The underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. The term scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a community is 'emergence'.
As we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top: the queen. It turns out that this is not the way individuals in the complex insect society know what to do. It is not a hierarchical system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. The amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. In a sense, it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. The collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon.
Likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. Most of the time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for food and moving about on its own. But when conditions worsen, food becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct creatures coalesce into a single being. The large mass of slime moves about, amassing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual creatures. The collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned through millennia of evolution. But it is only activated when the group is under threat. The processes allowing for these alternative strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations.
At first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap backwards. An individual human consciousness is infinitely more advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. But coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical precursors to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, thanks to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks, we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it.
This is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open access to the internet in the early 1990s would herald a new era of teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the collective will into public affairs. The emergence of a networked culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political system wherever it spread.
But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former Clinton pollster Dick Morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally flawed vision of push-button politics. That's the vision shared by most teledemocracy champions today.
So what went wrong? Why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely networked engagement in public affairs?
Interference in the emergence
First, by casting itself in the role of cultural and institutional watchdog, governments, particularly in the United States, became internet society's enemy. Though built with mostly US government dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of information, images and ideas that the network spread. The government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of pornography and the fear of terrorism. The result was a tirade of ill-conceived legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. New decency laws aimed at curbing pornography (which were ultimately struck down) elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. Unsubstantiated and bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law enforcement into the Keystone Cops of cyberspace and the US Justice Department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most valuable members. Misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (This tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven internet is contrasted by the early participation of the UK's Labour government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists. Of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent UK internet industry, which saw its slow start compared with the US and other developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and anti-competitive funding policies.)
So, the US government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture. Every effort was made to diminish state control over the global telecommunications infrastructure. The internet itself, a government project, soon fell into private hands (Internic, and eventually industry consortiums). For just as a bacteria tends to grow unabated without the presence of fungus, so too does corporate power grow without the restrictive influence of government.