This connection to the netroots grassroots political activists who work primarily through online media, such as blogs, instant messaging, Twitter and the like gave Obama an unshakeable advantage from the earliest days of the Iowa caucuses through to the general election in November. As an American citizen I was proud to donate USD $75 to Obamas campaign over the last year, one of the many millions of citizens who contributed an average of $80 apiece. When I donated, I was signed up to the campaigns email list. For many months, almost every day there was a new piece of email, from Obama, from his wife Michelle, or campaign director David Plouffe. During the campaign, the vast majority of these emails asked me to part with more cash. But now, with the campaign won, and Obama just twenty days away from taking the oath of office, the emails continue to arrive. Whats going on here? Isnt Obama done with us at least until 2012? The ringing theme of Obamas campaign wasnt Hope, or Change, but Yes, we can, a message that got taken up with such hunger that it permuted into many different forms, such as the video by Will. I. Am., which received tens of millions of views on YouTube. If Obama remains true to this commitment, he will turn to the American people for their input, for their help, for their encouragement, not just when the chips are down, but consistently throughout the next four years. This is why the emails keep landing in my inbox. Obama doesnt need my cash. He needs my network. Although the network entered politics in 2008, 2009 is when politics will enter the network. As Obama and his designates enter the halls of power in January, as they open up their offices, and establish
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connections to the outside world, they will be connecting to the network. By this I do not mean some well-designed websites promoting an agencys profile and capabilities, but a re-definition of that agencys relationship to the public. Political discourse has been a one-way street, from governing to governed, since the emergence of democratic institutions a few hundred years ago. The ballot box only occasionally afforded feedback from the governed to the governing. Now that feedback is continuous and instantaneous. Example as I sit writing this little essay, the following message has come through on Twitter, the social messaging service that allows individuals to share 140-character thoughts with vast numbers of friends: A SERIOUS PLEA TO YOU: Join us in asking Obama to appoint a Spec Prosecutor for torture on Change.gov (deadline!) A provided link takes you to a page on the website for The NATION, an American left-of-center publication, which further links you to pages on Change.gov, the website established by Obamas presidential transition team. Change.gov is the beginning of what network politics will look like in 2009, a site where individuals can make comments, suggestions, criticisms and recommend policy directions. The dialog which will frame Obamas presidency has already begun on Change.gov, a dialog that will transition seamlessly to the corridors of power. Will it all work? Can we hope to have anything like a coherent government when millions of voices all clamor to be heard? This has ever been the argument against direct democracy it simply doesnt scale. Hence we have representative democracies, with individuals standing in for tens of thousands (in Australia), or hundreds of thousands (in the United States). We concentrate power in the hands of the few because spreading that power around would result in chaos. Or so we believe. One of the big things well learn in 2009 is how well power can be redistributed via the network. Obama is asking for suggestions, but soon enough hell be looking for individuals to watch his back as he goes to war against recalcitrant (that is, Republican) senators. And if his army of supporters are successful, theyll be more likely to put
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that power to work directly for themselves. This is the promise and the peril of network politics: by empowering the network you risk creating an empowered public which can use its own power against you. Its a daring strategy, and by the end of next year well have some idea how well it has worked. Closer to home, the Australian Government has poked a hornets nest with its own proposal to mandate ISP-level filtering of Internet content. This proposal got a lot of people upset, and, unsurprisingly, many of these people are well-versed in the use of the network and in network politics. Thus far, that community has outpaced the Government in its ability to get its message out to the broader public. Most people arent yet tuned into the debate. As they do, the first messages they hear will likely be from opponents of the filter, because theyve effectively used the network to state their opposition. The Government is trying to keep up Senator Conroy has a blog, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (or rather, a proxy for the Prime Minister) began to use Twitter a few months ago. But none of these efforts have been anything other than spin and PR, using the net as another publishing medium to get the message out there. Things dont work that way anymore: 2008 was proof of that. In 2009 we all get to learn just how much power lies in a network of activist, empowered citizens. I imagine there are some major surprises in store both positive and negative as the old institutions of power collide with a newly empowered networked citizenry. January 2009

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Sharing Power
Introduction: War is Over (if you want it) Over the last year we have lived through a profound and perhaps epochal shift in the distribution of power. A year ago all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook users to turn out on election day. Today we bear witness to a green revolution, coordinated via Twitter, and participate as the Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the unpleasant little secrets buried in the MPs expenses scandal secrets which the British government has done everything in its power to withhold. Weve turned a corner. Were on the downward slope. It was a long, hard slog to the top a point we obviously reached on 4 November 2008 but now the journey is all about acceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the past. The configuration of power has changed: its distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble with circumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand with a loss of control. At a certain point our entire global culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will go airborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the roadbed of civilization behind, we can spin the steering wheel all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its own rationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force will meet force. Force is already meeting force. What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what happens in the guts of CERNs Large Hadron Collider. Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can learn a lot if were clever enough to watch these collisions as they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision will recognizably be governments or quasigovernmental organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before we glory, JG Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash, we should remember that these institutions are, first and foremost, the domain of people, individuals ill-prepared for whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is wearing a safety belt,

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even as things slip noticeably beyond control. Someones going to get hurt. That much is already clear. What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political science for the 21st century. We need to understand the autopoietic (selforganizing) formation of polities, which has been so accelerated and amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity. We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence. We need to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into action, and how this action spreads and replicates itself through hypermimesis. We have the words or some of them but we lack even an informal understanding of the ways and means. As long as this remains the case, we are subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor control. We can end the war between ourselves and our times. But first we must watch carefully. The collisions are mounting, and they have already revealed much. We have enough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new territory.

Part One: The First Casualty of War May 2009 saw one of those interesting and unexpected collisions. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia created by and for the people, decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would hereafter be banned from the capability to edit Wikipedia. This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the equivalent the Supreme Court in the Wikipediaverse. It seems that for some period of time probably stretching into years there have been any number of edit wars (where edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the Church of Scientology and certain of the personages in the Church. These pages have been subject to fierce edit wars between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics of the Church on the other, and, in the middle, Wikipedians, who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking, above all, to preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the encyclopedia aspires to
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in every article. When this became impossible when the Church of Scientology and its members refused to leave things alone a consensus gradually formed within the tangled adhocracy of Wikipedia, finalized in last months ruling from the Arbitration Committee. For at least six months, several Church of Scientology members are banned by name, and all Church computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia. That would seem to be that. But its not. The Church of Scientology has been diligent in ensuring that the mainstream media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstream medium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology which are unflattering to the Church. Theres no reason to believe that things will simply rest as they are now, that everyone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for six months, like children given a time-out. Indeed, the Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quickly issued a press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking, Whats next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing? How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come will be driven by the structure and nature of these two wildly different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and control flows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not in charge of Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a social contract between the parties participating in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you participate, the more power youll have. Power is distributed laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia has some ultimate authority. What happens when these two organizations, so fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique. But Wikipedia has thus far proven immune to lawsuits. Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia, running its servers and paying for its bandwidth, that is not
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Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the machines, it is not the bandwidth, it is not even the full database of articles. Wikipedia is a social agreement. It is an agreement to share what we know, for the greater good of all. How does the Church of Scientology control that? This is the question that confronts every hierarchical organization when it collides with an adhocracy. Adhocracies present no control surfaces; they are at once both entirely transparent and completely smooth. This could all get much worse. The Church of Scientology could declare war on Wikipedia. A general in such a conflict might work to poison the social contract which powers Wikipedia, sewing mistrust, discontent and the presumption of malice within a community that thrives on trust, consensus-building and adherence to a common vision. Striking at the root of the social contract which is the whole of Wikipedia could possibly disrupt its internal networks and dissipate the human energy which drives the project. Were we on the other side of the conflict, running a defensive strategy, we would seek to reinforce Wikipedias natural strength the social agreement. The stronger the social agreement, the less effective any organized attack will be. A strong social agreement implies a depth of social resources which can be deployed to prevent or rapidly ameliorate damage. Although this conflict between the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia may never explode into a full-blown conflict, at some point in the future, some other organization or institution will collide with Wikipedia, and battle lines will be drawn. The whole of this quarter of the 21st century looks like an accelerating series of run-ins between hierarchical organizations and adhocracies. What happens when the hierarchies find that their usual tools of war are entirely mismatched to their opponent?

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Part Two: War is Hell Even the collision between friendly parties, when thus mismatched, can be devastating. Rasmus Klies Nielsen, a PhD student in Columbias Communications program, wrote an interesting study in which he looked at communication overload, which he identifies as a persistent feature of online activism. Nielsen specifically studied the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign in New York, and learned that some of the best-practices of the Obama campaign failed utterly when they encountered an energized and empowered public. The Obama campaign encouraged voters to communicate through its website, both with one another and with the campaigns New York staff. Although New York had been written off by the campaign (Hilary Clinton was sure to win her home state), the state still housed many very strong and vocal Obama supporters (apocryphally, all from Manhattans Upper West Side). These supporters flooded into the Obama campaign website for New York, drowning out the campaign itself. As election day loomed, campaign staffers retreated to older communication techniques that is, mobile phones while Obamas supporters continued the conversation through the website. A complete disconnection between campaign and supporters occurred, even though the parties had the same goals. Political campaigns may be chaotic, but they are also very hierarchically structured. There is an orderly flow of power from top (candidate) to bottom (voter). Each has an assigned role. When that structure is short-circuited and replaced by an adhocracy, the instrumentality of the hierarchy overloads. We havent yet seen the hybrid beast which can function hierarchically yet interaction with an adhocracy. At this point when the two touch, the hierarchy simply shorts out. Another example from the Obama general election campaign illustrates this tendency for hierarchies to short out when interacting with friendly adhocracies. Project Houdini was touted as a vast, distributed GOTV program which would allow tens of thousands of field workers to keep track of who had voted and who hadnt. Project Houdini was among the most ambitious of the online efforts
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of the Obama campaign, and was thoroughly tested in the days leading up to the general election. But, once election day came, Project Houdini went down almost immediately under the volley of information coming in from every quadrant of the nation, from fieldworkers thoroughly empowered to gather and report GOTV data to the campaign. A patchwork backup plan allowed the campaign to tame the torrent of data, channeling it through field offices. But the great vision of the Obama campaign, to empower the individuals with the capability to gather and report GOTV data, came crashing down, because the system simply couldnt handle the crush of the empowered field workers. Both of these collisions happened in friendly fire situations, where everyones eyes were set on achieving the same goal. But these two systems of organization are so foreign to one another that we still havent seen any successful attempt to span the chasm that separates them. Instead, we see collisions and failures. The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf. While some may wish to turn the clock back to an earlier time when campaigns respected carefully-wrought hierarchies, the electorates of the 21st century, empowered in their own right, have already come to expect that their candidates campaigns will meet them in that empowerment. The next decade is going to be completely hellish for politicians and campaign workers of every party as new rules and systems are worked out. There are no successful examples yet. But circumstances are about to force a search for solutions.

Part Three: War is Peace As governments release the vast amounts of data held and generated by them, communities of interest are rising up to work with that data. As these communities become more knowledgeable, more intelligent hyperintelligent via this exposure, this hyperintelligence will translate into action: hyperempowerment. This is all well and good so long as the aims of the state are the same as the aims of the community. A community of hyperempowered citizens can achieve lofty goals in partnership with the state. But even here, the hyperempowered community faces a mismatch with the mechanisms of the state. The adhocracy by which the community thrives has no
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easy way to match its own mechanisms with those of the state. Even with the best intentions, every time the two touch there is the risk of catastrophic collapse. The failures of Project Houdini will be repeated, and this might lead some to argue that the opening up itself was a mistake. In fact, these catastrophes are the first sign of success. Connection is being made. In order to avoid catastrophe, the state and any institution which attempts to treat with a hyperintelligence must radically reform its own mechanisms of communication. Top-down hierarchies which order power precisely can not share power with hyperintelligence. The hierarchy must open itself to a more chaotic and fundamentally less structured relationship with the hyperintelligence it has helped to foster. This is the crux of the problem, asking the leopard to change its spots. Only in transformation can hierarchy find its way into a successful relationship with hyperintelligence. But can any hierarchy change without losing its essence? Can the state or any institution become more flexible, fluid and dynamic while maintaining its essential qualities? And this is the good case, the happy outcome, where everyone is pulling in the same direction. What happens when aims differ, when some hyperintelligence for some reason decides that it is antithetical to the interests of an institution or a state? Weve seen the beginnings of this in the weird, slow war between the Church of Scientology and ANONYMOUS, a shadowy organization which coordinates its operations through a wiki. In recent weeks ANONYMOUS has also taken on the Basidj paramilitaries in Iran, and Chinas internet censors. ANONYMOUS pools its information, builds hyperintelligence, and translates that hyperintelligence into hyperempowerment. Of course, they dont use these words. ANONYMOUS is simply a creature of its times, born in an era of hyperconnectivity. It might be more profitable to ask what happens when some group, working the data supplied at Recovery.gov or Data.gov or you-nameit.gov, learns of something that theyre opposed to, then goes to work blocking the governments activities. In some sense, this is good oldfashioned activism, but it is amplified by the technologies now at hand. That amplification could be seen as a threat by the state; such
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activism could even be labeled terrorism. Even when this activism is well-intentioned, the mismatch and collision between the power of the state and any hyperempowered polities means that such mistakes will be very easy to make. We will need to engage in a close examination of the intersection between the state and the various hyperempowered actors which rising up over next few years. Fortunately, the Obama administration, in its drive to make government data more transparent and more accessible (and thereby more likely to generate hyperintelligence around it) has provided the perfect laboratory to watch these hyperintelligences as they emerge and spread their wings. Although communications PhD candidates undoubtedly will be watching and taking notes, public policy-makers should also closely observe everything that happens. Since the rules of the game are changing, observation is the first most necessary step toward a rational future. Examining the pushback caused by these newly emerging communities will give us our first workable snapshot of a political science for the 21st century. The 21st century will continue to see the emergence of powerful and hyperempowered communities. Sometimes these will challenge hierarchical organizations, such as with Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology; sometimes they will work with hierarchical organizations, as with Project Houdini; and sometimes it will be very hard to tell what the intended outcomes are. In each case the hierarchy be it a state or an institution will have to adapt itself into a new power role, a new sharing of power. In the past, like paired with like: states shared power with states, institutions with institutions, hierarchies with hierarchies. We are leaving this comfortable and familiar time behind, headed into a world where actors of every shape and description find themselves sufficiently hyperempowered to challenge any hierarchy. Even when they seek to work with a state or institution, they present challenges. Peace is war. In either direction, the same paradox confronts us: power must surrender power, or be overwhelmed by it. Sharing power is not an ideal of some utopian future; its the ground truth of our hyperconnected world. June 2009

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Down the Rabbit Hole

As we all know by now, the Internet is a strange place. Because it is possible even easy for the like-minded to find one another, weve seen the emergence of some very weird groups. They find each other quite naturally, because theyre drawn to similar things. For instance, the website/bulletin board 4chan.org (parts of which are very, very NSFW) has played host to some of the odder types on the Internet for the past six years. They hang out, post images, and try to gross out one another other with ahem some of the mysteries of medicine, human anatomy and sexuality. 4chan appeals to the naughty adolescent in all of us. As suits a venue of such known infamy, individuals dont use their real names when making their posts and sharing the goods. They create handles to hide behind, fake names that give them a degree of anonymity when online. Some individuals simply post as anonymous at all times, never even bothering to create a handle. Anonymity is an important feature of the Internet; without it, whistle-blowers would never be able to expose wrong-doers. On the other hand, anonymity also snaps the social bond that keeps bad behavior in check. Its very difficult to be rude to someone you know, yet almost impossibly easy to be anonymously rude. Online anonymity is atomic; you are alone in it. Even if the fellow sitting next to you in your caf, typing madly away into his computer, is on the same bulletin board, anonymously plugging away, youd never know. Both of you are in your own private worlds. At least, thats the way it used to be. At some point around three years ago during the great upwelling of the Web2.0 revolution one of these anonymous individuals had a penny-drop moment: on the Internet people could be anonymous en masse. A group of individuals selfidentified as anonymous could band together in their anonymity around some common goal. This basic insight gave birth to ANONYMOUS. What is ANONYMOUS? Its difficult to say with any precision. At its core, it is an agreement between anonymous net-connected individuals to pursue aligned interests. There is no formal
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organization, and what coordination an anonymous organization needs can be handled through the same bulletin boards and websites where these individuals regularly congregate. The lines of communication are already open thats why ANONYMOUS exists in the first place. ANONYMOUS has been described as a flock of birds. Just as birds can flock together, fly away, peel off and form a new flock, the same is true for those who call themselves ANONYMOUS. Although all of this sounds rather vague and tentative, ANONYMOUS has a footprint in the real world. ANONYMOUS is most well-known for Project Chanology (from 4chan), a longterm effort to see Scientology discredited as a religion and expelled from the Internet. Since early 2008, ANONYMOUS has staged both physical and Internet-based protests and disruptions of Scientology activities throughout the world. Some of these protests have involved denial of service attacks, where Scientologys computers are hammered with enough Internet traffic to effectively knock them off the network. Other protests are of the more familiar, physical variety: members of ANONYMOUS regularly congregate in noisy gatherings outside Scientologys Surry Hills-based headquarters. When ANONYMOUS appears in public, its members wear Guy Fawkes masks (as seen in the motion picture V For Vendetta), so not even its own membership is ever aware of who is protesting. Anonymity is always preserved. Which brings us to last week. ANONYMOUS takes a very dim view of net censorship this being the original spark that set off their jihad against Scientology while our government, and, in particular, Senator Conroy, seem intent on providing Australians with a clean feed, whether they might want it or not. This angered ANONYMOUS, and in a manifesto published on 9/9/9, they threatened retaliation unless the Government repudiated its net filtering policy and Senator Conroy resigned. Needless to say, neither happened, so, in a well-documented string of events, a group of individuals engaged in denial of service attacks on the websites of both the Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Both attacks were possibly briefly and modestly successful, making headlines in the Australian
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media, and catapulting ANONYMOUS to a visibility that theyd not previously enjoyed. But was it ANONYMOUS? Heres where it gets strange. AnonSA, the South Australian branch of ANONYMOUS which runs a very professional-looking website at anonsa.org have unequivocally distanced themselves from any illegal actions done by anyone calling themselves ANONYMOUS. So, ok, it might have been ANONYMOUS, but it wasnt the South Australian ANONYMOUS. And, since anyone can freely call themselves ANONYMOUS, well, who knows, really, whos doing what? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the rabbit hole. Were all the way down in it. Everything we think we might know turns out to be much less than we believe. ANONYMOUS, because it is an organization based in anonymity, has no effective center of control to keep elements from going rogue and causing all sorts of grief in the name of ANONYMOUS. If thats what happened. In Australia, ANONYMOUS will always be tarred with the attack on the PMs website whether or not they were responsible for it. For all we know, one of the many enemies of ANONYMOUS could have pulled the stunt in order to discredit ANONYMOUS, the classic mark of an agent provocateur. So was this the work of some overheated script kiddies, or something more sinister? We dont know, and we may never know. Australias Defense Signals Directorate are looking into the affair, but with the funhouse mirrors all reflecting the face of Guy Fawkes, even their abilities are somewhat limited. What we do know is this: it is possible and ever easier for individuals to band together in common purpose while maintaining their anonymity. What they choose to do with that power will shape the 21st century. Weve had a small taste, but theres much more to come. September 2009

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That Sinking Feeling

Reading a recent lengthy and detailed Sydney Morning Herald article detailing the latest charges against Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, I can only nod my head knowingly. This was always going to be the way things worked out. From the time last year when we all became aware of Assange, I felt a twinge of fear, an inner voice saying Something isnt right here. It took me a few weeks to articulate that feeling into a real, grounded rationale for my dread. Long ago, before I moved to Australia, before Id done any of the work that Im known for within the technology community, I had some peripheral contact with the hacker world. (In this usage, hacker means folks who break into computers, not the folks who stay up all night programming them in weird and wonderful ways.) One of the things I learned very early on was a simple rule of thumb to separate the accomplished from the n00bs and fools: only a n00b would brag about their exploits. Only a n00b would tell others that hed broken the law. Those who do crimes keep silent about their darker doings. Those who wannabe, theyre loud about it. When Assange suddenly became the public face for the increasingly fascinating Wikileaks, it confused me on several levels. First, why does Wikileaks need a public face? Its a dropbox service that promises anonymity to whistleblowers across the world. That kind of service is best kept low-profile, very nearly invisible except to those who might want to avail themselves of the service. If you need it, youll know where to find it. Second, why would Assange or anyone, for that matter consent to being the public face of Wikileaks? Wikileaks has worked hard to anger some of the most powerful institutions on the planet. In no particular order: the US Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Department of State, MI5 and ASIO. These are organizations with institutional memory and global reach. If you vex them, they have it within their capacity to make things very difficult for you. Possibly terminally so.
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If this all sounds very much like a John LaCarre novel, thats because were dealing with the stuff of Cold War thrillers: spies, secrets, dropboxes, whistleblowers and the great mass of ignorance which is the body politic. Information is power, and Wikileaks pricks a big hole in the plans of the powerful. So again, why would anyone willingly associate themselves with Wikileaks? Isnt that the equivalent of painting a great big target yourself? Finally, what does this public exposure say about the long-term security and stability of Wikileaks? An invisible organization presents no surface that can be attacked, or compromised, or tortured into submission. An organization that has resolved itself into the body of a single individual has placed an enormous burden on that individual and placed them into substantial danger. Assange knows this, and all of his recent troubles in Sweden are, to his account, disinformation campaigns conducted by organizations seeking to thwart him and Wikileaks. This should have been expected. This is how that particular game is played. Everyone knows the rules. You cant scream and shout when your opponent makes a counter-move on the game board. You wouldnt need to scream and shout if your opponent has no idea who you are. I dont mean to sound naive; these organizations are well-resourced and probably would have gotten to Assange eventually. (Then again, given how long its taken to find Osama Bin Laden, maybe not.) Being visible gives Assange the protection of visibility. If hes taken down publicly, it could look bad. But whether or not Assange remains a free man, Wikileaks has been substantially weakened by his representation. Faceless, pervasive and powerful, Wikileaks might have grown into the mirror image of al-Qaeda, a force which could terrify the rulers while simultaneously becoming folk heroes for the ruled. Instead, all the power of the State is landing on Wikileaks and Assange. Whatever remains of Wikileaks in a years time will only be those components deemed to be unthreatening. Wikileaks will be compromised; that became inevitable as soon as we all got a look at Assange. Hence my dread. As much as we might regret this, it will not bring an end to this new era of whistleblowing, any more than the court-mandated
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dismantling of Napster was the end of peer-to-peer file sharing. Indeed, just a few days after Napster disappeared, a new network, Gnutella, opened for business, and having learned from Napsters mistakes. Where Napster was centralized, Gnutella was distributed. Where Napster was noisy, Gnutella was quiet. Where Napster had a surface that could be sued into oblivion, Gnutella was slippery, and very hard to grasp. Gnutella is still around. Napster has been gone for a decade. Any organization that follows Wikileaks will learn from the mistakes made by Assange & Co. It will be invisible unless sought for, as pervasive as necessity requires, and much more impervious to attacks that attempt to corrupt its essential functions and integrity. Will it be perfect? No. This is a cat-and-mouse game, a process where both the forces of State control and the forces which seek to thwart the control of the State are both evolving, both learning from one another. Within a few years, well be drowning in information from whistleblowers. The State will try to swamp these new channels with meaningless or useless information in order to render them unusable. With so much, how can any of us know the truth, or know what truths are significant? This presents the most interesting opening for a 21st-century journalism: investigative reporters will be those who have dedicated themselves to winnowing the wheat of truth from the chaff of noise, in order to share it with the rest of us. At the end, were precisely where we started; the State tries to keep things hidden, while a few brave souls work hard to shine a little light into the dark places. The means will have changed, but the aims remain the same. August 2010

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The Blueprint
With every day, with every passing hour, the power of the state mobilizes against Wikileaks and Julian Assange, its titular leader. The inner processes of statecraft have never been so completely exposed as they have been in the last week. The nation state has been revealed as some sort of long-running and unintentionally comic soap opera. She doesnt like him; he doesnt like them; they dont like any of us! Oh, and shes been scouting around for DNA samples and your credit card number. You know, just in case. None of it is very pretty, all of it is embarrassing, and the embarrassment extends well beyond the state actors who are, after all, paid to lie and dissemble, this being one of the primary functions of any government to the complicit and compliant news media, think tanks and all the other camp followers deeply invested in the preservation of the status quo. Formerly quiet seas are now roiling, while everyone with any authority everywhere is doing everything they can to close the gaps in the smooth functioning of power. They want all of this to disappear and be forgotten. For things to be as if Wikileaks never was. Meanwhile, the diplomatic cables slowly dribble out, a feed that makes last years MP expenses scandal in the UK seem like amateur theatre, an unpracticed warm-up before the main event. Even the Afghan and Iraq war logs, released by Wikileaks earlier this year, didnt hold this kind of fascination. Nor did they attract this kind of upset. Every politican everywhere from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Vladimir Putin to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has felt compelled to express their strong and almost visceral anger. But to what? Only some diplomatic gossip. Has Earth become a sort of amplified Facebook, where an in-crowd of Heathers, horrified, suddenly finds its bitchy secrets posted on a public forum? Is that what weve been reduced to? Or is that what weve been like all along? That could be the source of the anger. We now know that power politics and statecraft reduce to a few pithy lines referring to how much Berlusconi sleeps in the company of

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nubile young women and speculations about whether Medvedev really enjoys wearing the Robin costume. Its this triviality which has angered those in power. The mythology of power that leaders are somehow more substantial, their concerns more elevated and lofty than us mere mortals, who must not question their motives that mythology has been definitively busted. This is the final terminus of aristocracy; a process that began on 14 July 1789 came to a conclusive end on 28 November 2010. The new aristocracies of democracy have been smashed, trundled off to the guillotine of the Internet, and beheaded. Of course, the state isnt going to take its own destruction lying down. Nothing is ever that simple. And so, over the last week weve been able to watch the systematic dismantling of Wikileaks. First came the condemnation, then, hot on the heels of the shouts of off with his head! for traitor Julian Assange, came the technical attacks, each one designed to amputate one part of the body of the organization. First up, that old favorite, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves harnessing tens of thousands of hacked PCs (perhaps yours, or your moms, or your daughters) to broadcast tens of millions of faux requests for information to Wikileaks computers. This did manage to bring Wikileaks to its knees (surprising for an organization believed to be rather paranoid about security), so Wikileaks moved to a backup server, purchasing computing resources from Amazon, which runs a cloud of hundreds of thousands of computers available for rent. Amazon, paranoid about customer reliability, easily fended off the DDoS attacks, but came under another kind of pressure. US Senator Joe Lieberman told Amazon to cut Wikileaks off, and within a few hours Amazon had suddenly realized that Wikileaks violated their Terms of Service, kicking them off Amazons systems. You know what Terms of Service are? They are the too-long agreements you always accept and click through on a website, or when you install some software, etc. In the fine print of that agreement any service provider will always be able to find some
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reason, somewhere, for terminating the service, charging you a fee, or well, pretty much whatever they like. Its the legal cudgel that companies use to have their way with you. Do you reckon that every other Amazon customer complies with its Terms of Service? If you do, I have a bridge you might be interested in. At that point, Assange & Co. could have moved the server anywhere willing to host them and Switzerland had offered. But the company that hosts Wikileaks DNS record everyDNS.com suddenly realized that Wikileaks was in violation of its terms of service, and it too, cut Wikileaks off. This was a more serious blow. DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the magic that translates a domain name like markpesce.com or nytimes.com into a number that represents a particular computer on the Internet. Without someone handling that translation, no one could find wikileaks.org. You would be able to type the name into your web browser, but thats as far as youd get. So Wikileaks.org went down, but Wikileaks.ch (the Swiss version) came online moments later, and now there are hundreds of other sites which are all mirroring the content on the original Wikileaks site. Its a little bit harder to find Wikileaks now but not terrifically difficult. Score one for Assange, who if the news media are to be believed is just about to be taken into custody by the UK police, serving a Swedish arrest warrant. Finally, just a few hours ago, the masterstroke. Wikileaks is financed by contributions made by individuals and organizations. (Disclosure: Im almost certain I donated $50 to Wikileaks in 2008.) These contributions have been handled (principally) by the now-ubiquitous PayPal, the financial services arm of Internet auction giant eBay. Once again, the fine folks at PayPal had a look at their Terms of Service (stop me if youve heard this one before) and oh, look! those bad awful folks at Wikileaks are in violation of our terms! Lets cut them off from their money! Wikileaks has undoubtedly received a lot of contributions over the last few days. As PayPal never turns funds over immediately, theres an implication that PayPal is holding onto a considerable sum of Wikileaks donations, while that shutdown makes it much more
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difficult to to pass the hat and collect additional funds to keep the operation running. Checkmate. A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assanges actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And its awesome. You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isnt perfect. How could it be? Its untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made the state with all its powers it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor. Weve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the darknet for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella. In exactly the same way note for note the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. Were learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.

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This failure comes with a high cost. Its likely that the Americans will eventually get their hands on Assange a compliant Australian government has already made it clear that it will do nothing to thwart or even slow that request and hell be charged with espionage, likely convicted, and sent to a US Federal Prison for many, many years. Assange gets to be the scapegoat, the pinup boy for a new kind of anarchism. But what hes done can not be undone; this tear in the body politic will never truly heal. Everything is different now. Everything feels more authentic. We can choose to embrace this authenticity, and use it to construct a new system of relations, one which does not rely on secrets and lies. A week ago that would have sounded utopian, now its just facing facts. Im hopeful. For the first time in my life I see the possibility for change on a scale beyond the personal. Assange has brought out the radical hiding inside me, the one always afraid to show his face. I think Im not alone. December 2010

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Hyperdemocracy
For the past three hundred years, the relationship between the press and the state has been straightforward: the press tries to publish, the state uses its various mechanisms to thwart those efforts. This has produced a cat-and-mouse steady-state, a balance where selection pressures kept the press tamed and the state in many circumstances somewhat accountable to the governed. There are, as always, exceptions. In the last few months, the press has become hyperconnected, using that hyperconnectivity to pierce the veil of secrecy which surrounds the state; using the means available to it to hyperdistribute those secrets. The press has become hyperempowered, an actor unlike anything ever experienced before. Wikileaks is the press, but not the press as we have known it. This is the press of the 21st century, the press that comes after were all connected. Suddenly, all of the friendliest computers have become the deadliest weapons, and we are fenced in, encircled by threats which are also opportunities. This threat is two sided, Janus-faced. The state finds its ability to maintain the smooth functioning of power short-circuited by the exposure of its secrets. That is a fundamental, existential threat. In the same moment, the press recognizes that its ability to act has been constrained at every point: servers get shut down, domain names fail to resolve, bank accounts freeze. These are the new selection pressures on both sides, a sudden quickening of cultures two-step. And, of course, it does not end there. The state has now realized the full cost of digitization, the price of bits. Just as the recording industry learned a decade ago, it will now have to function within an ecology which like it or not has an absolutely fluid quality. Information flow is corrosive to institutions, whether thats a record label or a state ministry. To function in a hyperconnected world, states must hyperconnect, but every point of
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connection becomes a gap through which the states power leaks away. Meanwhile, the press has come up against the ugly reality of its own vulnerability. It finds itself situated within an entirely commercial ecology, all the way down to the wires used to carry its signals. If theres anything the last week has taught us, its that the ability of the press to act must never be contingent upon the power of the state, or any organization dependent upon the good graces of the state. Both sides are trapped, each with a knife to the others throat. Is there a way to back down from this DEFCON 1-like threat level? The new press can not be wished out of existence. Even if the Internet disappeared tomorrow, what we have already learned about how to communicate with one another will never be forgotten. Its that shared social learning this hypermimesis which presents the continued existential threat to the state. The state is now furiously trying to develop a response in kind, with a growing awareness that any response which extends its own connectivity must necessarily drain it of power. There is already a movement underway within the state to shut down the holes, close the gaps, and carry on as before. But to the degree the state disconnects, it drifts away from synchronization with the real. The only tenable possibility is a forward escape, an embrace of that which seems destined to destroy it. This new form of state power hyperdemocracy will be diffuse, decentralized, and ubiquitous: darknet as a model for governance. In the interregnum, the press must reinvent its technological base as comprehensively as Gutenberg or Berners-Lee. Just as the legal strangulation of Napster laid the groundwork for Gnutella, every point of failure revealed in the state attack against Wikileaks creates a blueprint for the press which can succeed where Wikileaks failed. We need networks that lie outside of and perhaps even in opposition to commercial interest, beyond the reach of the state. We need resilient Internet services which can not be arbitrarily revoked. We need a transaction system that is invisible, instantaneous and convertible upon demand. Our freedom requires it.
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Some will argue that these represent the perfect toolkit for terrorism, for lawlessness and anarchy. Some are willing to sacrifice liberty for security, ending with neither. Although nostalgic and tempting, this argument will not hold against the tenor of these times. These systems will be invented and hyperdistributed even if the state attempts to enforce a tighter grip over its networks. Julian Assange, the most famous man in the world, has become the poster boy, the Che for a networked generation. Script kiddies everywhere now have a role model. Like it or not, they will create these systems, they will share what theyve learned, they will build the apparatus that makes the state as we have known it increasingly ineffectual and irrelevant. Nothing can be done about that. This has already happened. We face a choice. This is the fork, in both the old and new senses of the word. The culture we grew up with has suddenly shown its age, its incapacity, its inflexibility. Thats scary, because there is nothing yet to replace it. That job is left to us. We can see what has broken, and how it should be fixed. We can build new systems of human relations which depend not on secrecy but on connectivity. We can share knowledge to develop the blueprint for our hyperconnected, hyperempowered future. A week ago such an act would have been bootless utopianism. Now its just facing facts. December 2010

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Power vs. People (Now look what YOU made me do!)

* In the beginning, there is only Power. The Power With a Thousand Faces: pharaoh, padishah, emperor, king, Lord Protector, Generalissimo, El Presidente. There is only the exercise of power, pure, uninterrupted, with no gaps in its smooth functioning. We have but to think the word and it is so. We are in a world apart, protected by G*d, by ritual, by blades, by dumb muscle. Nothing enters save by Our permission, and then only when stripped naked, bound, kowtowing. This is the perfect relation of archetypal power, complete and completely asymmetric. While We have him tortured, our leading economist relates a report, recently received, which ties the wealth of nations to their connectivity. The people need no one else, but as he tells me with his dying breath, We need the money. He spoke the truth; We need the instruments of Power to reinforce Our reality, and these do not come cheaply. Our remaining advisers, chastened and respectful, suggest beginning with television - the better to project Our Power into the homes of Our people - and an auction - to Our most loyal friends - of radio spectrum suitable for mobile communications. Our eyes, downcast, unable to look upon the Power except in its perfect portraits, had never seen the frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command that cameras captured, passions read and revealed: a heart that mocked us, and a hand always raised in reproach, as if we, ungrateful children, needed the admonition of the rod. This plain as nakedness, so that all the smooth words of newscasters, commentators, spokespeople and ministers could not remove the stain from Power. Each of us came to this alone, thought ourselves alone in our treason, quickly burying it beneath other, safer thoughts. Hidden truths undermine us in our humour, moments of lse majest, at first whispered giggles, hidden behind our hands, then scribbled graffiti above the pissoir, statements so shocking they made us gasp, laugh, grin, and then, after that, we knew them as truth. Other lines, more foul, funny, shocking and true,
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joined them, a vast fabric of written rebellion, without form or point, expressing everything we had always known. On the day the first text message arrives, with a murderous joke, that could get us killed, we delete it immediately though not before we forward it along to a few of our friends, who gasp, and erase and send it along. The secret suddenly become common knowledge. ** Those who mock Us seek to destroy Us. Endlessly vigilant, those loyal to Us scrub treasonous filth from walls and streets. If any appear disappointed, these, secured and interrogated, become Our entry points into a nest of radicals, revolutionaries, and anarchists. These We watch closely, tapping their mobiles, looking to who they contact, building a graph from these connections, one which outlines the dimensions of their treason. Our friends who own the telcos willingly hand over the files which spell out comings and goings of these traitors, and one night we take them, whole, to summary judgement. Treason troubles us no more. They came in the night, roused us from sleep, and took him away. We never saw him again. Without a body, how could we mourn? Without a body, how could we bury our grief? Yet we could not speak of it, lest we ourselves disappear. Someone - we know not whom - set up a memorial on Facebook, inviting those who knew him to share themselves. We stayed away, but were told that one, then two, then five, ten, fifteen, fifty, hundreds and finally uncountable thousands came to share, those who knew him, and those who only knew what he believed in. We were afraid, but also content. Those who love traitors are traitors themselves. We have no love for them, but We are thankful for their foolishness. Posting to Facebook reveals them to Us, and everyone they know. Traitors hang together. Treason breeds treason. So We friend, and listen, and drawn another map of another nest until the picture, finely detailed, demands action. Another night of gathering, judgement and cleansing. This ends that. There are not even whispers against Us. Internet dating - has there been a greater invention? Men and women who would not normally find one another can seek each other out in the privacy of their own homes. Here, this one is pretty. Such lovely green eyes. And what a
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lovely green jacket. And beautiful fingers, held up in such an attractive pose, count them: one, two, three, four. And the photo, taken in the Capitol Square? How interesting. Ill tell all my friends that I have a date, a Green Date, in Capitol Square, on the 4th. Yes. Ill tell them all. Theyll want a date as well. *** Inconceivable! They gather in My capitol, in My square, in their tens of thousands, to make demands. Impudence! They should thank the heavens for their homes and daily bread. Ingratitude! And by what witchcraft did they come together? We have tapped the phones, shut down the websites, and still they come, in their hundreds of thousands. Some advise it must all be unplugged, and once, but others tell Us that we too have grown dependent on the network. If We flip the switch, We blind Ourselves, drag Our banks and Our friends into darkness with us. But the storm must be stopped, the plug pulled. It didnt surprise us when the network failed: we half expected it, half surprised it took so long. We found ourselves thrown back into another time: before instantly, before everywhere, before all-at-once. But lessons learned lingered, taking different form: graffiti on street corners, posters on walls, chalk laid out on the sidewalk so anyone could add their own voice, so we could to move together in unity. This grew into a code: bare letters and numbers in text messages and street signs, which told us where and when. And still they keep coming, in their hundreds of thousands. How? Without eyes to see and ears to hear, how do they know? Our friends grow concerned, see Us sinking beneath this rising storm, but We see the root of Our troubles, and will pull it out. This all began when We foolishly permitted our people to connect. That must now stop, to preserve Us all. Against the wishes of My friends - who might lose their fortunes that We might maintain control - We order the mobile networks shut down, and wait for the inevitable collapse, as those against Us lose contact. It took a few moments to realize that these handheld lifelines had become useless lumps of silicon and plastic. It seemed like silence, even in the midst of the crowd. Then someone said, Here, take this, and gave me something that
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brought my mobile back to life, allowed it to connect with everyone else in the crowd and the world beyond. In lieu of thanks I was asked to pass it along, and did, so it spread like wildfire. We could see around the tanks, around the police, around everything, and move faster, move everywhere, move NOW. The guards join with us as we storm the palace. **** We The People, in order to form a more perfect union, choose from amongst ourselves those fit to represent our franchise. The elections, free, fair and hard-fought, divide, inevitably, along a spectrum from left to right. But whatever our position, no one argues the need to work together, reframing power as governance, making a mystery of the obvious, and placing it beyond reproach. Power - however dressed - draws those who lust for power, who benefit from the application of power, and this, too obvious, would ruin everything, igniting another Revolution. In secrecy and silence, safety. You can only be told No! so many times before the blood begins to boil and overflows into action. Theyll let us march in the streets now, but leave us impotent at the seats of government, with protests of process and decorum. How can we be polite as our future is stolen away? This shell of democracy - perfect in form but crowded with corruption - needs to be pierced, so the rot beneath the skin can be exposed and excised. Thankfully, someone with conscience - sick to death with the stench of power - comes forward with evidence enough to condemn everyone, bringing them down. Madness! How can anything be stable when everything is exposed? How can we guide the nation into prosperity with saboteurs underfoot? Incredible. The government will go on, will nail down roof nearly shorn off by these revelations, and will ensure that those who work for the government remain true to it: by oath and affirmation, by surveillance and monitoring, by force of law and pain of imprisonment. Only when guaranteed privacy can we work to preserve the continued security of the nation. Its in these moments our democracy proves itself supple enough to meet the challenges of our times. We can all congratulate ourselves on a crisis successfully overcome.
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The threw him in jail - of course - claiming espionage, charging treason, crying for his head. The message was clear, and silence descended, a curtain protecting them from us. Behind it, they grow deaf and arrogant: they manufacture a managed dissent, bringing their full power down upon on anything else. Still, a friend showed me something: a magic box. Anything placed into that box finds finds its way to editors and reporters and bloggers and radicals, no questions asked, in perfect anonymity. That invitation to share will prove irresistible. The wall protecting them from us is coming down. ***** If secrets they want, secrets they shall have, by the hundreds of thousands, a rising sea of silences broken, signifying nothing. All of the effluvia and trivia of state, dressed up as meaning, each item seeming significant, demanding more attention than even a planet of monkeys, constantly clicking through web pages, could possibly hope to digest. Let them chew on that as the government draws these mischief-makers closer, tantalizing them with the shadows of conspiracies, just beyond the horizons of reason, yet close enough to make them overreach into folly. As it collapses in a ruin of accusations and mistrust, the government steps in, brings order to the chaos, and carries on as before. Do I know you? How do I know you? Who knows you that I know? We have two choices before us: closely bound, connected at a thousand points of past and presence; or atomized, connected, and ANONYMOUS. On one hand, the tribe; on the other, legion. The tribe is loyal, safe and steadfast, the legion strong, but mercurial and diffident. We can subvert from within, or pervert from without. In the right circumstances, we might even do both at once. We might not always get our way, but we can resist, redirect, repurpose, and sometimes win. Success is our greatest threat; nothing works twice. Credentials, please. Access granted. You are now logged into the government. You will need to re-authorize your credentials every fifteen minutes to prevent unauthorized access. Todays status report: sixty-five percent of systems are functioning normally; twenty percent are undergoing integrity checks, ten percent are under persistent attack, and five percent are compromised. As a security
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measure your access has been temporarily restricted. Please confine your activities to the indicated systems. WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection. All system access has been restricted until further notice. Thank you and have a nice day! I ask for a password. It comes along a few hours later, buried in the back-end bits of a cute little image of a wet kitten. Thats a start, enough to log in. But what then, as the network watches my every move, measuring me against the real person behind this account? How should I behave? I whisper. Just above the throbbing of dubstep scoring this videogame, my fellow players feed me replies which could be actions within the gameworld - or something else entirely. I make my moves, as advised, and when I see WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection, I know I have won. May 2011

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