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Author: Matt Miller

SITUATING SMART MOBS IN THE AVANT-GARDE POLITICS OF 1968 by Matt Miller

Introduction

The use of SMS for political action is only in its infancy, but has already enabled citizens to topple governments and tip elections from Manila to Madrid. The electoral power of texting could be an early indicator of future social upheaval: whenever people gain the power to organize collective action on new scales, in new places, at new tempos, with groups they had not been able to organize before, societies and civilizations change. (Rheingold 2004d).

In 1999, Howard Rheingold started noticing people using mobile technology in new and unexpected ways. Rheingold published Smart Mobs in 2001; an influential, canonical text that cited a number of technologically assisted political outbreaks. The book chronicles the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, where mobile-phone equipped protestors used swarming tactics to out-manoeuvre the security forces, and the “People Power II” demonstrations in Manila during 2000 that gave birth to “Generation TXT” and signaled the end of the Estrada regime. Rheingold accompanied groups of Tokyo teenagers as they converged in public places and operated beyond the surveillance of parents, using text messaging to coordinate their actions. He joined ad-hoc social networks in Helsinki who interacted simultaneously in physical places, virtual communities and “mobile virtual communities.�?

Having previously chronicled his adventures in computer-simulated worlds with the publication of Virtual Reality in 1991, and having written about the political and cultural implications of online social networks in The Virtual Community in 1993, Rheingold now documents what he refers to as a “the next social revolution�?. From swarms of techno-savvy teenagers in urban Asia to citizen revolts in the “Battle of Seattle�?, smart mobs use the peer-to-peer networks of mobile communication and the Internet to organize new forms of collective action. “Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.” (Rheingold 2002: xviii).

For Rheingold, the smart mob represents a new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication and location. By allowing people to coordinate their actions in new ways and situations, mobile communication enables new vistas of cooperation to emerge that overcome the constraints of urban planning and threaten the forces of oligarchy. The “social software�? that allows online communities to regulate themselves through flat governance and distributed power also animates the smart mob. Like the online social network of the hacker community, the power of the smart mob lies in its adaptive ability to self-organise and “swarm�?, creating autonomous spaces of resistance that are unpredictable and free from coercive authority.

As the decentralized, non-hierarchical structure of the Net spills out into real space, Rheingold’s virtual communities become “mobile virtual communities�? and virtual reality becomes “augmented reality�?. The “grassroots groupminds�? of Rheingold’s virtual communities become the “collective intelligence�? of mobile ad-hoc social networks, an emergent property of the swarming, spatialised network.

Despite the “smart mob�? being posited as an entirely new phenomenon, the rhetoric of the network that was so ubiquitous throughout Rheingold’s previous publications during the 1990s is again emerging as the “newest major social organizational form�? (Rheingold 2002: 163). Rheingold’s continuing belief in the emancipatory potential of new technology and the grassroots power of self-organising social networks is clearly inspired by the radical politics of the 1960s New Left. Just as cyberspace was supposed to realise the anarcho-communist dreams of 1968, now smart mobs are being held up as the final realisation of the electronic agora; a utopia of self-regulating communities, direct democracy and spontaneous revolutions. While the utopian visions of immersive virtual reality and groupminds are replaced with those of augmented reality and wireless collective action, the radical politics underlying these imaginary futures remain unsurprisingly consistent. Rheingold’s vision of spontaneous smart mobs out-maneuvering the regulating forces of oligarchy continues to be informed by the techno-libertarianism of the 1990s and its romanticisation of 1968’s stalled revolution. Rheingold is simply recycling his own New Left-inspired theories of cyberspace in order to analyse mobile space.

The aim of this paper is to situate Rheingold’s theory of smart mobs in the avant-garde politics of 1968. In popularising European New Left ideology for the information age, Rheingold creates an ahistorical and undialectical theory of social change that replaces human agency and class struggle with the rhetoric of technological progress. The imaginary future is one where the peer-to-peer topology of mobile space will give rise to a neo-tribal collective intelligence that will transcend the constraints of urban planning and the regulating forces of oligarchy. The decentralised network is will spontaneously melt the hierarchies of coercive authority and allow civilisations to jump in complexity. Despite smart mobs being grounded in everyday life and real urban space, the myth perpetuated by Rheingold remains one of immaterialism; technology will liberate us from the shackles of modernity, the constraints of urban planning and the trappings of political economy.

The forms of distributed dissent that Rheingold chronicles in Smart Mobs do reawaken the psychogeographic tactics of Situationism and the molecular revolutions of Deleuze and Guattari. In this sense, smart mobs allow us to open up Marxist historical materialism to a long overdue spatiality. But when applying avant-garde theories to new techno-cultural phenomena, we should be careful not to inherit the anti-modernism and underlying vanguardism of the New Left. The smart mob is not an autonomous space with its own rules of construction and transformation outside of history and political economy. It is not a structureless entity or a biological swarm. On the contrary, as the spatial manifestation of the Net’s peer-to-peer modes of production, the smart mob is a new form of collective labour that is in dialectical conflict with the dominant relations of production. In everyday life, people are becoming actively involved in the making of history and geography.

This paper seeks to explore the ideological underpinnings of Howard Rheingold’s smart mob thesis, locating his interpretation of new forms of collective protest in Situationism, anarcho-communism and the invented tradition of anarchism. Ultimately the outcome will be to draw upon the socio-spatial dialectic of Henri Lefebvre in order to develop a historical-spatial materialist theory of the swarming smart mob.

Grassroots Groupminds and the Electronic Agora

Howard Rheingold is recognised as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the social and political implications of new technology. Acclaimed as a leading visionary and futurist of cyberspace and digital culture, Rheingold has traveled the world observing and documenting new cultural movements that have emerged from the PC and Internet revolution. With his books published in several languages, Rheingold’s utopian visions of mind-amplifying machines, immersive virtual realities and self-organising virtual communities have been shared with audiences worldwide. As far back as 1985, with the publication of Tools for Thought, Rheingold was optimistically predicting that new information processing technologies would allow people to create “new kinds of human communities�? or “supercolonies.�? The future of human-computer relations would be one “reflected in the shapes of the imaginal cells of the information culture.�? (Rheingold 1985). For Rheingold, the mind-amplifying machines of the future could potentially lead to the evolution of a new kind of intelligent species; a human-computer symbiosis that would operate beyond the limits of biological intelligence.

As the founding executive editor of HotWired, the successful website launched by Wired magazine in 1994, Rheingold has since made important contributions to the grand narratives of cyberspace that continue to influence today’s discourse on new technology. Rheingold’s Virtual Reality (1991), published during the heady days of optimism about new technology, was one of the first popular books to focus on the imaginary “virtual�? worlds created by head-mounted displays, data gloves and computers. Rheingold was idealistic about the almost Platonic potential of cyberspace and the magical worlds it could create:

VR is shared and objectively present like the physical world, composable like a work of art, and as unlimited and harmless as a dream. When VR becomes widely available, around the turn of the century, it will not be seen as a medium used within physical reality, but rather as an additional reality. VR opens up a new continent of ideas and possibilities. (Rheingold 1991: 154).

As an extensive survey of the institutions and corporations who were developing virtual reality during the early 1990s, Rheingold’s vision was not so much a description of current achievements as it was future ones. The future would be one where the boundaries between humans and machines would vanish and our transcendence beyond bodily and physical constraints would lead to a more egalitarian world of computer-mediated decision-making and collaboration. As human minds intertwined through the networks of the Net, a collective form of consciousness would emerge; what Rheingold referred to as a “grassroots groupmind.�?

In The Virtual Community (1993) Rheingold chronicled his life on the network of the WELL system (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic’ Link), California’s legendary electronic bulletin board. The WELL represented a truly grassroots communications medium, where people would “rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life – a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion.�? (Rheingold 1994: 110). When he participated in the ongoing process of group problem solving online, Rheingold felt as if he was tapping into a “multibrained organism of collective expertise�? (Rheingold 1994: 110). His visions of a citizen-designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network would give rise to an “electronic agora�? of direct democracy and emergent forms of group consciousness. Spontaneous, ad-hoc virtual communities such as that of the WELL would allow citizens to exchange ideas and information freely, and create new forms of collective action free from the regulation of the market or state bureaucracy.

The theme of “collective intelligence�? is one that runs throughout Rheingold’s prolific writing on cyberspace. As an emergent property of the self-organising networks that knit human minds together, grassroots groupminds “grow from the ground up, are self-propagating, and are difficult to eradicate.�? (Rheingold 1994: 131). Borrowing from theories of complexity science, Rheingold postulates that decentralised virtual communities give rise to a higher form of consciousness; a disembodied “superorganism�? that is greater than the sum of its parts. Like the “noosphere�? concept of Tielhard de Chardin, the networked topology of the Net is a vessel for the “body and nervous system of a world consciousness striving to be.�? (Davis 1998: 296). So despite introducing the online WELL community as an authentic social network grounded in everyday physical reality, Rheingold’s utopian quest remains one of gnostic immaterialism and disembodiment.

The idea of collective intelligence is very postmodern: the idea of progress toward some objective ideal is entirely rejected. In keeping with the ahistorical and anti-modern discourse of sixties radical politics, the virtual community is positioned as an immaterial knowledge space where grassroots groupminds are able to determine themselves randomly and chaotically. Progress becomes a process where whatever unfolds is the result of unforced relations between individuals free from hierarchy or coercion. Influenced by the theories of Marshall Mcluhan, Rheingold’s imaginary future is one that combines the rhetoric of technological and social progress with a desire to return to a tribal, pre-industrial society.

According to his techno-romantic narratives of virtual reality and virtual communities, we will rediscover the unity of humankind through the immediacy of electronic communication, unencumbered by the fragmenting and distorting effects of modernity and its social hierarchies. Virtual communities are positioned against the fragmentation of everyday life and the failure of the mass media to realise the goals of a truly civil society: “The political significance of CMC [Computer Mediated Communication] lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalise citizen-based democracy.�? (Rheingold 1994: 14). Self-organising virtual communities will create autonomous spaces that surpass class barriers and the material conditions of history. Social revolution will occur spontaneously as the network of cyberspace melts away the hierarchies of state power. However, as a recycling of sixties avant-garde politics, Rheingold’s technological utopia also inherits the underlying Leninist ideology of the New Left. The transformation of modern industrialised society will only be brought about by a cultural vanguard, a small band of intellectuals capable of foreseeing the future and leading mass society towards an immanent revolution. Rheingold unintentionally creates a form of digital elitism or aristocratic anarchism for the information age.

Rheingold, along with several other cyber-gurus of the 1990s, are part of the baby boomer generation who took part in, or were at least influenced by the hippy counter culture of the 1960s. Rheingold himself draws attention to the fact that the PC industry was “created by young iconoclasts who had seen the LSD revolution fizzle, the political revolution fail.�? (Rheingold 1994: 48). Combining political struggle with dreams of cultural revolution, the New Left was a reaction to totalitarian forms of state power and the rigid hierarchies of left-wing political parties. Forms of social contestation, spatial resistance and cultural experimentation were based around a refusal of the disciplinary regimes of material production. According to Hardt and Negri (2001), this avant-garde movement instead valued a “more flexible dynamic of creativity and what might be considered more ‘immaterial’ forms of production�? (Hardt and Negri 2001: 274). Rejecting hierarchy and bureaucracy in favour of more collective forms of organisation and communication, these radical hippies believed that the inherent democratic power of technology would help realise their libertarian utopias.

Identifying the era of preliterate culture as a golden age in which humankind was one with itself and with nature, Marshall Mcluhan proclaimed that advanced technologies would return us to a tribal, unitary existence where people would enjoy immediate engagement with one another and the world around them. The “global village�? would erode the logical, linear and sequential worldview of modernity and conjure up the collective psyche of pre-modern cultures. “Our new electric culture provides our lives again with a tribal base.” (Mcluhan 1962: 32). When Wired magazine launched in 1993, it declared Marshall Mcluhan as its patron saint. The utopian quest for Howard Rheingold and his contemporaries championed a return to a mode of existence in which humanity and nature were reunited, when people were one with each other and their technologies. Cyberspace was posited as an autonomous space of freedom where we would lift anchor from the constraints of the material world. However, this technology-assisted liberation was prefigured in the tribal past. The reactionary anti-modernism of the New Left was being recycled for the information age.

“The new age will be one in which the physical is transcended by information, providing opportunities for participation in a unity beyond the multiplicity and individuation of the material realm.�? (Coyne 1999: 47). Just as the New Left romanticised forms of nineteenth century anarchism in order to invent an entirely new form of politics, now American intellectuals such as Howard Rheingold recycle New Left theory and its post-modern rejection of modernity’s grand narratives. Mixing in a few doses of hippy ideology and new age mysticism, Rheingold and his fellow cyberspace luminaries reinvent a form of neo-tribal collectivism that relies on pseudo-scientific theories of complex systems. Revolutionary consciousness will “emerge�? from self-organised forms of collective action. When class distinctions, physical appearances and social hierarchies become immaterial in cyberspace, we will progress spontaneously from one sphere of existence from another. This new sphere will be a literal transcendence through immersion in virtual space and virtual communities, a “consensual hallucination�? and participation in an ideal, tribal unity. Rheingold postulates in his latest publication that “human society is an adaptive collective organism and that social evolution parallels and unfolds according to the same dynamics as biological evolution.” (Rheingold 2002: 180). Flirting with complexity theory and remixing anarcho-communism, Rheingold’s dream is of a networked spatiality that evades rather than engages with the forces of state bureaucracy and market capitalism; a collective intelligence or ‘grassroots groupmind’ that will return us to a tribal mode of existence.

Rheingold’s technoromantic narrative of cyberspace is noble in its quest to preserve the freedom of the Net, maintain the spirit of its grassroots origins and reconstruct the Enlightenment dream of an active and informed citizenry. However, the central trope of his thesis on virtual reality and virtual communities remains one of dematerialisation. His self-organising theories of society and virtual communities replace human agency with the blind forces of the market and technological progress.

The desire to transcend material life and the trappings of modernity with new forms of collective action and self-organisation is an imaginary future reinforced by Rheingold’s theory of “smart mobs.�? The New Left’s agenda to dematerialise historical materialism in favour of spatial tactics of resistance manifests itself again in theories of mobile space. Despite utopias of virtual communities being replaced with mobile virtual communities, the reactionary anti-modernism and new age spiritualism of 1990s cyber-discourse continues apace.

Swarming Smart Mobs and the Battle of Seattle

Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before. (Rheingold 2002: xviii)

Smart mobs use mobile technology and computer networks to organise new forms of collective action, from swarms of techno-savvy teenagers in Tokyo to citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle. Just as the Net amplified human cooperation in the form of virtual communities, now ‘many-to-many’ mobile communications are empowering cooperative bands of citizens in urban space. As the Internet moves beyond the desktop and its peer-to-peer structure becomes spatialised, everyone can become part of a mobile virtual community or an ad-hoc social network. For Howard Rheingold, these new forms of social, spatial cooperation allow civilisations to change and the lives of citizens to improve.

In November 1999, several autonomous but inter-networked groups of anti-globalisation protestors demonstrating at the meeting of the World Trade Organisation, used mobile communication to win what has become popularly known as the “Battle of Seattle.�? In what Rheingold refers to as a “deliberate and tactically focused use of wireless communications and mobile social networks in urban political conflict�? (Rheingold 2002: 160), a broad coalition of demonstrators converged in Seattle’s streets to create one of the first reported “smart mobs.�? An ad-hoc alliance was formed by a wide range of affinity groups who coordinated their actions in the city around a shared objective; to disrupt the meeting of the WTO. Using mobile phones, laptop computers and police scanners, the protestors were able to form a dynamic, peer-to-peer communications network that operated beyond the surveillance of the security forces and floated above the tear gas.

For Rheingold, what was revolutionary about the Seattle smart mob was the “swarming�? strategy adopted by the demonstrators to physically out-manoeuvre the police forces. Individual affinity groups, small units or “nodes�? in the larger network of the smart mob, would remain dispersed throughout the city streets until mobile communications drew them to converge on specific locations.

Swarming is seemingly amorphous, but it is a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best–perhaps it will only work–if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units… (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2000: vii).

Swarming, for the purposes of protesting, can be thought of as the technique of quickly massing a large number of individuals from all directions onto a single position in order to attain a specific goal. According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, there are essentially four phases to a swarming strategy: locate target, converge, attack and disperse. These phases can only work if they are synchronised between a diversity of seemingly disconnected individuals. Therefore there must be a layer of instantaneous communication between these nodes in the network.

The smartness of the mob is based on in its ability to repeatedly swarm and disperse from all directions simultaneously; a non-hierarchical form of collective action that would not have been possible without a decentralised communication network. For Rheingold then, the smart mob represents a spatialisation of the of the virtual community’s organisational model; a “many-to-many�?, self-organising social network. The smart mob is the ultimate peer-to-peer system, but just like Rheingold’s romantic visions of cyberspace, the network gives rise to emergent properties:

When it comes to hives and swarms, the emergent capabilities of decentralised self-organisation can be surprisingly intelligent. What happens when the individuals in a tightly coordinated group are more highly intelligent creatures rather than simpler organisms like insects or birds? How do humans exhibit emergent behaviour? (Rheingold 2002: 177).

Adopting the same pseudo-scientific rhetoric that Kevin Kelly uncritically applies to the “free market�? and biological and technological networks in Out of Control (1994), Rheingold refers to the smart mob as a “superorganism�?; a biological entity that is self-regulating, autonomous and peer-to-peer. Recycling his own “groupmind�? concept for an analysis of mobile space, Rheingold postulates (albeit tentatively) that the smart mob can give rise to a hive-mind or group consciousness: “Connected and communicating in the right ways, populations of humans can exhibit a kind of ‘collective intelligence.�? (Rheingold 2002: 179).

Recycling the extreme spatial politics of anarcho-communism, and mixing in some Californian new age spiritualism, Rheingold’s theory of mobile space carries forward the idea that technology will create an electronic agora of direct democracy. The smart mob is an autonomous space of collective action that operates outside of the regulating forces of coercive authority. Non-hierarchical virtual communities are able to regulate and coordinate themselves in urban settings; and from these local interactions a revolutionary consciousness and “collective intelligence�? will emerge. The connectivity of the network creates the collectivity of the swarm.

Spontaneous Revolution and Spatial Resistance

The concept of a self organising, spatial network that operates autonomously from the oppressive forces of state power and the historical processes of modernity is clearly inspired by the anarcho-communism of the New Left. Narratives of mobile space that position smart mobs as the decentralised subversion of the urban landscape reawaken the spatial anarchism of theorists such as Guy Debord and Félix Guattari. Since 1968, the importance of space that was so essential to nineteenth century anarchism has been gradually reasserted in theories of radical subjectivity. The end result of this process culminates in the complete rejection of historical materialism by a reactionary postmodernism that favours extreme spatiality and direct action; a form of avant-garde politics that is autonomous from the class essentialism and economic determinism of the Marxist project. Social change will be brought about by the reconfiguration of spatial relations.

For most leftist intellectuals and thinkers, May 1968 represented a break in the traditions of revolution. For some anarcho-communists, the protests in the streets of Paris signified that an oppositional position towards the existing order was possible beyond the boundaries of traditional Marxism. New groups and forces took part in the protest movement that were not traditionally associated with the proletariat, suggesting that orthodox Marxism was rather inadequate in accounting for the new aspirations of immediate and spontaneous revolution. For the Situationist International, 1968 represented the realisation of direct democracy and a playful rejection of serious, top-down revolution. Everyone would participate in the act of negation against the commodifying forces of the spectacle. However, when the student demonstrations and general strike failed to coalesce into a revolutionary force, a criticism of historical materialism and economic determinism emerged that rejected the grand narratives of modernity entirely.

Certain postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers that emerged from the European New Left movement strongly condemned the authoritarian tendencies of Marxist-Leninism, the repressive roles played by the various ruling Communist parties and the dogmatic glorification of the historical, emancipatory role of the proletariat. For these avant-garde theorists, Marxism was conceptually limited by its class essentialism and economic determinism, “which had the effect of reducing the political to a site that was strictly determined by the capitalist economy and the dialectical emergence of what was seen as the universal emancipative subject.�? (Newman 2003). In other words, Marxism was criticised for its inability to understand the political as a fully autonomous and contingent field in its own right. The catastrophic failure of the Leninist project in its culmination of centralised state power showed that it had neglected the importance of the political domain. In its subordination of politics to an analysis of capitalism, Marxism simply had no theoretical purchase on forms of political struggle that were not based on class or centred around economic issues.

Turning instead to nineteenth century anarchist philosophy in order to give their theories some historical validity, the New Left romanticised the idea of a spontaneous, undialectical revolution. A Marxist belief in history was associated with political authority, since change over time appealed to a need for a centralised body to regulate the process of social change. In opposition to materialist conceptions of history, the anarcho-communists appealed to the immediacy of bottom-up spatial resistance rather than top-down, historical revolution. In contrast to classical revolutionary thought which focused on ways to seize state power, anarcho-communism would spontaneously overcome the state and economic forces completely. The revolutionary moment would only occur spontaneously as an expression of the people’s will. The view of history as the unfolding of a fundamental law was rejected in favour of one that emphasised spatial ruptures, breaks and discontinuities.

However, underlying the New Left’s surface rejection of Marxist-Leninism and the authoritarianism of historical revolution was a continuing belief in cultural vanguardism. An immanent, spatial revolution would only come about via the actions of an elite force of avant-garde intellectuals. The anarcho-communists of the sixties, like Lenin before them, believed simultaneously in an all-inclusive direct democracy and the totalitarian rule of a revolutionary dictatorship. This fundamental contradiction of radical politics is once again recycled by contemporary theories of self-organising virtual communities and swarming smart mobs.

The Society of the Spectacle

In Postmodern Geographies (2003), Edward Soja defines the mid-to-late nineteenth century as the classical era of competitive industrial capitalism, a period in which historicity and spatiality were in approximate balance as sources of emancipatory consciousness. However, after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, “the explicitly spatial critiques, radical and liberal, began to recede behind more powerful Eurocentric assertions of the revolutionary subjectivity of time and history.�? (Soja 2003: 4). According to Soja, the last decades of the nineteenth century can be seen as an era of rising historicism and the parallel submergence of space in critical social thought. Socialist critique began to reconsolidate around the historical materialism of Marx, coinciding with the second modernisation of capitalism and the onset of empire and corporate oligopoly. The nineteenth century obsession with time and history, as Foucault referred to it, continued to dominate social and political discourse throughout the third modernisation of capitalism and the era of Fordism and bureaucratic state-management.

However, in the late 1960s, with the onset of a crisis-induced fourth modernisation, this long-lasting historicism began to change. “Both Western Marxism and critical social science appeared to explode into more heterogeneous fragments, losing much of their separate cohesiveness and centralities.�? (Soja 2003: 4). The radical spatial critiques of anarchism that were hidden for so long behind the revolutionary subjectivity of time and history, began to reassert themselves with the anarcho-communist theories of the New Left. Historical materialism once again became one of the major casualties of the ultra-left’s distrust of modernist grand narratives.

The anarchist appeal to the immediacy of spontaneous revolution and its emphasis on autonomous spatial resistance was evident in the activities of the Situationist International, a political and artistic collective who were heavily involved in the mobilisation of students and workers in Paris, May 1968. Established in 1957, the Situationist International defined modern capitalist society as an organisation of “spectacles�?; frozen moments of history in which it was impossible to experience real life directly or actively engage in the construction of the lived world. For Situationists such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the alienation fundamental to consumer society and capitalist production had permeated all areas of social life, to the extent that people were not only alienated from the goods they produced but also from their own individual experiences and emotions. The alienation of the Fordist assembly line had begun to permeate everyday existence.

Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate. (Debord 2002: 23).

Despite capitalism undergoing a series of transformations since Marx’s mid-nineteenth century critique, Debord proclaimed that the underlying economic structure of capitalist society remained essentially the same. Although the misery of material poverty had diminished to a certain extent, life was still made miserable by the extension of alienated social relations from the workplace into everyday lived experience. “The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonisation of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see – commodities are now all that there is to see…�? (Debord 2002: 29).

As Sadie Plant demonstrates in The Most Radical Gesture (1992), the commodity form places everything in the context of a world organised solely around the perpetuation of the current economic system. The society of the spectacle is one where the illusionistic appearance of “authentic�? life is maintained in order to conceal the reality of its absence. Bombarded with images and fetishised commodities, people can only experience reality second-hand. The spectacle can only be observed at a distance, from where it appears glamorous and desirable.

The promises of self-fulfilment and expression, pleasure and independence which adorn every billboard are realisable only through consumption, and the only possible relation to the social world and one’s own life is that of the observer, the contemplative and passive spectator. (Plant 1992: 10).

According to Plant, the concept of the spectacle essentially conveyed the sense in which individuals, alienated by the capitalist relations of production, were condemned to lives spent passively watching themselves.

Rejecting all forms of mediation and representation, the Situationists demanded political autonomy for themselves and the proletariat in whose hands the possibility of social revolution would be realised. Contrary to the belief that the proletariat had collapsed under the weight of consumerism, the extension of commodity relations into everyday life had actually enlarged the revolutionary class.

The proletariat has not been eliminated, and indeed it remains irreducibly present, under the intensified alienation of modern capitalism, in the shape of the vast mass of workers who have lost all power over the use of their own lives and who, once they realise this, must necessarily redefine themselves as the proletariat - as negation at work in the bosom of today’s society. (Debord 2002: 84).

If alienation is both the means and end of the organisation of spectacular society, then those who struggle to assert the negation of their alienation assume the proletariat’s revolutionary role. Revolution in the hands of this enlarged proletariat becomes a spontaneous act of everyday life.

Debord posits that those who produce and reproduce alienated social relations cannot be given consciousness of this alienation by some external power, but must actively realise it themselves. The prospect of either revolutionary organisation or theory representing the working class was quite unthinkable, since such representation is precisely the ground of alienation against which the revolution is effected. The Situationists broke with dialectical leftists who sought to justify control over revolutionary events by prioritizing history and economics. The “revolutionary organisation cannot allow the conditions of division and hierarchy that obtain in the dominant society to be reproduced within itself.�? (Debord 2002: 88).

For the Situationists, the only form of organisation that embodied the autonomous forms of political participation that would overcome the forces of corporate capitalism and state bureaucracy was that of the Soviet workers’ council. Capable of refusing all external mediation and resisting the spectacular relations of capitalism, the self-managed council was envisaged as both the means of social transformation and the basis of post-capitalist social organisation. The formation of general assemblies, strike committees and spontaneous, ad-hoc organisations would allow for maximum participation and subject all forms of hierarchy and mediation to a rigorous critique. Only the principles of autonomous self-management would be capable of negating alienated social relations at every point of the revolutionary struggle.

For Raoul Vaneigem, the only way to organise without lapsing into the hierarchy of the traditional left political party was through the spontaneity of free consciousness: “The only safeguard against authority and rigidity setting in is a playful attitude.�? (Vaneigem 1967). It is important to recognise that Situationism was a radical art school project; an avant-garde movement that represented a playful resistance to more orthodox forms of Marxism. The events in Paris 1968 were significant for the irruption of play, spontaneity and creativity within the political realm. Anarchist strategies, disorienting aesthetics, Dadaist slogans and performances were all put into practice by the Situationists during the Paris upheavals. This would be a cultural, spatial revolution rather than a historical one.

Capitalism circumscribed even the possibilities of subjective expression, so in their challenge to the ubiquity of spectacular relations, the Situationists took the words, meanings and theories of the spectacle and placed them in opposing contexts; an exercise of reappropriation or détournement; “a perspective from which the world was given a fluidity and motion with which the static mediocrity of the spectacle could be negated.” (Plant 1992: 3). The spectacle’s own diversionary tactics could in turn be diverted into revolutionary weapons. Cultural liberation would lead to social revolution.

A crucial and fundamental aspect of the Situationist critique of capitalism and dialectical history was the belief that the capitalist relations of production manifested themselves spatially. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists wrote on issues such as housing, urbanism, traffic regulations, and other geographical structures to argue that revolutionary activity was primarily a matter of the spontaneous rearrangement of spatial configurations. Even the avant-garde tactics of détournment could be seen as the subversion and reappropriation of spatialised, spectacular relations. The desire was to become a “psychogeographer�?, to understand the social and psychological effects of the geographical environment and explore the relationship between the material world and subjective experience. “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar décor.�? (Debord 2002: 121).

Psychogeographic modes of production such as the “dérive�? would cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is conditioned and constructed by spatial relations of power, and explore the playful potentialities of subversion and negation. The dérive would encourage the drifter to break with ingrained patterns of routine and transform the urban landscape into a field of endless paths and remappings. “Like the flâneur, the drifter skirted the old quarters of the city in order to experience the flip side of modernisation.” (Sadler 1999: 56). To dérive or “drift�? was to notice the way in which certain spaces of the city resonate with certain states of mind, and to explore the potential for movement beyond those for which the urban environment had been designed. Dropping their usual motives for movement and action in the city, people would let themselves be absorbed by the physical terrain and the random encounters they might find there. Like the act of détournement, the dérive represented the transcendence of the alienated world of the spectacle. Like generations of revolutionaries and avant-garde artists before them, the SI identified the city streets as the space of real, everyday life. If one peeled away the official representation of modernity and urbanism, the authentic life of the city would be discovered underneath. The physical manifestation of the spectacle in urban space did not preclude the possibility of identifying a more authentic world of experience beyond its constraints.

For the Situationists, the Paris Commune of 1871 represented the only realisation of a revolutionary urbanism to date. In its embracing of autonomy, spontaneity and playful uncertainty, nineteenth century anarchism had long sought to unleash unregulated dynamics in the spaces of everyday life, and to build emergent communities out of their confluence. In 1871, the citizens of Paris launched one of the largest urban insurrections of its time, igniting a relatively unplanned revolution against France’s National Government and the Prussian occupation. Dismissing the centralised authority of the government of the Third Republic, the people of Paris “fought to create an emergent social and cultural community as fluid as it was inclusive.�? (Ferrell 2001: 21). What came to be known as the Paris Commune proclaimed its intention to universalise power and property according to the necessities of the moment. The Paris socialists believed that revolution could only be brought to its full development by the spontaneous and continued action of the masses, contrary to the belief of authoritarian communists “that that a social revolution must be decreed and organized either by a dictatorship or by a constituent assembly emerging from a political revolution.�? (Bakunin 1871).

What was most significant about the Paris Commune and so influential to the Situationists was that the Communards of 1871 revolted as much against spatial authority as political authority. In other words, like the “swarming�? tactics of today’s smart mobs, they resisted and repurposed the spatial manifestation of power relations with decentralised forms of organisation. By reclaiming and reinventing the streets of Paris through spontaneous revolt, the revolutionary socialists invented a spatialised and autonomous form of politics. As Jeff Ferrell elaborates in Tearing Down the Streets (2001), citizens of the Paris Commune reinvented the politics of Paris’s public spaces, “rewriting the past and the future by rewiring the cultural spaces of the city.�? (Ferrell 2001: 21). To symbolise their disgust with new, “speedier�? governmental guillotines, and their more general opposition to the death penalty, Communards dragged these servile instruments of domination out into the street and burned them in public rituals. Groups of citizens marginalised by Baron Haussman’s extensive urban redevelopment scheme maintained a passionate sense of place and a fierce allegiance to their old communities, fighting to reclaim these spaces as part of the revolution. “Casting their revolution as a festival of the oppressed, a carnival of insurrectionary pleasure, a community of subverted meaning, the Communards embraced the essential disorder of urban life, and celebrated their own disreputable marginality.�? (Ferrell 2001: 22). The hierarchical relations between the urban centre and periphery would be contested with forms of spatial resistance; tactics that would later inspire the street protests of May 1968.

The Situationists, along with other post-68 intellectuals, romanticised nineteenth century anarchism in order to lend some historical weight to their avant-garde politics. Anarchism to them represented the celebration of decentralisation, self-regulation and voluntary cooperation, features that were so essential to their theory of direct democracy and the implementation of council communism. Anarchist theory posited that social relations would be carried out through free contractual agreements of mutual or equal benefit to all parties involved. For Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “mutualism’�? was the basic cornerstone of anarchy, where reciprocity as a mutual exchange was the fundamental structural principle of society. In direct opposition to this basic principle was the unreciprocal, coercive power of the state and government. Thus in anarchist theory where the sovereignty of the individual is paramount, any forces which appear to enshrine “irrational�? authority are oppressive to individual freedom and should therefore be abolished. All anarchist theory “shares a common concern for the individual and freedom, opposition to the state and a desire to establish a system of voluntary cooperation.�? (Barclay 1996: 19).

Unlike Marxism, which saw political power as deriving from class position, anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin insisted that the state must be seen as the main impediment to socialist revolution, and that it was oppressive no matter what form it took and or which class controlled it. As Bakunin described in The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871), the ultimate aim of the socialists and “revolutionary activists�? was identical; both equally desired the creation of a new social order based on the organisation of collective labour and collective ownership of the tools of production. However;

…the difference is only that the communists imagine they can attain their goal by the development and organization of the political power of the working classes, and chiefly of the proletariat of the cities, aided by bourgeois radicalism. The revolutionary socialists, on the other hand, believe they can succeed only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working classes in city and country, including all men of goodwill from the upper classes who break with their past and wish openly to join them and accept their revolutionary program in full. (Bakunin 1871).

As Bakunin goes on to emphasise, this fundamental difference between “revolutionary socialism�? and the Marxist project leads to a difference in tactics. Whereas the communists believed in the “dictatorship of the proletariat�?, the top-down organisation of worker’s forces in order to seize the political power of the State, the anarchists would only organise “for the purpose of destroying–or, to put it more politely–liquidating the State.�? (Bakunin 1871). Human groups would organise and federalise spontaneously from the bottom-up, of their own accord and true to their own interests, “never following a prearranged plan imposed upon “ignorant” masses by a few “superior” minds.�? (Bakunin 1871).

Exhibiting a playful disregard for the serious politics of revolution and the constraints of historical materialism, anarchism sought to invent an autonomous space of resistance and politics that transcended state power. For the avant-garde comrades of the New Left, the Paris Commune of 1871 represented an inclusive, communal alternative to authority. Revolution did not have to be a theory of the future, but could be an everyday living force that would constantly create new conditions for human growth. The very notion of “direct action�?, so prominent in theories of anarcho-communism and contemporary forms of political protest, emerges directly from the anarchist rejection of governmental politics in favour of physical, spatial intervention and immediate revolution. The swarming tactics of the Seattle smart mob are perfectly in accord with the ideological anarchism of the anti-globalisation movement, “which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimising and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it.�? (Graeber 2002). Bakunin’s “general strike�? theory manifests itself today in theories of mobile space; political smart mobs such as that involved in the Battle of Seattle are essentially about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down party structures, evading and eluding the state rather than engaging directly with it. As a spatialised manifestation of Howard Rheingold’s self-regulating virtual communities, smart mobs are based on principles of autonomy, decentralisation and non-hierarchical spatial resistance.

Flash Mobs and Urban Anarchy

During the summer of 2003, a series of enigmatic, frivolous events starting to occur in cities worldwide. Empowered by email and mobile communication, people began to organise spontaneous mass-gatherings in urban locations for no other purpose than their own self-entertainment. These self-organised events came to be known as “Flash Mobs�? and represented a form of urban performance art. Like the smart mobs witnessed during the Battle of Seattle in 1999, large groups of people would spontaneously materialise in public space, act out some loose instructions, then disperse almost as quickly as they had converged. But unlike the ideological anarchism of the Seattle smart mob, these forms of collective action existed purely as a form of self-organised entertainment.

On June 19, 2003, at precisely 7:27 p.m., approximately 150 individuals gathered in the rug department of Macy’s midtown location in Manhattan, New York. In orderly fashion, they surrounded a $10,000 Persian-style carpet. Claiming to be from a hippy commune in the suburbs, the mob explained to a rather bemused salesman that they were looking for a “love rug�? to play on, and would only make purchases as a group. After discussing the merits and drawbacks of the selected carpet for 10 minutes, the mob dispersed, sans rug.

The crowd of people that gathered spontaneously in New York were participating in the world’s second flash mob, an email and SMS-driven experiment initiated by a man publicly known as Bill. For Bill, this performance art project represented the “virtual community made literal.�? (Bill 2003). While a web page can give you some notion of being part of a group, “it’s very different to then find yourself in a physical space with all those people.�? (Bill 2003). Like Rheingold’s virtual communities, the flash mob is a grass-roots activity; an ad-hoc social network that attempts to operate beyond the surveillance of coercive authority.

The playful subversion of the flash mob was almost Dadaist in its emphasis on humour and frivolity. In one of the largest flash mob events, four hundred people showed up at the Toys R Us store in Times Square, New York. The premise of this particular event was that people would gather to worship a giant animatronic dinosaur that lived on the second floor. People assembled in the store for 10 minutes, falling to their knees in front of the growling beast, moaning and cowering with outstretched hands whenever it roared. “The overall effect was just amazing. The second floor of Toys R Us was literally covered with people. It was one of the most astonishing things I’d ever seen. Basically, we had taken over. For like 10 minutes.�? (Bill 2003).

As the flash mob became a global, albeit short-lived phenomenon, it became increasingly clear that this was a leaderless, self-organising movement. Bill declared, just as the Situationists did in 1968, that he had only organised the detonation. The free explosion would escape him and any other form of control entirely. “The idea is mine, and I write the e-mails, but I don’t think of myself as the leader of the mob,” Bill wrote in an email. “In my mind (the mob) is led by whoever forwards the e-mail around. People make the mob through whoever they know.” (Bill 2003).

Unlike more traditional forms of urban resistance, the flash mob isn’t formed by an established group who decide to stage an event. On the contrary, it is an all-inclusive, ad-hoc happening where the audience become the performance. Like the Situationist dérive, the flash mob is playful, cheap and populist, an artistic activity performed in the everyday space of the city; a form of organised spontaneity. Like the smart mobs identified by Howard Rheingold, flash mobs use peer-to-peer models of communication to create spontaneous, self-organising forms of spatial resistance; subversive tactics that are fundamentally psychogeographic.

If human subjectivity is indeed conditioned by the spatial configurations of capitalist production, then the ad-hoc, decentralised topology of smart mobs and flash mobs can spontaneously reconfigure these spectacular relations. Peer-to-peer forms of mobile communication are liberating in the sense that they allow people to transcend the physical constraints of urban planning and discover more authentic, unmediated experiences.

In Smart Mobs (2002), Rheingold chronicles the civilian-backed coup that overthrew President Joseph Estrada in Manila during January 2001; an event he describes as a “momentous early eruption of smart mob behaviour.�? (Rheingold 2002: 158). Accounts of what has become known as the “People Power II” demonstration indicate that over a million citizens converged on Epifano de los Santas Avenue over the course of four days, largely coordinated and mobilised by text messages. As Rheingold goes on to explain, the demonstrations broke out when the impeachment trial of President Estrada was suddenly ended by senators linked to Estrada. Immediately waves of text messages began to ripple through the city: “Go 2EDSA, Wear blck�?. Within seventy-five minutes of the abrupt halt of the impeachment proceedings, 20,000 people had converged on EDSA, mostly dressed in black. Over four days, over a million people showed up. As a result of these massive nonviolent demonstrations, the military withdrew support from the regime and the Estrada government fell.

In a study of Filipino mobile culture, Professor Vicente Rafael postulates that mobile phones were largely responsible for “calling forth the crowd and organising the flow of its desire, turning it into a resource for the reformation of social order.” (Rafael 2003). The People Power II smart mob embodied the utopia of Manila’s bourgeois middle class: the abolition of social hierarchy and the overcoming of a corrupt state. Bypassing the mainstream broadcasting media, individual mobile phone users themselves became broadcasters; nodes in a wider peer-to-peer network that the state in Manila could not even monitor, let alone regulate. So when the call was made for citizens to mass at EDSA, mobile phone users readily forwarded the messages they received, even as they followed what was asked of them. “Cell phones then were invested not only with the power to surpass crowded conditions and congested surroundings brought about by the state’s inability to order everyday life�? (Rafael 2003).

For Rheingold, the People Power II smart mob is the realisation of the electronic agora, the ultimate New Left fantasy where every citizen becomes a broadcaster to every other citizen via peer-to-peer modes of communication. As virtual communities spill out into real space, the urban landscape is revealed as an endless field of possibilities and random encounters that are so essential to direct democracy.

The mob, whether flash or smart, realises the Situationist model of the self-managed workers council. For the SI, this decentralised form of organisation would be extended electronically as a form of communication between localised meetings of workers. In the “commons�? of the electronic agora, all members of civil society would be free to participate in direct democracy and create their own media away from the forces of state bureaucracy and market capitalism. Capitalist social relations would be contested by everyone who experienced them. Revolution would become an act of everyday life. Just as Howard Rheingold postulated in 1994 that the virtual communities of the Net would help realise this New Left utopia, now mobile virtual communities are being held up as a spatialised manifestation of the digital commons. What is so significant for Howard Rheingold about the flash mob fad is that like online file sharing and multiplayer gaming communities, peer-to-peer media enable people to organise their own entertainment. “The millions of massive multiplayer gamers and the smaller crowds of flash mobbers are both engaged in varieties of self-organized amusement.�? (Rheingold 2004b). Whether they ever share another music file again or organise another flash mob, “tens of millions of people know that a new medium for distributing cultural content has been born.�? (Rheingold 2004b).

Although the flash mobs witnessed in New York during 2003 were not as ideologically political as the smart mobs of Seattle and Manila, both forms of technology-assisted collective action carry a deeper political and cultural value. The smart mob and the flash mob are part of an established tradition of progressive urban politics that seek to reclaim public space. In our contemporary urban landscape, the public sphere with its spatial foundations of direct democracy has become closed. Public spaces of unanticipated interaction and chaotic pleasure are being destroyed by the capitalist spaces of consumption. But as the latest arrangements of spatial authority are established, street activists regularly move to unravel these spatial configurations, liberating occupied territories and opening up the privatised spaces of the city. Critical Mass cyclists, Reclaim the Streets activists, pirate radio broadcasters, skateboarders and graffiti artists all seek to create little autonomous zones of spontaneity that undermine the frameworks of spatial authority. Using DIY media and tactics of ‘direct action’ inspired by the Situationist’s psychogeographic modes of production, these forms of urban anarchy demonstrate a playful disregard for the serious politics of revolution. Instead they invent inclusive, self-regulating communities that favour autonomous, grounded agitation. Their revolution isn’t designed to confront the legal structures of the present “so much as it’s intended to ride around them, to operate outside of them, as activists go about the direct retaking and remaking of public space.�? (Ferrell 2001: 146).

What is so revolutionary about the smart mob is that networked technology allows people to self-organise much more quickly. Whereas Critical Mass bicycle rides in San Francisco used to take weeks to coordinate using more traditional forms of DIY media, they now operate “through loosely linked networks, alerted by mobile phone and email trees, and break up into smaller, tele-coordinated groups when appropriate.�? (Rheingold 2002: 158). The peer-to-peer topology of the smart mob adds a fluidity to the way people move and organise themselves in urban space. Mobile technology allows the mob to promote restlessness, spontaneity and movement in a way that was simply not possible before. But as we have seen, the smart mob is an extension of more traditional forms of urban activism that can be traced back to the Paris Commune and the Situationist movement. It is not a complete break with history or an entirely new phenomenon. In their attempts to liberate themselves from the constraints of urban planning and its spatial relations of power, smart mobbers and flash mobbers create new spaces where human relations can flourish. “In so doing they reinvent essential political dynamics inside the spaces of everyday life�?. (Ferrell 2001: 222).

The Nomadic Subversion of Well Mapped Territories

Although the Situationist International favoured the immediacy of spontaneous, spatial resistance over the more authoritarian processes of traditional left politics, a faith in the emancipatory role of the proletariat remained. Most importantly, what distinguished Situationism from the more extreme forms of anarcho-communism that would eventually supersede it, was a continuing belief in historical materialism and the creativity of human labour. Despite its playful, semi-anarchic resistance to more orthodox and totalitarian forms of Marxism, the Situationist project actually reinforced Marxist concepts of history and class struggle. Socialism and Communism might have become less sophisticated, but the idea that class struggle under the sophistication of capitalism had somehow disappeared was considered naïve at best.

For Guy Debord, the tensions and contradictions between the forces and relations of production remained the essential antagonism of capitalist society. The spectacle remained a class society in which the proletariat was reproduced by capitalist social relations. In fact the extension of commodity relations into everyday life had actually enlarged the revolutionary class. This proletarianisation of an increasing part of society produced an extension of the forces that could potentially realise and surpass the existing relations of production.

The essential problem for the Situationists however, was that the crisis of capitalism had always been averted due to its ability to contain, rather than produce class conflict and economic crisis. “Cultural and ideological institutions exerted an unprecedented stranglehold on working-class consciousness, propagating a world view in which capitalism appears as the only possible system of social and economic relations.�? (Plant 1992: 14). The superstructure of capitalist society had been consistently able to resist changes in the productive and economic base. The solution to this hegemonic condition, then, was to negate spectacular relations with new forces of production that emphasised spontaneous revolt and the immediacy of spatial tactics. If the capitalist and bureaucratic spectacle had no fixed form, then neither would its resistance. The grassroots power and guerilla tactics of the self-organised workers council would be the complete antithesis of party discipline and centralisation. The emphasis for the Situationists remained, however, on human agency and the power of productive labour. A revolutionary self-consciousness and more authentic life would emerge from the freedom of spontaneity, play and creativity.

Although the Situationist tactics of imaginative subversion and spatial resistance posed an immediate challenge to the historical processes and hierarchical structures of the old left, even these strategies were rejected by the postmodern intellectual discourse that followed the failure of 1968’s revolutionary moment. For the Situationists the spectacle was an ideological unity; an ahistorical moment that illusionistically appeared to have no underlying realities to conceal. The fragmentation of consciousness and the aimlessness of modern society was actually the result of a society ordered on the principles of commodity production and consumption. The spectacle and its encoded relations of capitalist production could therefore be demystified and negated by a radical subjectivity. Opposing all forms of mediation and organising into cells of direct democracy would reveal a more authentic life beyond the relations of capitalism and bureaucracy.

For postmodernism however, the demands made by the Situationists and the events of May 1968 were impossible. The utopia of unalienated expression and unmediated experience was a completely misguided fantasy. Alienation was not a problem peculiar to capitalism, and the search for authenticity beyond the spectacle was a futile attempt to uncover a “hopeless nostalgia for a unity which never existed in the first place.�? (Plant 1992: 6). In the postmodern imaginary, alienation is everywhere and power is impossible to seize. Human subjectivity is trapped within a network of mediated discourse that is inescapable, where desires and experiences are no more authentic than those of spectacular relations. That capitalism will be surpassed by a revolutionary proletariat is not a historical inevitability, and any attempt to arrive at a totalising theory of the revolutionary moment is itself an act of oppression. In their attempts to uncover more immediate forms of expression and more authentic experience, revolutionaries only serve to perpetuate the social myth of a final resolution; a grand narrative that inevitably distracts our attention from the immediacy of the here and now. For both Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, there is no “self�? that can achieve knowledge and realisation in the world, and no subjectivity capable of acting on the world in order to transform it. Neither is there a world “out there�? to be transformed: history is a series of discontinuous struggles in a diversity of areas of social life. For Foucault, the dialectic does not liberate differences but instead guarantees that they can always be recaptured. Postmodernism then, represents a wholesale rejection of the grand narratives of modernity and the Marxist narrative of emancipation.

Breaking with traditional left politics and the entire concept of Enlightenment progress, the radical anarcho-communism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari was both anti-state and anti-capitalist. For these two post-structuralists, the forces of state bureaucracy and market capitalism represented “territorialisations” from which oppressed nomads would flee, forming “rhizomatic” tribes autonomous from the “machinic assemblages” of language and power. Rather than attempting to seize the state as part of a historical process of revolution, nomads would evade forms of hierarchical control completely. This extreme New Left theory represented a revolution against the whole concept of economic progress and modernity. Any faith in the teleological progress of modes of production and the relations between economic base and political superstructure was entirely rejected.

History for Deleuze and Guattari was associated with the triumph of States. In A Thousand Plateaus (1999), they immediately declare that their project will not be a history: “History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 23). Rather than history being understood as the unfolding of a rational logic or essential truth, as in the dialectic for example, it is seen from a Deleuzian perspective as a series of haphazard accidents and ruptures without origin or purpose. History becomes a series of antagonisms and multiplicities, rather than a fundamental law or universal logic. “Life is not just the progression of ordered sequences from some already given set of possibilities. Each branching out of difference creates the expansion of possibility, so the ‘end’ of life is not given, there is no goal towards which life is striving.�? (Colebrook 2002: 57). There is however, an internal or effective striving in life: to enhance its power and maximise what it can do. But this is achieved not by all events leading up to a single point, but by the creation of ever divergent paths, creating more and more “lines�? of becoming. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the production of “lines of flight�?, where mutations and differences produce not just the progression of history but disruptions, breaks and new beginnings.

Nourished by complexity science, the Deleuzian concept of history and society is one of a nonlinear system, a chaotic strange attractor or “multiplicity�? with its own decentralised spatial logic. As with any complex system, increasing the information flow can lead to a sporadic and spontaneous transformation. Deleuze and Guattari’s pseudo-scientific rhetoric of chaos theory marks them as spontaneous revolutionaries. For them, the transition from linear order to nonlinear chaos is clearly a model for non-dialectical revolution; a concept that is recycled by Rheingold when he asserts that society is an “organism�? and that the smart mob is a “swarm.�?

“Becomings�? are much more important than history in A Thousand Plateaus; history amounts only to a set of preconditions that one leaves behind in order to “become�?, that is, to create something new. The events of May 1968 represented a demonstration, an irruption, of becoming in its purest state. As Deleuze explains in Negotiations (1995), the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s own revolutionary becoming are two entirely different things. “Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.�? (Deleuze 1995: 171). Revolution, like the one advocated by Situationism and forms of nineteenth-century anarchism can be “immanent�?, existing in the here-and-now rather than as some far off, distant future. Marxist theory is apparently incapable of grasping the pure intensity of revolt, the true moments of existence and immediacy. Experience for Deleuze and Guattari, cannot be grounded on the subject, culture or language. There is just an “immanent�? flow of experience from which distinct beings, such as human subjects, are formed. Western thought has tended to take one of these beings as the ground for all experience; this is the illusion of transcendence. “When you invoke something transcendent you arrest movement, introducing interpretations instead of experimenting.�? (Deleuze 1995: 146). According to Deleuze and Guattari we must detect and nourish not revolution but a state of “becoming-revolutionary�? amongst people.

Revolutionary struggles therefore must break away from the dominant historical models, rejecting the concept of a unified proletariat or class struggle. Revolutions instead become “molecular�?; configurations of desires rather than solidarities between people or social groups. Impossible to locate on fixed coordinates, “they produce their own axes of reference, establish underground, transversal connections among themselves, and thus undermine older relationships to production, society, the family, the body, sex, the cosmos.�? (Plant 1992: 124). The molecular struggle then, is an autonomous space of resistance that exists on “the edge of chaos�?, maintaining a temporary unity without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organisations of the party or state apparatus. It asserts the multiplicity of desires, ad-hoc social groups and forms of expression that have no place in existing society. The political domain can no longer be seen as determined by economic and historical forces. Instead it is posited by Deleuze and Guattari as a largely autonomous sphere with its own contingent logic, a “micro-politics of desire.�?

Edward Soja argues that the primary characteristic of postmodernism is its replacement of historical with spatial concepts. The passage to postmodernity in the late 1960s revolved around the idea that it is now space more than time that hides things from us, “that the demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era.�? (Soja 2003: 61). As we have seen, the Situationists posited that the human subject had become conditioned by the spatial relations of the spectacle, and that in turn these same relations could be reconfigured with spontaneous acts of resistance and grassroots organisation. Deleuze and Guattari however, extended these radical politics much further with the wholesale rejection of history in favour of an extreme spatiality.

“Nomads�? are excluded from history, but transmute and reappear in unexpected forms in the lines of flight from some social field. They represent an unidentifiable class, minorities that represent the refusal of state hierarchy. Their disruptive power derives from their elusiveness and refusal of fixed coordinates. Nomads have territories; following customary paths and going from one point to another. But the emphasis for Deleuze and Guattari is on trajectories between these points; the “in-between�? enjoys an autonomy and a direction of its own. In place of history then is geography: “It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have geography.�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 393).

Nomads are able to evade the territorialised control of State apparatus by forming “rhizomatic�? topologies; a concept borrowed from Situationist models of council communism and direct democracy. Rhizomes are “flat�? in that they do not take commands from above but rather from within, from all points rather than from a permanent leader. “Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 7). The rhizome then, is a swarm, a fluid topology or living network that is constantly in flux and reconfiguring itself. Organising themselves into decentred collective assemblages, nomads are in direct opposition to the sedentary and static spaces of state power.

In their discussion of smooth and striated space, Deleuze and Guattari associate these two spatial arrangements with two systems: one that is state-oriented and static, the other nomadic and fluid. Striation allows for the central organising of state functioning; it is the coercive space of Cartesian grids and established territories. In contrast, the smooth space of the rhizome or “Nomadic War Machine�? sets up a system of continuous movement and deterritorialisation. Lines become vectors rather than units of measurement. “In striated space, one closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one ‘distributes’ oneself in an open space, according to the frequencies and in the course of one’s crossing…�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 481). To be a nomad is to encounter the regions and borders of striated space as amorphous and permeable. Allocative principles of “land�? are deterritorialised, giving way to distributive, smooth fields with multiple trajectories. Spaces constantly move, flow and reproduce themselves.

In the Deleuzian universe everything takes on a spatial dimension, with its own geography, cartography or diagram. Life and time become a multiplicity of layers: genetic, chemical, geological and cultural events that all produce different strata or “plateaus.�? For Deleuze there are no fixed structures that order existence; rather, life itself is an open and creative system of proliferating connections.

Revolution within this ecology is a moment of spontaneity and intensity; a “nomadic subversion of well-mapped territories.�? The Nomadic War Machine for Deleuze represents “a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary moments…�? (Deleuze 1995: 172). Society becomes an “autopoietic�? organism, an immanent webwork that is in constant oscillation between order and its own subversion. Any form of organisation, including the apparatus of the state and capitalism, is subject to constant interruption of its own components. Thus “the very conditions that make the State or the World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines.�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 422). Deleuze and Guattari define society not by its dialectical contradictions, but by its “multiple lines of flight.�? The nomadic war machine has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, “the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space.�? (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 422).

The Network, Swarm and Multitude

From a Deleuzian perspective, the smart mob is the ultimate realisation of the nomadic war machine. Its rhizomatic structure represents the complete antithesis of more hierarchical forms of political organisation. Like Howard Rheingold’s virtual community, the smart mob is a “swarm�?; a living network of local interactions that is in a constant state of becoming. As opposed to the allocative urban spaces of capitalism and the state, the distributive, fluid topology of the smart mob introduces nomadic vectors into the space of the city. Striated space gives way to a smooth field; a space of “deterritorialization” in which points “are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine…” (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 380).

To be a member of a smart mob is to think nomadically, to use your mobility to avoid the “territorialised�? authority of the State. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of molecular struggle, distributed forms of dissent such as those witnessed in Seattle and Manila gain their power from their refusal of fixed coordinates. The strength of the smart mob lies with its ability to constantly out-manoeuvre the forces that seek to control and regulate it. Rather than engage with the forces of the state and the historical processes of revolution, this subversive collective assemblage prefers to operate autonomously from the centralising tendencies of authoritarian power. Picking up from where the New Left struggles of 1968 left of, smart mobs are mini-revolutions; eruptions of chaos and complexity that perform nomadic smoothings of striated space. Revolution in the plane of immanence becomes an “act of will�?, the spontaneous reconfiguration of spatial relations.

Hakim Bey’s concept of a “Temporary Autonomous Zone�?, like Howard Rheingold’s swarming smart mob, is an insurrectionary uprising; a guerrilla operation that liberates space then dissolves to reform elsewhere before the state can crush it. Recycling Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine, Bey postulates that the TAZ recolonises space without being noticed and moves on before the map can be readjusted. Like temporary autonomous zones, smart mobs represent the unfolding of chaotic “fractal dimensions�? within the territorialised spaces of control and consumption. The multiple lines of flight that characterise the smart mob and the TAZ give rise to emergent forms of “collective intelligence�?, or what Hakim Bey refers to as a “higher state of consciousness.�?

This is a temporary, non-dialectical revolution that is in direct opposition to the concept of Hegelian progress. “History says the Revolution attains ‘permanence,’ or at least duration, while the uprising is ‘temporary.’ In this sense an uprising is like a ‘peak experience’ as opposed to the standard of ‘ordinary’ consciousness and experience.�? (Bey 1991). The TAZ is an uprising that springs up and out of time, and violates the law of history. If then, the State is history, then “the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic.�? (Bey 1991). To reject the historical processes of revolution in favour of a temporary, spatial remapping is to reject the state and any form of top-down, hierarchical organisation.

Howard Rheingold’s smart mob, like Hakim Bey’s TAZ, is therefore an anarchist dream of free culture and a popularisation of Deleuzian rhetoric. The utopia is one in which political systems will spontaneously decay, giving way to the decentralised distribution of anarchist liberated zones. The rhizomatic topology of peer-to-peer networks, whether “virtual�? or “mobile�? will spontaneously melt the hierarchies of the State and Market into a direct democracy and tribal gift economy. Spaces will be liberated from the forces of consumption and bureaucracy; a culture of collective transformation and revolutionary consciousness will emerge from the network. As communication technologies lower the threshold for collective action, new communities will come into existence that are able to govern through mutual cooperation rather than coercive authority.

The “social software�? of the smart mob is the hacker ethic, with its promotion of open standards and mistrust of authority. For the hacker community of the 1960s, the best way to promote the free exchange of information was to have an open system with no boundaries. “Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers.” (Levy 2001: 7). According to Siva Vaidhyanathan, the collective activities of hacking, open-source software development and peer-to-peer file sharing are all forms of “information anarchy.�? For Vaidhyanathan, culture is naturally anarchistic. It grows up from common interactions and shared experiences. Whereas information anarchists believe that culture should flow freely with minimal impediments, the forces of oligarchy “favor a top-down approach to culture with massive intervention from powerful institutions such as the state, corporations, universities or museums.�? (Vaidhyanathan 2004: 83). Information anarchy, with its emphasis on openness, peer review and communal responsibility is in continuous conflict with forms of information oligarchy that seek to control and regulate it.

For Rheingold the smart mob is the spatial manifestation of the Net’s information anarchy. Self-organising communities of urban activists use swarming tactics to out-manoeuvre the territorialising powers of oligarchy and to reclaim public space. Like any complex system, the individual nodes or “singularities�? within the smart mob depend on a free flow of information to maintain their fluid topology and continual reorganisation. The collectivity of the swarm is determined by the connectivity of the network. For a culture that is naturally anarchistic, peer-to-peer communication technologies are inherently emancipatory.

Networks, whether technological, biological or social, are fundamentally spatial phenomena, a map of fixed nodes and links. But like the rhizomatic topology of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine, the smart mob in a constant state of becoming: “Networks are always living networks.�? (Thacker 2004). The swarm then is an emergent property of the network, a fluid topology in which the relationship between nodes and links undergoes constant change in response to environmental conditions and feedback. Like a complex organism, the behaviour of the smart mob is at the intersection of the individual, group and environment. The locale of agency is not identifiable; rather “it emerges out of the interactions within groups, between individuals, and in response to environmental constraints.�? (Thacker 2004). The swarm intelligence or “hive mind�? is a global pattern that emerges from these localised interactions.

As witnessed during the Battle of Seattle, networks and swarms coexist. On one level there were the self-organised affinity groups of protestors, who converged and dispersed at particular physical locations. Then there was the layer of networked mobile communication that enabled the protestors to coordinate their actions. What Hardt and Negri refer to as “the democratic network�? of cyberspace, with its decentralised grassroots organising, is now being realised in urban space: “The development of cellular telephony and portable computers, unmooring in an even more radical way the communicating points in the network, has intensified the process of deterritorialisation.�? (Hardt and Negri 2001: 299).

Whether smart mobs are consciously political or not, their ideology is the swarm. This form of self-organisation is all about creating horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, corporations or political parties. In a certain respect, the medium of the smart mob is the message. But the smart mob’s structure is not simply the result of peer-to-peer communication. As with the Situationist spatial tactics and the forms of urban anarchy it inspired, the smart mob represents the radical reclaiming of the commons from the existing relations of power. “As our communal spaces—town squares, streets, schools, farms, plants—are displaced by the ballooning marketplace, a spirit of resistance is taking hold around the world. People are reclaiming bits of nature and of culture, and saying ‘this is going to be public space.�? (Klein 2001). Like the Situationists before them, smart mobbers and flash mobbers are working against forces whose common thread can be broadly described as the privatisation and commodification of everyday life.

The swarming smart mob is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, but it is a heterogeneous rather than a unified, homogeneous whole. From a Deleuzian perspective, it represents a political form that is the complete antithesis of a unified proletariat. It is rather a dynamic and highly differentiated collectivity of interacting agents. Swarms are able to regulate themselves on the edge of chaos without lapsing into the bureaucracy of hierarchical organisation. They are a micro-politics of desire or a “multitude�? of singularities. What keeps the multitude from being a permanent unity or lapsing into hierarchy is that it is defined by a set of diverse interests that may only converge in the most temporary, networked ways. For Antonio Negri, the multitude is a self-validating and immanent collective assemblage that spontaneously rises up against the powers of global sovereignty or “empire.�? It is an “ensemble of singularities whose life-tool is the brain and whose productive force consists in co-operation. In other words, if the singularities that constitute the multitude are plural, the manner in which they enter into relations is co-operative.�? (Negri 2004: 225). Unlike the traditional revolutionary party, the multitude creates forms of resistance without mediation or any coherent political consciousness.

As with the multitude, Howard Rheingold’s swarming smart mob is a heterogeneous social force that eludes the homogeneity of empire with collective forms of resistance and revolt. What makes the smart mobs of Seattle and Manila so radical is their unpredictability and indeterminacy – the way that unexpected links and alliances are formed between different affinity groups that would otherwise have little in common. The common emancipatory horizon for these urban protestors may be an opposition to capitalism or dissatisfaction with established political parties. However, this common ground is not accompanied by the old notion of a unified revolutionary project, which denies difference and subordinates all struggles to the central role of the proletariat or the vanguard role of the party. As with the anarcho-communist struggles of 1968, the elaborate connections and linkages within smart mobs bring vast numbers of imaginative people into collective endeavours that threaten the forces of empire.

Every insurrectional event that erupts within the order of the imperial system provokes a shock to the system in its entirety. From this perspective, the institutional frame in which we live is characterised by its radical contingency and precariousness, or really by the unforeseeability of the sequences of events – sequences that are always more brief or more compact temporally and thus ever less controllable. (Hardt and Negri 2001: 60).

The smart mob represents a body politic that is rooted in the avant-garde spatial tactics of the New Left. It is a postmodern geography of networks, swarms and multitudes.

Dematerialising Historical Materialism

As with his previous theories of virtual reality and virtual communities, Howard Rheingold’s smart mob thesis demonstrates a recycling of New Left politics. This in itself does not pose a problem. Smart mobs do reawaken the utopian ideals and revolutionary spatial tactics of 1968. The body politic of the network, swarm and multitude that characterises distributed forms of dissent is rooted in anarcho-communist dreams of direct democracy, molecular struggle and spontaneous revolt. The issue with Rheingold’s technological utopianism is that he does not acknowledge the historical roots of his theory. Instead he positions the smart mob as a complete historical originality; an entirely new cultural form brought about by the emancipatory power of mobile technology. To a certain extent Rheingold can be accused of intellectual laziness. Now that the imaginary futures of virtual space that characterised 1990s cyber-discourse have failed to materialise, he now remixes his own New Left-inspired utopias in order to theorise mobile space.

The ahistoricism and anti-Marxism that was so characteristic of sixties radical politics now allows American intellectuals to conveniently dematerialise historical materialism. Raised on decades of unrelenting anti-communist propaganda, these theorists popularise European New Left politics for the American cold war psyche, creating undialectical theories of spontaneous social change. Stripping New Left discourse of any references to Marxism or Communism, only the pseudo-scientific and anarchistic rhetoric remains in a pristine theory that positions technology, rather than proletarian class struggle, as the driving force of social change. The information age will apparently transcend the historic conflict between capital and its labouring subjects.

Rheingold’s utopia of mobile space is unsurprisingly consistent with his cyberspace fantasy of self-organising, self-regulating virtual communities. Peer-to-peer modes of communication, whether wired or wireless, are the solvent that will spontaneously melt the hierarchies of the state and market into a direct democracy. Class distinctions will become immaterial in the neo-tribal unity of the electronic agora. A culture of individual and collective self-actualisation emerges from the self-organising network of the swarm. Despite smart mobs being grounded in everyday social reality and real urban settings, the trope of Rheingold’s thesis remains one of dematerialisation. Recycling the pseudo-scientific rhetoric of Deleuze and Guattari, and mixing in some Californian new age mysticism for good measure, Rheingold positions the smart mob as a “superorganism.�? A disembodied form of collective intelligence or “grassroots groupmind�? emerges from the rhizomatic, ad-hoc social network. The swarming smart mob is a techno-biological construct, a living network with its own autonomous rules of transformation. Mobile space, like cyberspace, becomes just another version of the noosphere.

Biological metaphors are useful when it comes analysing the swarming behaviour of smart mobs, but they should not be taken too literally. Despite grand claims from Rheingold that society and smart mobs are both organisms subject to sporadic leaps in complexity, we should not use theories of natural evolution to explain socio-cultural phenomena. To do so is undialectical. The problem with the collective intelligence myth is that it reduces human individuals to “simple�? nodes in the network. We are expected to surrender our own smartness to the higher form of consciousness that emerges from the collective swarm. But politics is not self-organised “life.�? The spontaneity of human collective action should not be restricted to the behaviour of an ant colony or a swarm of bees, and it is absurd to compare the ideological underpinnings of thousands of protestors to that of the biological network. To do so ignores the creative powers of human labour and denies us our ability to transform the conditions of our own existence. As we can see from the mobile-empowered mob of Manila’s People Power II demonstrations, collective dissent can in fact topple governments and bring about social change. But if smart mobs are revolutionary as Rheingold proclaims, it is precisely because they represent a form of collective labour, rather than an emergent form of collective intelligence.

The New Left ideal of spontaneous, undialectical revolution is a myth that found favour with forms of techno-libertarianism during the 1990s and continues to influence contemporary discourse on mobile technology. However, what is most significant about the smart mob phenomenon is that the mobs responsible for creating real social change have been those that have chosen to engage with the forces of the state rather than evade it. On March 13th 2004, thousands of Madrid citizens converged on Genova Street, the location of the Partido Popular headquarters, to vent their anger at the government cover-up regarding the bombings of March 11th. Mobilised by a single anonymous text message that spread across the city and then the entire country, spontaneous gatherings of protestors self-organised in cities across Spain within just a few hours. The day after suffering at the hands of the smart mob, the Spanish government was defeated at the polls.

This exercise in mobile-enabled collective protest clearly demonstrated the power of the smart mob phenomenon. Unlike more traditional forms of protest and collective action, people were able to self-organise much more quickly and responsively using mobile technology. Like the electronic agora of the virtual community, the Madrid smart mob represented a challenge to the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media. Empowered by the peer-to-peer topology of SMS and email communication, citizens were able to report the government cover-up to each other free from the established broadcasting channels; every citizen became a broadcaster to every other citizen. However, what was really revolutionary about the Madrid smart mob was that it inspired the disillusioned electorate to go to the polls and vote. This was not an exercise in direct democracy, but representative democracy. The smart mob is therefore not inherently anarchistic. The anarchists of the nineteenth century, unlike the Madrid smart mobbers of the twenty-first century, did not believe in emancipation by the ballot. To vote would be a complete contradiction, an act of weakness and complicity with the corrupt regime of the state. Similarly, the revolution of May ’68 failed partly as a result of the New Left’s inability to organise an election; to vote was considered treason. The smart mob then is not realising the utopia of the electronic agora. It is not necessarily a spatialised form if information anarchy. Ultimately it is creating social change by engaging with the state, rather than eluding it with avant-garde tactics of spatial subversion.

The dialectic that optimistic theories of new technology often fail to grasp is that peer-to-peer models of communication can be used by conservative, hegemonic forces as well as supposedly “anarchistic�? ones. The fact that the most comprehensive study on political swarming has been conducted by the US military-funded RAND Corporation debunks the myth that the network is the complete antithesis of state power. Rheingold may be correct in asserting that the network is the newest form of social organisation, but according to Eugene Thacker, the body politic of the network, swarm and multitude is politically ambivalent. That cyberspace and mobile space display a distributed and decentralised topology is not necessarily an indicator of the inherently anarchistic or democratic principles of information technology. In some contexts yes, the swarm can become politically radical, such as that of the Battle of Seattle. But in others, the same rhizomatic topology can become conservative and reactionary. “Caught between the extremes of technical innovation and political conservatism, new technologies seem to promise social and political change at the same time that they categorically disable it.�? (Thacker 2004). As Thacker goes on to emphasise, complications arise when a combination of technological euphoria and new social practices lead to an over-optimistic view of connectivity as immediately implying a collectivity.

For Rheingold, the many-to-many model of mobile communication will realise a virtual Paris Commune; an agora of reciprocal relations and unregulated flows of information between nodes in the swarming network. However, when Rheingold eulogises about the self-regulating tendencies of smart mobs, he is in fact inheriting the traditions of the New Left with its romanticisation of nineteenth-century anarchism. Anarchism is in fact what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as an “invented tradition�?; in short, a response to a novel situation that takes the form of reference to an older situation. The cultural vanguard of the sixties New Left repurposed nineteenth century forms of anarchism in order to give their radical politics some historical validity, just as Rheingold now performs a similar remixing of anarcho-communism for the same reason. The invention of tradition in both cases has reactionary implications.

The Paris Commune was not the realisation of anarchism; it was in fact an elected working class government. In the sense that it developed spontaneously from collective forms of protest in the city streets, it is relevant to the struggles of Paris ‘68 and Seattle ‘99. But this was not an ahistorical, anarchistic revolution. The Paris Commune emerged from the process of class struggle; a new form of state that was elected by the proletariat. For Marx and Engels, this was the realisation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.�? The old centralised government would have to give way to the self-government of the producers. The working class would run the state, without the need to repress the majority in the interests of a minority. “The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.�? (Marx 1984: 60).

Despite claims to the contrary by Mikhail Bakunin, anarchism was not socialist in any sense of the word. It was instead a justification for an “invisible dictatorship�?; an ideology that eventually found its practical realisation in Stalinism and Maoism. Whereas for Marx the revolution would be the product of a class becoming conscious of itself, for Bakunin the stupid masses would never go beyond the level of instinctive and chaotic rebellion. Therefore anything more than this could only be achieved by a “general staff�? acting behind the scenes. Liberation from capitalism and the forces of state bureaucracy would not come about by an act of self-liberation from below, but through the actions of a tiny minority. An invisible dictatorship would be established by an invisible band of conspirators who would impose their hidden control over the anarchic revolution. Bakunin’s goal was “revolutionary anarchy led on all points by an invisible collective power.�? (Welch 2001).

The reason that anarchism became so popular with intellectuals in the sixties was because it represented an alternative to the totalitarian left-politics of Bolshevism, Leninism and Stalinism. Whereas the utopia of socialism had become identified with these bureaucratic regimes, anarchism represented a truly democratic and radical philosophy. However, what these New Left theorists failed to recognise was that Bakunin had actually inspired the idea of an invisible dictatorship. From its inception anarchism had been a profoundly anti-democratic doctrine. What is most revealing about the New Left’s recycling of anarchist ideology is that it actually aligns itself with the very authoritarian politics that it was supposed to be reacting against. Just as Lenin had argued that the proletariat could only achieve revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a communist vanguard party, so too the avant-garde intellectuals of the sixties imagined themselves as an artistic aristocracy leading the masses. The myth of “structurelessness�? championed by the New Left models of council communism and today’s swarming smart mobs is according to Jo Freeman, “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.�? (Freeman 1970). In this sense, techno-romantic narratives of cyberspace and mobile space come dangerously close to a form of intellectual elitism. Despite the libertarian rhetoric of self-organising communities, the fantasy remains one of a digital intelligentsia leading the unenlightened masses towards the next social revolution. Rheingold’s smart mob thesis recycles the radical spatial politics of anarcho-communism, and in doing so it inherits the rhetoric of tyranny as well as libertarianism.

For American theorists who are today still living the Cold War years after it has ended, the rhetoric of anarchism remains a useful way of avoiding Marxism. When Rheingold, Vaidhyanathan or Bey talk about the anarchistic politics of smart mobs, file-sharing communities and temporary autonomous zones, what they are really talking about is a form of communism. However, in American discourse the mere mention of this word creates an instinctive reaction involving references to mass murder and totalitarianism. Therefore anarchism is used as a synonym for Marxism. In reality, the collective actions of hackers, file-sharers and open-source programmers signify new productive forces that threaten the existing relations of production. This is historical materialism, not anarchism or “libertarian socialism�? as Noam Chomsky refers to it. Just as anarchism didn’t build the Net, neither does it contribute to the formation of smart mobs. Emancipation is realised through the self-mobilisation and self-organisation of the proletariat, not by a cultural vanguard or elitist dictatorship. Hacking, open-source programming and file sharing are everyday activities for the majority, not an avant-garde, anarchistic pursuit for an intellectual minority.

The smart mob then, can be seen as the spatial manifestation of the Net’s new productive forces. The dialectical conflict between new forces of production and the existing relations of production is played out geographically as well as historically, between the smart mob’s liberated zones of spontaneity and the striated space of urban planning. The swarming smart mob is a rhizomatic topology that is in a constant state of becoming. It is a nomadic war machine that subverts the well-mapped territories of capitalism and the state. Its emphasis on spatial resistance and playful spontaneity does represent a challenge to the more serious politics of historical revolution. But like the pyschogeographic modes of production invented by the Situationists, the smart mob does not operate autonomously from the forces of history and political economy. What we are witnessing is another restructuring of modernity, not a return to a pre-modern tribal unity. “The development of the forces of production is the real unconscious history that has built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups (understood as the conditions of survival and their extension): this development has been the basis of all human enterprise.�? (Debord 2002: 27).

When theorising new forms of technology-assisted collective action such as smart mobs, one should only introduce spatiality as a means of understanding the historical and dialectical processes of production. What is required is a materialist ontology of mobile space that opens up Marxism to a long overdue spatiality, but does not completely reject the insights of historical materialism. When people create new forms of collective action in urban space that are in opposition to the dominant relations of production, they are making history as well as space. This is Marx’s “general intellect�? at work, rather than some disembodied form of collective intelligence. The smart mob phenomenon needs to be situated in the historical and spatial processes of modernity.

The Production of Space

Henri Lefebvre was perhaps one of the most influential figures that shaped the course of Marxist theory from the early 1930s to at least the late 1950s. After this period he became one of the leading spatial theorists in Western Marxism and an influential advocate for the reassertion of space into critical social theory. With a deep methodological understanding of the work of Marx and Engels, Lefebvre extended dialectical materialism beyond economics into other areas of social life. For Lefebvre, there were no “red lights�? in Marx that would prevent the application of dialectical materialism “as a rigorous method for revealing the mechanisms of everyday life, our understanding of the environment, passions such as nationalism and even love.�? (Shields 1999: 2).

Exerting a profound influence on members of the Situationist International, Lefebvre presented everyday life as the place where alienation and mystification were played out and concretely inscribed. It was also, therefore, “the place where the struggles to demystify human consciousness, erase alienation, and achieve true liberation would be located.” (Soja 1997: 41).�? For Lefebvre, critical thinking about social life would always begin with an analysis of the contradiction-filled interplay between the development of the forces of production and the dominant social relations of production. However, what was so significant about his theory and so influential to the Situationists was that he made the city an object of Marxist thought. Redirecting historical materialism towards a spatial problematic, Lefebvre enlarged the concept of production from its narrower industrial sense to include the production of works in the built environment. The dialectical conflict between the forces and relations of production would manifest itself spatially.

Historical materialism will be so far extended and borne out by a history so conceived that it will undergo a serious transformation. Its objectivity will be deepened inasmuch as it will come to bear no longer solely upon the production of things and works, and upon the (dual) history of that production, but will reach out to take in space and time and, using nature as its ‘raw material’, broaden the concept of production so as to include the production of space as a process whose product – space – itself embraces both things (goods, objects) and works. (Lefebvre 1991: 128).

Extending the Hegelian idea that everything occurs in time and is inherently historical, Lefebvre argued for a similar materialist ontology of space. “The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself.” (Lefebvre 1991: 129). Failing this spatialisation, these relations would remain in the realm of pure abstraction; that is to say in the realm of representations and hence of ideology:

Any ‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be ‘real’, but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the ‘cultural’ realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of reality. (Lefebvre 1991: 53).

Space for Lefebvre is a historical production, both the medium and outcome of social being. It is not an empty void or setting for historical processes, but rather a social production that is simultaneously mental and material. The relationship between the social and the spatial, what Soja refers to as the “socio-spatial dialectic�?, is an interactive one in which humans produce, and are produced by space.

Lefebvre argues that the production of space is intimately connected with modes of production, and therefore with social arrangements. A change in culture and mode of production reveals a change in the production of space - and vice versa. The passage from one mode of production to another results from contradictions in the social relations of production “which cannot fail to leave their mark on space and indeed to revolutionise it. Since, ex hypothesi, each mode of production has its own particular space, the shift from one mode to another must entail the production of a new space.�? (Lefebvre 1991: 46). From this Lefebvre develops a rich theory of the development of different systems of spatiality in different historical periods. A history of “modes of production of space�? emerges which completes Marx’s vision of successive historical of modes of production in urban and geographical terms. For Lefebvre, a communist revolution must not only change the relationship of the proletariat to the means of production, but also create a new spatialization:

A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realised its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses. (Lefebvre 1991: 54).

Lefebvre grounds his argument in the assertion that socially produced space is where the dominant relations of production are reproduced. They are reproduced in a concretised spatiality that has been “progressively ‘occupied’ by an advancing capitalism, fragmented into parcels, homogenised into discrete commodities, organised into locations of control, and extended to the global scale.�? (Soja 2003: 91). Urbanisation, for Lefebvre, represented the spatialisation of modernity; the strategic planning of everyday life that allowed capitalism to survive and reproduce its essential relations of production. In fact the very survival of capitalism, Lefebvre argued, was built upon the creation of a socially mystified spatiality that was hidden from critical view under the veils of illusion and ideology. The dominance of capitalism in the modern West was directly related to the production and occupation of “abstract space�?; characterised by social fragmentation, homogenisation and hierarchisation. Saturated with private property relations, abstract space is a global productive force that compartmentalises and routinises all human activity. “The dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and power, endeavors to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there.” (Lefebvre 1991: 49).

Class struggle then, must focus upon the vulnerable point: the production of space, the territorial structure of exploitation and domination, and the spatially controlled reproduction of the system as a whole. And the proletariat must include all those who are exploited, dominated, and “peripheralised�? by the imposed spatial organisation of advanced capitalism. Completing the project of historical materialism in urban, spatial terms, Lefebvre highlights the contradictions and instability within abstract space that cause differences to assert themselves. A new space, a “differential space,” emerges in dialectical conflict with the fragmentation and homogeneity of abstract space:

The reproduction of the social relations of production within this space inevitably obeys two tendencies: the dissolution of old relations on one hand and the generation of new relations on the other. Thus, despite - or rather because of - its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space… (Lefebvre 1991: 52).

Subjects and spaces are produced as part of the larger capitalist abstract space, but simultaneously a resistance to that spatial arrangement emerges, complete with separate modes of production. Lefebvre cites Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationist tactics of détournement as representing alternative spatialisations. Also included are underground spatial practices which suggest revolutionary restructurings of institutionalised space, such as that of squatters, illegal aliens and Third World slum dwellers; all of which fashion a spatial presence outside of the norms of the prevailing social spatialisation. Lefebvre differentiates the popular “appropriation�? of space from the “dominated�? space of the nation state, or of the capitalist city. The latter is the site of the hegemonic forces of capital, the former the site of possible emergent spatial revolutions. Abstract space and differential space are in continuous dialectical conflict.

In Lefebvre’s socio-spatial discourse, social and spatial relations are interdependent and dialectically inter-reactive. Social relations of production are both space-forming and space-contingent. Contradictions arise from the duality of space as both a product and producer of social activity. Actual human geography becomes a competitive arena for struggles over social production and reproduction, “for social practices aimed either at the maintenance and reinforcement of existing spatiality or at significant restructuring and/or radical transformation.�? (Soja 2003: 130). New productive forces that challenge the dominant relations of production manifest themselves concretely as spaces of difference. But unlike the molecular struggles of Deleuze and Guattari, the temporary autonomous zones of Hakim Bey, or in fact the swarming smart mobs of Howard Rheingold, these are not ahistorical spatialities. Lefebvre’s intention is not to reject the historical but to open it up to a critical spatialisation. Western Marxism can be spatialised without inducing the aura of anti-history that characterises 1960s anarcho-communism and contemporary techno-romanticism. Lefebvre’s objective, after all, is a politically charged historical geography, a spatio-temporal perspective on society and everyday life, not the resurrection of geographical determinism.

The reassertion of space in critical social theory does not demand an antagonistic subordination of time and history, a facile substitution and replacement. It is instead a call for an appropriate interpretive balance between space, time, and social being, or what may now more explicitly be termed the creation of human geographies, the making of history, and the constitution of society. (Soja 2003: 23).

Lefebvre assigns to space what has so assertively been attached to time in the Marxist tradition: a fundamental materiality. Rather than rejecting wholesale the insights of historical materialism in favour of an extreme spatiality, Lefebvre uses spatiality as a means of understanding the historical processes of modernity. We are historical-social-spatial beings, actively participating in the production of histories, geographies and societies.

The forms of urban protest and distributed dissent witnessed in Seattle, Manila and Madrid are at once both historical and spatial phenomena. The swarming smart mob is revolutionary in the sense that it represents a differential space with its own forces of production. As the spatial manifestation of the Net’s peer-to-peer topology, the smart mob represents a challenge to the dominant relations of production and the oppressive forces of oligarchy. If urbanisation has allowed capitalism to survive and reproduce its relations of production spatially, then the smart mob is in dialectical conflict with this abstract space. The swarm is a spontaneous eruption of non-alienated labour and ad-hoc organisation that aims to demystify the commodification of space. The body politic of the network, swarm and multitude is in direct opposition to capitalism’s tendencies towards homogenisation, fragmentation and hierarchisation. The smart mob then, in the context of Lefebvre’s socio-spatial dialectic, is a differential space that emerges from the crisis of capitalism’s own spatial instability. As Lefebvre proclaims, capitalism will be transcended, but the revolution must not only change the relationship of labourers to the means of production, but also create new spatialisations.

To participate in a smart mob is to become a true subject in time and space; not simply a user of, but produced by, and productive of, the architecture around us:

We must treat the city and its architectures as a ‘possibilities machine’, a place of artistic production in its widest sense, where the ‘texture’ of the city is its creation of time-spaces through the appropriative activities of its inhabitants; a place of nonlabour, joy, and the fulfillment of desires rather than toil; a place of qualities, difference, relations in time and space, contradictory uses and encounters. (Borden 2001: 20).

Conclusion

In Rheingold’s thesis, the smart mob is just another example of a techno-biological construct; a symbiosis between man and machine that he first postulated in 1985 with the publication of Tools for Thought. The imaginary future that has been repeated throughout Rheingold’s influential writing over the past two decades is one where humans transcend bodily and physical constraints with the aid of “mind-amplifying machines.�? As human minds come together in the decentralised networks of cyberspace and mobile space, forms of swarm intelligence emerge spontaneously. So despite the smart mob being an authentic social phenomenon grounded in everyday life, Rheingold’s fantasy remains one of immaterialism and disembodiment. He is simply reapplying the same New Left-inspired theory to each new techno-cultural form that arises.

By repurposing the avant-garde politics of 1968 for the mobile revolution, Rheingold is able to perform a cunning sleight of hand: the dematerialisation of historical materialism. In Rheingold’s version of the electronic agora, self-organising mobile virtual communities will create autonomous spaces that surpass class barriers and the material conditions of history. Social revolution will occur spontaneously as the peer-to-peer topology of mobile space melts away the hierarchies of state power and capitalism. When technology lowers the threshold for collective action, civilisations will jump in complexity. Rheingold romanticises the idea of an immanent, undialectical revolution that was so characteristic of sixties anarcho-communism. Social progress becomes a process where whatever unfolds is the result of unregulated interactions between individuals free from coercion. The mobile virtual community is the ultimate realisation of direct democracy.

Rheingold’s smart mob, like Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zone, is a popularisation of New Left ideology for the American Cold War psyche. Substituting any references to communism with anti-modern and pseudo-scientific rhetoric, Rheingold refuses to acknowledge the ideological roots of his theory and instead presents the smart mob as a complete historical originality. The “mob�? or “multitude�? is a useful way of avoiding the concept of a proletariat, the extreme spatiality of the “swarm�? replaces historical materialism and human labour, and “anarchism�? is a convenient way of displacing Marxism.

As we have seen, smart mobs and flash mobs are part of a long established tradition of progressive urban politics that seek to reclaim public space from the capitalist spaces of consumption. The only real difference with smart mobs is that they are able to self-organise far more quickly and responsively using mobile communication and the Net. Mobile phones are liberating in the sense that they allow people to unravel the spatial configurations of the city and liberate striated space. In a certain sense the smart mob is an electronic agora, in that every citizen becomes his or her own broadcaster to every other citizen. But ultimately, social revolution does not occur unless people engage with the state. The Madrid smart mob was not an anarchistic spatial revolution but an example of social democracy in action. People were inspired by their collective actions and self-organisation to go to the polls and vote. There lies the real power of mobile virtual communities.

The smart mob is not an ahistorical spatiality, but a politically charged historical geography. If one accepts that the organisation of spatial relations is a social product, then there is no longer any question of it being a separate structure with its own rules of construction that are independent from the wider social framework. “From a materialist perspective, what becomes important is the relationship between created, organised space and other structures within a given mode of production.�? (Soja 2003: 80). If space is part of the network of human relations, then that space can be reconfigured with new peer-to-peer forces of production.

The mobile-enabled forms of collective action witnessed in cities such as Seattle, Manila and Madrid reveal spatiality as both a social product and a shaping force in social life. People become not only the creators of history but also geography, human beings that are actively situated in a geographical and historical contextualisation. The smart mob is not nature, but what Lefebvre refers to as “second nature�?, the transformed and socially concretised spatiality that arises from the application of purposeful human labour.

To provide the necessary recomposition of Marx’s familiar dictum: We make our own history and geography, but not just as we please; we do not make them under circumstances chosen by ourselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the historical geographies produced in the past. (Soja 2003: 129).

It is debatable as to whether smart mobs actually represent “the next social revolution” as Rheingold grandly proclaims. However, with its potential for advanced forms of collective labour and networked activism, mobile space can be revolutionary. When citizens share text messages and organise forms of collective dissent, they are adopting advanced productive relations that may eventually democratise the existing relations of production. Smart mobs are subversive in that they are fast becoming a part of everyday life; people want to create as well as consume new spaces, whether for the purposes of their own entertainment or for more serious political reasons. Either way, what these new forms of collective action represent is that modernity is the continuous organisation and reorganisation of space as well as time. Differential spaces emerge from the crisis of capitalism’s own spatial instability. What we are witnessing with smart mobs is another restructuring of modernity, not a complete break with history and a replacement of all progressive, post-Enlightenment thought.

Matt Miller, MA Hypermedia Dissertation, September 2004.

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Within this MySpace version of the electronic agora, cybernetic communism was mainstream and unexceptional. What had once been a revolutionary dream was now an enjoyable part of everyday life.