SELF-ORGANIZATION: FACING REALITY

When Humans Self-Organize

We live with the most powerful vehicle for self-organizing ever known on this planet: the Internet. It is possible to find anything, connect with anybody, and organize groups around their interests at ever more discrete levels of personalization. And all of this within a matter of seconds. In the early days, this freedom to organize was intoxicating and exciting.

We found new ideas, information, support—the World Wide Web was inviting and spacious. The Web was able to grow so quickly and extend its reach everywhere because it made excellent use of the dynamic of self-organization.

The Web still provides all that, but now at a high price of incessant marketing, daily petitions for myriad social causes, fund-raising efforts from unknown groups, scams, frauds—this is easy to observe any morning when overnight emails download. And the tone of these emails is increasingly loud, angry, and desperate—no wonder they’re termed email “blasts” that we “shoot” at one another. Now that we’ve lived with Web 2.0 for a decade, its negative effects are clearly evident, and many thoughtful commentaries have appeared in the past few years.⁴

With us humans, self-organization is far more complex than with other living systems. It is complicated because we have high powers of cognition (or so it has been reported).

We don’t just take in information from the environment—we use our brains to make up our own. Gossip, rumors, slander, lies, conspiracy theories—these fly around the Web at the speed of light.

This “information” is used to strengthen the group’s identity. The system quickly closes in on itself. It becomes less in touch with the outer world, except to identify it as a threat. This is the trajectory of human self-organized efforts that is predictable from the start. The identity that first called people together intensifies, rigidifies, and pushes out divergent views; what was a permeable boundary becomes a wall of defense against outside hostile forces.

One reason identities slam shut is that other greater human needs supersede openness, curiosity, and intelligence. We need to belong. We need to feel accepted.

When we do belong, life is better, even healthier. People who work together in groups are happier than those who isolate themselves. The harder the work becomes, the more we bond together. We worry less about each other and how they irritate us and focus more on getting work done on behalf of the cause and defining enemy.⁵ We have more energy for the work, greater dedication to our cause.

But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong.

This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls⁶ claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves.

The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone.

But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.⁷ Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.

It is important to understand both the power of self-organizing and its damaging effects because, still, it is the most powerful organizing dynamic we have. As leaders choosing to take a stand against these behaviors and to create the conditions for people to act with sanity, we need to know the full story about self-organization as it is manifesting in our culture.

In Britain, an analysis in 2015 by the think tank Demos found that on average, around 480,000 racial slurs are tweeted every month, compared to just 10,000 three years ago. The researchers admit that the vast majority of those uses won’t amount to hate crimes. But the numbers are still significant. “A 4800 per cent increase is astonishing—far greater than the general increase in tweets over that time.”⁸

“2015: The Year That Angry Won the Internet”

BBC News

“2015 saw a greater normalization of hate speech in society

than in previous years,” says Andre Oboler, chief executive of

the Australia-based Online Hate Prevention Institute. “Where

previously a person might make a vague negative allusion

to race, religion, gender or sexuality, by the end of 2015 the

comments on social media were blatant and overt.”

People no longer felt the need to hide behind pages and fake

accounts; “by the end of 2015 many people felt their hate was

acceptable and were comfortable posting it under their real

name or their regular social media account.”

Oboler flagged up anti-Muslim hate as a particular hot spot—

perhaps predictable considering the continued fallout of the

Syrian civil war, the refugee crisis, and terror attacks. But

other groups have also been among the top targets, he says,

including women and Jews.

BBC News⁹