Well...
Let’s get started.
Because what I’m gonna try to tell you here,
Is that we must see the ‘matrix’.
It exists.
Maybe it doesn’t exist like the one in the Wachowski Bros’ movie.
But it does exist as that which is interconnecting all of us here and now.
That which is interconnecting all human collectives.
That is what we properly refer to as ‘social’.
And it is not the sum of individuals.
When someone says ‘social',
we go: ‘I know, it’s a lot of people’.
No, it’s not.
It is what’s between the people.
Maybe it’s something like this: an image of an internet network.
And that’s what we’re gonna talk about now.
Imaginative explorations in what we could call the “space-time of flows”,
which I've been doing with many other people over the last ten years,
more or less.
How did it all begin?
I was working with local development,
I’ve worked for many years, almost two decades, with local development.
I was interested in learning
why some communities are alive and flourish,
and people are entrepreneurs, and play a leading role, collectively, while others don’t.
the human persons there are the same,
sometimes the resources and the natural environment are the same.
Then why the difference?
I began investigating that from a very practical problem.
Which was ‘how to induce human, social, sustainable development locally'.
But then I saw that only through observing practice
I could not come to satisfactory conclusions.
So I started to also investigate
what other people had said about this.
Here you can see several interesting people
who were the giants on whose shoulders I stood for a while.
Beginning with Tocqueville, who, during that fantastic trip to America,
was absolutely amazed by the partnership spirit,
by the capacity of self-organization for problem-solving.
Dewey, who saw that, deep down, democracy was life in community.
Hanna Arendt,
who realized that freedom depends only on the way we organize ourselves.
And, above all, this old lady you see there;
Jane Jacobs, she unfortunately passed away in April 2006.
She realized the value of sidewalks,
the value of ‘happy hours’.
She realized that people must interact with other people in public spaces
in order to generate enough energy to promote their own development
and the development of the place where they are.
In this investigation, I discovered this thing called ‘social capital’.
You can't buy it at the store, you can't cut it down,
you can’t deposit it,
but it’s the result of those invisible bonds, those hidden connections,
which connect us to other people with whom we coexist.
And the most important thing I discovered,
actually I was not the one who discovered it, Jane Jacobs did, back in 1961,
was that what we call social capital, this systemic factor of development,
which economist don’t take into account--
they’ve already learned about human capital,
but ‘social capital?’, they're still not sure what that is --
it is but the social network itself.
So I was like: Well, we should investigate social networks.
If they are the social capital,
if they are what explains how a community behaves,
if they are the fingerprints of a given place,
the identity card of a people, collectively speaking.
So, I have to understand what social networks are.
So then, I went to Paul Baran.
This is the only slide I will spend (or gain) a little more time on,
because it is vital.
Paul Baran worked for the Rand Corporation, in Santa Monica.
In that time everyone was terrified of the Cold War.
‘There’s gonna be a nuclear catastrophe, World War III!'
This issue was very present in the early 1960s.
The missile crisis in Cuba, basically...
So, Paul Baran was asked the following...
There’s a little beep...
He was asked the following...
I’m right here people, you can take pictures.
Paul Baran was asked the following:
‘How should our media, radio, and broadcasting stations organize
in order to survive a nuclear catastrophe?’
‘What’s the safest way?’
‘What’s the most sustainable way?’
And this is what Paul Baran said:
‘There are only three ways: the first is centralized,
the second is decentralized, and the third is distributed’.
Look at how important this is: this is the most important slide.
It's the most important design, it was for me, and for many others
who seek to understand what a network is, because today we call everything a network.
You get things like: ‘I understand networks, I own a network of supermarkets.'
And like: ‘It’s a television network.’
So, the word network is applied for meanings that
aren't exactly this meaning about which
I am talking to you here.
What is the centralized model?
This is the centralized model: all of the nodes,
which are those dots, are connected by these lines,
or links or paths, to a center.
Hence, centralized.
If you detonate the center, you disconnect all the nodes.
This is the centralized model.
Naturally, it’s the worst, from the perspective of the question Paul Baran was asked.
If you hit the center, you annihilate and kill everything.
The second model is decentralized.
What’s that?
Decentralized, actually, as we can see
by looking at this middle slide, at this diagram, is not 'center-less';
decentralized means that there are many centers.
Decentralized means multicentralized.
So what happens?
You get several interconnected centers;
if you detonate one center, the others remain,
only that little cluster is disconnected,
which is centralized according to a ‘decentralized’ model.
So what happens here? This is what most organizations look like.
This is the model adopted by political parties, unions, governments, NGOs...
Everything, really.
Or almost everything: 99% of the things (companies, schools, churches) we engage in.
Very well.
You know what this is, don’t you?
This is Mr. John. He wants to speak to Mrs. Mary, who’s here.
He has to go through the little boss, then up to the big boss, back through the other little boss...
Alright! I got to Mrs. Mary!
This is the memo that goes upstairs to the 2nd floor, then downstairs to the 1st floor,
then all the way to the 4th floor, until it gets that final signature.
This is the decentralized or multicentralized model.
But there is a model called ‘distributed’.
So, if Mr. John wants to speak to Mrs. Mary, he just does it.
Naturally, not all lines are drawn here,
otherwise you’d see nothing but lines.
Now look at something interesting.
Have you noticed that in all three diagrams
the nodes are exactly at the same place?
Look at Mr. John here, and here he is again, and here again.
Look at Harold here, and Harold here.
I’m running out of...
Let’s do something...
...and here’s Harold again.
Look at that.
Very well.
So, this means that with three--
With the same people, if this is an actual social network representation,
I can have three different societies?
This means that with the same people, I can have three different organizations?
How about that, huh?
This can be easy to understand, but it’s very difficult to accept.
Because we’ve been educated and raised
to believe that what was in our minds was determinant.
And so we set off to make up other people’s minds.
We want a better world, we engage in proselytism.
Let’s save the planet.
Let’s save humanity.
Peace, cooperation, understanding.
Because we imagine that by shoving,
by depositing content into other people’s minds,
we can change the way that society, collectiveness, will manifest itself.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It looks like, with the same people,
I can have three different types of organizations,
which will have three different behaviors, you see?
If I have a centralized structure made up of Mahatma Gandhi clones,
it will not be able to behave in a peaceful, cooperative manner,
even if they’re all perfect clones of Mahatma Gandhi.
Sure, this is a thought experiment,
it's only a ‘gedankenexperiment’, as the physicists say.
Einstein loved those.
We won’t be able to convince Mahatma Gandhi clones
to join a centralized structure.
But, even if they did, they couldn’t behave collaboratively.
So what I mean to say is:
cooperation is an attribute of the way human beings organize themselves.
And that’s it.
It’s hard.
It took me over a year for that to sink in, for me to come to terms with that.
And that’s not an evidence.
Because it doesn’t reveal itself evidently for us.
Well,
That was the foundation of networks. Now, over the past few years,
a new science of networks began to develop.
Here are three very important exponents, among so many others,
of this new science which is growing fast.
This is a very young science, it has no more than 15 years
under its current statute.
The analysis of social networks, networks as developing structures,
and networks as complex dynamic systems,
are the three branches that make up the new science of networks.
The new science of networks began to explain the things that happen in the world
in a totally different way.
And this totally different way involves phenomena such as ‘clustering’:
the tendency, regardless of intention, to form clusters within the network,
and, obviously, within society itself;
‘swarming’: an incredible capacity for organization
which may often lead to these amazing bug-like designs.
It can also lead to this you can see here:
March, 2004, Spain, in La Calle, when there were those attacks in Madrid.
How did people connect, and without anyone to summon them,
they filled the streets and squares and changed the destiny of Spain?
Traditional social science cannot explain that.
But the new science of networks has been able to.
Along with an essential phenomenon, which is the small-world phenomenon.
You’ve heard of that.
Six degrees of separation, small-world networks...
But what's that, really?
That’s actually what we could call ‘crunching’;
that is, the more you increase connectivity,
and the more you increase the degree of distribution in a social network,
the smaller the world gets.
Not in geographic-populational terms,
but in social terms, it does get smaller.
And the smaller it gets, in social terms,
the more imponderable the social field it is creating becomes.
That is, the greater your ability to induce people to innovate,
to play leading roles, to become entrepreneurs, and you don’t need many people.
Only 1% of the people connected are capable of ‘capillarizing’ the social networks
in order to reveal that collective capacity of social capital or social networking,
of promoting that which we interpret as development.
So, this is the beginning of what I wanted to tell you about today.
But it’s also the end of this initial provocation of mine.
Thank you very much.