Matt Boggs of the always thought-provoking Digiblade blog has posted an interesting recap and commentary of the ideas of flash tribes, i.e. a society that is centered around the self-organizing of affinity groups, which organize life solidarity aided by the new generations of technology. This scenario, although in a less rosy context, was described by Neal Stephenson is his great SF novel The Diamond Age. Matt says the Millenial generation is fast moving in that direction. Read the whole post, here is already an excerpt. I also posted my own comment at the bottom of that post. My comment is centered around the fact that at present, there is no institutionalized security mechanism that could stabilize such a society. So it either has to rest on a traditional family system, on a state-based welfare system, or find new solidarity mechanisms, if it is to be a stable alternative.
Matt Boggs:
“Millenials, the “anti-consumers”. Their lives right now are either played out in MMRPGs or in Live role-playing games. Many claim they have more friends on-line than IRL (in real life). Yes, it’s about who they know, and how they connect with those people. Sure, a lot of kids their age are still consumerist, but – there is change coming, and you see it in these kids, both in my daughter’s age group and younger. The millenial generation believes in social capital in a way that I have not seen in a generation since the depression babies. In the case of the depression babies, it was all they had. In the case of the millenials, it is because the tools to make communities are now much more powerful, and have much more leverage.
They certainly believe in it far more than my generation did – which formed sub-cultures and cults by the bucket (Goth, Punk, Valley Girls), but somehow did not find the community it was looking for. Instead, the alienating forces of broadcast were abundant, and either people built pyramids, or they became, like me, lone grey wolves, carrying with them a one person sense of their role in a world. already having networks of virtual friends spread in a far net geographically. Nor can these friends be dismissed as not “realâ€? friends, they are often truer friends than those who are friends by accident of geography, spending their time and money to help people they know mainly online. Indeed I am, personally, closing in on the point where more of my friends and business associates are people I originally met virtually than ones I met physically. And these are real relationships as measured by both money and time – thousands of dollars and thousands of hours have been spent on them, and earned by them.
My guess is that the most important of these will form out of groups centering around mutual interests and hobbies and form into long enduring networks of reciprocal\symbiotic friendships which will turn into societies with formal dues and duties. They have been called Flash tribes in the past, for the way they will be able to protect their members by quickly dispatching help to their aid and indeed I expect the first forms to be mutual aid societies, where social norms and the sharing of personal dreams that comes so easily in the virtual world leads to strong expectations that members will be there for other members who need help. It is this beginning which made me call them militias or tribes – because they will be tied together at first mainly by custom.
When traveling you will reach out to see who in your tribe lives in the area and can act as a guide, or a host. When doing research you will see who is an expert in your tribe. When doing business you will tend to use members of your tribe first, because you will know that strong social approbation will fall on those who fail to live up to their duties to a tribe member.”
Received from Ted Lumley:
the word ‘tribe’ as it is used in ‘flash tribe’ has little to do with the ‘tribalism’ of indigenous peoples and, in spite of the claims, nothing to do with ‘real relationships’ as they have existed in tribal societies; i.e. the ‘reality’ of relationships is not measurable in terms of ‘money and time’, as in ian welsh’s and matt bogg’s usage;
“And these are real relationships as measured by both money and time – thousands of dollars and thousands of hours have been spent on them, and earned by them�.
tribalism involves the land, nature, the common hostspace, which plays the role of a relational intermediary in all ecosystemic relationships. ‘the land’ is a metaphor for the natural hostspace in which we are all included and the land is ‘sacred’ in tribal belief systems. modern man, putting ‘rational models’ for ‘making things happen’ ahead of the space he lives in, has twisted off and out of the land and now refers to it as ‘the environment’, … a kind of ‘resource’ that he can use for whatever purpose. in this shedding of his tribalism and his splitting himself out of the ‘land’, modern man has refocused on ‘what he can do’ out of the context of the sensitive eco-space he lives in.
electronic society man ‘comes in two forms’. in one form, he seeks to use electronic communication to re-kindle his tribal attunement to the hostspace he feels included in, … and in another form, we seeks to use electronic communications to extend his ability to ‘make things happen’ out of the context of the space he is included in.
as an example of the former, we live in an era where many people (environmentalists, zapatistas, those who put local community socio-ecosystems first) are trying to get back to their relationship with the land and with one another. this land-mediated (hostspace-mediated) caring for one another that electronic communications are helping to re-kindle is very different from usage oriented to the construction of make-it-happen membership clubs. in the former, the sensitive attunement to our shared hostspace comes first and our activities seek to sustain balance and harmony within that common hostspace. in the latter, there is no sense of grounding in the land, our sacred commons, there is simply the orientation to ‘making things happen’, ‘constructing a desired outcome’, and other anthropocentric ‘assertive accomplishments’.
in using the term ‘tribe’, it would therefore seem to be useful to ‘understand the difference’ between these new ‘disembodied’ internet or cell-phone-based (electronics-based) relationships and those rooted in the land (i.e. ‘in nature’).
for example, what naturally evolved tribal people did not suffer from is ‘a sense of belonging’ that is so important when the land is taken out of the relational equation. the land is what ‘includes’ in tribal thinking and everyone is included in the land. the pure, people-relationship aspect of naturally evolved tribalism is secondary and ‘political’. if tribes-people found their local chief to be too oppressive, they moved to new land and began the brew their tribalism anew. the land is always central and mediating in tribalism, and the anthropic-relational aspect taken in its own right, is secondary.
what our newtonian society (i.e. the newtonian facet of our diversely constituted society), which seems often to characterize our electronic society, is all about is ‘humans making things happen’. it is about ‘what people do’ and ‘how they do it together’, there is [within this model] no respect for the land, the hostspace that provides the operating theatre for all of our ‘making things happen’ initatives and which is interdependently bound up in them; i.e. there is no accounting for, in ‘make it happen’ based models and operations, the complex ecosystems within which we operationalize our ‘make it happen’ initiatives and issues of sustainability that are inevitably involved. in the ‘newtonian model’, the earth and our relationship with(in) it is incidental, people can operational purely ‘make-it-happen’ plans anywhere in the universe, … imagine phone-sex with a klingon or between two people residing on different space-stations.
the ‘flash tribes’ model and many if not most ‘electronic society’ models are anthropocentric-membership-club-based (rational) while tribalism emerges inductively from the sense of inclusion in the land, a deep emotional bond with the land (the natural hostspace) and with its diverse and subtle co-participants and ecosystemic interdependencies. the sense of inclusion in the evolutionary dynamic of nature as in natural tribalism is entirely unlike the deliberate politically anthropocentric membership organizations that ‘bypass’, or at least ignore/fail to put into precedence man’s relationship with the earth’.
deliberate membership-based social organizations involve ‘duty’ and ‘obligations’ and give a rational sense of mechanically-integrated inclusion rather than a spiritual sense of innate organic inclusion. this comes from the perceived obligation to ‘make things happen in the desired way’ and it is very different from believing one is included in an evolving dynamical unity that one must attune to and sustain harmony with. this sense of ‘dutiful deliberate inclusion’ raises its newtonian head in ian welsh’s ‘the flash society’;
“This is the beginning of re-creating a society where citizenship involves a duty to one’s fellow citizens; a society where you can feel like you matter and you belong – because when the shit hits the fan – you’re there helping. . . . This is a world where people swim in a network of relationships explicitly, where who you are is who you know and what you do, in a very explicit way. It’s a world of social ties, where you are a part of society in an active way.�
all this talk of ‘what we do’ deliberately and rationally belies the fact that we are inextricably included in a common hostspace dynamic (the medium is the message), an essential point that marshall mcluhan stressed, but which didn’t seem ‘to take’. that is, the new technologies we use for ‘doing’ are the mere ‘content’ which makes no reference to the context of our hostspace. that is, ‘what we do’ (the content of dynamics) induces transformation in the interferential spatial-relational flow we are included in; i.e. mcluhan’s following point in ‘understanding media’;.
“In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs.”
the world of ‘making things happen’ is, in mcluhan’s terms, ‘the visual space world’ (of thing-dynamics or ‘content-dynamics’) while the ‘real world’ we are included in is the ‘acoustic space world’ (the hostspace flow-field) that we sense through our real-life inclusional experience.
‘tribalism’ is to do with our acoustic space experience (in the land) rather than our visual space perception ‘of what is going on out there’.
for example, in a 1994 paper on culture change, Tribalism and Modernity in Kirgizia ( http://www.smi.uib.no/paj/Hvoslef.html ) erlend hvoslef notes that the attuned relationship of tribal peoples with the land was disrupted by the seventy years of soviet power with the result that the ‘make it happen’ (rational plan based) collectivisation of livestock husbandry ‘devastated the land for pasture, and eventually, led to a severe decline in the number of animals.�
my point is that we live in an interdependency within a sensitive ecological hostspace that is transformed IMPLICITLY by our actions; i.e. the dynamical context of our hostspace is INDUCTIVELY transformed by the dynamical content. that is why there is so much concern over modern genetic modification of foodcrops and other forms of gene-manipulation. that is simply the nature of living interdependently within a finite unbounded common hostspace that is highly relationally networked. it is subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (chaos) which can be triggered, as in ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’, by a passenger in a small plane throwing an empty coke-bottle into the desert.
the notion of a ‘flash tribe’ is a content- (visual space) based model which is UNGROUNDED in the dynamical context in which it is included (acoustic space). it is therefore a ‘superficial story’ in the same manner as mcluhan points out that ‘the machine’ and ‘what it does’ is just the ‘superficial story’; i.e. ‘the flash tribe’ being an artifact of electronic technology, corresponds NOT to the nature of the social hostspace but to “cornflakes or Cadillacs� in mcluhan’s above formulation (something we produce with our electronic machinery). we, as a natural tribe, are in a continuing struggle to attune to and sustain harmony with the hostspace dynamic in which we are included. our lives are not simply about ‘what we do’ (the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine may prefer to focus on his self-center driven ‘make-it-happen’ actions within the cart, but that is no more than blindering illusion that occludes his inextricable inclusion within the hostspace flow-dynamic). as stephen jay gould says, in an evolutionary dynamic such as the natural one we are included in, one can ascribe no realistic meaning to ‘hitting’ (anthropic asserting) out of the context of ‘fielding’ (spatial accommodating).