Massively Parallel Globalization

Explorations in Self-Organization and World Politics

David C. Earnest

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438456621
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

In this era of globalization, people organize into fluid, adaptive networks to solve complex problems and provide resources that nation-states cannot. Examples include the Grameen Bank, mHealth, and the Ushahidi open source software project. Why do these networks succeed where nation-states fail? Only recently have social scientists developed tools to understand exactly how these complex networks self-organize, emerge, adapt, and solve collective problems. Three of these tools—agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and evolutionary computing—are converging in a field known as computational social science. In this provocative book, David C. Earnest discusses how computational social science helps us understand "massively parallel globalization." Using "explorations" of global systems ranging from fisheries to banking, Earnest illustrates the promise of computer models for explaining the surprises, cascades, and complexity that characterize global politics today. These examples of massively parallel globalization contrast sharply with the hierarchical and inflexible governmental bureaucracies that are poorly suited to solve many of today's transnational and global challenges.

ONE

THE GYRE

Rethinking Systems in World Politics

The North Pacific Gyre offers an odd yet important lesson for scholars of world politics. Consisting of four ocean currents, the gyre swirls clockwise in the North Pacific Ocean, touching the United States in the east, Japan in the west, the equator to the south, and the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to the north, while sheltering Hawaii in its central “convergence zone.” While much of the gyre’s approximately twenty million square kilometers are geographically remote from humans, it nevertheless harbors one of humanity’s largest unintended creations: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, “an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade that is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.”¹ Others estimate the size of the patch as one-and-one-half times the size of the United States, extending to a depth of one hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific.² A “plastic soup” that includes degraded small particles of waste plastics, massive driftnets, and other refuse, the patch includes enough plastic to outweigh the zooplankton in the gyre by a factor of six to one, according to some estimates.³ Because marine wildlife mistakes fine plastic particles for food, researchers have found increasing amounts of toxic chemicals in birds and fish. One concern is that these toxins will travel up the food chain with possible health consequences for the 20 percent of humanity that relies on fish for protein. This ecological nightmare arguably is a product of the global organization of production and consumption:

[T]oday plastics have invaded the most distant places, from the Bering Sea to the South Pole. Indeed, when I was exploring a remote beach past the South Point of Hawaii, I found pill bottles from India and mashed pieces of various products—oil containers, detergent jugs, plastic cups—with Russian, Korean, and Chinese writing on them. It’s hard to get your brain around these connections.⁴

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch clearly fits Hardin’s definition of a tragedy of the commons.⁵ The world’s oceans are common property, untouched by state regulation and subject to overuse by self-interested actors who spread the costs of their overconsumption across vast distances. Yet the patch also is a system that exhibits coherence but is not static: It grows and evolves with the currents and winds. It is, furthermore, a “system of systems,” a product of the interaction of social systems with a biophysical system. The interdependent, uncoordinated decisions of billions of human beings produce unintended consequences and create positive feedbacks that make state-based regulation increasingly difficult. The patch, in other words, is self-organizing. Governments did not create it, consumers did not intend it, yet consumption choices interact with wind, water, and rain to produce a thick plastic soup covering one-quarter of the Pacific Ocean.

This book is about such self-organized systems in global politics. It examines how individuals, civil society groups, firms, nation-states, and others organize to solve—or equally importantly, fail to solve—collective action problems characterized by “complexity.” Although researchers have yet to agree on a definition of complexity,⁶ they appear to share a sense that complexity suggests nonlinear and/or recursive relationships between causes and effects, and consequently “limits [to] the ability of individuals to identify the full set of possible outcomes or assign probabilities to particular outcomes of specific actions.”⁷ How do individuals, groups, and governments make decisions when faced with an inability to assess the likelihood of the outcomes of their actions? Answers to this question may shed light on some of the most vexing problems of world politics, in which the patterns of interactions among actors are as important to solutions as are the nature of the problems themselves. Such interactions characterize the simplest of social choice problems—how do groups make decisions when choosing among three or more options?—to the far-reaching global systems that touch everyone on the planet: the climate, finance, and public health, among others.

Complexity and self-organization are defining features of world politics today. This book makes three claims of interest to observers of world politics. First, self-organization is an important but nevertheless largely ignored reality of world politics. Although several scholars in the 1990s suggested complexity theory promised to make contributions to the study of world politics, the recent scholarship has failed to build on the foundation of these works.⁸ Second, the interactions that create complexity and self-organization are not random. Rather, the networked structure of interactions crucially shapes the success or failure of collective action. To illustrate the ubiquity of these networks of interaction, the book explores broadly similar patterns and dynamics across economic, ecological, and political domains of world affairs. Finally, the book illustrates that computational methods—specifically the synthesis of agent-based models, social network analysis, and genetic algorithms—are invaluable tools for studying self-organization and complexity in world politics. The emerging field of computational social science seeks to investigate complex social phenomena. By definition, complex systems have a high degree of interaction effects; instability in cause-effect relationships over time and across scales, particularly due to feedback effects; and infrequent but sudden and theoretically and politically important changes. All of these attributes make it difficult for researchers to study complexity with empirical and statistical methods. For many important events, from state failure and secession to ecological catastrophes, researchers face additional difficulties gathering relevant data.⁹ Computational methods have matured rapidly in the last decade, providing most researchers with an accessible if underutilized tool for understanding self-organization and complexity in world affairs.

The imagery of world politics as a complex gyre is not new. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote in his famous 1920 poem The Second Coming. The “widening gyre” that concerned him was the apocalypse, a metaphor for the destruction and political conflict Europe suffered during and immediately after World War I.¹⁰ Yeats wrote about an event that has profoundly influenced theories of international conflict. Scholars argue that World War I occurred because of statesmen who possessed a cult-like faith in the superiority of offensive military doctrines;¹¹ inflexible bureaucratic routines that spread the conflict from the Balkans to the rest of Europe;¹² and the mismanagement by statesmen of the July crisis.¹³ The war was inadvertent as events in obscure places and seemingly innocuous decisions contributed to a spiral of events over which statesmen quickly lost control. In this respect, the spiral theory of inadvertent war provides one of the most compelling arguments about emergent phenomena in world politics: microdecisions produced macrobehaviors that none of the political actors desired. One cannot simply reduce the war to the preferences of the tsar, kaiser, emperor, or king. Thirty-seven million people died.

The gyre also offers a useful metaphor for the seemingly uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of world politics today. Whether it is the sudden crisis in global finance capitalism, the civil conflict in Ukraine, or climate change, like Yeats’s gyre global politics seem structured and coherent and yet, in the details, are unpredictable. Rosenau has characterized contemporary world politics as “the turbulence puzzle”: “It consists of complex pieces that do not fit readily together and thus serves as an endless provocation to the intellect, to our capacity to grasp those individual, organizational, and international dynamics in which actions are negations of values and outcomes are discrepant from intentions.”¹⁴ Whichever metaphor one prefers—turbulence, spirals, or the gyre—together they suggest a conceptual focus on dynamics in world politics, and on the divergence between actors, preferences, and interests at one level and structures and outcomes at another.

World politics today feature many self-organized actors that one might characterize as “complex global social systems.” One may generally define a complex global social system as a massively parallel organization of social actors who transcend the constraints imposed by sovereign boundaries and physical geography. Some of these systems help nation-states and others may oppose governments. Like the Occupy Movement, skilled individuals everywhere organize themselves into coordinated groups that produce collective goods on a local, transnational, and global scale. They do so often without the direction or involvement of governments, yet these social systems have profound consequences for what might be called traditional international politics, that is, among sovereign nation-states. These systems share some common features. Social actors organize themselves. They use information technology to coordinate their efforts. By using a massively parallel architecture, they not only multiply their scarce resources but also incentivize others to join the system. These complex global social systems may reflect national allegiances, as in the case of so-called patriotic hackers, but in all cases their efforts transcend territorial constraints and national borders. Their efforts have profound consequences for states, in some cases empowering them to improve social services while in others undermining their security and legitimacy.

The study of world politics is poorly equipped to conceptualize and theorize about such complex social systems. One example is “e-medicine.” In South Africa, Project Masiluleke uses text messaging to direct people to HIV clinics outside their immediate communities, helping them avoid the stigma of the disease. A similar program in Uganda has helped authorities increase testing for the disease by about 40 percent. These efforts all take advantage of the power of networks to multiply modest efforts of individuals. The two-way communication of text messaging “forces you to take a moment to think and maybe act” in a way that passive media such as newsprint, leaflets, or billboards do not.¹⁵ Even small efforts—such as providing people a map to the nearest clinic—can quickly mobilize large numbers.¹⁶ Text messaging reminds tuberculosis patients in Thailand to take their medicines, improving their compliance with doctor-ordered care. Similar use of cell phones allows public health officials to provide basic care to remote villages in Mexico. The use of cell phones thus allows public health authorities to partner with private providers and extend scarce resources in places lacking adequate public health infrastructure.¹⁷

“Rumor registries” and crisis maps are other forms of self-organized social action. The Ushaihidi project empowered Kenyans to use cell phones to report postelection violence in 2007 and plotted these reports on an online map for others to read and to which to contribute new reports. Similar self-organized maps allowed humanitarian organizations to prioritize their efforts after the Haitian (2010) and Japanese earthquakes (2011) and the Pakistani floods of 2010. Such tools are not merely for societies lacking resources and infrastructure. The Washington Post used an online user-generated crisis map to monitor snow removal efforts during the “snowpocalypse” storm of February 2010 that dumped twenty inches on Washington.¹⁸ Remarkably, these efforts become more valuable and effective as more individuals participate—a self-organizing virtuous circle of positive feedback—all without centralized direction or a hierarchy of authority. The New York Times, for one, suggests this may be the future of humanitarian relief: “The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organized mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.”¹⁹

Complex global social systems may produce social ills as well as social benefits. The global interrelationship among banks holding credit default swaps helps explain how the failure of a relatively small portion of the American financial services industry reverberated in credit markets around the world: “What happens deep inside one national financial system can wreck another halfway around the world.”²⁰ While presumably banks did not intend to cause harm, other social systems may have explicitly political agendas that seek to affect others adversely. Consider the phenomenon of patriotic hackers, or self-organized communities of like-minded individuals with computer skills. Russian nationalists staged a distributed denial-of-service attack on Georgian government agency Web sites during the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war. A similar cyberattack occurred on Estonian government information systems in 2007.²¹ Other patriotic hackers seek to spy rather than disrupt. Chinese hackers have infiltrated the Pentagon, White House, and even the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain.²² During the protests following the contested 2009 election in Iran, an Iranian group of patriotic hackers attacked Twitter. Democracy advocates following the protests—indeed, any Twitter user—found their feeds redirected to an English-language page stating “This page has been hacked by the Iranian cyberarmy.”²³ Responding to a request from the Dalai Lama to check his offices’ information systems for malware, a team at the University of Toronto uncovered a vast cyberspy network they labeled “GhostNet.” The researchers identified more than 1,200 computers in 103 countries that GhostNet had infiltrated, including computers at the Indian Embassy in Washington and at a NATO facility.²⁴ One advantage of patriotic hacking is that it blurs the relationship between governments and the hackers themselves; in none of the above cases could investigators prove conclusively that governments supported the patriotic hackers. This “attribution problem” protects hackers and governments alike from retribution; in general, anonymity may afford actors opportunities to pursue their interests unfettered from the state’s ability to enforce the law. Interestingly, the hackers themselves appear to recognize the power of complex global social systems to amplify their modest efforts: in one instance, hackers broke into the information systems that control the United States’ power grid and reportedly installed software that could disable the grid.²⁵ Some commentators suggest the United States is vulnerable to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” in which a social network of patriotic hackers uses access to the computers that govern transportation and utility networks to wreak havoc on the American economy.²⁶

Epidemics and pandemics also illustrate how interactions between social networks and individual behavior challenge the ability of states to govern effectively. One need only look at the public discussion a few years ago about the H1N1 virus, or “swine flu.” A Washington Post-ABC News poll in 2009 found that more than 60 percent of Americans were unconcerned with the virus, suggesting that public health officials had yet to persuade people to get a vaccine shot.²⁷ Epstein reports an interesting counterexample from 1994, when citizens of Surat, India, fled the city to escape an outbreak of pneumonic plague even though the World Health Organization found no cases of the disease there.²⁸ This interaction between social networks and behavior makes it difficult to model the prevalenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE The Gyre: Rethinking Systems in World Politics
• CHAPTER TWO Agents and Networks: Complex Social Systems and Theories of World Politics
• CHAPTER THREE The Advantage of Size: Why Large Groups Solve Coordination Problems Better than Small Ones
• CHAPTER FOUR Dividing the Pie: How Complex Networks Learn to Solve Distributive Conflicts
• CHAPTER FIVE Cows Grow Trees, Nets Grow Fish: How Social Networks Manage the Commons
• CHAPTER SIX Too Big to Compromise: Did Eleven Banks Block Reform during the Great Recession?
• CHAPTER SEVEN Nets of Insecurity: Trade Networks, Cascading Failures, and Economic Vulnerability
• CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusions: Self-Organization in World Politics
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX