Help! We are under attack from a networked group which mocks state authority and is motivated largely by opportunism and greed. And that’s just the bond markets. (Boom Boom).
Another parallel is in the ideas of organisation we project onto things like markets and looters. Obviously the phenomenon that we take a collection of individual actors and tend to aggregate and personify it is a pretty familiar one (“the markets want…”) (“the rioters want…”). But where it gets interesting, for me, is how we talk about groups like rioters when their activities look co-ordinated.
We’re seeing this in today’s coverage of the second night of London rioting, which saw looting and attacks on shops in a variety of boroughs. “This time it was organised” says the Guardian, calling it “part of an orchestrated plan”. But doesn’t an orchestrated plan involve a planner? There’s little evidence of a master riot committee out there. No doubt there will be arrests of “ringleaders” etc in coming days but that idea is starting to ring somewhat hollow. There’s a vast difference between “organised” and “planned” and I think the press and authorities’ understanding of that difference is being severely tested.
In financial markets, as I understand them, one key reason for volatility and mass movements is that the latency of information - the delay between information and action - is very low. Since every action is also a piece of information (and the latency of action based on THAT information is low) you get very rapid effects talking place which look like they ought to have a single big cause rather than multiple identical micro-causes. The activity looks planned but actually it’s more like flocking, where birds (a crowd of starlings, say) seem to take moment-to-moment decisions based on what their neighbours are doing rather than based on a “flock identity” or “alpha bird” or anything like that. (This is a very imperfect but helpful parallel - it shows the difference between organised activity and planned activity.)
I think a similar sort of thing is happening with the rioting - communications networks lowering the latency of information so that mass effects happen very quickly. These mass effects look co-ordinated and planned, when in fact they’re just very rapidly organised. You could propose a corollary of Arthur C Clarke’s famous saying: “Any sufficiently rapid organisation is indistinguishable from planning.” But there is a distinction, as becomes very clear when you try and stop the next occurrence.
(This all relates to “virality” and influencer theory and so on too, which is partly why I’m so interested in it. But obviously mostly it’s that I’m a voyeuristic news junkie at the moment.)
