Networks solve coordination costs. The cost of discovering a radical group has never been lower: combine search engines with anonymity tools with social media, and you have a way for people with extremely high-risk beliefs to discover one another, refine their views, attract more followers, and work together for their common aims. This is the force that gave rise to the pro-democratic “color revolutions,” the Arab Spring movements; the Occupy Movement and Anonymous — but also neofascist/hyper-nationalist movements; Al Qaeda; troll armies; and darknet pedophile rings.
Lowering coordination costs confers a disproportionate benefit to radical and fringe groups, and has a much less significant effect on mainstream activities. That’s because being in the mainstream means that you’ve already solved your coordination costs. When I was an anti-nuclear proliferation activist in Toronto in the 1980s, 98% of my job was figuring out how to pay for stamps, then address envelopes, then put the stamps on the envelopes — the remaining 2% was the time I had left over to figure out what to print on the things I put inside the envelopes. By contrast, the share of resources used for coordination by organizations agitating for more nuclear weapons (NATO, NORAD, arms dealers) was a rounding error — a line-item just below the coffee-and-doughnuts budget.
When you make coordination costs lower, the people whose work is most constrained by coordination costs get the biggest benefit. Thus the era of networked politics has seen profound shift and significant achievements for political fringes. In the 2000s, the Smart Mobs took to the streets — as in 2001, when the Philippines’ People Power revolution used SMS-coordinated demonstrations to topple Joseph Estrada’s corrupt regime.
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But netroots movements have always been better at tearing down than building up. Popular Power got rid of Estrada, but didn’t create the kind of lasting institutions that reformed the Philippines government — that’s why today the country is governed by a terrifying psychopath. Obama used the netroots to overcome the Bush legacy, but hit pause on the grubby street-level activists on day one in favor of a horse-trading, Chicago-Machine-style establishment politics where everything moved into the smoke-filled back rooms — and was fatally undermined by the Tea Party, a right-wing netroots movement (with mainstream financial backing, of course) that was nearly as effective at opposing Obama as Obama’s netroots had been at mobilizing against Bush. In Egypt, the netroots kicked out Mubarak — something the traditionally organized opposition failed to do in 30 years — but the country turned around and promptly elected an intolerant, authoritarian Islamist government that was then toppled in a military coup, leaving the country governed by murderers and torturers who are no more accountable than Mubarak was for his 30 year run.
Occupy was an attempt to force Obama to govern from the netroots, and it went further than anyone could have imagined, but it did not push Obama to the left; nor did it create an alternative power structure that was powerful enough to overturn the Democratic establishment (yet) or win the 2016 elections.
Which brings me to Donald Trump, and the Women’s March…