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The Political Power of the Decentralized Emergent System
We live in a paradoxical world where the masses are marginalized and the few rule the world. We have acquiesced to the struggles and injustices we are pitted against; many of us have been tricked into believing that there isn’t any other way. Nature, however, tells us that this is not so. Many successful social systems found in the natural world are decentralized and emergent in nature. Take ant colonies for example. Ant colonies are highly organized and efficient, ranging from job distribution to the allocation of waste landfills and even cemetaries. One can easily assume there must be a leader figure, perhaps the queen, who governs the colony’s behaviors. This is untrue, and there exists no central figure or planning department in ant colonies. Their intelligent colony system is decentralized and emergent, working from the bottom-up and exhibiting behaviors that are always for the greater good of the colony. We, as human beings, are inclined to a centralized mindset where we automatically tend to look for the central figure in understanding group behaviors. Decentralized systems utilize networks composed of a multitude of individual agents, whether they are people or groups. The very nature of a decentralized system makes it an effective political tool for fighting against centrally structured forces with pro-democratic activism while also empowering its members.
An emergent system is a system of complexity that arises from the simpler relationships between multitudes of smaller, local, and isolated agents. An emergent system does not require any purposeful, central decision-making or any exertion of leadership from a single figure. It can develop and self-organize completely on its own. Often times, especially in nature, the individual agents that make up the collective system are not aware of the higher rules that govern them; they are only concerned with their local interactions which in turn is what allows for the emergence of more complex rules. One of the most advantageous qualities that such systems can boast is its resiliency. The source of its power is in the collective, and the failure of a single point in the system is greatly less traumatic to the rest of the system than it is so in centralized systems. A centralized system, on the other hand, can self-destruct if the central figure is dismantled. This can explain why people in power, especially monetary power, feverishly try to obtain more and more power just to stay at the top and keep their system alive. In decentralized, emergent systems however, what arises is a set of self-organized, group-intelligent complexities that promote the health of the system.
Decentralized systems have structures ideal for social organization and political activism in today’s centralized world. The collective that grows from the grouping of individuals brings about properties and possibilities that are impossible for the individual to achieve and that only the collective can accomplish. It can solve problems that can be impossible for the individual agents to do on their own, such as increasing the amplitude of an action or avoiding targeted punishment. Within a collective, actions can be justified as representations of social moral issues, whereas an individual committing the same action alone would not be heard in the same way. In order to better understand a self-organized system at work, we can learn from the Underground Railroad of the 1800’s. The Underground Railroad did not come about through the convening of central authorities that planned out all the route logistics entirely at once. Instead, it was organized in smaller, localized groups. These individual agents belonged to a larger scheme of organization that they did not necessarily have specific knowledge of. The Underground Railroad was an emergent network that owes its success to the characteristic qualities of a decentralized system. In fact, it was crucial that the individual agents merely did their share of the job and had a limited knowledge of the bigger picture. Without the existence of a central headquarters susceptible to attack, the safer the network was.
Networks are especially apt for a social revolution of the masses due to their multitudinous nature. Since the eighties, Hacktivists, politically active hackers, worked to make privately, governmentally owned internet technologies accessible to all. Contributing to the “freeing information” movement of the sixties, they worked to politically disrupt the existing order of computing. The EZLN, or the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, was the response to unfair NAFTA deals that would further marginalize their people, robbing them of their historical land and way of life. The Zapatistas were not hackers with access to computers, and the Hacktivists were not indigenous Zapatistas whose lands and rights were being exploited. By the unifying power of networks, however, on January 1st, 1994, the Zapatistas, without computers and without access to the internet, broke into the virtual, electronic fabric in protest to the injustice inflicted on their people. Despite the Mexican government’s attempts to limit media coverage of Chiapas, through networked information sharing the computerless Zapatistas unleashed a crippling netwar against its great oppressor. These disparate groups, the Hacktivists and the Zapatistas, working separately but towards essentially similar goals was catalysis enough for the emergence of a network that unified these previously separate entities. There lies great power in the multitudinous network of “weaker” people that can subvert the influence of “greater” authorities that usually act in self-interest and not in the interest of the masses. This power gave the Zapatistas a greater weapon that did not exist as guns and arms but as nonviolent direct action, and with it they were able to injure their globalizing oppressor. The electronic attack rendered the NAFTA useless in terms of retaliation. How could one fight back an internet-based network where there exists no physicality or a clear node of centralization? This idea works on the same principle as nomadic power, the upper hand of ambiguity lacking in set borders. This is precisely why decentralized systems provide to the marginalized masses a powerful, political tool practical to the opposition of centralized evils, without the need of vast amounts of money and tightly knit infrastructure planning.
Furthermore, the structure of the EZLN itself is pro-democratic and horizontal in nature, keeping the interests of the masses alive. Its needs and demands are based on the interests of the community as a whole. A key characteristic of the horizontal EZLN group is that it does not seek to overthrow the Mexican government; all they desire is autonomy and the enabling of rights of their own. Such horizontal decentralization is also integral to other pro-democratic groups. Extreme Democracy is a network of activists that acts on a philosophy of putting the people in charge, following the political model of “Emergent Democracy” by the emphasized use of technological tools and the Internet. An aspect they share with the EZLN is that they too define the basic unit of organization as the people, or more specifically, the activists. They act to change the very nature of democratic representation by utilizing the emergent, effective qualities of networks. Decentralized, networked systems are not only more stable than centralized systems; they promote self-regulation and increased efficiency in information exchange. Also, centralized systems lack in adaptability to new factors or evolving issues. This model is impractical especially for social and political activism. In case of becoming attacked, a certain degree of tension is necessary for collective networks seeking successful reform. The ambiguity of a central node characteristic to decentralized systems can provide this tension, increasing resiliency to disruption. Although there are pros and cons to both systems, top-down systems tend to fall short against the demands of bottom-up systems. David Ronfeldt insists that "institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks"(Wehling). Metaphorically put, decentralized systems are nets that can absorb the stab of a pyramid and also engulf the pyramid on all its sides; the pyramid cannot win unless it too turns itself into a net. This gives networked, decentralized systems an advantage when working against centralized authorities, which was proven by the Zapatista movement and other social revolutions around the world.
The modern world is made up of 6.7 billion people. Yet, all political power lies in the hands of a selected few. Selected not by the 6.7 billions people, of course, but by some magical, God-given Calvinian, predestined birthright to exorbitant financial fortunes. 6.6999 billion lives are under a dictatorship of social, political, and economic oppression whether we realize it or not. How can we even begin to chip away at that centralization of power? We, all 6.6999 billion of us, have an advantage. We are the masses and the multitudes, and in that itself lies our potential power. Without participating in direct action, no amount of faith in a leader figure is enough to propel the changes you wish to see. Continuing to feed our centralized political system can do nothing for the best interest of all, not just in America but oppressed people all over the world whose lives are directly paying for the luxuries of the few. In order to see change, we must change first. Only when the individual agents do their own part can the greater, networked system of self-organization and adaptability emerge, unleashing the power to make real changes. Only in horizontal networks of the multitudes lie the power to disrupt the vertically oriented, unjust order of the world.
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