bird's eye view of technology

DANNY O'BRIEN

WIRED: The speed and transparency of online experimenters’ rude education is riveting and educational

I’VE BEEN fascinated over the last few years about how quickly groups have been using the internet to learn about new ways to organise.

Almost always, these new methods begin as inferior to those that we’ve used for the last 300 years. They’re clunky, ignore human nature, and have subtle failure points that only emerge after people have placed significant resources into them.

Even when they fail, the speed and transparency of the online experimenters’ rude education is riveting, and educational. The ruins hang around on the net, in forums and on websites. Frequently the communities grow and collapse at enormous speed.

It’s like watching a time-lapse animation. But from each group’s mistakes, others learn. And, occasionally, all that learning leads to forward movement. For all the litany of failures of collective editing, for instance, there’s one or two Wikipedias.

Recently, I’ve been spending perhaps a little too much time watching the Occupy movement.

Almost all of this has been done in the same way that a substantial minority of people in the world have been watching: by following tweets, live videostreams and direct internet reports from those at the encampments.

It’s a proximity that few of us have had an opportunity to see before. David Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist who has observed and participated in the leaderless movements such as the World Trade Organisation demonstrations of the last decade – the forefathers of the current protests. In his book Direct Action: An Ethnography , he claims “absolutely nothing radicalises ordinary citizens so much as seeing what it’s like to be in the middle of an action”.

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