Portrait as Grimoire of Crowd Sourcing


  Where would a crowd be without its event? Mobs need something to gape about, something to talk about. It is in then the event or the sequences of happenings, that the crowd is born; that is our strange need to share the odd in order to somehow ingest or perhaps just control it, means that we crowd. We then ‘crowd’ as seagulls mob an owl – it is a way of coping together over what we have not expected, with what has fallen from outside. As such there are clearly a fair number of different ways in which we crowd – that is different ways that we flock in response to different outsides, different kinds of threats or thoughts. What differs in these crowds is the way in which another is related to across the multitude of voices. The question then always has to be asked - what are these voices doing? Are they being defined by the event to by this crowd? Or is the phenomena of the crowding itself creating the event, which has nothing special about it beyond this shared interest? Or is it that the event, which is so complex or so dreadful, is creating or demanding this crowd to be? Is it then the event that forms the crowd or the crowd that forms the event? In a world where crowds are all too common, and often appealed to as the ultimate source of good ideas, this question is one that is likely to matter all the more. This is clearly a question with very many answers. This week I counted at least nine!

  At base level of this crowd lies the paradigm of scientific knowledge and thought. At the core of evidence-based peer-reviewed knowledge lies an idea that perhaps originated in Hume. The notion that an idea is only really mine, if I can share it. The aim then of all science is not to create occult knowledge tied to specific events or places, but rather to create an open milieu of thinking, where my thought or predictions in the here and now could be replicated and understood at other times and in other places. The world of experiment, (the ‘other’ of science), exists in this locus of ideas to be shared. As such it forms an open-ended and double-headed axis for this sharing. This world, the world I wish to understand, is where the ideas to be shared come from. It forms a limitless axis from which ideas to be shared originate. But at the same time, this world is by definition external to us all. It is that which you and I look out upon, it is not a thing we control or delimit. It is not tied to certain times or places. It is not a world of ‘great events’ set in their times and places. It is rather the world that repeats itself in all events, and across many times and through multitudes of places. Finally this world is not quite in the world as such. One does not meet scientific truths wandering down the street, but rather conjures them up in the context of the lab, and in the wearing of white coats and the following of experimental procedures. Science then needs its own rituals to create this shared other. Rituals that do not of course invalidate what it has to say.

  Moreover the scientific crowd has a strange presence. It exists not in the flesh so much as in the media and as a concept. The community is then created in the journals and through the endless reviewing and updating of ideas. One feels it then in the drawing up of others ideas into one’s own perceptions or experiments, and through the exploring of the world which they outline in experiment. One participates in this crowd not through simple acquiescence but rather through careful and qualified challenging. One takes up ideas of others, and sees how they then fit into one’s own experience. One then asks others to reflect on that encounter and how it is related to what they themselves feel about the matter. One of the interesting features of modern times is that this basic model has recently been extended. We can then ‘crowd source’ not merely knowledge but also the design of computer software and wonder whether we might form a society in this manner.

  At which point of course one needs to worry, for things are probably not that simple. Not all crowds are the same. Science is after all created by a unique take upon the world - a unique set of events. If the events are different then the organization and its knowledge will be different and less useful or at least more problematic. Take the example of the on-going oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It is an odd disaster (or event), for it is one that is drawn out across many days. We are still not halfway through, and the problem is still building in intensity and threat. Southern America is then caught in the dynamics of the slow train crash. They know a disaster is building on the horizon but cannot act to prevent it. The very impotence of this situation opens up on  another dimension of crowds. Crowds that cannot act directly to contain a situation, will look to other dimensions in the world, other crowds or other individuals, for reaction or for blame. They want then the world to at least bear witness to their plight, to feel sorry for them, or to take sides. Crowds then have a tendency to demand or create other crowds. The rest of the world becomes in a sense their crowd - their audience, whose reaction, in the absence of anything else, they can at least respond to. In short crowds are sloppy in their events - one event could be transmuted into another to placate them. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is then changed into a demand for anger from the President, an outburst that is useless in itself, but is at least an event, a happening. The crowd wants then an action, and in the end any action will do.

  The trouble then is of course that the crowd beyond it clouds the response with an intensity of its own. The last week has then seen the US government call for ideas to solve the problem of the oil spill, an appeal that has lead to an almost overwhelming number of ideas from the feasible to the daffy. The trouble of course being that the crowd has no quality control, it merely responds according to the intensity of its anxiety or fear, and not from knowledge, and the danger always is that useful ideas are lost in the hubbub. The fact that crowds then breed other crowds in response is a deep feature of all crowding behaviour.

  Moreover this additional crowd is conjured come what may and irrespective of its appropriateness. There is a real callousness then in this secondary crowding. Take as a terrible example this week’s shootings in Cumbria. Here the event was singular and so traumatic that there are clearly for those involved a whole sequence of different responses and reactions. The event then has not quite formed a crowd on the inside; or if it has it is a complex sad crowd, the crowd of a community in mourning. But the complexity of this crowd and its internal nature has not prevented a secondary crowd, inspired in part by the media, from forming. This secondary crowd looks onto the first one (or its complex absence-presence) and starts to fantasize about what it is feeling. The media then give us an orgy of ‘live from the Scene  of the Tragedy’, producing a sequence of maps and sad stories for our delectation. In the name then of empathy, we become mere voyeurs caught in the mystery of another’s misery, and in our reaction to it. We share our great if furtive interest, under the rubric of some kind of compassion.

  Secondary crowds are then problematic affairs, in that they create other reactions than those that are appropriate for the situation, or perhaps they augment and exaggerate what has been, warping proportion, and changing the nature of realities. Take here the example of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is clear that the crowds in part external to the affair make this conflict all the more intractable; so peace protesters then highlight issues irrespective of whether their actions actually helps or even who it helps (what does it mean to aid Hamas I wonder). Or even more problematically, Israel as a nation dwells on the admitted threat it is under, magnifying it in the sharing across many shifting crowds and clouds of reaction. A threat that was real but containable becomes across these paranoid whisperings all but a holocaust in name, and produces excessive and violent reactions. Crowds then magnify events or warp them across their words, making the event both different from what it was, and more acute. 

  It has been in the West at least, the traditional role of democracies to contain these crowds, and give them names, purpose, structure and even a cause. The role of democracy is to set into some kind of collective concrete the hopes and fears or reactions of the pack. The trouble with modernity, is that the sheer number of crowds we are asked to participate in, has essentially overwhelmed the old system. There are too many crowds for democracy to readily absorb. This leads us with three main democratic styles.  Firstly we could create micro democracies, which are genuine and self-governing. New Labour (bless ‘em) did start the ball rolling here in the form of directly elected Mayors, but then hit the snag. Namely that properly constituted these democracies will rival large government, and oppose the government from their own power base. Of course they will, one might reply, that is the point, but then no government wants to breed rivals. Secondly we could succumb to the world of endless ‘vox pops’ where our opinion because it is ours (and not because it is very clever or wise) will be said to matter. One would have then a world of mass ‘X-Factor’ style democracies, God have mercy on us.

  The only other real alternative for Democracy is one that the recent British Election has somewhat oddly conjured into government – namely a coalition that is a union of parties whose eventual electoral fate will be different or even opposed. It is then government by individuals who must remain not merely rivals in their parties but also in a subsequent general election; and yet in the meantime they must cooperate within government. As such it adds a double dimension to policy. Not only must a policy not split the union of individuals whose actual interest lies apart from that union; but also it must not excessively favour one part of it against the rest. But of course whether this strange union of eventual rivals produces actually good policies or not is still not at all clear.

  But the trouble is that if we break this bond of democracy, and the structures that it gives us, one very easily slips into the dynamics of a mob knowledge. For it is one of those features about humans and their crowding, that the very fact that there is a crowd, is usually enough to get us gawping as well. Crowds create then their own truths, and do so irrespective of the world itself. And once so created, such well-known facts, or urban legends or quack practices, become very difficult (and certainly undemocratic) to suppress. Error becomes then the normal currency of the day, and needs to be allowed for or even indulged. This problem is then made all the worse as this is the very ‘error’ that underpins a part of an economic and democratic system. The economy is all based on a collective trust of one another. As we rely on others to believe certain things, and act in certain ways, be those others individuals or crowds, we behave and spend in predictable ways ourselves. That is, our belief in other’s beliefs makes us economically rational (or at last predictable). Likewise our faith in each other’s faith in democracy gets the whole show on the road. Unless then I believed in your belief, and accepted what you accept as a given, there is no reason why I should act in this manner. As a society then we simply need the delusion that crowds breed, for it is our system of government. Pyramid schemes, and celebrity culture are then merely a price we pay for the freedom of knowing what others in the crowd think - a freedom that is real enough.

  Crowds then are not the same, and it is a mistake to treat them as such. That is, our herds have radically different dynamics, different ways to orchestrate themselves. What is more they have rather different ways of ingesting differences. The crowds then that gather around events are somewhat different in their form and content from the crowds that are there for the event (or at least part of the event), and this difference needs to be understood and allowed for. All the more so, as we are surely entering the great world of the crowd. What else is globalization but the appeal to a hidden, unspoken but present multitude? – call it the world, upon whose reaction our fate now hangs. The game then in this age is to allow for this difference, and to create meaning for it. That is, it is not to go with the crowd that insists that crowding is all the same, but rather to articulate the ethics of difference between mobs – an ethics we need as never before.