This is cross-posted, with a few minor modifications, from New Public Thinking, where my collaborators and I were considering the question of “what is public thinking.”

I answered that I thought it was two things:

First: Thinking Beyond the Individual

This requires thinking about networked relationships, and power, but also about the world beyond the human.

Second: Thinking Beyond the Present

A popular way of considering this thinking about “sustainability”. But a more radical approach might be thinking not just analytically but creatively: what some call “design” thinking.

1. Thinking beyond the individual: the network

So many of our institutions and social conventions are constructed in order to establish individual gain. The competitive logic of capitalism is predicated on the idea that competing individuals create better outputs. Even the idea of the state is that it is a unitary entity, which acts on behalf of individuals. This is Hobbes’ idea of the Leviathan. We have now become accustomed to the idea of the state as responsible.

An alternative to this state is the conceive of thinking as happening in a network – this is the first notion of thinking beyond the individual.

In a network, each individual node is a unitary entity, but they are not arranged in hierarchy.

The network can scale and, because of its interconnections, develops value beyond the mere number of its nodes.

Peer to peer work can thus be an alternative to both the competitive logic of capitalism and to the idea that the unitary state has to act on behalf of the individuals it serves.

What if we thought about solving problems not as requiring competition between individuals but as leveraging the capacity of all of us? The advantage of thinking about a network is that it’s way more flexible than a state. It can adapt and amplify. Some networks become heterarchies, where a variety of power structures are in operation, and some remain horizontal. Networks can of course evolve into hierarchies, but once that happens we aren’t really using them to think beyond the individual anymore.

Thinking beyond the network: the non-human

The other way of thinking beyond the individual is to think beyond the human.

We tend to essentialize things into categories. For example, we say “women are like this, men are like that. Nature is this kind of thing, and civilization is this other kind of thing.” There is an interesting tradition of philosophical thinking that unpacks this. It’s sometimes called cyborg feminism, and Donna Haraway has done most of the most challenging thinking in this area.
The idea behind cyborg feminism is that we have essentialized ideas about both feminity/masculinity and about nature and civilization. And we tend to connect feminitity with nature and masculinity with civilization. But what if we could break down these tendencies? Our current thinking is that we should use the products of civilization (often produced through individual competition) to somehow protect a pristine nature. We should develop more, so that we can afford to protect nature.

The problem with this is that there is no natural opposition between the machine of civilization and the garden. The machine is already in the garden, and has been there for some time (Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden examines this trend in context with the history of American pastoralism). Donna Harway, the thinker who came up with the idea of cyborg feminism, suggested that we use the character of the cyborg to get past this false essentialism.

The cyborg is neither woman nor machine, neither natural nor technological. It has a particular view on the world – it’s not really totally in it or totally out of it. Haraway calls this ‘partial perspective’ and I think it’s a very useful stance for thinking outside of the individual.

What if we saw the world not as a contest between the pristine and the ruined? What if we though of it as an ecosystem? Here in the woods, humans are part of an ecosystem. They have dammed the river down below so they could build a road on it. They have changed where the sheep graze, and introduced some grazing cows as well. What would the cyborg think of this? Would the cyborg see more technology as a necessary good, or a necessary evil? Or something that is not quite both, or either.

So there are two ways of thinking past the individual. The first is to think in terms of networks to get past ideas that valorize either the individual, or the unitary state as the entity with responsibility to those it is meant to represent. The second is to think past the human, and specifically to think about humans and technologically driven civilization as not necessarily opposed to or essentially different from nature, but actually one and the same thing. From this perspective, we can start thinking about the major problems of our day, like making nuclear energy safe, feeding the world’s population, addressing major shifts in the climate, and protecting biodiversity, from a standpoint in which we are deeply embedded, but which we also acknowledge is situated, and partial.

This brings me to the second part of what I think public thinking is.

2. Thinking beyond the present: Sustainability

Thinking past the present requires thinking past individual benefits. Differently put, we might think about thinking in this way as considering the public good. In the UK, we are apt to think of any action for the public good as being the responsibility of the state, but I think this is one of the core problems that need to be addressed in our current thinking – we don’t currently have a very good sense of public stewardship. Again, there is a tendency to think that progress will somehow fix the future – that if we think enough about making things productive in the present, the future will automatically be better. Of course, this isn’t about thinking into the future at all: it’s just fetishizing the progress of the present.

So how could we actually think into the future – think sustainably? This requires a mindfulness of the future with a sense that the whole reason of thinking beyond the present moment is a concern with unknown others in totally different situations. This is, to my mind, the basis of the notion of a public good or a public service. Think of the well-known aphorism that we should make decisions about the land “for the next seven generations.” The public good here is something that can be maintained and sustained over a long period of time. In this way the public good ceases to be something that the state or someone else is responsible for, in the short term, and becomes something that must be sustained over time.

The “seven generations” aphorism can be overwhelming. The obvious critique is – well, we have built systems of society. We aren’t nomads or small-scale cultivators. True, but this doesn’t mean we can’t think sustainably. In the field of information systems, sustainable systems are not perpetual motion machines, but are simply systems that can continue to function over the long term with a set of defined inputs.

So what about making the public good into a sustainable system that had to be maintained over a long time? And, if we take our first set of premises, what about making that sustainable system one that is not based on defining benefits for individuals or for states, and not based on benefits only for humans, but instead mindful of the ecosystems they are part of and that they build?

Thinking Beyond the Present: Design Thinking

The final point I want to make about public thinking, and specifically about thinking past the present, is about how to do this. First of all, thinking about the network instead of the individual or the state gives a good sense of the scale we want to be working at: not the scale of the worldwide social network, in which we are all alienated individuals, but maybe instead the scale of the local community: some place where we can understand the ecological connections at work.

Second, I think that we need to start teaching and learning more about design, and less about analysis. Our analytic brains are well developed, but analytic work, which connects together facts and theories, is not very easy to align with the future. We could add to this some more design thinking, which is concerned with creating the conditions for innovation, for thinking into the future, about things that haven’t happened yet. This is quite different than analytical thinking, because in design thinking you’re looking at things that are jarring, that disprove your ideas, that are shocking, and follow them through. I’m convinced that the final part of public thinking – that is, thinking that is beyond the individual, that is in the public interest, that is thinking about creating sustainable systems in which nature and civilization are not irreconcilable opposites, is the ability to get to solutions in interesting ways. If you like – to remember what things feel like when they are new.

I’ll try to speak more about methods for thinking into the future next time. For now, I want to leave you with the sense that we should not throw our hands up in the air. All is not lost. It is not us versus the forests. Things are, as always, in flux. In his last post Dougald noted that many of the things that are part of the transformation might seem utopian, but are just part of an historical process. So let’s see how we can re-narrative that process to think beyond the individual and beyond the present.

I’m very happy to be a member of the New Public Thinking group blog, established by the provocative and brilliant Dougald Hine.  My first post over there reflects on what the Coyote trickster can tell us about our media narratives.  Enjoy!

The UK census is beginning, and so is the protest movement against it.  Organizations like No2ID, as well as peace organizations are arguing for a boycott of the census for various reasons, including its processing by Lockheed Martin, which also does defense contracting, and the potential of census questions to violate civil liberties.  No2ID has a list of their concerns here.

This boycott movement is a little odd for me, because in Canada academics have been lobbying against the government’s decision to CUT the long-form census.  The Canadian census creates publicly available data which is widely used in social science research (and its perceived as being relatively reliable). It’s seen as the only way of getting unbiased data about some things, like household internet use, or real levels of immigration. Now that the long form has been eliminated, ostensibly because it was intrusive and cost too much money, researchers are scrambling to try and reproduce the data it collected.

So this raises some questions for me about the British census, that I hope someone can shed some light on. I don’t know about how useful the British data is, and I don’t know whether the census here is more or less intrusive. It sounds like it is more intrusive, and it sounds like there is a history linking census with persecution, where I don’t have this association of the Canadian census. Also, does everyone fill in the same census or are there random ‘long forms’ where more information is solicited? It also sounds to me like questions about religion and employment are perceived as being more intrusive than they might be seen elsewhere.

Do you know who holds census data? Do you know how it’s used? Is there baseline data on population demographics that isn’t collected any other way? Is there a way to get this data without breaching privacy? Is this publicly accessible afterwards, or only available under license? And finally – how are we supposed to understand who is living in Britain if we don’t have a census?

I’m not sure if I’ve missed a trick, and the census is really not useful here, or whether there is some cultural understanding of what census (the verb, French recensement) means.  Any thoughts?

I’ve just returned from Berlin and Transmediale, where I was lucky enough to get to host a panel called Democratic:Ability, in which Garnet Hertz, Tapio Makela, Juergen Neumann and Nancy Mauro-Flude discussed the various ways that DIY and hacker culture promise, and constrain, political transformations.

We wanted to get away from a technocentric perspective on the relationship between technological tools and political subjectivities.   As such we discussed the way that DIY culture influences individual agency and challenges market ideology, as well as the difficulties of confronting institutions (like city governments) when scaling up P2P projects like community wireless.  In addition to examining these structures of political relations, we also considered identity politics, examining how projects like the GenderChangers Academy politicize our essentialist perspectives on gender and technology, and the significance of “boundary objects” in negotiating when things are political (for example, a piece of media art in an art gallery) and when they are not (a piece of media used uncritically in everyday life).  The presentations explored this work at the boundaries in various ways, including Nancy’s silent photo essay on processes of developing autonomy and agency and Garnet’s reference to several DIY citizenship projects that use DIY to reveal broader political issues.  Tapio focused on our imaginations of technology, and the way that our oppositional imaginings of technology also provide us with new ways of consuming technology – this connected with the observation that DIY practices are an emerging market for producers of certain electronic components.

One of our strongest lines of questioning was about how much had changed in terms of radical politics due to our interconnected and interactive media, our ability to DIY.  We struggled with this question quite a bit, which I see as being partly a reflection of the difficulty in reconciling the marginal with the hegemonic, the dominant paradigm with the emergent.  We noted that DIY technology can become political and can become radical.  Technologies can be boundary objects embedded in struggles that have been unfolding for a long time.  But how does this happen, when, and where?  We didn’t arrive at a fully-worked out answer in the discussion, but I reflected on this later:

The middle space, in between the new modes of production, is the space in which change happens – when the the capactiy of a certain tool or mode of working outstrips the constraints.  This allows it to transcend the breach between emergent, collective grassroots practices, and more entrenched power structures.  We can think about the emergent middle space in several ways:  we have boundary objects that mark it, we can think about the relationships that it structures between people and their fellows (who might be other humans, or technologies, or non-humans).  But we also have the middle space of social and organizational coordination.  Adjoining this middle space are institutions which might include the market or (perhaps most strikingly in Egypt) the political system, education or the patriarchy.  These are not completely fixed, as they are composed of our social relationships.  So how do they change?  And, more fundamentally, how do the ideas that we can work out about P2P technologies, DIY and hacker subjectivites, help us to understand them?

Tonight I chaired a public lecture by Evgeny Morozov, who is on a book tour with his The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World.

The book argues that, in the hype about the democratic potential of the Internet, we have overlooked the technology’s capacity to control dissent and even to support authoritarianism.  The internet, despite our hopes, doesn’t automatically establish democratic communications in repressive regimes.  Thus, we should make better internet policy that looks at the contexts in which technologies operate.

I’m not sure I agree.  I thought that the proclamations of cyber-utopia and the attendant disappointment when the reality fell short of the vision had been consigned to history at the end of the 1990s.  Surely, it is now possible to see that the Internet and the multitudes of social connections that it produces could be either positive or negative, or surely both positive or negative, depending on the context?  Is there a technology on earth that would be guaranteed to bring freedom and democracy without any of the bad stuff?

Regardless, the book presents some interesting new examples of how everyday people, activists, corporations and even authoritarian governments can use the opportunities of social media – for both good and evil.  The general narrative of these examples goes like this:  “activists use social networking sites to mobilize, and the rich data about connections that is generated helps them to situate their activism so it includes more links and connections than in the past.  HOWEVER, all those links and connections create data that evildoers (corporations or authoritarian governments) can use to track down those activists and dissidents.”   The more interesting examples cover the way that policy structures play into this duality – for example how existing policies are threatened by digital practice, or changed because of it.  Morozov also highlights how this “cyber-utopianism” and “internet-centrism” limit effective policy making by being too techno-centric.

There’s a weird way that the book falls into the same technological determinism it claims to decry.   If you didn’t imagine to begin with that the internet was going to be a democratic force, it wouldn’t be such a surprise that it wasn’t.  And further, the ‘democratization’ in question seems to be primarily American-style representative democracy, rather than radical participative democracy or media democracy – which you could argue adopt some of the internet’s opportunities.

The book dabbles in philosophy and popular culture, nodding at Kierkegaard and titling a chapter “Orwell’s Favorite LOLcat” but it lacks a sustained and deep theory of media.  Despite the length (400 pages) it reads as a collection of anecdotes that ultimately fails to develop a sustained policy critique based in a theory of what is unique about the internet.  This is a shame, since Morozov has strong expertise in internet advocacy in many non-Western contexts.

Beyond the simple premise, I had one other serious misgiving about the book.  Even though there is a bibliography for each chapter, none of the direct quotations in the text are cited.  This is no petty academic quibble – without a citation for a direct quote, it’s impossible for me to find the original work and judge Morozov’s interpretation of it.

I’m glad to see how this book captures the increasingly reflective zeitgeist of American geeks and cheered that Morozov thinks we need better policy (who doesn’t!).  But I encourage Morozov to dig a little deeper, push a little further, in his future writing.

Inspired by David’s comments and this slideshow by Charlie Beckett, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the relationship between WikiLeaks and the mass media.  Charlie argues that Wikileaks is “new” because it disrupts networked forms of power. Certainly it points out the difficulty in establishing a binary distinction between “old media” and “new media.” Journalism has been destabilized by WikiLeaks, but it’s also been reinvigorated, as this Columbia Journalism Report article explores through its discussion of the working relationship between Julian Assange and the newspapers that published the diplomatic cable leaks.

Given this complex relationship, perhaps some more nuanced theory is required.  I’m starting to think that the media scandal that we’re experiencing is an example of what Galloway and Thacker describe as “exploit” – which is the event, within a network, that destroys the power of the network.  Their 2007 book The Exploit: A Theory of Networks argues that decentralized networks do not necessarily route around control; instead, they have their own logics of control, which can be most effectively subverted by an “exploit” or disruption from within. The DdoS attacks that have been propagated both by opponents and purported supporters of Wikileaks are examples of exploits, meant to undermine the function of a network’s control, or what Galloway elsewhere identifies as “protocol”. Galloway and Thacker write:

To be effective, future political movements must discover a new exploit. A whole new topology of resistance must be invented that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in relation to power centres. . . .The new exploit will be an ‘anti-web’ (2007, p. 22)

Behind the web, the network doesn’t look as well-determined as a form of control or organization. Previous theorizations of emergent social and ontological forms have included Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the appearance of rhizomatic forms of organization and cultural expression, as distinct from tree-like forms. The rhizomatic form has been used to explain tactical media which in the networked age has included Indymedia and it’s open access and open source journalism. In this case though, a more apt metaphor might be the swarm, where particles are interconnected but autonomous, and where the direction of movement is influenced by a larger law or principle of collective intelligence. Galloway and Thackeray thus identify the swarm as the future of the control structure now enacted by protocol.

Galloway and Thackeray argue that the network is merely a condition of possibility for the operation of protocol, which can direct control around the network. Using the exploit (if I understand this correctly) is the way of disrupting the management system that is associated with the network. Discovering holes in existing networks can thus be a way of creating change. This is one thing that WikiLeaks has effectively done; by identifying the logic of control underlying both secrets and their media representations. The exploit in this case occurs on several levels at once. First, it facilitates the power of the swarm by hosting leaked information. Second, it takes over the mass media by slowly and dramatically leaking information which is subject to editorial control both by WikiLeaks itself and by mass media journalists. The mass media is still fulfilling its function, but its logic of control has been undermined – perhaps this is something like the way a zombie computer is mobilized by a botnet – or an organism that has suffered a neurological virus (gesturing at my previous attempt to frame WikiLeaks as a parasite).

The WikiLeaks’ “exploit” is thus more effective than it would be were it less well integrated with the mass media’s networked forms of power. Indeed, WikiLeaks is not itself rhizomatic. It is organized, and with a carefully planned interventionist strategy. It has a figurehead who has acted as a focal point for the media while the real work of undermining state control of information carries on. With the complicity of newsrooms, WikiLeaks intervenes in the power structures behind international news.

The exploit, if this is what it is, disrupts the existing logic of networked control and allows the swarm to intervene in the protocols underpinning news production. This is precisely why it has been so effective.  It is a hack – in the non-technical sense.  It uses the rules of journalism to break journalism.

As I’ve been thinking about this more, I am more taken by how the exploit, or hack, (yes, the noise in the system) has disrupted several things in several different ways.  It’s disrupted the pretense of secrecy around government information.  It’s exploited the same network of influence that is normally responsible for filtering government scandals and transforming them into headlines.  And the DDoS attacks by Anonymous,  whether pointless or amplificatory or dramatic also exploited protocol systems established to govern the web.  So there is an exploit within the technical governance level as well as an exploit within the media system. Of course, WikiLeaks’ own resilience through its web presence  is also the result of an exploitation of the network, and of the reproducibility of digital content.

When constructing the WikiLeaks case, then, it’s tempting to come up with a way of accounting for the different kinds of interventions made in technical, policy, media, and governmental networks.  Despite the fact that I’ve used this post to think through how to use the “exploit” to do this, I’m not convinced it’s the only way.  Using Milton Mueller’s 2010 Networks and States might be a way of framing the aspects of the case focused on governance by technology – but Mueller has little understanding of journalism and so wouldn’t be able to comment on the shift in power relations in that area.  So far, most commentators in this area have focused primarily on one aspect of WikiLeaks, often from one philosophical perspective.  I’m wondering if it might be more fruitful to think of WikiLeaks as a kind of prism for thinking through how (or if) exploits take place in similar ways across different kinds of networks.  We may find that the case is less significant than we thought.