[Advisors] Governance, community, and complex adaptive systems

[Michael Gurstein]

Interesting and important paper Garth and worthy of a much more extensive commentary (and rebuttal) than I'm currently available to provide.

Let me just make a few points...

I think you have made the up and down--individual to global argument extremely well and captured the necessary linkages that follow given the assumptions that you have made.  As well, I'm persuaded by (without re-reading) your critique of Quilligan in the context of Ostrom.  

Where I disagree or rather have a quite different problematic re: my approach to these issues is that you have what I think is an extremely optimistic perspective on how the Internet and its overall relationships to governance are evolving and will evolve. The overall problem with your analysis seems to me that you completely ignore both the theory of power and the increasingly oppressive reality of power  (and concentration of power) in the Interneted society and polity -- national and global.  

The paper seems to argue that there is some linear autonomous process of evolution in the local and the global polity which is founded on a principle of "autonomous individuals" interacting in a manner so as to realize Internet enabled communities of these autonomous individuals (or at least the elements of their autonomous being that the individuals choose to share with their (multiple?) shared communities).  This evolution is seen as necessary and benign in all aspects including its likely outcomes. Arguments concerning the possible independence of this evolution or the contribution of the likely outcome to overall human well-being are presented as so 20th century and de-legitimized as being associated with one "ism" or other. Thus we are, whether we know it (or want it) or not, moving into the best of all possible worlds.

I disagree with Garth in several areas.  First while I agree that the autonomous individual (networked individualist) may be the modal form of identity in the networked society I see this as a problem and something to be resisted rather than something to be celebrated. As I argued in my little book "What is Community Informatics" the networked identity is a weakened identity and one which is unable to resist the overwhelming force of the State and now the even more overwhelming force of Internet enabled corporations.  I see communities as the place where individuals are able to recreate their wholeness and potentially realize their power through the strength of solidarity and through being enabled by technology. 

As well, I see that there are active forces in the world and including and particularly those in the Internet ecology which are anything but benign; and who are looking to achieve monopolies of technical, intellectual and ultimately political power which it is their intention to use in the narrowest and most damaging of selfishness and self-interest.  

To my mind one can either adopt a best of all possible world's position of passivity in the face of what I see as multiple on-rushing catastrophes or one can attempt in whatever way one can with whatever resources one can muster to find ways to confront and defuse these trends.

M

-----Original Message-----
From: advisors-bounces at tc.ca [mailto:advisors-bounces at tc.ca] On Behalf Of Garth Graham
Sent: May 10, 2016 8:22 AM
To: advisors <advisors at tc.ca>
Subject: [Advisors] Governance, community, and complex adaptive systems

Here's latest in my ongoing attempts to reframe the Internet Governance debate by reference to the changing nature of governance.  In the process of thinking my way forward, I’ve also evolved my understanding of what community networking actually means.  This article encompasses some of that shift.

Garth Graham.  Cooperating community connections: A changing political reality.  The Journal of Community InformaticsVol 12, No 1 (2016).
http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1295

 Abstract: Community Informatics has declared that the global is a federation of locals. James Quilligan has written an essay to the effect that applying such a definition of global requires a world institution of democratic governance. Some members of the community of community informatics researchers have come to a similar conclusion. This essay outlines an alternative interpretation based on complex adaptive systems theory, and with consequent results for a different definition of the individual, the community and their interdependence. It asks the question – where does the predominance of opinion in community informatics about the changing nature of governance and community reside?

GG

 
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