My current labour of love…. my PhD on Collective Intelligence funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK:

Context

Brexit, Trump’s rise to power and developments in Catalonia show a rubix cube of desires around self-governance, populism, sovereignty and the need for home (Moffitt, 2020; Mouffe and Smucker, 2018; Wylie, 2019). These desires interact with the pros and cons of digital life, creating issues of urgent public interest, inspiring hope as well as fear (Snowden, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). The duration of my PhD research has spanned the evolution of these events, and I believe “collective intelligence” theory and practice is useful in analysing both current events as well as options going forward.

Bridge Between Context and Research

I believe the way “collective intelligence” is enacted in the participation work of Barcelona City Council (the site of my PhD fieldwork) and related “technopolitical” researcher-activist networks, can help us unpack what self-governance looks like in a combined online-offline world. In particular, how self-governance can be freshly re-imagined in a more practice-based way as a form of collective intelligence. And how it can be deconstructed into components of political participation, sovereignties, self-organisation, authorship, self-representation and technology. All of which helps specify and distinguish between political discourses and practical options going forward. In the words of Xabier Barandiaran, the co-founder of Barcelona City’s participatory democracy platform Decidim [“We Decide” in Catalan; Decidim, 2019], remembering that Catalonia has also been through an independence referendum recently:

Here we have to talk about sovereignties in plural because if not, the debate only centres on territorial identity. The nation-state-centred-sovereignty debate in a globalised world is quite empty and sterile … what use is a sovereign country if the people then cannot decide how to transform their city or if democracy stops when the establishment is affected?
(Barandiaran, 2018)

Research Project

In order to examine how Collective Intelligence is conceived as an idea, and applied in practice, fieldwork was designed in two stages. First, there was a pilot study in Mexico City which learnt from social mobilisations following the disappearance of 43 students in the hands of the police (2014). Here “Tecnopolítica” researcher-activist networks were first encountered. In 2018, the principal fieldwork was carried out with the Decidim online-offline participatory democracy platform of the City of Barcelona, a fruit of technopolitical networks and practices.

Multimedia Analysis

The primary medium for fieldwork was video, within a quasi-participatory video approach. Since fieldwork, I have been working through the fieldwork material, and integrating research ethics into a consensual editing process, creating the building blocks for the eventual PhD thesis which will include audio-visual pieces as well as the written word. Linking with self-organised learning communities online (which are themselves examples of collective intelligence), I am teaching myself Nvivo (a qualitative research tool) and hopefully Gephi (a network visualisation programme) to make the analysis more precise (Gephi, 2019; Nvivo, 2019).

Analytically, I am getting deeper through an iterative process between key hubs of the research project: the empirical material (primarily video); concepts and literature; and the research questions. I started by developing and editing a video piece La Colmena de Decidim [The Hive of Decidim], which communicated my experience of Decidim through the idea of the hive (and vice versa). This involved establishing an ontological framework, working with audio-visual aspects of ontology such as sound and movement. There were consultations and discussions with the Decidim team throughout the process. In fact, the very idea of making a video about Decidim using the concept of ‘the hive’ was agreed with the Decidim office team at the end of the fieldwork.

Conversation and dialogue are the engines moving the iterative process forward. Not only in discussions with my supervisors and people from Decidim, but also through an ‘analytical dialogue’ between the key hubs mentioned above (empirical material, concepts/literature, research questions). So, for example, key concepts were identified through the process of editing La Colmena video as well as subsequent discussions around the video. With these concepts in mind, I am now reviewing two key pieces of literature collectively authored by researchers who are also actors in Decidim:

• Tecnopolítica: la potencia de las multitudes conectadas. El sistema red 15M, un nuevo paradigma de la política distribuida [Technopolitics: the potential of connected multitudes. The network system 15M, a new paradigm of distributed politics] (Javier Toret, @Datanalysis15m, Antonio Calleja, Óscar Marín Miró, Pablo Aragón, Miguel Aguilera, Alberto Lumbreras, Xabier Barandiaran, 2013).
  
• Decidim: political and technopolitical networks for participatory democracy. Decidim’s project White Paper (Barandiaran, Xabier, Calleja-López, Antonio & Monterde, Arnau, 2018).

So far, reviewing these texts has involved Nvivo, desk research and discussion. This will then lead to another video piece exploring the concepts and tecnopolitical researcher-activist networks in the Decidim ecosystem. I am currently developing and writing about this in both Spanish and English. La Colmena will be publicly available soon, and I also hope to share some of the more detailed writing about the texts in both Spanish and English so that it is accessible to the Decidim community.

Conceptual Framework

I settled on “collective intelligence” as the central concept for my PhD as it was the most tangible, evocative and commonly used idea in the set of concepts and theories I had been exploring for many years. I had started with more of a focus on distributed knowledge, decentralised action and emergence, investigating parallels between online life and social movement ways of being, including parallels between artificial intelligence and social movement knowledge, and the double-sidedness of terms like “open” which can mean both being ‘open to connecting with others’, and also ‘open to exploitation and attack’. However, this set of ideas could easily become very abstract despite the fact that “decentralised modalities” were becoming ever more noticeable, from the blockchains in cryptocurrencies, to autonomous affinity group activist strategies, to assembly decision making in public squares, to increasingly ubiquitous social media.

“Collective intelligence” is a way of understanding decentralised systems and emergence, which speaks to both human-centred collectivity as well as the artificial intelligence shaping online and offline life. It is a much more accessible idea than many of the other terms in the area, giving readers a more familiar entry point into the research, and I am systematising the wider set of concepts into a navigable form which may be structured as a map, interactive hypertext and/or a thesaurus. Some of the more familiar “collective intelligence” ideas are outlined in the following paragraph, which I have selected to show how the PhD project may be connected to ideas, experiences and commitments which you are already engaged in (Beck, 2018; Daily Mail Comment, 2018; Halpin, 2012; Marx, 1939; Mouffe, 2013; Nagle, 2017; Notes From Nowhere, 2003; Reddit, 2018; Rheingold, 2002; Rondfeldt et al, 1998; Smith, 1759; Surowiecki, 2005).

Concepts in Action

In everyday online life, “collective intelligence” surfaces in Wikipedia’s “wisdom of the crowd”, and it is common to see people turning to their “hive mind” on social media to work out anything from where to buy food, how to learn a new app for their phone, to what political party to vote for. In political life, manifestations of collective intelligence abound, with both empowering and regressive connotations: from the “swarm intelligence” of the Zapatista uprising and alter-globalisation movements around the turn of millennium, to “smart mobs” turning up for a coordinated action, to “troll-” and “bot-armies”, to the “General Intellect” of Marx, and the free-market’s “invisible hand”. There is a cluster of related terms that are active in a populist imaginary, many of which I have identified in Brexit Britain: migrant swarms, the Will of the People, the mob, the National Popular Will. Linking both Brexit and Trump contexts, Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie stated that social media manipulation threatens the “psychology of an entire nation” – pointing to the “collective mind” in play, and the way it is threatened as well as potentialised in open digital space (Wylie, 2019).

Barcelona is the place where I have seen “collective intelligence” used most substantially and most positively by a wide range of actors, and it is a key idea in the current Barcelona City Plan which aims to mobilise technological potential to make city structures more “porous” to people living in the area, thereby nurturing citizen engagement and participation. Decidim already engages in practical problem-solving for issues such the existence of fake accounts (/bots), and governance communities are nurtured to defend meaning and values within these politically ambiguous technologies (Metadecidim, 2019). As my PhD is part of an Ibero-Latin American programme, and I wanted to keep a constructive applied approach for my research, I selected Barcelona as the site of my main PhD fieldwork.

The Research Workbench

Working ideas on the research workbench:

• Authorship and collective authorship. I am working on a widened conceptualisation of authorship in order to partially problem-solve intersectional issues in the short term.
• The idea of being ‘alive’ and how important that is to collective intelligence (referencing Sherry Turkle’s work on being ‘almost alive’). This possibly connects to the way that sound and movement were very important in the development of La Colmena.
• Terms such as self-representation and self-determination have always been useful and important to me in the development of the research. However, there is some unclarity whether the term ‘self-determination’ can work in a Spanish context. Plus, I am not sure how to give these ideas adequate space given limited time to properly research each key concept, and the more obvious relevance of related terms such as ‘self-governance’ (see ‘rubix cube’ of ideas mentioned at top of page under Context section).
• The difference between open and participatory research.
• Decidim as a prototype for public-commons partnerships.
  

Possible Applications in Wider Context

Particularly in a UK going through Brexit, where it is unclear how we are going to make constructive decisions together for whatever scenario going forward, it may be useful to make the practical experience of Decidim – and positive ideas of collective intelligence – more accessible and tangible. There are three main ways that I can currently envisage my PhD research potentially contributing to current challenges:

1. Decidim is an example of deliberative participatory democracy. There is some voting in Decidim, but the votes work in tandem with a body of online discussions as well as face-to-face meetings and processes of the Decidim community. This is distinct from purely vote based referenda, which are normally accompanied by campaigns and debates in the media, however that is not the same as structured deliberative processes such as Decidim or citizen assemblies (both of which can include voting as well). A vote alone will not do the same job as a deliberative participatory process, where we talk, share information and discuss together.

2. Related to the first point is the distinction between outward and inward looking sovereignties, an articulation which should be credited to Xabier Barandiaran, as quoted at the beginning of this text. During the fieldwork, I asked Xabier about the relationship between the Brexit and Catalonia referendums and he made this very clear articulation: there are different political sovereignties in play, sovereignties that can be worked on externally through borders (as in the Catalan and Brexit referendums) and sovereignties that can be worked on internally, through projects such as Decidim. Working on external sovereignty alone will not resolve the issues of internal sovereignty, such as how we make decisions together about what our city, community or region will be like.

3. Populism is being used to explain the rise of numerous political actors and events around the world (Salvini in Italy, Brexit in the UK, Podemos in Spain, Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Putin in Russia and so on). I had not planned to examine populism in my thesis, however, I realised there was a link when I found that terms like “The Will of The People” had their place in my “collective intelligence” conceptual map. In particular, there are many concepts associated with both left and right wing politics in my conceptual map, and with my supervisors, it has been discussed whether this set of concepts facilitate – or help us navigate – a kind of cognitive slippage between left and right populism. Given debates about whether progressives should reoccupy populist space and discourse, or reject populism per se, mapping out the specifics of the conceptual territory could be a useful contribution (Mouffe and Smucker, 2018).

Note

Conventionally, the PhD thesis is in the written word. As I work in multimedia, in reality a significant portion of the research was developed autonomously of the university-space.

Supervisors

Professor Roger Burrows
Profile: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/staff/profile/rogerburrows.html#background

Professor Bridgette Wessels
Profile: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/staff/bridgettewessels/

Autonomous Supervisor: Javier Toret

Drawing Notes

This drawing is part of the PhD research. It is one drawing in an exploration of the visual representation of nodes and networks, and engages with issues raised by Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin in their piece “Collective Individuation: The Future of The Social Web”, published as part of the Unlike Us Reader. Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (2013).

References

Barandiaran, Xabier (2018). Telegram Messages with Chris Hotz.
Xabier Barandiaran’s research website: https://xabier.barandiaran.net/

Daily Mail Comment (2018). “DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Britain will never forgive a Brexit betrayal from vain and arrogant MPs that would shatter the integrity of our democracy.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6461435/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Britain-never-forgive-Brexit-betrayal-vain-arrogant-MPs.html

Decidim (2019). https://www.decidim.barcelona

Gephi (2019). https://gephi.org/

Halpin, Harry (2012). “The philosophy of Anonymous. Ontological politics without identity”, Radical Philosophy, Vol.176 (November/December), p. 19-28.

Halpin, Harry and Yuk Hui (2013). “Collective Individuation: The Future of The Social Web”, Unlike Us Reader. Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (eds) Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Marx, Karl (1939). Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Fundamentals of Political Economy Criticism).

Metadecidim (2019). https://meta.decidim.org/

Mulgan, Geoff (2017). Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

Moffitt, Benjamin (2020). Populism (Key Concepts in Political Theory). Polity Press.

Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political. Routledge, Oxon.

Mouffe, Chantal and Jonathan Smucker (2018). “For a Left Populism: Chantal Mouffe in conversation with Jonathan Smucker.”
https://neweconomics.org/2018/12/weekly-economics-podcast-populism-live-with-jonathan-smucker-chantal-mouffe?fbclid=IwAR2JH1VW67KdHap11sw6NsvTt10ZZ68a7Vo8rQ9C_DAHJRXSiNV2F8sOEYk

Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies. Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right, Zerobooks, London.

Notes from Nowhere eds. (2003). We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global AntiCapitalism. Verso, New York and London.

Nvivo (2019). https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo/what-is-nvivo

Reddit (2018). “Vladimir Putin tells Theresa May to ‘fulfil will of people’ on Brexit | Politics.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/a7xfg6/vladimir_putin_tells_theresa_may_to_fulfil_will/

Rheingold, Howard (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Perseus, Cambridge, Mass.

Ronfeldt, David et al (1998). The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. Washington, Rand.

David Shariatmadari, David (2015). “Swarms, floods and marauders: the toxic metaphors of the migration debate”.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/migration-debate-metaphors-swarms-floods-marauders-migrants

Smith, Adam (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Surowiecki, James (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. Abacus, London.

Tecnopolitica (2019). Publications list: https://tecnopolitica.net/es/tecnoteca?f%5B0%5D=type%3Aarticle

Wylie, Christopher (2018). “Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: ‘We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=72&v=FXdYSQ6nu-M
Linked to article: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump