Market Theocracy

The idea that this tiny group of committed individuals could with minimal expense create giant changes in British lawmaking is so inspiring that it suggests that there’s a future for this for other people. And there’s other examples of this: in the Philippines (Howard Rheingold writes about this in his Smart Mobs book), there was a televised corruption trial of the President and it was going very badly for the government, and so they ordered the televised hearings to be shut down. Within 15 minutes of the television sets going dark, twenty thousand people had mobilized to the presidential palace to demand that the broadcasts be opened up again, so that they could watch justice being done, so they could see to it that the corrupt government got what it deserved. And the way that those people mobilized was with text messages on cell phones.

The way that it happened was that someone sent someone else a message that said, “Be in front of the presidential palace in fifteen minutes, wear black, send this to everyone you know” — and that person sent it to everyone in their address book, who sent it to everyone in their address book, who sent it to everyone in their address book. Fifteen minutes later, there are 20,000 people in front of the presidential palace. The military was shitting bricks. They went to the people who were in the front of the crowd, who weren’t the leaders, because there were no leaders, and they said, “What can we do?” And these people said, “We don’t know what you can do, but there’s twenty thousand of us now, there’ll be half a million of us in an hour — I think you better turn the broadcast back on.” And they did.

Now the afterword to that is as important as the story itself, which is that the crowd dispersed, the government toppled, and a government that was just as bad was instated immediately afterwards, because these mobs don’t have a long attention span. They are ad hoc — they form and they dissolve almost immediately. Without a kind of vigilance, the mobs are only good at advancing destructive agendas (”this must go”), and not constructive agendas, [in which the mobs can] be replaced by something better.

So one of the things that I hope emerges from this kind of movement — one of the things that I hope that geeks come to as they build the tools that help them organize — is constructive agendas, a means whereby there’s follow-through, so that bad ideas aren’t just torn down, but replaced by good ones.

KM: I know that you gave two political philosophies for geekdom, and you consider both of them to be a bad idea, and slashdotting is where you think things will fall — do you ever think, if this is so successful in Britain, and at least partially in the Philippines, why hasn’t America done this?

CD: Well, we have, a little. Whether or not you believe the theory that bloggers ousted Trent Lott, there’s certainly no question that the media’s attention span was a lot longer in the case of Trent Lott than it typically is in scandals, and that the Trent Lott phenomenon was buoyed up by word of mouth as much as it was by the mass media — the mass media was kept honest. The battle of Seattle is another good example of this, where you had all these people who were involved in this political action, and the word from network headquarters for all the major news networks was: “This isn’t news, don’t show it on the local newscasts,” and there was no video distributed to the local newscasts. But what happened was the activists who were actually a part of this had camcorders, and they were shooting video, and were finding public 802.11 access points or ethernet drops and uploading the video to the Internet, and it was being watched in rural places all over America, and cities all over America, and people were calling up their local news stations and saying, “Here’s the URL for the footage, why isn’t it on your newscasts — there’s this incredible demonstration going on American soil, where’s the news coverage?”

(And I know people today who live that life. I mean, I have a friend who was a systems administrator for a company in San Francisco but living in Manchester, who would get up at one in the afternoon and go to bed at one in the morning, and whose only social contact was with stoned friends coming home from raves or the guys who worked at the all-night gas station with the sandwich machine where he bought his dinner — and there are people who work tech-support lines in the Philippines who keep much the same schedule, and there are hardcore gamers in Singapore who keep much the same schedule. . . .)

One of the things that we know about communities of intent, or indeed communities in general, is that they look out for each others’ interests, and when you’re geographically disparate, I think the way that you end up looking out for each others’ interest is by essentially forming favor-trading networks, like the Masons, like the Rotarians, like the Kiwanis. You can land in a strange town and the Kiwanis will help you get a job and an apartment if you’re a member.

[The characters in the novel] are members of quasi-Masonic societies, secret societies, who work to get each other jobs, and who also work to sabotage the jobs of other people, other tribes. They mostly work as management consultants, so they work for McKinsey and so on — and they go to other time zones and they sabotage them. They make bad recommendations to governments and businesses that make their companies and government less efficient, so that they can be steamrolled by the economic stability of some other region.