Alastair McGowan writes:
I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)
If you look around right now you may get the impression that the time for change is imminent, that converging factors of climate change, financial instability, social instability, war, peak oil, and zeitgeist are begging for real change to begin and that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge. An alternative view is that change already started, decades ago or more, and that current turmoils are bound up in that change. The global restructuring looks like its just getting under way but only from the standpoint of institutions and centralised organisation - the real change has been happening since the early days of the information age.
When we look at the human organised world we tend to see it the way it is presented through the lense of our culture: Most human societies are presented as being organised in centralised ways around institutions and group norms, in terms of objective (abstracted) standards, in pursuit of quality and speed of decision-making, in the belief that some are better at governing us, some are better at teaching us, that some are better at this or that aspect of keeping our world turning – standards are good. Through this culture, our governance and our habits are constrained, certainly in terms of the way the mass of society converges around common principles. But this constraint is as much in our minds as it is a reality – the world continues to turn regardless. Liberal culture began to disturb the foundations of the monoculture significantly during the twentieth century.
Liberal culture may have been one factor in social change but another critical factor was mass communication. Alexander Graham Bell started it and the World Wide Web lead a quantum leap in the way we telecommunicate. The ongoing reorganisation of society which has been accelerated by the web, the fragmentation of (rigid and limiting) institutions and centralised norms of behaviour as its core, is seen by some as yet another crisis on the horizon. But to others this is a new age of creative possibility. The norms and averages, the classes and trends, standards and winners, of an institutionalised society are giving way to a diverse culture created from the bottom up. It is communication technology that is weaving its way around the foundations of a top-down centralised society and beginning to strangle the constant increase in power that a sustained hierarchy must feed on. And there is no way back other than through repression, and thankfully we left that behind a long time ago.
Self-organising communities, distributed communities of people and their minds, in nature’s own image - Capra’s Web of Life, the real forces of cultural change, do not operate as classically formed institutions. Self-organising communities, communities of rich ecology, reflect life in its uncertainty - there are no rules or norms but the fundamental need for equilibrium and permanence of culture. Conversely, the classical culture of institutions is based on the idea of norms and acceptance of Kantian ideas about ‘natural class’, an abstraction and poor representation of equilibrium, often anything but equium or librium. In our social and family lives we have always practised the self-organising, informal way of finding equilibrium. Now it is the turn of public life to submit to the flat structures demanded by peer-to-peer communications, to build a rich human ecology unconstrained by concepts of norms and standards and power hierarchies, no limits to creativity and difference, no limits to the potential for change and hence the strength of human ecology.
The short and homogenous tail of the Greeks’, Kant’s and Gauss’s ideas about the way the world works is giving way to an ecological way of thinking (see Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and Makridakis et al Dance with Chance). Self-organising networks and communities of people are nurturing human culture back to its potential of rich diversity and creativity in balance with the earth’s life processes. The ecological and creative thinkers, the non-normalists, the unclassifiable, have been excluded from the filters of our narrowly homogenous institutions and the power structures which perpetuate them but the new framework of the internet is now allowing their creative solutions to flourish beyond the control of centralised concepts of authority and standards. Creative minds hook-up and instantly they have the competitive edge over-and-under fixed institutions - self-organising communities spell the end of centralised hierarchical thinking.
Clay Shirky argues that current economic trends are partly related to this ongoing shift as the information age truly takes over from the industrial age (mass centralised organisations of production). The information age, in terms of peer-to-peer organising possibilities (e.g. social networking, collaborative tools, open source problem solving) is subverting existing social power structures and forcing them to contract. This happens whenever a form of industrial organisation is replaced with a new method.
When the motor car and oil-based production were in the ascendant the old social structures were forced to restructure and this caused economic turmoil. We are now in a similar situation as information and communication technology is beginning to support new ways of non-industrial economic organisation - the power of the individual is starting to overgrow institutional rigidity and causing them to contract. The grass-roots rhizome promised by ideas of democracy is now empowered by communication technology, it is spreading scale-free, it is putting pressure on representative forms of democracy to perform better at their representation, and is bleeding over into our economic world in ways that were never intended. It is a brave new world of opportunity for the creative thinkers of the long tail and an unsettling future for those who based their world on social norms and standards promoted by institutional hierarchy and classical thinking.
In terms of the Bill Mollison quote above there is everything to be sanguine about in these changes - the potential for a relocalised world in the context of peer-to-peer global communication means that power will continue to trickle from centralised and globalised processes back to the minds, places and activities that are best fitted for their environments. We are in the heart of an ongoing revolution of human reorganisation that institutions will inevitably try to keep up with as they go through their ‘global restructuring’ - but they will be the last to realise the facts of life long after the power of self-organisation has reasserted itself on human society.