Acorn, Again

I just got back from spending three weeks at the Acorn Community in Virginia.   Faithful readers (if I have any left) might remember that I began my community-seeking travels there back in September of 2012, a year and a half ago.  (See my posts entitled Update 2: The Acorn Community, 9/14/12, and Update 3: Life on the Farm, 9/23/12.)  At that time I went exploring the possibility of joining Acorn as a member.  This time I went for completely different reasons.

I'm currently involved with a group exploring building a community in the Hudson Valley of New York (at some point I will blog about this--hopefully when it's clearer what we are doing), and went to Acorn for several reasons.

The first is that I'd like to see our community become part of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.  (I wrote a little bit about the FEC in my post on Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08--basically these are secular income-sharing communities.)  The FEC was having its Assembly (a gathering of member communities) at Acorn this year and I came as an unofficial representative of our group.  (Unofficial because, although I'm not the only one in our group that hopes we can eventually be part of the FEC, we haven't come to any agreement about what kind of community we will be.)

Full FEC members  prior to this meeting, were Acorn, Twin Oaks (I've written a bunch about TO, including  Real Models 1:Twin Oaks, 9/30/10, Update 6: Life at Twin Oaks, 12/4/12, and Snow, Darkness, and Fire, 3/13/13), East Wind (in southern Missouri--I've never visited there but I hear interesting stories about them), Sandhill (in northern Missouri, I posted on them as Sandhill Farm, 6/8/13), The Midden (an urban community in Columbus, Ohio that I've never visited but would like to someday), and the Emma Goldman Finishing School (in Seattle, Washington).  All of these communities sent delegates except Emma Goldman.

There were also delegates from a bunch of other communities that were either Communities in Dialogue (and wanting to be full members) or communities wanting to be Communities in Dialogue.  These included Living Energy Farm (Which I wrote about as Update 7: Living Energy Farm, 12/8/12), the Possibility Alliance (I wrote about them in The Possibility Alliance, 6/11/13), Sapling (a new community--an offshoot from Acorn--just starting in Louisa county, and located halfway between Acorn and Twin Oaks), and CRIChouse (a community in California).  There were also some presentations from a project that a couple of folks at Acorn are doing to create urban communes along the East Coast, a project that they're calling 'Point A'.  (I briefly alluded to this in my last post, A Long Pause, where I mentioned getting into dialog with someone wanting "to create urban activist communities."  This was second reason I was at Acorn.)

Some highlights from the few sessions that I attended is that Living Energy Farm is now a full member, and Sapling, CRIChouse, and the Possibility Alliance are all now Communities in Dialogue.  Unfortunately, the FEC has not (as of this writing) updated their website to reflect all these changes. Hopefully this will change soon.  I'm personally excited that the FEC is growing--hopefully, in a few years, it may include the community I'm part of starting, and maybe a few urban communes coming out of Point A as well. (Point A folks are hoping to have their first communities up in running some time in 2015.)

Some of my other reasons for being at Acorn were to catch up with some of what was going on down in Louisa county (I got to find out more about Sapling and the current state of Living Energy Farm, for example),  to see how things were going at Acorn itself (after two major fires in the last year--see my posts on Snow, Darkness, and Fire, 3/13/13, and Issues in Community: Recruitment, 11/11/13, for a bit about these--and some major new construction, I wanted to see how they were doing), getting a hit of community living in a well functioning community, and learning some skills about rural living from living in a rural community.

I'm pleased that Acorn is doing well.  The building I stayed in and worked in didn't exist the last time last time I was there.  It's called the Seed Palace and, although it isn't finished, it's in pretty good shape.  Heartwood, site of the arson attempt, was in pretty good shape as well.  It, too, is still a construction zone, but they were finishing rebuilding the kitchen and were just starting to use it while I was there.  (The steel building, site of the first fire, was apparently only cleaned out and reused, even though it's not in very good shape.  It's mostly used for storage and what I heard is that it leaks but they have simply thrown tarps over stuff stored in the leaky areas.)

As for my plans to do things, I had been sick before I arrived and discovered that the more I did, the sicker I got.  Although I was able to help briefly with the goats there and got to feed a baby calf, mostly I worked with the seeds.  Acorn runs a major seed business (Southern Exposure Seed Exchange) and I ended up doing a lot seed work--packing seeds, picking seeds, counting seeds, etc.  It wasn't very strenuous work, so that's how I ended up spending lots of my time there.

Overall, I'm glad I went.  I talked with a bunch of folks there about our community endeavor and got some good feedback.  I was also able to do some outreach, posting a flyer at Acorn, and sending flyers to be posted at Twin Oaks, Sandhill, East Wind, and the Possibility Alliance.  And it was good to get another taste of well functioning community.


Quote of the Day: "Being a thriving anarchist community (and consequently not having any bosses or supervisors) we are necessarily committed to a culture of personal responsibility; effective and healthy communication; and being serious about getting done what needs to get done on our farm. We are fairly hard-working ... We enjoy the hard work because it is our livelihood (that which provides us with direct connection to the healthy, cruelty & exploitation free food that we grow and nurture; as well as our shelter which we build), rather than a job which has no meaningful connection to that which we truly value in life and only provides money to buy things which we have no insight into or connection to.  Its the difference between making a life and making a living."  - from the Acorn website

A Long, Strange Trip

This is the post I've been promising on my community plans. I know it's taken me a while but I haven't had anything in place until now, and there is still a lot of things that are shifting.

This will be a more personal post than I usually do. I hope that it may be useful to others searching for community as well as letting those who follow this blog know what I will be doing and why. Among other things (and this even sounds crazy to me) I'll be quitting my job, leaving my home, and traveling around the country. In otherwords, I'll be jobless, homeless, and I don't even like traveling.

In order to understand why I would do this to myself, you need to know that my goal in life (more or less for the last 25 years) has been to live in a community where people were connected and committed to building something together. I had this at least once when I lived in a community I helped build that lasted five years in the nineties. I've decided that I really want to live in a community like this somewhere in New England, if possible, or at least on the east coast.

My most recent attempt has not turned out to be what I wanted. There have been some parallels here with what happened with an attempt to build community in northern New England a few years back that made me realize that I need more than just my own willingness and efforts to build community. I need other people with the passion to do this and at least one with some real experience. I won't do it again without both those pieces--that's a public promise. At this point I'm looking for either a community to join or some people to build one with.

There are two wonderful communities in Virginia that are examples of what I want: Twin Oaks and Acorn (see my last post, Communities of Communities, for more information on them and other communities I mention in this post). Both communities require a three week visit to apply for membership. I knew that Twin Oaks had a long waiting list so I contacted Acorn, initially for a three week visit in July. They approved it but said they were very full and that even if I was accepted, it would be at least six months before they had an opening. (Note--in some ways this is a good sign; the fact that both Acorn and Twin Oaks are full with long lists means there are lots of people who want this kind of community.)

At that point I heard about an interesting community in the midwest looking for people and decided to apply there instead. Unfortunately, it turned out to not be a good fit. So now I am back to visiting and applying at Acorn.

And it looks like I will spend the fall traveling. I'm beginning with the Communities Conference at Twin Oaks on Labor Day weekend (hoping that there I can connect with some folks really interested in community) followed by my three week visit to Acorn nearby, now rescheduled for right after the conference. I will apply for membership there, but even if  they accept me, I won't be able to stay. So I will come back to Boston briefly before leaving to visit a very close friend in Oakland, California (and since I don't like flying, I will be going across country by train or bus, a four day journey in either direction). I will spend about a week with my friend sometime in October (and may stop to visit the northeast Missouri communities--again, see my last post for details on them--on the way back) and then I'm now trying to schedule a three week visit at Twin Oaks in November. I hope to be back in Boston for the holidays, probably staying with friends and family, and maybe by that time I'll have some idea what I'll be doing in 2013. My goal for next year is to either get into one of the Virginia communities (Twin Oaks, Acorn, Living Energy Farm, 'Chubby Squirrels', or something else that emerges) or be building a community in New England with committed people.

What makes this really difficult is that I'm now 60, and soon to be 61. But I know this is what I need to do. I believe in the social change ideas I talk about in this blog and, for me, the way to put them into practice is a community that models these ideas. If it takes me the rest of my life to find or build that community, well, that's what I need to do.


Quote of the day: "...hope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or a cognitive process. ... hope is a combination of setting goals, having the tenacity and perseverence to pursue them, and believing in our own abilities. ... Toleration for disappointment, determination, and a belief in self are at the heart of hope." - Brené Brown

Interlude: Next Changes

I'm still reading my biology book but I'm not sure whether I'll continue this series, or when I will if I do.

Several things have been happening. The first is that I kept a copy of all the posts that I've written on a flashdrive that I kept in my pocket. Some of it was backed up, but there was much of it that wasn't. Then one day the flashdrive was missing. I still haven't found it and that's put a crimp in my desires to write lots of posts.

More importantly, about halfway through this first year of my latest community venture, I realized that it wasn't working. I'm not happy about this but I don't think that continuing on, as is, makes sense. Neither does starting over. I've done this several times and it hasn't worked. There comes a point where I need to pay attention and decide that it's time to go in a different direction.

In essence, instead of trying to create community (at least for now) I'm looking at trying to join an already functioning community. Part of the reason is to learn from what's working (as well as to perhaps help a community or two work even better) and part of it is to look for others with experience living in community. I will not (and this is a promise to myself) try again to start building a community alone or only with people who haven't done it before. I need to have others with experience to do this with--and, I think the way to find others with experience is to get active in the communities movement.

Unfortunately, this is a challenge, as I'm now sixty and starting over, especially since it will involve traveling and some short term community situations (a year or two, is what I'm thinking). It may involve more than one situation before I find the folks I'm looking for. This isn't exciting and it is risky, but I don't have any better ideas.

What I want to do is to build or live in community in New England, but the kind of community I want (simple, sustainable, communal, and egalitarian) doesn't exist here. What it looks like I'll be doing is leaving New England, hopefully not for too long and not going too, too far.

Meanwhile, my next post will be on what I see as one of the most hopeful developments in building this kind of community: communities of communities.


Quote of the Day: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself. If all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” - Simone de Beauvoir

Three Small Blogs

Austan, from AUSTANSPACE, recently gifted me (and two other bloggers) with the Liebster Blog Award.

The award goes to three blogs with less than 300 followers. The honor of having gotten it goes with the duty of honoring three more small blogs. One of the first blogs I would have honored with it is AUSTANSPACE--but, obviously, that's already been done.

I don't have the time to research to find out which other blogs have already been given this award, so I may be giving this to a blog which has already gotten it in the past, but I am going to simply pick out three favorite small blogs.

And here's my three honorees:

The first is SoapBox Tech. I think Jerry is doing some amazing things out there and I would love to join him in doing some of it but since I'm in New England (USA) and he is in Alberta (Canada)--several thousand miles away--I am glad that he's documenting it in his blog so we can all learn from it. I also enjoy his rants.

Then there is Michaelann Land. Michaelann is a social justice warrior, someone who has spent her life fighting against poverty, exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the environment, and still manages to have the occasional post about theoretical physics.

Finally, there is The Wheeling Traveller. Blues has not written much in the blog yet, but what's there is a deep exploration of the pain of disability. This is a perspective that many of us need to learn. Blues, consider this a nudge toward writing more.

Quote of the Day: "There are beautiful wild forces within us. Let them turn the mills inside and fill the sacks that feed even heaven." - Francis of Assisi

Organization

Okay. Organizing and organizations as a human need. Sounds a bit strange. But really, if we are going to get anything done, we are going to have to find ways of working together and working together well.

In order to get any type of work done, we need energy. But, although there are many folks that prefer to work alone, when we work with others we get much more done. And if there is more than one or two of us working together, structure helps. That's what organizing is all about.
It doesn't mean we have to have bureaucracy. If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I advocate decentralized structure. But structure, nevertheless. Organization to get the work done.

This also doesn't mean organization for the sake of organization. In fact, I think many organizational structures should be temporary. Just as I think we need to avoid bureaucracy, we need to avoid institutions--organizations that seem to exist primarily to perpetuate themselves. Organization exists to achieve certain goals. When the goal is met, often the need for the organization is over. I think the transition movement is smart about this. The steering group that helps guide the initial effort deliberately plans its own demise. (See my post on Transition Towns--10/16/08)

In spite of things like bureaucracy and institutionalization, organizations and organizing are an important part of life. Early on, in my post on Creating Social Change, I blogged on the motto: "Agitate, Educate, Organize". Organizing is part of the process of social change, part of getting work done, part of how we will need to live.


Resources:
Covey, Stephen, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People--Covey devotes a chapter to 'Principles of Creative Cooperation', outlining the habit he calls 'Synergize'; this is a way to build on the fact that the whole is more than the sum of it's parts, so as we work together new things can emerge; as he points out, 'All nature is synergistic'; our organizations should be as well
Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"--The need for structure, in fact the impossibility of 'structurelessness', and how those advocating for 'structureless' organizations are usually the ones benefitting from obscuring power dynamics
Steven Johnson, "Two ways to emerge, and how to tell the difference between them"--A chapter of a book on cybernetic democracy that I liked so well I devoted a post to it (see Clustering and Coping--8/13/08); it talks about two different ways that organization can emerge and what makes the difference
Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, Leadership for Change--A manual on the difference between leaders and leadership; organizations need leadership, they don't need leaders; this little booklet is available from Training for Change

Also see the resources in my posts on Communal and Cooperative Resources (10/12/08) and SLoDBN Resources (12/15/08)

Quote of the Day: "Don't agonize. Organize." - Forynce Kennedy

Weaving the Threads Together

I started this blog claiming that 'it's all connected'. For the last few months, I've been laying out my own theories of social change. Now let me show how they're all connected.

I began by explaining I was trying to get a clear sense of what my politics were. I came up with the realization that I want a world that supports Simplicity, Equality, Community & Cooperation, and Sustainability. But I also enjoy Complexity, Diversity, Individuality, and Practicality. I've spent a number of posts showing how this was not so much a contradiction, as a case of complementality: Complexity evolves from Simplicity--and can actually support Simplicity; Equality and Diversity are both needed--and, in small systems, we can have both; Community and Individuality are interrelated and enhance each other; and Sustainable has to be Practical just as Practical needs to be Sustainable.

I then talked about a strategy that I called SLoDBN--building Small and Local and evolving Decentralized Bioregional Networks. I've recently realized a better acronym might be SLoBiND--going from the Small and Local to the Bioregional by Networking in a Decentralized way. Something I like about this acronym is that it describes the process--slowly binding it all together.

While talking about SLoDBN, I pointed out its relation to SECS--Small and Simple, Local Communities, Decentralized Equally, Bioregionally Sustainable, and Networked Cooperatively. It's also interesting that as I laid out my SLoBiND strategy, I kept referring to earlier posts when I was talking about other people's theories. I think most of them support this way of thinking. Complexity theory, which I talked a lot about early on, particularly supports the bottom up nature of SLoBiNDing. Looking at my post of 9/20/08, where I wove together the theories I had covered, I pointed out: "Complexity theory... suggests small systems built from the bottom up, using cooperation and networking, and allowing solutions to emerge from our collective creativity, the way new behavior often emerges from living systems." I think this is one way of viewing the SLoBiND strategy.

Now let's see this in action.


Quote of the day: "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." — John Muir
Word (or phrase) of the day: Earth-Crunchy Dyke
Hero(es) of the day: I.F. Stone

SLoDBN Resources

In reality, most of these catagories overlap. I will start with resources on Small and Local--and even there some of the resources also talk about Decentralization.

First of all is the book, Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher, with the wonderful subtitle, 'Economics as if People Mattered'.

There is also an E. F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that focuses on "Linking people, land, and community by building local economies".

In my Going Local post of 7/26/08, I reviewed three books that were all focused on local economic efforts: Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age by Michael Shuman, Making a Place for Community: Local Politics in a Global Era by Thad Williamson, Gar Alperovitz, and David Imbroscio, and America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy by Gar Alperovitz. (See that post for more.)

The term 'relocalization' has been popularized by the Post Carbon Institute, which sponsors the Relocalization Network, as well as a website focused on urban issues called Post Carbon Cities. Another group that sponsors websites with a small, local orientation is an organization called Community Service. One of the sites is called, in fact, Small, Local Community. They also have a site called Community Solutions.

The book The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, first mentioned in my 'Catalysts and Network Weavers' post of 8/31/08, is a good resource about Decentralization. A blog with a lot of information on decentralization, both for guerrilla warfare and resilient communities, is Global Guerrillas, which I have mentioned in a few posts back in August (8/13 and 8/31).

There are a bunch of websites with definitions of and information about Bioregionalism, including the Great River Earth Institute, The Digger Archives, Green Anarchy, The Co-Intelligence Institute, and bioregionalism.com (which is actually focused on the coast of Southern California). A couple of classic books on bioregionalism are Home! A Bioregional Reader edited by Van Andruss, Judith Plant, Christopher Plant and Eleanor Wright, and Dwellers on the Land by Kirkpatrick Sale.

As far as Networking goes, the paper "Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving" by Valdis Krebs and June Holley and their Network Weaving site are two of the more useful things I've found. Also check out my post on 'Clustering and Coping' (8/13/08).

I also want to point to several other blogs advocating what I think is a SLoDBN viewpoint. The Archdruid Report offers useful critiques of the process as well as some guideposts along the way. Albert Bates' site, The Great Change also offers ideas and perspectives in this vein. But, if I'm right, SLoDBN work is happening all over. Some blogs that support this approach include Murph and Freeacres' Trout Clan Campfire, RAS's My Flight From the Grid, and SoapBoxTech's blog, SoapBoxTech. They (along others trying to live in this fashion, such as undacova mutha) give me hope that there really is a SLoDBN movement.



Quote of the day: "The undeniable trend of these past forty years has not been toward larger and more consolidated arrangements but, everywhere in the world, toward smaller and more decentralized ones. ... What is so interesting in this amazing process is the clear expression of the bioregional idea." - Kirkpatrick Sale
Word (or phrase) of the day: Rising Tide
Hero(es) of the day: Elizabeth Margaret Chandler

Networking

We need to start small and local. Hopefully, at some point, we will have lots of small, local groups. The next step is to begin weaving interconnections.

The goal, of course, is something regional and decentralized. To achieve that requires some type of networking. And networking is all about cooperation--cooperation between communities and small groups.

I wrote a post on Catalysts and Network Weaving (8/31/08) which focused on networking and how to do it well. Rather than repeat what I wrote there, I will just say that networking is the crucial step that builds beyond the local, yet does it in a way which doesn't create bureacracy, centralization, and hierarchy. This is how we build from the bottom up. And it requires being open to what emerges.


Quote of the day: "...weaving a network requires two iterative and continuous steps: 1. Know the network... 2. Knit the network..." Valdis Krebs and June Holley
Word (or phrase) of the day: Disaster Capitalism
Hero(es) of the day: Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan

SLoDBN

So how do we do it? How can we create what I call a SECSy world--a world where SECS balances out CDIP? (If you can't understand that, review my last dozen or so posts.)

If you read much of the posts I wrote prior to this SECS/CDIP sequence, the answer won't suprise you. I call it SLoDBN, and it's a strategy to build a better world from the ground up. SLoDBN (pronounced Slow-D-B-N) stands for Small, Local, Decentralized, Bioregional, and Networked. Once again, I will go over each of these pieces in their own post so I can adequately cover each one.


Quote of the day: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." — Henry David Thoreau
Word (or phrase) of the day: Husbear
Hero(es) of the day: Mala Zimetbaum

Catalysts and Network Weavers

While searching for more information on Resilient Communities I found this post by John Robb on his blog, Global Guerrillas. It's entitled The Guerrilla Catalyst and it's about people who help form and maintain networks and communities. He cites Rob Hopkins (who initiated the Transition Towns concept) as well as arms-dealer/guerrilla leader Henry Okah (aka Jomo Gbomo), pointing out that this type of networking can be used to build guerrilla insurgencies as well as resilient communities.

Robb calls these people catalysts and says that they "accelerate growth and effectiveness by increasing the trust and connectivity of the networks they inhabit". He talks about the book, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, where the authors describe the characteristics of catalysts. From Robb's post, catalysts serve as:

• Connectors. Able to map, mine and connect loose networks of people with similar needs/interests.
• Onsite helpers and Trust builders. Willing to work with people on the ground in the role of helper. Forges emotional bonds and encourages trust.
• Supporters. They let the network navigate itself forward by walking away from leadership responsibilities/roles. They trust the network and embrace its ambiguity.

This got me thinking a lot about how to make decentralized networks emerge (the subject of the Brafman and Beckstrom book). But then I saw the first comment made about the post where there was a link to an online essay (posted by one of its authors) claiming, "They are 'network weavers'!"

The eighteen page article referenced is entitled "Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving" by Valdis Krebs and June Holley. In it, the authors begin by talking about the characteristics of effective networks, and then point out there are two types of networks; what they refer to as unmanaged networks and managed networks. The differences between the two networks remind me a lot of what Steven Johnson refers to as 'Clustering' and 'Coping' (see my blog of 8/13/08). Krebs and Holley describe the unmanaged networks as "small and dense clusters with little or no diversity" and give examples of isolated rural communities and 'old boy networks'. They then go on to describe how to build 'vibrant community networks' using a form of leadership they call network weaving. Network weavers take scattered groups and individuals and connect them. This slowly forms what the authors refer to as "a hub and spoke network" with the weavers as the hub. This is only a temporary step. If it stops there, it keeps the responsibility focused on one individual. (This is very similar to what Brafman and Beckstrom call a 'Spider', a group where power is centralized--if you lop the head off a spider, it's dead.) The next step is for the weaver to begin encouraging others to start weaving also. The 'network weaver' becomes a 'network facilitator', mentoring new weavers who take over much of the building and maintaining of the network. Eventually the 'hub and spoke network' becomes what the authors call "a multi-hub small-world network". Over time (as the authors put it "many years of network weaving by multiple hubs") this can build into a 'core/periphery' network that links to other networks. (This is what Brafman and Beckstrom call a 'Starfish', because if you cut the arm off a starfish, the starfish grows a new arm--and the arm often grows a new starfish!)

While reading all this, I was exploring links to Rob Hopkins and the Transition Towns movement (yes, I know I will have to do a post on Transition Towns at some point). They use what's called Open Space Technology--a process that allows people to set their own agendas and run a decentralized meeting. This encourages dialogue and a built-from-the-ground-up process. They start something going, get people involved, and trust the process from there. What seems important is to hold a simple set of values and as long as that's in place, allow the process to emerge--even when it seems like total chaos. And it does seem like stuff emerges.

All this interests me because it could well be the blueprint for grassroots social change, the bottom-up variety, the stuff I've been talking about. Now to get to work on catalyzing and network weaving.


Quote of the day: "Although you may start out developing your Transition Town process with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall. Your role is not to come up with all the answers, but to act as a catalyst for the community to design their own transition.
"If you keep your focus on the key design criteria - building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint - you'll watch as the collective genius of the community enables a feasible, practicable and highly inventive solution to emerge." - from the Transition Towns WIKI
Word (or phrase) of the day: Requisite variety
Hero(es) of the day: Susan La Flesche Picotte and Susette La Flesche Tibbles

Clustering and Coping

I've been reviewing books here lately, as well as looking at trends and ideas. In this post I want to review just one chapter of a book. The book is called Extreme Democracy and it's a collection of articles, mostly about how new networking tools (using the internet) can change current politics. But there's a chapter in the book by Steven Johnson, author of the 2001 book Emergence, in which he clarifies his thoughts on the phenomena of emergent systems. It is available online on a website that is also called Extreme Democracy. Most of the book can be read there but I will only be concerned with Steven Johnson's chapter, entitled "Two ways to emerge, and how to tell the difference between them".


As anyone who reads this blog closely can tell, I've been taken by the ideas from complexity/self-organizing systems/emergent behavior and especially how they relate to social change. This chapter specifically talks about the relationship between emergence and political movements. Johnson points out how the new wave of protests, such as the 'battle for Seattle', which are organized around affinity groups, are nonhierarchal and bewildering to those who are looking for leaders. He writes: "To old school progressives, the Seattle protestors appeared to be headless, out of control, a swarm of small causes with no organizing principle--and to a certain extent they're right in their assessment. What they fail to recognize is that there can be power and intelligence in a swarm, and if you're trying to do battle against a distributed network like global capitalism, you're better off becoming a distributed network yourself."

He also talks about how, in a very scary way, the same decentralized, grassroots bottom-up organizing is used by terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda. (This has been noted by other people as well. There is a whole blog, Global Guerrillas, devoted to how networking, decentralization, self-organizing systems, and 'Resilient Communities', can be used by terrorist groups. A very good review of this blog is on the blog Worldchanging lamenting how these tools which can be used to create so much good, can also be used for violence--and looking at alternatives.)

Johnson goes on to say how, after watching several more positive uses of emergent behavior (such as moveon.org, meetup.com, and particularly the Howard Dean campaign for president), he began to realize that there were (at least) two different types of emergence.

He calls the first kind 'Clustering'. He talks about the slime mold--a strange creatures/creature that can go from being many 'free-floating cells' to becoming a sort of multicellular organism depending on the situation. He notes that the self-organizing systems researchers are, naturally, obsessed with this process, but many other beings also organize in a similar fashion, such as flocks of birds, columns of ants, etc. In none of these cases is there a leader, just a process where more and more of the individuals begin tending in a direction, eventually resulting in the group coming to a decision--sort of an instinctual democracy. Clustering is the natural world's version of consensus. The problem with clustering is that it's dependent on what scientists call positive feedback loops--more and more leads to more and more. It's great at creating a crowd, but lousy at dealing with changing situations.

He also talks about ongoing colonies of ants, bees, and termites, and how adaptive they are. Leave food in several different places and ants will organize the best way to collect the food. If you leave a different pattern of food, the ants will organize a different way of collecting it. He refers to this as 'Coping' behavior and points out how important this is to survival. It involves communication and a type of learning mechanism. Instead of simple positive (runaway) feedback, it involves homeostatic feedback, feedback on the state of the system, checks and balances.

Johnson ends his article by talking about what kind of 'emergent politics' is capable of self-regulation. Not political campaigns but local communities--looking at what we want and need and creating systems to develop and govern ourselves. He ends by suggesting we 'Think local, act local.' I'm still with the 'Think globally, act locally' folks, but I agree with many of his points. We need to create bottom up systems that are flexible and adaptive.

This all makes me think of one of my earliest arguments in this blog--from the post where I talked about the slogan: 'Agitate, Educate, Organize'. Agitating is pretty much Clustering--getting a crowd together and making progress through numbers. What Steven Johnson calls Coping is what I think of as Organizing--creating systems that are capable of dealing with changes. And the method systems use to deal with change is commonly referred to as learning--ie, we need to Educate.

Steven Johnson sees the end product as "community tools ... [that] help us locate and improve troubled schools, ... playgrounds, areas lacking crucial services..." and this is fine, but I also want tools that will help us build alternatives, decrease our dependence on oil and capitalism, make sure everyone is fed and taken care of, and increase fairness and diversity. Given that, I admire his conclusion: "That kind of politics--the kind built from the ground up, without leaders--is truly within our grasp right now, if we can just build the right tools." Let's hope we can do just that.


Quote of the day: "Clustering is, ultimately, a more dynamic version of the beautiful crystal shapes generated by snowflakes: amazing patterns generated out of simple rules. Coping systems, on the other hand, have the spontaneity and intelligence of life: they seem to learn from experience; they probe and explore the environments; they keep themselves healthy and well-fed in sometimes hostile conditions." - Steven Johnson
Word (or phrase) of the day: Emergent properties
Hero(es) of the day: Septima Poinsette Clark