Power and Emergent Systems

Everyone was telling me to watch ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. I missed everyone of them. So I sat down and watched them all last week on iplayer – (bless it, but I do think that everyone who uses it should have a TV license…).

Anyway, I found it fascinating particularly in regards to the theories of both self-organisation and emergence. The self-organisation of networks is often presented in a somewhat utopian way by emergent theorists, if we have a flat system people, communities and organisations will collaborate and organise themselves in an egalitarian way. No hierarchy, no leaders and this, it is claimed, is the way that church could be if we just let the system organise itself. (I blame the hippies...)

Unfortunately this theory assumes that all people will act altruistically. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace highlighted to me, once again, that this is not the case. Instead as the traditional places of power are evacuated of power and authority other places and people grab that power.  And it is not always the case that those who grab the power are people/institutions’ that know how to exercise that power in a more altruistic way.

For example as the Presidency in the US lost credibility and authority through Clinton the financial sector grabbed the power, and look at how that left us. People who were not accountable, who were self-selecting taking the authority that they wanted without a public mandate. Google is another example, the utopian view of the web as an open-source place of share collaboration is now seen as unbelievably nieve. Perhaps when it was conceived this was the case but we all know google knows a lot about me, as does mac and other large brands, and this gives them immense power.  Power that they have grabbed without any authority to do so...

So when we go emergent, go self-organising the people who are the most articulate, most likeable, most interesting get the power leaving the vulnerable voiceless, marginalised disenfranchised and powerless - and thats not Gospel... But what makes this different is that because the people who have grabbed the power are not accountable externally there is no way to challenge their power, other than to stop metaphorically using google…by following their blogs, tweets or facebook pages.

Comments

[John]

Fair enough in some sense.
But did Bill Clinton create the financial crisis in the USA?
Why not check out the book The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America?
And what about the massive Savings & Loan Scandal which was facilitated via the deregulatory policies put in place by Reagan.
Plus why not check out this reference on the "great communicator"
http://www.psychohistory.com/reagan/rcontent.htm

And did not the Presidency of the USA lose ALL credibility during the 8 years of the Bush mis-administration. Somewhere in Texas the village idiot went missing and ended up in Washington!

Plus did Christianity become the world DOMINANT religion via the spontaneous manifestation of the politics and culture of loving-kindness?

No not at all. Quite the opposite in fact as these two references dramatically illustrate.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/cruelty.html
Also
http://www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner

And what about the never-ending decades long wars between the Protestants and the Catholics after the Reformation. Wars in which hundreds of thousands were murdered and in which much of Europe was ruined agriculturally and economically.
Murdered because they interpreted a mere book in different ways.

[steve]

But I'll still follow you Ben, even though you are "most articulate, most likeable, most interesting" :)

steve
www.emergentkiwi.org.nz

[michael volland]

I'll keep following too...
Michael

[benedson]

and you two too!

b