RETHINKING SECURITY

It looks like Occupy Wall Street is beginning to reach an impasse. Adam Martin reports that coverage of the movemen’s political message has ceased to be the story. Rather, the various escapades going on Zucotti Park have become the story. The story of OWS, in a way, is also the story of how theories about network organization (in both war and peace) have run into some hard realities:

On Wednesday, The New York Times ran a crime-stats story about policing the park, and on Tuesday the Wall Street Journal went with the development angle, reporting on how the protest encampment was building up, not out. As the coverage of the encampment itself gets more in-depth and starts resembling a micro-version of city reporting, the movement’s political message, at least in New York, has ceased to be the story. …It’s not just fringe elements overshadowing the protesters’ message, it’s the protesters themselves. As the Zuccotti encampment’s development, self-management, internal politics, and security occupy more of the discussion of the protest movement, there’s little space (1 percent, maybe?) left to cover what they’re actually protesting.

The article is a very fascinating parade through various logistical dysfunctions associated with the New York side of OWS. The subtext, however, is unmistakable. The movement has become consumed with its own internal dynamics at the expense of pushing a larger message. And it’s not simply a matter of message—the functions described in the link roundup, such as internal politics, freeloaders at encampments, issues of self-management, sanitation, and crime themselves are serious problems that threaten the organization’s ability to maintain itself.

So why is the movement having such difficulty in maintaining a strategic focus, especially after we were told by a bevy of social media gurus that they were utilizing a hitherto superior method of organization rooted in decentralization, co-production, and social networking that would enshrine a new era of participatory politics? A method that was so self-evidently superior that it rendered the idea of goals or strategies passe?

The answer is actually very relevant to discussions of strategy as a whole: goals and strategy matter. And they matter even more to small organizations without resources, because they are less able to weather the organizational and material costs inherent in any ambitious endeavor.

The idea inherent in much of the OWS strategic commentary is that information-age social networks could help the occupiers build up a strategic infrastructure through viral replication. Rapid and wide-ranging infrastructure generation is made possible by the low transaction costs of communication and organization that network technologies and forms of organization make possible. This is undoubtedly true. A system, driven by its own dynamics, can rapidly generate infrastructure, especially given an operating concept as tailor-made for economic and political downturns as the concept of the “99%.”

However, such an infrastructure, once built, has its own upkeep costs—which can be steep. An encampment is not a 4Chan server that people can virtually peruse. It’s a real place where people have to be clothed, fed, and kept warm, clean, and safe, and there are important organizational and tactical decisions that have to be made every single day. In short, maintaining this infrastructure requires resources, physical and intellectual labor, and organizational acumen. Maintaining the infrastructure is also a cognitively draining task, especially when the organization itself is fractious and has important fissures as to how to allocate resources.

These problems are not exclusive to political activists camped out in New York. Crisis management and the daily minutia required to keep a system running squeezes out strategy and long-term thinking in defense too. But there’s a crucial difference between DoD and Zucotti: even relatively small pieces of the DoD budget could put all of the OWS up in five-star hotels and drinking more Cristal than Jay-Z and Kanye West combined.

Organizations with resources have more of a cushion to compensate for becoming consumed with their own internal dynamics. Whatever the political decision-making problems the US currently faces, it is still the richest and most powerful nation-state in the history of the state system. It isn’t a good thing that we can’t seem to make crucial decisions about priorities, but it’s drastically worse for OWS.

The organization is caught in something of a trap. Without a plausible means of satisfying its amorphous demands or at least realizing a goal that would allow it to “declare victory and go home,” it must stay within its camps to maintain the infrastructure and media attention it has built. But the logistical costs inherent in maintaining the infrastructure indefinitely are fearsome. And although it uses public land, the movement cannot expect the public, however sympathetic to their aims, to allow a disruptive presence to remain in perpetuity—especially if the disruption imposes basic quality of life costs. 

This doesn’t mean that the movement can’t luck out due to some kind of external mistake that breathes life into OWS, or that the movement will not have an political impact.  These problems are not fatal, but they are serious issues—which might have been avoided if the network itself had what David Ronfeldt calls “topsight,” a mode of centralization that focuses strategic priorities while still maintaining decentralized execution and opportunities. Topsight, in turn, can enable goals and a set of ends, ways, and means to achieve them—concepts that digerati have largely rejected as oldthink.

It’s often common to state that “amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics.” Such a flippant statement ignores that there is a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship between logistics and strategy. A strategy without the logistical means to realize it as a fantasy. Without a solid logistical infrastructure and global deployment system, an American strategy to repel Iraq from Kuwait would simply have been a piece of paper.  But a system of logistics is intended to support a strategy, much in the same way that the sum of a car’s electronic systems supports a driver. The design of the car system itself is guided by the consideration of getting you from Point A to B.

Even in an age of networks, goals and strategy are still important. They may not be destiny, but don’t leave your house without them.