ATTW 2010 call for papers

Just forwarded to me. Comments below:

ATTW 2010
Synergies: The Intersections of Research and Teaching

13th Annual Conference
March 17, 2010
Louisville, KY

The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) invites proposals for papers, poster presentations, and workshops to be given at its annual conference immediately preceding the CCCC. The thirteenth annual conference will be held in Louisville, KY, on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. The full-day event includes concurrent sessions, poster presentations, workshops, book exhibits, and opportunities for exchanging ideas, working on projects, and networking in a supportive and challenging academic environment.

This year's conference will highlight ways that research informs teaching and teaching informs research. It will challenge researchers, teachers, and practitioners of technical and professional communication to push beyond the generic "implications for teaching" section appended to research articles to explore the synergies and questions available when we place research and teaching into conversation.

Submissions on all topics are welcome, but we especially encourage proposals that examine topics such as the following:

* the effectiveness of established or innovative pedagogies,
* a research question sparked by an observation in the classroom,
* pedagogical experiments sparked by research findings,
* the needs of the workplace, the university, the field, or the community and ways to meet or challenge these needs in service, major, or graduate courses,
* the roles, challenges, and benefits of instructional technologies,
* the implications of existing research for the design of programs and curriculum,
* pedagogies that can be used to teach research in the university and in the workplace,
* research methods that can be used to examine pedagogies,
* the relationships between teaching and research as they play out in different contexts within our discipline,
* directions for future research on pedagogy or questions raised by classroom experiences.

Proposals, limited to 300 words, are due October 5, 2009. All proposals will be peer reviewed. We offer three formats:

1. Regular Sessions: Individuals may submit proposals for 15-minute talks that will be placed on panels by conference organizers. Groups may submit proposals for 45-minute panel presentations. To submit proposals, follow the conference links at www.attw.org after September 21, 2009.

2. Poster Presentations: Posters will be on display throughout the day with special times dedicated for conversations about this work. Follow the same process for submission as for a regular session.

3. Workshop Sessions: The conference will include two 90-minute workshops overlapping with the regular sessions. Workshops that would help newcomers integrate into our field are especially encouraged. Please submit workshop proposals directly to Summer Taylor (slsmith@clemson.edu).

For additional information, contact the conference chair, Summer Taylor at Clemson University (slsmith@clemson.edu). New teachers of technical and professional communication are particularly invited to attend the conference, as are graduate students and CCCC attendees interested in technical and professional communication.

Just two comments. One is that although I highly encourage people to go, I won't be there this year. (I've decided to take a break from traveling, and only plan to go to SXSWi.)

The other is that although I understand the urge to "push beyond the generic 'implications for teaching' section appended to research articles," I've generally done that by not including implications for teaching. I don't have anything against implications for teaching, but not every study has those implications, and too often I see that subsection jammed into the end of TCR article manuscripts when implications for theory or methodology would be much more apt. I don't see that same tendency in any of the social sciences or most of the humanities, and I wonder if it's a generic convention left over from composition's emergence as a subfield.

Reading :: Terror in the Balance

Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts
By Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule

This book was one of several I received recently from Oxford University Press. I suppose it counts as pleasure reading, since it's far outside my expertise, focused on constitutional law. In any rate, I'll make this a short review since I don't have the ConLaw background to evaluate it critically on its own terms.

In a sense, that's what the book is about: deference to others' expertise. But in this case, deference is a more high-stakes issue, since the topic is: to what extent should the judiciary defer to the executive branch in times of crisis? The authors argue that the judiciary has traditionally given much deference to the executive branch in such periods, allowing it to temporarily compromise civil liberties because "civil liberties interfere with effective response to the threat" (p.4). This deference sometimes leads to bad decisions, they acknowledge, but they claim that "Both Congress and the judiciary realize that they do not have the expertise or the resources to correct the executive during an emergency. Only when the emergency wanes do these institutions reassert themselves, but this just shows that the basic constitutional structure remains unaffected by the emergency." They argue that "the traditional practice of judicial and legislative deference has served Americans well, and there is no reason to change it" (p.5).

The authors use some Bush-era cases as case studies, but they make clear that they do not defend particular choices on their merit (p.9). (Indeed, they say, many executive decisions are bad calls; they point to the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII as one.) Rather, they argue that deferring to the executive branch leads to swifter decision-making and does not lead to systematically biased decision-making. They further assert that as the emergency recedes, Congress and the judiciary reassert themselves, as in the Hamdan and Hamdi decisions that reined in some of the Bush Administration's earlier executive decisions.

The authors' arguments for this view are heavily based in ConLaw, a body of work - and, I suspect, a form of argumentation - with which I am unfamiliar. To me, the arguments look bloodless and Machiavellian, in the positive sense of being ruthlessly pragmatic rather than idealistic. I am not sure I find them convincing, particularly the point that the legal system can systematically bounce back from deference, but as I say, I don't have the ConLaw background or the historical background to take these on in a principled fashion.

I also thought that parts of the book were unfocused, particularly in Ch.6, where the authors take a detour to argue for narrowly legalizing coercive interrogation on pragmatic grounds. For me, this was the most uncomfortable part of the book: the authors acknowledge the moral issues with coercive interrogation, but argue that legalizing it would be the best pragmatic way to control it and meet our national moral obligations. As I said, the arguments are sometimes bloodless - and in this case, this shocking (to me) argument distracted from the book's central argument about judicial deference.

I did enjoy touring the legal system as a system, though. In any case, a thought-provoking book.

More on that SXSWi panel

As you recall, I've put together a South by Southwest Interactive panel on What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work. We've solidified the panel at this point, so here's what we're going to cover:

Clay Spinuzzi: I have been developing deep knowledge in how people collaborate day to day, especially in how they use innovations and technologies and how they organize their work in looser work relationships. I've written a couple of books on the topic (see the right bar of this blog). So I'll bring

• Detailed case studies of loose work organization, especially in Austin
• Comparisons of what motivates coworkers and coworking proprietors at different spaces in Austin
• Connections between these loose org trends and Austin's local economy

Drew Jones: Drew is a trained anthropologist and consultant who has been studying how work is changing as Gen Y takes over the workforce. He's involved in a consuntancy, Shift101, and a related coworking space, Shift Workspace. Drew literally (co)wrote the book on coworking and another on innovation. He'll bring

• A broad idea of work trends and generational trends across the country
• Deep experience in mentoring the broader coworking community and specifically coworking in his space
• Background on innovation

Gary Swart: Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk Corporation (www.odesk.com). oDesk facilitates connecting, maintaining, and building trust among online workteams. Gary will talk about the practical challenges of "loosely coupled, highly aligned teams working remotely, including our own use case of 70+ remote resources working directly for oDesk from around the world." He'll bring

• A broad international idea of how to connect workers in loose, sometimes ad hoc organizations
• International trends
  
• Trust and accountability building among people who haven't met face to face
  
• Strong, scalable, successful solutions for connecting people
• Case studies illustrating the above
• A CEO's perspective

Needless to say, I'm very excited about how the panel is taking shape. Please do click through and give us a thumbs up.

"Have you ever noticed how many, many people are writing and just how much writing there is in the world?"

At the NCTE Inbox blog, Millie Davis lists several pieces of quotidian writing that she has noticed: satellite information for farmers, testimonials for service providers, billboards, texting, etc. And she concludes, "Writing is a significant part of our lives—not just English-teacher lives but the lives of repair people, babysitters, kindergarten artists, pet-sitters, lawyers, bloggers, farmers, hospitality workers, truckers, travelers, advertisers, nurses, trades workers, and more." She says she has noticed these much more lately, since she has been thinking about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)-proposed National Day on Writing.

Yes: writing developed out of a quirky Sumerian accounting system to keep tributes straight, not to express great truths or arguments. And in a highly literate society it saturates every corner of our lives, from our workplaces to our streets to our bodies. Writing is everywhere, often rough, opportunistic, localized, pragmatic, and unrelated to the idealized formal genres that are valorized by so much of our formal schooling.

A writing teacher's discovery of quotidian writing is like a fish's discovery of water.

That's part of what makes the idea of a National Day on Writing so odd and unappealing to me: it's like having a national day on personal hygiene, or clothing, or walking. Writing is one of our most important skills, but it's also too generalized and far-reaching a skill, with too many untaught applications, to be defined by a professional teachers' group. Especially one whose members are surprised to discover that we are surrounded by texts.

From big brother to little sisters

So President Obama has been quoted as claiming in a conference call with rabbis that "we are God's partners in matters of life and death." Reported how? As Mickey Kaus points out, the reporting came from the live Twitter feed of one of the rabbis involved in the call, and that rabbi has now deleted the tweet. As I mentioned earlier, during the campaign, the explosion of peer-to-peer outlets, what Castells calls mass self-communication, means that nothing is private anymore - but as we can see in this instance, it also means that anything can be published, and absent recorded evidence, it's very difficult to verify.

Vote for my SXSWi panel!

I'm a little behind in promoting my SXSWi panel due to a recent trip. Please consider voting for it!

What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work
What happens when people can work anywhere - home offices, coffee shops, libraries, coworking spaces? With mobile computing, telecommunications, and broadband, knowledge workers are choosing new work arrangements and self-organizing in looser, more transient arrangements. We'll discuss these broad trends and what they mean for work, using coworking as a specific example.

Reading :: The Information Society and the Welfare State

The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model
By Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen

Given my interest in the Nordic countries' "third way" between socialism and capitalism, I was eager to pick up this book, which is an attempt to examine how Castells' discussion of the information society fares in the Finnish welfare state. The authors emphasize that Silicon Valley is not the only model for the information society - we won't become a planet of Silicon Valleys - and they set out to examine Finland's development as another model.

Unfortunately, this book is not the sort of expansive theorization that I have enjoyed so much with some of Castells' other books. It is filled with statistics and case studies about the Finnish economy, it seems to incisively examine Finland's upcoming challenges, and it does note the fact that Finns have traditionally resisted flexible work because it threatens to weaken the welfare state. This is all good and valuable work, but unless you have a specific interest in Finland's development, it may not be riveting to you.

Reading :: The Internet Galaxy

The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
By Manuel Castells

So I'm continuing my tour through Manuel Castells' books, of which there seem to be too many to count. Castells writes books like I write articles. This particular book was based on the author's Clarenden Lectures in 1999 – pre-crash, pre-9/11, pre-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq - and originally published in 2001; I read the 2003 reprint. With all that has happened since it was published, though, the book is surprisingly fresh and relevant. That's particularly true as I work through some case studies I've been conducting into net work here in Austin.

Castells' central argument here is that "the Internet is the basis for the organizational form of the Internet Age: the network" (p.1). Networks have been around for a long time, he allows, but information technologies have allowed them to "take on new life" (p.1). He adds:

Networks have extraordinary advantages as organizing tools because of their inherent flexibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive and prosper in a fast-changing environment. This is why networks are proliferating in all domains of the economy and society, outcompeting and outperforming vertically organized corporations and centralized bureaucracies. (p.1)

However, "They have had considerable difficulty in coordinating functions, in focusing resoruces on specific goals, and in accomplishing a given task, beyond a certain size and complexity of the network" (p.2; this is familiar territory for those who have read about networks in business and warfare). Castells refers here to the problem of scaling that has traditionally limited networks to "primarily the preserve of private life" (p.2). But

Now, however, the introduction of computer-based information and communication technologies, and particularly the Internet, enables networks to deploy their flexibility and adaptability, thus asserting their evolutionary nature. At the same time, these technologies allow the coordination of tasks, and management of complexity. This results in an unprecedented combination of flexibility and task performance, of coordinated decision-making and decentralized execution, of individualized expression and global, horizontal communication, which provide a superior organizational form for human action. (p.2)

IT-powered networks, particularly the Internet, are now structuring "Core economic, social, political, and cultural activities throughout the planet," and "exclusion from these networks is one of the most damaging forms of exclusion in our economy and in our culture" (p.3; cf. Castells' discussion of "black holes" in End of Millennium).

Castells goes on to discuss the culture of the Internet in Chapter 2, particularly "the producers/users at the source of the Internet's creation and configuration" (p.36). He argues that the Internet culture has four layers: "the techno-meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture, and the entrepreneurial culture" (p.37). He describes the four in more detail than I intend to do here; let's skip forward a bit.

In the next chapter, Castells moves on to e-Business and the new economy, where he drops this interesting statistic:

as of 2001, about 80 percent of the transactions over the web are B2B [business-to-business], and this implies a profound reorganization of the way in which business operates. Internal networks, by which employees communicate among themselves and with their management, are critical for the performance of the firm. The entire business organization needs to conform to the Internet-based technology through which it relates to customers and suppliers. Furthermore, as individual entrepreneurs blossom in this kind of economy, linkages between consultants, subcontractors, and firms over the web become as significant as the firm's own operations. What is emerging is not a dot.com economy, but a networked economy with an electronic nervous system. (p.65)

He describes "e-business": "By using the Internet as a fundamental medium of communication and information-processing, business adopts the network as its organizational form" (p.66). This transformation "permeates throughout the entire economic system" (p.66). He refers to his earlier work on the "networked enterprise," I.e., "the organizational form built around business projects resulting from the cooperation between different components of different firms, networking among themselves for the duration of a given business project, and reconfiguring their networks for the implementation of each project" (p.67). So "the network is the enterprise":

While the firm continues to be the unit of accumulation of capital, property rights (usually), and strategic management, business practice is performed by ad hoc networks. These networks have the flexibility and adaptability required by a global economy subjected to relentless technological innovation and stimulated by rapidly changing demand. (p.67)

Using case studies of companies such as Nokia and Cisco, Castells argues that although "the network enterprise preceded the diffusion of the Internet," the Internet "enables scalability, interactivity, management of flexibility, branding, and customization in a networked business world" (p.76, his emphasis). He discusses each of these, but I'll zero in on customization, which Yrjo Engestrom has also examined in terms of the new economy in terms of co-configuration.

Customization, Castells says, is

the key to the new form of conducting business. Cultural change, and the diversity of global demand, make it increasingly difficult to resort to standardized, mass production to satisfy the market. On the other hand, economies of scale still count, prompting the need for high-volume production as a way to lower marginal costs per unit. The right mix between volume and customized production can be achieved by operating a large-scale network of production, yet customizing the final product (be it good or service) to the individual consumer. This is accomplished by personalized, iterative, on-line interaction. But it is also helped by automated profiling incorporated into the model of on-line transactions, which allows business to target specific customer preferences. ... If customization is the key to competitiveness in the new global economy, the Internet is the essential tool to ensure customization in a context of high-volume production and distribution. (p.77)

So "Thus, what the Internet adds to the network enterprise model of business is its capacity to evolve organically with innovation, production systems, and market demand, while keeping its focus on the ultimate goal of any business: money-making" (p.77). And the Internet has changed money-making as well, by transforming financial markets (p.79); "the stock market valuation of firms has increasingly diverged from their measured book value" (p.85) because this transformation has made intangibles more valuable "in an economy where well over half of the workers process information" (p.88). In this economy, where 1.5 billion GB of information are generated each year, "The e-conomy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process" (p.90).

Such labor "must be able to reprogram itself, in skills, knowledge, and thinking to change tasks in an evolving business environment" (pp.90-91. And that self-programmable labor takes education that is oriented toward continual expansion or (as others have termed it) lifelong learning. But it also takes a certain environment, because "self-programmable labor cannot deploy its capacity in a traditional, rigid, business environment. ... The e-firm, on-line or off-line, is based on a flat hierarchy, a teamwork system, and open, easy interaction between workers and managers, across departments and between levels of the firm. The network enterprise is enacted by net-workers, using Internet capability, and equipped with their own intellectual capital" (p.91).

Such labor also tends to be operationally autonomous, particularly in small businesses and consultant-subcontractor networks (p.92). "These business entrepreneurs own their means of production (a computer, a telephone line, a mobile phone, a place somewhere, often at home, their education, their experience, and, the main asset, their minds)" (p.92; cf. Drucker, who states in Post-Capitalist Society that knowledge workers' minds are their means of production). Castells recalls a division he described in earlier writings: "the distinction between self-programmable labor and generic labor," i.e., between labor that can't and can be generalized, automated, or codified (p.94). He argues that "the entire labor force should become self-programmable" (p.95). And he stresses that both types of labor must become more flexible. (Again, Drucker addresses this issue as well in Post-Capitalist Society, drawing the distinction between knowledge work and other types of labor, such as manufacturing and agriculture.) Indeed, in the knowledge economy, "innovation is the primordial function" (p.100).

On to the next chapter, in which Castells tries to untangle the differences between virtual communities and networks. The term "community," he complains, confuses different forms of social relations (p.125). He sees the residential community fading away as "a meaningful form of sociability" (p.126) and argues that understanding current social interaction requires redefining community: "de-emphasizing its cultural component, emphasizing its supportive role to individuals and families, and de-linking its social existence from a single kind of material support" (p.127). He quotes Barry Wellman's definition of communities as networks, then adds that

Naturally, the key matter here is the displacement from community to network as the central form of organizing interaction. Communities, at least in the tradition of sociological research, were based on the sharing of values and social organization. Networks are built by the choices and strategies of social actors, be it individuals, families, or social groups. Thus, the major transformation of sociability in complex societies took place with the substitution of networks for spatial communities as major forms of sociability. (p.127)

Right, and although the Internet has accellerated that substitution, other networks – telephone and roadway systems, for instance – had already begun that work.

In the next chapter, Castells discusses networked social movements, including the Zapatistas (who he had discussed in previous work) and Falun Gong (p.138). In movements such as these, the Internet becomes "the indispensible component of the kind of social movements emerging in the network society" (p.139). That's because "social movements in the Information Age are essentially mobilized around cultural values" (p.140); because social movements "have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era" (p.140); and because of the globalization of movements (p.142). For the second point, Castells draws on the example of the WTO protests in Seattle, as I discussed in a recent post.

The second feature characterizing social movements in the network society is that they have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era. Mass political parties, when and where they still exist, are empty shells, barely activated as electoral machines at regular intervals. Trade unions survive only by abandoning their traditional forms of organization, historically built as replicas of the rational bureaucracies characteristic of large corporations and state agencies. Formal civic associations, and their organizational conglomerates, are in full decline as forms of social engagement ... This is not to say that people do not organize and mobilize in defense of their interests or in the affirmation of their values. But loose coalitions, semi-spontaneous organizations, and ad hoc movements of the neo-anarchist brand substitute for permanent, structured, formal organizations. Emotional movements, often triggered by a media event, or by a major crisis, seem often to be more important sources of social change than the day-to-day routine of dutiful NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. The Internet becomes an essential medium of expression and organization for these kinds of manifestation, which coincide in a given time and space, make their impact through the media world, and act upon institutions and organizations (business, for instance) by the repercussions of their impact on public opinion. These are movements to seize the power of the mind, not state power. (pp.140-141, my emphasis)

The Seattle WTO protests were characterized by

a vast coalition of extremely different, and even contradictory, interests and values, from the battalions of the American labor movement to the swarms of eco-pacifists, environmentalists, women's groups, and a myriad of alternative groups, including the pagan community. The activists of Direct Action Network provided the training and organizational skills for many protestors. But the movement was based on the exchange of information, on previous months of heated political debate on the Internet, that preceded the individual and collective decisions to go to Seattle and to try to block the meeting of what was perceived as an institution enforcing "globalization without representation." (p.141, my emphasis)

The WTO case has been discussed extensively in the netwar literature, and Castells in particular acknowledges the work of Arquilla and Ronfeldt, "in my view the leading analysts of security affairs in the informationalist paradigm" (p.158; I agree, of course). Castells is taken with the idea of noopolitik, which I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Let's skip a bit again, since some of this work is redundant with Castells' other work. In the chapter "The Geography of the Internet," Castells points out that the Age of the Internet hasn't obviated geography; the Internet Age is not the end of cities (p.224), because "the networked economy ... is an economy made of up very large, interconnected metropolitan regions" (p.225), because such "territorial complexes" facilitate innovation and synergy (p.226). Similarly, he throws cold water on the idea that a substantial number of people will work from home (pp.231-232). (My current studies suggest that working from home limits the sort of networking one must do in order to establish and exploit contacts, particularly potential subcontractors.) Rather than the home worker, we get the nomadic worker: wireless and mobile Internet access mean that people can work from various locations, desk assignments are reduced, and workers spend more time in the field (p.234). The result is

a multiple configuration of work spaces. The overwhelming majority of people do have workplaces to which they go regularly. But many also work from home (not instead of, but in addition to, their usual workplace), they work from their cars, trains, and planes, from their airports and their hotels, on their vacations and in the night – they are always on call, as their beepers and mobile phones never stop ringing. The individualization of working arrangements, the multi-location of the activity, and the ability to network all these activities around the individual worker, usher in a new urban space, the space of endless mobility, a space made of flows of information and communication, ultimately managed with the Internet. (p.234)

I'll just add here that we can include buses, coffee shops, and waiting rooms (where I do much of my work) as well as coworking spaces and libraries. Since Castells wrote this passage, laptops have become far more powerful and inexpensive, mobile phone lines have become more numerous than landlines, smartphones have become more powerful, free wifi has become common in urban areas, and social networking/status broadcasting technologies such as Facebook and Twitter allow us to tell our personal networks what we are doing right now.

Hand in hand with this trend, Castells notes that the trend in knowledge work is not toward complete control and monitoring of individual workers, as has been feared:

What management of information requires is, in fact, the opposite: to give workers as much initiative as they can handle, under conditions defined and organized by management. The informal transmission of information, tacit knowledge of the company, group dynamics, and economies of scale for advanced telecommunications equipment seem to be among the key elements underlying the growth of these "electronic communication factories" that become a new form of workplace in the Internet economy. (p.233)

Reading this book, several things strike me.

One is the convergence among Castells' work, the netwar literature (of which Castells reviews only a small part), and some of Drucker's work. In fact, I don't think that Castells ever cites Drucker in the books I've read, and Drucker certainly doesn't cite Castells, but they seem to note many of the same phenomena. Their orientations are quite different, but beneath the surface they have much in common (beyond the fact that they are both prolific writers). Both have influenced the discussion of netwar, which encourages me since I am seeing many parallels between netwar and networked business practices.

Another thing that strikes me is that this book seems prescient in some of its implications for work, particularly, as I said earlier, in the cases of distributed work organization I'm studying in Austin. Inside, outside, and between organizations, people are increasingly mobile, increasingly autonomous in operational terms, increasingly able to enact separations between self-programmable and generic labor, and increasingly able to turn what was once self-programmable into generic labor by leveraging protocols, APIs, and automation. So, although Castells seems prescient in examining implications, I think that networked organizations have still moved beyond what he describes in 2001 in terms of decentralization, mobility, flexibility, and change. I'll be developing these thoughts further as I continue to develop these cases.

I'm not sure I would recommend every Castells book, but if you're interested in how the Internet is changing work and society, this is a good place to start. It's more accessible and up-to-date than his Information Age trilogy, but it still bundles the most relevant of those ideas, and it does so in a readable fashion. I recommend it highly.

In the Pipeline

I'm a little behind on blogging book reviews due to the end-of-summer crunch, but here's some of the books in the pipeline - books I've either finished or am working on. I hope to post reviews over the next few weeks.

• The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model by Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen
• The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society by Manuel Castells
• Communication Power by Manuel Castells
• Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts by Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule
• Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age by Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot and Paulo Amaral

About those health care bill town halls

In the last week, members of Congress have gone back to their districts to hold town hall meetings about pending health care reform legislation, and have been surprised by vociferous opposition. Congressional members have characterized this opposition as "astroturfing." In addressing these ongoing protests or disruptions, Mickey Kaus puckishly asks: "If an 'astroturfing' campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing?"

I think the answer is yes and no - these protests aren't wholly manufactured, but at the same time they are not community organizing in the traditional sense. They could be characterized as swarming. And reading them through the traditional grassroots/astroturf dichotomy is not productive because they are a different sort of organization.

To explain myself, let me start with a quote from Manuel Castells:

The second feature characterizing social movements in the network society is that they have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era. Mass political parties, when and where they still exist, are empty shells, barely activated as electoral machines at regular intervals. Trade unions survive only by abandoning their traditional forms of organization, historically built as replicas of the rational bureaucracies characteristic of large corporations and state agencies. Formal civic associations, and their organizational conglomerates, are in full decline as forms of social engagement ... This is not to say that people do not organize and mobilize in defense of their interests or in the affirmation of their values. But loose coalitions, semi-spontaneous organizations, and ad hoc movements of the neo-anarchist brand substitute for permanent, structured, formal organizations. Emotional movements, often triggered by a media event, or by a major crisis, seem often to be more important sources of social change than the day-to-day routine of dutiful NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. The Internet becomes an essential medium of expression and organization for these kinds of manifestation, which coincide in a given time and space, make their impact through the media world, and act upon institutions and organizations (business, for instance) by the repercussions of their impact on public opinion. These are movements to seize the power of the mind, not state power. (Castells, The Internet Galaxy pp.140-141, my emphasis)

Castells doesn't use the example of the current protests, because he's writing not in 2009, but 2001. His paradigmatic example is that of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, a case that has been examined as a paradigmatic case of netwar. This case was characterized by

a vast coalition of extremely different, and even contradictory, interests and values, from the battalions of the American labor movement to the swarms of eco-pacifists, environmentalists, women's groups, and a myriad of alternative groups, including the pagan community. The activists of Direct Action Network provided the training and organizational skills for many protestors. But the movement was based on the exchange of information, on previous months of heated political debate on the Internet, that preceded the individual and collective decisions to go to Seattle and to try to block the meeting of what was perceived as an institution enforcing "globalization without representation." (Castells, The Internet Galaxy p.141, my emphasis)

Castells notes that these individuals and groups had a common tactical goal, but not a common ideological or strategic objective. Radicalized, violent elements such as anarchists marched alongside those with far less radical agendas. Readers of this blog may be reminded of John Robb's Brave New War, in which he describes the insurgency in Iraq: loosely affiliated or unaffiliated groups, often with differing ideologies, can share information and resources and "coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets" (Robb, Brave New War p.16). Like the Seattle protestors that Castells describes, these groups coordinate loosely over the Internet and mobile phones, as well as through media reports, which publicize their successes and therefore present a blueprint for further groups to construct their own disruptions.

Castells' protestors and Robb's insurgents sound a lot like the knowledge work organizations that Drucker describes in Post-Capitalist Society: loose, decentralized, flexible, always moving. That's not too surprising, since both Castells and Drucker claim that such organizations have begun to characterize our workplaces, our leisure, and our civic engagement. Information technology, particularly the Internet and mobile phones, has allowed people to create loose ties and connect with like-minded people outside their own communities. In fact, Castells does a good job of examining this shift in his earlier book The Power of Identity, in which he evenhandedly examines the black-helicopter crowd, the Zapatistas, and Aum Shinrikyo as examples of networked organizations enabled partially through information technologies. Castells confesses sympathy for the Zapatistas and unhappiness about the other two cases, but he emphasizes that the three work structurally similarly; they are manifestations of the same shift.

Fast forward a few years, and we see this sort of loose networked organization entering partisan US politics. A president, fresh from an electoral victory, proposes sweeping reform of an ailing sector but leaves the details up to Congress. Over a break, Congresspeople hold town meetings to sell the plan, but the meetings are swarmed by vocal citizens who are affiliated with partisan groups and coordinated via the Internet. Shocked, the Congresspeople attempt to lock down the town halls, then shut them down entirely, characterizing the citizens as centrally coordinated mobs. The year is 2005; the issue is Social Security reform; the President is President Bush; the bill is DOA.

Now, in 2009, some on the Right are bringing up these 2005 protests to suggest moral equivalence as they defend the health care protests. That's certainly not my aim; I'm not after evaluating either protest morally. I am rather arguing that such networked protests, as Howard Rheingold said about the tea parties, are "a hybrid of top-down and grassroots organization." They are an evolution of the netwar tactics that Castells describes, tactics that temporarily tie together groups with little ideological coherence in order to counter proposed change. In that sense, they are decentralized, reactionary and counterstrategic, even though some represented groups have longer-term strategic objectives. They're going to become more prevalent, I think, since we are encountering such structures in business and leisure as well. And they're going to continue changing form over time as people leverage more information technologies.

This year's technology is Internet video, which protesters have leveraged to self-report their protests. The Drudge Report had at least four links to such videos yesterday, and Instapundit, which has reported on continuing "tea parties" since they started, has more. The unexpected opposition has led some representatives to say things they probably regret:

"This bill is un-American,” said another voter, who asked whether Kratovil has read it.

“I am reading it right now,” he said.

Such statements feed the narrative that the bill is being rushed through without due diligence, the contingency that unites many of these otherwise ideologically incoherent citizens. As Kaus intimates, these people appear to be there of their own free will, and they don't appear to have signed onto a unified slate: Birthers, anti-immigration folks, Libertarians, fiscal conservatives, senior citizens worried about Medicare, Blue Dog Democrats, Reagan Republicans, etc. don't have a lot of ideological common ground, just as union representatives and anarchists didn't have a lot in common in Seattle. But for these point protests, they only needed a common tactical goal. They "just say no," because, like the WTO protestors, they are united in tactical opposition rather than strategic objectives. And they come into contact and network with those who have similar tactical goals through information technologies that also help them to rapidly coordinate. All these strands come together in yesterday's AP report on one event (my emphasis):

Some of the activists who've shown up at town hall meetings held recently by Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Wis., and others are affiliated with loosely connected right-leaning groups, including Conservatives for Patients' Rights and Americans for Prosperity, according to officials at those groups. Some of the activists say they came together during the "Tea Party" anti-big-government protests that happened earlier this year, and they've formed small groups and stayed in touch over e-mail, Facebook and in other ways.

But they insist they're part of a ground-level movement that represents real frustration with government spending and growth.

"There isn't any group that's backing me, who's influenced me, who's pushing me to do this," said Robert A. Mitchell, a small business owner from Doylestown, Pa., who questioned Specter at a weekend town hall event about lawmakers failing to read legislation.

Note that the Tea Party protests earlier this year, which were characterized as incoherent, were networking opportunities that allowed people to make initial connections. They were able to maintain these loose ties via Internet services, and could then deploy spontaneously.

The initial response of Congress and the White House was to portray these people as dupes, liars, and worse. Now, the White House is now urging Congresspeople to pack town halls with their own supporters, a tactic that will probably result in charges that Congress is astroturfing. The problem is that such tactics assume centralized control. If I'm right in applying Castells, Robb, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, and others, that assumption is incorrect and such counterprotest measures will backfire. In fact, they will likely give protestors more common ground - protestors who are undoubtedly exchanging phone numbers and email addresses at these meetups.

So let's go back to Kaus' question. "If an 'astroturfing' campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing?" I said the answer was yes and no. Yes in that these people are genuine citizens, genuinely concerned for a number of ideological reasons, perhaps most of which are not commonly held. No, because these are not communities in the traditional sense of the term, nor is this organizing in the traditional sense. In that sense, they are very similar to the knowledge workers I've been studying in Austin, independent actors who come together in federations, swarm a problem, then disperse at the end of the project, only to come together in different combinations for subsequent problems.

I'll end by stating again that in examining this development, I am not taking a side - even if there were a side to take. Protesters - of the WTO, of Social Security reform, of health care reform, etc. - don't necessarily have a coherent side, any more than federations of knowledge workers do. In describing this tactical development, I'm not endorsing any of these groups, any more than I would be endorsing Nazi Germany by analyzing the Blitzkrieg.

In fact, I worry considerably about the transition period as netwar-style protests become more frequent and more broadly deployed. At present they are disruptive, reactive, and tactical, and I don't see hope for more ideologically coherent or lasting movements based on them. Since it's easier to protest what is than to build what isn't, in the short term these protests are more likely to encourage gridlock and inaction than they are to move us toward productive development. The White House has increased this danger by handling opposition through central coordination, even setting up a centralized clearinghouse for reporting rumors about health care (like a trouble ticket system), rather than by pushing discretion to the level of individual Representatives in individual Congressional districts; they have centralized rather than decentralized, creating a single point of tactical failure for swarms of loosely affiliated agents to exploit. Just like the town hall meetings of 2005 and 2009.

Reading :: Post-Capitalist Society

Post-Capitalist Society
By Peter F. Drucker

When I blogged Drucker's The Concept of the Corporation recently, David Ronfeldt commented that his favorite book was Post-Capitalist Society. So I picked it up on my next library run. It was riveting. Written nearly 50 years after The Concept of the Corporation, this book looks back on everything that had happened since - starting with the GI Bill of Rights, which Drucker says "signaled the shift to the knowledge society" (p.3). In this new society, the nation-state is only one, not the only unit of political integration (p.4) (cf. Castells). And the knowledge society is post-capitalist - not Marxist, as so many had assumed (p.4), but not capitalist either. The decisive factor of production is not capital, not land, not labor, but knowledge (p.6). And in this post-capitalist society, traditional work has shrunk to only a sixth or an eighth of the workforce; "the classes of the post-capitalist society are knowledge workers and service workers" (p.6).

Drucker's argument here is interesting and in some places quite daring, and frankly, reading it just before Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class made the latter book look thin and pedestrian. Drucker argues strongly that knowledge is now, and will be, the basic economic resource; value is created via productivity and innovation. The leading social groups will be knowledge workers, "who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use," and "practically all of these knowledge people will be employed in organizations" (p.8). So "the economic challenge of the post-capitalist society will therefore be the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker" but "the social challenge of the post-capitalist society will, however, be the dignity of the second class in post-capitalist society: the service workers" (p.8). Service workers will constitute a majority, he says, but will lag because they will have trouble increasing their productivity.

Drucker argues further that post-capitalist polity will involve nation-states networking with internal, external, and transnational entities; they will continue to be powerful players, but they will no longer be the only players (p.11).

Let's get back to the transition from capitalism to the knowledge society. Drucker argues that knowledge went from being a private to a public good almost overnight. Up to the 1700s, abstract knowledge was distinguished from techne, or skill - which, divorced from general principles, could only be learned via apprenticeship (p.27). But around 1700, knowledge became a public good, described by what until then could have been considered an oxymoron: technology, techne + logy, skill + organized, purposeful knowledge (pp.27-28). and we get the Industrial Revolution, in which knowledge was applied to tools, processes, and products (p.19).

But soon - relatively speaking - knowledge was applied not just to tools, processes, and products, but also to work itself - yielding the Productivity Revolution (p.32), in which individuals became more productive. Drucker argues that until Taylor, no one thought that work could yield more except by working longer or harder (p.34). But under Taylorism, workers could become more productive by applying knowledge to their work. Drucker argues that Taylor has been grievously misquoted and that the majority of the benefits of Taylorism flowed to the workers (p.34). Taylor also argued that authority in the plant must be based on superior knowledge, not on ownership of the plant (p.36). Taylorism, Drucker argues, was what transformed unskilled sharecroppers into skilled shipbuilders in 60-90 days, enabling it to build a new fleet for World War II far, far faster than the Germans had anticipated (p.36).

Taylorism, of course, also led to the death of lifelong employment and the advent of lifelong learning (p.37). After WWII, Drucker argues, "Taylor-based training became the one truly effective engine of economic development" (p.37). And as people became more productive, they became middle class. "This explains the total failure of Marxism," Drucker says confidently (p.39).

At the same time, Taylor-based training and its yields in productivity have meant that fewer and fewer people are involved in "making or moving things": when Taylor began, 90% of workers did this sort of work, but "by 2010 they will form no more than one tenth" of the workforce (p.40). So "from now on, what matters is the productivity of non-manual workers. And that requires applying knowledge to knowledge" (p.40). This third transformation is called the Management Revolution. It involves "supplying knowledge to find out how existing knowledge can best be applied to produce results" (i.e., management), but "knowledge is now also being applied systematically and purposefully to define what new knowledge is needed, whether it is feasible, and what has to be done to make knowledge effective. It is being applied, in other words, to systematic innovation" (p.42).

So now we get to organizations. Organizations, Drucker argues, must weld together "knowledges" (or specializations of knowledge) into "a single, unified knowledge" (p.50). This is the reason for organization and its task, Drucker says (p.50). Organizations concentrate on a single task; diversification destroys performance capacity (p.53). "Organization is a tool. As with any tool, the more specialized its given task, the greater its performance capacity" (p.53). Yet "results in an organization are always pretty far away from what each member contributes" (p.55). So, to ensure that people understand how their work contributes to the organization, an organization's "task and mission [must] be crystal clear. Results need to be defined clearly and unambiguously - and, if at all possible, measurably" (p.55). Indeed, that's vital, since in knowledge work organizations, the critical competition is for "its most essential resource: qualified, knowledgeable, dedicated people" (p.56). And given that resource, management's "job in the knowledge organization is not to command: it is to direct" (p.57).

Unlike older institutions,

the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change. It must be organized for innovation ... It must be organized for systematic abandonment of the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable - whether products, services, and processes, human and social relationships, skills, or organizations themselves. It is the very nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today's certainties will be tomorrow's uncertainties. (p.57).

So "every organization of today has to build into its very structure the management of change" (p.59). That includes "organized abandonment of everything it does"; "the ability to create the new" (p.59); the ability to exploit its own successes by developing new applications (p.60).

Drucker adds that "post-capitalist society has to be decentralized. Its organizations must be able to make fast decisions, based on closeness to performance, closeness to the market, closeness to technology, closeness to the changes in society, environment, and demographics, all of which must be seen and utilized as opportunities for innovation." And he continues: "Organizations in the post-capitalist society thus constantly upset, disorganize, and destabilize the community" (p.60).

Drucker believes in the organization: "Knowledge workers can work only because there is an organization for them to work in. In that respect, they are dependent. But at the same time, they own the 'means of production,' that is, their knowledge" (p.64). Whereas workers own the means of production, "Somebody else, the organization, has the tools of production" (p.66).

Enough about organization; Drucker moves to labor and capital. He's frustrated that while Japan and the US were both seeing manufacturing gains and manufacturing job losses, the US interpreted this change as a bad thing - the US saw manufacturing jobs as an asset, while in Japan they were seen as a liability. Productivity is the proper measure, Drucker argues (p.70). (Imagine what his reaction to the recent GM and Chrysler bankruptcies would be.) Capital is another matter; he argues that the only real capitalists left are those who manage the vast pension funds - and he foresees our current situation, warning that "no safeguards at all exist against the most serious danger: the looting for political purposes of the pension funds of government employees" (p.75). That danger is critical because of the lengthening of life expectancy (p.76)

On to productivity of knowledge work. Drucker argues that the productivity of knowledge and service work is critical, but it may actually be going down rather than up (p.83). So how to improve it? Drucker argues that teamwork has to be reorganized to better address the type of work it accomplishes: for repetitive tasks with well-known rules, it should resemble baseball - just as modern mass production did (p.87). For crisis teams, the work should be orchestrated and rehearsed, but flexible enough to address contingencies, like soccer. And for a well-calibrated team that faces unpredictable challenges, the team should be small (7-9 people, max), with preferred rather than fixed positions and fluid adjustment to each others' weaknesses, like a tennis doubles team (pp.87-88). Drucker states that although "most work in large American companies was organized on the baseball team model," information technologies are aiding the development of the other two models (p.89).

Drucker argues here that "Workers must be required to take responsibility for their own productivity, and to exercise control over it" (p.92). (I immediately thought of GTD here.) And "productivity in knowledge work and service work demands that we build continuous learning into the job and into the organization"; he advocates that people learn by teaching others how to do their jobs (p.92).

In chapter 5, Drucker argues that organizations must be responsibility-based (p.97). Information has transformed organizations, and in knowledge work, the organization in increasingly composed of "specialists, each of which knows more about his or her own specialty than anybody else in the organization." In such organizations, superiors may not know the jobs of their subordinates; they can't "appraise what the specialist actually contributes" (p.107). So management must shift from command to information; all members of the organization must "take responsibility for that organization's objectives, contribution, and, indeed, for its behavior as well" (p.108). Subordinates give way to associates (p.108).

Drucker moves on in Chapter 6 to the "Megastate," where he argues that we have reached "the age of the post-sovereign state" (p.113). I'll skip this chapter except to say that Drucker's not a fan of the megastate, the heavy-spending, heavy-taxing state that provides an increasing number of services and takes on an increasing amount of debt. Its one success, he says, has been to avoid World War III (p.140). Indeed, as he argues in Chapter 7, the sovereign nation-state is threatened by internationalism, regionalism, and increasingly within its borders by tribalism (p.152). What we need, he says, is a third sector between [correction 2009.08.04: David Ronfeldt suggests in the comments that the correct expression is not "between" but "alongside and in addition to"] the public sector of government and the private sector of enterprise: the social sector. The megastate, he says, has all but destroyed citizenship; a social sector could revive it (p.171). He sees hope for a social sector in the large number of volunteers searching for community (p.176) and the many opportunities for growing leaders in churches and nonprofits (p.177).

Okay, let's wrap it up. I have more sticky notes, but you get the gist of this very long review. The book reads the way you might expect: a senior scholar (84 at the time) reflects back over the many decades of his work and draws lessons. He doesn't get much into citations or spend much time reflecting on his opposition; he's more interested in getting out his broad vision of what has happened and what he believes needs to happen. For those reasons, I imagine that reading Drucker will rub some people the wrong way. But I found the book to be exciting, even though I don't agree with all of it (and will probably argue against some points in a later article). This is smart work, showing an innovative point of view, proposing some startling solutions. I don't expect Drucker's policy recommendations to be folded into either political party's platform anytime soon, and perhaps for that reason, I can enjoy reading about them.

All in all, definitely a book to pick up.

Reading :: The Shield and the Cloak

The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons
By Gary Hart

The Shield and the Cloak was cited in Arquilla's Worst Enemy, which I recently reviewed, and I was intrigued enough to pick up a copy. Like Worst Enemy, this book, written by longtime Democratic senator and onetime Presidential candidate Gary Hart, focuses on how we might go about achieving security in the 21st century. And it provided an interesting contrast with Robb's Brave New War, which I had just finished reading when I picked up Hart's book. So I was initially very optimistic about this book.

Hart argues that there are two kinds of security: the shield and the cloak. In the past we have focused on the shield: "The narrow definition of security is the prevention of physical harm by creating a protective shield" (p.17). But, he says, we also need to provide the cloak: "The broader definition of security includes the opportunity for a stable livelihood, the chance to be productive, the comfort of community in a healthy environment, and confidence in the integrity of government - all representing a cloak of protection. Genuine security requires a cloak of economic security, environmental security, health security, energy security, and educational security" (p.17).

Hart continues:

To a degree, the difference in these definitions flows from a difference in outlook on life. If one believes that life is dangerous, that each of us is pretty much alone, that each must make his own way, that our moral duty is to ourselves alone, and that the government's job is to protect us and otherwise leave us alone, then the leaner definition of security as a shield will probably suffice.

If however, one senses that we are all members of a community, that we have a responsibility to look out for each other, that we are all in this together, and that our moral duty is to help to create a general sense of well-being, then one is necessarily drawn to the richer definition of security as a cloak and collective obligation. From the difference in these philosophical dispositions flows political parties and, ultimately, national policies. (pp.17-18, my emphasis)

Yes, go ahead and read it again. Hart has sketched out a Manichean understanding of security, built on a similarly Manichean reading of the US' political parties, essentially claiming that Republicans are by philosophy extreme Libertarians or Objectivists, while Democrats are people who genuinely care for other people. It's an extremely unrealistic depiction of the parties. It assumes a degree of party unity that is simply not present in either party. It assumes that community-building is either a governmental function or no function at all - something that is hinted at in this quote and clarified in the remainder of the text, and that ignores how people in both parties have worked with nongovernmental social sector institutions. It's an unnecessarily partisan text, and Hart's political enemies are made to seem dull, venal, and wrongheaded throughout.

Those enemies are not just on the Right: Hart grumbles that Pres. Clinton did not act on his idea to "appoint a commission of elders to consider where America was to go following the end of the Cold War" (p.35), but did eventually act on Newt Gingrich's "similar, but considerably more limited, version of the same idea" (p.36). The way Hart tells it, if people had just listened to him earlier, things would be much better: indeed, he even claims that had he been elected President in 1988, the Cold War would have ended sooner (p.35).

But, frankly, his analysis does not inspire confidence in me. Hart sees some of the same threats that Robb sees: fourth-generation warfare, private security companies, the loss of the state's ability to extend protection and a safety net. But whereas Robb was willing to go out on a limb with radically decentralized solutions, Hart's impulse is to double down: centralize Homeland Security, extend the social safety net further, increase governmental services, eliminate hunger worldwide, increase economic interdependence between states. These measures must be paid through the US' boundless funds and political will, Hart argues (an argument that probably sounded more plausible in 2006 than it does today). Hart's doubling down on the centralized benevolence of the state leaves the state open, in Robb's analysis, to the inevitable weakening of the state's legitimacy through systematic disruption - and Hart, unfortunately, does not articulate any legitimate countermeasure to such disruptions. In short, Hart's argument is (small-c) conservative, repackaging Great Society solutions to counter an emergent threat for which they were not designed.

Hart ends the book by arguing that "When every child in America is secure, then America will be secure" (p.180) - a bait-and-switch, since the two securities he describes are of different categories. From my view, Hart has simply failed to grapple with the question of fourth-generation warfare, and his conclusions constitute a faulty causal argument. I don't recommend this book.

Reading :: Brave New War

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
By John Robb

I've been reading several books on warfare and terrorism lately because I'm interested in the network organizational structure used by some terrorist organizations and advocated for components of our own military. Networks, as I've noted in other reviews, are also being adopted in knowledge work (my current focus), and looking at conflict as a parallel case helps me to think through implications for knowledge work. And vice versa - as John Robb demonstrates in his book Brave New War, which characterizes the organizational structure of the Iraqi insurgency as "an open-source community network" (p.4). Brave New War lays out, lucidly and in terms that the general readership can understand, what such organizational changes mean to the future of security, focusing primarily on the Iraqi insurgency up to the publication date (2007). Although it's repetitive at times, and although it doesn't predict the post-Surge (relative) calm in Iraq, this book does a great job laying out the changes in the security landscape and their implications for national security.

In a nutshell, Robb argues that "we have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy" (p.3). Our military is still tuned to fight state-to-state wars (p.7), but our most next-generation enemies are now stateless, without a recognized center of gravity, and thus nearly immune to conventional military force (p.4). Such enemies have organized in innovative and agile ways that promote much faster decision-making cycles and much more distributed decision-making, similar to software companies (p.4). And rather than turning to conventional weapons and targets, they turn to

systems disruption, a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens (p.5)

He predicts "the rise of global virtual states" that "will rapidly undermine confidence in our national-security systems" (p.6). New conflicts, he says, will be substate, fought by "superempowered groups" who can leverage technological advances and pinpoint systemic weaknesses of states (p.8).

In subsequent chapters, Robb details how such groups work. He argues that this new method of warfare focuses on delegitimizing the state, leading to weakened or failed states, by "derail[ing] the key drivers of economic globalization: the flow of resources, investment, people, and security" (p.14). Such groups look for high return on investment for their attacks. Such "global guerillas have atomized into loose, decentralized networks that are more robust and learn more quickly than traditional hierarchies" (p.15). These networks form a "bazaar of violence" (p.15) in which loosely affiliated or unaffiliated groups, often with differing ideologies, can share information and resources and "coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets" (p.16). Such networks want failed states (p.17): the feudal vision of the Caliphate is "the hollowing out and failure of the nation-state" (p.18). Again, he points to the Iraqi insurgency, in which Baathists, al-Qaeda, and criminals all wanted a weakened state for their own purposes (p.18).

Such networks are vanishingly small. Of course, the apparatus of the state is also vanishingly small, although it claims the entire territory. "This new organization," Robb warns, "once established, is now in competition with the states as an equal and not as a successor" (p.21). And it is at an advantage in that no one expects such networks to provide services, stability, or protection in the same way that a state does.

Most of the United States' recent "wars," Robb points out, were actually interventions in failed states: Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo (p.26). Indeed, conventional warfare has been almost eliminated due to Mutually Assured Destruction on one hand and global economic and social integration on the other (p.25). Under these pressures, as the Cold War wound down, proxy guerilla war became the primary means of wars between states (p.27). Such fourth-generation warfare (4GW) "was seen as a way to waste the strength of the strong - to bleed the target state dry morally and economically. The result is an eternal war that typically ends with the target state's inevitable defeat" (p.27). 4GW turns states' strengths into weaknesses (p.28). And the latest development has been that "guerilla and terrorist movements, which were once the proxy puppets of nation-states, became autonomous" (p.30).

Here we return to Iraq, the centerpiece of Robb's argument. After the Gulf War, Robb argues, Saddam Hussein knew that Iraq could not win a conventional war with the US. So his planning team decided to plan a 4GW, establishing the irregular Feyadeen Saddam in 1995, stashing weapons in the countryside, and selecting an urban swarming strategy that focused on systemic disruptions (something they learned from the pinpoint infrastructure bombing carried out during the Gulf War) (p.44). When Gulf War II started, the forces simply melted away and began their 4GW: a 4GW that grew to include hundreds of small groups (p.73) that "range from a small family group to large ideologically motivated groups measuring in the thousands" (p.74). The groups are united by a common enemy and more or less by tactical approaches, but not by a common strategic objective.

In this emerging landscape, Robb argues, the state is stretched to the breaking point - not just the US, but also China, where rapid economic growth has outstripped the government's ability to control it (p.86). In such conditions, paramilitary forces and ad hoc militias develop; Robb points to China here (p.86), but also mentions the proliferation of SWAT teams and the rise of the Minutemen in the US (p.87). He expects private military companies to gain ground (p.91).

Robb turns to the analogy of open-source warfare, arguing that in OSW, a spectacular attack functions as an alpha release. Other networks can take the basic architecture of the attack, tweak it, fork it, and release their own versions (p.116). The promise of the attack draws people with differing motives but the same objective, the attack (p.116). In such an environment, coordination consists not of centrally directed activity, but of stigmergy:

Stigmergic systems use simple environmental systems to coordinate the actions of independent agents (each with their own decision-making process). These signals are used to coordinate scalable, robust, and dynamic activity. This activity is usually much more intelligent than the actions capable by the individual actors ... (p.124)

Based on the analysis above, Robb argues that we must turn away from solutions that rely on the nation-state as the primary actor (p.162). Security, he argues, must be affordable, efficiently allocated, broad-based and participatory; the state cannot deliver this sort of security well in the face of 4GW, he says (p.163). Instead, he says, "the only way to ensure security in the future will be through survival and decentralized resilience" (p.164). Let's rethink the state, he says, transitioning from a nation-state to a market-state (p.165); that would entail moving the legitimacy of the state from a provider of its people's welfare to "maximal 'opportunity' through the use of market mechanisms" (p.166). (To some, I note here, this might sound like destroying the state in order to save it.)

Since I've been reading a lot of this literature lately, Brave New War doesn't seem as fresh or radical as it might to many. But it's a well written book, lucid, smart even when it goes where few will want to follow. As I said earlier, it's a bit repetitive and perhaps a bit alarmist. But it is such a daring book that transcends these weaknesses, and it made me think about things differently even when I disagreed with it. Especially if you haven't read about netwar before, take a look at this book.

Reading :: Fanatical Schemes

Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus
By Patricia Roberts-Miller

I've been meaning to pick this book up ever since it came out. That's not because of its subject matter, which is outside my research area or expertise, but because Trish is a colleague, and I like to read my colleagues' books. And Trish does crank out the books: this is her third, and she's currently working on her fourth.

Maybe I should call her "Roberts-Miller" for the purposes of this review.

Fanatical Schemes is Roberts-Miller's examination of proslavery rhetoric of the 1830s. She's arguing with other scholars of this period: the common understanding is that proslavery rhetoric became more strident in response to increased stridency of abolitionists, but Roberts-Miller argues that this causal argument is incorrect. Ratheer, she argues that the inflammatory aspect of proslavery rhetoric preceded abolitionist rhetoric; it was, she says, inherent to proslavery rhetoric. Roberts-Miller sees this as a crucial point because it has definite implications: when "civility" is the yardstick, the only permitted criticism is from superiors to inferiors; substantive social change is impossible because "under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts"(p.6).

Indeed, she argues, the South – despite the education in rhetoric afforded its citizens – actually silenced deliberation in routine ways; it made certain topics off-limits. And consequently it could not deliberate properly with Northern politicians, nor could it deliberate internally, making war all but inevitable (p.31). Prudence was considered mildly dishonorable (p.65); proslavery public discourse was dominated by the epideictic (p.64); discourse was framed by in-groups vs. out-groups (Ch.2); and hyperbole characterized the discourse (p.42). Roberts-Miller describes this discourse as yielding self-referential absurdity that demanded loyalty to the group rather than the logic (p.41). That situation leads to "cunning projection," in which the same behavior is considered a virtue in the ingroup but a vice in the outgroup (p.106).

Roberts-Miller concludes the book by discussing cunning projection in terms of Orwell's "doublethink" (p.219). Personally, I would have liked to see an actual rather than a fictional phenomenon here, such as double consciousness or dialogism, both of which are grounded in actual cases that involve believing contradictory ideas, both of which are well theorized and may have gotten to the layers of argumentation in a less modernist way. But Trish (let's call her Trish again now) indicated to me in a hallway conversation that neither quite get to the group loyalty aspect she was trying to express. See what you think – and I do recommend the book.

Reading :: Supersizing the Mind

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
By Andy Clark

Someone in my Twitter stream recommended this book, and it sounded interesting enough that I picked it up and read it on the plane from PA the other week. Essentially, it's an apologia for Clark's assertion that the human mind is best understood as extended beyond the skull, not "brainbound" as his critics suggest. He begins the book with the illustration of Richard Feynman's writing, which Feynman insisted was not simply a representation of his thinking but actually part of his thinking. Clark characterizes this extension of thinking across artifacts as "the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine" (p.xxvi). Although the brain is certainly an essential, perhaps the only essential, part of this loop, the extended perspective is needed to understand the full range of cognition. Environmental engineering, he says, is self-engineering (p.xxviii).

In my case, as you might imagine, Clark could be characterized as preaching to the choir. But his "sermon" is more exigetical than hortatory: in answering his critics from cognitive science, he marshalls illustrations and evidence touching on aspects of cognition that are not familiar to lay audiences. For instance, he reports work in sensory substitution conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, in which blind subjects were fitted with grids of "nails" on their backs, nails that gently stimulated the skin based on input from a head-mounted camera. Incredibly, after a short while, the subjects began to interpret the stimulation as "quasi-visual experiences of objects looming and so forth," even ducking balls thrown at them (p.35). They interpreted these experiences visually. Similarly, in a 2003 study, patients with leprosy were fitted with sensor gloves that stimulated sensation at a forehead-mounted disk; they quickly began to interpret the forehead stimulation as occurring at the fingertips (p.36). Based on these and other cases, Clark argues that three grades of embodiment exist: mere, basic, and profound (p.42).

In a profoundly embodied organism – I.e., us – language functions as "a form of mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding" (p.44). Clark takes us from material symbols stripped of cues, which result in "fast-and-frugal subroutines" (p.45), to the use of "spatial proximity [e.g., stacks, piles] to reduce descriptive complexity" (p.46), to mathematics and language. "Our mature mental routines," he concludes, "are not merely self-engineered: they are massively, overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably self-engineered" (p.60).

Clark argues that embodiment seems to matter in three ways. First, it spreads the load of cognition, making problem-solving and adaptive response more fluid and efficient. Second, it allows the organism to self-structure information. Third, it supports extended cognition, co-opting "bioexternal resources into extended but deeply integrated cognitive and computational resources" (pp.196-197).

I'm skipping over a lot here, in part because Clark's book is actually a conversation with many critics and I'm neither fully privy to that conversation nor expert enough to recapitulate it well. If you are, you may find this book to be more enlightening. I found it to be both intriguing and difficult in the same sense that A.N. Leontiev's experiments with lights and gels were; I saw many examples of counterintuitive function, but I don't have enough grounding in the subject to evaluate them. So in the end, my takeaway from Clark's book was not as rich as I would have liked. If you are grounded in Vygotsky, Hutchins, Bateson, and similar scholars, you'll get the gist as I did – but I will personally hesitate to lean too heavily on this book when making my own arguments.

Reading :: The Rise of the Creative Class

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
By Richard Florida

Last week, I tweeted that I had picked up this book and that it was thicker than I had expected. My favorite response was: "It's thin on the inside."

True? More or less. The book is 404 pages, including appendices and index, and it is not all unique material. I actually shook my head in amazement when Florida explained on p.150 et passim that the Creative Class suffer from a "time famine" and have little patience for slow, low-yield activities – a point that Florida makes after recycling various other statements about the Creative Class repeatedly. What person suffering from such a time famine has time to read a 404-page book, one that could have been slimmed down considerably while making the same points? (Me, apparently.)

So what are those points? I'll attempt to summarize first, then critique.

Florida argues that the Creative Class is an emerging class, the dominant class of our day, comprising 30% of the workforce (p.ix). Creativity has become "the driving force of our economic growth" (p.ix) and is "the key factor in our economy and society" (p.4). Others, he says, have characterized our economy a "knowledge economy" or "information economy," but the key factor is creativity – which he defines, quoting Webster's dictionary, as "the ability to create new forms" (pp.4-5). Creativity, he says, is technological, economic, artistic, and cultural, and all these forms reinforce each other (p.5). Once-fringe groups, viewed in the past as "bizarre mavericks," are now "at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth" (p.6).

Such creative people may be everywhere, but they tend to congregate in specific places: "Place has become the central organizing unit of our time, taking on many of the functions that used to be played by firms and other organizations" (p.6). And those places are tolerant places, he says: the Creative Class seeks places and organizations that are diverse and tolerant, particularly in terms of same-sex partners, but also in terms of "odd personal habits or extreme styles of dress," because "many highly creative people" fit that bill (p.79). Florida acknowledges that such tolerant places and organizations seem to be short on one particular aspect of diversity – African-Americans – but pins this shortfall on the digital divide (p.80, for instance). Tolerance, he says, is a core and necessary value for the Creative Class, since creativity is so highly valued that employers can't turn it away: "we are more tolerant and liberal both because our material conditions allow it and because the new Creative Age tells us to be so" (p.82).

Tolerance, Florida says, is epitomized by a place's or organization's attitude toward gay people. He notes a remarkable, statistically significant correlation between high-tech centers and the Gay Index – an index based on US Census data that connects unmarried partners data and data on same-sex roommates (p.255). (I should point out here that, based on the methodology, this index is more of an "Out" index.) The Gay Index, Florida says, is "a reasonable proxy for an area's openness to different kinds of people and ideas" (pp.244-245).

Creativity, Florida says, provides a more precise definition than "existing, more amorphous definitions of knowledge workers, symbolic analysts, or professional and technical workers" (p.9). At the same time, he takes pains to say that creativity can be a factor in any job, including factory work (p.10), the tacit creativity of copy machine repair (p.70), and the increasingly coordinative work of the secretary (p.70). But the Creative Class proper includes a "Super-Creative Core" of "scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, as well as the thought leadership of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers" (p.69). They produce "new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely usable" (p.69). The Creative Class also includes "creative professionals" who serve in "high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health care professions, and business management." "These people engage in creative problem solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems" (p.69).

The Creative Class are, as a class, financially well-off but time-poor. So, Florida says, the Service Class increases to support the increase in the Creative Class, performing functions that were once performed in the family (p.76). But although they tend to be financially well-off, the Creative Class are not motivated by money: IT workers, for instance, prefer "challenge and responsibility, the ability to work a flexible schedule and a secure and stable work environment" to financial rewards (p.10). And those characteristics are needed, because, Florida tells us, creativity isn't like factory or service work. "It is not something that can be kept in a box and trotted out when one arrives at the office" (p.22).

Florida's book isn't just description, it's advocacy: he ends by imploring the Creative Class to develop a class consciousness that can support mass action (p.317). He also uses the word "we" a lot, clearly indicating that he sees himself as part of this nascent movement.

So what does a Creative Class member look like? Richard Florida has provided a ready, well-drawn example: Richard Florida. Florida repeatedly uses himself as an example of the Creative Class, so much so that by the end of the book I knew his birth year, his upbringing, his employment history, his kitchen setup, his eating habits, his preferred exercise, his usual casual clothing, and his many issues with his adopted home of Pittsburgh. After a while I felt as if Florida had invited me over to watch home movies or to read his autobiography, Florida on Florida. (As you may have guessed, Florida is a Baby Boomer.)

I suppose I have moved into the critique phase of this review, so let me bottom-line it for you. Florida has a kernel of a good insight here, but he makes several missteps in order to inflate his thesis.

First, he never really nails down the term "creativity" in which he invests so much importance. At the end of the book, I'm still not sure how to distinguish Creative Class jobs from service and working class jobs. I tried simply thinking of the Creative Class as a renaming of knowledge work, but Florida makes clear that some managers – the epitome of Drucker's knowledge work – did not qualify as creative (see p.308 in his case study on Pittsburgh, for instance). Without a solid definition, the Creative Class – despite its name – tends to be somewhat orthogonal to the other classes, with Florida even implying that service and working class jobs are increasingly creative (see above). The distinction is unclear. Compare that to Drucker's discussion of knowledge work, in which he paints a picture of knowledge work as becoming an increasingly larger factor in other forms of work. This is a crucial point: without a concrete, definable concept, the book is not terribly useful, even though I think Florida is genuinely detecting something in his comparative statistics.

Second, Florida cuts a lot of corners. He tends to play heavily on stereotypes of creativity: creativity is inspired, creativity is signified by outlandish dress, creativity is eclectic, creativity comes from everywhere. Bluntly, Florida seems to think of creativity as a personal attribute rather than a process anchored in culture. He tends to see the markers of creativity as continuous across times and cultures: "Artists, musicians, professors and scientists have always set their own hours, dressed in relaxed and casual clothes and worked in stimulating environments," he states (pp.12-13), seemingly unaware of how, say, 19th-century professors or 20th-century orchestra musicians dressed. But Florida also cuts corners in his citations: for instance, he name-checks Castells' The Power of Identity as illustrating how important individual identity is (p.229). That's like saying that Bakhtin emphasized the importance of storytelling. With examples like these, I quickly grew wary of Florida's other statements.

Third, Florida has tended to remake creativity in his own image. He's played what I think is a dangerous game, equating specific kinds of tolerance (particularly but not exclusively tolerance of gays) with tolerance in general, and pegging creativity to that liberal tolerance. Yet some of the most creative organizational thinking of this young century has been performed by the Islamic fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, and the aftermath of Prop 8 has of course problematized the notion of general, universal tolerance.

It was at this point that I realized what The Rise of the Creative Class resembles: Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Fukuyama's book enthralled neoconservatives with its claim that capitalism and democracy had won – we had reached the end of history, the point at which the free market was systemically inevitable – and all we had to do was wait for its realization. And Florida's book makes similar promises to social liberals, telling them that they have won: tolerance and openness are inevitable, part of the systemic change brought by the Creative Class, and that we only have to wait for the class to develop its class consciousness; the Creative Class only needs to realize that it's in the driver's seat. Like Fukuyama's argument, Florida's argument is so attractive that it's hard to step back and gain the distance necessary to critique it. But once I did, the argument fell apart. We haven't reached the end of history yet.

I recommend the book – it has a kernel of an idea – but read it critically.