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Title: The Stigmergic Revolution
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: November 12th, 2011
Language: en
Topics: stigmergy, open source, Occupy
Source: Retrieved on 2018-05-06 from [[https://c4ss.org/content/8914]]

Kevin Carson

The Stigmergic Revolution

It was long believed that the queen played a central role in the complex

social order of an ant colony, through the exercise of direct command

and control over her subjects. Not so. Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse

coined the term “stigmergy” for the anthill’s social organization There

is no central coordination, no hierarchy, no administrative mechanism.

Each ant’s behavior is entirely spontaneous and self-directed, as it

responds independently to the chemical trail markers left by other ants.

Mark Elliot, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the best study on

the subject to date, applied the term “stigmergy” to any form of human

socialization in which coordination is achieved not by social

negotiation or administration or consensus, but entirely by independent

individual action against the background of a common social medium.

That’s essentially the organizational form used by the Linux developer

community, by networked resistance movements like the Zapatista global

support network of the 1990s, and by the post-Seattle anti-globalization

movement. It’s the way Wikipedia and al Qaeda are organized.

Eric Raymond, writing on the open source software community, called it

the “Bazaar” model. Under the Bazaar model, every individual

contribution is modular. Every participant is self-selected, and her

action is based entirely on her independent judgment of what needs to be

done. So all actions are not the result of consensus or majority

consent, but of the unanimous consent of everyone participating. Those

with the highest level of interest in a particular aspect of a problem

and the highest affinity for finding a workable solution contribute to

that part of the project.

In networked movements, any such contribution or innovation in a single

cell will only be adopted by those who find it valuable. Those that are

considered valuable instantly become the property of the entire network,

free for adoption by all. So the self-selected individuals most

interested in solving problems are spontaneously developing innovative

solutions all over the network, and those solutions that work

immediately become available for adoption by each cell deciding only for

itself.

As Cory Doctorow points out, the record companies developed their DRM in

the mistaken belief that it only had to be strong enough to deter the

average user, and that the small number of geeks capable of cracking it

would be economically insignificant. But in fact it takes only one geek

to crack the DRM and post an MP3 on a torrent download site, and it

becomes freely available to average users. In a stigmergic organization,

the intelligence of each becomes the property of all with virtually no

transaction costs.

In contrast to a hierarchically administered organization, in which

proposed innovations must be evaluated and deliberated upon — gestated —

by a central authority over a period of many months, a stigmergic

network goes through generational changes in praxis with the speed of

replicating yeast.

That’s exactly what’s happened with the social movements of the past

year and a half — the arc from Wikileaks’ cable release in Summer 2010

to the latest developments in Occupy Oakland. Bradley Manning, a heroic

soldier morally appalled at the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in

Iraq, allegedly took it upon himself to release hundreds of thousands of

classified diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Wikileaks chose to post them

online.

In the face of attempts to shut down Wikileaks by seizing their domain

name or cutting off funding vectors like PayPal, the stigmergic

innovation mechanism kicked into high gear. Thousands of mirror sites

sprang up all over the world. Thousands more websites and blogs posted

the numeric IP addresses for Wikileaks’ sites. And hackers like The

Pirate Bay’s Rick Falkvinge immediately started thinking about an open

domain name service and open digital payment systems.

The Wikileaks cables included private diplomatic assessments of the

level of corruption in the Tunisian government, which were quickly

circulated by Facebook among the dissident community. Mohamed Bouazizi,

a poor vegetable vendor in Tunisia, set himself on fire in protest after

being slapped in the face by a government official, sparking a

revolution that has toppled several Arab governments and since spread

from London and Amsterdam to Spain to Greece and Israel, to Madison and

Wall Street — and outward again from Wall Street to hundreds of cities

around the world.

Egypt’s attempt to destroy the revolution by shutting down the Internet

spurred projects like ContactCon to a new sense of urgency in developing

a “NextNet,” a global open meshwork that can’t be shut down because the

only routing nodes are the users’ own hardware at the endpoints.

The Occupy movement itself operates stigmergically, with innovations

developed by one node becoming part of the total movement’s common

toolkit. Some Oakland demonstrators made the first experiment in

occupying a vacant office building and encouraging the homeless to squat

vacant and condemned buildings all around the city. They did this in a

clumsy and imprudent way, unfortunately, provoking vicious police

repression.

But the basic idea remains, and someone will soon do it better — because

that’s the way stigmergy works. All across America, there are vacant

office buildings and homes owned by banks, and millions of homeless

people who need a place to sleep. There aren’t enough police and

sheriffs’ deputies in the world to stop them from moving in, if they get

it into their heads to start moving in on their own initiative.

What’s more, the homeless have nothing to lose — if they get kicked out,

they were housed for the period of time while it lasted. And every

single eviction becomes another point of failure for the system, to be

publicized with cell phone videos and streaming Internet coverage. Every

single house becomes the site of another defensive stand, another PR

nightmare for the local “authorities” hauling families out of their

homes before the eyes of the world. Already, the Minneapolis movement

has interposed itself in defense of foreclosed homeowner Monique White.

It’s only a matter of time until local Occupy movements become centers

of innovation, not only in protest tactics, but in new forms of social

organization in the communities where they live. In communities all

across the country, people will realize that they’re neighbors who live

in the same town or city — there’s no reason their cooperation has to be

limited to the park or town square.

Occupy will become not just a protest movement, but a school for living:

Local currency and barter systems for the exchange of skills by the

unemployed, small-scale informal and household production techniques for

unemployed workers who need to provide for as many of their own needs as

possible through self-provisioning, intensive horticultural techniques

like permaculture — the possibilities are endless.

Occupy Wall Street recently became a teach-in, with Michel Bauwens of

the Foundation for P2P Alternatives speaking in Zuccotti Park on

peer-production as a mechanism for creating value, and Juliet Schor

discussing the decentralist and DIY economic ideas in her book

Plenitude. A character in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time said

that the new world, the revolution, wasn’t built by slogans and big

meetings. It was built by people who found new ways of feeding

themselves, new ways of teaching their kids, new ways of relating to

each other.

So all over the world, we’re figuring out ways to live without the land

and capital of the classes who think they own the planet, ways to make

their land and capital useless to them with no one to work it for them.

And they can’t stop us because we have no leaders.

In the words of Neo, in “The Matrix”:

“I know that you’re afraid … you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of

change. … I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I

came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. … I’m going to show these

people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world

without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or

boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

Or more succinctly, as Anonymous puts it: Expect us.