So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shaks a guilty land,
Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleas’d th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
The Campaign, Joseph Addison, 1705
Marcus Tacitus of Between Hope and Fear, a blogger whose work I’ve come to admire, has posted an engaging entry, The Delphi Age. In this post Marcus Tacitus compares three phenomena of our age: the blogosphere, Open Source software development (particularly the development of Linux), and al Qaeda.
Marcus Tacitus suggests that we are moving into the “Delphi Age”, an age dominated by the Delphi Effect, the principle by which the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is a more reliable predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. Marcus Tacitus goes on to ask a series of questions. I’ll cite each question and give my own observations on it.
Is Al Qaeda an example of the Delphi Effect applied to extremists? Does this account for much of their power to challenge sovereign nations?
Short answer: no. Long answer: NNNNoooooo. There’s little to suggest anything other than a hierarchical organization to al Qaeda. But more importantly both in the case of the development of Linux and, I suspect, the origins of al Qaeda, there has been the need for a directing principle. There had to be an angel in the whirlwind—the whirlwind itself was not enough. In the case of Linux, it was Linus Torvalds. In the case of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.
I’m not sure what qualities were necessary to provide this directing principle whether charisma, talent, determination, some other quality, or a combination of all of these. But it’s apparent, at least to me, that the directing principle was a necessity. Will the top, once set to spinning, continue to spin on its own indefinitely? To tell the truth we have no idea. Time will tell.
Was a directing principle stepping forward inevitable? I think this is a re-statement of an old question: does a man make the times or do the times make the man. We’ll never know the answer to that one.
The blogosphere has no directing principle. There is no angel in this whirlwind.
If so, is a sovereign country a ‘cathedral’ to the terrorist’s ‘bazaar’? In other words, can Delphi-style terrorists be defeated by traditional top-down applications of power?
In one sense I answered this question in my response to the first question. Al Qaeda is no bazaar. In private correspondence with Dan Darling of Regnum Crucis, one of the blogosphere’s foremost experts on al Qaeda, I’ve suggested that a good analogy for al Qaeda rather than the typical multi-national company would be a franchise operation like McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Doughnuts. I notice that Dan has begun to include this analogy in his own analyses recently. Dan has pointed out that al Qaeda has a tendency to absorb its subsidiaries. Whatever the goals, methods, or philosophies of the pre-existing subsidiaries may have been originally, al Qaeda’s goals, methods, and philosophy come to predominate. It’s a sort of quality control.
But more importantly the U. S. is no cathedral. I’ve written about this before in my post Emergent Phenomena. The civil bureaucracy believes that we are a cathedral and they’d certainly like the U. S. to be one. But that’s a profound misunderstanding of our system.
A significant demonstration of my point i.e. that terrorist operations aren’t exhibiting the kinds of qualities that Marcus Tacitus is suggesting was in the seizing of School #1 in Beslan. There are multiple reports that the terrorists were taking directions by cell phone. This suggests a hierarchical organization making use of modern communications technology rather than some de-centralized command structure.
Dan Rather’s ‘cathedral’ career is on the line; is there equivalent accountability in the Blogosphere, where most users are anonymous?
Comparing an individual (Dan Rather) to an emergent phenomenon like the blogosphere is an apples and oranges comparison. The more correct comparison would be between the entire CBS News organization and the blogosphere. Do you know which editor at CBS News wrote the copy that Dan Rather is reading? There’s as much anonymity in Big Media as there in the blogosphere. Both have the same accountability: the accountability of the marketplace. Consumers are voting with their eyeballs. Or mice. Or remotes.
Is the war on terror a war against asymmetrical opposition? If so, how can we embrace asymmetry in technological and social development while we fight it’s darkest sociological side-effects?
Well, pretty clearly the terrorists’ approach in the War on Terror is using asymmetrical means. Americans by inclination and experience are much better suited to to a de-centralized and emergent phenomena approach the War on Terror than our enemy is. We have not yet begun to fight.
I’ve been working on a post for some time cataloguing how the Internet and the blogosphere is being used in the War on Terror and some ideas for how they can be exploited in the future. Watch this space.
Does the power of evaluation created by blogs always serve the cause of truth? What about Al Quaeda’s blogs, or ones in the Arab world? No doubt that in those blogospheres Jews are pigs and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the de facto truth. Can the Delphi Effect work against itself in a bazaar composed of closed minds laboring under a consensus of delusion?
Neither the Internet nor its child, the blogosphere, is about truth. They are about choice. That’s the point I made in my earlier post All the News That’s Fit to Type. We can choose to enter an echo chamber. Or we can listen to many voices. It’s our choice. I think the self-examining quality so typical of American life gives us an advantage here. But how we’ll respond to the new opportunities to stick our heads in the electronic sand remains to be seen.
Can the Blogosphere become the ultimate medium for a new kind of demagoguery? With over 100,000 readers a day, could someone like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs organize the ultimate flash mobs, if so inclined? That’s real power in this era. What are the limits of power available to bloggers?
Well, that’s already happening in both the left- and right-sides of the blogosphere and has been for some time. We’re living in interesting times.
While this examination has been fun, I honestly believe that Marcus Tacitus is being overly subtle in his analysis. What do the blogosphere, the development of Linux, and al Qaeda have in common? Answer: the Internet. Period. Al Qaeda is a hierarchical organization making effective use of modern technology including cell phones, email, web pages, and, I’m sure, blogs. Although organized horizontally the Linux development still required a Linus Torvalds to build upon the availalbe technologies and provide a guiding principle.
And the blogosphere is the ultimate in de-centralization. There’s no angel in the whirlwind there.
