In Saskia Sassen's book The Global City (2001, Princeton University Press), she describes the (counter-intuitive) process of the formation of major urban centers like New York, London and Tokyo as the command centers of the global economy. I say counter-intuitive because new communication technologies allow for the decentralization of command and control. For a variety of reasons, Sassen argues that the opposite takes place.

Furthermore, these cities become, to some extent, disconnected from the nation-state:

These cities constitute a system rather than merely competing with each other. What contributes to growth in the network of global cities may well not contribute to growth as nations.(9)

She describes the architecture of a global network of cities: key cities as nodes, linked in a variety of ways, including financial flows, communication, travel, and trade.

For Sassen, one of the important reasons for the formation of these global cities are changes in the financial system from the 1980s on, requiring the concentration of firms (and the workers at all levels to support the concentration) in the global cities to make the system work.

That is, the emergence of speculative capital carried with it certain imperatives that contribute not just to globalization, but to the network of globalization. The city nodes provide a concrete reflection of the digitalized connections of 21st century finance.

jd

Media - information networks - noosphere

Here's a link to the freepress site campaign to pressure Sinclair broadcasting to not show the anti-Kerry documentary a few days before the election, or at least to provide equal time for counter-programming:

http://freepress.net/sinclair/

I know this barely scratches the surface of addressing what is wrong w/ the dominant media networks; that Bush vs Kerry is a flimsy set of choices; etc. etc. But on the other hand, that's what is in front of us now, so ... deal with it.

jd

One of the foundation ideas of materialism is that we live in a law-governed universe. And one of the foundation concepts of dialectics (and focal points of this blog) is interconnectedness. Probably the most important type of interconnection is that of cause-and-effect. Here's an excerpt from a recent Nature item of interest:

Is causality an inherent and necessary characteristic of the Universe, or just an illusion produced by the way our brains interpret the world?

It's real, say physicists, who believe they have worked out how the Universe is constructed from the tiniest building-blocks of space-time. The finding could also help the development of a theory of quantum gravity, which would marry the two currently estranged physical theories of the Universe: quantum theory and relativity.

How can the observable universe emerge out of quantum interactions at the tiniest level?

"Physicists have long been trying to figure out how the fuzzy nature of space-time at this tiny scale can give rise to the large four-dimensional Universe we see around us, as described by Einstein's theory of relativity."

In trying to assemble these tiny quanta pieces,

Renate Loll of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and her co-workers have now found a way to assemble the pieces so that they inevitably produce a four-dimensional Universe. Instead of assuming that all tilings are allowed, they impose two constraints.

First, the theory of relativity must apply within each individual tile (so that nothing can travel through it faster than light) and second, the assembly must preserve causality. This means that a piece of space-time cannot be constructed in such a way that an 'event' - some change in the Universe - precedes its cause.

When they enforced these criteria on their calculations, the researchers ended up with universes with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension - just like our own1. It was "like magic", says Loll.

Even more startling, they found that typical universes generated this way started off small and got bigger - they expanded, just like the real Universe has done since the big bang. This was completely unexpected - there was nothing in the tiling rules that seemed to demand it. 'We're completely stunned,' says Loll.

She admits that there's no a priori reason to demand that quantum space-time has to observe causality: the researchers put it into their equations by hand. But that, it seems, is the only way to end up with a realistic Universe.

For the complete item: http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041004/full/041004-17.html

"Without a corresponding theory of behavior -- of dynamics -- a theory of network structure is essentially uninterpretable and therefore of little practical use." (Duncan Watts, Six Degrees, 51)

In an earlier post (6/6/04), I referenced Steven Johnson's Emergence book where he talks about idea revolutions and paradigm shifts in terms of emergence (and by easy extrapolation, as aspects of network behavior).

Here's a relevant story to terrify the kids at bedtime:

"Intelligent design advocates say that teaching students to 'critically analyze' evolution will help give them the skills to 'see both sides' of all scientific issues. And if the Discovery Institute execs have their way, those skills will be used to reconsider the philosophy of modern science itself - which they blame for everything from divorce to abortion to the insanity defense. 'Our culture has been deeply influenced by materialist thought,' says Meyer. 'We think it's deeply destructive, and we think it's false. And we mean to overturn it.'" ("The Crusade Against Evolution", Wired, Oct. 2004. (And see also: "Discovery Institute's 'Wedge project' circulates online".

This is an example of hacking the idea network, to change both it's behavior and its content.

jd

And related to the write-up just posted on the west coast dock situation two years ago (should be just below), the Wall Street Journal carried a news story by Margot Cohen last week (9/22/04) "Wave of the Future: China, Vietnam Supplant Philippines as Port of Call For Finding Low-Cost Crews". In the previous post I referred to a talk by Edna Bonacich that included info about the nature of sailor labor. This article brings that aspect of global transportation up-to-date.

"The shipping industry is searching the world for new sources of seafarers. Pressured to cut costs and boost competitiveness, shipowners are looking for ordinary seamen -- known as 'ratings' -- who are willing to work for lower salaries and endure tougher conditions than their current crews are. That search is taking owners everywhere from China, Vietnam and Myanmar to Latvia, Georgia and Ukraine."

"About a third of seamen come from just one nation: the Philippines. Thanks, in part, to their superior English and compatibility with other nationalities on board, Philippine seamen have come to dominate this labor market over the past 15 years. But over the years, the Filipinos' unions have secured pay raises for their members that shipowners find increasingly burdensome."

[So what was once low cost labor supplier (in this case the Phillippines) becomes even too expensive (we're talking $1100 - 1500 per month, including overtime and benefits), and so the search is on for even cheaper labor. However, the situation is more complex than just finding workers with modern sailing skills. Language is important -- English is the esperanto of the shipping industry so sailors without that skill are at a disadvantage. And also, given crews of mixed countries of origin, the ability to culturally mix is important too. The nature of the labor requires cooperation at the point of production (or transportation as the case may be).]

"And so, once again, owners are searching for new crews, just as they have done many times in the past: In the 1970s, European ratings were largely replaced by Indians who were, in turn, displaced by Filipinos in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Iron Curtain left the global shipping industry flush with well-trained and experienced seamen from Eastern Europe, who now account for about 25% of ratings. Now, as their own economies improve, the pickings are getting slimmer."


[An index of the swath cut by globalization...]

So here is an aspect of the network of globalization -- the links expressed by the shipping industry, and within that link, the detail of the workers, and the network of their relations to each other.

jd

The following is a column I wrote a couple of years ago as a strike was looming on the West Coast docks in the U.S. The world economy, as a network, is connected in many ways, not the least of which is the transportation system which moves goods from producer to market; or market to consumer. The digital transport system is a part of this (i.e., the Internet and other digital communication systems). Older forms are still key components also, for moving about those things which cannot be digitally rendered.

A West Coast longshore workers strike is looking likely. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which represents the dock workers and clerks at the ports from Long Beach to Seattle, is stuck in contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents the major shipping lines, over who's going to pay what for health care benefits.

All that stuff on the shelves at Walmart and Target -- big surprise -- is made across the big water in the sweatshops of Asia. Somehow it has to get to Walmart and Target. In the global economy, the transportation section of the economy -- shipping, trucking, warehousing, railroads -- plays a key role. It's relatively easy to move a factory from Chicago or Buffalo to Mexico or Indonesia; it's hard to move 280 million consumers. So the big retailers are stuck having to deal with transportation workers.

Shipping, like every other part of the economy, has been undergoing a technology revolution; and, as a result, an upheaval in the way it is organized and run. The big modern container ships are so big that they can't get through the Panama Canal. Which means goods destined for the U.S. must pass through the west coast docks. The west coast ports, and especially the ports of Los Angeles, are the gateways to the malls of America.

A lot is at stake. According to Edna Bonacich, a researcher at the University of California - Riverside, a one week strike on the west coast docks would cost American business $5 billion. A two-week strike would cost them $20 billion. Modern manufacturing relies on "just-in-time" production; modern retailing relies on "just-in-time" goods. That is, there aren't lots and lots of computer chips or shoes sitting in warehouses -- the factories and stores count on a smoothly flowing distribution pipeline to keep the assembly line and shelves primed. An interruption of more than just a few days quickly disrupts the global assembly line.

September 11 provided the cover for a big advance in the building a police state begun under Clinton and U.S. administrations before him. Now just about anything that threatens the interest of capitalism is being passed off as a security threat. In the inside-out logic of the Bush regime, a humming U.S. economy needs working docks, therefore a longshore strike would be a security threat. As would any effort by workers and people without to defend their rights or secure basics like housing, food, health care, etc. The Bush administration is considering its options. These include the invoking a range of laws to break a strike, up to and including using the U.S. Navy to work the docks -- a wartime measure, but, after all, we are in a war against terror.

Beyond the current looming strike, the march of technology proceeds apace. The shipping companies and the giant retailers who pull their strings want deregulated, strike-free, smooth-running ports. Like the Liverpool "dockers" and the Australian "dockers" before them, the workers of the ILWU stand in the way. The ILWU faces a future of automated docks. But blocking new technology that relieves people of dangerous, dull or dirty work is no answer. The problem is an economic system that blocks new technology from being used for the benefit of all, and instead uses new technology to terrorize people with a future of poverty.

The west coast dock situation demands that we defend what the ILWU has won. It also demands that we fight not just against each new brick of the police state, but for a new economy free of the terror of poverty. The whole situation points to a need for a political party to represent our class -- like the Labor Party.

Jim Davis
8/24/02

Additional information on the west coast dock situation

David Bacon, "Bush Threatens Dockers' Right To Strike"

International Longshore and Warehouse Union

Pacific Maritime Association
(This is the trade association that represents the shippers)

West Coast Waterfront Coalition

(This is the association of shipping customers whose businesses depend on the steady flow of goods through the ports. Its members include Gap, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, etc.)

In a talk at a globalization conference in Chicago last May [2002], Edna Bonacich, a researcher at the University of California - Riverside, described the trans-Pacific shipping industry. The next bit is from notes I took at the conference -- jd
In the drive to cut costs, much of the transportation sector has been de-regulated. Most shipping lines register their ships under "flags of convenience", like Panama or Liberia, where enforcing maritime laws is difficult. The boats are basically floating sweatshops. The use of standard-sized containers going back to the 1960s (pioneered, by the way, by the U.S. Navy to make it easier to move stuff in wartime), coupled with advanced computer and imaging technology, have led to largely automated docks (which is actually the case in the Rotterdam port in Holland). Boats can be unloaded so fast that shore leave for the handful of predominantly Filipino or Chinese sailors is a thing of the past, making them virtual prisoners on the boats for months at a time. In the most important port of L.A., the goods are loaded onto trucks driven by "independent contractors" -- code words for low paid, high-stressed, often undocumented workers, "sweatshops on wheels" -- and hauled up I-10 to the giant warehouse complexes of the Inland Empire. There, the goods are sorted by close-to-minimum wage workers for trucks or rail destined to the Walmarts and Targets of the heartland. And there still are a lot of factories in the U.S. that depends on parts and materials from Asia. In the middle, are the relative handful of unionized, well-paid ILWU workers running the cranes and processing the paperwork at the docks.

I'm reading James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, which is a generally useful addition to the broad genre of popular treatments of complexity, emergence, networks and the like. His particular focus is on the decision-making process, as opposed to the emergence of order in systems as discussed in Steven Johnson's Emergence. Setting aside the rather bizarre conception of "rational behavior" as narrow self-interest that provides the straw man for many of his observations about social behavior, there is much of interest for anyone involved in committees, collectives, organizations, etc.

One of the general challenges of the "network form" is how to ensure that the organization maintains some coherence and common purpose via a decentralized structure. Surowiecki addresses this question in chapter 4 of his book.

Decentralization's great strength is that it encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other. Decentralization's great weakness is that there's no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated, making it less useful that it otherwise would be. What you;d like is a way for individuals to specialize and to acquire local knowledge -- which increases the total amount of information available in the system -- while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information into a collective whole. (p 71-2)

That is, the problem is not "decentralization" per se, but data aggregation in the system (that is, in the network). "[A] decentralized system can only produce generally intelligent results if there's a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system." (74)

"Information aggregation" is a network function in that the structure of the network -- the efficiency of the links, the degree of filtering or friction or consolidation at the nodes -- determines how well information is aggregated. If links are missing, or nodes collect but do not forward information, aggregation will suffer.

"Aggregation -- which could be seen as a curious form of centralization -- is therefore paradoxically important to the success of decentralization". (75) The "centralization" is really the "collectivization" of information, transforming it from local to global information. "It's possible and desirable, to have collective decisions made by decentralized agents."

Decentralization is hard, and teeters on the edge of disorganization. The crucial difference is the integrity of the network in keeping the nodes in contact, and providing the mechanism for information aggregration.

Citing the Iraq army during the 2003 Iraq war, the destruction of the Iraqi command and control system left pockets of resistance -- "all tactics and no strategy" per one British commander. The U.S. Army, on the other hand, is cited as the "true decentralized military" in that war. Individual units were given wide latitude for decision-making, but maintained a functioning communication system that allowed the local experience/information to be shared, aggregated and become collective information.

The chain of command remains essential to the way the military works, and all battlefield action takes place within a framework defined by what's known as the Commander's Intent, which essentially lays out a campaign's objectives. But increasingly, successul campaigns may depend as much on the fast aggregation of information from the field as on preexisting, top-down strategies. (p 77)

jd

Another quote from Steven Johnson's Emergence book. He is exploring the concept of feedback as critical to emergent systems; both "negative feedback [where the feedback regulates or restrains the system - jd], a way of transforming a complex system into a complex adaptive system." p 139, emphasis in original); and positive feedback, where the output feeds back into the system, building into a whole new effect.

Johnson uses the "mediasphere", the environment of media, as an example of a complex system. Changes in technology, in this case cable television, and the ability of local stations to feed news into the system; and in policy (rules), that allowed local CNN affiliates to feed stories into the system, as a dramatic change that ultimately allowed the Gennifer Flowers story to come to mass-light during the 1992 primary campaigns.

Once again, we return to the fundamental laws of emergence: the behavior of individual agents is less important than the overall system. In earlier times, connections were hierarchical; they lacked the connections to generate true feedback; and too few agents were interacting to create any higher-level order. But the cable explosion of the eighties changed all that. For the first time, the system started to reverberate on its own. The sound was quiet during those initial years and may not have crossed into an audible range until Jim Wooten asked that question. And yet anyone who caught the nightly news on January 24, 1992, picked up its signal loud and clear. (p 145)

And earlier: "The likelihood of a feedback loop correlates directly to the general interconnectedness of the system." (134)

A couple of pages later, Johnson describes the danger of an absence of feedback. While the Gennifer Flowers affair as an example of "runaway positive feedback", "the tyranny of the crank results from a scarcity of feedback: a system where the information flows are unidirectional, where the audience is present and at the same time invisible." (152)

Like living in a sensory deprivation tank -- eventually you begin to hallucinate.

jd

Resources: Open theory

The mechanism being used on the Open Theory web site looks to be an effort to apply the concepts of open source to developing theory ("open theory" or "ot"). "Developing texts like Free Software according to the principle »rough consensus, tasty text!«"

An interesting use of the Internet in collaborative development of political projects...

Although most of the stuff on the site looks to be in German, it also looks like there is nothing to keep any member from starting a project in any language.

jd

"A strong body of psychological research, supported by widespread anecdotal evidence, confirms the hypothesis that direct contact with nature leads to increased mental health and psychological development."

This is the opening sentence from a very useful overview, "Psychological Benefits of Nature Experiences" by John Davis, who teaches at Naropa University and the School of Lost Borders (he is also my brother).

The paper, and the research it summarizes, is relevant to interconnection and networks in several ways:

The notion of the human/nature connection (and in this sense, nature is understood mainly as "unbuilt", or barely touched by human hands -- "wild" or "natural" environments; although John does reference research into benefits of connections as seemingly trivial as those with potted plants or pets -- well nothing trivial about the relationship to pets). Situating the individual in an environment, where the individual is really just a node in a vast network of biological and physical interactions...

But we tend to compress the network down to two nodes, Me and Nature. John points out towards the end of the paper, that that distinction is ultimately false, because, well, aren't we eating, breathing, pissing, shitting, screwing "nature" too?

"[We need] to reconsider the duality of Person and Place. The psychological benefits of nature are usually framed in dualistic terms: nature affects human experience. A transpersonal view questions the assumption of nature (as one thing) affecting human experience (as another thing)? Or could we speak of a more primary category, Being, of which Person and Place are two aspects.

And

In a transpersonal analysis, it is also important that we not confuse nature (as the natural world relatively unaffected by human intervention) and Nature (as spirit or the ultimate ground of being). ... The point is that both human and nature are expressions of the same source, Nature.

(see also John's article "The Transpersonal Dimensions of Ecopsychology: Nature, Nonduality, and Spiritual Practice")

Part of John's work includes taking people out into wilderness areas, so he speaks from personal experience as well as from academic learning. On a trip I did with him a couple of years ago, he explored the range of relationships to Nature: Nature as danger; Nature as resource; Nature as commodity; Nature as ?mirror?; Nature as self (in the sense described above). And in these relationships we can see how broader social and economic contexts come to play -- specifically capitalism as an alienating system that reduces Nature to something to be exploited, consumed, bought and sold, and dumped on. The quality of the connections of humans and nature are determined? (to a great extent anyway) by production relations.

Another aspect of the overview paper that jumped out at me was the role of Nature as a "trigger for peak experiences" and personal transformation (or, in dialectical terms, qualitative changes in the personality or self that take place as leaps). "Survey results on frequency and triggers for peak experiences ... shows that nature is the most common trigger for peak experiences".

If thought of as "ego transcendence" and in terms of "Object Relations Theory": "If the self is a structure integrating the various object relations, going to a radically different environment would tend to destructure or disintegrate this self-structure."

The process of "de-structuring" is another way, I think, of saying that the connections within the network-of-the-self are broken, destroyed. This process of destruction is an integral stage of the leap (qualitative change as the shift from one law system to another, one kind of "necessary connections" to another). The old connections are destroyed and new connections forged.

Here we get to aspects of what makes for qualitative change. The "radically different environment" can be seen as the trigger -- a catalytic agent that kicks off a process that is "waiting to happen", but itself is not changed in the process or even incorporated into the new quality. The source of the new quality (say, self-understanding, or healthy, balanced personality) is not in nature-the-external-environment, but discovered from internal wells, or introduced from the outside (teacher, book, dervish, therapist, collective, etc) in the form of ideas, in an intellectual way, but not really integrated until the transcendent or transforming moment triggered by nature.

Or another way to see this is that Nature, the experience of the unity, "Coherence, Complexity, Legibility, and Mystery" [these are the qualities of "preferred environments" per John's references] of Nature is itself the new quality. Some sort of Nature-integration -- we become Nature-Boy and Nature-Girl.

Classic dialectics views causality as arising from within the phenomena, as the result of interacting contradictions. The classic kind of causation results in what physics would call "phase changes", where "quantity becomes quality". These phase changes are triggered by changes in the environment -- the addition or subtraction of energy, for example, in the case of water, and the presence of catalysts or "occasions". ["Nature" or the wilderness setting would be the "environment", and some event in the wilderness -- the appearance of an animal, a strong wind, an eclipse, etc the "occasion" or catalyst. Or other mechanisms might be at work that allow for the trigger effect -- John's paper surveys these. For more on the use of the term "occasion", see my piece "Networks and Interconnection".]

But I think we also have to allow for special kinds of causation that involves the introduction of a new quality into a process, generally of a spontaneous or relatively random character, not predictable, but expected. This kind of causation leads to another kind of qualitative change, a much more profound change: the overthrow of one law system, one type of connections; and its replacement with a new law system, new types of connections.

The "new" quality, in this latter sense of becoming Nature-Boy/Nature-Girl isn't Nature per se, because, as noted, we already are "Nature." It's more of a sense that "we got to get ourselves back to the garden"; a re-realization; a lost, or misplaced quality re-discovered; or given back, given again by being in wild places; but now understood in a more profound, higher, deeper, complete, complex way.


jd

As technology (in particular, the Internet) allows new kinds of connections to develop, old network forms are challenged.

An 7/7/04 item from Internet Week, "Peer-To-Peer Gambling Coming Soon To America" describes the rise of a new form of online gambling that bypasses the "house" altogether. See the "house" (the casino, which literally, Italian diminutive for "house") as the centralized node via which individual gamblers can find a game; or punters can assemble the parimutuel pool. In the past this would be the brick and mortar facility, although with the Internet, the gambling space has become quite virtual. This scheme goes one step further, to remove even the virtual house -- you can become the bookie.

"It's like Kazaa or Morpheus, but for betting", per the BetBug website. If I understand the way this works, the individual bettor offers odds on some event, and escrows the money in an account; any takers also park money in an account (in a Cyprus-based bank). So the website is the vehicle for connecting bettor to bettor, rather that bettor to house, and through the house to other bettors. BetBug scrapes 5% from the winning account for the service.

According to the Internet Week article:

Unlike Web casinos, bettors using peer-to-peer services don't wager against the house, but rather against each other. The online betting services allow users to set their own terms. This shift in risk from more traditional casinos to individual users poses a threat to established online gambling sites. A market that some analysts estimate generates $8 billion per year.

While online wagering is technically illegal in the U.S., BetBug is arguing that this is legal, because the betting takes place between two individuals, like you betting with your neighbor whose garage will collapse first. With no "middlemen" -- i.e., the bookie or the house -- the U.S. Wire Act (the legal basis for outlawing online gaming)is not violated. Or so they argue.

Here's a link to a more comprehensive New York Times article on the same: "Gambling Sites Offering Ways to Let Any User Be the Bookie".

What is clear is that the Internet is changing how gambling is conducted, just as it has changed auctions, securities day-trading and music sales.

While Web casinos are not new, a new generation of online services like Betfair has emerged to allow sports bettors to wager not against the house but directly against each other. The services, by letting individuals set the terms of their own wager easily and efficiently, threaten to diminish the role of more traditional casinos, which set the odds of a contest and then assume the risk for paying a winning bet.

And another resource on complexity theory and more:

Complexity Digest

This is a great maintained digest of articles plus searchable archive that gathers together multi-disciplinary articles that touch on complexity. There is a lot here. It's the kind of site that gives one hope for the Internet.

I guess I can go home now.

jd

Here is an Internet resource I came across recently:

Barkley Rosser's Home Page

Barkey Rosser, Jr. is an professor of economics at James Madison University. The home page lists a number of writings on non-linear dynamics, complex systems and economics.

The paper that initially drew my attention: "Aspects of Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics". "Among the deepest problems in political economy is that of the qualitative transformation of economic systems from one mode to another... this paper will argue that nonlinear dynamics offers a way in which a mathematical analogue to certain aspects of the dialectical approach can be modelled, in particular, that of the difficult problem of qualitative transformation..."

"In most linear models, continuous changes in inputs do not lead to discontinuous changes in outputs, which will be our mathematical interpretation of the famous 'quantitative change leading to qualitative change' formulation."

The paper reviews basic dialectical concepts; discusses how catastrophe theory can imply dialectical results; considers chaos theory from a dialectical perspective; and examines some emergent complexity concepts along similar lines, "culminating in a broader synthesis."

I recently spent a week in Colorado's canyonlands. I found a space on the slickrock above where I was camping, a desert garden of sorts. An indentation where sand and dirt and loose rock had accumulated, with a crust of crypto-biotic. Sitting on a large rock, a bench of sorts, from which I can observe the garden.

On the left focus, a juniper; a pinyon pine at the other focus. Some scrubby bush and tufts of grass here and there, some bearing small flowers. The pinyon pine has some hard, dead? roots wandering off. Two largish boulders flank the pine.

I think, this has the discplined feel of a Japanese garden. Well not knowing two turds about Japanese gardens, still, that's what came to mind, so there. But no hand of woman or man directed this space. Instead, a random arrangement achieved by gravity and solar rays and chemical reactions and biological interactions. Processes layered upon processes, a density and complexity that seems without boundaries. And out of it all, a lovely rock garden.

On the surface a simple bounded space of definitely arranged biotics on a rock in a canyon in western North America, planet Earth. But start tugging at the knit of connections, and the whole amazing web of it is revealed.

The World Series of Poker

Consider the number of entrants in the WSOP for the past three years:

2000 - 512 entrants
2003 - 839 entrants
2004 - 2576 entrants

For the past two years, the winners have been Internet poker players with little or no prior "live" game experience. This year an estimated 40% of the players in the tournament won their seats from online tournaments and promotions -- that is, more than participated in the previous year's tournament. It's hard to say how many other players were energized about poker via the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour (cable TV and the "hole card cam" being another dimension of electronics), or the by the more general cultural buzz about poker (and here the rise in gambling has an electronics dimension (for more see "Speculative Capital").

The presence of so many players, and so many Internet players has changed the character of the WSOP. For one thing, Internet play is different -- Internet players bring a different playing style to the tournament. Since play is so much faster online, "the experience of playing thousands of games in roadhouses and casinos is being eclipsed by a cyborg-like intelligence produced by humans weaned on machine play," per Peter Wayner in a fascinating New York Times article "The New Card Shark" (7/10/03, only the abstract is available for free now). Some other changes in playing style that Wayner notes:

"The changes in the nature of the game are both subtle and striking. The advantages of some well-understood strategies are being tuned, and others are being abandoned. Some online enthusiasts, for instance, are even suggesting that the value of any information gleaned from watching the opponent's body for telltale tics or gestures is overrated. These so-called tells are too easily manipulated. More information comes in the pattern of bets, raises and calls. The money, they say, talks.

"The biggest factor propelling change may be the speed of technology. Players do not wait while someone shuffles and deals. Chips do not need to be counted or watched. Computers handle the accounting, often finishing hands in as little as 30 seconds."

The growth in the number of online players has been dramatic -- some 2.8 million as of last October, and that was triple the number of the previous April. Many online sites offer cheap tournaments that allow players to try for a big prize of an entry to events like the WSOP; according to one guess (I think this is from John Vorhaus's blog on the tourney, but I can't find the actual post now) said that some 12,000 Internet players had participated in tourneys leading up to the final event. These tiny rivulets and streams are gathered together in the giant watershed of the Internet into a torrent of new players.

These numbers mean more money going into the event, which expands the prize pool, which attracts more people, and expands the attendance which ... -- in the end first prize at the WSOP this year was over $5 million.

All of these players though, well, like Nobel laureate Phillip Anderson said in a famous 1971 paper, "more is different."

"Veteran poker pros -- who originally pegged all these newcomers as easy marks -- now are shuddering at the notion of a field so huge that it will take an eerie run of luck for anyone to prevail. 'It's going to be pretty random,' says 70-year-old Doyle Brunson, a two-time winner of the World Series championship in the 1970s. 'To win it now would be like winning the lottery.'" ("Up Against a Full House Amateurs Pack Poker Tourney, Changing Odds for the Pros; Just $10,000 and a Dream", Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2004.

While poker is more or less a game of skill, the random dimension -- luck -- looms large. That is, as the numbers increase, the statistical "shit happens" has more opportunity to happen.

Another snippet from Duncan Watts' excellent Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age book (now in paperback, Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Powell's):

"[I]n the past, networks have been viewed as objects of pure structure whose properties are fixed in time. Neither of these assumptions could be further from the truth. First, real networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something -- generating power, sending data, or even making decisions. Although the structure of the relationships between a network's components is interesting, it is important principally because it affects either their individual behavior or the behavior of the system as a whole. Second, networks are dynamic objects not just because things happen in networked systems, but because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in time, driven by the activities or decisions of those very components. In the connected age, therefore, what happens and how it happens depend on the network. And the network in turn depends on what has happened previously. It is this view of the network -- as an integral part of a contiuously evolving and self-constituting system -- that is truly new about the science of networks." (28-29) (emph. in original)

Here's another LA Times commentary reference/link. This one is a column by Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks, called Killing the Hydra: Only attacks on its ideas can defeat a network like Al Qaeda (you need to register to use the LA Times site).

Sageman situates the Al Qaeda network within a broad "loose-knit, violent, Islamic revivalist social movement held together by a common idea: the global Islamist jihad". With the Taliban-provided base in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda on the one hand had the infrastructure to carry large-scale and relatively complex operations.

"But the Afghan sites, which gave Al Qaeda its control over the movement, were also its Achilles' heel because they became specific military targets. After 9/11, U.S. and allied forces destroyed all identifiable terrorist targets: training camps, residential compounds and support facilities. Communications were disrupted. The network lost much of its internal glue and reverted to being small clumps of terrorists loosely connected to each other."

Now, Al Qaeda is more "network form" than ever. "Far from having a formal command structure, wherein followers strictly obey orders from above, these [new] networks are self-organized from the bottom up and demonstrate a great deal of local initiative and flexibility. Like the Internet, they function very well with little coordination from the top."

The network has survived because the circumstances that created the environment for it to flourish has not changed, or if anything, has only intensified. That environment being capitalism in the age of electronics, i.e., globalization and all of the havoc it wreaks. Under new conditions, it has adapted accordingly, in true network form.

Sageman considers Al Qaeda and similar networks as "idea-based" networks, that is linked by a common outlook or ideology. Following his logic, idea-based networks can only be combatted with ideas. That is, if the nature of the connections between the participants in the network, or the broader population that sustains and nourishes the militants are ideas, then counter-ideas, or anti-ideas (e.g., [a negative one,] "de-legitimizing terrorist ideas, and a positive one, aimed at promoting an alternative vision of a just and fair Islamic society living in harmony with the West") can destroy the network.

One must consider if such ideas can exist independent of the world from which they arise: poverty, expropriation, exploitation, destruction, eviction, dislocation, torture, etc. etc. That is, a hatred of "the West" -- really, globalization -- cannot be replaced by a love of globalization because that too would be an obvious lie (as in not reflecting reality, covering over, inaccurate). Only an idea that corresponds to reality can dislodge an idea based on fictions. Islamic fundamentalism itself is as much a lie as "globalization means democracy means freedom" is.

The war of ideas is critical, but what ideas? Ideas that ultimately correspond the kind of world that new technologies make possible -- free of the poverty and exploitation that give rise to the mis-directed insurgencies like Al Qaeda.

jd

Emergence, idea revolutions and networks

I highly recommend Steven Johnson's 2001 book Emergence (Touchstone). It's an easy read, and very informative in bringing the reader up-to-date (as of 2001 anyway) on thinking about emergent behaviors in complex systems.

Anyway, he describes one experiment, a simulation of the behavior of slime mold. Slime mold is a primitive amoebalike organism, related to fungi that acts one way by itself, but takes on entirely different behaviors when it gets together with other slime molds -- even to the point where scientists can "train" the mold to navigate a maze.

Johnson describes how Mitch Resnick, a researcher at MIT, developed a computer program [instance of eletronic instruments of science] to simulate the behavior of slime mold. Slime molds leave a chemical trail that other slime molds can detect, and then alter their behavior accordingly. The length of time that the trail persists will therefore affect the impact of other molds, so these two dimensions -- the number of molds, and the life of the pheromone trail -- will affect the behavior of the slime mold "system."

"Keep the trails short, and the cells few, and the slime molds will steadfastly refuse to come together. The screen looks like a busy galaxy of shooting starts. But turn up the duration of the trails, and the number of agents [i.e. # of slime mold cells - jd], and at a certain clearly defined point, a cluster of cells will suddenly form. The system has entered a phase transition, moving from one discrete state to another, based on the the 'organized complexity' of the slime mold cells." (p63)

Johnson then uses this pattern of behavior -- processes that under certain conditions undergo a phase transition -- a "quantity becomes quality" shift -- to talk about "idea revolutions", when new patterns or ways of thinking -- paradigm shifts -- take place.

"I suspect Mitch Resnick's slime mold simulation may be a better metaphor for the way idea revolutions come about: think of these slime mold cells as investigators in the field, think of those trails as a kind of institutional memory. With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress -- like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail --by publishing those ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas -- and before long the system arrives at a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals." (p64)

In this second example, the network dimensions are clearer:

-- an existing communication network affects the dispersion of novel ideas. In the case of ideas, access to the network on the production side can be closed, or filtered through editors. On the consumption side, access can be blocked by lack of access to the necessary technology (e.g., illiteracy or no computer) or lack of money and absence of public libraries. Filtering can take place along the network connections, in the form of censorship, or lack of money to put the ideas out. So of course the nature of the communication channels has a tremendous effect in how ideas spread -- the amount of friction in the network that determines how long ideas "persist" if they even see the light of day.

-- new networks may develop to communicate the new ideas, if the existing network is too closed or has too much friction. For example, alternative media networks like IndyMedia.

-- the network of ideas exists within a broader environment. Even in a "frictionless" network, irrelevant, nutty, goofy ideas generally will not gain traction; or be sidelined amongst a cultish few. So the paradigm shifts that do occur -- setting aside periods of mass delusion, manias, etc. -- are enabled by some broader consciousness (enabled by new tools of science) that has some relevancy or correspondence to new discoveries.

-- networks undergo phase transitions in their process of growth (quantity becomes quality, as in the case of the ideas gaining popular currency), but this should be distinguished from the overthrow of one law system by another (quality replaces quality, regime change in the world of ideas or world outlook).

jd

Here's a link to an interesting article that someone forwarded along to me:

Need to Make a Good Decision? Join the Crowd

The article is a commentary piece from the LA Times, you need to register on their site to read articles.

The author, James Surowiecki, is a columnist for the New Yorker, and also the author of the just-published The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The book title just about sums up the content of the commentary piece.

"To be intelligent, crowds have to be made up of people relying on diverse sources of information who make their choices relatively independently of each other. Diversity is so important, in fact, that without it, we have a hard time being intelligent."

It sounds like an example of emergence. But the author also somewhat suspect when he talks about the market as an efficient vox populi feedback system. Like much pop-science in the same vein, e.g., Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, or even Barabasi and Buchanan's network books, he looks to be glossing over the social and political context of the process or the law system at work:

"For all of the dismissal of crowds, we do rely on collective decision-making to guide our economy (the market, not a politburo, dictates how much orange juice will be produced in the next month), and we entrust our government to voters."

To suggest that markets and elections in the U.S. are free and democratic processes is absurd.

jd