Against the simplistic conservatism of Evgeny Morozov: a network-theory critique

Con:

Morozov sees decentralization as a leisurely, unnecessary, and incompetent social experiment by people unwilling or unable to engage in the serious work of reform. I suspect such attitudes say more about Morozov’s social circle than the subjects he claims to study. Moreover, he’s convinced that the trial runs we’ve seen by the groups identified as “internet centrist”, like Occupy and the Pirate Party, is already sufficient evidence for condemning the whole approach. He’s quick to link the innovative strategies of these radical upstarts with collectivist thought and media analysis from decades before the Internet, to further suggest that the strategy has had plenty of time to mature and succeed, and has utterly failed to do so. On his one-dimensional analysis, the jury is basically already in: decentralization is functionally incompatible with organizational success. Morozov is convinced that the barbarians can’t win; the only way to make Rome fall is to build a better Rome. The observations and anecdotes he has collected here might be a convincing argument for perpetuating the existing order, if centralization were the only dimension available for analyzing the structure of political institutions.

Pro:

Organizational structure and success is not a product of hierarchy and centralization any more than it is a product of decentralization and horizontalism. Organization and centrality are entirely distinct measures of a network. Successful organizations find ways to effectively execute sustaining functions by any means, and this requires both concentrating and distributing power in a variety of ways. Dogmatically clinging to any degree of centrality for an institution is meaningless without some explanation of the institution’s functional role and methods for executing that role.

Excerpted from Daniel Estrada:

A reply to Evgeny Morozov.

“There are two ways to be wrong about the internet. One is to argue it doesn’t live up to its hype. Speculative futurism and unabashed mysticism have become commonplace in discussions of technological change, and it isn’t hard to find people ready to claim that the internet is a panacea heralding everything up to and including immortality. In such an environment, one need only be moderately critical about the internet to position oneself as a pariah standing against a swarm of naive technoidealists. Democracy doesn’t even work on Wikipedia, the argument goes, and so it is foolish to think that “liquid democracy” will change the form of legitimate governance (read: the nation-state) in any substantive way, hype be damned. The problem with such criticisms is that they treat the possibility of internet-generated change as all-or-nothing: either the internet meets the expectations of its most wide-eyed advocates, or it is a waste of time with all the sociopolitical importance of a video game. There’s no room in this view for registering the subtle cultural shifts that can change the practice of legitimate governance over time, or for understanding how the ideals of extremists can change the discourse even when their ideals are not achieved.

The other, more insidious way of being wrong about the internet is to accept that the internet changes things subtly, and proceed to argue that the old ways were better. That’s what I take Evgeny Morozov to be doing in this article, and it’s important to see how regressive his arguments (and the institutions they support) are. Just to be sure I have the argument right, I’ll try to charitably reconstruct its key points before blowing them to pieces.

Morozov’s core argument against Johnson’s “internet-centrism” is that it is shallow:

It’s not hard to see why: his Internet-centric theory of politics is shallow. Wikipedia, remember, is a site that anyone can edit! As a result, Johnson cannot account for the background power conditions and inequalities that structure the environment into which his bright reform ideas are introduced. Once those background conditions are factored in, it becomes far less obvious that increasing decentralization and participation is always desirable. Even Wikipedia tells us a more complex story about empowerment: yes, anyone can edit it, but not anyone can see their edits preserved for posterity. The latter depends, to a large extent, on the politics and the power struggles inside Wikipedia.

Not only are the naive politics of internet centrism underequipped to handle the realities of politics, Morozov argues that those realities are in fact best met by centralized, hierarchical structures. Thus, even in groups that advocate decentralized politics we see an inevitable need to centralized and consolidate power in the form of traditional hierarchies:

The Porto Alegre experiment succeeded because there was a centralized effort to make it work. Centralization was the means through which the end of decentralization was achieved. Without well-organized, centralized, and hierarchical structures to push back against entrenched interests, attempts to make politics more participatory might stall, and further disempower the weak, and coopt members of the opposition into weak and toothless political settings. This was the case before the Internet, and, most likely, it will be the case long after.

Morozov repeats this theme for the rest of the article: decentralization is a poor method of organization, centralization and hierarchy is a political reality we must take seriously, decentralization is unprepared to meet that challenge. “Internet centrism”, while superficially advocating decentralization, is itself a centralizing, institutionalizing force, putting “severe intellectual limits” on the narrative surrounding politics in the digital age. More than just hype, the naive politics of internet centrism is a discursive nuisance. It distracts us from serious reflection on the activities of legitimate institutions of power.

At least, I take this to be Morozov’s position. The upshot is that we’d do better, from the perspective of the political discourse, to ignore “the internet” altogether, because treating it as a centralizing and totalizing political agent isn’t getting us anywhere other than up our own ass. Real political change comes from working with the realities of institutional politics today, and internet centrists “lack curiosity about how the world works”, worrying more about their gadgets and sci-fi fantasies than any serious reform.

There’s places to quibble about the details, but I hope it’s a generous enough reading of the article that the following comments have some impact. I haven’t read Johnson’s book and I don’t mean to defend it; my goal is to straightforwardly attack Morozov’s critique of it. Or rather, I want to give a defense of networked politics against the hierarchical institutions that Morozov treats as inevitable. Morozov’s critique ultimately misunderstands the role of networked analysis in politics, and profoundly misrepresents the advantages it has over other forms of political analysis. Perhaps this misrepresentation is Johnson’s fault, but Morozov should know better quite independently of Johnson’s popularizing text.

The error Morozov makes throughout the essay is the use of “centralization” as a primary axis of political analysis, ranging from the quite centralized operation of (apparently) successful hierarchical institutions (like political parties), to the decentralized, horizontal structures of “internet-centrist” institutions like Occupy. Morozov’s view is quite simply as follows: centralization is good for organizational consistency and sustainability, and decentralization is bad.

He writes:

If one assumes that political reform is long, slow, and painful, hierarchies and centralizing strategies can be productive. After all, they can keep the movement on target and give it some coherent shape. Ideas on their own do not change the world; ideas that are coupled with smart institutions might… But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization.

Morozov doesn’t elaborate on how centralized institutions might better challenge the existing power structures without recapitulating their crimes, but reiterates (with no argument) that they “might”:

Challenging power requires a strategy that in many circumstances might favor centralization.

Morozov’s position is purely observational: look at how decentralized movements like Occupy routinely (!) fail, and look in contrast at how many and powerful their centralized competitors are. If we are going for lasting and effective institutions, it would seem clear that a hierarchy has the best chance. Right? If we were to take Morozov seriously, we might be persuaded to think that centralized hierarchy was reliably correlated with organizational power, such that the more tightly structured the organization, the more successful, controlled, and organized it becomes. Presumably the military is an institutional ideal on this view, one that political dissidents should emulate? If this seems absurd, we get no better suggestions from Morozov, who fails to acknowledge any of the vices of centralized control or to pin the failures of our institutions on their structure or theoretical grounding.

On his view it’s not so much that hierarchies are good, but that the evidence shows them outperforming decentralized alternatives. Given the existing order of things, it is a curious kind of pragmatism that defends the status quo. One wonders how Morozov explains the dreadful state of our existing institutions, if our equipment was already well-poised to challenge the powers that be? Instead of seeing the adoption of alternative institutional structures as a move born of desperation by those for whom the existing systems have failed, Morozov sees decentralization as a leisurely, unnecessary, and incompetent social experiment by people unwilling or unable to engage in the serious work of reform. I suspect such attitudes say more about Morozov’s social circle than the subjects he claims to study. Moreover, he’s convinced that the trial runs we’ve seen by the groups identified as “internet centrist”, like Occupy and the Pirate Party, is already sufficient evidence for condemning the whole approach. He’s quick to link the innovative strategies of these radical upstarts with collectivist thought and media analysis from decades before the Internet, to further suggest that the strategy has had plenty of time to mature and succeed, and has utterly failed to do so. On his one-dimensional analysis, the jury is basically already in: decentralization is functionally incompatible with organizational success. Morozov is convinced that the barbarians can’t win; the only way to make Rome fall is to build a better Rome.

The observations and anecdotes he has collected here might be a convincing argument for perpetuating the existing order, if centralization were the only dimension available for analyzing the structure of political institutions. Thankfully, it isn’t. Organizational structure and success is not a product of hierarchy and centralization any more than it is a product of decentralization and horizontalism. Organization and centrality are entirely distinct measures of a network. Successful organizations find ways to effectively execute sustaining functions by any means, and this requires both concentrating and distributing power in a variety of ways. Dogmatically clinging to any degree of centrality for an institution is meaningless without some explanation of the institution’s functional role and methods for executing that role.

Network and systems analysis allow the study of these power relations– and their organizational capacities– beyond the arcane limits static, top-down hierarchies of nominal control. Organizations can flourish within a wide range of institutional control, but can just as easily fail. What matters are the organizational dynamics within those structures; these dynamics emerge from the actions of agents at many scales of analysis, not from the artificial bureaucracies that have been tasked to manage them. Hierarchical control imposes constrains on the system’s ability to organize. Some constraints may be necessary or even desirable, but it is a grave misunderstanding to mistake the constraints for the organization itself; it is something like thinking the pot causes the plant to grow. Morozov confusion over constraints is nowhere more apparent when he accuses Johnson’s internet evangelism with banal libertarianism. Network theory, which worships the same gods as Morozov’s disdained “internet-centrists”, does not consist in the dogmatic advocacy of decentralization or the arbitrary smashing of pots. It is the study of organizational dynamics across all forms of institutional and environmental control. If that analysis recommends the smashing of pots, it’s because some pots really do hinder the development of the network. Digital politics cares about discovering when and how development occurs, not about arguing over whether or not we need more pots.”

Read the full article for some examples of network-theoretical analysis of organisational forms.

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