Crowds and Party · 第 13 页

Under communicative capitalism, the democratic claim for the crowd reinforces and is reinforced by the hegemony of ideals of decentralization and self-organization. Early crowd theorists describe the crowd as primitive, violent, and suggestible. In our present context, these descriptions are often inverted as “smart mobs” and the “wisdom of crowds.”¹⁶ Such inversions appropriate the crowd, enlisting it in support of capitalism as they strip away its radical political potential.

Business writers like James Surowiecki, for example, talk about the crowd in terms of collective intelligence.¹⁷ Surowiecki’s primary interest is in how to harness this intelligence, which he treats as information compiled from diverse and independent sources. His claim is that a crowd of self-interested people working on the same problem separately in a decentralized way will come up with the best solution. Cognitive diversity is key, necessary for avoiding imitation and groupthink (necessary, in other words, for blocking the affective binding-together of a provisional collective being). Surowiecki’s exemplary crowds are corporations, markets, and intelligence agencies. Their wisdom depends on mechanisms like prices and systems that are able “to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off.”¹⁸ In actuality, Surowiecki’s crowds are not so much crowds as they are data pools. He can treat the crowd as wise because he has condensed it into information, dispersed it into individual heads, and re-aggregated it under conditions that use the many to benefit the few. Aggregation, Surowiecki admits, is decentralization’s paradoxical partner.

Eugene W. Holland commandeers Surowiecki’s claims for the wisdom of crowds in his attempt to envision a free-market communism.¹⁹ Holland wants to show the plausibility of horizontal, bottom-up, decentralized, and self-organized social organization. Jazz, soccer, the internet, and markets all demonstrate, Holland argues, how group members adapt themselves to one another in the absence of top-down coordination. There are limits to these examples as social models. When playing, musicians and soccer players know and accept that they are involved in a common endeavor.²⁰ A performance and a game necessarily restrict who and how many people can play. Jazz and soccer don’t scale. Further, and more fundamentally, Holland ignores the unavoidable production of inequality on the internet and in markets. Concerned with avoiding anything that smacks of state power, he neglects the extreme division between the one and the many that arises immanently. Self-organization in complex networks doesn’t guarantee horizontality. In fact, it produces hierarchy.

The clearest exposition of the constituent role of inequality in complex networks comes from Albert-László Barabási.²¹ Complex networks are networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. Free markets and the internet are prime examples. Complex networks have a specific structure, a “power-law distribution” of the items in the network. The most popular node or item in the network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular, and so on, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This is the structure that produces blockbuster movies, best-selling novels, and giant internet hubs. The idea appears in popular media as the “80/20 rule,” the winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy and the “long tail.”²²

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