intricate networks are subject to chaotic storms and sudden, violent collapse; but such emergent behaviours cannot be understood apart from the political economy of capital, and the specific ideologies of neo-liberalism that power them

The argument and the examples are to0 complex to summarize and quote from here, but I recommend the reading of Sean Cubit’s commentary on the writings of Jane Bennett, who uses actor-network theory to explain accidents in global systems, with as example electricity grid failures in megacities:

“she discusses the Northeastern blackout affecting the Boston-New York and Great Lakes conurbations in August 2003 – can be traced to the chaotic behaviour of electrical flows in complex grids. Like Virilio (2007), she sees the very existence of the power grid as the intimation of its collapse (Bennett 2010: 27)”

Sean finds fault with such ‘general argumentation’:

“it is equally naïve to omit the interconnection of this network with another, the deregulated energy market of the USA in the 2000s.

It is illuminating to compare the 2003 blackout with another case of megacity outage in the USA. The now shamed Enron corporation had used campaign funds to pressure California legislators to deregulate the state’s energy market. Before deregulation, there had been only one serious rolling blackout: from the deregulation of December 200 to its re-regulation in June 2001, there were 38 (Public Citizen 2002). In August that year, Enron share price began to tumble, resulting in its filing for bankruptcy in November. There is no clear connection between the collapses of California’s energy market and that of Enron. It is true however that ascribing the collapse of both to human greed, is inadequate. Equally, however, Bennett is correct in saying that the electrical network, the medium through which these crises occurred, provided the affordances necessary to drive them into collapse.”

In other words:

“The collapse, however, was driven by changing network goals. Missing in Bennett’s analysis is the interaction between two systems, the public utility and the market. It is this interaction which created the new network behaviours which caused the crises … This is not an example of emergent properties in a chaotic network: it clearly arises when one value – .the provision of light – conflicts with another – the extraction of profit, in the Californian instance not from retail sale but from speculative trading in real-time energy futures, in the North eastern from taking immediate profit even at the expense of the long-term profitability or even feasibility of the operation. These outcomes of clashes betwen service and profiot are even more visible in the developing world.”

I believe that what Sean Cubitt says here is generally true for the subtle reductionism at work in network theories in general, where both human intentionality and social structures are abstracted away by only considering ‘flat’ agents in a system.