Happy networks are all alike.
Every unhappy network is unhappy in its own way.
For well over a year now, I’ve been obsessed with an elementary question:
“How can 100 committed human beings, working as a network, positively transform a social system of 100 million, which is locked in self-destructive vicious circles?”
As is usual with simple questions, this one doesn’t have a simple answer. Spoiler alert: if you are hoping to find the answer to this question in this article, well, you won’t. I don’t believe there is one single answer to this question and there shouldn’t be one.
I have lost count of all the articles, papers, books, zoom calls, ted talks, online courses, computer models I have read, participated in, listened to or played with. In none of them, I found the answer. In all of them I found clues and metaphors. I have written about beehives and spider webs and the power of the simple commitment of the minority. One common feature in all these analogies is that they all describe networks as a living “thing.” And so, my studies moved into the issue of what it means to be alive, how life spontaneously emerges from lifelessness and how it self-organizes into complex hierarchies in a constant struggle to adapt to their environment while at the same time, interacting with it and changing it in the process. Networks are just the same: they emerge, sometimes rather spontaneously, from the apparent vacuum when triggered by the environment to do so, they self-organize into hierarchies that are well adapted to the environment they live in.
I like to think that they exist both as a kind of invisible social probability field and as a social kinetic field that has the power to change the environment when challenged to do so by it.
It’s a bit like in the quantum mechanical world where electrons exist both as massive particles and as waves of probability depending on how you observe them. We all keep many stakes in numerous networks but only when we need to organize a surprise party for a friend, do these connections become “real” and materialize as an event in the real world. But how do we keep them alive and real? How do we harness their power to spread information, behavior, innovations and to do collective sense-making and adaptation on the fly? A lot has been written about how to “hocus pocus” a network into existence. My question today is how to keep it alive to harness its power.
One of my favorite characteristics of some complex adaptive systems (CAS) is that they adhere to the so-called Anna Karenina Principle (AKP). The principle that states that, in such systems, several different factors need to be present in very well defined quantities or qualities for them to function at all. If one and only one of these factors is not present or out of balance the system won’t work. AKP takes its name from the first sentence of Tolstoy’s book: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Could we expand the AKP to our networks for societal change? Could we say that “All effective networks are alike. All ineffective networks are ineffective in their own way”.
In this 2017 book, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies, Geoffrey West, laid out the foundations of a comprehensive understanding of scale in complex living systems, from bacteria to cities. Scale provides a big clue to the original question as it profoundly explores how networks may scale exponentially (from 100 to 100 million) in a self-similar manner without proportionally scaling the metabolic rate, i.e. the amount of energy needed to maintain it.
Twenty years earlier, in the 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond proposed an explanation as to why humans were able to domesticate only a small number of animal species.
He based his argument in the AKP listing six factors that needed to be present in an animal species for humans to even have a shot at trying to domesticate it. (here’s a fun video about it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMpMxaX3Kdg
Could we combine the two? Can a proper organic social network be domesticated (and be kept alive) so that we can harness the power of exponential impact?
Still, no answer to this question but let’s play with the factors that Jared identified in the animal world in the first place and see if we can fit them to our domestication of networks problem.
First, let me propose that there are three variants of social networks.
Most networks are Wild. These include our relationships with longtime friends, family, coworkers, but also people you meet on the street and have an occasional exchange with. All of us are part of this savannah of wild networks that spring in and out of existence throughout our daily lives.
Then there are the Tamed networks. Here I include the Tango dancing community or the cluster formed around a response to a natural disaster. People actively join in, because of a clear, shared interest. There’s a mission or any other form of attractor that binds people together. But as soon as the attractor is gone or the mission is complete, the network dissolves back to the realm of the social probability field.
Beyond wild and tameable networks, we are looking at those we can domesticate for creative purposes. It is much harder to create a new life then it is to destroy. So yes, Cambridge-Analytica-type social media manipulation is a form of network domestication, but it is by far easier to propagate destruction, polarization and simplification then it is to spread creation, unity and complexification. This is because the second law of thermodynamics is playing against you. To have a chance of winning against the laws of thermodynamics of increasing entropy or disorder, I believe networks must adhere to the AKP of networks and show a balanced set of features simultaneously. The absence of or imbalance in one of these features is enough to doom the network into oblivion or, worse, into irrelevance.
One of these features is the focus on structure as opposed to focus on size. Whoever has had the experience of creating a startup knows that the initial team of 4–5 people are far more easy to manage and more effective than the future organization of 400–500 employees. We usually correlate size directly with power. But this is not true for networks for societal change. What gives these networks real power are their structuring laws. Like a small seed that contains the information to grow a tree, the key to the reach and effectiveness of a network is its structure and growing laws that should be self-similar; expanding the network from regional to national reach, should follow the same principles as growing it from neighborhood to regional reach. One of the first mistakes I see us doing at the start of a network domestication is putting a lot of effort into having a large number of nodes added to the network just because in our culture “more is better”. The balance between having enough initial nodes that fill in all the skills’ gap and not being overwhelmed with the task of onboarding hundreds of nodes is hard to strike.
And this leads me to a second factor which is the growth rate. Again there’s a sweet spot to discover in this variable. The tension is between our sense of urgency to transform the system and the time it takes to grow a strong drive and trust in the network. Climate change does not stop, slow down or wait for us. If anything, it is accelerating. This conflicts with the time needed to grow an active global awareness network that stops all our self-destructive ecological habits both by top-down regulations but mainly by changing consumer habits and expectations from the bottom-up. And by the bottom, I mean from inside the human mind up!
A third factor, linked to growth rate is the networks’ dietary needs: what kind of resources and in what amounts are needed to keep the system alive is critical for long-term survivability. Most networked initiatives stop in their track when supplies to keep it alive start falling short. The tension here is between the temptation to consume vast amounts of resources that feed the network beast and supports its growth in the initial phases, but without creating a dependency on these amounts which, if the resources get scarce (which eventually they will,) will force your network into a diet, hibernation or even starve to death. Consider all the sources of capital that are at your disposal and convert them into resources: social capital, financial capital, symbolic capital, and cultural capital.
In my view, most networked initiatives fail because either one or several of these factors are out of balance. Social network entrepreneurs struggle to keep an eye on both the weaving of the right skill set/roles into the network (the individual organs of the living system) and how the living network self-regulates and reproduces itself (autopoiesis). Although both are important, I feel we tend to forget about the latter. It’s like giving birth to a baby, taking care that all is good with his health, organs and body parts but neglecting to raise him into adulthood. I know this literally sounds paternalistic and perhaps it is. But if you’re in the business of weaving people together into networks for collective action and social change, shouldn’t you be? To quote one last book:
“C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
