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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]]
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.