The toppling of hierarchy as a characteristic inherent to the new network rationality is reiterated in “The New Facts of Life” (Meyer 2004). In Chapter 7 I elaborate on the underlying cosmology of the digital discourse, which considers network technology to be compatible with the universal laws of nature. Here, the narrative of network technology as facilitating a social transformation in accordance with the universal laws of nature is applied to explain the transposition of spontaneous order and mob action from the biological to the social realm. Social constructs, the article asserts, act just as if they were living things: “Markets and power grids have much in common with plants and animals . . . It turns out that many of life’s properties . . . show up in systems generally regarded as nonliving” (Meyer 2004). Among these “life’s properties” (i.e., the unchanging laws of the universe) now showing up in human-made systems are, according to the article, emergence and self-organization: “Emergence describes the way unpredictable patterns arise from innumerable interactions between independent parts . . . Self-organization is a basic emergent behavior. Plants and animals assemble and regulate themselves independent of any hierarchy for planning or management” (Meyer 2004). The underlying narrative is quite straightforward: organizations modeled after a network architecture work best when they are ungoverned and left to self-regulate.
The article further makes this point with the example of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Programmed with only simple rules, UAVs are able “to direct themselves better than any dispatcher could” (Meyer 2004). They are networked and self-taught: “If one is shot down over Afghanistan, all drones everywhere gain improved responses to that form of attack.” As the article points out, this network principle has been known in nature for ages. The way UAVs work “is precisely how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, only faster” (Meyer 2004).
But these network characteristics are now showing up not only in nature and technology but also in society. “Oddly enough,” the article continues, “our growing knowledge of life processes could have its biggest impact in the social sciences. Social systems, after all, are made up of interacting agents, i.e., people. When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we’ll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself. At that point, the new science of life will help us not only live better, but live better together” (Meyer 2004). Society, in this piece, is rendered a particular case of the general template of networks, individuals are “interacting agents,” and society progresses through self-regulated, self-taught processes. We humans, this narrative implies, have been investing too much energy in planning, managing, and controlling social processes in a centralized, top-down manner, when really the best results can be achieved by simply letting the “distributed bottom” (Kelly 1998, 14) communicate, coordinate, and swarm.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age