Generic analysis of networked social movements and systemic complexity

young organizations that blossomed from connectivity. Other Spanish protest groups, such as labor, anti-abortion activists or regional separatists, relied on decades-old organizations. 15M - like Occupy Wall Street or pieces of the Arab Spring or Al-Qaeda - relied on groups fresh-born into a hollow, worried political vacuum. A survey of 15M members looked like a review of new Internet companies: Young, wired, vividly unplugged from history and impossible to understand without their constant connection. They were built by leaching people away from traditional parties, the appeal was both the potential of the new and the chance to get away from the rotting smell of old politics, surely an instinct many of us feel now.!24 This is one reason it’s wrong to look at the world and consider it filled merely with random events, with Black Swans. In fact, regularities and patterns appear many places on the mesh of connection that surrounds us. They can be searched and mapped and studied with the tools of data science, but of course they can also be felt. They may surprise you if you don’t know how to look for them. But the regularities are there. Human history is not only made of earthquakes. 4, Even if it can’t be predicted, complexity in any system, whether it is an Indonesian coral reef or a Russian computer network, can at least be measured. How many points are connected? How quickly and deeply do they interact? It is the multiplication of connection that produces a complex landscape. There won't be much emergence in a desert, for instance. You alone, unconnected: one point. You online: Several billion. The essential benefit of many points connected in real time is that they are an extremely fast feedback loop. This fine-tuning of action-reaction forces them to adapt and adjust quickly, as if they were runners with a coach constantly at their side. Compare the feedback loop of a marching Cairo street protest to, say, the feedback loop of the old men around Mubarak. One was capable of grabbing a new techniques and ideas in real time. The other stuck in a molasses haze of old, sweet, slowing ideas. Faced with rapid change, a fast-adapting system will nearly always perform a slow one. When we say that networks can and will devour hierarchies this is one reason. All the businesses that have been devoured by technology firms in recent years failed to adjust fast enough. Network systems are more complex, their “org charts” are an unnerving mess as a result of their speed. But under the mess is efficiency, growth, innovation. Such systems can tip into failure easily, of course. But they also can adjust their fitness before it is too late. The design of such systems becomes, then, a matter of decisive power. And most of our essential systems now are designed fora slower age. Refiguring the global financial system for an age of instant linkage was one of the crucial conceptual puzzles of the 2008 crisis. Have we done that yet for our taxes? Our voting? Our biological security? The chaos of those few weeks in the markets in 2008 revealed new geographies of finance and speed, a mechanism that had been wired to produce fortune for a few and to inspire, as a result, regulatory 124 They were built: See Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,” 759 89 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018321