Excerpts from HYPERPOLITICS by Mark Pesce

Introduction by way of a poem:

Good Catch In A Lonely Network

Keep your heart near the music
You, and yours fill up the definition: muse
Make cupids touch your favourite
wrapped up in speaker cables
with a mouse mat under your hat

All my great whispers to
your heart and your voice
Defined by a USB stick
Data drive to the movies
Together, upstairs.

To be alone on the web of Billions
Seems impossible
nothing can fall
through this net.

HYPERPOLITICS BY MARK PESCE

EXCERPTS BY STEVE FLY AGARIC 23

"All actions generate equal and opposing forces, rising to meet

them. This is the essence of Taoism, as well as Newton’s Second

Law of Motion. Politics is the art of opposition, hence why von

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other

means.—pg 7

 The level of direct human addressability of the species in toto can

be calculated as the ratio of total number of subscribers versus the

total world population: 5,400,000,000 / 6,900,000,000 or 0.7826.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, this figure will approach

1.0: all individuals, rich or poor, young or old, post-graduate or

illiterate, will be directly connected through the network. This

type of connectivity is not simply unprecedented, nor just a unique

feature in human history, this is the kind of qualitative change that

leads to a fundamental reorganization in human culture. This, the

logical culmination in the growth in human connectivity from the

aural tribe to the landline telephone, can be termed

hyperconnectivity, because it represents the absolute amplification of

all the pre-extant characteristics in human communication,

extending them to ubiquity and speed-of-light instantaneity.—pg 15

A group of hyperconnected individuals choosing to

hyperdistribute their knowledge around an identified domain can

engender hyperintelligence. That hyperintelligence is not a static

actor. To be in relation to a hyperintelligence necessarily means

using the knowledge provided by that hyperintelligence where,

when and as needed. The more comprehensive the

hyperintelligence, the greater the range of possible uses and

potential effects.—pg 21.

Page numbers to PDF article (not printed page numbers).

“The desire to conserve that power led the guilds to

become increasingly zealous in the defense of their knowledge

domains, their ‘secrets of the craft’.

The advent of Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press made it

effectively impossible to keep secrets in perpetuity. One

individual could pen a single, revealing text, and within a few

months all of Europe would learn what they knew. Secrets were

no longer enough to preserve the sanctity knowledge domains.

Ritual cast a longer shadow, and in this guise, as the modern

protector of the mysteries, the university becomes the companion

to the professional association, indoctrinating then licensing

candidates for entry into the professions. The professions of

medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc., emerged from this

transition from the guilds into modernity. These professional

associations exist for one reason: they assign place, either within

the boundaries of the organization, or outside of it. An unlicensed

doctor, a lawyer who has not ‘passed the bar’, an uncredentialed

architect all represent modern instances of violations of ritual

structures that have been with us for at least fifty thousand years.

--Hyperpolitics pg.19

Hyperconnectivity, hyperdistribution, hyperintelligence and

hyperempowerment have propelled human culture to the midst of

a psychosocial phase transition, similar to a crystallization phase in

a supersaturated solution, a ‘revolution’ making the agricultural,

urban and industrial revolutions seem, in comparison, lazy and

incomplete. Twenty years ago none of this toolkit existed nor was

even intimated. Twenty years from now it will be pervasively and

ubiquitously distributed, inextricably bound up in our selfdefinition

as human beings. We have always been the product of

our relationships, and now our relationships are redefining us.—Pg. 22

They don’t need fancy services – and wouldn’t use them.

They only need to be connected to other people. That in itself is

entirely sufficient. People come fully equipped to provide all the

services they need. Nothing else is required. Five thousand years

of civilization have seen to that. We know how to organize our

own affairs – and can do so without any assistance. But now we

can do so globally and instantaneously. That’s not a power

restricted to the billion richest of us; it’s now within reach of half

of us, and improves the lives of the poor far more than it helps us.

Our innate capacity for self-organization, now extended and

amplified almost infinitely, has itself produced some unpredicted

and unexpected effects.—Pg 29.


“The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes

around it.”

At the time Gilmore made this statement, he was talking politics.

Gilmore is a political animal – many of you probably know of his

long-running tangle with US Homeland Security over the free

right to travel within the States without having to display ID.

And, for many years this aphorism was interpreted as a political

maxim – that political censorship of the net was essentially

impossible.—pg. 30

In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is no

center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power

ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no

institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited

liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years

ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network,

that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of

salience (meaning) for that group. The product of that network

could be Wikipedia – or it could be al Qaeda. Buy the ticket, take

the ride. And it’s not over yet. The network hasn’t finished changing, and it

hasn’t finished changing us.—Pg. 33.

But what does the Meraki Mini have to do with the end of the

telcos? Just this: a mesh network is a network that’s been subject

to the corrosive effects of a network. There is no center anywhere.

There’s no hierarcy or preferred route. There’s no gatekeeper

anywhere. You can have one gateway, or twenty. You can have

one mesh node or a thousand. Just throw another mesh node into

the mix, and it’ll all work seamlessly. And mesh networks scale:

the dynamics of a network of a thousand mesh repeaters aren’t

substantially different from a network with ten. Packets still find

their way, with minimal delay.—pg. 34.

But for the past thirty five minutes, you’ve all been bathing in

WiFi, which I’m providing to all of you, free of charge. You’ve all

got good signal, and (I hope) plenty of bandwidth to blog, or

check email, or whatever you might want to do when I get boring.

And here’s the kicker – it’s all running off batteries. The whole

thing is good for at least four hours of fun before someone needs to

30

go find the mains. And, because it’s both entirely battery powered

and entirely wireless, I can drop it anywhere in I like, whether in

Australia or America or Namibia.—Pg. 36

You need to reach into that bucket of dreams and

ambitions and pull something out to share with us mob, something

that will dazzle and excite us. It might only do so for a moment,

but, in that moment, your social stock will rise so high that you’ll

never have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the

mortgage. You may not retire a millionaire, but you’ll certainly

never go hungry. The mob is a meritocracy – admittedly a very

perverse and bizarre meritocracy – but it is the one place where

“quality will out”. Quality only comes from the marriage of craft

and obsession. You have the craft. Embrace your obsessions.

You will be rewarded.—Pg. 39

 I need to leave you with one concrete example of how this is all

going to work, and for this example I’ve selected the last bastion of

authority and hierarchy – after everything else has dissolved into

the gray goo of the network, one thing will remain. It won’t be

government – that’s half gone already. It’s medicine. Medicine is

very nearly the oldest of the professions, and has been a closely

held monopoly for half a thousand years – closer to a guild than

anything resembling a modern profession. Why? Medicine is

guarded by the twin bulwarks of complexity and mortality:

medicine is rich and deep body of knowledge, and, if you screw it

up, you’ll kill yourself or somebody else. While the pursuit of

medical knowledge is conducted within the peer-review

frameworks of science, that knowledge is closely held. That leaves

all of us – as patients – in a distinctly disempowered position when

it comes to medicine. But that is all going to change.—Pg. 39

But the mob won’t wait forever. Remember: it is smarter and faster and stronger than

you. You can try to get in front of it, and get picked up by it –

I’ve given you more than enough clues to do that – or you can get

run down. That choice is yours. But if I’ve learned anything from

my study of mob rules, it’s that the future lies in making networks

happen. If you do that, there’s a place for you with us mob. – Pg. 41

The lovely thing about science is that the truth eventually

triumphs. Just this year a number of papers – including a few by

E. O. Wilson – describe what biologists are now calling “multilevel”

selection; that is, a process of natural selection which

includes both the individual and groups of individuals. Within the

individual, selfish behaviors are selected for, but with social

groups, altruistic behaviors can be just as strongly selected for.

Consider two prides of lions, one of which has a number of females

who have opted-out of breeding, while another has an assemblage

of selfish individuals, all of whom are breeding. When each pride

is threatened, or needs food, the pride with the altruistic

individuals will tend to succeed, while the pride with only selfish

individuals will tend to fail. The pressures of natural selection will

tend to select altruism over selfishness when selecting between

groups, but tends to select selfish individuals within either group.—Pg 46.