This is related to the previous post, regarding the question of philosophical foundations of political organizations.
In the past, the most thoughtful revolutionaries might say -- "dialectical materialism is the philosophical foundation." Which is fine as far as it goes. Dialectical materialism provides a rich outlook from which to understand the process of change.
But to leave it there suggests that history, and least in the realm of science and technology has ended. But science and technology (or, the instruments of science) have not stopped developing. With new developments, the universe is understood better. And so the general framework of dialectical materialism must be reviewed, extended, enhanced. And I would go so far as to suggest today, with the breakthroughs in complexity theory, chaos, emergence, network science and the like (all made possible with electronic-based tools of science) that the principles of "dialectical materialism" have been absorbed and extended, for the most part, by contemporary science.
For example, a key tenet of dialectics is that "Nature is connected and determined". Network science starts from there and goes ten steps farther, revealing? describing? the laws that govern the nature of the connections and determinations. To ignore network science is like leaving the TOW missiles and kevlar body armor at home and going into battle with muskets and ... well no armor at all.
Certainly there are still important contributions from the philosophical realm of dialectics that can push the science of complexity farther. And the body of literature around historical materialism will enhance "the future of history as a science". But the tools of science have advanced dramatically in the past 30 years -- that's a ridiculous understatement -- and classical dialectical materialism has a lot of catch-up to do.
So now, much can be gained by comprehending what contemporary science is discovering, and feeding that back into thinking about social change, because contemporary science is where the cutting edge reality-based thinking about how the world works is happening.
jd
Thursday, June 3, 2004
A friend of mine told me that he "didn't get networks". He being brilliant, I had to think about that a little bit. The concepts of "network science" are not that complicated; and rather intuitive. So I took his question to really be "why the fuss?"
So. Why the fuss? Why bother?
One answer is that "network science" provides some useful, even important and powerful analytical tools for understanding how the world works. Pulling the thread, some more, well -- so what?
One of the things that attracted me to networks and especially network science, since network science brings some structured thinking and insight into the "network form", was that it explained a lot about what makes for a successful organization in the age of electronics. The insights are generally applicable to any organization, but my interest mainly being in how society changes, in social and political revolution, and the role of organizations in that process, especially how those insights apply to political or revolutionary organizations.
So the bother now assumes not just a general interest in the world, nature, history, society, the Internet, Qabalah, baseball or any other arbitrary starting point of investigation, where network science (or dialectics for that matter) might be helpful; but now a couple more steps -- that profound social change is necessary and inevitable, and that organizations will play some role in that process. In which case, network science suggests to contemporary organizations how to maximize the distributed intelligence of the organization; how to be robust; how to comprehend weaknesses and address them; how to grow -- i.e., how to be organized to succeed -- how to master the network form.
And then beyond that, organizations operate on the basis of some fundamental philosophical outlook -- the world can change or it can't; change is gradual and evolutionary or change is a mixture of the slow and tedious and the abrupt and dramatic; great people make history or history makes great people; etc. etc. Oftentimes, of course, such things are not discussed or even articulated by organizations. But the outlook is there, and here also network science has important contributions to make.
So now the chain of interest is extended further, and if one is thinking about the philosophical foundation of revolutionary political organizations. So here, again, network science has important, even critical contributions to make.
jd
So. Why the fuss? Why bother?
One answer is that "network science" provides some useful, even important and powerful analytical tools for understanding how the world works. Pulling the thread, some more, well -- so what?
One of the things that attracted me to networks and especially network science, since network science brings some structured thinking and insight into the "network form", was that it explained a lot about what makes for a successful organization in the age of electronics. The insights are generally applicable to any organization, but my interest mainly being in how society changes, in social and political revolution, and the role of organizations in that process, especially how those insights apply to political or revolutionary organizations.
So the bother now assumes not just a general interest in the world, nature, history, society, the Internet, Qabalah, baseball or any other arbitrary starting point of investigation, where network science (or dialectics for that matter) might be helpful; but now a couple more steps -- that profound social change is necessary and inevitable, and that organizations will play some role in that process. In which case, network science suggests to contemporary organizations how to maximize the distributed intelligence of the organization; how to be robust; how to comprehend weaknesses and address them; how to grow -- i.e., how to be organized to succeed -- how to master the network form.
And then beyond that, organizations operate on the basis of some fundamental philosophical outlook -- the world can change or it can't; change is gradual and evolutionary or change is a mixture of the slow and tedious and the abrupt and dramatic; great people make history or history makes great people; etc. etc. Oftentimes, of course, such things are not discussed or even articulated by organizations. But the outlook is there, and here also network science has important contributions to make.
So now the chain of interest is extended further, and if one is thinking about the philosophical foundation of revolutionary political organizations. So here, again, network science has important, even critical contributions to make.
jd
Sunday, May 30, 2004
For an intersection of world/global/empire resistance politics, new technology, networks, internet-mediated theory collaboration, see the makeworlds web site. "border = 0 location = YES". You can find copies of makeworlds papers 1-4 ("a product of collaborative text filtering") there.
jd
jd
"By constructing a language for talking about networks that is precise enough to describe not only what a network is but also what kinds of different networks there are in the world, the science of networks is lending the concept real analytical power."
from Duncan Watts excellent book, Six Degrees (WW Norton, 2003), now available in paperback (p. 28)
from Duncan Watts excellent book, Six Degrees (WW Norton, 2003), now available in paperback (p. 28)
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
This may seem tangential at best, but...
Speculation as an economic activity and gambling have similarities but are qualitatively different; but still, they interpenetrate in some cases.
For more on the similarities and differences, see the write-up I did in "Speculative Capital"; for another distinction, here is something from Edward Chancellor's extensive but generally disappointing Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (despite the title, and the author's various protestations, it is mostly a catalog of manias and general capitalist excess and greed and other departures from the day-to-day dullness of the bulk of speculative activity):
"Economists differentiate gambling and speculation on the grounds that gambling involves the deliberate creation of new risks for the sake of diversion while speculation involves the assumption of the inevitable risks of the capitalist process. In other words, the gambler places a bet on a horse he is creating a risk, while the speculator who buys a share is simply inovlved in the transfer of an existing risk." (pp xii - xiii)
Okay as to the interpenetration, since gambling does involve money and the accumulation or the pooling of money, in many cases the "house" (whether a state or casino or host of the game) has come to function as a bank, that is, an accumulation of capital that can then be used invested in more routine economic activity.
Lotteries have historically (often) been used as a way of accumulating capital for extensive projects where the financial system (e.g., raising money through bonds) is primitive or non-existent; e.g. U.S. colonial-era projects for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other colleges.
A historically interesting spin on this is described in Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers by Nathan Thompson (2003, The Bronzeville Press, Chicago). In Chicago's black community, the mainstream banking system was for the most part inaccessible to the community. Thompson describes how the "policy kings" -- the people who ran the numbers (or "policy")games, basically illegal or quasi-legal daily lotteries, became the holders of pools of money that could then be lent out to the community -- i.e., they became the de facto bankers for the community.
"Policy became the biggest Black-owned business in the world with combined annual sales sometimes reachng the $100 million mark and employing tens of thousands of people nationwide. In Bronzeville [the heart of Chicago's black community - jd] Policy was a major catalyst by which the black economy was driven ... Policy Kings underwrote the establishment of several private dental and medical practices for professionals facing lack of placement options due to racial discrimination." (pp 13-14) As Thompson told the Chicago Sun-Times, "They were the bank that aspiring African-American businessmen and women could go to when they couldn't go downtown... They were a ready source of venture capital."
Later in his book Thompson describes legitimate businesses created by "policy kings", funded by the policy game; also the "kings" provided a social insurance function.
I should say that simply re-investing money into productive enterprises is not "speculation". But the financial function of investment eventually ties into the bigger world of speculation, the trading of financial instruments for gain; or, the buying and selling of risk. This needs to be worked out more...
How does all of this tie into networks? (a) Economies are networks (b) speculation comes into its own as a dominant aspect of the economy because of the globalized economy made possible by electronics and (c) the electronic-based communication networks that allow "network effects" to come to the fore. For a start.
jd
Speculation as an economic activity and gambling have similarities but are qualitatively different; but still, they interpenetrate in some cases.
For more on the similarities and differences, see the write-up I did in "Speculative Capital"; for another distinction, here is something from Edward Chancellor's extensive but generally disappointing Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (despite the title, and the author's various protestations, it is mostly a catalog of manias and general capitalist excess and greed and other departures from the day-to-day dullness of the bulk of speculative activity):
"Economists differentiate gambling and speculation on the grounds that gambling involves the deliberate creation of new risks for the sake of diversion while speculation involves the assumption of the inevitable risks of the capitalist process. In other words, the gambler places a bet on a horse he is creating a risk, while the speculator who buys a share is simply inovlved in the transfer of an existing risk." (pp xii - xiii)
Okay as to the interpenetration, since gambling does involve money and the accumulation or the pooling of money, in many cases the "house" (whether a state or casino or host of the game) has come to function as a bank, that is, an accumulation of capital that can then be used invested in more routine economic activity.
Lotteries have historically (often) been used as a way of accumulating capital for extensive projects where the financial system (e.g., raising money through bonds) is primitive or non-existent; e.g. U.S. colonial-era projects for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other colleges.
A historically interesting spin on this is described in Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers by Nathan Thompson (2003, The Bronzeville Press, Chicago). In Chicago's black community, the mainstream banking system was for the most part inaccessible to the community. Thompson describes how the "policy kings" -- the people who ran the numbers (or "policy")games, basically illegal or quasi-legal daily lotteries, became the holders of pools of money that could then be lent out to the community -- i.e., they became the de facto bankers for the community.
"Policy became the biggest Black-owned business in the world with combined annual sales sometimes reachng the $100 million mark and employing tens of thousands of people nationwide. In Bronzeville [the heart of Chicago's black community - jd] Policy was a major catalyst by which the black economy was driven ... Policy Kings underwrote the establishment of several private dental and medical practices for professionals facing lack of placement options due to racial discrimination." (pp 13-14) As Thompson told the Chicago Sun-Times, "They were the bank that aspiring African-American businessmen and women could go to when they couldn't go downtown... They were a ready source of venture capital."
Later in his book Thompson describes legitimate businesses created by "policy kings", funded by the policy game; also the "kings" provided a social insurance function.
I should say that simply re-investing money into productive enterprises is not "speculation". But the financial function of investment eventually ties into the bigger world of speculation, the trading of financial instruments for gain; or, the buying and selling of risk. This needs to be worked out more...
How does all of this tie into networks? (a) Economies are networks (b) speculation comes into its own as a dominant aspect of the economy because of the globalized economy made possible by electronics and (c) the electronic-based communication networks that allow "network effects" to come to the fore. For a start.
jd
Monday, May 24, 2004
MeshForum has some interesting posts and links related to network form discussions. The subtitle for the previous site home page was "Network Science - From Theory to Practice or Filling the structural holes between society, science, business and politics". Looks to be an interesting collection of links and posts, mostly related to the social sciences and business/economy.
jd
jd
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
The PBS science series Nova had a very interesting show last night (5/4/04) "Battle Plan Under Fire" on the U.S. military, new technology, "transformation" and "network-centric" warfare. The home page for the show is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wartech/. The transcript isn't available yet -- the site says one to three weeks after the broadcast.
For opposing views of "transformation" ("moving from an Industrial-Age massing of troops with most intelligence held by commanders to an Information-Age era of special operations, precision weapons, and a level of interconnectivity that goes right down to the individual soldier") see an interview with Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, Director of Force Transformation at the Department of Defense promoting "transformation", and an interview with Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, former president of the Marine Corps University. Van Riper led the "enemy" force in the embarassing military wargame "Millennium Challenge 2002". Van Riper's troops successfully employed low-tech and unconventional tactics to defeat the high tech "transformed" military.
jd
For opposing views of "transformation" ("moving from an Industrial-Age massing of troops with most intelligence held by commanders to an Information-Age era of special operations, precision weapons, and a level of interconnectivity that goes right down to the individual soldier") see an interview with Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, Director of Force Transformation at the Department of Defense promoting "transformation", and an interview with Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, former president of the Marine Corps University. Van Riper led the "enemy" force in the embarassing military wargame "Millennium Challenge 2002". Van Riper's troops successfully employed low-tech and unconventional tactics to defeat the high tech "transformed" military.
jd
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