ORDER WITHO<sub>U</sub>T ORDERING: DECENTRA<sub>L</sub>IZATION AND DEHIERARCHIZATION
As stated previously, one of the most important implications of this new rationality is that it cannot be managed, programmed, and directed from any central point. It works best when it is left to its own devices—that is, when it is self-regulated. Luckily, the argument goes, the requirement for self-regulation can now be satisfactorily attained with network technology. These complex systems (such as the market) can regulate themselves through the internal mechanisms of networks: decentralization, flexibility, and adaptability. Network rationality is markedly different from the previous model of rationality that prevailed in industrial society. It is in fact a complete reversal of industrial rationality, which entailed a hierarchical and centralized organization of command and control. As Nicholas Negroponte—founder of the MIT Media Lab, author of Being Digital (1996), and a contributor to Wired magazine—puts it, network technology undermines authority, since in a network “nobody is in charge . . . The Net—a reliable system composed of loosely connected and imperfect parts that work because nobody is in control—shakes up all our centralist notions, and hierarchy goes away by example” (Negroponte 1997). Networks entail (and require) the collapse of any centralized oversight.
Kelly further exemplifies decentralization and dehierarchization with Cemex. This Mexican company, Kelly reports, is able to excel where others have failed—delivering a time-sensitive product like cement—by switching from rigid centralized planning, to a just-in-time technique, where drivers, not management, schedule deliveries in real time. With the aid of network technology the drivers form a smart mob: “The drivers formed a flock of trucks crisscrossing the town. If a contractor called in and order . . . the available truck closest to the site at the time would make the delivery” (Kelly 1998, 15). In this, as well as other cases, the lesson that Kelly draws is that “no central brain coordinates; the [result] comes from the swarm of minibrains” (15). For Kelly, this is a story about the toppling of the centralized brain in the economy, an overthrow of the prenetwork, bureaucratic organization (be it management or the state) that could presumably grasp the whole picture and hence be able to coordinate the work of disparate units. This old type of big brain, as opposed to the new “minibrains,” is too slow and inadequate to manage the complexity of systems such as a cement company, let alone the market. Such systems are indeed so complex that no one can manage them. But with the power of network technology, they can now manage themselves through the connection of many dumb ones into a smart whole. As Kelly puts it, “Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm”—that is, through the tools of network technology, “yield smart results” (13).
Network Market
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