The Networked Rise of Network Society: A Review of This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams

We all know we live in a network society. But what does that mean? And what does knowing that mean for networked society? In his latest novel, This Is Not a Game (Orbit Books, 2009), Williams explores several themes, among them massive alternate reality games (ARG) and global capitalism, all in the context of the well-known "small world" thesis--the idea (pioneered by Stanley Milgram, among many others) that all of us our connected to each other along short chains of acquaintances. There have been other novels exploring the "six degrees of separation" idea, of course, but this is the Web 2.0 release--think David Lodge's Small World with more computing power and less spleen.

In Williams's novel, four friends who gamed together at Caltech--Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ--find their futures revolving around a massive alternate reality game called The Long Night of Briana Hall (or, alternatively, Motel Room Blues). The details of the game itself are somewhat obscure. Pace ARG's in general, players traipse across real and virtual space to discover clues, all under the direction of Dagmar in her role as game designer and "puppetmaster" pulling the strings of this emergent narrative.

But, of course, there are problems--Dagmar's boss (and old friend) Charlie seems to be bent on micromanaging her game for his own ends, Austin is mercilessly gunned down by a Latvian assassin, BJ again becomes part of Dagmar's life. In other words, the logical extension of the "This Is Not a Game" design ethic:

TINAG--this is not a game. The game only worked when both players and puppetmasters acted as if everything was real. (138)

But although ARG's are nothing new in fiction (and their presence here is testament to Williams's own experiences and skills as a gamer and game designer), what is interesting in this novel is the way Williams harnesses the network itself as a deus ex machina and novum for his story--the network made up of "millions" of players, an unbelievably tiny number of whom post rather unbelievably literate postings on the game's discussion board, "Our Reality Network".

Here, Williams develops the other idea underlying much of contemporary interest in networks: the strength of weak ties. In a virally popular paper originally published in the American Journal of Sociology, Mark Granovetter argued that the intimate circle of friends with whom we ordinarily "network" is not really useful for something like gaining employment. Your friends are, after all, most likely in the same lousy boat you are viz. employment. Instead, what you rely on are "weak ties"--acquaintances only weakly connected back to your network. And this makes complete sense; after all, opportunity doesn't knock every day. And 'seizing' opportunity involves, by definition, some kind of risk.

This insight becomes especially important in the age of Facebook, when social networking sites stimulate the multiplication of weak ties. In Williams's book, the Long Night of Briana Hall creates a vast network of weak ties to be mobilized by Dagmar for various, utilitarian purposes--saving her life in the first pages of the novel, solving the mystery in the final pages. This is what Dagmar thinks of as:

the Group Mind, lots of little autonomous agents out in the world, each with a skill set and a knowledge set, each with her own motivations, her own joys, her own alternate reality, all networked together in the great gestalt, the great becoming, that was the world. (365)

That is, the online network created by the ARG allows Dagmar access to "short chains" that connect her with resources around the world--highly proprietary financial information, contact with Indonesian para-military groups, etc. Dagmar's network folds and connects in more-or-less believable ways--players know someone who knows someone, resources are mobilized and the plot moves along.

But there's something disingenuous here as well, as one of the posters to "Our Reality network" reflects:

We're used to following the whims of puppetmasters, but puppetmasters with real-world policies are another matter. Is this a good idea? Should we follow anyone who provides what they say is entertainment, even if it comes with an ideology? (365-66)

That is, the vast networks of weak ties that people cultivate today are their own raison d'etre. Do people accumulate hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook with an agenda? Is there an underlying purpose to working on one's room in Cyworld?

As a plot device, the social networking that Williams describes works well, but still, I think, doesn't capture the semi-altruism of social networking, i.e., that it is an end in itself. Or, rather, Williams just gives us one side: the neo-liberal social networking where all of us our reduced to obsessively chasing down our network contacts on LinkedIn, nonce Willy Lomans employed in selling ourselves. But the other side is a strange altruism, where weak ties are their own reward, and where social networking seems to take on the kinds of importance once granted to kinship (not that kinship isn't shot through with utilitarianism).

To me, it's this circular logic that's the most interesting (and perhaps most profound) dimension to social networking. People accord importance to the cultivation of weak ties; they develop countless software applications helping people to cultivate, maintain and and manage weak ties; these networks of weak ties confirm the importance of weak ties.

Book Review, The City and the City: China Mieville and the Revival of Anthropological Science Fiction

I have often suggested that China Mieville is the best new writer of anthropological science fiction, although appending the word "anthropological" to his stuff suggests the extent to which anthropology has changed in the time since the concept was coined in the 1960's. (Although, see a March 2009 interview Mieville did with Ursula K. Le Guin (posted on her website in the MP3s section)). Mieville's Bachelor's degree is in social anthropology (at Cambridge), and reading King Rat or Perdido Street Station makes me think of Marilyn Strathern's work, with a thick dose of Donna Haraway: lots of hybridity, fecund sites of emergence of new forms of life that combine biological and machinic into fantastic topologies, all shot through with a sense of postcolonial theory and a strong grounding in Marxism. Chad Oliver (my favorite anthropological science fiction ancestor) would, I think, not really have liked his stuff, and I'm not even sure that Mieville himself would particularly identify his work as anthropological. He certainly doesn't in a 2003 interview in Science Fiction Studies with Joan Gordon. There, he includes among his influences 1) his teenage fascination with RPGs; 2) his interest in postcolonial writers; and 3) his commitment to socialism. If anything, anthropology is presented as a negative dialectic leading him to reject postmodernity (then still fashionable in anthropology), and embrace a broader critique of capitalism.

But readers of The City & The City will find this his most anthropological to date--theoretically rich, critical, and ultimately subversive of contemporary militancy. The story (and I will not include spoilers here) concerns two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) that co-exist, one interpellated into the other at various, fractal places. Not surprisingly, a variety of institutional orders exist to police the sites where the two cities "cross-hatch," including educational programs to "unsee" the other city as well as a mysterious, vaguely para-human force (breach) to police unlawful incursions into one place from another.

That this is absolutely believable is testament to the 21st century explosion of "spaces of exception"--all of variously enfeoffed "zones" that proliferate along the edges of capital and empire, marking off places for foreign capital investment, for the suspension of one governing system for another (think Kaesong industrial complex at the border of North and South Korea), for the suspension of citizen rights or even (after Agamben) human rights: refugee camps, the chicanery of international "internship" visas, etc. When we hear, as we have now daily for years, about Bagdhad's "Green Zone," Guantanomo on the edge of Cuba, occupied territories, what we're really doing is witnessing the ability of law and politics to create hybrid spaces within nations--what Mieville calls in the context of his novel "interstitial" spaces.

Take a conventional topographic narrative--say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities--and then fold it on itself like a Mobius strip. That's the theory behind Mieville's novel (although his narrative takes a more familiar, linear form). But, in a real sense, it's also exactly the situation for much of the world's population today, all of whom, and with varying degrees of choice, shift between legal, political, social and cultural orders in a world where borders are mobile, but still very real. So: in the grand tradition of sf dating back to at least More's Utopia, Mieville describes the present through his oeuvre. And really, only through sf is this kind of description of hyper-reality possible (Mieville, I think, would not appreciate the Baudrillard reference).

The underlying message in this is the question of the ends of interpretation, the goal of analysis. Should we frolic in the interstices of global capitalism (a la postmodern jouissance) or should we solve its crime. It's no whim that leads Mieville into this uneasy amalgam of sf, fantasy and detective fiction. The city, as Poe and Benjamin knew, demands a detective--the desire to follow the thread of the crime back to its source. In the figure of Inspector Tyador Borlu lies the moral imperative to expose the workings of power beneath the phantasmagoria of interpenetrating boundaries and identities.

It is a clarion call for us to investigate the interstices of our own cities--to "breach" the ideologies that naturalize the logic of exception, and follow the crimes back to the powerful forces behind them.

My interest in anthropological futures

My own entry into anticipatory anthropology started with my dissertation work, research that forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress was just beginning its “National Digital Library” program, involving, among other things, the large-scale digitization of multimedia collections and their placement online. This was a technically formidable project, but it also served to telescope the hopes and fears of Library staff and users at the Library for the future. Examining my informant’s narratives about what the coming “digital library” would mean for their work and research revealed a great deal of ambivalence about both the project’s viability and its relationship to information society in general. But these did not simply fall into neatly contained categories of “computopian” and “computropian” (these are David Hakken’s terms), optimistic technophile and sullen Luddite. Instead, people were keenly aware of both the new connections this experiment in information society would enable as well as the ways in which it would lead to new forms of inequality and disenfranchisement. This was a much more complex projection for information society—considered not as the autochthonous development of information technologies but as multifarious shifts in work, social life and culture—an ultimately deeply contradictory prognostication that, over the past ten years since my original field research, has largely come to pass.

I have taken this more nuanced approach to the future of information society in a variety of settings. One of the most fruitful has been my collaborations with computer scientists and robotics engineers—researches undertaken to utilize anthropological ideas to interrogate and critique linear and one-dimensional models of technologically-informed human futures. Our lives are being profoundly shaped (albeit not deterministically) by our interactions with a variety of non-human agents—including the many variously intelligent agents that guide (or goad) us along in the Internet. And yet, most working on the development of these non-human agents have utilized only crude (and even procrustean) models of human behavior grounded in what they believe to be “universal” attributes (cognitive, psychological, social and cultural) of Homo sapiens. One of my goals in collaborating with these engineers has been to act as a catalyst for the generation of alternative (e.g., less ethnocentric and less androcentric) models of the human in order to suggest new human agent/non-human agent hybrids, hybrids that we begin to explore in Handbook of Research on Agent-Based Societies.

In my mind, this is one of anthropology’s greatest resources—the ability to question (if not entirely overcome) hide-bound assumptions in order to open up the space for the imagination of alternatives to an ethnocentric present people assume will continue into an endless future. Accordingly, I began to explore the way anthropology has dealt with the “future,” not just as a theme in anthropological writings, but as a site for the interaction of anthropologists with non-anthropologists in futurology, political science and public policy. The result is my All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future, part historic review of anthropological futures, part plea for redoubling our efforts to impact the ways the future is imagined in government, international relations and other parts of the academy. Whether I’m discussing Margaret Mead’s or Reed Riner’s contributions to anthropological futures or critiquing nineteenth century “survivals” in anthropological writings on the future of race and multicultural society, my goal in the book is to both demonstrate the centrality of the future to anthropology and to salvage some of the our insights in order to stimulate futures premised on difference and diversity.

I have tried to do the same thing in the classroom, and have utilized a variety of methods (including simulations and highly abbreviated forms of Delphi and Ethnographic Futures Research) to elicit narratives about the future from my students, texts that we then have used less to actually predict than to critique the kinds of assumptions people bring to their expectations for the future, assumptions that rest on remarkably homogeneous ideas about the continued geopolitical dominance of the United States and the inevitability of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”. Moving towards possible alternatives means interrogating these assumptions for what they are—bland recapitulations of the ideological present imprisoning us in ethnocentric (and tempocentric) assumptions that have already proven disastrous for our world.

Here, my experience in the classroom has informed my current research: ethnographic futures research on Korean reunification. I ran similar future elicitations with college students and adult informants in Seoul when I was there on a Fulbright from 2006-2007. Those narratives revolved around the possibilities and pitfalls of reunification and, in particular, the kind of imagined future of a unified Korea, a future with one leg in an imagined past. Examining these narratives suggests the idea of a nation grounded in the “old” Joseon Dynasty (that last dynasty before the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910) while at the same time projecting a new, national space where “distortions” introduced in the colonial era will be resolved and Korea will (re)attain its rightful place among nations in the world. While the policy work and economic studies of institutions such as South Korea’s Ministry of Unification are, of course, vital to the success of a united peninsula, it is, I believe, the quotidian imagination of a unified Korea which will have the greatest impact upon the eventual shape of a north-south agreement, conceived, not just as a treaty or a series of policy initiatives, but as a social fact.

Tomorrow, Networks!

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4)

Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties—feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways.
Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “networks” always simultaneously exist in the penumbra of becoming—we can attempt to describe their parameters, but their ultimate configuration is in a process of continuous becoming. From the perspective of activists trying to intervene in the world in order to bring together
“Networks” are the perfect example of the “boundary object” for the information age. They are “real” in that we can characterize them qualitatively and quantitatively, but they are also shifting, protean, temporary and chiasmic. “Networks” are the preferred form of social life and social interaction in an ICT-mediated world, yet they represent utopian alternatives to the present arising “from below” and self-organizing through horizontal chains rather than more vertical forms of governmentality. In a world still dominated by verticality, networked socialites represent possibilities for other kinds of realities—at once more participatory and more democratic.

Previewing Post-Capitalism

How many books are there (in anthropology and elsewhere) describing/advocating/conjuring up "post-socialism"? I'm looking at one right now entitled, appropriately enough, "Post-Socialism" by Maruska Svasek (Berghahn Books, 2006). But, as lay-offs continue and plans to nationalize industries multiply, where are the texts on "post-capitalism"? I don't know about you, but it's sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to re-read my Kim Stanley Robinson! For most, "post-capitalism" refers to a miscellaneous theories for either "next" stages (a la Drucker), or alternatives to corporate capitalism (like various tracts on "participatory" economies). But perhaps the more anthropological take on this would be an economy of "shreds and patches" (to commit unspeakable violence to Robert Lowie) made up of the residue of dominant capitalism together with a thousand heterogeneous practices that make up the barely sublimated unconscious of economic life--in short, just the sort of bricolage that anthroplogists explicate every day in the lives of actual people who find themselves on the receiving end of IMF structural adjustments and other forms of economic violence.

This is the kind of post-capitalism I'd like to see elaborated, and, despite Robinson's own penchant for utopian system-building, not far off from what he does in the Mars triology, which--in a kind of Baconian way--takes the kinds of reciprocities and exchanges common to scientific communities as a starting point for a Martian economy.

The Polygenism of Science Fiction

I just finished reading Ben Bova's Mars Life, largely because of its enigmatic dedication to the former polygenist, Carleton S. Coon. Coon was the last of a long, if disgraced, line of anthropologists at Harvard who promoted the "American school"--the idea that races evolved separately. Needless to say, these theories, long superseded by data in population genetics, were utilized to justify any number of racist policies, including (but not just limited to) slavery in the US and apartheid in South Africa.

The anthropologist in Bova's novel, Carter Carleton, seems to embody what I imagine Coon to have been like--curmudgeony and atavistic (he, of course, may not have been). Pace the general characterization of anthropologists in fiction, he's a sexual brute; falsely accused of rape on Earth, he is nevertheless aggressive in his attempts to bed women he meets on Mars--the male version of the sexualized female anthropologist stereotype based on Margaret Mead. Thoroughly unpleasant in all respects, Carleton fails to even discover physical remains of Martians; rather, he takes the credit from a young colleague who stumbles on to the site.

Of course, given this ambivalent characterization of the anthropologist, this still begs the question--why Carleton S. Coon? Well, Coon was in some ways the darling of science fiction anthropology in the 1950's and 1960's, contributing to the 1968 edited volume of anthropological science fiction, "Apeman, Spaceman." The reasons are obvious--the "hard" science fiction of the time espoused a kind of galactic polygenism, still preserved (like a fly in amber) in Star Trek episodes, where different "races" populate the universe, each originating on a separate planet, with plots hinging upon the mechanics of "racial" conflict between these different groups. If it looks vaguely Victorian, that's because it is--the supposed conflict of nations/races that legitimated empire building in the 19th century, most recently given new life by Samuel Huntington.

On the one hand, this "racial" understanding of the alien other is just so much space opera, providing a patina of Gernsback-ian "wonder" to tales of space travel. But, on the other, it projects a conservative, even procrustean, understanding of races as separately developing, conflicting "types" to our future encounters and ultimately works to legitimate racist reactions to other peoples and other cultures today. Without polygenism as a body of theory in anthropology, what would epic science fiction have been like? Can we imagine a science fiction without it? What would that be like? Can we, for example, imagine an alien that was never separate from the non-alien . . .The galactic equivalent of mitochondria?

Bova, of course, is not advocating polygenism, nor, I suppose, is he really suggesting that we pick up the Carleton S. Coon again. His somewhat ambiguous rationale is described in the "Biology in Science Fiction" blog. I see it as an interesting form of reflexivity. The antiquated Carter Carleton, by excavating the Martians, is simultaneously excavating the polygenism of the genre, the history of science fiction that has never been separate from the constellations of power/knowledge that supported it.

On the Trail of Emergence

As the Python sketch said long, long ago: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" By definition, future forms and practices will be unexpected, i.e., inexplicable from our perspective now. One reason--technologies, behaviors, ideas, social relationships will combine in unforeseen ways and result in some novel assemblage. This semester, we're on the trails of these sites of emergence in my "information age cultures" class as we plumb the depths of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in East Asia. By looking at the flow of new technologies and concomitant social practices in Korea, Japan and China, we can, perhaps, tease out (yet not predict) the emergence of new forms in the U.S. It's not that U.S. practice will ineluctably follow on the tails of East Asia (although this has often been the case), it's that those different social and cultural perspectives suggest the possibility of future differences here . . .

Anyway: check out our messy, messy ning site, "Information assemblages."