"Organized Networks"

Ned Rossiter, Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

[Presented at The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity conference, April 15-16, 2004, University of Surrey, England

Abstract

This paper is interested in how networks using ICTs as their primary
mode of organisation can be considered as new institutional forms.
The paper suggests that organised networks are emergent
socio-technical forms that arise from the limits of both tactical
media and more traditional institutional structures and architectonic
forms. Organised networks are peculiar for the ways in which they
address problems situated within the media form itself. The
organised network is thus one whose socio-technical relations are
immanent to, rather than supplements of, communications media. The
paper argues that the problematics of scale and sustainability are
the two key challenges faced by various forms of networks. The
organised network is distinct for the ways in which it has managed to
address such problematics in order to imbue informational relations
with a strategic potential.Introduction

The question motivating this paper is this: what is the relationship
between institutions, networks and the mobility of information? In
recent months I've been looking at what various research centres in
the UK are up to in the areas of media studies, communications,
sociology and cultural studies. I've been doing this because I've
just moved from Monash University in Melbourne to the University of
Ulster, Northern Ireland and I needed to get a sense of what's going
on. The lasting impression I have after idling through a dozen or so
websites is that everyone proudly claims to be pursuing activities
that consist of building networks. Yet very few of these sites ever
explain how their activities constitute a network formation, and I
can't recall any that bother to define what a network might be. They
must have done this at some stage, however, because many of these
research centres and programs delight in informing the reader of how
much money they've been able to attract in research funding. I get
the strong impression that many of these programs are responding to
the latest directive set forth by the command-economy of government
funding agencies. One can only presume that somewhere along the line
these projects made some attempt at defining their activities in
terms of networks.

I would suggest that there is little about the activities of these
various centres and programs that correspond with a logic of
networks. And here, I am talking specifically about networks that
are immanent to the Internet - the primary socio-technical
architecture that enables the mobility of data within a logic of
informationalism. Really, what the networked university offers all
its believers is something akin to what Bourdieu calls 'circuits of
legitimation' that enable the reproduction of 'state nobility' (1996:
382-389). I wouldn't begin to deny that I'm also caught up in this
process.

It almost goes without saying that the networked university is
conditioned by the advent of new ICTs which enable connections
between a range of institutional entities and individuals that are no
longer bound by the contingencies of place. Equally, the effects of
neoliberalism in terms of shrinking budgets for higher education and
a gradual deregulation of education as a commercial service have
played a strong conditioning force in decomposing the traditional
university form. These days it is the norm rather than the exception
to find that the movement of knowledge and information is restricted
by authentication firewalls and IP policies underpinned by a hybrid
paranoid-blue-sky discourse. Within such architectures, the
networked university is hardly conducive to radical information
critique or creative intellectual work (although there are of course
cracks that do of course allow such practices). Moreover, there
aren't too many projects being produced out of all this networking
beyond the final report that's submitted to funding authorities who
understand no other language than that of counting beans. As the
state continues its process of de-institutionalisation, to what
extent is a new institutional form emerging that does provide
conditions for critical Internet research and culture? How is this
form manifesting within on- and off-line practices associated with
the Internet?

The Network Problematic

A spectre is haunting this age of informationality — the spectre of
state sovereignty. As a modern technique of governance based on
territorial control, a "monopoly of violence" and the capacity to
regulate the flow of goods and people, the sovereign power of the
nation-state is not yet ready to secede from the system of
internationalism. The compact of alliances between nation-states
over matters of trade, security, foreign aid, investment, and so
forth, substantiates the ongoing relevance of the state form in
shaping the mobile life of people and things. As the Internet gained
purchase throughout the 1990s on the everyday experiences of those
living within advanced economies in particular, the popular
imagination became characterised by the notion of a "borderless"
world of "frictionless capitalism". Such a view is the doxa of many:
political philosophers, economists, international relations scholars,
politicians, CEOs, activists, cyber-libertarians, advertising
agencies, political spin-doctors and ecologists all have their
variation on the theme of a postnational, global world-system
inter-linked by informational flows.

Just as the nation-state appears obsolete for many, so too the term
"network" has become perhaps the most pervasive metaphor to describe
a range of phenomena, desires and practices in contemporary
information societies. The refrain one hears on networks in recent
years goes something like this: fluidity, emphemerality, transitory,
innovative, flows, non-linear, decentralised, value adding, creative,
flexible, open, risk-taking, reflexive, informal, individualised,
intense, transformative, and so on and so forth. Many of these words
are used interchangeably as metaphors, concepts and descriptions.
Increasingly, there is a desperation evident in research on new ICTs
that manifests in the form of empirical research. Paradoxically,
much of this research consists of methods and epistemological
frameworks that render the mobility of information in terms of stasis
(see Rossiter, 2003a, 2003b).

Governments have found that the network refrain appeals to their
neoliberal sensibilities, which search for new rhetorics to
substitute the elimination of state infrastructures with the logic of
individualised self-formation within Third Way style networks of
"social capital" (Latham, 2001: 62-100; Giddens, 1998).[1] Research
committees at university and federal levels see networks as offering
the latest promise of an economic utopia in which research practice
synchronically models the dynamic movement of finance capital, yet so
often the outcomes of research ventures are based upon the
reproduction of pre-existing research clusters and the maintenance of
their hegemony for institutions and individuals with ambitions of
legitimacy within the prevailing doxas (Cooper, 2002; Marginson and
Considine, 2000). Telcos and cable TV "providers" revel in their
capacity to flaunt a communications system that is not so much a
network but a heterogenous mass of audiences-consumers-users
connected by the content and services of private media oligopolies
(Flew, 2002: 17-21; van Dijk, 1999: 62-70; Schiller, 1999: 37-88).
Activists pursue techniques of simultaneous disaggregation and
consolidation via online organisation in their efforts to mobilise
opposition and actions in the form of mutable affinities against the
corporatisation of everyday life (Lovink, 2003: 194-223; Lovink and
Schneider, 2004; Meikle, 2002). The US military-entertainment
complex enlists strategies of organised distribution of troops and
weaponry on battlefields defined by unpredictability and chaos, while
maintaining the spectacle of control across the vectors of news media
(Der Derian, 2001; De Landa, 1991; Wark, 1994: 1-46). The standing
reserve of human misery sweeps up the remains of daily horror.

Theorists and artists of new media are not immune to these prevailing
discourses, and reproduce similar network homologies in their
valorisation of open, decentralised, distributed, egalitarian and
emergent socio-technical forms. In so doing, the discursive and
socio-technical form of networks is attributed an ontological status.
The so-called openness, fluidity and contingency of networks is
rendered in essentialist terms that function to elide the
complexities and contradictions that comprise the uneven
spatio-temporal dimensions and material practices of networks.
Similarly, the force of the "constitutive outside" is frequently
dismissed by media and cultural theorists in favour of delirious
discourses of openness and horizontality. "Immanence" has been a key
metaphor to describe the logic of informationalisation (see Rossiter,
2004). Such a word can also be used to describe networks. To put it
in a nutshell, the technics of networks can be described as thus: if
you can sketch a diagram of relations in which connections are
'external to their terms' (Deleuze), then you get a picture of a
network model. Whatever the peculiarities the network refrain may
take, there's a predominant tendency to overlook the ways in which
networks are produced by regimes of power, economies of desire and
the restless rhythms of global capital.

How, I wonder, might the antagonisms peculiar to the varied and more
often than not incommensurate political situations of
informationality be formulated in terms of a political theory of
networks? A processual model of media theory inquires into the
movement between the conditions of possibility and that which has
emerged within the grid of signs, codes and meanings - or what
Deleuze understands as the immanent relationship between the plane of
consistency and the plane of organisation. How might the politics of
networks as they operate within informationalised institutional
settings be understood in terms of a processual democracy?

Conditions of possibility are different in kind from that which comes
to be conditioned. There is no resemblance or homology between the
two. External forces are not grids whose stabilising capacity
assures the temporary intelligibility of a problematic as it
coalesces within a specific situation. Yet despite these
dissonances, networks are defined by - perhaps more than anything -
their organisation of relations between actors, information,
practices, interests and socio-technical systems. The relations
between these terms may manifest at an entirely local level, or they
may traverse a range of scales, from the local to the national to the
regional to the global. Whatever the scale may be, these fields of
association are the scene of politics and, once they are located
within institutional settings, are the basis of democracy in all its
variations. This isn't to say that in and of themselves these
components of networks somehow automatically result in democracy.
But it is to suggest that the relationship between institutions and
the sociopolitical habitus of the state continues to be a primary
influence in conditioning the possibility of democratic polities.

The persistence of state sovereignty within the immanent logic of
informationality presents an invitation to transdisciplinary
theorists to invent new techniques of deduction, appraisal, and
critique. Indeed, the task of invention is an inevitable one for
creative critical theorists inasmuch as they, along with other
actors, subsist reflexively within the logic of informationalism.
The relationship is a reflexive one because the theorist encounters
problems that are presented by the tensions within the triad of
networks, institutions, democracy. Problems emerge in the form of
feedback or noise peculiar to the socio-technical system. Critical
theorists are not, of course, alone in this engagement; it is one
they share with many whose labour-power is subject to the
constitutive force of networks-institutions-democracy.

My primary interest in bringing the terms
networks-institutions-democracy together is to develop a conceptual
assemblage with which to think the emergence of organised networks as
new institutions of possibility. From a theoretical and practical
point of view how might organised networks be defined as new
institutional forms of informationalism? Given that institutions
throughout history function to organise social relations, what
distinguishes the organised network as an institution from its modern
counterparts? Obviously there are differences along lines of
horizontal vs. vertical, distributed vs. contained, decentralised vs.
centralised, bureaucratic reason vs. database processing, etc. But
what else is there?

Networks and Translation

All communication is a process of translation. Networks are uneven,
heterogeneous passages and combinations of communication in and
through which translation is intrinsic to the connectivity of
information as it encounters technical, social, political, economic
and cultural fields of articulation, negotiation and transference.
Translation, then, is about making connections between seemingly
incommensurate things and objects. Translation conditions the
possibility of communication, transversality, transduction, intensity
and individuation between different systems (Mackenzie, 2002;
Murphie, 2004). From the connection emerges a new logic, a new
sensibility, and new capacities. At a very basic level, the logic of
networks is the process of connectivity.

Networks have the capacity of transduction, which Adrian Mackenzie,
via Gilbert Simondon, describes as a process of ontogenesis 'in which
a metastability emerges' within biological and socio-technical
systems (2002: 16-19). Or as Andrew Murphie puts it, 'transduction
*translates intensities* so that they can be brought into
individuating systems' (2004). The form of organised networks
provides a mutable architecture in which matter is temporarily
arrested within a continuum of differentiation and individuation.
Transductive forces subsist within the relation between form and
matter. The organised network can be considered as a new
institutional actor whose political, economic and expressive
capacities are shaped and governed by the metastability of the
network system. The intelligibility of such arrangements, relations
and informational flows is thus most accurately summarised by a
theory of translation which incorporates processes of transduction.
Translation is truly a concept of praxis. It is part and parcel of
every network. Transduction conditions the possibility of organised
networks as emergent institutional entities.

Modernity ushered in experiences of mobility, for people and things,
in ways hitherto unexperienced. With mobility came all sorts of
connections. Railways moved people and merchandise from the country
to the city, troops and armaments to the front (Schivelbusch, 1977).
Telegraphy transmitted code from the metropole to the antipodes and
back again (Wark, 1997). The penny novel accompanied workers on
their journey to the office, the evening newspaper or racing guide on
their trip back to the suburbs. People, ideas and things came to
occupy a shared space and time of motion. In so doing, the
experience of movement is at once made possible and defined by new
combinations of elements. This is translation at work.

With the onset of the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and
modernity, new disciplines emerged in the hard and human sciences.
The discipline of anthropology set itself the task of cataloguing
human habits and attributes within a language system that translated
in various ways into policy initiatives, geographic survey reports,
academic monographs, economic prospectives, architectural forms,
museological displays, and cultural exchanges. This too is
translation at work. Elements previously without relation, are
combined in such a manner that something new is invented (see Brown,
2002: 6).

What I have discussed elsewhere as a processual media theory
(Rossiter, 2003a) is derived from research in cybernetics, biology
and systems theory that is interested in information as it relates to
the problem of calculation, control and determination in order to
enhance efficiency. The primary question for first-order cybernetics
was how to impose stability and order over the entropic tendencies of
information, as witnessed, for example within biological systems and
their transmission of DNA code or radio signals and their
interference by "noise". The preoccupation with efficiency in
first-order cybernetics denies the relational character of
communication. Second-order cybernetics saw the necessity of not
banishing noise from the system, but establishing a balance between
order and disorder: noise or feedback was "rehabilitated" as a
"virtue" of communication within a system (Mattelart and Matterlart,
1992: 45).

Within anthropology, for example, the observer impacts upon that
which is observed and changes what might otherwise have transpired in
the course of the event, had the observer not been a part of the
system. Second-order cybernetics and systems theory thus adopts a
reflexive understanding of the relationship between observer and
observed. Feedback - what Bateson termed the 'difference that makes
a difference' - is acknowledged as fundamental to the functioning of
the system. Moreover, communication is more properly understood as
not a unilinear channel of transmission, but rather a non-linear
system of relations. Corresponding with this conceptual development
is a shift from an instrumental view of communication to an
understanding of communication as a social system.

When information is located within a capitalist economic system and
its practices of production, circulation and exchange, one can speak
of the logic of informationalism. The conceptual developments within
cybernetics and systems theory correspond with shifts in the logic of
informationationalism. The logic of informationalism is
characterised by various sociologists and political economists as
heralding a shift from an industrial age of manufacturing, manual
labour, Fordism, surveillance and internationalisation to an
informational age of services, knowledge workers post-Fordism,
control and globalisation. Christopher May writes that a central
assumption to this change is a belief that 'New ICTs will transform
the relations of production of the economies in which they appear,
promoting fluid networks rather than ossified hierarchies' (2002:
51). My argument is that in order for networks to organise mobile
information, a degree of hierarchisation, if not centralisation, is
required. The point is that such organisation occurs within the
media of communication. Herein lies the difference between the
organised network and the networked organisation - a point Lovink
reiterates in the newspaper for the Free Cooperation conference
that's about to start (http://freecooperation.org). Let's not forget
that for all the anti-state rhetoric of anarachists, they, like many
"radical" outfits, are renowned for being organised in highly
hierarchical ways - typically around the cult of the alpha-male.

Organised Networks as New Institutional Forms

The challenge for a politically active networked culture is to make
strategic use of new communications media in order to create new
institutions of possibility. Such socio-technical formations will
take on the characteristics of organised networks - distributive,
non-linear, situated, project-based - in order to create
self-sustaining media-ecologies that are simply not on the map of
established political and cultural institutions. As Gary Genesko
writes, 'the real task is to find the institutional means to
incarnate new modes of subjectification while simultaneously avoiding
the slide into bureaucratic sclerosis' (2003: 33). Such a view also
augurs well for the life of networks as they subsist within the
political logic of informationality that is constituted by the force
of the outside (Rossiter, 2004).

The organised network that co-ordinates relations through the
socio-technical form of the networked institution imbues information
with a strategic potential. In this respect, the organised network
can be distiguished from what David Garcia and Geert Lovink (1997),
Josephine Berry (2000), Joanne Richardson (2002), McKenzie Wark
(2002), Konrad Becker (2002), Lovink and Schneider (2002), and others
on nettime have called "tactical media". Characterised by temporary
political interventions, tactical media activism builds on the legacy
of counter-cultures, protest movements, the Situationists,
independent media activities and hacker culture.[2] Lovink and
Schneider (2002) provide the following short history of tactical
media:

'The term "tactical media" arose in the aftermath of the fall of the
Berlin Wall as a renaissance of media activism, blending old school
political work and artists' engagement with new technologies. The
early nineties saw a growing awareness of gender issues, exponential
growth of media industries and the increasing availability of cheap
do-it-yourself equipment creating a new sense of self-awareness
amongst activists, programmers, theorists, curators and artists.
Media were no longer seen as merely tools for the Struggle, but
experienced as virtual environments whose parameters were permanently
"under construction". This was the golden age of tactical media,
open to issues of aesthetics and experimentation with alternative
forms of story telling. However, these liberating techno practices
did not immediately translate into visible social movements. Rather,
they symbolized the celebration of media freedom, in itself a great
political goal. The media used - from video, CD-ROM, cassettes,
zines and flyers to music styles such as rap and techno - varied
widely, as did the content. A commonly shared feeling was that
politically motivated activities, be they art or research or advocacy
work, were no longer part of a politically correct ghetto and could
intervene in "pop culture" without necessarily having to compromise
with the "system". With everything up for negotiation, new
coalitions could be formed. The current movements worldwide cannot
be understood outside of the diverse and often very personal
[battles] for digital freedom of expression'.

RTmark's web co-ordinated campaigns against global corporate
capitalism, the live webcasting and "Help B92" campaign of Belgrade
independent radio station B92 following its banning by Serbian
authorities during the Kosovo War of 1999, Adbusters' culture jamming
campaigns against media oligopolies, the electronic civil disturbance
activities and "virtual sit-ins" undertaken by the likes of Critical
Art Ensemble, the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Mexican
Zapatistas, and the Indymedia camaigns against the Woomera detention
centre in South Australia are just a few of the many examples of
tactical media.[3] Tactical media differ from alternative media,
which is typically concerned about consolidating a "better" option
for existing media forms (Lovink, 2002: 258; Meikle, 2002: 119).
Alternative media are frequently underpinned by moral and
politico-aesthetic discourses of "quality culture". The paradox of
alternative media, when it assumes to embody such discourses, is that
its "alternative" agenda is rendered in terms of stasis and
conservatism rather than change and transformation. Whereas tactical
media, as Graham Meikle notes, 'is about mobility and flexibility,
about diverse responses to changing contexts ... It's about
hit-and-run guerilla media campaigns ... It's about working with, and
working out, new and changing coalitions' (119). Tactical media,
then, are about rapidly organised, at times even spontaneous,
short-term interventions. Certainly, such interventions resonate
over time - some even become mythical, as has been the case with the
Zapatistas. Diverse skills accumulate and are shared across
networks; in so doing, they hold the potential for deployment as
techniques that address specific situations. Nevertheless, tactical
media have for the most part been unable to address the problematic
of sustainability.

A primary challenge for tactical media concerns the question of
scale. With their focus on creating "temporary autonomous zones"
(Bey, 1991), tactical media run the risk of fading out before their
memes reach a global scale. And when they do reach a level of
globality — as in the case of the B92 streaming media reports, and
the refrain of "anti-globalisation" protests centred around WTO
meetings — the question of scale becomes focussed around the
challenge of sustainability. How are tactical media to create
effects that have a purchase beyond the safe-haven of the activist
ghetto? As Lovink writes: 'Grown out of despair rather than
conviction, tactical media are forced to operate with the parameters
of global capitalism, despite their radical agendas. Tactical media
emerge out of the margins, yet never fully make it into the
mainstream' (2002: 257). This is a problematic clearly recognised by
Lovink and Schneider (2002):

'We face a scalability crisis. Most movements and initiatives find
themselves in a trap. The strategy of becoming "minor" (Guattari) is
no longer a positive choice but the default option. Designing a
successful cultural virus and getting millions of hits on your weblog
will not bring you beyond the level of a short-lived "spectacle".
Culture jammers are no longer outlaws but should be seen as experts
in guerrilla communication. Today's movements are in danger of
getting stuck in self-satisfying protest mode. With access to the
political process effectively blocked, further mediation seems the
only available option'.

Various treatises and commentaries on tactical media note the
distinction Michel de Certeau (1984: 29-44) makes between tactics and
strategies. Graham Meikle makes the important point that strategies,
with their exploitation of place, are about permanency over time,
whereas a tactic 'exploits time - the moments of opportunity and
possibility made possible as cracks appear in the evolution of
strategic place' (2002: 121). In one of the many essays associated
with the fourth Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media
(2002-2003), Joanne Richardson suggests that tactical media departs
company with Certeau over the production of meaning: 'Maybe the most
interesting thing about the theory of tactical media is the extent to
which it abandons rather than pays homage to de Certeau, making
tactics not a silent production by reading signs without changing
them, but outlining the way in which active production can become
tactical in contrast to strategic, mainstream media' (2002).

I would argue that it's time to make a return to and reinvestment in
strategic concepts, practices and techniques of organisation. Let's
stop the obsession with tactics as the modus operandi of radical
critique, most particularly in the gross parodies of Certeau one
finds in US-style cultural studies. Don't get me wrong - I'm not
suggesting that the time of tactical media is over. Clearly,
tactical media play a fundamental role in contributing to the
formation of radical media cultures and new social relations. What
I'm interested in addressing is the "scalability crisis" that Lovink
and Schneider refer to. If one starts with the principle that
concepts and practices are immanent to prevailing media forms, and
not somehow separate from them, it follows that with the mainstream
purchase of new media forms such as the Internet come new ways in
which relations of production, distribution and consumption are
organised. An equivalence can be found in the shift from centralised
Fordist modes of production to de-centralised post-Fordist modes of
flexible accumulation. Strategies within the spatio-temporal
peculiarities of the Internet are different from strategies as they
operate within broadcast communications media. The latter ultimately
conceives the "audience-as-consumer" as the end point in the
food-chain of media production, whereas the former enable the "user"
to have the capacity to sample, modify, repurpose and redirect the
social life of the semiotic object. Moreover, there are going to be
new ways in which institutions develop in relation to Internet based
media culture. How such institutions of organised networks actually
develop in order to obtain a degree of sustainability and longevity
that has typically escaped the endeavours of tactical media is
something that is only beginning to become visible.

The Dehli-based media centre Sarai is one exemplary model of an
emergent institution designed along the lines of an organised
network. Fibreculture — a network of critical Internet research and
culture in Australasia — is another. In their own ways, the
conditions of possibility for the emergence of these organised
networks can be understood in terms of the constitutive outside.
Both networks address specific problems of sociality, politics, and
intellectual transdisciplinarity filtered — at least in the case of
fibreculture — through a void created by established institutions
within the cultural industries and higher education sector.

Take the case of fibreculture. In many ways the fibreculture network
is quite centralised: list facilitators, journal editors, book series
editors, website management, conference organisers, etc. Hierarchies
prevail. The facilitator's group has endeavoured to make the
structure of the network as transparent and public as possible. Even
so, the list is not privy to most of what is discussed in these
various "backrooms". And to a large extent, that has to be accepted
— trust has to be assumed — if the network is to develop in the way
that it has. So, a degree of centralisation and hierarchisation
seems essential for a network to be characterised as organised. Can
the network thus be characterised as an "institution", or might it
need to acquire additional qualities? Is institutional status even
desirable for a network that aspires to intervene in debates on
critical Internet research and culture? How does an organised
network help us redefine our understanding of what an institution
might become?

One of the key challenges that networks such as fibreculture present
is the possibility of new institutional formations that want to make
a political, social and cultural difference within the
socio-technical logic of networks. It's not clear what shape these
institutions will take, but we get a sense of what they might be in
cases like fiberculture and Sarai. To fall back into the crumbling
security of traditional, established institutions is not an option.
The network logic is increasingly the normative mode of organising
socio-technical relations in advanced economies, and this impacts
upon both the urban and rural poor within those countries as well as
those in economically developing countries. So, the traditional
institution is hardly a place of escape for those wishing to hide
from the logic of networks.

It's important to distinguish the organised network as a new
institutional form from traditional institutions that have become
networked through their use of new ICTs. As Lovink and Schneider
(2004) have recently noted, the maintenance of hierarchical forms of
power within hegemonic networked institutions 'is part of a larger
process of "normalization" in which networks are integrated in
existing management styles and institutional rituals'. Traditional
institutional forms — corporations, cultural industries, and the
higher eductation sector — are increasingly appropriating many of the
technics of tactical media: you can have your p2p experience (but at
a price!) and who isn't advocating the merits of open source? Think
IBM and opensource.mit.edu. There's a distinct whiff of new age
refashioning in many of these projects as they seek to recapture a
"spirit" of sharing and experiences of collaboration — the kinds of
things that were swept into the dustbin in the hard-nosed culture of
unit-driven corporatism. Ultimately, the networked organisation is
distinguished by its standing reserve of capital and its exploitation
of labour-power. Such institutions are motivated by the need to
organise social relations in the hope of maximising "creativity" and
regenerating the design of commodity forms that have long reached
market saturation. It'll be interesting to see the extent to which
the Creative Commons license is adopted by big business - I'm
guessing it'll create a suitable amount of havoc, enabling service
variation and consolidate an even brighter future for the legal
sector.

By contrast, the kind of emergent organised networks that I'm
referring to are notable for the ways in which information flows and
socio-technical relations are organised around site specific projects
that place an emphasis on process as the condition for outcomes. The
needs, interests and problems of the organised network coincide with
its emergence as a sociotechnical form, whereas the traditional
modern institution has become networked in an attempt to recast
itself whilst retaining its basic infrastructure, clunky as it is.
Strangely enough the culture of neoliberalism conditions the
emergence of the organised network. The logic of outsourcing has
demonstrated that the state still requires institutions to service
society. Scale and cost were the two key objections econorats and
servants to neoliberalism objected to. Forget about ideology. These
bureaucrats are highly neurotic, obsessive-compulsive types. They
hate any trace of disorder and inefficiency, and the welfare state
embodied such irritations. The organised network can take advantage
of such instituted pathologies by becoming an educational "service
provider", for instance. The key is to work out what values you have
that distinquish your network from the MIT model. The other factor
is to work out a plan for sustainability — a clear lesson from the
dotcom era.

As Phil Agre (2002) has noted, 'Institutions persist in part because
of the bodies of skill that have built up within them'. This idea of
institutions as accumulations of skills strikes me as a perfect way
of describing what goes on within organised networks such as
fibreculture and sarai. Yet why do so many networks fail to persist?
What does it take for a network to become sustainable as an organised
form? What's the 5 year business plan going to look like? And how
might it do this without sliding in to 'bureaucratic sclerosis', as
Genosko puts it. Lovink and Schneider (2004) suggest that a large
reason for the transience of networks has to do with the factors of
information overload, inadequate software and interface solutions,
and socio-cultural impasses in online communication.

To this I would add the need for networks to address situated
problems if they are to develop into an organised form. I'm not
speaking of flamewars on mailing lists or people who don't express
themselves in the correct lingua franca of a particular list — these
are features of pretty much every mailing list with a substantial
number of subscribers who have a bit of life in them. Rather, I'm
talking about problems associated with undertaking projects that
require an organised response in order to realise activities such as
conferences, publishing in different formats and platforms,
educational workshops and training, accredited provision of
educational packages to the traditional education sector, new media
art exhibitions, software development, online translation of foreign
language books, etc. Networks like nettime used to do some of these
kind of things in the past, but it seems that eventually their size
put an end to that. This doesn't mean individual subscribers to
nettime don't get together and organise things (they frequently do
this!), but it does mean that the "brand" of nettime is no longer a
continuum of relations beyond list culture. Scale, in the case of
nettime, has been the impasse to organisation.

Conclusion

In order for tactical media and list cultures to organise as networks
that have multiple institutional capacities, there has to be — first
and foremost — a will, passion and commitment to invention. There
has to be a desire for socio-technical change and transformation.
And there needs to be a curiosity and instinct for survival to shift
finance capital to places, people, networks and activities that
hitherto have been invisible. The combination of these forces
mobilises information in ways that hold an ethico-aesthetic capacity
to create new institutional forms that persist over time and address
the spectrum of socio-political antagonisms of information societies
in a situated fashion.

Notes

1 See Agre (2003) for a brief genealogy of the term social capital.
See Tronti (1973) for an Autonomist deployment of the term.

2 For a personal history of tactical media, see Geert Lovink's 'An
Insider's Guide to Tactical Media' in Dark Fiber (2002: 254-274).

3 For developed accounts of these various tactical media campaigns,
see Lovink (2002) and Meikle (2002). See also Angela Mitropoulous'
documentation at http://woomera2002.com and
http://antimedia.net/xborder.

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