Brian Holmes on Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:30:55 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Markets, Hierarchies, Networks: 2 questions |
Hmm, Felix, I was led off the track by your use of the word commune, which I thought was surely a typo - since in American English, a commune denotes a hippie community that has exchanged utopia for history! Cooperatives are more easily understood as attempts at doing things together, producing both objects and the forms of daily life, though of course comunes do the same thing, so your use of the word is just surprising, an interesting surprise. With that cleared up, your following remarks make perfect sense: > If you look at how power works, there >are real differences between these different sets. In markets, power is >based on money, since the coordination takes place through price signals. >In hierarchy, power is based on position, since decision-making authority >is hard-coded into the structure of the organization. In a network, power >is a) based on the ability to define the network protocol, and b) on the >ability to contribute to the overall goal of the network on the basis of >that protocol. In cooperatives, power is based on the ability to create >consensus. Does a cooperative not then become a small version of a democracy? A democracy also theoretically bases its power on the ability to create consensus. But in contemporary societies, what we see is that democracies mainly create the illusion of a reasonable, Habermasian consensus, which serves to mask the economic operations of markets, hierarchies and networks.... >Somehow, I think 'cooperation' is located on a different, normative, level. >I have a hard time to think of cooperation in negative terms, and I have >less problems thinking of networks as, say, being set up for exploitation. On the normative level, the key words for the four types might be: competition (for markets), command (for hierarchies), reciprocity (for networks) and consensus (for cooperatives). I'm interested in how all these forms of organization work, and I'm sure many others are, so more references to interesting articles would really be worthwile. In particular I wonder about your own interest in cooperatives. Of course that was a great theme of 70s political-economic theory: workers' self-management.... As for social network analysis, it would be great to hear more from Shannon Clark who surely has precise ideas about what is emerging from that field; my question was meant as a kind of pointy but gentle provocation. Concerning what you say: >In the late 1990s, I was doing research on electronic money, and I met >David Chaum, who was doing digicash at the time. I asked him why he had >become interested in anonymous e-cash. The story he told me sounds >credible, even though I don't know if it's true. He said that before the >overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, the CIA has done extensive >analysis of the communication pattern among senior officials of the >administration. They were not interested in what they were taking about. >What they were really interested in were the communicative networks and in >understanding who are the key nodes, connecting one part of the >administration to another. These were the people they were taken out first, >thus seriously crippling the ability of the government to coordinate its >response to the events. He was a afraid that online such techniques would >be even more powerful if we did not have anonymous communication, including >financial communication. All you have to do is look at the massive number of articles and diagrams on the Al Qaeda network to be sure that this long-held interest of the CIA has been pursued up to today. Among others, the reseearchers who come to mind are the infamous Rand twins, Arquilla and Ronfeldt; Marc Sagemann, the forensic psychiatrist who also tried his hand at network mapping; and above all Karin Knorr Cetina, who has written an article called "Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies," published in Theory, Culture & Society, a journal to which I don't have access (if anyone can send me the pdf it would be great). Like many people using SNA representation techniques, Knorr Cetina is interested in complexity theory, which promises to tell us something about how organizations cross thresholds of change. Someone like Harald Katzmir from FAS.Research in Austria is also very interested in such theories. I am just ignorant of how far they have gotten in real predictive or even just insight-generating applications. best, BH # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net