DEMOS

Perhaps a reality check is in order. The Papandreou comment may have been a spoof, even Tom could have done it. If not, it is unlikely that Papandreou reads the Greenhouse; there are little people to do that sort of scut work, print relevant material, and compose responses with or without consultation. It is mostly lonely obsessives who read blogs regularly, but they are networked with principals and alert them to relevant material, functioning as a clipping service in a sense, monitoring new media in the same ways as old media. The novelty and power for social change from blogging isn't connection with the same, tired old politicians. They are wheezing their way to irrelevance. It is the new minds and voices that have effect and even influence without having clawed their way up the patronage ladder that are interesting. As the wags have said, "on the internet they don't know that you are a dog", and it doesn't matter if you are. What matters is what you say since the words must fend for themselves once released into the wilds of the net. More importantly, the words are heard and repeated, often unattributed. Try as they might the old guard can't maintain control of the "ideosphere" as they have in the past. More interestingly, the ideas, once released, seem to have a will of their own, evolving and prospering, or not, in unpredictable ways. Take it a step further, beyond realization that you can't "control the flow of our ideas" to understanding that you can't control anything, that there is no flow of ideas. There is an ecology that finds it's own uses for whatever oddments of thought fragments are in the soup after ideas have been decomposed and digested. Those uses aren't controllable or predictable. All Demos can do is contribute and consume like any other beastie. If your ideas have value then they will improve the ecology. Your reward derives from what you consume. Listening is more profitable than speaking.

"they?ve helped me to understand why bloggers get so excited about their medium" I've always compared this to the dawn of journalism during the Enlightenment: a lot of early journalism was dedicated to discussing and defending the free press. A lot of early blogging is dedicated to discussing and defending blogging for the same reasons, and those reasons (I think) are as follows. As a technology goes through the status transition from 'new media' to 'old media', its users go through a related one. They go from being the majority in that medium but a minority in society, to being a minority in that medium but a majority in society. Newspapers are no longer primarily concerned with newspapers, because the act of reading a newspaper is no longer rare enough to deserve comment. Journalists therefore have to cover stuff which they probably find less interesting, but non-journalists are obsessed with (property prices, paedophiles). The same transition will affect weblogs, once it becomes rarer to be interested in weblogs than it is to use weblogs.

Excuse, me. I?d like to enter this conversation (discreetly hiding my blog-reading-virginity behind bluster). I have read this post parts of which are similar to much ?Demos-type? talk. Can I invite answers to two questions? 1)Why are 'openness' and 'flow' good? I don't see that they are. I also don't see that 'flow' and 'openness' are complementary. Something that flows is hard to catch, pin-down and mull over. That makes it un-amenable to certain kinds of alteration; closed down in other words. Don?t social relations need obstacles to the flow? Isn?t that vital to them ? (Imagine a conversation with no objections, a politics with no disagreement, an oyster with no grit). 2)Mr. Skidmore says 'we' 'neither can nor should try to control the flow of our ideas'. Why shouldn't you try? I thought you were in politics? Isn?t the point of political activity to try and control just this?

Bluster is always welcome on the Greenhouse - I particularly enjoyed the below-the-belt reference to "'Demos-type' talk" - not sure what you could possibly be referring to, but I'm guessing it's mean. To address your first question, I'd prefer to operate at the level of the specific rather than defend openness or flow per se, so here goes: as a result of changes to the way we disseminate our ideas and intellectual content (making our archive and all future work freely available online) and reform of our intellectual property position (to an Open Access "some rights reserved" licence), I submit that Demos is indisputably more "open" - in the sense of transparent, accessible, equitable - than we were previously. I think this is a good thing, although I'm not claiming we should win a Nobel Peace Prize or anything and we clearly have a long way to go. But it also means that we have even less idea than we once did about where our ideas are getting to and having an impact. Google searches on recent publications always reveal that they are turning up in some surprising places, often with fantastic results. Next month I am heading to New Zealand to talk at a conference organised by some people who are using the regulation work we did last year in a project with small businesses. The same pamphlet received almost no coverage in the mainstream media, and I have no idea how they got hold of it - but nor do I particularly care. This experience is by no means unique to Demos - it is captured in Stewart Brand's maxim that "information wants to be free". But Brand also said that "information wants to be expensive", and like other organisations whose operational viability depends on being able to extract value from our knowledge and ideas, I merely observe that this creates difficulties for us - not least since normatively we remain committed to our founding values of enlarging and deepening democracy, and not simply serving as the outboard brain of a narrow policy elite. To answer your second question, which is more directly addressed to me, I believe that you are creating an entirely false dichotomy between control and complete disinterest. I maintain that we neither CAN control the flow of our knowledge and ideas (because it is impossible, as I think every organisation - from the music industry to government departments - is experiencing to varying degrees); nor SHOULD we try to control it because (a) there are some legitimate ethical reasons for being as open as possible and (b) there are some compelling Hayekian reasons to believe that Demos is not in the best position to judge who should and should not be interested in our content. But none of that implies that we are simply going to dump our ideas in what John Kingdon calls the "policy primeval soup" and see what emerges. We can and do seek to intervene and influence what comes out - we are just a little more modest about our capacity to specify or control it in detail. And this is part of an emerging Demos-ian epistemology around systems thinking and complexity theory (see Tom Bentley's essay Letting Go and Jake Chapman's System Failure) that informs the way we think about political and organisational life more generally.

Will's comments bear some reflection in this debate: "Newspapers are no longer primarily concerned with newspapers, because the act of reading a newspaper is no longer rare enough to deserve comment. Journalists therefore have to cover stuff which they probably find less interesting, but non-journalists are obsessed with (property prices, paedophiles). The same transition will affect weblogs, once it becomes rarer to be interested in weblogs than it is to use weblogs." Maybe in this context, we will also become used to the shift from being information protective (in terms of IP) to being information transparent. See the BBC creative archive story as further evidence of the shift towards allowing information its own 'freedom'. But then, some want to restrict it more than ever. Maybe we are becoming information reflexive as we become more introspective about what happens to all that info out there. Re weblogs - i think the authority of a blog has to be seen as important here... after all there are millions of blogs out there. how could i ever read all of them?

The THES story has been published this week incidentally. You can find it here: http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2013474 But unless you're a subscriber you'll need to register for a free trial because the THES isn't quite as *open* as we are...

I am sorry it has taken me a long time to rejoin this discussion. Thanks for the interesting replies. I take the point about the specific ?open ?access? of Demos material. That does make sense, subject to the usual (but necessary) observations about the actual inequality of access that does (and will continue to) exist. Although I we should be careful not to confuse accessibility with ?openness? and ?flow?. 24 hour on-line banking makes my bank more easily accessible but I don?t think it makes it any more ?open?. But there are larger conceptual issues here (and it is those that I would like to get at). So, firstly, can you direct me to the Bentley and Chapman essays? It is this notion that there is a political epistemology of ?flow? and ?networks? and ?openness? that I?d like to find out more about (because it is so widespread and, I think, influential). I am particular interested in two aspects of this. Firstly, the form in which ?knowledge? is presented has a ?control? aspect. It is important to be aware of how the ?form? in which one thinks and expresses oneself is shaped before we begin to think and shapes those who use what we think after we have expressed it. And not all thought can be expressed in all media. Secondly, are there not good reasons to require control of information. Information about cheap sweets for obese school-kids, or information about my bank account. Underlying these thoughts is a more general one that I casually alluded to in my first post: ?openness? sounds like an intrinsically good thing since, by definition, it must be opposed to closure, the opposite of restriction and control etc. But this is not necessarily the case. ?Openness? can be a method of control. Why, for example, do we have a ?closed? or ?secret? ballot? If our voting was open, and all could see it, we would be subject to all sorts of covert and overt pressures. ?Opening? up the details of school results might be about opposing the professional tyranny of teachers; but it might also be about subjecting schools to new forms of inspection and market-based control that require such openness. I am not sure that this is directly related to Demos? use of the ?creative commons? but I think it is related to a general ?zeitgeist? that conceives liberty in terms of network openness and forgets that, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, ?liberty for the wolves means the end of the lambs?.

Thanks Alan that does help to clarify things. I was also going to reply to Will, but predictably his comments thing refused to accept my elegantly drafted rejoinder so I’ll try and include some of it here. 1. Will suggests that Demos thinking gives undue prominence to ideas borrowed from the web, notably emergence. Actually we talk very, very little about emergence. Indeed, Jake Chapman’s pamphlet makes it clear that he is very sceptical about using models or metaphors based on natural phenomena to describe human subsystems. Open source, I grant you, does crop up a fair bit (see David Hargreaves’ “Education Epidemic” for example). But I would argue that this is part of a longer Demos tradition around new forms of innovation and entrepreneurship. Perhaps the metaphor is over-stretched, but perhaps 100 years ago people were saying “Why is everyone banging on about this Ford guy?” It is the underlying principles of organisation that are interesting, not the specific application. 2. Analogies may be an intellectual con but they are extremely powerful – for example, in her Demos pamphlet on Gaia Mary Midgeley shows how evolution was hijacked by a particular political project to make “survival of the fittest” the natural order of things. 3. Alan has requested a clearer sense of what this epistemology might look like (the references I alluded to are Jake Chapman’s Demos pamphlet “System Failure”, now in its second edition which you can download from our site; and Tom Bentley’s essay “Letting go: complexity, individualism, and the left” in Renewal, Vol. 10 No.1, which you can’t. There is of course a whole discipline and literature on systems thinking, from slightly impenetrable sociology by people like Niklas Luhmann to touchy-feely business gurus like Peter Senge – the Chapman book has a good bibliography). In essence this epistemology sets itself against the idea that policy-making is a rational process, or that large institutions and sets of institutions resemble predictable machines whose behaviour can readily be predicted in advance. Instead they are better understood as complex adaptive systems: systems because the whole is more than the sum of their parts, complex because the interactions between these parts are hard to specify or predict, and adaptive because they respond to changes in their environment by adapting whilst preserving some core characteristics. Treating complex adaptive systems as machines (which government does when it imposes target regimes, for example) is likely to weaken their ability to survive in the long run. This analysis has a number of important implications for policy, not least that command-and-control as a dominant model of organisation is not likely to be sustainable and that policy-makers ought to be more humble about their claims to know what will work in advance and more willing to experiment, take risks, and learn from what works. In political terms, and Bentley's essay is better than Chapman's for this, there is a line of argument that links the self-organisation of complex systems to a political project of self-government. I wish that this way of thinking were part of a “zeitgeist”, but I fear that it runs counter to many of the powerful assumptions that run through mainstream economics, audit and public administration, and I see little evidence that the grip those disciplines have on our mental models of governance and policy-making is loosening. 4. On Alan’s general point that openness is not synonymous with accessibility, and that openness is not always a good or empowering thing, I agree. Mike Power argues very powerfully in a forthcoming pamphlet on “The Risk Management of Everything” that much of what has been done to turn organisations inside out in the name of openness has simply caused a flight from professional judgement (by accountants, teachers, doctors - you name it) that in turn creates its own risks. One of the reasons why Demos has argued enthusiastically in favour of developing teachers’ professional networks in education is that they provide a space for the rehabilitation of professional judgement and, by enabling professionally-driven improvements to spread laterally across the system as whole, act as a counterweight to the top-down, standards and inspection regimes that have dominated for more than a decade. 5. Both of you imply that we are uncritical network cheerleaders. When we had the marathon ISociety-Demos complexity dance-off a year ago, we were also repeatedly accused of genuflecting too readily at the altar of the network society. But there is nothing in either the network tradition generally (going back to the analysis of “iron triangles” in US policy-making) or our work specifically that says that networks are necessarily wholesome and good. For two very useful accounts of why networks are not always nice, read the pieces by Geoff Mulgan and Manuel Castells in our recent collection of essays, “Network Logic” (again available from our site). Mulgan points out that hierarchies have actually got stronger not weaker, and networks have been used to strengthen systems of control (an extension of an argument he made more than ten years ago in “Communication and Control”). Castells talks about the need to sever certain network ties (such as those that link the mass media, business and government) and create new ones.

I should probably apologise a little. I may have been unduly influenced by the Douglas Rushkoff pamphlet, which argued: "Interactive communication technologies could even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual self-interest?. But I accept that Demos was probably acting more as a publishing house in that instance (or should that be portal? ;-) All points taken, and I hope I haven't pastiched such a wide-ranging body of work *too* much. However, I do worry about forms of ideology and even hegemony coalescing around the internet. I don't mean to suggest that you are a cheerleader, I just think it's worth imagining how intellectual historians will judge the early 21st Century in about fifty years time. Is there a risk of 'reification' (allowing concepts or analogies to be mistaken for real objects) in the network society? For instance, I think it is a bit silly for Castells to be talking about 'switchers'. He is a sociologist. There is plenty of jargon at his disposal without having to borrow it from the Nasdaq. I take the point about Fordism, and you're right that technology in tandem with new social forms creates new intellectual paradigms. I wouldn't want to down play the significance of ICT. What we all ought to be aiming for is "soft determinism": recognition that technology *does* change things, just not in a straight-forward causal fashion. But are Fordism and Open Source actually comparable? I'd say that a better analogy would be between Open Source and William Morris/Arts & Crafts: a movement that is forward-thinking, egalitarian and iconoclastic but nevertheless deeply romantic, and potentially reactionary. Why not talk about Tescos-ism? If there is a truly paradigmatic organisational model for our decade, I'd say that Tescos comes closer, in terms of financial success, numbers employed, type of labour, and political and cultural clout. Will PS - my usual qualification: finding the middle ground in the blogosphere between flaming and luviedom is like getting the temperature right in a crap shower. So my comments are always aimed at doing this rather than anything else.

Fascinating and necessary discussion. Paul's regret about the notion of 'letting go' amongst managers and administrators not being part of the dominant zeitgeist is key. 'Command-and-control' is a consciousness question ultimately, shaped by an Enlightenment/scientific-industrial legacy which it's proving difficult to grow larger than (though complexity and network thinking is helping). 'Touchy-feely' is a regrettable term of abuse for Senge: what he's realised - and is explicitly on about this in his new book Presencing - is that it's not enough to 'objectively' understand how networks and complexity operates, there has to be a 'subjective' correlate also. Mulgan ends his essay in Network Logic on a note of regret which relates precisely to our limited capacity to feel and intuit connexity: ?It is far easier to assume a world without connections - a world of fewer dimensions where simpler heuristics carry us through. This is perhaps the hardest aspect of an interconnected world and the reason why our concepts and institutions may be doomed to lag behind.? (Remember this man once trained to be a Buddhist monk, so he knows whereof he speaks.) All I would say (in my limited consulting experience) is that there are a lot of facilitators, workshop organisers, imagineers and consultants who are more than au-fait with the epistemology of complexity, and are attempting (under cover of ?human resources? and ?continuous professional development? and ?change management?) to inculcate those values, department by enterprise by sector. What they need in the UK ? and what Demos could create, given its kudos with government ? is a public legitimacy for these approaches (Douglas Rushkoff is precisely the kind of outsider that needs to come in on these issues). But what?s actually happening in terms of a culture of complexity seems to be occurring away-day by away-day, conversation by conversation, only picked up as a general trend by sociologists when the right surveys are taken. And in terms of consciousness development ? not just how do we see the network, but how do we feel our networkness? - perhaps that?s the only effective way.

This is turning out to be an interesting (if oddly fractured and stilted) discussion. You are all turning up a lot homework for me. I find this sort of complexity, network, connexity, self-organising-systems-not-machines talk all over the place. It does not seem marginal to me. I have previously just assumed that it is pretty hegemonic. When you say that it is counter to mainstream economics, Public Administration and audit etc. I am surprised. Perhaps this is because you are thinking of mainstream economists and public administrators whereas I only experience these things as intellectual/academic fields which seem full of all this (such as ?social capital?, one of the more horrible of recently successful concepts) and the ?postmodern public administration? literature. And that is not to mention the whole ?governance? and ?policy networks? field. Anyway, it would seem my views are somewhat in line with the reference to Mulgan saying that networks strengthen systems of control. I think this is true and I think that when some sections of the intellectual left signed up to ?networks and connexity? etc., to make up for the loss of a solid sense of civic sociality, it was a political and ethical disaster. The extension of ?openness? has legitimated the removal of barriers that were essential to protect people. It has made them open to all sorts of new technologies of control and regulation. Here is a non-economic example: the reforms of the Labour Party initiated by Kinnock and completed by Blair were undertaken in the name of openness and democratisation. They took control away from organised unions or groups of activists and weakened a range of intermediate organisations replacing them with ?direct? election and a direct relationship between leadership and ?the people?. Sounds great. But did it ?open up? the party or help the leadership to bypass it? Is it not easier to force through a policy if you only have to convince a disorganised, individualised membership rather than a number of well organised groups? Groups that function by giving people the space and opportunity to develop and refine their perspective? Isn?t the network ideal, its utopia, that we have everyone involved, everyone in a network, everyone participating ? with nobody outside, no opposition because everyone is part of it? Is it coincidence that changes in management practice premised on opening things up, flattening the hierarchy etc. go along with the removal of union organisations and the intensification of monitoring systems, from performance related pay and permanently short-term contracts to monitoring of net usage? It is, after all, easier to pick people off one by one. In short, the move to the network etc. increases visibility and the possibilities for surveillance ?and the opportunities for new regimes of control. It is at one with the audit culture that was described above as part of the old mentality of command and control (which it was never a part of). An analogy given by Deleuze is relevant here: we are shifting from the disciplinary to the control society; in the former the archetypal form of control and punishment was imprisonment, in the new society we are developing it is electronic tagging ? permanent monitoring. And in this society control is directed at the individual through their very participation in the network. One of you said this: 'Command-and-control' is a consciousness question ultimately, shaped by an Enlightenment/scientific-industrial legacy which it's proving difficult to grow larger than (though complexity and network thinking is helping). ' This is not true. It is part of a myth that legitimises the cultural shift I am talking about. Enlightenment and science and all the rest of it were precisely directed at command and control: against absolutist monarchy and religion. This was required if control and management of society was to be extended to larger territories and refined to ever greater detail. Kingly control IS crude and limited and allows people to evade and elude, just as people could evade and elude when working in the vast factories of Fordism (which necessitated crude time-and-motion Taylorism). The shift to network governance is not a break from this ?enlightenment? but a continuation of it with the same aim. Pat Kane referred to someone saying ?it's not enough to 'objectively' understand how networks and complexity operates, there has to be a 'subjective' correlate also?. This freaks me out. I see it in various management and marketing literatures ? getting your workforce to really believe in the product, to feel part of the company so they want it to succeed and communicate their success in their selling, so you can free them to act on their own initiative etc. ?Command and control? just wanted to control the body. In the network society management wants your soul too. It is not enough to comply, you must want it as well. This isn?t 1984. It?s Brave New World.