DOUGALD HINE

Tag: technology

  • How Can We Be Bored When We Have Google?

    On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could ever get off to. Until a few years ago, it was unthinkable, this cornucopia of information. Those of us who were already more or less adults when it arrived wonder at how different it must be to be young now. ‘How can any kid be bored when they have Google?’ I remember hearing someone ask.

    The question came back to me recently when I read about a 23-year-old British woman sent to prison for sending rape threats to a feminist campaigner over Twitter. Her explanation for her actions was that she was ‘off her face’ and ‘bored’. It was an ugly case, but not an isolated one. Internet trolling has started to receive scholarly attention – in such places as the Journal of Politeness Research and its counterpart, the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict – and ‘boredom’ is a frequently cited motive for such behaviour.

    It is not only among the antisocial creatures who lurk under the bridges of the internet that boredom persists. We might no longer have the excuse of a lack of stimulation, but the vocabulary of tedium is not passing into history: the experience remains familiar to most of us. This leads to a question that goes deep into internet culture and the assumptions with which our infinity machines are packaged: exactly what is it that we are looking for?

    ‘Information wants to be free’ declared Stewart Brand, 30 years ago now. Cut loose from its original context, this phrase became one of the defining slogans of internet politics. With idealism and dedication, the partisans of the network seek to liberate information from governments and corporations, who of course have their own ideas about the opportunities its collection and control might afford. Yet the anthropomorphism of Brand’s rallying cry points to a stronger conviction that runs through much of this politics: that information is itself a liberating force.

    This conviction gets its charge, I suspect, from the role that these technologies played as a refuge for the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. Brand himself embodies the line that connects the two: showing up to meet Ken Kesey out of jail in the opening of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) – ‘a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead… an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it’ – then creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, or, as Steve Jobs would later call it, ‘Google in paperback form’.

    Before there was a web for search engines to index, Brand had co-founded the WELL (the ‘Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’), a bulletin board launched from the Whole Earth offices in 1985. Its members pushed through the limitations of the available technology to discover something resembling a virtual community. At the core of this group were veterans of the Farm, one of the few hippie communes to outlast the early years of idealism and chaos; in the WELL, these and other paisley-shirted pioneers shared their experiences with the people who would go on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and Wired magazine in 1993.

    This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.

    The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.

    The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.

    A writer friend was asked to join a pub quiz team in the village where he has lived for more than half a century. ‘You know lots of things, Alan,’ said the neighbour who invited him. The neighbour had a point: Alan is the most alarmingly knowledgeable person I know. Still, he declined politely, and was bemused for days. There can be a certain point-scoring pleasure in demonstrating the stockpile of facts one has accumulated, but it is in every other sense a pointless kind of knowledge.

    This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.

    There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed. In most human societies, there have been specialists in this skill, yet it can never be the monopoly of experts, for it is also a very basic, deeply human activity, essential to our survival. If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.

    It is only fair to note that the internet is not altogether to blame for this, and that the rise of boredom itself goes back to an earlier technological revolution. The word was invented around the same time as the spinning jenny. As the philosophers Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani put it in their essay ‘The Delicate Monster’ (2009):

    Boredom is not an inherent quality of the human condition, but rather it has a history, which began around the 18th century and embraced the whole Western world, and which presents an evolution from the 18th to the 21st century.

    For all its boons, the industrial era itself brought about an endemic boredom peculiar to the division of labour, the distancing of production from consumption, and the rationalisation of working activity to maximise output.

    My point is not that we should return to some romanticised preindustrial past: I mean only to draw attention to contradictions that still shape our post-industrial present. The physical violence of the 19th-century factory might be gone, at least in the countries where industrialisation began, but the alienation inherent in these ways of organising work remains.

    When the internet arrived, it seemed to promise a liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives. In fact, at its best, it is something else: a remarkable helper in the search for meaningful connections. But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.

    The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it. As any survivor of the 1960s counterculture could tell us, it is best to treat magic substances with respect – and to be careful about the dosage.

    Published on AEON.

  • Commoning in the City

    Commoning in the City

    In the architecture museum on the island of Skeppsholmen, in the heart of Stockholm, eleven of us have been brought together to spend two days thinking aloud around the theme of Commoning the City. The human rights researcher Saki Bailey provides a forensic analysis of the foundations of property law. The artist Fritz Haeg tells us what happened when he opened his home in Los Angeles to the public as a space for collective learning and collaboration. Alda Sigurðardóttir leads us through a version of the visioning process that was used by the national assembly of citizens, following the economic and political collapse in Iceland. Meanwhile, Fredrik Åslund — the founder of a Swedish think-tank, the name of which translates as Create Commons — has the best t-shirt slogan of the event: ‘Home-cooking is killing the restaurant industry.’

    I am the night watchman on this team, sent in to replace the Swiss author, P.M., the man responsible for the anarchist utopia bolo’bolo, who has had to pull out for family reasons. Taking his place in the open conference that is the centrepiece of the two days, I realise that this is the first time I have spoken in public on the subject of the commons. For most of the others, this is a term that has been at the heart of their work for years or decades. Meanwhile, this event itself is evidence of the new importance that it is taking on: ‘commons’ is becoming a charged word, following a path similar to those taken by words such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’, raised as a banner under which an increasing variety of people and organisations wish to place themselves.

    At such moments, there can be mixed feelings for those who have a long history with the word in question: there is room for a sense of vindication, but also concern at the new meanings, or new vaguenesses, that accrete to a word as it comes into vogue. As a relative outsider, it is interesting to observe people coming to terms with this, and certain questions arise: not least, why is this happening now?

    Of everything I hear during these two days, the answer that most impresses me comes from Stavros Stavrides: ‘commons’ has become useful, he argues, because of a change in attitude to the state, a disillusionment with the ‘public’ and a need for another term to takes its place. The public sphere, public values, the public sector: all of these things might once have promised some counterweight to the destructive force of the market, but this no longer seems to be the case.

    We are not witnessing a turn towards anarchism, exactly, but something more pragmatic: a shift in the general mood, reflecting the reality of people’s experience after five years of this unending crisis, itself coming after decades of neoliberalism. It is the attitude that underlies the Squares Movement, from Tahrir to Syntagma, the Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. If those camping out in cities across three continents were reluctant to distill their discontent into a set of demands on government, this was not simply a utopian refusal to engage with the compromises of political reality; it was also a conviction that to put hope in government is now the most utopian position of all. This is also the attitude that has driven the rise of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, and it has all the uncomfortable ambiguities such an example suggests.

    Into this vacuum, the commons enters as an alternative to both public and private. I find myself wanting to push this further, to suggest that it indicates a significant historical rupture, in at least two senses: a breaking of the frame of politics as a tug of war between the forces of state and market; and the failure of the project of the public, the promise of liberal modernity to construct a neutral space in which we could meet each other as individuals with certain universal rights. This latter point is particularly uncomfortable, we discover during our conversations in Stockholm, since many of our ideas of social justice are founded on that framework. Yet if it is true that the rise of the commons reflects the failure of the public, it is not clear that we can simply expect to borrow its assumptions.

    A politics that has abandoned the public might justly be called a post-modern politics. We have already seen the cynical form of such a politics in the hands of Bush, Blair and Berlusconi: the reliance on controlling the narrative, the disdain for ‘the reality-based community’. Against this, the appeal to older public values looks sadly nostalgic. (Think of Aaron Sorkin’s latest series for HBO, The Newsroom: its opening titles, a montage of a nobler age of American journalism, the series itself offers a kind of liberal wish-fulfilment, while Obama presides over drone wars and assassination lists.) The attraction of the commons, then, may be that it promises the emergence of a non-cynical form of post-modern politics.

    If the commons was to hand as a reference point for such a politics, this was to no small extent the result of the emergence of new modes of collaboration, facilitated by — but not limited to — the internet. A great deal of excitement, some of it well-founded and some of it hype, has centred on the disruption to our forms of property and modes of production being brought by the ways in which people are using networked technologies. It hardly helps that attempts to articulate the genuine possibilities of these technologies are inevitably entangled with the interests of venture capital firms and huge corporations, a libertarian ideology, and a California-inflected mythology about the evolution of human consciousness.

    Apart from anything else, these entanglements obscure the extent to which the most appealing aspects of the internet are often as old as the hills: many of the modes of community and collaboration that have come into being around these technologies are recapitulations of earlier social themes, marginalised by the structure and scale of industrial mass societies.

    One of the defining characteristics of such societies has been the marginalisation of human sociability: domestic space becomes a private sanctum, strangers no longer speak to one another in the street, while there is a compulsion to choose the more profitable and efficient mode of any productive activity over forms whose inefficiencies might allow more room for sociability and meaning within the activity itself. Describing the organisation of activity within cities, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified the phenomenon of the ‘third place’: neither the home nor the workplace, but the convivial meeting point — whether pub, cafe or hair salon — whose importance to the life of a local community is out of proportion to the amount of time we get to spend there. Where Oldenburg views this as an eternal feature of human societies, we might recognise the third place as a kind of native reservation: an enclave in which our indigenous sociability exists under license, while the rest of the social landscape is subject to the demand for efficiency.

    Against this, it is striking that the online spaces that inspire greatest attachment seem to be those which have something in common with the campfire, the bazaar, or indeed the commons, and that such pre-industrial social forms have been a recurring reference point within internet culture. These spaces exceed the boundaries of the third place, both in the range of activity taking place within them and the amount of time which many devote to them. Even the structure of the internet itself resembles not so much the ‘information superhighway’ envisaged by politicians in the 1990s as the proliferating web of trade routes that centred on the Silk Road. (The historical analogy is also implicit in the argument made by the information activist Smári McCarthy, that the radical possibilities of these technologies are under threat from ‘the industrialisation of the internet.’)

    There are deep ambiguities here: technologically, the internet represents an intensification of many of the dynamics of the industrial era; yet in the new social spaces that have accompanied it, people have had powerful experiences of what it means to come together, work and build communities under conditions other than those that dominate the real-world communities and workplaces we have inherited from industrial society.

    Whatever else, these ambiguities imply the political nature of such spaces: the new forms of collaboration easily turn into new forms of exploitation — the line between crowdsourcing and unpaid labour is poorly marked — and hence our conversations in Stockholm also touch on the need for new forms of collective organisation.

    The historical commons might suggest another element within the resistance to exploitation and the formation of a new politics. As Ivan Illich and Anthony McCann have argued, historically, the commons was not simply a pool of resources to be managed, but an alternative to seeing the world as made of resources. Specifically, the commons was not something to be exploited for the production of commodities, but something that people could draw on within customary limits to provide for their own subsistence.

    During the generations of enclosure and industrialisation, the meaning of the term ‘subsistence’ was turned upside down: a word which, in its origin, referred to the ability to ‘stand firm’ came to signify weakness instead of strength. In the language of economics, ‘subsistence’ now stands for the barest and most miserable form of human existence. The irony is that this inversion took place just as the means of subsistence were being taken away from the greater part of the population, not least through the enclosure of common lands to which they had previously enjoyed claims of usage.

    To reclaim subsistence as a condition of strength, especially when compared to total dependence on wage labour, is not to confuse it with the fantasy of self-sufficiency that has a particular grip on the American imagination. When Illich speaks of ‘the commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded’, he is describing a fabric of social relations, a patchwork of customary law. ‘It was unwritten law,’ he says, ‘not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’ This is not the radical independence of self-sufficiency, but a kind of mutual dependence that is held together by human relationships, rather than only by the forces of the market.

    Reclaiming the concept of ‘subsistence’ — the ability to stand firm, to meet many of our own needs, without being wholly at the mercy of the market or the state — may be an important piece in the jigsaw of a 21st century politics. If the Pirate Party marks one end of the new politics of the commons, perhaps the other end looks something like the Landless Peasant Party.

    How do we handle it, when words that have mattered to us gather a new momentum and get raised as banners? Of course, I hope that good things will flourish in the name of the commons in the years ahead. At the same time, the experience of many who have worked for the goal of ‘sustainability’ suggests how disorientating such a journey can become. Subsistence is hardly the only example of a word that has come to mean the opposite of what it once did.

    That words fail us is not a mistake, it is in the nature of language. In the plenary session that brings our time on Skeppsholmen to a close, I find myself quoting that passage from Illich about ‘a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’ If what matters most is the part that is hardest to write down, then the challenge is to stay faithful to this: to tack towards the unwritten, rather than setting a straight course towards an approximation. Ultimately, all our language is provisional, an endless reaching towards what we are trying to say.

    Such statements sound close to those made by the kind of theorists of postmodernism whose students often fall into cynicism. Yet the provisional nature of language need not be a source of despair: it can be sufficient to our situation. The trick is to hold our words lightly, to be willing to let them go, for no word needs to be sacred. And as I write this, four weeks after those conversations in Stockholm, it occurs to me that perhaps I am just stumbling towards what P.M. himself would have said to us, had he been able to make the trip from Switzerland.

    Here he is, in an interview from 2004, explaining what led him to the invention of bolo’bolo:

    ‘The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics — retirement cuts — and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as “solidarity,” “community,” they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them.’

    Published as the cover story of STIR: Issue 2.

  • A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise

  • In the Future, Everyone Will Be Powerful for 15 Minutes

    Published in Despatches From the Invisible Revolution (PediaPress). 

    1.

    Rioters smash the windows of banks, the drum beats towards war with Iran, protests fuelled by social media take over the streets of another capital city. As 2011 reached its endgame, the cinematic surface of Mike Bartlett’s play, 13, could have been taken from the next day’s headlines. Into its dark, refractive world, where everyone seems to be having the same bad dream, comes an unkempt young man named John, whose friends had given him up for dead. He takes to giving sermons in the park, pulling at the materialist threads of a fraying society. Someone films him and posts it on YouTube, and soon his message is spreading, sparking a movement whose aim is not just to stop the war, but to start… something better.

    If the positive vision of the movement John finds himself leading was left undefined, this gave it a certain symmetry with the Occupy encampment across the river, at the steps of St Paul’s. In each case, the desire for change struggled to find a clear articulation, while cohabiting uneasily with matters of belief. As the play builds towards its conclusion, John meets his antagonist in the form of a polemically atheist and pro-war establishment figure – part Richard Dawkins, part Christopher Hitchens. Then his downfall comes when one of his followers acts on her interpretation of his message, with murderous consequences.

    Bartlett seems to be using theatre as a form of public thinking: not simply to present an argument, but to make the process of thinking public. ‘In the moment of writing,’ he told an interviewer, ‘I genuinely changed what I thought.’

    I wonder if this willingness to rethink out loud, to voice our uncertainties, might be emblematic of a generational shift which leaves the winner-takes-all polemic of Hitchens or Dawkins looking suddenly old-fashioned: an intellectual Maginot Line, built for a kind of war we no longer fight? Among those whose thinking holds my attention, there is a fluidity to the way ideas emerge, flowing in and out of the projects, actions and movements with which we become involved. Careful thinking is valued, but being right is less important than contributing to the unfolding of the conversation, and discovering something you hadn’t seen. This reflects the habit of publishing our conversations in real time, thinking aloud in written form, sharing our ideas in progress through blogs and Twitter exchanges that weave into our face-to-face encounters, and formal publications that crystallise out of the wider conversation.

    The interweaving of social media with the fabric of our lives is reflected in the writing and staging of 13. Its lines are punctuated with the sounds of mobile devices. Even the prime minister monitors developments on her iPad. Yet Bartlett himself is not on Twitter, and perhaps this explains the point at which the play stumbled for me. Among all the resonances of 2011, and the skill with which the production conjured the sensation of ‘continuous partial attention’, what felt out of place was the idea that a movement grown over social networks could be critically dependent on the rise and fall of a single leader. For those of us immersed in the network, a different mode of leadership and power has been emerging, and this was the year when it began to matter on a geopolitical scale.

    2.

    If I felt a twinge of anachronism that night at the National Theatre, the same condition returned more sharply a few days later, when NESTA and The Observerlaunched their hunt for ‘Britain’s New Radicals’ – and this time, my discomfort was intensified because the feature was accompanied by a large photograph of myself and my collaborator, Mitchell Jacobs, and a profile of our work as Space Makers.

    The main article, by NESTA’s Chief Executive, Geoff Mulgan, was awkwardly over the top. He seemed to be arguing that people like us should get the kind of recognition currently given to celebrities. He invoked the names of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, observing that they had received ‘brickbats, not bouquets’, and connected this to society’s churlishness in failing to value ‘the healthily unreasonable change-makers’ within their own lifetime. Never mind that it might be in the nature of things for the genuinely radical to be at odds with the mainstream of their day, or that it might be a little weird for a search for a new generation of radicals to be led by a man who had been Tony Blair’s Director of Policy, or that Space Makers is hardly the most radical thing I have had a hand in. Besides all of this, what struck me was how out of touch it seemed to talk about radical change in 2011 as if it could usefully be represented by turning the spotlight on a handful of individuals.

    The defining feature of the movements which shook the world over the past year was the absence of a Gandhi or an MLK. There were huge numbers of courageous individuals, heroic acts, and voices that at times seemed to speak for a generation, but even the most visible of these looked small in proportion to the events which we were witnessing. In a networked revolution, the charismatic leader is largely obsolete.

    The closest you could find to an exception would be Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: here, at least, was a figurehead the old-school media could recognise, and paint as a villain or a hero. Yet even as the leakage of US Embassy cables continued to work its way through the engine room of global politics, Assange had already ceased to matter. Whatever the eventual outcome of his legal entanglements, the momentum he had been riding has moved elsewhere. The kinds of loose voluntary collaboration which can take on extraordinary agency in a networked environment are equally quick to melt away. This represents a change in the dynamics of power and leadership: within the familiar organisational structures of corporations, trades unions, governments, schools and workplaces, over-sized egos and delusional behaviour might endure for years at the highest levels; in the new collective forms which ride the network, such failures of self-awareness are swiftly fatal. Key members of the WikiLeaks team took their talents and ideals elsewhere; new projects such as OpenLeaks sprang up to pursue its original goals, while the next wave of networked freedom fighters wore their anonymity on their sleeve. Meanwhile, those who stuck with Assange were, for the most part, a cadre of ageing celebrity Marxists who had mistaken him for a Che or Fidel for the information age.

    3.

    While the spectacle of Julian Assange suggests the demise of an obsolete mode of radical leadership, Occupy Wall Street brought another model for handling power into view. In the encampments that sprang up at Zuccotti Park, outside St Paul’s and elsewhere, the focus of activity was the General Assembly: a daily meeting held according to a process of ‘consensus-based decision-making’. For many around the Occupy movement, this process stands for an alternative to the power structures which have presided over deepening economic inequality and the dominance of an amoral, crisis-ridden financial system.

    Since the emergence of Occupy, the most common criticism has been of its refusal to produce a set of demands. For me, this misses the point: the best experiences I have had as a visitor to Occupy camps were of conversations, usually involving curious fellow visitors as well as committed Occupiers. There is a deep social good in the existence of hospitable spaces in the heart of our cities in which these conversations can come about: spaces that are not structured to the requirements of production or consumption, but to the possibility of coming together and talking about the mess the world is in, how we got here, and what we might be able to do next. If there is life in such a conversation, new possibilities for action are likely to emerge from it and be put into practice by groups of people who choose freely to combine their efforts. There is a great difference, though, between the flavour of a living conversation, and that of the consensus-based meeting; and the point at which Occupy feels weakest to me is when I hear people speaking as if such meetings are prefigurative of the world which this movement seeks to bring about. 

    For a first-time participant, the immediately striking feature of a consensus meeting is the hand signals. (Most famously, the ‘twinkles’ of agreement: hands upraised, palms forwards, fingers waggling, in a kind of silent applause.) Beyond these, there is a process whose promise is of an alternative to the drawn swords of parliamentary debate, but also to the closed doors of top-down power, formal or informal. As David Graeber describes it:

    The point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a common course of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the final stage, actually ‘finding consensus’, there are two levels of possible objection: one can ‘stand aside’, which is to say ‘I don’t like this and won’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it’, or ‘block’, which has the effect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group.

    Many people met this process for the first time as they were swept up in the extraordinary wave of networked social movements which rolled around the world in 2011, so it is worth noting that the technique was not born out of the new possibilities of the network. In its current form, it originated in the feminist movement of the 1970s, while among the Quakers, similar practices go back to the 17th century. And these roots prompt a couple of thoughts, for me, about the gap which I have experienced between the promise and the reality of the process. It is not my intention to attack consensus: it represents a desire for a more human, hospitable and inclusive approach to the exercise of power, and I share that desire. However, I do want to question the faith which I see people putting in it, and invite others to engage thoughtfully in such questioning. Because I remain unconvinced that this is truly a living, generative mode for handling the dangers and possibilities of power, adequate to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and capable of leading us towards better ways of living and working together.

    My first thought is that the strength of the consensus process in its original contexts may be closely related to the specific character of those contexts. There is a commitment to discernment amongst Quakers, an attentiveness to oneself and one’s neighbours which grows out of regularly spending time together in silence and is reflected in their formal name: the Religious Society of Friends. One of the great gifts of the feminist movement has been its insistence on the intimate connections between the personal and the political; when taken seriously, this leads to a similar quality of attentiveness to how we feel and how we treat each other. I do not mean to put either Quakerism or feminism on a pedestal, and it is worth revisiting the latter’s influential self-critiques, such as ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’. Still, it seems to me that there is something vital in both examples: when we come together with the courage to take ownership of our feelings and desires – neither to deny them, nor to reduce ourselves to them – this can be the ground for powerfully effective collaboration. Meanwhile, in the absence of such attentiveness, there is a constant likelihood that our attempts to act for a good which is greater than our own self-interest become a covert route to the satisfaction of unmet desires. In this way, our meetings may become a vehicle for those who seek gratification in the sound of their own voice, regardless of their listeners; while our quest for consensus may turn out to have to do with a search for shared identity and a feeling of belonging, regardless of the relevance to any practical work. Under these conditions, an emphasis on the transformative potential of a particular process may be actively unhelpful: according it a sacramental function of incarnating the new world, while the life is draining from the vision that brought us together.

    If the success of consensus depends on conditions which are not described within the process (indeed, which are not capable of being described as a process), my second thought concerns its failures: might these be critical in a new way, within the networked context in which the movements of 2011 took life? This follows from the argument I made in relation to Assange: that certain pathological dynamics of power, which could endure for decades in a world of solid organisations, may be swiftly fatal in a world of fluid networks. If individual leaders who lack self-awareness are likely to find themselves suddenly without followers, collective processes which lack emotional honesty or effectiveness are just as likely to find themselves rapidly losing participants. They may survive as zombie groups, made up of those interested in playing a game which has little to do with their stated reason for existence; but meanwhile, as with Wikileaks, the momentum will move elsewhere and take new forms. Compared to the wild fluidity with which ideas emerge, spread or vanish within the network, there is something anachronistic about a process – however non-hierarchical – in which an entire gathering must always listen to one voice at a time. Perhaps the consensus process will turn out to be as obsolescent as the charismatic leader: cultural forms for handling power in an age when people could be expected to tolerate levels of boredom and self-deception against which we are now more likely to vote with our feet?

    These are strong claims that I am making about how networks may transform the dynamics of power, and I mean to develop them elsewhere. For now, let me just add that I am not heralding some networked Age of Aquarius: rather, in the ways that people are making use of these technologies, I see glimpses of an escape from certain particular deformations in the way that life has been organised in industrial societies. With luck, we may be reinventing customs and practices which resemble some of the better ways in which people have lived together in other times and places, while holding on to some of what we have gained; if so, this will surely happen by accident and improvisation, not design and planning, and against an alarming backdrop of social, economic and ecological upheaval.

    4.

    Future historians may argue over whether the Age of Networked Disruption began when Al Qaeda took centre stage in world events in September 2001, or when WikiLeaks followed it in November 2010. But they will probably agree that 2011 was the year in which its fuller implications made themselves felt. From our nearer vantage point, we now see the extraordinary power of people connected in networks to surprise and disrupt older power structures. What is harder to make out is the nature of the structures through which power may be held and exercised effectively and legitimately in the eyes of a network.

    Yet within the story of Occupy itself, we may find the traces of a new mode of power and leadership, one which corresponds to the experience of those who have been immersed in the social possibilities of networked technologies. For this leaderless movement has nonetheless benefited from moments of leadership from individuals able to hold the respect and imagination of its participants for a time. In the first instance, the idea to Occupy Wall Street did not emerge from a consensus process: it came out of a conversation between two friends and collaborators, Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the editors of Adbusters magazine.[6]Other names recur in accounts of how their idea was taken up and turned into reality by activists in New York. Of course, this partly reflects the media’s desire for an Assange-like figure on which to hang their narratives; yet it also points to the emergence of a humbler form of leadership within environments in which many of the characteristics of industrial-era leadership have been rejected. I suggest that is worth developing a vocabulary for naming and reflecting on these emerging forms of leadership, rather than insisting on a language of leaderlessness which may obscure what is going on.

    As a small contribution towards such a process, let me name two qualities which seem intrinsic to what we might call ‘networked leadership’.

    The first is that it works by invitation, rather than compulsion. Lasn and White float the idea of Occupy Wall Street to the network. They are able to draw on a following built up over more than two decades of producing Adbusters, but this only makes it somewhat easier for their idea to get heard, it does not guarantee that anyone will act on it.

    The second quality is that leadership in such an environment is transient, rather than structural. As the Occupy meme spreads through the network, others take the lead on turning it into reality. Its originators step back and do not claim any special authority or control over the movement – nor could they do so. Their earlier role means their voices will be listened to by many, but no more than that.

    In these moves of invitation and handing-on, there is something close to the way that one takes the lead in a dance or an improvisation. (By contrast, leadership within the kinds of organisation we have known more often resembles a wrestling match or an orchestrated performance.) Power is held lightly and provisionally. Whether such a style of holding power can handle all that history has to throw at it – this is, I guess, a vital question for the years ahead.

    In trying to anticipate the answer, we can look for earlier parallels. The phenomenon of networked leadership in the movements born in 2011 resembles the experience of the Free Software community and of others working with the new social possibilities of the network, and the lessons which they have drawn from it. For example, Gupta’s Law of Network Politics, which states: ‘In a networked environment, the person who knows what to do next is in charge.’ This captures the reality and the limitations of leadership within networks, as well as the advantage the network has over the organisation. ‘Hierarchies using the network experience dissonance at the point where the feed coming off the network proposes a better plan than the feed coming off the hierarchy.’ Knowing what to do next is not simply about inspiration in the moment, any more than the art of improvisation is simply making it up as you go along; in both cases, there is generally a long back story.

    Another parallel to the transformation of leadership comes in the experience of professional musicians who have embraced the network. The solo bass player Steve Lawson writes about the way in which the relationship between performers and their audience is being transformed by two-way interaction through social media, and the possibility that this is leading to ‘the death of global super-stardom’, an industrial-era model that was intrinsically pathological:

    Michael [Jackson] was rightly celebrated for his musical contribution, but his fame and its destructive influence on his life was out of all proportion to that… Fame is the downside to success, and the way it removes the consequences from one’s actions means that people like MJ who desperately needed help to recover from his screwed up childhood-in-the-spotlight never got it.

    The network makes it possible, in Lawson’s terms, for the binary division between ‘idols’ and ‘friends’ to open up into a plurality of possible relationships, with the result that life as a ‘small, mobile, self-contained indie artist’ like himself becomes both more viable and more enjoyable. He writes of the experience of a tour of the United States, playing gigs in the front rooms of people he had met through social media, and the mutually-rewarding encounters to which this led:

    What we had was a shared sense that meeting someone we’d read about, watched on screen and had communicated with was exciting, valuable and something noteworthy. They were, to us, very special people to meet. They could’ve blown it by being proper freaky unpleasant weirdos (as could we) but we were as impressed with them… as we’d hoped to be. And they, in their gratitude and excitement, hosted house concerts, brought their friends and family along to the shows we did, got excited about it, and helped us to take our music to an audience who were happy to become part of that story, and spend some money to be there!

    The music industry first felt the disruptive force of the network in 1999, when its business model was knocked sideways by Napster. There were times in 2011 when it felt like politics was reaching its ‘Napster moment’. Musicians like Lawson have spent over a decade working out what kinds of relationship between performer and audience are possible and desirable in a networked world, and finding ways to make a living on these terms. The parallels between fame and power, performance and leadership, are not exact; still, in their example, there may be clues towards the further evolution of the limited, transient and proliferating forms of leadership which characterise today’s radical movements.

    Whatever else, when Lawson jokes that the new relationship he has found with his audience must be ‘Celebrity 2.0’, he is describing a kind of recognition which is more appropriate to the networked age than the old-fashioned celebrity to which Geoff Mulgan proposes promoting a hand-picked selection of radicals.

    The old and new forms of celebrity coexist uneasily right now, while the waves of the network rise and fall against the continued power of old-style organisations, institutions and governments. None of us can say quite how all this will unfold, but in attempting to narrate its unfinished story – and recognising the power which such narrations may have – perhaps it is possible to offer a lead of sorts; an invitation to certain possibilities present within this moment of deep uncertainty.

  • How I Became a Cyber-Womble

    This is James Wallbank’s story of founding Access Space, based on an interview I did with him for the ‘Steel City’ special issue of PICK ME UP zine, 28 October 2005

    James and his friends wanted to make art with computers. But they didn’t have any money. So they decided to see what they could do with PCs other people were throwing away. Now they run a free “media lab” where anyone can come and learn.

    One day I sent an email to some friends saying, look, I’ve got a great idea for an arts organisation. We’ll only work with technology that costs nothing. We’ll have exhibitions and all sorts of exciting events where we show people the creative things that we do. And that will inspire people to give us more computers.

    A friend of mine, without telling me, rewrote the top of this email to say “You should hear about this great thing that James Wallbank is running in Sheffield…” and forwarded it to all these mailing lists. Within a few days I had emails coming from all over the world saying, “Hey, what you’re doing is absolutely great!”

    There was one in particular, from California. The guy said, “We had an idea like that, for being creative with old computers in Silicon Valley. We tried it and we just couldn’t get it to work. I’m so happy to hear that you’re actually doing that successfully in Sheffield now!”

    And I didn’t have the bottle to say to him, it’s just an idea, I haven’t really got started. So instead, like an idiot, I sent back emails to everyone saying, “Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? People are giving us computers from all over the place and we’re having exhibitions and activities and what have you…”

    After that, I had to make it happen.

    I thought the hard thing would be getting access to technology – but it turned out we could get as many machines as we wanted.  People started writing back saying, I’ve got this friend and his firm are throwing out sixty PCs – do you want them?

    So I went racing round the country collecting computers in a tiny little van that ended up completely knackered. We started making them work and doing exhibitions – and still more computers kept arriving. A year later, we had a warehouse with 2000 old PCs sitting there. We just didn’t know what to do with them all.

    That was when we had the idea for Access Space.

    Anyone can walk in, but it’s not a free cybercafe. We’re asking everyone to get actively involved in developing content, doing things. 

    The one thing we can’t provide is motivation. So we ask everyone to propose to us a project that they really want to do, something they’re excited about.

    The philosophy is simple: share what you know, learn what you don’t. 

    If you get stuck with something, you can ask anyone in the space and they’ll try and help you – the only catch is, when someone asks you for help, you’ve got to give them a few minutes.

    In the future, everyone’s going to need to acquire new skills over and over and over again. How are we going to do this in Britain, in every neighbourhood, for free, forever, in a sustainable way, that isn’t going to cost us all a fortune?

    The answer is to have local, community-based organisations where anyone can walk in and do creative activity that they’re excited by, that helps them to learn skills. I think Access Space is an unbelievably great model for that – because it also solves another question, which is that businesses all over the UK are throwing out computers hand over fist.

    Now should we, at Access Space, go all over the country collecting computers, taking them back to “Access Space Central” and then distributing them to people like you? No, that’s stupid – and it’s also a complete waste of diesel.

    Instead, we should give you the skills to find computers in your local area, revivify them in your local area and make them available to people in your local area. Not only so that people can come to you and learn skills and do exciting creative things – but so that you can learn skills from them.

    www.access-space.org.uk