The rapid change in the structure of participatory democracy has everything to do with the new media pushing it outward. But how exactly does all of this horizontal growth look, in a schematic of political organization?
Naomi Klein has referred to a study done by the Washington D.C.-based research center TeleGeography, which set out to “map out the architecture of the Internet as if it were the solar system. Recently, TeleGeography pronounced that the Internet is not one giant web but a network of “hubs and spokes.” The hubs are the centers of activity, the spokes the links to other centers, which are autonomous but interconnected” (Klein 2001). That is to say, anyone can create or become a hub, a centre of some kind of activity that generates related actions and reactions. This structure allows for infinitely expandable communication and organization.
The Hubs and Spokes Model
This model of organization is now being applied to describe the structure of recent activist campaigns, including the Battle of Seattle. Klein argues that “these mass convergences were activist hubs, made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of autonomous spokes” (Klein 2001). Each hub had its own specific agenda, its own internal structure, and only loosely constructed relationships with the other protesting groups, while the spokes were given varying degrees of creative freedom to pursue those agendas.
Klein summarizes the similarity in the following way:
“Like the Internet itself, both the NGO and the affinity group networks are infinitely expandable systems. If somebody doesn’t feel like they quite fit in to one of the 30,000 or so NGOs or thousands of affinity groups out there, they can just start their own and link up. Once involved, no one has to give up their individuality to the larger structure; as with all things online, we are free to dip in and out, take what we want and delete what we don’t. It is a surfer’s approach to activism reflecting the Internet’s paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for external connection.” (Klein 2001)
This organizing principle of networking and nodes, in contrast to the traditional hierarchical structure of political organization, has also been referred to as “netwar,” although usually referring specifically to guerilla or terrorist organizers in a low-intensity conflict situation, including the Zapatistas (Ronfeldt 1998: 8-12). Even more specifically, the hub-and-spoke system used by anti-globalist activists can be retermed as the form of netwar called the “all-channel network,” which is a “collaborative network of militant peace groups where everybody is connected to everybody else” (Ronfeldt 1998: 12).
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But the link goes much deeper than a simple compare-and-contrast. Rather, the
“communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and labored manifestoes are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information-swapping. What emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet—the Internet come to life.” (Klein 2001)
Structuring activist campaigns in this sprawling way, encouraging horizontal and unfiltered participation, is a direct reaction to the corporate monopolization, conglomeration, Westernizing homogenization – globalization: “It responds to corporate concentration with a maze of fragmentation, to globalization with its own kind of localization, to power consolidation with radical power dispersal” (Klein 2001).
