Note: This is cross-posted from techPresident, albeit with a new title.

A few weeks ago, powerful corporations like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal weren’t very concerned with the hacktivists and pranksters on 4chan. Now, thanks to the tactical success of Operation Payback‘s DDoS attacks, they are. The U.S. government also has its own problems with networked activists. After massive leaks of documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars and diplomatic cables from around the world, Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is a formidable threat to American legitimacy and power.

These are but two recent examples of how decentralized digital networks (starfish) can have dramatic effects on centralized hierarchies (spiders). However, these two alternative structures of human organization can interact in a variety of ways, both mutually beneficial and destructive. Below is a typology of how networks affect hierarchies in the digital world. In their interactions with hierarchies, members of networks can act in the following roles.

Positive

1) Deputies: Hierarchy sets agenda, network follows (maximum hierarchical control)

examples: Guardian crowdsources audit of MP expenses, Obama campaign coordinates supporter house parties through MyBarackObama

2) Amplifiers: Network helps hierarchy’s content go viral or network remixes hierarchy’s content, which goes viral

examples: Old Spice Guy videos, Beyonce “Put a Ring on it” fan videos, “tell a friend” buttons

3) Autonomous Allies: Network self-organizing advances hierarchy’s goals, though hierarchy does not direct network’s actions

examples: Obama supporters self-organize through listservs, Daily Kos community supports Ned Lamont, It Gets Better campaign

Negative

4) Competitors: Network spreads content that competes for attention and authority with hierarchy’s content (both original and maliciously remixed content)

examples: Wikipedia, lolcats, “Obama’s a Muslim” viral emails, Hillary Clinton 1984 parody video

5) Pirates: Content created by hierarchy, taken by network

examples: Napster, Pirate Bay, BitTorrent, online news scrapers, Wikileaks

6) Attackers: Direct attack on hierarchy by network (mostly through DDoS)

examples: Operation Payback, criminal DDoS “hold-ups”, Pro-Zapatista FloodNet

7) Gatekeepers: Hierarchy no longer the default, network refuses hierarchy access to institutions (maximum network control)

examples: Wikipedia blocks out Scientology

Networks and hierarchies are currently locked in a struggle for power over a range of human endeavors, from politics to business to the arts. However, there are a range of possible outcomes, from continued hierarchical dominance to a new network dominance and from cooperation to vicious competition. The outcome of this struggle will be determined by the members of both institutions. The only outcome that now seems unlikely is for the power of networks to disappear.

Mary Joyce is the founder of The Meta-Activism Project.

In economics, a “transaction cost” is the cost incurred in making an economic exchange – the price of doing business. In sociology, we could talk about a “coordination cost,” the cost incurred in working effectively in a group. The Internet has altered the cost of coordination, and will also alter the social structures based on that premise.

In the pre-digital era, in order for people to collaborate effectively then needed to be in the same place. So one had to rent office space or purchase a factory or build a university or construct a military base. Second, if you wanted to motivate people to collaborate where intrinsic motivation was absent you had to pay them to collaborate. So one had to buy people – or at least 40 hours of their time each week – through salaries.

These pre-digital rules of geographic synchronicity and wages shaped much of our modern world. In the field of economics, corporations made money because corporate collaboration is expensive according to the two determinants of collaboration cost: geography and labor. Modern corporations have geographically dispersed operations and the labor involved is not intrinsically meaningful (ask an accountant or factory worker). In the field of politics imperial states are also geographically dispersed and requiring labor which lacks intrinsic motivation (ask a legionnaire). Even for those motivated to collaborate, geography made collaboration costly and inefficient.

The Internet has ended the geographic cost of collaboration, at least for short-term actions. Operation Payback – the incredibly successful pro-Wikileaks DDoS attacks on Mastercard, PayPal, and others – has demonstrated that. This is also an evolution from previous international digital coordination, where people carried out geographically siloed yet synchronized activities (think of the Iran solidarity protests in 2009). In Operation Payback hacktivists attacked the servers of corporations. Both the location of the activist and the location of the server were relatively insignificant. As Clay Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus, for those who have the willingness to work for free, geography is no longer an obstacle.

In my last post I wrote about the struggle between hierarchies and networks as the organizing structure for human society. In that post I implied that one would eventually win, but I don’t think this is quite true. Complex and expensive hierarchical institutions will find their niche in fields where there is no intrinsic motivation to do the work and wages are still required. This will compose a great deal of human labor.

However, for work that does have intrinsic motivation - writing, music, film, social justice – the network will take over. It is no coincidence that these are the arenas most threatened by the Internet today – print journalism, the entertainment industry, political institutions. This does not mean the end of an old way of doing things as much as the beginning of a new way. Both will continue, but the hierarchy has the most to lose and the network the most to gain. It is social Darwinism, not of the individual but of the way those individuals organize themselves.