[ExI] Edge.org "HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)" by Mark Pesce

[Michael LaTorra]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html#pesce


*HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)
A Talk By Mark Pesce*

*Introduction*

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy
Forum<http://pdf2008.confabb.com/conferences/60420-personal-democracy-forum-2008>(organized
by Andrew
Rasiej <http://www.personaldemocracy.com/about/#andrew> and Micah
Sifry<http://www.personaldemocracy.com/about/#micah>),
"digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "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.*

In presenting his ideas on "the human network" Pesce references the work of
archeologist Colin Renfrew, that "we may have had great hardware, but it
took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of
it"; and Jared Diamond's ideas in *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, that "where
sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years,
it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of
the planet".

In the 21st century, it's time to "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."

To understand this new kind of mob rule, it's necessary to realize
that "*Sharing
is the threat.* Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo
taken on a mobile now becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible on
Flickr or other sharing websites. This act of sharing voids "any pretensions
to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power".

Pesce concludes that "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."
*

Read on.

—JB <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html>

MARK PESCE is an expert in social media, best known for his work blending VR
with the Web to create VRML, the distant ancestor of Second Life. Pesce is
an author, teacher, inventor, and well-known media personality in Australia.
For the last four years has practiced "digital ethnology," studying the
behavioral, cultural and political changes wrought by the new technologies
of sharing and communication.

*Mark Pesce's Edge Bio Page*<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pesce.html>
------------------------------

*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, we've 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 planet's 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 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.

Last month, *The Economist*, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed
humanity "halfway there." Somewhere in the last few months, half the
population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's
time we've 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 Bangladesh's Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that even
this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why? 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, we'd 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 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.

*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. It's 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 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-more-difficult 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
Washington's 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 post-modern
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 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 ever-increasing rate. Wikipedia's 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 buzz-saw 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 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*

Last Monday, as I waited at San Francisco International for a flight to
Logan, 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 d'un 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 here's the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my journey with
my many friends, both in Australia and America, who 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 she's 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, don't believe a word of it. It's whistling
past the graveyard. It's clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best
thing since sliced bread, but this isn't 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, as if he'd never given the question any thought,
before answering, "I don't know. I don't believe anyone's thought that far
ahead." There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he'd
like to 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 King's horses and all the King's men.

And yes, that's 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, we're 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 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 world's going to move—for all of us.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080730/7ea408f4/attachment.html>