[Air-l] networks

[Willard Uncapher]

At 03:20 PM 9/17/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Has anyone else on this list been struck by the parallel between the
>current portrait of de-centralized terrorist networks emerging in the
>media coverage and the organizational logic of distributed computer
>networks? [...]

"It takes a tank to fight a tank. It takes a network to fight a network," 
says John Arquilla, senior consultant to the international security group 
Rand and co-author of the forthcoming "Networks and Netwars: The Future of 
Terror, Crime and Militancy."

I would submit that if notion of networks is a key elements of Internet 
research and theory that is also one that needs much further theoretical 
consideration.  Those that have responded to the note the initial note 
about networks I think are in agreement. I cite Arquilla in part to 
indicate that we need to consider networks as a more complex entity than as 
a transport and storage system of information and connectivity, such as to 
what I have sometimes called flat or planar maps of mere connectivity.  Can 
we take social network theory as a preliminary phase in this inquiry, and 
look to an emerging network theory, indeed to a theory of both network 
emergence and network control?  Can we deal with the networks interacting 
along a variety of scales, time frames, and evolutionary possibilities?

It has been only with great difficulty that many theories of media have 
grappled with the new network based media. My own experience was such that 
the 'broadcast model' simply focused on  the power of corporate media to 
deliver content, and the parameters of personal and inter-personal behavior 
and semiotics involved in 'receiving' it.  Hence, when network based media 
became ever more critical to media studies in the late 1980s, there was a 
lopsided battle between those who would position new media as bearers of 
democracy (cf. Benjamin followers) or fascism and corporate control (cf. 
Adorno followers).  Mark Poster has had some interesting things to day 
about this 'stalled dialectic.' My research suggests that we need to put 
into questions the very definition of networks. The definition of the 
network, its role, and activities, is up for grabs, and is more complicated 
than it initially seems. The question of terror networks brings this 
realization out into the public- it is an issue not easily addressed by the 
traditional categorical thinking that leads to the identifications 
associated with declarations of war (or research).  The studies of the 
telephone and of social networks is important, but I want to emphasize that 
we must include issues of epistemology/semiotics, 'multi-dimensional 
dynamics,' and questions of power of and in  networks to the mix.  I really 
don't know where this sort of deconstruction of the notion of the network 
is taking place- but given that I am preparing a lot of material related to 
this (indeed my diss. took up this theme), I am sure that there are many 
others out there as well.

While the Internet research community and network researchers in general 
have taken up and have begun to explore the theoretical and practical 
problems of locating identities, agency, resources, bypass strategies, etc. 
in an increasingly networked world, there now seems a need to present some 
of these findings in a way that can inform public policy. It is as if many 
of the leaders were bound to outmoded conceptual frameworks in calling for 
this 'war' whether we look to their activities from a somewhat cynical, 
opportunistic perspective, or from a more moral, ethically 'pure' 
perspective. In my own theoretical work, I have looked at questions of 
'nested' identities- what happens if 'parts' don't exactly match up to the 
'whole' - what happens if individuals can't be located by a single nation 
or category- because they have become more connected to an information or 
transportation network:  War- but against whom?  And if we are to think of 
these networks in terms of internally coherent, even autopoietic systems, 
then how are such 'networks' bounded, and what keeps one individual as a 
member of one such group, rather than another.  I look not only to 
endogenous factors, but also to external factors, and  it is the play of 
the internal to external factors that needs a lot more attention.

So where is the end, or limit of a terrorist network?  Suddenly this become 
an important, legal question- and I can imagine the trials of some people 
who gave money say to a religious institution arguing that they do not 
believe or agree with the 'agency' attributed to the network- are all the 
members of the US linked to US government actions- who to the activities of 
networks become characterized as unified as if that network were a single 
body. Isn't the obvious link to these questions and those of semiotics and 
categories also interesting?

There needs to be promulgated new ways to think about networks. The issue 
as to whether networks concentrate or disperse people and resources is an 
old one. I would point not to Castells or Saskia Sassen but to Ithiel de 
Sola Pools' classic 'Predicting the Telephone.'  We find that telephones 
were simultaneous predicted to cause both concentration and dispersion, and 
in fact they did both. Combined with a transport technology (the elevator), 
we find that telephone's promoted concentrations of works in multistory 
buildings.  With the threat on them as obvious targets to terror, they may 
become more dispersed.  But companies need 'pools' of labor, and there are 
economies of scale, supply issues, and security/privacy issues associated 
with having companies in close proximity, in association with other dense 
conclaves.

The idea that one responds to the threat of a network with a network 
demands consideration.  The netwar strategist argue that given the need for 
'trust' within networks, that is pays to in some way to infect the network 
with distrust.  "It's a whole new playing field. You're not attacking a 
nation, but a network," says Karen Stephenson, who according to author Joel 
Garreau studies everything from corporations to the U.S. Navy as if they 
were tribes.

It is interesting to see how redundancy and decentralization in the 
financial networks appears to have limited the loss of one 'node' - but at 
the same time, we should be as willing to ask, just what was unique about 
this node and its environment, and how will its transformation in turn 
transform the larger systems to which it is connected, and which it helped 
organize. We have to move beyond the Leibnitz world of monads- nodes are 
not simply passive, and they also can exert a organizational influence over 
the whole. Just as we can look to the ability of nodes to relay information 
redundantly (as do libraries in a fashion), we need to consider the 
uniqueness of the node, and the complex cybernetic environment in which any 
node both works and is empowered. These questions will have strategic 
importance as we move to new paradigms by which to consider war and media.

Willard (mailto:willard at well.com)


>Certainly both forms of networking emerged with a similar
>goal in mind: a resiliance to the forms of centralized large-scale
>attacks characteristic of warfare in the first half of the 20th
>century. Redundancy and de-centralization are defensive structures
>whose effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact (reported yesterday, I
>think) that despite the destruction of something like 10 percent of
>Manhattan's office space, suprisingly little data was lost. In the face
>of this kind of distributed networking, the type of military response
>envisioned by Bush/Cheney et alia seems disturbingly out of joint. Just
>as we wouldn't imagine that we could take down a network by hitting a
>node, so too does the goal of "taking out" Osama bin Laden seem more
>symbolic than effective (to the effect that it works to proliferate
>cells of resistance, it might even be read as counter-productive). I'm
>wondering if there's some way to use the commonly accepted discourse on
>computer networking to shed some light on the current debate over the
>appropriate U.S. response to the recent acts of terrorism.