John Robb on the Political Power of Networked Organizations
Podcast at https://www.jimruttshow.com/john-robb-4/
Description
"Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay “Blitzing DC,” about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, Trump’s 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amplifier, the Blue Network’s counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship & ‘the long night’, digital rights & moderation, the Ukraine conflict & swarm response, the Red Network reconfiguration, digital ledgers & truth-seeking accounts, the professionalization of Red digital warriors, network decision-making at a societal level, the government contracting corruption, defense procurement issues, the D.C. area wealth concentration, the future of network organizations, and much more."
Excerpts
From the transcript:
"What we’re seeing is the emergence of a way of making decisions with networks and doing that within an organizational structure. And that’s being driven by networking changing the way we think and the way we organize society. It’s kind of McLuhan-esque, you know, the medium is the message. It’s rewiring us, just like the printing press rewired us and changed society as a result. You know, constitutional government, everything else, those printed documents that we use as the basis for organizing society. So what I saw in Iraq, being ex-special ops and having my experience as an Internet analyst, is that the way the insurgency was operating was different than the analysis that was coming out of DC, coming out of the DOD, coming out of the NSA and CIA. And it was operating differently, and it was making it very hard to run a counterinsurgency. And some of the core dynamics was, some of the differences, for instance, were instead of like one large insurgent organization, maybe two, that mirrored the nation state, with a political arm and a military arm, etcetera, that you could roll up, a big pyramid organization that you could roll up by taking the people out the bottom, flipping them, and going up to the top. We saw 70 different groups. Each of these groups had a motivation for fighting. Some were jihadi, all sorts of different flavors of jihadi. Some were pro-Saddam, some were anti-Saddam nationalists. They were criminal organizations, tribal organizations. Each group was paper thin, so you could roll them up very quickly. But somehow they were coordinating to take on the U.S. military and keep it at bay and score lots of victories against the U.S. So I started piecing together how it was working, and that was my first insight into the networked organization as an emergent organizational structure.
...
the organizational type that I identified in Iraq, and we saw it also in Nigeria, was a kind of an open source dynamic. There wasn’t a hierarchy – these groups were all united based on a single “plausible promise” as it’s called in open source software, a single unifying goal. It’s usually a very general, very simple goal that everyone can agree with. You know, 80% of the people in a given country could agree with that one goal, and they all worked together to try to realize it. Each had a different reason why they were trying to achieve it and a different idea of what that actually meant when they did achieve it. They couldn’t agree if they did achieve it what to do afterwards. But that allowed them to coordinate, and they used a kind of very sloppy “throw it against the wall, see what works” approach. If it works, it’s reported by the press and other things, and it starts propagating very quickly. Everyone just copies the success.
The U.S. had a $3 billion counter-IED program, and these guys were running circles around it. They’d have fixes within two weeks – I think 30 times faster in terms of their innovation rate than the IRA. So this was like, wow. And then I wrote up a New York Times op-ed on this saying, here’s how you defeat it: you hit it in different directions by using the Shia militias as a kind of anvil. And that worked.
That kind of died down after the Iraq War subsided, and then we saw it again in the Arab Spring, the same open source dynamic. In this case, the best example was getting rid of Mubarak in Egypt. That unifying goal united a huge protest movement. It was done largely online, and they kicked it off. No matter what they did, they couldn’t unravel it because there were so many people that wanted that similar goal, even though every single person in that protest probably had a different idea as to what removing Mubarak meant.
The leadership – there wasn’t really any leadership. Anytime they had an influential figure come in and try to take control of it and say, “Okay, we should be talking about constitutional reform” or “This is what we have to do,” they were kind of pushed to the side. No one really wanted to talk about all that stuff. Really, they wanted to follow anybody who was leading them towards removing Mubarak. We saw a little bit of that in the U.S. with the Occupy movement and the Tea Party, that similar open source dynamic and protest structure. What we find with all of these is that they can create massive crowds, they can swarm the streets, and then all the typical ways that you would use to unravel a protest, like negotiating with them, giving them concessions – didn’t work because you couldn’t give enough concessions to everybody to unwind it. You might take out a tiny piece of it, but you wouldn’t be able to take out the entire group."
Packetized Media
John Robb:
" we were moving towards packetized media. And the packetized media broke everything down – all little videos, little pictures, little takes on stuff, you know, little posts that encapsulated various parts of a description of an event. That packetized flow is massive, I mean, it’s torrential. What they were doing using this mechanism was that they were piecing together patterns, patterns of understanding, sense-making. And those patterns are basically those memes and then other things. And they put them into an upregulation system. They were voted up or voted down or modified, and it was kind of a little bit more formalized than what we see in the open social media. And then it ended up at the top where they were being used by Fox and Trump and others as weapons. And it was an amazing thing to see from the ground. You know, seeing it from my interviews with them. I mean, I wasn’t fully, you know, “pro everything Trump does is a god.” And then my interview on The_Donald, I talked about the dynamics, and they were exactly following this pattern."