The Renaissance Mob

The abandoned Lee Plaza Hotel

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.
~Meg White

Early Monday morning, as a winter storm finished burying the U.S. Midwest in snow heavy enough to collapse the roof of the Minneapolis Metrodome, the ever-chipper Gordon Deal (Wall Street This Morning) announced to his predawn radio audience that Detroit had decided to cease serving 20% of its residents. “Officials bristle when their efforts are described as downsizing,” writes WSJ’s Matthew Dolan in a related article. “Their aim is to repurpose portions of the city, not redraw its borders.” But the residents of the sparsely populated neighborhoods losing police patrols, road repairs, garbage pick up and streetlights might not be so keen to the arrangement.

So it’s come to this – “Motor City,” once a thriving boom-town, now busting to pieces as it cedes almost a quarter of its municipality to gang rule, in the hope that residents will move inward – huddling together to form a more dense, possibly more productive, city. But administration officials are fighting against both the opposite trend (decades of urban sprawl) and holdouts hoping for handouts. Mayor Bing: “I don’t want people to think that, if they hold out, there’s going to be a pot full of money somewhere, because there’s not.”

Hence the denial of services in a city which has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for years. However, this decision is just the tip of an historical iceberg of events. Detroit serves as an excellent case study in initial conditions determining the fate of a system (a city). After all, it was in 1805, when the town burned to the ground, that Detroit’s motto originated:Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus (“We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes”). Since then, the city’s history has been a rocky fractal of innovation, population growth, and violence: (Thanks to Allison Lumb’s post for some of the following facts.)

A Timeline of Detroit (Innovations, Growth, and Violence:
-1806: City of Detroit incorporated,
-1820 First Census: 1,422 (over the next 60 years the cities population doubles each decade),
-1837: Detroit becomes the capital of Michigan (until 1847),
-1840 Census: 9,102 and growing,
-1863: Anti-draft/race riot,
-1877: Detroit College founded,
-1903-1950: A period of great innovation and productivity starting with the founding of the Ford Motor Company,
-1943: Race riot over wartime factory jobs,
-1950 Census: The city’s population peaks at 1,849,568 (while the metro area continues to grow, the city shrinks in population),
-1967: The 12th Street Riot (one of the worst in U.S. history),
-1996: Michigan votes to allow three casinos in Detroit,

The estimated figures for Detroit’s 2010 Census is 910,920. However, the population of the greater metropolitan and surrounding area continues to grow leaving ungovernable gaps. Mayor Bing’s goal is to encourage population density. “Great cities like New York, Paris, even Mumbai thrive because of density,” writes Mlive.com’s Jeff Wattrick. “It creates economies of scale that allow for efficient delivery of expensive public services.” The idea of scalability is of great interest to those of us seeking sustainable systems of community renewal.

Last month we highlighted a speech recently given by Geoffrey West, in which he talked about “why companies fail but cities survive.” He was primarily discussing discoveries regarding scalability as it applies to that ever-popular buzzword these days, sustainability. His data indicated the existence of what he called a “finite time singularity,” which is a fancy way of saying growth which reaches an unsustainable pace…

When you have a growing city… it’s within a cultural paradigm that’s to do with a major innovation like coal or oil…. As you approach the singularity, you must innovate and start again.~Geoffrey West

This sounds great. “Refill your tank” with innovation every now and then, and you’re back on the road to success (productivity). However, West goes on to say that these finite time singularities systematically grow closer and closer together in time. “If you want to have continuous growth,” he warns, “you have to have continuous innovation. This system is destined to collapse.” Detroit seems to be making his case beautifully, reaching their singularity in the 1950′s, leveling off, and now in decline.

What’s been happening up in Michigan has people wondering if Detroit is a leading indicator of things to come in other cities. This might not be as pressing an issue, if the trend were not toward increased urbanization, but it is. The lessons Detroit can teach us are not just about innovation and growth, but also a need for population density in order for scalability to have any chance. The world might be becoming more urban, but, as West is eager to point out, it is not doing so in an organized manner. (One need only visit southern California to see a city that sprawls out for miles.)

The question remains: is city living sustainable? We’ll stay tuned to Detroit’s struggle with scale to see if they find a solution.

Tea Part Rally, September 12, 2009
Estimated turnout of 1.2 million

The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.
~Karl von Frisch

Do a Google search for “The Tea Party,” and you get the following top results:

Join the Tea Party (www.jointheteaparty.com) – owned by Todd Cefaratti of Glengary Inc. in Gilbert, Arizona

Tea Party Patriots, “Official Home of the Tea Party Movement” (www.teapartypatriots.ning.com) – owned by attorney Mark Meckler of Grass Valley, CA

Tea Party (www.teaparty.org) – owned by Dale Robertson of Drums, PA (infamous for his “n-word” sign)

The Tea Party Express (www.teapartyexpress.org) – owned by Our Country Deserves Better PAC in Sacramento, CA

Tea Party Day (www.teapartyday.com) – owned by the American Family Association in Savannah, TN

Tea Party Nation (www.teapartynation.com) – owned by Judson Phillips of Franklin, TN

…just to name a few (but we’ll leave www.teaparty.com out of it, since they’re a Toronto rock group).

Let’s pause here to say The Renaissance Mob is not a political blog in the sense that we don’t get down in the mud villifying and demonizing political parties and/or politicians. So before going further, perhaps it would be good to clarify the purpose of this post.

At first, it seemed àpropos to publish this post before the November elections which took place earlier this month. However, while it might have been a “hotter topic” then, this post is not meant to instigate or provoke. Rather it is meant to ask: Can a mass of humans self-organize and carry out positive change? The “Tea Party” seemed an ideal contemporary case study, since the claim, among their admirers and advocates (insert any of the big name “Talk Radio” hosts here), is that the group:
1. Has no one visible leader (collective intelligence)
2. Is a “grassroots movement” (diverse sampling of population)
3. Was spontaneously organized (emergent organization)

Indeed, both allies and enemies of the Tea Party Movement seem to be in… at least semi-agreement on these claims:

If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. ~Karl Rove
So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?” ~Barack Obama
Many [Tea Party activists] are proud of their decentralization, which makes them feel like their voices are being heard. ~The Daily Beast
There is no single Tea Party. The name is an umbrella that encompasses many different groups. ~Matthew Continetti

…It’s actually pretty hard to find quotes about The Tea Party that aren’t charged with strong rhetoric. But if you distilled the views of everyone from Michael Moore to Glenn Beck down to the most basic elements, they all are saying the same thing about the movement: that it has no leader, that it comes from individuals, and that it is self-organizing. (True, Nancy Pelosi called them “Astroturf” a while back, but that may have been more wishful thinking since she is now talking about the things she has in common with The Tea Party.) It should be said that, while most seem to agree on these three points, not all think them a good thing. The post-election news shows a brewing battle between “establishment Republicans” and “The Tea Partiers.” In particular is the issue of leadership and control. Career politicians aren’t usually big fans of movements they can’t predict or control. But we’ll leave battle for someone else to sort out…

The interest here is how the Tea Party thinks. On the Washington Post website, Robert J. Goodwin attributes some of the success of The Tea Party to what he calls “distributed leadership:”

The Tea Party movement embodies that of a “starfish” organization. It is difficult to attack with no clearly defined leadership, and even if one cell-or candidate-is defeated, the movement lives on.

Readers of this blog may hear an echo of a recent post in which we looked at Al Qaeda’s growing use of “swarm attacks.” No, this is not meant to equate The Tea Party to terrorists. But – if it is possible to remove yourself from political views – it is interesting to see how the strategies (not the motives and goals) are similar.

Let’s assume for a moment The Tea Party is a bone-fide example of swarm/collective intelligence that works – separating yourself from your feelings for or against the movement. What compelled it to form in the first place? How can it be strengthened/weakened?

For the first question, we can go back to last month’s “Tweeter of the Month” Dave Snowden, who teaches three conditions for innovation: starvation of resources, pressure, and perspective shift. According to Wikipedia, the first Tea Party protests (imitating the Boston Tea Party) were over the 100-some new taxes being proposed in New York State. The perception was that there was a starvation of resources via taxation, the pressure of isolation of the individual from government and a perspective shift away from the two-party (or any party, for that matter) system.

As far as how the movement might strengthen or weaken, that might be accomplished by resisting or giving in to groupthink. Tea Party rallies have been described by some as a circus, with all kinds of freaks. Advocates of the movement tend to be dismissive of the “freak show” element, not realizing that it is that very diversity that gives the movement viability. Enemies of the Tea Party really may not need not do anything, because if the movement tends toward centralized leadership, it will weaken under the weight of groupthink. Groupthink is defined as “a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.” In other words, thinking is homogenized to the point of losing individuality and diversity.

This means, for The Tea Party to stay viable, it must stay decentralized and increase its diversity. A movement, then, is limited to the degree of faith it puts in its members. It is also limited by its willingness (or lack thereof) to listen to very different opinions.

See also:
The Tea Party’s Weird Science

The Angel Damiel perches on the Victory Column, where he listens to the thoughts of the city.

Germany has crumbled into as many small states as there are individuals. And these states are mobile. Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter…. The German soul of today can only be conquered and governed by one who arrives at each small state with a password.
~Driver, Wings of Desire (1987)

Closing his eyes, the angel Damiel calmly lifts his face to the sky as though captivated by some enticing aroma. Instead, voices rise up from the streets of Berlin to his perch on the right shoulder of the statue of Victoria. These voices, we quickly learn, are the thoughts of Berlin’s citizens: worried, singing, depressed, making plans, laughing. Later, we find Damiel in the library – a place filled with trenchcoat-clad angels leaning over scholars and students. And then, at the scene of a motorcycle accident, Damiel listens to the thoughts of a dying man – at first panicked and fearful, then (as though sensing the angel’s presence) reflective and at peace.

The first half of the movie Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) is devoted to this idea of listening. In a 2009 interview, filmmaker Wim Wenders told of the movie’s popularity among the women of Tokyo. “A social phenomena,” he claimed. “The only explanation they could find was that women loved the film so much because [in it] men listened.”

This week in the United States we held our mid-term elections. We herded into polling locations and registered an opinion. Yesterday, Republicans and President Obama interpreted that opinion with very different conclusions. While the election may have been effective at shuffling politicians, was it good at providing a sense of the people? No.

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all others that have been tried.” Of course, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S., we have a republic where we elect people to represent us. People who spend millions of dollars and countless hours propagating their view of things, leaving the average citizen feeling like Tokyo’s women: Who is listening to me?

In an article posted this week, Scott Southward, of the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems, wrote about studies of ant colonies at Arizona State University. They found “that the ‘brain’ of the colony is distributed throughout the group of workers, and that there is no one ant doing the thinking or making the decisions for all of them.” It’s called collective or swarm intelligence. A remarkable video (found here) shows how several ants working together can retrieve an object and move it to a specific place. Now compare that video with this one of a common team-building game called “the helium stick.” The object is for all members of the team to lower the bar to the floor without lifting it off any one individual’s finger. Simple, right? Watch…

In spite of all the talking and coaching you can hear the humans doing, the ants seems to do a better job at working quietly, efficiently and intelligently together. Why?

The problem is how we come to a consensus. How does a collection of diverse people come to a decision on how to go ahead with a project or plan? Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow addressed this when he came up with his “impossibility theorem,” which states:

When voters have three or more discrete alternatives (options), no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of people into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of criteria.

In “The Perfect Swarm,” Len Fisher lists these criteria as: completeness, unanimity, non-dictatorship, transivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and universality. In short, there is no such thing as a “fair” election when there are three alternatives. (And, as mentioned in our last post, there are always three or more options.) But there is more to be learned from Arrow’s theorem. Alex Tabarrock recently “popularized” this theorem on the Marginal Revolution blog. Beyond showing the flaws of the voting system, Arrow also demonstrated the limits of what we can conclude about a group from election results: “More generally, what Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice.” So while the Republicans say “referendum on the President,” and the President says otherwise, it’s just not that simple.

What complexity scientists are finding is that to understand a human system, we need to go back to the narrative. Much like the angels in Wings of Desire, we must listen to the fragments of narrative each person contributes. Recently we’ve seen projects like StoryCorps (where people go in a booth and tell a story from their life) are emerging as a “new” way of understanding society as a whole. ….Of course, it’s not new. People have been sitting around campfires and family reunions for ages telling stories. Perhaps the only difference is we are only now understanding how important it is.