Zach Stevens

Network Anarchism, or Wiki Government Anyone?

In May 1549, Hernando De Soto, a hero of the Spanish conquest of Peru, landed on the tip of Florida with an invasion force of almost a thousand men, twenty-four priests, nine ships, 220 horses, and enough pregnant sows to feed this traveling army.  Four thousand miles and four years of looting, burning, raping, and pillaging and pig eating later, the remnants of this invasion force, having fought their way from Florida to Texas, melted down the last of their iron to make nails, built crude boats, slaughtered the few surviving horses, and floated down the Mississippi in a last ditch attempt to reach the Spanish settlements along the Gulf of Mexico.  Three hundred or so eventually made it back to Mexico City, and told the story of the dead De Soto, and his doomed expedition.  But it was too late.

Even though they slaughtered their horses to prevent them from falling into Indian hands, enough of them were stolen or lost along the route to breed and establish the first populations of wild mustangs in North America.  The technology of the horse was now in native hands.

Over the course of the next three hundred years something extraordinary happened.  The horse allowed tribes from all sides of the Great Plains, from the subsistence hunter-gatherers of the Colorado Basin, to sedentary agriculturalists along the Mississippi, to take to the rolling seas of grass, these American steppes, and forge a life of saddle nomadology.  But the horse wasn’t merely a technology that facilitated a new explosion of culture, custom, and myth.  The horse, and the nomadic lifestyle it enabled, was a method of resistance.  To this day, the most celebrated icons of the Native American stand proud with an eagle headdress, a bow and arrow.  He’s Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo.  He’s the last to fight the whites and win.  But ultimately he got caught, imprisoned, put on a reservation.  Bribed with Cadillacs and casinos.  Because he couldn’t keep moving forever.

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER IS OUR HORSE.

Or rather, the personal computer, the Internet, wireless, satellites, transatlantic cable, cafes with wifi for a cup of coffee...  Laptop Nomads.  Hakim Bey theorized an actual anarchist lifeway in the temporary autonomous zone, a Stateless space that shifts and moves before the hammer of the system can come down on you.  Fiume, Barcelona, Burning Man without cover, a party before the cops come.  Because we’ll be too old to have any fun if we keep waiting for the State to whither away, and the workers are gonna seize the means of production about the same time that mechanization eliminates world hunger.  These places exist now - a squatter apartment in Chicago, Christiana, permaculture communes in Germany, The Farm in Tennessee, the green movement, anti-globalization, critical mass, vegans with firebombs.  Spurts and sputters, but a unifying culture, a global culture, with the will and want to live outside the corporate, nation-state structure.  A unifying culture, but not a unified one.  We have no way of harnessing this energy into an actual, practical lifeway.

ENTER THE NETWORK.   

Over the last five years the Internet has undergone an extraordinary evolution.  No longer is it just a great way to pirate media and watch free porn.  Now it’s being used as an organizational principle.  This principle is manifested in two ways - firstly the indexing of vast amounts of information through the organization of collective intelligence, using decentralized, non-hierarchical structures and electronic efficiency to order and grow vast databases.  Wikipedia is the darling child here, but Youtube and even slashdot are expressions of this new phenomenon, which we’ll call informational organization.  The second manifestation is in social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace, where the increased informational complexity afforded by the Internet isn’t used just to amass databases, but to facilitate interpersonal networking.  Lacking imagination, we’ll call this second manifestation social organization. 

Now combine these tools with our aforementioned laptop nomads.  Suddenly we have an actual community, a global network, linked through electronic social organization.  The members of that permaculture commune in Germany now have profiles for themselves and their little homestead.  So does that dumpster diving freegan with a BA in organic farming who’s been trying to hitchhike through Europe.  Or maybe they need someone to tutor the village children in English, global language of the future.  Maybe he just needs a hot meal.  Now for the first time, they’ll be able to find each other, using the network to fulfill their goals and utilize their collective skills in the most efficient, yet liberating manner.  MonsterTrak for the bureaucratically disinclined.  An Old Boys Club for those with severe cubicle cabin fever. 

It’s not just the possibilities of social networking for a fluid subculture that fascinate me, though this aspect would be the quickest and easiest to implement.  Imagine the long-term effects of placing Wiki-like informational organization in the hands of radicals and layabout dreamers.  Pirate gift economies, where “from each according to his abilities, to each according to her needs” actually works, assuming that our needs become dematerialized and obscure enough, leaning towards Eros, complex tchotchkes and skillsets.  Imagine Ebay as a barter economy with built in affinity networks.  My apartment needs a new toilet seat, and I have nothing to offer save a $160,000 education.  My network friend Larkin needs someone to paint his living room, and has something of actual value - a vast collection of 1960’s James Bond memorabilia.  Somewhere outside of Austin a reclusive plumber/ collector is mailing me that toilet seat as we speak.  Try taxing that!  Sufficient informational complexity effectively makes money obsolete, enabling intricately interlocking barter style exchanges at a micro-level between a dozen or a hundred individuals in the blink of an eye. Suddenly use value is all that matters. Dusty concepts like interest rates just make the children scratch their heads.  Or imagine entire prestige networks where an internal currency of karma points tracks your service sector interactions with other members of the community, who feed or clothe you based only on your reputation, with a concurrent expectation of a serious boost in their own ratings.

Of course, we’d have to keep moving, juggling networks, switching masks.  The cavalry had horses too.  And global decentralized anti-corporate cells of economic revolutionaries would probably get stepped on pretty quick.  But as long as they’re a lumbering bureaucracy, plagued with petty boardroom battles and red tape jealousies, we’d stay a step ahead, because we embody a more fluid, quick-footed organizational model.  As we’ve seen from last summer’s Israeli adventure in Lebanon, or the insurgency in Iraq, a massive but archaically organized force, from privates to generals, can’t handle a decentralized guerilla network, as long as the guerillas have technological equalizers like laptops, cell phones, RPGs and IEDs.  Perhaps in the future the Facebook, or at least what it represents, will be our rocket-propelled grenade.  Wikipedia, our improvised explosive device.