Dear Brian,
Yes, there was great hope from emergence, and the expected results did not
materialise. But was that because emergence was not adequately understood, or
was it because emergence per se is limited. My instinct is that it is more the
former than the latter.
Let us take the example of a termites nest, which is one of the highly cited
examples on emergence in living systems. The wonderful order in large termites
nests emerges not because there is leadership in the termites, but because
termites leave pheromone trails when they move, can sense the pattern of
movement that has happened earlier, and have ingrained responses to place mud
in the act of nest building based on pheromone patterns that they recognise.
Thus one can identify the conditions for emergence as:
High-synchrony and high-frequency physical interaction
All actions and interactions leave traces
There is an impulse toward pattern recognition in the traces.
Levels of information symmetry are very high as all information is in the
public domain
There is a low preoccupation with grand design, and the focus is on immediate
experience and engagement
The system develops through iterative evolutionary spirals of pattern
recognition
There was great hope when social media began to play a role in political
struggle, the Arab Spring being a prime example. It was felt that relatively
leaderless revolutions and the openness of the new media laid the grounds for
emergence. When that did not happen, faith in emergence fell. But an
open-ended system of public exchanges is not necessarily emergent, for it does
not necessarily lay the grounds for emergence. To identify a few concerns:
Recognition: As Lawrence Lessig points out, there is a significant difference
between recognition in physical space and cyberspace. He cites the example of
a pornography store. In a physical store, if an eight-year old child walks in,
there is immediate recognition of a problem, whereas in cyberspace this
recognition is more problematic given the ease with which false identity and
anonymity are possible in cyberspace. Equally significant is the fact that the
masks of identity and anonymity are equally available to the person who is
doing the recognising, which is a new capability that power can now utilise.
Lessig argues that cyberspace needs its own legal system, and one cannot merely
extend the law of physical space into cyberspace. But we also need to realise
that the question of recognition is one of the most inadequately acknowledged
questions in politics. This dates back to the US constitution, which is held
up often as a beacon on democracy and human rights, but failed to recognise
either misogyny or slavery (a failing that is still to be adequately
addressed). And we see it now in the doctrines of neoliberalism that claims a
form of the economy is good for everyone, but a refusal to indulge in the data
collection and analytics that will actually measure that claim. Without
attention given to an inclusive politics of recognition, emergence will never
occur.
Axes of the Social Contract: The hope of emergence came from protest
movements. But protest only looks at the vertical axis between citizen and
state. This axis contains an asymmetry of power heavily weighted against the
citizen. The potential for emergence in lateral connections between citizens,
where emergence can occur before engagement with the state, has not been
adequately explored.
Data Trails: Emergence requires that traces of action remain in the public
domain. All of us are well aware of the problem here with digital data traces.
Distortions: Specific distortions are possible given the problems in
recognition what with fake accounts, bots, and so on. Again, not much needs to
be said on this given the recent publicity on Russian interference in US
elections (and no doubt, there are many other such problems that are yet to
receive public recognition). Emergence has largely occurred in geographically
rooted contexts with physical interaction. This base cannot be easily
bypassed, and emergence in social media has to look at its connections with
physical space, and particularly the hierarchies of scale at which physical
space occurs, operates and evolves. Without this connection, it is unlikely
that emergence can happen in socio-political reform.
Flak: Chomsky and Herman, in their analysis “Manufacturing Consent”, argue that
media remains a tool of propaganda and is not the check on the system that it
is believed to be. One of the factors is the ability of the system to generate
flak that threatens the fundamentals by which media economies work.
Manufacturing Consent was written before the era of digital media (I wonder if
the argument has been revisited since), but the ability to generate flak is far
far greater today. And it is not just at the level of threatening the
economics of media institutions, it is also at the le
