Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the concept of swarming, which we define/cite as follows in the P2P Encyclopedia:

Swarming is “a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, and strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force,� (John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt)

Swarming is used in biology, to denote the collective intelligence and behaviour of social insects, in war, but also in political protest.

However, in a very, very!, interesting essay, Brian Holmes shows why more is needed to understand contemporary, internet-enabled self-organized human behaviour, and phenomena such as the free software movement, or the alter-globalization movement. He, citing Karin Knorr Cetina, introduces an important new concept I was not hitherto familiar with: global microstructures, which are replacing the traditional institutional frameworks which can no longer cope.
I’m quoting some essential passages, but the whole essay should be read:

1 – On The Necessity of a Shared Horizon

“I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon – aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical – which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. You can think of this as “making worlds.” The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance : the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an “ecology,” a set of complex and changing inter-relations ; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger evironment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work).”

2 – The emergence of Global Complex Microstructures

Brian Holmes then cites sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina:

“Modern, industrial society created ’complex’ forms of organizations that managed uncertainty and task fulfillment through interiorized systems of control and expertise. But complexity was institutional complexity ; it meant sophisticated multi-level mechanisms of coordination, authority and compensation that assured orderly functioning and performance. A global society leans towards a different form of complexity ; one emanating from more microstructural arrangements and the rise of mechanisms of coordination akin to those found in interaction systems…. The basic intuition that motivates the concept of a global microstructure is that genuinely global forms, by which I mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across all time zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply further expansions of social institutional complexity. In fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex institutional structures. Global financial markets for example, where microstructures have been found, simply outrun the capacity of such structures. These markets are too fast, and change too quickly to be ’contained’ by institutional orders. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns ; a complexity that results, in John Urry ?s terms, from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified social processes and is always intertwined with chaos. More concretely, these systems manifest an observational and temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity, auto-affective principles of self-motivation, forms of ’outsourcing’, and principles of content that substitute for the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex organization.”

3 – From Pipes to Scopes

“Knorr Cetina stresses the creation of shared horizons in much the way that I described it above, focusing for this particular article on the religious horizon of a shared orientation to “transcendent time” (eschatology). As in previous articles on the microstructures of global finance, she also shows how networked ITCs allow participants of the microstructure to see and recognize each other, and to achieve cohesion by coordinating with each other in time, observing and commenting on the same events, even though the microstructure is very dispersed and not all the participants or even a majority of them are necessarily living anywhere near the particular event in question at any given moment. Cetina very suggestively reinterprets the usual idea of networks as a system of pipes conveying contents, to insist instead on the visual or scopic aspect of contemporary ICTs : from “pipes” to “scopes.” Information is important for coordinating action ; but it is the image that maintains the shared horizon and insists on the urgency of action within it (especially through what Barthes called the “punctum” : the part that sticks out from the general dull flatness of the image and affectively touches you).”