Praise for “monitory democracy”: a concept attuned to TIMN (Part 2 of 2)

As noted in my Part-1 post on monitory democracy, I’m always on lookout for concepts that may help show how the +N (network) part of TIMN may unfold in the future. John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy” is one of the best I’ve seen lately.

The Part-1 post summarized the concept and provided preliminary review comments. This Part-2 post assesses the concept’s relevance to TIMN.

I’m interested in “monitory democracy” for its own merits. But doing this double-post now is prompted by my intent to refer to monitory democracy, but sparingly, in the final (Part-IV, upcoming) post in my coterminous series on the causes, conduct, and consequences of Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements.

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Monitory democracy and TIMN: major similarities, minor differences

TIMN is about the rise of network (N) forms of organization; how they work differently from older tribal (T), hierarchical institutional (I), and market (M) forms; and how the whole thing can be assembled into a theory of social evolution that spans the ages from monoform (T-centric), to biform (T+I), to triform (T+I+M), to quadriform (T+I+M+N) societies. According to TIMN, the rise of the information-age network (+N) form is strengthening civil society more than state and market actors, and will lead to the growth of a new sector that is different and separate from the existing public and private sectors. TIMN associates this with the spread of networked NGOs and other entities that act as sensory organizations and do lots of watching and monitoring.

Keane’s view is remarkably consistent with TIMN. The concept of monitory democracy parallels, overlaps, and reinforces much that I’ve said about TIMN. The similarities are not precise — see the next two sections for some major differences. Yet his concept is tantamount to a missing piece in TIMN — a piece that slots into place quite nicely. I like it in lots of ways, as follows:

I like his emphasis on monitoring. My TIMN efforts have long pointed to the monitoring roles of NGOs and other actors involved in the rise of the network form (see Appendix 1), and related to that, the growth of vast new sensory apparatuses, both organizational and technological, that enable monitoring (see Appendix 2). But I never thought of elevating monitoring to a degree that redefines and renames the nature of democracy.

I like 1945 as a date for the start of monitory democracy. For TIMN, I’ve often wondered when to date the start of the rise of the +N form. Sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century, for sure. But when, why? The +N form doesn’t start to take-off until faxes come into play in the 1970s. But seminal experiments with organizational networking occurred earlier, in the 1960s, notably with the civil-rights and anti-war movements. I’ve not seen a way to put the take-off date earlier. But Keane’s account shows that the stage-setting ferment for networked activism within civil society began decades earlier, circa 1945, with the appearance of monitoring “inventions” all across civil society, often operating outside the standard boundaries of the state- and market-related public and private sectors. Thus, these early inventions were not extensions of the prevailing +I or +M parts of TIMN; they were a new breed of actors and entities — forerunners — awaiting a capacity to link up and maneuver in +N directions.

I like Keane’s emphasis on civil society. TIMN also regards civil society as a growing source of monitory power vis à vis state and market actors. And related to that, I like Keane’s point that monitory democracy brings new kinds of checks and balances. TIMN is very much about each form being used in proper ways vis à vis the other forms — ways that would keep the forms and their realms largely separated, limited, balanced, and mutually regulated. I see monitory democracy fitting well with that.

I like Keane’s point that the progression from assembly to representative to monitory democracy does not mean that the old forms are displaced by the new. Rather, the old continue to coexist with the new, and they all work on and with each other. Likewise, TIMN is about the layering and compounding of all the TIMN forms and their respective realms, in a preferred progression over time.

I also like Keane’s recognition that all three types of democracy have both bright and dark sides. This too is TIMNish. Keane does not extol monitory democracy in utopian terms, any more than TIMN is utopian about the rise of the +N network form. Indeed, if the trends behind monitory democracy turn out to generate far more surveillance than sousveillance, the outcome might be more a monitory cyberocracy than a monitory democracy.

And I like that Keane’s concept offers a way to look beyond Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. TIMN does so as well; and I plan to eventually post about this. As a reminder, Fukuyama’s famed thesis (1992, p. xi, quoting from 1989) held that “[L]iberal democracy may constitute the “end point of man’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” … the “end of history.”” From a TIMN perspective, Fukuyama’s thesis is thoroughly triformist (T+I+M); it does not grasp that the network form of organization is on the rise and will remake history by creating quadriformist (T+I+M+N) societies. Rather similar to TIMN, Keane’s monitory democracy means that political evolution is far from ending. The forces and dynamics behind Keane’s concept will grow throughout this century. Something quite different from liberal democracy á la Fukuyama seems bound to result.

Monitory democracy vs. TIMN: differences along with similarities

Despite all these likeable similarities, there are some major differences I’d highlight:

Keane’s progression from assembly to representative to monitory democracy makes good sense, and aligns quite well with the progression of TIMN forms. But with qualifications. As I’ve long intended to show (2006, p. 39, fn. 16), each TIMN form may be associated with a different type of democracy. Thus TIMN implies four, not three, types of democracy.

What I’ve had in mind means that Keane’s assembly democracy corresponds well to the tribal (T) form; consultative consensus-seeking in tribal councils — majority rule — was indeed the first type of democracy. Representative democracy evolved later, when it appears first in hierarchical state-centric (+I) societies, and then is more fully realized in later societies where the (+M) market form takes hold as well. Monitory democracy corresponds to the modern rise of the (+N) network form and its effects on civil society.

Which leads to a discrepancy. TIMN implies that representative democracy — or should I say liberal democracy, with its allowances for political parties to compete and for dissenting minorities to have rights — corresponds best to triformist T+I+M societies where the market (+M) form has taken hold, penetrating and modifying the state (+I) realm. That leaves a question as to what kind of democracy corresponds just to a biform T+I system that revolves around a central (+I) state hierarchy, and where the +M form has not emerged, esp. if it is being prevented from doing so. The answer, I detect, is what is now called democratic centralism — a sheltered pyramidal institutional (+I) system in which allowances are made for the selection of lower-level representatives who then select or otherwise approve higher-level ones, tier by tier, until the top ruler (e.g., a dictator like Lenin, Mao, or Castro) is validated, along with his chosen cadre. It’s essentially hierarchical but can claim to be democratic. Variants I’ve spotted include “consultative dictatorship”, “authoritarian deliberation”, and “networked authoritarianism” — mostly in connection with efforts to characterize China’s system today.

From a TIMN stance, such a four-part typology makes more analytic sense than a three-part. But I’ve not yet gone through the history of democracy enough to document that it makes factual historical sense as well. Making a good case would require identifying past examples of democratic centralism, say in medieval monarchies or the Papacy, in order to show that what may seem like early examples of representative democracy can be recategorized and better understood, from a TIMN perspective, as instances of democratic centralism. Any suggestions?

This difference in Keane’s and TIMN’s approaches to typologizing democracy is reflected in our views about the nature of enabling technologies. I like very much Keane’s association of each age of democracy with a different information and communications technology: assembly democracy in ancient times, with the spoken word and early writing; next, representative democracy, with first print, then telegraph and radio, and lately television; and now monitory democracy with all sorts of new digital media. This is very TIMNish. I have long associated the rise of the tribal form with early language and writing; the hierarchical institutional form, with the mechanical print revolution; the market form, with the electronic revolution (telegraph, telephone, radio); and now the new network form, with the digital media revolution.

That’s quite an overlap between our analyses — but notice the discrepancy: Keane associates representative democracy with both the mechanical and the electronic revolutions. In contrast, TIMN says the two are so different that they help explain the phasing of two different forms of organization. The +I and +M phases each require, in turn, a deeper denser information / communications revolution to take hold. This suggests that, at a minimum, representative democracy goes through two phases: an intra-hierarchic (+I) phase and a more open competitive marketlike (+M) phase. Or more to the point, the two phases are so different that the +I phase should have its own name — e.g., democratic centralism — and representative democracy, in its liberal sense, should be identified primarily with the +M phase. That would be more in accord with what I think TIMN implies.

Of course, none of this is to say that one of us is right and the other wrong — that a three-part or a four-part typology is better. We just have different analytic sensibilities and priorities. Mine is to keep elaborating TIMN. Hence my interest in identifying the foregoing differences and discerning ways of adjusting to them. In any case, most are of an historical nature. More significant may be some differences in our orientations toward the future.

Monitory democracy vis à vis TIMN: long-range future implications

As already noted, monitory democracy is a powerful concept that fits well with TIMN. Yet, TIMN contains some pointed themes about future forces and dynamics that are not fully evident in Keane’s approach. I lay them out in this section, with an eye to wondering whether they might benefit future elaborations about monitory democracy or TIMN, if not both.

One key TIMN theme is the growing importance of the network (+N) form of organization. Keane’s writings, to their credit, often refer to networks — “organizations and networks”, NGO networks, global networks, computer networks, media networks, social networks etc. And it seems implicit that all kinds of networks — organizational, technological, social — are making a crucial difference for monitory democracy. But in contrast to TIMN, Keane’s writings do not (yet?) say much about the rise of networks as a distinct form of organization. And I don’t mean this strictly as a plug for TIMN’s +N view; Bauwen's P2P or similar views may be suitable as well. I just think that monitory democracy, as concept and practice, would benefit from a stronger clearer identification with the rise of network forms of organization.

A second key TIMN theme is that the rise of the network form will lead to the creation of a new sector, from out of civil society, that is different and apart from the established public (+I) and private (+M) sectors. Various names have been tried out for this nascent sector over the past several decades: e.g., third sector, social sector, civic sector, citizen sector, social-benefit sector, commons sector. But sure as I am that TIMN implies a new sector, it remains unclear what’ll be its cardinal purpose, scope and scale. Maybe one of the previous names will stick, but I have doubts. In any case, it cannot turn out to be simply a monitory sector, for a lot of monitoring will also be done in and by actors in the other sectors. Yet, monitoring — á la Keane’s concept — will surely be a major function. I’m still trying to figure out this aspect for TIMN. And I will hope that Keane’s future writings offer further guidance. His current writings indicate in spots that a new sector is emerging; and as my Part-1 post noted, he ties the prospects for monitory democracy to prospects for people having “equal access to ‘the commons’”. But that is far from explicitly forecasting a new sector, much less calling for a commons sector.

A third TIMN theme is that the network age will result in new modes of governance. Keane’s mention of “networked governance” indicates that he recognizes this, though he doesn’t elaborate. TIMN, mainly in a paper on future prospects for cyberocracy, expects networked governance to become increasingly significant, perhaps resulting in a “nexus state” that combines multiple modes of governance, as a successor to the classic bureaucratic and modern market states. A democratic nexus-state would surely be a monitory democracy. Keane’s concept also fits well with Michel Bauwen’s P2P concept of a “partner state”. In any case, a lot of work remains to be done on how monitory democracy may affect governance in the future, from local to global levels.

And that leads to a set of final points: One is that the prospects for a new sector and for monitory democracy will depend on what happens with the vast new sensory apparatuses, technological and organizational, that are expanding capabilities for both surveillance and sousveillance. I’d suppose that a balance between them is advisable for the sake of both TIMN and monitory democracy. But at present, surveillance seems to be growing far more than sousveillance. I covered some of this in a 2008 writing (see Appendix 2), but a lot has transpired since then. For example, just the past few months have led to revelations about the construction of a huge NSA electronic surveillance facility (reported here in Wired, blogged here by ever-attentive David Brin). And there’s an idea to build a “social radar” for the U.S. government. But I’ve also come across ideas for a “sensor commons” and “surveillant landscapes” as well as “augmented activism” and “crisis mapping” that are mostly about sousveillance. Quite a lot of ferment! And it’s still in early stages. The balance is far from set.

Something else: A point that is missing in writings so far about TIMN and monitory democracy is that, if a new sector is to become influential in the deep future, new kinds of aggregators and clearinghouses will be needed. I offer this point speculatively, but I’m pretty sure about it. The +I realm has its states with their councils, congresses, parliaments, parties, and elections. The +M realm has various markets, exchanges, banks, and currencies. But so far, the +N sector is lacking in aggregators and clearinghouses of similar scale and scope. Sure, there are bits and pieces, often by issue area, as in social forums, watch-dog networks, opinion polls, and philanthropic entities that do scanning. But we’re still far from seeing major aggregators and clearinghouses that can assemble large amounts of monitoring from multiple diverse sources and give voice to what it all may mean. Perhaps like a Google designed for monitoring rather than searching, or a platform like All Our Ideas that uses “wiki surveys”, where people may even set their own parameters.

A final point: As I noted in my Part-2 post about Occupy! and related pro-democracy protest movements, responsibility is emerging as an important thread. Many activists talk about rights — e.g., Occupy as a continuation of the civil rights revolutions of the 20th C. But I detect a growing emphasis on responsibilities, and have wondered whether Occupy! may develop into a responsibilities revolution more than a rights revolution. Corporate social responsibility and government accountability are strong threads. If monitory democracy is to take hold in the 21st C., it may make sense for activists of all stripes to press on civic responsibilities even harder than on civil rights. A recent plea for this appears here in the Democracy journal. It comes with a liberal / progressive bent, but I’ve seen similar pleas of a conservative bent. Monitory democracy may well turn out to be about responsibilities more than rights — and about how this affects people’s abilities to work together and abide by mutual social compact despite different leanings.

Coda: revisiting a comparison of 1848 and 2011

Previously, in a sidebar at the end of my Part-1 post on Occupy! and related protest movements, I picked up on comparisons of the 2011 movements to the 1848 revolutions, and speculated in TIMN terms that 2011 is to the rise of the +N form as 1848 was to the rise of the +M form:

"If 2011’s wave reflects the rise of the (+N) network form … what about the 1848 wave? Where’s the similarity in that TIMN regard? Back then was too early for the network form of organization to be much of a cause …. But — and here’s my TIMN point — it was an era when the (+M) market form was on the rise, reshaping not only economic but also political and social dynamics. Indeed, representative democracy depends on the penetration of (+M) market principles and dynamics into the (+I) realm of the state. …

"… The 1848 revolutions were “caused” by the rise of the market form, much as the 2011 revolutions are “caused” by the rise of the network form. As to whether the post-1848 outcomes imply being cautious about expecting much from the 2011 wave, I’ve little idea. But my sense of TIMN suggests that the stakes this time around involve a different kind of democracy, not just representative democracy."

After reading Keane, I see that the “different kind of democracy” at stake may well be monitory democracy. If so, then 2011 (or will it be 2012?) is to monitory democracy as 1848 was to representative democracy — a year full of upheavals, harbingers, and turning-points for the future of democracy, but likely to yield mixed results for decades to come.

Thus Keane’s framework — his distinctions about assembly, representative, and monitory democracy — is consistent with (and helps make) a point that undergirds my coterminous series on Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements: These movements are doing a lot to express and propel the rise of the network (+N) form of organization. They will succeed to the extent that they continue to do so, presuming it’s in a constructive manner.

From a TIMN perspective, fostering monitory democracy is one of the most constructive things to do. It’d help with renewing social compacts that have been badly damaged in many societies over the last decade or two. It’d help with assuring that the liberal democracies of the world get fully back on that path, rather than slipping further in the direction of patrimonial corporatism.

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Appendix 1: Excerpt from “A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution” (2002)

What follows is an excerpt from a TIMN-related paper I wrote — “A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution” — in 2002 for Robert Olson and David Rejeski (eds.), Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow: Shaping the Next Industrial Revolution, (2005). The excerpt is from pp. 92-93, 94-97. The paper is available as a download here.

I include the excerpt in order to document and provide elaboration that TIMN has long been moving along a similar track to Keane’s in regard to the monitoring roles of NGOs. The excerpt focuses on environmental matters, but its scope could be applied to other issue areas as well, in keeping with TIMN’s general implications about how the rise of the network (+N) form may reshape societies.

Implications for Future Modes of Conflict and Cooperation

New modes of conflict and cooperation emerge with each evolutionary shift. A society’s efforts to transition from one stage to the next, or relate to a society that is at a different stage, are bound to create internal and external contradictions; indeed, the values, actors, and spaces favored by one form tend to contradict those favored by another. Thus, the rise of a new form induces epochal philosophical, ideological, and material struggles that are jarring to a society’s stability, transformability, and sustainability. This happened in the past when tribal systems faced the rise of states, and states the rise of market systems. It will happen anew now that the network form is on the ascendance, energizing mainly nonstate actors.

Network forms of organization are attracting enormous attention these days; new books and articles appear every few months (with some of the best analysis coming from researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). But it remains quite unclear what a new network realm may ultimately look like. One way it may evolve is through a four-stage progression in network topology: from an initial scattering of groups and individuals that have sparse network ties (“scattered emergence”); to their combining into a “single hub-and-spoke” design where the central hub acts mainly as a clearinghouse and coordinating agency; then to a deeper, more dispersed, specialized “multi-hub small world” design; and eventually to a dense, vast, sprawling “core/periphery” mass of organizational networks.[*] To some extent, the environmental movement (not to mention other civil-societal movements) is already moving through this progression. But just as the molding of a network realm will take time, so will the development and understanding of its interactions with the other, existing realms. …

Long-Term Scenario: New Approaches to Policy and Strategy

As the subversive effects subside and additive effects take hold, a society adapts to the rise of a new form and learns to combine it with the prevailing forms (realms). This may take decades, probably much longer. The deepening of the network age will cause a leap in the strength of civil society, or the emergence from it of a new network-based realm whose name and nature are not yet known. An end result will be the creation of next-generation policy mechanisms for communication, consultation, and collaboration among state, market, and civil-societal (or new-realm) actors, at home and abroad.

Because of the rise of a realm of networked actors and forces, current approaches to domestic and foreign policy will go through radical revisions. Some oft-noted trends will deepen: First, the boundaries between domestic and foreign policy will blur further, as activist NGOs continue to press for transnational perspectives on policy problems and solutions. Second, public-private cooperation, so needed in so many issue areas, will continue to extend beyond state and market actors to include socially minded nonprofit NGOs (who are sometimes said to comprise a new social sector separate from the traditional public and private sectors).

Meanwhile, new challenges will take shape. Taking advantage of the information revolution, people and organizations in advanced societies are developing vast sensory apparatuses for watching what is happening in their own societies and elsewhere around the world. Many innovations are occurring in organization and strategy, often by taking advantage of the new information and communications technologies. For example, one unusual benefactor of the Internet has been birdwatchers in North America, a group that contains an estimated one in four of all U.S. citizens. A few years ago, with the help of the National Audubon Society and Cornell University, bird watchers started sharing data online and have used the network to better understand and map migration patterns.

Mining and analyzing data culled from large networks is not new and has long been used by existing government regulatory, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies; corporate market-research departments; news media; and opinion-polling firms. What is new is the looming scope and scale of this sensory apparatus, and its increasing inclusion of NGOs who watch, monitor, share information, and report on what they see in diverse issue areas. One example is Global Forest Watch (GFW), an international network of local forest-protection groups linked by the Internet and a common data-gathering format. The World Resources Institute collaborated by e-mail with over a hundred scientists in different parts of the world to create a unique set of digital maps showing the location and extent of the world’s old-growth forests. The GFW network monitors all these areas, recording any illegal cutting, burning, or other violations of forest leases on the digital maps. This information is posted to the Internet in near-real time, naming specific violators. Review processes check the accuracy of the data collected and ensure that participating network groups are acting responsibly. The information makes it possible for activists to mobilize quickly, apply market pressures to companies, and pressure governments to regulate effectively.

Developing the kind of early warning capability illustrated by GFW is an increasing concern for many environmental NGOs; so is gathering information to affect the framing of policy options. Determining appropriate designs, and roles, for this array of sensory organizations and their (centralized? decentralized?) internetting will be a growing challenge. Perhaps one day in the future, advances in autonomic and pervasive computing will even enable us to build self-regulating systems that can monitor and report on conditions without the constant involvement of humans. How such networked-based, self-regulating systems may interface with traditional forms of top-down regulation by government is only a speculative question today.

The emergence of a network realm — and of massively networked systems and infrastructures with it — will pose significant challenges for the agencies responsible for environmental protection. Their advisory councils and decision structures will have to open up to more regular participation from NGO representatives, at least in consultative capacities. Indeed, various environmental, health, consumer, and other activist watchdog and advocacy groups are already working — perhaps with more success in Canada and Europe than in the United States — to see that such reforms occur. And as stronger, more transparent connections are built among the responsible government agencies, NGOs, and companies, they will have to learn to work more cooperatively to formulate policy through new governance systems that embrace not only government and business but also NGO representatives. Climate change is probably the best example of an environmental issue that can only be resolved by networking across institutional boundaries of every kind.

Public policy dialogue has, for over a century, revolved around contentions as to whether government or the market represents the better solution for particular policy issues. In the network age, this choice will prove too narrow, too binary, even for blending. New views will come to the fore that the network is the solution. These views may well open up possibilities for major improvements in environmental protection. …

If this view of the role of networks — and of the eventual rise of a new network realm — in long-range social evolution is correct, the growth of transnational NGOs, and the ability of NGOs, states, and market actors to network with each other, should prove a major asset for democratic societies. It may help reanimate the concept of progress — giving it new direction and credibility. It may point the way to developing the structures and organizational processes that will make a sustainable future possible.

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Appendix 2: Excerpt from The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited) (2008)

What follows is a sub-section, minus footnotes, from an unpublished paper available online: The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited) (2008, co-authored with Danielle Varda). It updates the first paper I wrote on the topic in 1991, and the excerpt is from the 2008 update.

As with Appendix 1 above, I include the excerpt in order to document and provide elaboration about TIMN’s long-standing concern with monitoring roles that may increase as the network (+N) form takes hold.

Development of New Sensory Apparatuses Throughout Societies

Taking advantage of the information revolution, people and organizations in the advanced societies are building vast new sensory apparatuses for watching what is happening in their own societies and around the world. Of all the uses to which the new technologies are being put, this may become one of the most important for the future of the state and its relationship to society.

These sensory apparatuses are not entirely new. Government agencies, public utilities, science centers, corporate market-research offices, news media, and opinion-polling firms have long amassed data and tracked trends in selected areas of interest. What is new is the burgeoning scope and scale of these apparatuses: the deployment of new kinds of sensors by all kinds of actors; the increasing roles of NGOs and NPOs in this activity; and the internetting and sharing of information that is becoming possible across agency, sectoral, and national boundaries, both publicly and privately. 

Many of the new apparatuses reflect the perception of perils. Crime and terrorism are impelling new installations for watching cityscapes, monitoring communications, and mapping potential hotspots. But sensor networks are also being deployed for early warning and rapid response regarding many other concerns — disease outbreaks, forest protection, bird migration, and urban electricity spikes, to name a few. In addition, environmental, human-rights, and other social activists continue to develop new media — notably, IndyMedia — to keep watch and speed mobilization in case of a challenge or abuse somewhere, say against the Zapatista movement in Mexico. In a sense, the partisan blogospheres amount to a gigantic, reactive sensory apparatus in the American body politic.

Many technologies are involved. Indeed, the diversity of devices being deployed is impressive — such as cameras on satellites in earth orbit, moisture sensors embedded in trees in fire-risk zones, postings broadcast on public Web pages, and silent alarms for remote private monitors. Networked computers, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags play prominent roles today. But looming advances in nanotechnology, robotics, biometrics, and alternative energy sources will enhance the trend. Cell phones, smart cards, and other hand-held and embedded devices may become the key bearers of this new technology at the individual level.

Thus, technologists are fusing the decades-old goal of “ubiquitous computing” with the newer goal of “pervasive sensing.” Before long, what are called “anticipatory technologies” may become so widespread and effective that many surroundings are embedded with “ambient intelligence” — leading to so-called “smart buildings,” “sensible organizations,” and “sentient cities” set to autonomically monitor for everything from leaky pipes to lost children. Then, the sensor era will turn into a sensor/effector era, where devices not only detect but also can manipulate matters. Meanwhile, citizens’ concerns about top-down surveillance may be countered by bottom-up “sousveillance” (or inverse surveillance), particularly if individuals wear personal devices for detecting and recording what is occurring in their vicinity.

This is not to say that societies will increasingly resemble “organisms” that have a central nervous system and brain. That’s going too far. But something is taking shape for which sensory apparatus seems an appropriate term. A term like surveillance system is too limited (and biased). Far more than surveillance is occurring, and the diverse arrays comprising this apparatus are far from forming an integrated system. Bits and pieces have existed for decades — they are normal for complex modern societies — and more pieces are being emplaced. Yet most are scattered and task-specific. They exist to do people’s bidding — such as responding to a change in environmental conditions, or to a signal from a nearby actuator, transponder or microprocessor. Some pieces are networked, but not all. And no central master hub exists (and presumably never will).

The scope and scale of this apparatus are growing far beyond what government, business, and civil-society actors have ever had at their disposal or had to cope with. They will all be challenged to figure out proper designs for the kinds of sensory organizations and technologies they prefer — and proper ways to regulate them. Their growth has already sharpened issues about privacy and security, but it may also open new pathways for fostering transparency and accountability. How information is assembled and accessed, how issues and options are illuminated, how public and private forces are mobilized, and how oversight is achieved will all be affected.

It has become standard fare to speculate that such apparatuses mainly benefit government and corporate actors, for good and ill. Less noticed, but we think equally likely and significant, is that the apparatuses will aid the rise of civil-society actors, by providing networked NGOs and NPOs with new tools not only for checking on the behavior of government and corporate actors, but also for participating in collaborative governance schemes with them. New mechanisms for attracting and combining diverse viewpoints under the rubric of “collective intelligence” could help foster this. So could the continued advance of principles favoring freedom of information, the right to communicate, and open access.

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A thankful h/t to Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson for calling my attention to John Keane’s concept of monitory democracy.

Special thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and the Highlands Forum, for his overall interest and encouragement.

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[AMENDED — April 14, 2012: I added a few phrases and links here and there.]

Praise for “monitory democracy”: a concept attuned to TIMN (Part 1 of 2)

I’m always on lookout for concepts that may help show how the +N network part of TIMN may unfold in the future. John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy” is the best I’ve seen lately. It merits a lot more attention.

I first heard about it indirectly a year or two ago in posts by Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson at the P2P Foundation blog, and from Carson’s writings at his blog on The Desktop Regulatory State (specifically, Ch. 3). Lately, I’ve managed to read Keane’s own writings about his concept.

This Part-1 post summarizes the concept and provides preliminary review comments. A subsequent Part-2 post will assess the concept’s relevance to TIMN.

I’m interested in “monitory democracy” for its own merits. But I’m also trying to develop background for examining the concept’s implications for Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements in a future Part-IV post in my coterminous series on the causes, conduct, and consequences of those movements.

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John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy”

To learn about monitory democracy, I’ve read parts of Keane’s book on The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), along with spin-off papers found online (2008a, 2008b, 2010), plus a few discussions I spotted. For this post, I’ve relied mostly on the paper (2008b) that I think offers the best summary of Keane’s analysis (and also because it’s easier to copy and paste quotes from it than from his hardcopy book). Readers who want access to more of his articles and essays should peruse his website at johnkeane.net.

In these writings about monitory democracy, Keane grounds his analysis on the following phenomenon: increases in monitoring roles played by NGOs and other actors representing civil society.

Keane is not among the first to observe this phenomenon. Analysts have been documenting and speculating about it for decades. A handy example, with a large annotated bibliography that extends back a decade or two, is Ann Florini’s The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (2000), which concluded that:

“[T]he growing attention to transnational civil society is not mere hoopla. It reflects a real and considerable increase in the number and effectiveness of transnational nongovernmental networks. The power of transnational civil society manifests itself at virtually every stage of policy making, from deciding what issues need attention to determining how problems will be solved to monitoring compliance with agreements.” (p. 211)

By now, there are myriad writings in this vein. Almost all relate the rising influence of civil society and its NGOs to the spread of network forms of organization, and to their enablement by new information technologies. And all this is said to be promising for the future of democracy, partly because monitoring roles are so greatly enhanced. (See Appendices 1 and 2, which I will include at the end of Part 2.)

Yet, Keane offers an innovative way to look at this phenomenon — as the rise of a new kind of democracy: monitory democracy. To my knowledge, that’s an insightful contribution; it moves thinking quite a few steps beyond the now-common notion that the information revolution is empowering and altering civil society in ways that will reshape democracy.

Keane provides a succinct summary statement about monitory democracy in the introductory chapter of his book (2009; chapter titled “Bad Moons, Little Dreams”):

“[T]he years since 1945 have seen the invention of about a hundred different types of power-monitoring devices that never before existed within the world of democracy. These watchdog and guide-dog and barking-dog inventions are changing both the political geography and the political dynamics of many democracies, which no longer bear much resemblance to textbook models of representative democracy, which supposed that citizens’ needs are best championed through elected parliamentary representatives chosen by political parties. From the perspective of this book, the emerging historical form of ‘monitory’ democracy is a ‘post-Westminster’ form of democracy in which power-monitoring and power-controlling devices have begun to extend sideways and downwards through the whole political order. They penetrate the corridors of government and occupy the nooks and crannies of civil society, and in so doing they greatly complicate, and sometimes wrong-foot, the lives of politicians, parties, legislatures and governments. These extra-parliamentary power-monitoring institutions include — to mention at random just a few — public integrity commissions, judicial activism, local courts, workplace tribunals, consensus conferences, parliaments for minorities, public interest litigation, citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies, independent public inquiries, think-tanks, experts’ reports, participatory budgeting, vigils, ‘blogging’ and other novel forms of media scrutiny.” (p. 14; online here and here)

In that first chapter, Keane makes clear that democracy’s proponents would be well-advised to start understanding and fostering monitory democracy, but he also shows that he is far from utopian about its prospects:

“In contrast to those policy makers, activists and scholars who suppose that the fundamental choice facing contemporary democracies is that between accepting the terms of Westminster-style electoral democracy and the embrace of more participatory forms of 'deep' and 'direct' democracy — in effect, a choice between embracing the present or returning to the imagined spirit of Athenian democracy — The Life and Death of Democracy carves out a third possibility, one that has much contemporary history on its side, an option, the growth of 'monitory democracy', that needs to be recognised for what it is: a brand-new historical form of democracy.” (pp. 15-16)

The Life and Death of Democracy does not suppose that monitory democracy is leading us to paradise on earth. It pays attention to the way that trends in its favour are to a varying degree subject everywhere to counter-trends.” (p. 17)

There’s a lot worth elaborating here. And I’m going to do so next, at some length. The quotes (and the concept) are so illuminating that I’d advise bearing with my extensive excerpts, for they bear on what I will eventually turn to say (in Part 2) about the overlaps with TIMN and implications for Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements.

Further elaboration of Keane’s concept of monitory democracy

To place monitory democracy in historical context, Keane divides the history of democracy, from ancient through modern times, into three grand ages: assembly democracy, representative democracy, and monitory democracy.

“My claim is that our world is now living through an historic sea change, one that is taking us away from the old world of representative democracy towards a form of democracy with entirely different contours and dynamics.

“My conjecture is that monitory democracy is a new historical type of democracy, one that is defined by the multiplication and dispersal of many different power-monitoring and power-contesting mechanisms, both within the ‘domestic’ fields of government and civil society and beyond, in cross-border settings that were once dominated by empires, states and business organisations.

“In terms of its contours and dynamics, monitory democracy is the most institutionally complex form of democracy yet. It is the tertium quid, the undefined and not fully formed successor of the earlier historical experiments with assembly-based and representative forms of democracy.” (2008a, pp. 2-3)

According to Keane, “the age of monitory democracy … began around 1945” — right after World War II. That’s a decades earlier than I expected, but he has good reasons for this date. It has to do with people’s reactions to war, including writings by Thomas Mann, Sidney Hook, Jacques Maritain, and especially Reinhold Niebuhr, that called for a new form of democracy to deal with “the devil of unaccountable power” (2009, p 731). It also has to do with “the birth of nearly one hundred new types of power-scrutinising institutions unknown to previous democrats” — inventions that “break the grip of the majority rule principle — the worship of numbers — associated with representative democracy” (2008b, pp. 4-5).

Keane specifies a large catalog of post-1945 organizational “inventions” that give voice to minority views, watch over government and corporate behaviors, publicize neglected policy positions, and even just “come on the scene, stir the pot, then move on like nomads, or dissolve into thin air.” (2008b, pp. 4-5)

“By making room for opinions and ways of life that people feel strongly about, despite their neglect or suppression by parties, parliaments and governments, these inventions have the combined effect of raising the level and quality of public monitoring of power, often for the first time in many areas of life, including power relationships ‘beneath’ and ‘beyond’ the institutions of territorial states. …

“The number and range of monitory institutions so greatly increase that they point to a world where the old rule of ‘one person, one vote, one representative’ — the central demand in the struggle for representative democracy — is replaced with the new principle of monitory democracy: ‘one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives’.” (2008b, pp. 5-6)

“[S]lowly and surely, the whole architecture of democracy has begun fundamentally to change. So too has the meaning of democracy. No longer synonymous with self-government by an assembly of male citizens (as in the Greek city states), or with party-based government guided by the will of a majority, democracy comes to mean a way of life and a mode of governing in which nobody rules.” (2008a, pp. 8-9; it’s clearer in his book (2009, pp. 856-859) where he writes “no body rules” rather than “nobody rules”)

Keane insists that monitory democracy does not spell a revival of assembly democracy, nor a replacement of representative democracy. Instances of both earlier forms will continue to exist, necessarily. Monitory democracy is still representational, but in new ways. For it’s a set of structures and processes that is being built outside, alongside, and throughout the old ones:

“What is distinctive about this new historical type of democracy is the way all fields of social and political life come to be scrutinised, not just by the standard machinery of representative democracy but by a whole host of non-party, extra-parliamentary and often unelected bodies operating within and underneath and beyond the boundaries of territorial states. In the era of monitory democracy, it is as if the principles of representative democracy — public openness, citizens’ equality, selecting representatives — are superimposed on representative democracy itself. This has many practical consequences, but one especially striking effect is to alter the patterns of interaction — political geography — of democratic institutions.” (2008b, p. 8, italics in original)

“Just as representative democracies preserved the spirit and form of ancient assemblies, so monitory democracies preserves legislatures, political parties and elections, … But such is the growing variety of interlaced, power-monitoring mechanisms that democrats from earlier times, if catapulted into the new world of monitory democracy, would find it hard to understand what is happening. (2008b, p. 9)

“Monitory mechanisms operate in different ways on several different fronts. Some scrutinise power primarily at the level of citizens’ inputs to government or civil society; others are preoccupied with monitoring and contesting policy throughputs; still others concentrate on scrutinising policy outputs produced by governmental or non-governmental organisations. Monitory mechanisms also come in many different shapes and sizes, and operate on various spatial scales, ranging from ‘just round the corner’ bodies with merely local footprints to global networks aimed at keeping tabs on those who exercise power over great distances. Given all this variability, it should not be surprising that a quick short list of inventions looks — at first sight, to the untrained eye — to be a higgledy-piggledy collection of different practices that resemble something of a magpie’s nest of randomly collected items.” (2008a, p. 11, italics in original)

For traditionalists who might reiterate old arguments that civil-society actors still don’t matter nearly as much as established political and market actors, he has a solid counter-argument — and I welcome his mention of “networks” as agencies of power-monitoring:

“It is sometimes said that the business of power scrutiny changes very little, that states and corporations are still the ‘real’ centres of power in deciding who gets what, when and how in this world. Evidence that this is not necessarily so is suggested by the fact that all of the big public issues that have erupted around the world since 1945, including civil rights for women and minorities, American military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq, nuclear weapons, poverty reduction and global warming, have been generated not by political parties, elections, legislatures and governments, but principally by power-monitoring networks that run ‘parallel’ to — and are often positioned against — the orthodox mechanisms of party-based representation.” (2008b, p. 19)

“The intense public concern with civil society and with publicly scrutinizing matters once thought to be non-political is unique to the age of monitory democracy.” (2009, p. 709)

Keane depicts representative democracy as belonging to an age of nations, hierarchies, and limited connections. In contrast, monitory democracy is for a new age of densely transnational, networked connections. His depiction of its dynamics — latticed, inter-laced, and often non-linear, viral, and chaotic — sounds straight out of recent complexity theory and network science, as well as older interdependence theory:

“One interesting thing about monitory democracy is that it begins to confront the wall of prejudice with a hammer. Its latticed patterns of power monitoring effectively fudge the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. Like other types of institutions, including business and universities, democracy too is caught up in a process of ‘glocalisation’. This is another way of saying that its monitory mechanisms are dynamically inter-related, to the point where each functions simultaneously as both part and whole of the overall system. In the system of monitory democracy, to put things a bit abstractly, parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist. Its units are better described as sub-wholes — ‘holons’ is the term famously coined by the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler — that function simultaneously as self-regarding and self-asserting entities that push and pull each other in a multi-lateral system in which all entities play a part.” (2008b, p. 17)

“The dynamics of monitory democracy are thus not describable using the simple spatial metaphors inherited from the age of representative democracy. Talk of the ‘sovereignty’ of parliament, or of ‘local’ versus ‘central’ government, or of tussles between ‘pressure groups’, political parties and governments, is just too simple. It is obsolete. In terms of political geometry, the system of monitory democracy is something other and different: a complex web of differently-sized and more or less interdependent monitory bodies that have the effect, thanks to communicative abundance, of continuously stirring up questions about who gets what, when and how, as well as holding publicly responsible those who exercise power, wherever they are situated. Monitory democracies are richly conflicted. Politics does not wither away. Everything is never straightforwardly ok.” (2008b, p. 27)

“Despite such weaknesses, the political dynamics and overall ‘feel’ of monitory democracies are very different from the era of representative democracy. Politics in the age of monitory democracy has a definite ‘viral’ quality about it. The power controversies stirred up by monitory mechanisms follow unexpected paths and reach surprising destinations. … In the world of monitory democracy, that kind of latticed — viral, networked — pattern is typical, not exceptional. It has profound implications for the state-framed institutions of the old representative democracy, which find themselves more and more enmeshed in ‘sticky’ webs of power-scrutinising institutions that often hit their target, sometimes from long distances, often by means of boomerang effects.” (2008b, pp. 28-29)

Lest this make monitory democracy seem too conflictive, too chaotic, during this early phase of its emergence, Keane insists otherwise, partly by pulling “networked governance” into the picture:

“[M]onitory democracy contains plenty of mechanisms for stitching and binding together individuals and groups and institutions. For all its public conflicts, monitory democracy is not ‘anarchy’. It contains plenty of bonding and bridging devices that bring a measure of coherence to political life. … [including] the new arts of what is called ‘networked governance’ — the knack of combining and co-ordinating complex decisions across a variety of potentially conflicting organisations.” (2008a, p. 25-26)

As a causal factor, Keane’s explanation for monitory democracy emphasizes the development of new media that create “communicative abundance”. Other factors are significant too — like the “trigger” of war, and the rise of civil-society NGOs and networks concerned with human rights (2009, pp. 729-731) — but he keeps returning to the roles of communications media, even associating each age of democracy with the rise of a different media technology:

“All these pressures have conspired to push actually existing democracies in the direction of monitory democracy. But one force is turning out to be the principal driver: the emergence of a new galaxy of communication media.

“No account of monitory democracy would be credible without taking into account the way that power and conflict are shaped by new media institutions. Think of it like this: assembly-based democracy in ancient Greek times belonged to an era dominated by the spoken word, backed up by laws written on papyrus and stone, and by messages dispatched by foot, or by donkey and horse. Representative democracy sprang up in the era of print culture — the book, pamphlet and newspaper, and telegraphed and mailed messages — and fell into crisis during the advent of early mass communication media, especially radio and cinema and (in its infancy) television. By contrast, monitory democracy is tied closely to the growth of multi-media-saturated societies — societies whose structures of power are continuously ‘bitten’ by monitory institutions operating within a new galaxy of media defined by the ethos of communicative abundance.” (2008b, p. 21)

From these considerations, Keane concludes that “monitory democracy is the deepest and widest system of democracy ever known” (2008a, p. 20, italics in original) — in part because “the new scrutiny mechanisms add checks and balances on the possible abuse of power by elected representatives” (2008b, p. 16). Indeed,

“In the era of monitory democracy, the constant public scrutiny of power by hosts of differently sized monitory bodies with footprints large and small makes it the most energetic, most dynamic form of democracy ever. … Various watchdogs and guide dogs and barking dogs are constantly on the job, pressing for greater public accountability of those who exercise power. The powerful consequently come to feel the constant pinch of the powerless. In the era of monitory democracy, those who make decisions are subject constantly to the ideal of public chastening, tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings of scrutiny (figure 4).” (2008b, pp. 27-28)

So much is changing that Keane disputes and refutes the influential “end of history” view whereby Francis Fukuyama (1992) praises liberal democracy as the endpoint of political evolution. Says Keane (2008b, p. 2), that view is “too limited to grasp the epochal change — too bound to the surface of things, too preoccupied with continuities and aggregate data to notice that political tides have begun to run in entirely new directions.” In contrast, Keane expects that monitory democracy will prove

“its superiority as a way of preventing and amending mistakes, as a self-reflexive mode of anticipating, defining and handling unexpected events and unforeseen consequences and reversing wrong-headed decisions and their unjust effects.” (2009, p. 14)

But much as Keane lauds ways in which monitory democracy may lead to radical changes and benefit peoples’ interests, enabling them to question and even prevail against those in power, he notes (2008a, p. 24) that “such monitoring is also often ineffective, or proves to be counterproductive.” Indeed, the very same communicative abundance that fosters monitory democracy has dark sides as well:

“There is admittedly nothing automatic or magical about any of this. In the era of monitory democracy, communication is constantly the subject of dissembling, negotiation, compromise and power conflicts, in a phrase, a matter of politics. Communicative abundance for that reason does not somehow automatically ensure the triumph of either the spirit or institutions of monitory democracy. Message-saturated societies can and do have effects that are harmful for democracy. …

“The coming age of IPTV (internet protocol television) is likely to deepen such disaffection and if that happens then something more worrying could happen: the spread of a culture of unthinking indifference. Monitory democracy certainly feeds upon communicative abundance, but one of its more perverse effects is to encourage individuals to escape the great complexity of the world by sticking their heads, like ostriches, into the sands of willful ignorance, or to float cynically upon the swirling tides and waves and eddies of fashion — to change their minds, to speak and act flippantly, to embrace or even celebrate opposites, to bid farewell to veracity, to slip into the arms of what some carefully call ‘bullshit’.” (2008b, pp. 30-31)

“Nothing is sacrosanct — not even the efforts of those who try to rebuild the sacrosanct. The art of making a public spectacle of private life for political purposes now happens on a geographic scale and with a democratic intensity that past generations could never have imagined, let alone grasped or accepted.” (2008a, p. 31)

Dark notes at the end — but bright ones too

After making these points, Keane turns to write in his book (2009; chapter titled “Memories from the Future”) as though an historian 50 years out were looking back on current times. The ensuing analysis is fraught with unease and pessimism about current conditions and future prospects for democracy. A dark critical eye is cast on today’s politicians, politics, parties, and party government; on popular malaise that voting does not matter much, but celebrities’ views do; on the abilities of market actors to elude scrutiny; on nationalisms that foster instability and “uncivil wars”; on cross-border actors who are anti-democratic; on a distortion he terms überdemocracy — and of course, on American imperialism. Monitory democracy, Keane implies, is being undermined by hypocrisy and hubris, fakery and fatalism, contempt and corruption — indeed, by “pathological reactions to monitory democracy” (p. 765).

I find the pessimism pervading this chapter of the book to be too contrived, too biased. Many if not most of the plaints seem quite ageless; many apply to, and arose during, earlier phases of democracy, not just the new monitory phase. Moreover, the plaints read much like an au courant litany of criticisms collected from partisans of Occupy! and related movements — not a bad thing, but very much part of our own times, more about the decline of representative democracy than the promise of monitory democracy, and far from representing a profound voice from the future.

Even so, Keane raises valid warnings with this quasi-futuristic chapter: One is that enemies of democracy may succeed at spreading (Chinese) concepts about “harmonious society” and “democratic centralism” that could destroy monitory democracy in the name of democracy (pp. 813, 831-833). Another is that monitory democracy will be harder to foster if democracy’s greatest power, the United States, wanes. Electoral and party reforms are needed in order to revitalize representative democracy there and elsewhere. As are efforts to strengthen monitory mechanisms, so that civil-society “bodies and networks” gain a greater voice in policymaking and in holding all sorts of actors publicly accountable (p. 825). Keane also uses his fictive future muse to raise an interesting concern about the lack of effective global institutions:

“She went on to say that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many representative democrats fought against monopolies of power, whereas monitory democrats were faced in many contexts with the opposite problem, the under-concentration of power. Monitory democracy, she said, was weakened by the lack of global driving seats and steering mechanisms, plus the ineffectiveness of many that did exist.” (pp. 777-778, italics in original)

Even so, Keane makes clear in his penultimate chapter (2009; titled “Why Democracy”) that he believes deeply in democracy, and that its monitory age can make democracy better than ever — in part because it promises “to democratise the ideal of democracy” (p. 847). He still worries that “The enemies of democracy are on the rise” (p. 841), and expresses his doubts about the universality of democracy. But he looks forward to seeing monitory democracy add to society’s checks and balances, and prove its worthiness “as a humble and humbling ideal that gathers strength from the vision that, although citizens and representatives require institutions to govern, no body should rule.” (p. 856, italics in original)

In favoring ways in which “[d]emocracy points to the equalization of power” (p. 861, italics in original), Keane even brings up people’s access to “the commons” — a matter of great importance to the Occupy movement. And he takes as far-reaching a view of the commons as many Occupiers do:

“Without equal access to ‘the commons’ — in matters as diverse as public transport, telecommunications and a sustainable biosphere — humble democracy in monitory form simply cannot survive, let alone thrive.” (p. 862)

And that strikes me as a good note on which to end this Part-1 post.

In sum, monitory democracy is an insightful forward-looking concept. As I step back, I notice that the book’s title and cover art seem overly dark; and so does a metaphor warning that rooting for democracy nowadays risks building “a campfire on ice” (2009, p. 18).  But no matter, for Keane’s key concept — monitory democracy — shines new light on ways for societies to reorganize and improve for decades to come. I’ve tried to lay out its particulars in detail, because I think monitory democracy has deep significance for TIMN, as well as for movements like Occupy!. I turn to that in the next post — Part 2 — where I will revisit many of the points summarized above.

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Many thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and Highlands Forum, for review comments on a pre-final draft of this post, as well as for his overall interest and encouragement.

A thankful h/t to Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson for calling my attention to John Keane’s concept of monitory democracy.
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[AMENDED — March 24, 2012: I added a few more quotes from Keane’s book (2009, from pp. 15-16, p. 17, and p. 18).]

Miscellany: Cyber war isn't the same as cyberwar — or is it?

Although cyberwar is no longer a priority interest for me, I still follow it a bit. Mostly via topical postings at a handful of blogs.* And lately by reading the debate between Thomas Rid and John Arquilla about cyberwar at Foreign Policy. This has roused me to want to roll out a bygone distinction — even though it ends up feeling more like I’m revisiting a Sisyphusian rock than a potential nugget of an idea.

* * * * *

In brief, their debate — not to mention earlier debates involving other bloggers — reminds me of a distinction that, for years, I was sure was in John’s and my 1993 paper on cyberwar.  But when I went looking for the pertinent paragraph a few months ago, I couldn’t find it. The missing paragraph distinguished between “cyberwar” (one word) and “cyber war” (two words). Back then I wanted to be sure no one confused our concept of cyberwar with computer hacking, which was becoming quite the rage at the time.

Accordingly, cyberwar (one word, as John had proposed) would be thoroughly military in nature — in keeping with our paper, mostly about information-age ways of organizing, knowing, and fighting, and barely about computer code attacks. In contrast, cyber war (two words) would refer to aggressive hacking — computer code attacks. This distinction from nearly 20 years ago was aimed at clarifying that cyberwar, as a future-oriented military concept, was not mainly, or necessarily, about hacking. Armed warfare can be conducted according to information-age principles without requiring computer code attacks. And the latter can be conducted without involving military matters.

But however valid the underlying point, it’s an awkward distinction to make that way. I have a vague memory (and so does John) that a reviewer or editor of a draft of our paper called the distinction into question, on grounds that it might confuse or distract a reader, and would be difficult to brief since a listener might constantly ask whether we were voicing the one- or two-word notion. So I suppose we agreed to drop the paragraph, and evidently it was never put it in any subsequent publication.

While I may wish — and long believed — it had been retained somewhere, I doubt it would have been heeded. For since then, the two terms have taken on crowd-sourced lives of their own, often interchangeable or conflated ones at that. Adding to the lexical turmoil, a slew of related terms has appeared, also in both one- and two-word versions: e.g., cyberattacks, cyberwarriors, cyberweapons, cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, cybercrime, cyberespionage, cybertheft, cybersubversion, cyberdeterrence, cyberstrategy, cybersecurity are often seen split apart, or hyphenated, with no difference in meaning. Besides, if cyber is considered a domain like air, land, and sea, or a realm like the political, economic, and cultural realms, then two-word phrasings are the norm (e.g., sea power, economic war); one-word contractions rarely appear for the domains (e.g., airspace), and never for the realms (e.g., no one uses a term like econowar). So why shouldn’t cyberwar mean the same as cyber war?!

Yet, I’d like to think that the missing point bears repeating, even though it stands no chance of taking hold: Cyber war (two words) is mostly about cyberspace — computer hacking. Cyberwar (one word) may be partly about cyberspace, but was meant to be mostly about a comprehensive approach to warfare attuned to the information age — to see this, just go back and read the first two pages of our 1993 paper.

If so, this distinction helps parse the debate between Rid and Arquilla. Rid is writing mainly about cyber war (two words), and barely about cyberwar (one word). Arquilla is writing about cyber war too, but I gather he means to be writing mainly about cyberwar.

Thus, Rid’s post emphasizes the cases of Stuxnet and Estonia, and disputes the prospects for an “electronic Pearl Harbor” or a “cyber 9/11” — all of which are about computer code attacks. He also points out that our major protagonists in the domain of cyber conflict, Russia and China, seem more concerned about the social than the military implications of cyber warfare:

“So Russia and China are ahead of the United States, but mostly in defining cybersecurity as the fight against subversive behavior. This is the true cyberwar they are fighting.”

Good points to make. But in John’s and my terms à la 1993, a “fight against subversive behavior” pertains mainly to social netwar, not military cyberwar.

In contrast, Arquilla’s post emphasizes the Soviet military ground attack on Georgia, which was accompanied by cyberattacks and other information operations. But he also treats Stuxnet and Estonia as cases of “strategic cyberattack” or “strategic cyberwar” — a “low-intensity form of cyberwar” that attacks covertly without engaging militarily, yet might become fully military. Says Arquilla,

“My deeper concern is that these smaller-scale cyberwar exploits might eventually scale up, given the clear vulnerability of advanced militaries and the various communications systems that cover more of the world every day. This is why I think cyberwar is destined to play an increasingly prominent role in future wars.”

Thus he too makes good points. And then he too brings the debate around to our concept of netwar, by introducing points about the “color revolutions” and Arab Spring. But he says “If there is to be more cyberwar in the future, better it should be what we called ‘social netwar’ than the alternatives.” I tend to agree with what I think he means. Yet, this phrasing makes netwar seem like a subset or variant of cyberwar. It would be more in keeping with our original spectrum about cyberwar and netwar, if that last sentence were to read “cyber war” and not “cyberwar”.

So, I’m left with as many questions as ever; lexical and other debates about cyberwar seem far from settled. My point about one-word versus two-words renders no resolution — it would be a Sisyphusian task to insist on rolling it along — but it underscores that cyberwar has gained a crowd-sourced life of its own. Today, its meaning is indeed centered around computer code attacks, and it’s a strain to maintain the broad military dimensions we once saw for it. But even though the definition we originally gave to the term keeps receding, the vision we raised behind it (see Appendix below) keeps gathering momentum, often via new terms (e.g., distributed operations).

As Rid and Arquilla noted, the Russian military attack on Georgia looks a bit like a case of military cyberwar. But I gather that it was more an instance of a coordinated cyber attack, perhaps partly involving surrogate privateers, conducted in support of an otherwise rather conventional military raid. Thus it really doesn’t qualify much as a military effort at cyberwar, at least not as we originally envisioned it.

Our vision was more about prospects for military operations built around small units of distributed networked special-operations forces — a trend barely mentioned by Rid or Arquilla in their debate about cyberwar at the Foreign Policy blog. Thus a better example of cyberwar than Georgia would be the phase of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 when a small number of U.S. special operations forces, coordinating with U.S. air units and Northern Alliance forces, drove the Taliban out of power. Another example might be Operation Neptune Spear, in which Seal Team Six and associated forces did away with Osama bin Laden in 2011. Such operations did not involve the kinds of cyber attacks that Rid and Arquilla emphasize above, but these operations were much in keeping with our original concept of cyberwar. So too may be some recent operations involving drones.

Since I’m not a military person, I hesitate to write about military operations on my own. Arquilla has — and could further — write about them expertly. But I gather from other writings that he now treats them more as instances of military netwar than cyberwar. Moreover, in recent years the U.S. Army and Navy have both created new organizations that have netwar in their name or acronym. Thus, as time passes, it appears that the lexical reach of netwar is being militarized, and cyberwar demilitarized.

Will that spell further twists in future lexical debates? It seems as though the conflict spectrum we initially laid out — a single spectrum with cyberwar at the fully military end, netwar at the social end — has served its original purpose: to call attention to the advent of new modes of conflict. But by now, some 20 years later, it has become problematic, and is being turned 90º, split into two separate parallel spectrums, and stretched — such that netwar defines the top spectrum and now has both military and social spans, while cyberwar (cyber war) defines a parallel spectrum underneath, with its own military and social spans. In this re-envisioning, netwar becomes the top spectrum, because it now seems to have the more organizational and doctrinal content of the two; and cyberwar (or cyber war) is underneath, because it has been reduced to emphasize its technological aspects.

I’m not seriously proposing such a re-envisioning of the spectrum. I’m just pointing out that it seems implicit in recent discussions about cyberwar (and netwar). If so, I suspect it’ll represent more a new puzzle than a solution as lexical debates continue to arise. At the same time, it’s not clear how much the lexical debates matter. They certainly roil discussions about policy and strategy; but they’re also a bit of a sideshow, for many major issues — e.g., how to prioritize threat scenarios, how to organize for cyber defense, how to create deterrence — can be addressed without necessarily first settling the lexical debates, engaging as they tend to be.


[UPDATE — March 19, 2016: John provides some clarification of his view in his article “Toward a Discourse on Cyber Strategy” (Communications of the ACM, January 15, 2016 — here). In it, he notes that

“… we were focused on the overall military operational and organizational implications of "cyber," not just the specific cyberspace-based concerns. It was our hope that this very wide-angled perspective would help to shape the strategic conversation.

“Sadly, it was not to be. Forests have been felled to provide paper for the many books and articles about how to protect information systems and infrastructure; but too little has emerged to inform and guide the future development of broader strategies for the cyber era.”]

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Appendix: Excerpts about Cyberwar and Netwar

In the text above, I noted that, even though the definition we once gave to cyberwar keeps receding, the vision behind it keeps gaining momentum. I’m not going to reiterate that vision here; but as a reminder, I excerpt two sets of quotes that apply to the conflict spectrum as we once saw it. The first is about the rise of network forms of organization, the second about the rise of swarming as a way that networks fight.

1. The excerpt below reiterates our basic maxims about the rise of network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies. The excerpt is from our chapter (with Michele Zanini as a co-author) about “Networks, Netwar, and Information-Age Terrorism” (1999). I’ve also used this excerpt in a prior post’s appendix here about creating a collaborative community for cyber defense. The maxims mainly mention netwar, but in my view they also pertain to cyberwar. [UPDATE — May 22, 2012: Earlier expressions of these maxims appear in The Advent of Netwar (RAND, 1996, pp. 81-82), and The Zapatista “Social Netwar in Mexico (RAND, 1998, pp. 17-18.)]

“Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. There are examples across the conflict spectrum. …

“It takes networks to fight networks. Governments that would defend against netwar may have to adopt organizational designs and strategies like those of their adversaries. This does not mean mirroring the adversary, but rather learning to draw on the same design principles of network forms in the information age. These principles depend to some extent upon technological innovation, but mainly on a willingness to innovate organizationally and doctrinally, and by building new mechanisms for interagency and multijurisdictional cooperation.

“Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages. In these early decades of the information age, adversaries who have adopted networking (be they criminals, terrorists, or peaceful social activists) are enjoying an increase in their power relative to state agencies.” (1999, pp. 55-56, italics in original)

2. The next excerpt is from what we wrote later in our first full statement (2000) about swarming and the future of conflict. Accordingly, swarming will emerge across the spectrum, becoming an attribute of both cyberwar and netwar.

“Here we advance the idea that swarming may emerge as a definitive doctrine that will encompass and enliven both cyberwar and netwar.” (2000, p. iii)

“Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, co-ordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. This notion of “force and/or fire” may be literal in the case of military or police operations, but metaphorical in the case of NGO activists, who may, for example, be blocking city intersections or emitting volleys of emails and faxes. Swarming will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing — swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to re-combine for a new pulse.” (2000, p. 12)

“Swarming, we hypothesize, provides an important alternative vision of the future for the American military — and it may well do so for other militaries, too, if they begin looking for innovations that may enable them to outwit the Americans. Whoever gets there first may find in swarming the doctrinal catalyst for waging cyberwar — the military end of the information-age conflict spectrum that has long been a central theme in our research (see Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1993).” (2000, p. 77)

Swarming remains a potent trend for organization, doctrine, strategy, and tactics all across the conflict spectrum — and we’ve written more about this since then. But swarming has proven as debatable as cyberwar in resistant military circles. In contrast, swarming and netwar have been welcome ideas among social activists. Indeed, cyber warfare often involves “hacktivist” swarming, as in DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks by groups like Anonymous and LulzSec.

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NOTE:  *While cyberwar / cyber warfare is a marginal interest for me at this point, I still try to follow — and recommend others follow — topical posts by David Betz, Jeffrey Carr, Adam Elkus, Sam Liles, Thomas Rid, and Tim Stevens at their blogs.  They provide additional background for this post, and provide good guides to writings elsewhere by other experts.

Beware of “monstrous moral hybrids” — a TIMN perspective

In preparing for Part IV of this blog’s ongoing series on the Occupy protests, I’ve realized that something should be said about “monstrous moral hybrids” as organizations that will surely impede the kinds of democratic reforms that protesters may wish for. So I do not have to say too much in that future post, this post provides extended background. It also follows up on a previous post that expressed doubts about the trendy popularity of hybrid forms of organization.

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As noted in the Part-I post on the protest movements, the two “winningest” systems of the 20th century were patrimonial corporatism and liberal democracy. The former prevailed in the less-developed regions of the world, the latter in the more-advanced.

Lately, both systems have become fraught with decay and distortion in many nations. Once-functional exemplars of patrimonial corporatism — like Egypt — were increasingly rigged to serve clannish ruling elites. And systems exemplifying liberal democracy — notably, the USA — increasingly reverted to their own versions of patrimonial corporatism. That’s partly why so many protest movements — Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc. — have sprung up around the world, demanding democratic reforms.

Looking ahead from a TIMN perspective, it appears that a major obstacle to reforming such systems — obliging patrimonial-corporatist regimes to head anew toward democratization, and reversing patrimonial-corporatist back-sliding among the liberal democracies — will be dealing with the entrenched entities and practices that Jane Jacobs calls “monstrous moral hybrids”.

TIMN, as I’ve elaborated before (e.g., here and here), instructs that the four cardinal forms of organization — tribes, institutions, markets, networks — and their realms should be kept basically separate, in balance, and within limits as a society advances. Some mingling is inevitable and worthwhile, say in the way that staff camaraderie can spur a corporation’s marketing, or that public-private partnerships may facilitate development projects. But, as a rule, TIMN warns against fusions that result in enormous rigid hybrids of the forms. And elsewhere no one has warned against this better than Jane Jacobs.

Jane Jacobs’ concept of “monstrous moral hybrids”

In her marvelous Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992), Jane Jacobs lays out the “guardian moral syndrome” and the “commercial moral syndrome” as the two key moral / ethical “systems of survival” that lie behind successful social evolution. For each syndrome, she specifies fifteen precepts that define an optimal code of behavior for operating in that syndrome. The two sets of precepts are very different, even contradictory.

Here’s a layout taken from her book (p. 215; also pp. 23-24), as depicted at Wikipedia (source):

Her view tracks well with TIMN, for her guardian and commercial syndromes correspond roughly to TIMN’s institutional and market forms. She refers to practices that correspond to TIMN’s tribal form, but she does not separate them out, instead treating such practices as aspects of one or the other of the two syndromes. In the chart above, the guardian syndrome includes some precepts (e.g., about honor, vengeance) that pertain more to TIMN’s tribal form, while others (e.g., about hierarchy) fit with TIMN’s institutional form. Indeed, her guardian model sometimes seems more (T) tribal than (+I) administrative in nature, but for now I’ll stick with her intent: that it represents the underpinning of government.

Overall, and much like TIMN, she emphasizes that these two syndromes serve best when kept separate. As one of Jacobs’ protagonists explains:

“… It’s bootless to try to harmonize commerce and guardianship into one joint system of morality. Trying to do it can’t produce harmony — quite the opposite. The contradictions are innate. We have no way to escape them.

“To seek harmony in the sense of oneness is a profoundly false lead. But harmony can be sought by seeking to maintain each syndrome’s own identity and integrity. Then the two can support and complement each other, as I tried to show when I explained why commerce needs the support and help of guardians and why guardians need the support and help of commerce. Symbiosis: from the Greek for ‘together’ and ‘living.’ As the dictionary tells us, it means ‘the living together of two dissimilar organisms, especially when the association is mutually beneficial.’” (pp. 106-107)

But, while symbiosis is good, and while an actor may move back and forth between the two syndromes, cross-mixing is bad. If the two syndromes get mingled together improperly, the results are problematic hybrids that Jacobs calls “monstrous moral hybrids” (Chs. 5, 6, 9):

“These are examples of behavior that conforms neither to the intact guardian syndrome, nor the intact commercial syndrome. This is behavior that picks and chooses precepts from both syndromes, creating monstrous moral hybrids.” (p.80)

“You can’t mix up such contradictory moral syndromes without opening up moral abysses and producing all kinds of functional messes.” (p. 81)

Most of her examples are dark: like Nazi physicians and Soviet psychiatrists who should have aided their patients but instead served the state; violent crime syndicates that traffic in drugs, arms, or other illicit goods; police agencies that profiteer from false arrests; and media businesses that prop up dictators by censoring artists and journalists. By implication, totalitarian regimes are prone to monstrous moral hybrids. But liberal democracies may generate them too. She points to corrupt aspects of the military-industrial complex, though she never explicitly calls it a monstrous hybrid. In a later book — Dark Age Ahead (2005, p. 189) — she views privately-run jails and prisons in Canada and the United States as monstrous moral hybrids that have resulted from efforts to “reinvent government”.

I like Jacobs’ concept. It fits well with TIMN, and calls attention to some downsides and dark sides that may crop up as societies evolve. The next two sections show how her concept illuminates recent tendencies in both patrimonial-corporatist and liberal-democratic systems.

Monstrous moral hybrids as bastions of patrimonial corporatism

Enormous efforts go into creating monstrous moral hybrids, and then into protecting and preserving them. And many turn into bastions of patrimonial corporatism. Indeed, the creation of such hybrid entities is a key enabler of patrimonial corporatism, for one of its functions is power through patronage.

Exemplars of such hybrids are most noticeable in patrimonial-corporatist systems where government-sanctioned military enterprises have acquired vast commercial operations. This is the case in two of the societies hit by the recent wave of protest movements: Iran and Egypt.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), exemplifies a monstrous moral hybrid. It was founded in order to consolidate various paramilitary forces after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Today, it has not only its own ground, naval, air, and special forces, but has also expanded economically and acquired assets to become a multi-billion business enterprise. Its business activities range from public construction projects to dentistry and travel agencies, not to mention black-market smuggling. In areas where it operates, it can shut out private competition; underbid and overrun; and use military conscripts as well as recruits for labor. Thus, in TIMN terms, it amounts to a hybrid tribal-institutional-market organization. It is sometimes said to amount to a state within a state, but it seems more than that to me — more like a proto-caliphate (or quasi-emirate) within a nation-state. (source source source source)

Egypt’s military is also said to be like a state within a state, since its commercial enterprises penetrate so many areas of industry, agriculture, real estate, and construction. Its economic roles commenced decades ago, rationalized as a way to spur efficient state-led development. But the enormous expansion that now exists followed from the 1975 peace agreement with Israel, for it led to a need to create thousands of new jobs for demobilized soldiers. (source)

“The answer was the military would also produce for the civilian market. Thus the generals came to preside over 16 enormous factories that turn out not just weapons, but an array of domestic products from dishwashers to heaters, clothing, doors, stationary pharmaceutical products, and microscopes. Most of these products are sold to military personnel through discount military stores, but large amount are also sold commercially.” (source)

“There is a great deal of speculation concerning how much of the Egyptian economy the military truly controls, with estimates ranging from 5 to 40 percent. But it is known that the economic assets of the military include industrial enterprises, construction companies, Red Sea resorts, and, probably most importantly, vast tracts of land, in addition to the more traditional industrial enterprises that have long been in military hands.” (source)

Again, as in Iran, this has resulted in cooperative, competitive, and even adversarial relations with private-sector businesses. It also has made labor relations a sore point, as have military exemptions from paying taxes and duties. Says one source cited above, “Many civilian businessmen complain that competing with the military is like trying to compete with the Mafia.”
[UPDATE — August 18. 2012: For additional discussion, I like the following monograph that I recently read: Yezid Sayigh, Above the State: The Officers’ Republic in Egypt (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Middle East Center, August 2012), available for download here.]
[UPDATE — May 8, 2015: Also see Ahmed Morsy’s The Military Crowds Out Civilian Business in Egypt (2014) and Shana Marshall’s The Egyptian Armed Forces and the Remaking of an Economic Empire (2015).]

The Iranian and Egyptian cases underscore that huge military-commercial hybrids reinforce a society’s tendencies toward patrimonial corporatism and pose severe obstacles to market-like democratization. The presence of such hybrids distorts entrepreneurial and employment opportunities, creating resentments and grievances across all classes. In addition, their presence constrains a central government’s capacity for initiating reforms.

In other societies affected by the Arab Spring — Tunisia, Libya, Syria — such hybrids have congealed around ruling family and tribe members rather than formal military offices. But these kinds of hybrids still mix Jacobs’ guardian and commercial syndromes in ways that qualify them as monstrous moral hybrids, for their commercial roles are often enforced by paramilitary forces tied to the family and tribe members.

Elsewhere, China’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) once commanded such enormous commercial holdings and activities that it was dubbed “PLA Inc.” But in the 1990s China’s government and party leaders called a halt to this practice, and obliged the army to spin off its holdings to the private sector (often to the benefit of retired officers). This helped to reduce corruption, reassure institutional loyalty, and improve the army’s focus on readiness and professionalization. I can’t say that the disbanding of this monstrous moral hybrid helps explain why China has adopted the market form better than have Iran or Egypt, or whether it removed a potential cause for protests. But at least this case shows that disbanding is possible when top leadership orders it.

Monstrous moral hybrids in liberal democracies

It seems natural for patrimonial-corporatist regimes to create at least some monstrous moral hybrids, in part because they are so useful as patronage networks. But it seems unnatural for liberal democracies to do so. And yet they do so. Perhaps it’s because they are have old patrimonial-corporatist remnants embedded deep within them, and thus are prone to occasional reversions, as circumstances permit. Perhaps the “iron law of oligarchy” should have a corollary “iron law of hybridity”?

Even so, the advanced liberal democracies in Europe, North America, and elsewhere don’t have military-commercial entities like those noted above. A case may be made that some democracies have cognates in their military-industrial complexes, and lately especially in military subcontractor systems that have firms like Blackwater. Also, as noted above, Jacobs would include America’s prison-industrial complex in her list. But what seem more interesting in the liberal democracies are hybrids in areas outside of military, law-enforcement, and other armed “guardian” circles.

To help identify monstrous moral hybrids where guardianship is not explicitly tied to armed force, I’d dissect Jacobs’ guardian syndrome into TIMN’s tribal and institutional forms (even make them “syndromes”). By tribal, I basically mean patrimonial in this context; for patrimonialism, with its penchant for relying on crony patronage networks, amounts to an advanced iteration of tribalism. And then, with that modification of Jacobs’ framework in mind, I’d go look for huge hybrids that fuse tribal with governmental and commercial purposes.

The best exemplars I’ve spotted are the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Conservative economists have long criticized them; and thus perhaps it should not come as a surprise that one — Mark Calabria (Cato Institute) — even relates them to Jacobs’ concept:

“I repeatedly watched, while working in the Senate, Fannie/Freddie invoke their “private” nature in order to avoid regulation while invoking their “public” nature to gain protection and privilege. The result was little accountability from either the market or the government (our largest banks currently enjoy a smaller version). Of course, one of the primary differences in debates over financial regulation is the degree to which one believes that either the market or government provides accountability. Setting aside those debates, we should all be able to agree that companies should be either private or government. That the mixing of the two, government sponsored enterprises, is a recipe for avoiding accountability and transparency. But then I suspect that might have been the intent all along. Monstrous moral hybrids by design.” (source)

 But criticisms emanate from liberal-leaning sources as well. Here’s what Adam Posen (Petersen Institute for International Economics) says, albeit without invoking Jacobs’ concept:

For automobiles, hybrid engines are a huge advance. For financial institutions, hybrids are the worst possible design. By financial hybrids, I mean institutions that are neither wholly public-sector bureaus nor private-sector companies. …

Thus, it is no coincidence that the most spectacular crashes of the recent financial turmoil involved the hybrids on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, it was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; in Germany, it was Sachsen LB and IKB. In both countries, these neither-fish-nor-fowl institutions were long recognized as financial accidents waiting to happen. … But their political utility kept them open: …

Of course, the basic technical purposes of these financial hybrids had some merit. … [But] once they were set up as hybrids, the political incentives for the institutions' managers and political patrons got these questionable institutions into businesses they had no business being in and that were ancillary to these more limited positive purposes. …

… The common point for both sides of the Atlantic is that if these institutions cease to be hybrid, it will be natural for their existence to depend upon their utility in serving their core mission, rather than on their political support and threat of failure.” (source)

Much as I might like to think that these GSEs serve noble causes by using public-private partnerships to ease economic hardships and spread home ownership, it seems now that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, following their enormous expansions during the Bush (Sr.) and Clinton administrations, have served an elitist kind of patrimonial corporatism that has extended deep into Wall Street and Capitol Hill, entangling Democrat and Republican leaders along with bankers and other financiers who oscillate between high offices in New York and Washington. (example)

Lest anyone think I’m being biased in criticizing a huge hybrid that many liberals have touted, here’s something else to think about: How about Fox News as a monstrous moral hybrid? It’s a commercial enterprise that has sought to tribalize its market on behalf of leaders in the Republican party; it embodies the spread of patrimonial corporatism in the United States more than any other media enterprise I can think of. In addition, what about “K Street”? The NCAA? Some public-sector unions? Are there grounds for viewing them as monstrous moral hybrids as well? In keeping a lookout for hybrids serving patrimonial corporatism in democracies elsewhere around the world, I’ve also begun to wonder about Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Worth disbanding, but so difficult

Much as I appreciate Jacobs’ concept, it’s not entirely clear. I can’t tell exactly what is or is not a monstrous moral hybrid, why immoral doesn’t figure along with moral in her write-up, and what kinds of hybrids, if any, may be acceptable, even beneficial. Surely not all mixed public-private endeavors, nor all efforts at government outsourcing to private enterprise, should be automatically suspect — yet the criteria are unclear.

Even so, her concept fits well with TIMN, and is better — more insightful and illuminating — than anything else I’ve seen or come up with in this regard. It identifies a significant organizational distortion in dramatic terms. It would suit TIMN even better if she had posited more than two syndromes, particularly by splitting out something like a tribal one, as I indicated above.

By implication, it would be advisable to disband all monstrous moral hybrids. But that seems too much to hope for. They serve too many purposes and powers to be easily undone. They are conducive to patrimonial corporatism, and regressive for liberal democracy. In hindsight, a good way to backslide or at least muddle a liberal democracy is to create such hybrids; for that can generate patrimonial-corporatist pockets of power, profit, and privilege that help co-opt and compromise myriad economic, political, and other actors.

But who is to take the lead in calling for a disbanding of these enormities? Strategy is the art of positioning, and such intricate hybrids are created for strategic positioning purposes in the first place. Undoing them implies repositionings of a grand order.

Perhaps Arab-Spring, Occupy, or other protesters ought to insist on their disbanding. But I have doubts. Though advisable, it could get complicated and divisive (even risky in places like Egypt) if protesters were to push hard on this. The Tea Party movement tried a bit, but to no effect I can see.

Better yet would be if the top leaders of societies distorted by these hybrids were to disband them on their own enlightened initiative. The regimes that have incurred large protests, and fielded great resistance to them, all have monstrous moral hybrids not far from their cores. While objecting specifically to them has figured only marginally in protest movements in a few nations, disbanding them would maneuver the regimes and their systems back onto optimal TIMN paths. Nonetheless, it’s easier to imagine reasons why regime leaders wouldn’t take such initiatives than why they might. And that applies to both patrimonial-corporatist and liberal-democratic governments.

That’s a sour note on which to end this post. But there are hopeful notes yet to be played. The prospects for doing something about monstrous moral hybrids may improve as societies continue to evolve from representative democracy to “monitory democracy” — the topic of the next post.

[UPDATE — May 8, 2015: I’ve resisted discussing another hybridity concept: “hybrid warfare”. But here’s a recent post that raises good questions: Jyri Raitasalo’s Hybrid Warfare: Where’s the Beef? (2015)]