Democracy in the Age of Networks & Covid-19

Published in Medium, November 7, 2020

1. The pandemic has laid bare a system beyond repair

The Covid-19 pandemic infected more than 16 million people by the middle of 2020 and killed more than half a million of its victims around the world. While not as lethal as the Black Plague of the 14th century that killed nearly one in three Europeans, nor the “Spanish” flu of 1918 that felled 50 million, the virus has been devastating nonetheless: it hides in plain sight for weeks, like a serial killer or terror network; it suspended the world’s commerce, locked up much of its population, and brought home to rich countries a level of devastation they usually view from afar. Even worse, the world’s richest and most technologically sophisticated economic blocks, the US and the European Union, dithered, exacerbating deep economic and social wounds along national, regional and racial lines.

Similar dysfunction and miscalculation followed previous assaults this century, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to decades of endless wars, to the subprime contagion that ignited the Great Recession, and troll networks that turbocharged autocratic nationalism. All of these attacks are asymmetric: small clusters that brew quietly and then burst on the scene via largely unregulated social media, supply chains and global finance links to wreak havoc. Covid-19 and the misinformation epidemic around it rode essentially the same rails, as does much of today’s innovation.

My four decades of work on technology’s impact on society strongly suggest that the proliferation of distributed technologies — PCs, smartphones, big data and AI — has accelerated the pace of change and the way societies work by connecting more than 10 billion devices across 130 trillion web pages and apps. These vast interlinked electronic webs create what network science calls small world effects that enable stories, videos and money to travel at lightning speed around the world without asking governments’ or companies’ permission. Their connections don’t rely on family bonds, professional hierarchies or national boundaries; they connect through so-called weak ties — anything from new tactical coalitions via online forums to chance encounters at an airport — to forge explosive coalitions, as well as global contagions, at lightning speed.

Together, these capabilities are different from the underlying computer age that created them. They have enabled what sociologist Manuel Castells predicted a decade ago would be “The Rise of the Network Society”: an era of “… instantaneity, random discontinuity … split-second capital transactions, flex-time enterprises, instant wars, and … daily war making … scattered all over the planet …”

The emergence of network society is accelerating the collapse of the one-size-fits-all top-down institutions of the industrial age. This poses both a fundamental threat, as well as a vital opportunity, to reinvent democracy by harnessing the technological wave of the times.

Like the industrial age before it, the network paradigm can’t be resisted and can’t be managed using old-fashioned tools and worldviews. Democracies that embrace the network paradigm can ride its dynamism and diversity to a new era of productivity and creativity for their communities, as well as free up desperately needed physical resources to heal an angry and parched planet.

Covid-19 won’t just be remembered for its devastation. Like the Black Death and the Spanish flu, history’s verdict will rest on nations that internalize the cruel lesson of great plagues noted by historian Sevket Pamuk: the urgent need to radically reorganize societies around their people, enabling them to harness the technological wave of the times. If they don’t rise to the challenge, even harsher lessons await them in the future.

2. Asymmetric attacks

Small world effects and coalitions that form arise out of so-called weak ties give digital networks asymmetric power, a David-versus-Goliath ability to attack the weak parts of giant systems. Interconnectedness at all levels of society makes any part of it fair game for contagion — networked societies are only as strong as their weakest links. Covid exploits them in the same way predatory lenders, terror networks and gangs do.

Pioneering network scientist Duncan Watts describes how networks break-through in his book, “Six Degrees”:

“… small events percolate through obscure places by happenstance and random encounters … in the absence of any grand plan, yet aggregating somehow into a momentous event unanticipated by anyone …”

Like all network attacks, Covid requires fast responses: immediate testing, isolation and healing; coordination at all levels; and a torrent of transparent and accurate information so that communities can respond and adapt. The US and EU failed on all levels. Their responses have been slow, disconnected and divisive.

The big Western democratic blocks remain industrial-age monoliths where the chain of command is top-down and disputes are left to fester between elections, referendums, lengthy regulatory procedures and interminable litigation. The visceral speed of videos, stories and viruses in network society makes a mockery of these hierarchies by working around them, peer-to-peer, leaving people furious at their institutions’ slow and unresponsive pace.

Before Covid, an earlier cluster of network attacks was asymmetric warfare: Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists lured the US into interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq whose ravages are felt throughout the region to this day. Then came the USsubprime loan contagion in which rogue lenders and traders triggered the Great Recession and Euro Crisis, ripping rich societies apart. A third wave, starting in 2016, was launched by online trolls and network propaganda, infecting US and European elections and referendums. All of these attacks followed a now-familiar S-shaped diffusion curve of stealth nascency, lightning-speed spread, devastating impact and eventual stagnation. They all rode the rich rails of globalized, digitized networks like the internet.

Covid is the fifth major attack and still spiraling. A sixth firestorm kicked off with protests around a viral video of the brutal police killing in the US of George Floyd. It revealed a longer term contagion that broadly echoes Covid: bands of racist cops contaminating out-of-date and disconnected police departments, as well as the incapacity and outright refusal to track and trace the villains locally and nationally. But the public response to the killing also showed a more hopeful side of small worlds and weak-tie networks: lightning-fast new coalitions formed around the world between communities of color and younger generations which, along with the disasterous Covid response, fractured Trump’s coalition in ways interminable investigations and impeachment couldn’t achieve, terrifying authoritarians around the world.

The increasing frequency, speed and impact of these once-in-a-lifetime events and the incapacity of institutions to respond have produced a marked loss of faith in democracy and widely observed pessimism in the West. These contingent eventsare neither random nor predictable. Rather, they’re like the increased frequency of hurricanes and wildfires in a worsening climate crisis. They reveal what science historian Thomas Kuhn called crises of the governing paradigm that eventually force a change in worldviews.

Critically, the very same digital networks and peer-to-peer connections are at the heart freedom marches as well as creative and technological insurgencies. In my own experience, the PC revolution, search engines, social networks in technology, and vital new musical genres like rock, punk and hip hop all arose out of networks attacks on stale orthodoxies.

Some powers retreat from the challenge of paradigm shifts, while others embrace them. Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call these openings history’s critical junctures that separate the fates of civilizations. The outcomes of these monumental shifts are far from predetermined. Nations that start out strong often miscalculate, while others engulfed by the crises belatedly find ways of pulling themselves together. What’s important is understanding the urgent need for transformation using the very mechanisms behind the attacks.

3. The tipping point

Network attacks, even outsized ones like Covid and the worldwide race justice protests, are generally absorbed by growing and dynamic societies. But when a social order becomes old and frayed — after failed wars, economic dislocation and an unravelling unifying narrative — the anxiety that it no longer protects its citizens sets in. This “state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance” as British historian Arnold Toynbee called it, is today recognized by social science as a collapse of social capital and inter-group understanding.

The US’s disorganized and politicized Covid response reflects the three different pandemics experienced by rich cosmopolitan centers, left-behind rural towns and communities, and overexposed, under-represented minorities and immigrants.

Rural America has been devastated, over four decades, by the ravaging of small-town life, including closures of local shops, manufacturing, newspapers and hospitals, and young people abandoning hometowns, leading to nearly 1 million deaths of despair tracked by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. These areas also suffered more and longer from the Great Recession and Middle Eastern wars. At least initially, social-distancing policies were seen as another heavy-handed infringement on their life and liberty. This notion was aided and abetted by opportunistic politicians, led by President Trump, with no clue how to reconnect small towns to their rich country but eager to exploit their anger.

While European nations have richer social safety nets, at least for their white citizens, the EU was incapacitated for the first seven months of the pandemic by its incessant north-south divide. Southern states, led by Italy, were left largely to their own devices, while northern European states tended to themselves until France eventually brokered a landmark bail-out package in a fractious July EU summit. The same pattern followed the harrowing Euro Crisis of 2010 and the 2015 refugee crisis.

While the US situation seems worse than Europe, a closer look at depopulation, disconnection and despair in Europe’s left-behind communities — what historian Philipp Ther calls Europe B — shows likely further waves of resentment, protest and appeals to autocracy well beyond Covid-19.

While people of color throughout the US and Europe suffered greater hardshipsfrom Covid-19, as well as the Great Depression, a large body of historical worksupports historian Toynbee’s contention that an unsettled mainstream plurality can trigger a “schism in the body social” precisely because it can commandeer parties, institutions, money and propaganda against more fractious majority coalitions.

The algorithms that drive social networks and digital videos incessantly magnify and amplify this anger by exploiting the human brain’s basic survival mechanisms: homophily encourages like-minded people and kin to band together, the availability heuristic over-emphasizes current news, and confirmation bias validates pre-existing beliefs.

In this cauldron, a once-mighty middle class is atomized into warring particles through the centrifuges of technological media. Unless the technological wave is harnessed, the murderous propaganda of the early 20th century that eventually led to concentration camps and atom bombs stands to make an untimely comeback: when unspeakable lies are repeated incessantly, eventually they enable the unthinkable to be committed on a massive scale.

4. Network rules

The network paradigm would see the decades-long march toward division, inequality and disconnectedness as a massive failure of network inclusion: eliteshoarding vital connections, information and decision-making forums that drive wealth, health, liberty and creativity.

Ideologies can’t solve the problem because they are the problem. They worship false gods: mechanistic industrial-age simplifications of complex human societies like benevolent invisible hands guiding progress; egalitarian collectivizations that resolve greed and avarice; and increasingly bogus notions of blind justice and meritocracy.

While capitalism, socialism and liberalism once critically checked each other, today they hover above the communities that give them legitimacy instead of engaging them. They have devolved into merry-go-rounds in which businesses, government bureaucracies and professional experts rotate wealth between each other, depending on who’s in power.

Network science, which grew out of the sociology and biology of complex living systems, rejects the premises of these ideologies. It sees societies as fishing nets — pulling on any one strand tugs at all the others.

Most importantly, network science offers a novel insight into power. Inequality and stratification are built into the very fabric of complex systems like markets and societies. So-called power laws — science’s name for the 80/20 rule — more or less automatically favor a handful of agile incumbents, successful renegades and connected gatekeepers precisely because they collect more connections.

Nature has magnificent ways of reining in predators and reinventing systems. Biologists see allometries across all species that slow down creatures as they become large, while smaller animals gang up to swarm larger predators, checking their power and sometimes feeding off them.

Human societies have access to the same mechanisms, and often use them effectively. But they’ve spent centuries getting around nature and its checks and balances. Digital networks make this stratification worse by vastly expanding the reach and control of elites, as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee note in “The Second Machine Age.” Consequently, the gains from reforms and recovery packages are circumvented and recirculated back to the bureaucracies, businesses, rich universities and large banks.

Brookings economist Kemal Derviş is right in advocating a new social contract for a new era. Throughout history, lasting inclusion means changing the notions that underlie power itself: property, capital, work and citizenship. A network social contract would start with property. Personal, family and community content and data should be reclaimed by the people who create it. That would enable governments to tax vast monopolies in social media, technology, finance and healthcare that feed off this treasure trove.

Reclaiming personal data and content also means making it completely interoperable like phone numbers: easy to switch between tech platforms, bank and health providers. Society should directly tax the wealth of concentrated industries – today, most big businesses – and invest that wealth in universal capital accounts advocated by myself, Derviş and others. These accounts would be like trust funds, creating flexible access to healthcare, housing, education, creativity and entrepreneurship.

Paid and unpaid work should be revalued by making today’s elaborate taxation mechanisms two-way — paying out income supplements to undervalued care and protective work. Going further, technologies that economist Carl Benedict Fray calls productivity-enhancing should carry subsidies, while the prices of worker-replacingrobots should reflect their social costs.

Finally, individual US states and EU nations are mostly too small to stand up to global attacks, and yet the large superstates are too sluggish, disjointed and politicized. Regions should be able to band together organically rather than through soulless supply chains, forming what consultant Parag Khanna calls regional value chains of universities, businesses and municipalities that value their distinctive cultures. I’ve written previously of two examples: in the US, the Midwest stands to bypass the coasts altogether to become a new powerful manufacturing and logistic technologies hub; Southern Europe has the makings of a technological media oasis from Barcelona through Southern France, Italy and all the way to Athens. Both would enhance the meaning and power of citizenship and nationhood.

Even more important than the substance is the delivery. The instantaneous negative feedback in network society fatally compromised the launches of big top-down behemoths like the US Affordable Care Act and French pension reform and promises the same for Green New Deals, Eurobonds and other across-the-board programs.

Instead network society should follow the lead of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. They upended once-crowded markets by deploying deceptively simple improvements in book sales, desktop tools, search engines and social networks. These initiatives were largely self-organizing through clever initial design and lots of real-time adaptation. They were emergent: startups that totally transcended their humble origins. Government policies should deploy the same emergent strategies to pry open these and other monopolies.

This view cuts directly across ideology of every stripe. Ideology may demand wealth taxes or universal basic income, or tax cuts and deregulation, but a network strategy would treat monopolies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon whose great innovations are long behind them differently from the grinding work by the likes of Warren Buffet and Elon Musk to reinvigorate boring old businesses.

More broadly, network initiatives should largely bypass management by big businesses and government agencies altogether. Instead they should use those behemoths’ consumer touch-points — bank accounts, tax schemes, social security numbers, online accounts — to funnel badly needed energy, money, knowledge and attention into families, contractors, small businesses and regions directly. This would reverse the cruelly politicized failures of top-down Covid relief, as well as the Great Recession and Euro Crisis responses before it.

Taking care of weak links, intervening in network failures, circulating different forms of energy so that the whole organism can thrive, is network management. It represents, as science historian Kuhn puts it, “a whole new way of regarding the problems.” Just past today’s crises lies the immeasurable productivity, creativity and dignity embedded in relatively clean digital networks, freeing up vital resources to heal a burning planet.

5. Transformation

In analyzing big waves of change from energy crises, technological innovations and cultural insurgencies, I’ve seen that they are opportunities in disguise, mainly because they leave companies, societies and civilizations with no choice but to adapt or fade away.

Changes in social orders, however, are terrifying near-death experiences that take longer than anyone imagines at their outset. That’s why the times are so unsettled. The mobilization needed to get aging empires to re-engage their fellow citizens usually means wars in which elites lose the value of their property and share the trenches with laborers; pandemics that raise the value of workers by killing them; and slaughter on a scale so great and prolonged that nations have no choice but to agree to a new order.

The French Revolution didn’t resolve itself with the guillotines of The Terror; it was settled through the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars killed tens of millions across Europe. The industrial age didn’t find equilibrium after World War I or the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that came on its heels. It took a global Great Depression and the concentration camps and atomic bombs of World War II to impose the institutions of the UN, IMF World Bank and liberal democracy on nations.

Covid’s disastrous management has revealed the underlying festering wounds at the heart of rich democracies. All at once, right-wing autocrats like Donald Trump are rightly humiliated. But as Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, rightly points out, the arrogance and hubris of experts and agencies leave them with a big dose of humility as well.

In other words, the system has to change altogether. Trying to tear down a government through revolution has a huge disadvantage in rich countries. Big chunks of the middle class, with property and security on the line, eventually collude with tyrants against collectivization. Social historian Barrington Moore shows how this ends, with revolution from above: fascism. And yet visionless reform coalitions like those of France, Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1920s draw out the agony and lead to the same place: tyranny and war.

That leaves institutional transformation as the only viable option. It requires four movements in tandem: laser-focused alliances, institutional change, practical objectives, and transformative leadership.

Alliances. They’re already forming against tyrants like Trump, Xi and Putin, as well as plutocratic monopolists like Mark Zuckerberg. But they’ve been formless — without a hopeful constructive agenda that resonates with the times. Resistance identity negativity has to eventually embrace the nearly infinite, and comparatively green, technological wave of digital networks. When freed from autocratic and monopoly control peer-to-peer networks are inherently more diverse, open, adaptive and self-correcting than older technologies. This is why tyrants and oligarchs around the world are scurrying to hijack them before their appropriation is reversed.

Any alliance around US presidential hopeful Joe Biden, if he’s to win and succeed, will have to transpose his former rival Bernie Sanders’ vision of a just society onto this fluid network society that loathes government collectivization as much as big business.

EU nations are further along the road of reinventing their societies but need to ditch their contentious and dysfunctional Eurozone in favor of Southern and Northern currency and development regions.

Institutions. Going further, every new social order — from the Renaissance through the Reformation, Revolutionary Wars and World Wars — has had to create new institutions to reconnect with citizens. Like earlier monoliths, today’s government departments are too siloed across disciplines and functions like education, housing, labor, etc. And they’re stratified like a factory: bosses, officials and professors telling the people what to do.

Network scientist Watts has spelled out how institutions have to be wired in a wholly different way to avoid the anarchy of decentralization as well as the oppression of centralization. He calls it multiscale connectivity — mobilizing agile, software-driven teams connecting at all levels and across disciplines. New agencies for protective care – police and health – as well as for community, environmental and regional revival have to displace corrupted older institutions.

Practical Objectives. Structural change takes a long time and people get discouraged. That’s where demonstrable action on the ground makes an enormous difference. Strategy consultant Richard Rumelt calls these proximate objectives: “close enough at hand to be feasible.” The New Deal’s earliest and most popular program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, mobilized millions of young people to take care of the environment. Today millions more would want to work in rural and urban communities, as well as environmentally vulnerable ecosystems.

The approach works because of a network property called Hebbian synchronization: people (or cells or organisms) that relentlessly work toward the same goals forge strong bonds. Other proximate goals include a monopoly tax most would agree on, a Southern European central bank with borrowing power and, in the US, healthcare passports with public options, and a nationwide code of conduct for protective care from policing to hospitals.

Transformative leaders. One of history’s rich ironies is that the task today would fall to well-known archetypes: in the US, to a previously written-off former vice president who was once a lion of the Senate; in Europe, a brilliant French renegade pressed into one-too-many about-faces; and fractious Italian and Spanish coalitions. Covid shows that their window of opportunity is mercilessly short. If the US’s Joe Biden, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s Giuseppe Conti can’t make a new compact quickly, others will follow, but those could well be autocrats rebounding with even harsher lessons in store for the future.

Some 40 years ago, China was forced to reinvent itself into a multiscale entrepreneurial social order after the Communist Party’s near-death experiences with the Soviet collapse and Tiananmen Square demonstrations. A Dickensian capitalist economy grafted onto a paranoid East Germany surveillance apparatus is the dream of every autocrat. But that model’s lurch into tyranny fails the most basic test of civilizational success laid out by economists Acemoglu and Robinson: inclusive institutions. The burden of harnessing the new era inclusively falls right back onto the beleaguered shoulders of the rich and sophisticated democracies humbled by Covid. They will have to prevail after being way behind, as they did against the Axis powers in the 1940s and the Soviets in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s. In doing so rich democracies would help free up a hot and angry planet from the toxic debris of industrial age western ideologies.

Network scientist Watts summarizes the challenge: “… the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each other’s burdens as well.” The admonition is echoed by every major religion including Christian gospel: “… if you go on biting and devouring one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.”

Late Rome, Ming China and the Ottomans doomed themselves and their heirs to decay, humiliation and poverty by grinding in the opposite direction of exclusion and equivocation, thus turning their backs to the new paradigms that would ultimately destroy them. We should learn the hard lesson from Covid-19 and embrace the Network Era for the sake of our children and the planet.