The Analysis of Social Networks ... Caution Advised

Kovas Boguta has written a posting on work in progress in trying to evaluate the masses of data emerging from social networks like Twitter. It is not a clear read for non-specialists but it gives some sense of what is currently going on to manage flows of information arising out of social networks.

This is evidently going to be a central area for future governmental soft power and security investment. A new industry is already tentatively emerging that hopes to creates the mathematical and analytical tools needed to draw useful conclusions from raw data.

We are both impressed and sceptical. Impressed because the sheer intellectual force being applied to problems of assessing how populations and political movements react to events (and consumers to new products and services or crises) will certainly increase the bounds of knowledge.

As with all other major technological innovations, these analyses are going to change how we think of ourselves. They will rewrite our past histories and place new pressures on our governments and administrators. They may undercut a generation of 'experts' and create new business opportunities.

But we are sceptical because there is a real danger that a mathematical or computational approach to politics and society will result in an over-enthusiasm amongst amateurs and promoters that contains the same potential for disaster as mathematical model-making has done within our economic system.

The same major errors are likely - a failure to understand that no system can contain all necessary information for all moments of time to make it reliable and the same delegation of judgement and decision-making to experts whose understanding is more limited than anyone will dare admit.

If you add the propensity of the 'few' (those in the know on the technicals) to bamboozle without intending harm those who do not even know how to ask the right questions but who have responsibility for making decisions affecting all our lives, then we should be a little worried about where this may go.

An extension of 'science', mathematics and quantification into politics and social management looks as if it could be the intellectual fashion for the next decade or so. Politicians are already under intellectual siege. There are no easy solutions and there may be a tendency to grasp at straws.

There is also a very thin line between scientific analysis and technological innovation. The leap from the theory of physics to the nuclear bomb happened very quickly. Many of the more intellectually-driven scientists soon became horrified at what had grown out of their blue skies thinking.

Something similar is threatened us by the massive re-direction of government security investment from hardware designed to exercise physical force to software designed to analyse insurgency. It is a small step from this to actively creating social and political change through intervention.

This could be as scary as Robert McNamara's 'brilliant' attempts to use intellectual analysis to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam or Herman Kahn's cold analyses of survivability in a nuclear holocaust. Only this time, we are talking about the potential social or economic meltdown of whole societies.

The urge to intervene on the basis of 'insights' developed from a new scientific engagement with political and consumer decision-making could result in successes but also hubris. Stored up resentments at manipulation may explode in a political crisis analogous to the recent collapse in credit.

As one anarchist friend told me with glee, every move made by the system can be countered by the people at large in what might amount to a socio-political arms race in which Baudrillard's apparently daft claim, that the Gulf did not actually take place but was a simulacrum on our TV screens, becomes true.

Each attempt at manipulation by social scientists, who must themselves be manipulated into believing that their actions are 'progressive' or 'patriotic', depending on the culture, can be countered by a public determination to react with a possibly justifiable paranoia, a conscious irrationality or just plain defiance.

Like the bureaucrat who thinks that writing something is doing something, the progressive or security activist might mistake 100% support by all persons engaged within his system as 100% of all minds with a stake in a situation. We think the Western media certainly made this error in assessing events in Iran.

The interplay between authority and its subjects is never simple. Not only can the subjects of authority hide information and even themselves (in effect becoming a 'black society' with a 'black economy') but they can supply their own false information - such as lying on censuses and tax forms.

The State, of course, is constantly engaged, on its side of the arms race in gathering information - this is one of the primary drivers for the introduction of identity cards in the UK - but few really believe that its knowledge covers everyone or is timely.

Eventually people will smell a rat - is all this data gathering designed to protect or control them? It comes down to trust and trust in authority is in increasingly short supply. Ideologies of resistance may thus wax and wane to the degree that manipulation is perceived and resented.

Indeed, Boguta's own posting exposes this very air of public distrust. The first comment from dallasm12 asks: "Hmm ... could twitter be abused in the future to falsely imply a social uprising that isn't really there?" Very good question!

The conspiracy theory is a tool of resistance that irritates authority intensely. More dangerous still is the ideology of 'leaderless resistance'. An attack either never comes in a decisive way (the attacker is a lone nutter) or it comes everywhere at once because widespread anger reaches a tipping point.

This is definitely not an argument against research but it is an argument for an early political scepticism of any analyses that are delivered as 'expert' and a strategy of engaging decision-makers directly with their populations rather than using such tools to extend the compass of more manipulative strategies.

If new analytical tools are to be used as substitutes for direct commitment to community democracy, the result must be expensive failure, A major crisis for the existing political system will then come out of the blue much as the credit crisis has done. You read it here first.

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On Conspiracy Theory

Do you remember post-9/11 conspiracy hysteria? It still potters on in the backwoods of the internet. Nevertheless, the fashion for the belief that complex conspiracies rule our lives has somewhat diminished since the credit crunch.

The first half of this decade already seems like a high point in one of those periodic waves of political paranoia that rise and subside, moving from fringe to mainstream and back again. America has been particularly prone to these events but Europe has never been immune.

Nurtured by growing interest in the esoteric and the irrational, becoming mainstream with the massive popularity of the X-Files and appearing to become real with the psychological assault of America on 9/11, the movement now seems to be subsiding again.

Most of our ruling class now seems to be too obviously incompetent at some very basic tasks such as getting the economy to work or ensuring barely adequate national security. If we are guided by some inner circle of Bilderbergers or reptiles from Sirius, they do not seem to be particularly good at their job!

On the other hand, we must be equally cautious about too easy acceptance of the prevailing idea of the Left and of the Academy that there are no conspiracies, only movements and social forces. This is a position promoted by the State Department and, for that reason alone, should occasion caution.

The truth lies somewhere in between - as always. There are great economic, cultural and social forces which drive the lives of individuals, but there are also tight cliques at the apex of every system of power (much like the courts of eighteenth century Europe that became terrified of the Illuminati).

There are certainly conspiracies to corner natural resources and truth of just the type which that most sensible of men, Adam Smith, identified as likely whenever men (or women) huddle into a corner and calculate their interests against those of the larger mass of humanity.

The tendency of academics, especially centre-left academics understandably worried that populist obsession with conspiracy will create an anomic, defeated, suspicious, inactive and irrational mass on which the elite can feed like political vampires, is to be so dismissive of conspiracy as to miss the point.

Conspiracy theory is generally false theory to try and explain a truth. Most people's destinies are guided by small groups of unaccountable persons who are highly clubbable and who bludgeon each other into group-think about what is right and wrong for the rest of us, often using dodgy science and theory.

In this context, a typical conspiracy looks more like the bumbling High Command of New Labour or the dodgy world of security and NGO collaboration in international affairs than anything so extreme as the Illuminati.

The populist masses have grasped at a truth in this but the academy in general still does its best to deflect them from enquiring further by trying to prove that there are no conspiracies at all and that they are all 'irrational' and stupid for even raising the possibility.

Meanwhile, the loss of faith in simplistic conspiracy in recent years has many causes:

• there has been some successful re-assertion of simple common sense while the public has developed a much more mature appreciation of conspiracy theory as an entertainment phenomenon;
• the internet has matured as a source of information - social networking permits debate and the questioning of assumptions whereas the web until recently had been little more than an efficient mass transmitter of received ideas;
• some nonsense is being delivered to our minds by people with an increasingly obvious commercial motive - the recent surge of books and films on the Mayan Calendar in the US does not represent a religious movement, it represents a business model;
• 'real' conspiracies are much more basic, less competent and less well organised than the fantasists would like us to believe - they just have more cash or power than we do;
• the election of Obama and the credit crunch have shifted the balance of opinion somewhat back to movements and blind forces as the motors of history.

But this does not mean that there are no conspiracies. In fact, there are many conspiracies - but 'not quite as we know them, Jim'. These conspiracies are much more mundane than the myth and represent any process of systematic manipulation and lying by the few against the many i.e. normal politics.

I hope that we do not lose our interest in the phenomenon of conspiracy both as an instrument of the powerless, who can use it as a form of coded cultural resistance that the market then cynically serves, and as the actual fact of conspiracy against the public interest.

This latter is implicit in the way that our already self-appointed and barely accountable elites (Washington, Brussels and London) are riddled with networks of like-minded individuals whose primary interest is to use their access to office and information to enrich themselves now or in the future.

It must be a major project for the future to get researchers and the academy to stop fretting about restoring 'pure reason' to politics (as if politics was anything other than the expression of some very basic drives) and start getting anxious about the practical and moral competencies of our ruling castes.

Until this is done, the public will always want their conspiracy theory. Their need for it will remain a standing challenge to those who purport to represent their interests. The suppression of conspiracy theory is of far less importance than making it redundant through reform.

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Iran: The War of Words

The war of the words between the West and the Iranians has reached new levels. Obama has been forced by domestic and allied political considerations to heighten his rhetoric on Iran, but his essential themes are the same. The prospect of talks still remains on the table.

Obama Forced To Raise The Heat

The suppression of demonstrations is condemned in extremely forceful terms [‘appalled’ and ‘outraged’] but no firm opinion is being offered on the rightness of the demonstrators’ cause (he merely stated that many Iranians considered the election illegitimate which is self-evidently true).

What is Obama doing? He is holding the political line in the hope that the importance of dialogue will restrain the regime from some sort of white terror. It is now more important that Rafsanjani survives even than that he mount a coup against Khamenei.

Perhaps somewhat forlornly, he is hoping that the issue of talks (which Iran wants at all levels) will drive the balance within the ruling elite towards some sort of restraint of Khamenei's actions in regard to his negative attitude to the US.

The rhetoric required of Obama is part and parcel of an hysterical reaction on all sides, except curiously within the UK, where the general attitude seems to be sceptical of all claims, perhaps out of cynicism over a Government that has not been averse to making deception part of its normal political strategy.

Iranians, on both sides, are engaging in similar extreme rhetoric at each other and, on one side, at the West. The Europeans are much the same in their preference for sentiment over analysis – placing liberal rights above national cohesion as wealthier stable countries are wont to do.

Anglo-Iranian Tensions

Anglo-Iranian relations are degenerating into tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions with an assertion by the UK Government (necessary as much because of suspicions within London as genuine outrage) that the Iranian allegations were ‘absolutely without foundation’.

However, we smell something like the Equatorial Guinea affair where Western ministers may have been protected from knowing about ‘private sector’ involvement in subversion that the security services had observed, probably approved and possibly assisted, if only through silence.

The informal British link to the MKO is a matter for investigation. The sudden emergence of the BBC Persian TV service funded ultimately by the FCO is suggestive to the Iranians if not to most Britons.

The Iranians also claim that British agents appeared just before the election to help organise the reform challenge. We should avoid conspiracy theory but circumstantial evidence already suggests something was going on and we have to wait now for the Iranians to evidence their accusations.

As far as the Iranian Establishment is concerned, Western interests (though not necessarily directly the US) have mounted a coup attempt designed to break the back of the regime in the interests of their ambitions in the region.

As far as the West is concerned, the Iranians have illiberally suppressed legitimate dissent and confirmed their inability to adjust to the norms of the ‘international community’. As the hysteria mounts, dialogue gets pushed further into the long grass.

Depression On The Street

In the middle of all this are the protestors who seem to have become a pawn in the hands of both sides. To the Iranian conservatives, they now represent a street uprising manipulated to effect a coup attempt.

Even now, there are strong rumours that Rafsanjani is manouevring to oust Khamenei as Supreme Leader constitutionally. This image of naïve tools of political forces attempting to overthrow the regime is probably not entirely false but the dissent, if fuelled by astute propaganda, is genuine.

Whatever Rafsanjani does, this is no longer an uprising of the very many against the very few if ever it was. Iranian society is split.

Pro-conservatives, whose street presence has been limited by Khamenei’s edict (since they must follow his lead), are beginning to mobilise on their own account with very small anti-Western demonstrations.

As for conditions within Iran itself, these appear to be returning to normal, notably in Tehran, much to the evident disappointment of somewhat over-heated Western journalists. However, this normality is currently protected by a massive internal security presence, made up of riot police and basij.

The activist elements in the middle classes are now coming down from their revolutionary high and are beginning to experience the expected depression and anger at their thwarting and at the futile deaths on their own side. What does this imply for the revolt?

Once depression sets in after defeat in ‘battle’, it is often hard to mobilise people for the next struggle. We assume that the probability of further mass action is now becoming increasingly vitiated by the presence in the streets of the forces of the State, prepared to take extreme action if necessary.

Further mass action, like so much else, now depends on a coup at the top so that an order can be given to remove these forces of containment and allow the activists back on the street. This seems increasingly unlikely.

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