RETHINKING SECURITY

I’m buried under lots of work, including a substantial research project on information warfare (major cases are Operations Desert Storm, Allied Force, and Bagration) but the drama of Occupy Wall Street is interesting to me from the perspective of both organizational design and the recurring question of the impact of network technologies on social movements. 

First, let’s establish the baseline. Politics itself is about “power over peoples.” Harold Lasswell put it more elegantly as a matter of “Who Gets What, When, and How.” This is not to say this is all of what politics is about, and certainly not what always motivates people. But it runs through the practical element of politics, hence the pejorative complaint of someone “playing politics” (a most curious insult). War is politics, with the added (and prominent) element of violence.

In the last ten years, the dominant question of technology’s relationship to politics has centered around technology (means) ability to revolutionize the ways of political organization to more decisively achieve an end. There is a synergistic and symbiotic relationship between technology and new (or just evolved) forms of organization.

What Evgeny Morozvoc dubs the “Internet Intellectuals” all argue is that technology enables better forms of organization that are more open, egalitarian, emancipatory, and resilient. When it comes to creating or contesting power, they have often argued that technology and the forms of organization it enables can generate decisive victory against normally entrenched political forces.

The Internet Intellectuals, to some extent, mirror the creators of strategic airpower theory both in their fixation on technology’s ability to create a quantum leap in human capabilities and their ability to couch guiding ideologies and worldviews within the supposedly neutral sphere of the techne. Airpower theory emerged from the Progressive period and the Taylorist production style, a reflection of an overriding fixation on efficiency. Morozov and Jaron Lanier have both written substantially on the basis of current technological ideology, and I much recommend Lanier’s concept of “cybernetic totalism.”

Ontology aside, the practical problem with both airpower theory and the “Internet Intellectuals” is what I (not originally) call the “Underpants Gnome Theory of Strategy.” The cognitive space between the action (network organization, tweeting) and the goal (power) is always fairly barren. This is not to say that technology or new forms of organization are unimportant—Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s entire corpus largely refutes that. But the problem is that all of this has become more of an ideology than an incisive analysis, and it becomes different to analyze the process from within the constraints of techno-utopianism. 

One of the most ridiculous examples of this ideological vision of technology happened when several notable technology writers wrote blistering reviews of the iPad, largely because Apple’s “walled garden” approach did not fit with their egalitarian, DIY philosophy. But consumers loved it. And in light of the many fawning tributes to the “revolutionary” Steve Jobs that nearly every technology blog has penned, many analyses on the iPad appear simply bizarre. Given the scale of techno-utopian writing about the Arab Spring as supposed test case of information power, it’s delightfully ironic that many of the protesters actively use those evil Apple products that they cannot take apart and toy with.

Had many of these figures been alive in the early half of the 20th century, they would have denounced the Model T Ford. What I (and many others) expect my computer to do, as analog-age Internet guru J.C.R Licklider originally wrote about in his “Man-Machine Symbiosis” paper, is help me effectively realize my desires by doing all of the grunt work in as elegant and simple a fashion as possible. The supposedly regressive Apple’s Siri application is explicitly bringing the consumer closer to this reality.

So what about Occupy Wall Street? It’s a little bit different from what I’ve previously discussed. As Reihan Salam notes, the movement prizes a decentralized organizing method and prominently eschews (or is incapable of generating) of goals or concrete plans.The common operational idea that drives the movement, as articulated by Jeremy Kessler, is that goals don’t matter—the purpose is to create the means to create an end, but not the end itself.

In practice, this essentially means generating an organization and demonstrating its “plausible promise.” Shlok Vaidya wrote a very perceptive post on the actual mechanics of this in practice:

[The protest] is an independent system (potentially aggressive), that shares the same environment as the traditional economy. It is driven by internal dynamics (not an emphasis on the external, as classic protests have).

OWS currently consists of thousands/millions/hundreds of millions of cognitive nodes:

• Connecting/infecting new nodes. As part of this, the organization is generating memes, testing against live audiences, and dropped if counterproductive. Trying to build sufficient capacity before…

• Probing attack vectors. A botnet, like a storm, emphasizes growth of its own capacity before attacking (or raining). Mild DDoS on the Brooklyn bridge or around the Bank of America in SF. Anonymous phishing for corruption, etc. This is enabled by…

• Decentralized command and control. Perhaps more specifically, modular design. Each protest in each city is led by independent affiliates (if not further broken down). Crashing a protest in Ohio has no impact on the rest of the network.

So in a sense, this is somewhat different from the Douhet-esque vision of technology articulated when writing about the Arab Spring or the Green Revolution. It’s an system driven by internal dynamics and the desire to replicate itself. The proper comparison is not really a traditional political movement but a virus. Analog populist movements, peasant revolts, and riots all occur according to similar dynamics, but technology obviously amplified the reach of this particular virus.

So what’s next? Shlok notes that “like Earth’s electron skin is marked by a thousand perpetual botnets, the political landscape will weather its own storms.” This is also right, as the drama over OWS is simply one data point in a larger crisis primarily afflicting the West. It produces “storms” in the form of political disruptions. Disruptions do not equal decision, but they can create the conditions for decision.

Ultimately, we don’t know what impact those disruptions will have on political systems and subsystems. Sometimes they provoke large backlashes. Other times they have an indirect impact on the orientation of political systems and subsystems. Most of the time they just fizzle out. This is not to say that disruption doesn’t have an impact on politics, but introducing a disruptive element into an interactively complex system has long-ranging and essentially unpredictable effects. Moreover, social movements are governed more by contingency than political scientists like to admit.

All in all, I think Shlok’s botnet metaphor is a lot more restrained and realistic way of evaluating networked movements than much of the popular literature, which is long on cheerleading. We’ll likely have more data to evaluate all of this in the coming years as political and economic issues in the West generate new disruptions on tactical, operational, and strategic levels.