Distributed Emergence: Networking the Counterjihad

The mission of the Counterjihad is to organize action to resist sharia and roll back Islamization in the nations of the West.

This purpose will be accomplished via a number of strategies that can operate together or separately, consecutively or concurrently. They may include some or all of the following:

• Legislative initiatives, mounted locally or nationally
  
• Constitutional challenges to sharia law, or to the mandates of the EU and the UN
  
• Legal defense funds for people sued or criminally charged for speaking out.
  
• The formation of political parties
  
• Putting pressure on existing political parties to induce them to include anti-sharia planks in their platforms
  
• Public demonstrations
  
• “Street theater” events, such as the veiling of statues
  
• Media outreach

How can these actions be accomplished in the most effective way?

Small demonstrations or other actions may have a widespread effect if they gain media coverage, or if they go “viral” on the internet. The SIOE demonstration in Brussels last September 11th was an example of a small occasion with a disproportionately large effect.

My goal is to help leverage such small efforts into much larger occasions through the technique of effective organizing.

What is the nature of an anti-jihad network?

The most important characteristic of an effective anti-Islamization network is that it be international. The enemy’s networks are very international, and radical Islam coordinates effortlessly across national boundaries. We must do the same thing.

Fortunately, the advent of the internet makes this relatively easy to do. When the “Veil the Statues” movement in Germany prepares a new initiative, people all over the world can become aware of it as soon as it occurs.

Or even beforehand — and this is where the real power of transnational counterjihad organizing can have the greatest effect.

Imagine that your local anti-sharia group is mounting a street theater event in Oslo, and will be posting thousands of copies of a Mohammed cartoon on lampposts all over the city.

Now imagine how much more effective your operation would become if the same thing happens simultaneously in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Belgrade, Rome, Zurich, Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London. Each “Mo” cartoon would bear the same caption — say, “Don’t like the pic? Go home!” — but in the local language.

And can you imagine the effect this would have? A very low-budget operation, requiring only the paper and printing costs, and relying on email and instant messaging to spread the word across the continent. There would likely be media coverage, and even in its absence, the word would spread, and the significance of the event would become known all across Europe.

People who had hitherto been isolated and atomized by the suffocating PC culture of the EU would realize that they are not alone.

But it takes a cross-border network of trusted contacts to generate such efforts. That’s where effective organization is required.

A distributed network

The most effective network for this kind of action is a decentralized, non-hierarchical one.
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A hierarchical network can be an important and effective operational structure, but its top-down organizational chart will not produce results as quickly and efficiently as a distributed network.

There’s no boss in a distributed network. I can’t pick up the phone and order simultaneous demonstrations in Lisbon, Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Dublin.

I can, however, make sure that my contacts in those places are immediately informed of important upcoming events as soon as I learn of them.

I spend several hours every morning reading my email and performing “network acceleration” based on it. My contacts and tipsters send me news and information from all over the world, especially Europe. I parcel the important pieces out to those I think need them, and try to spread the news as widely and effectively as I can.

There’s no immediate payoff for such activity. I don’t get my name in the paper. No one will ever get rich or famous doing this kind of thing. But in the aggregate, if thousands of people do the same kind of deliberate network acceleration, the information-spreading function of the mainstream media is replicated, and the newspapers and television become irrelevant.

Distributed networks are not glamorous. There are no stars, no big glitzy events, and no real payoffs except being effective.

Networking existing organizations together

An effective distributed network does not initiate action itself.

There’s no point in my re-inventing the wheel, since a fully-balanced wheel with titanium bearings and laser stabilizers is already out there, waiting to be utilized. My job is to help people find the wheel.

If I try to organize a demonstration in Århus, it’s not an efficient use of my time. Anything that I might want to do is already being done somewhere by an existing organization.

The function of a distributed network is to connect these groups together, to make them aware of one another, to act as a nervous system relaying signals back and forth. When I find out that something important is happening in Sweden today, I try to get the word out. Blogging is only one part of the operation; the medium of communication could be anything — phone, instant messenger, email, skype, passenger pigeon — as long as the word gets out through the network as quickly as possible.

So when someone wants a text translated from the Danish, I don’t do the job myself — what a foolish activity that would be! — but I pass it on to the distributed network. If the network is functioning properly, a translation will make its way back to me with astonishing speed.

Another advantage of a distributed operation is that our networks, once they are well-established as a web of trusted contacts, can help coordinate events in advance. For example, if Sverigedemokraterna are about to present a complaint to the police accusing the Swedish prime minister of treason, the same kind of initiative can be mounted simultaneously in Denmark, Britain, Spain, France, Austria, Germany, and any other countries whose constitutions or statutes forbid the surrender of sovereignty to the EU.

The efforts mounted in a single country could thus be magnified by reduplication across the rest of the EU. All it takes is coordination through efficient communication.

Sub-networks

A distributed network is non-hierarchical, but that doesn’t mean that it has no organizational complexity. To function most effectively, it is divided into nodes with sub-networks. Networking everybody with everybody else is obviously not the best way to accomplish a task.

Sub-nets don’t have to be mutually exclusive; in fact, a degree of overlap is desirable. I may be the primary node in a network that organizes translations of European languages, and at the same time a secondary or tertiary node in a network that lobbies for legislative initiatives. The most efficient organizational structure will emerge over time to perform the specific group of functions in the network.

But more than three levels of complexity will tend to make the network slow down and become less responsive. It will be more prone to top-down dysfunctional behavior, and it will be more vulnerable to being disabled through decapitation, i.e. the removal of a primary node.

In other words, the deeper the hierarchy, the more the network behaves like a government.

Building a trusted network

Any network is vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage. A resilient structure is needed to repair disruption, counteract disinformation, and compartmentalize functions so that infiltration is less damaging.

Building an initial contact base that you can trust is the first step, but it still takes only one misjudgment or hacked password to put a sub-network at risk.

That’s why a traditional cell structure — the distributed aspect of the network — can be important to keep damage from spreading too far. This will become more important as various Western governments crack down harder on “racists” and suppress dissent.

What I say here is already illegal in several European countries. Maintaining security in a network is important now, but it will become even more important in the future.

Steam Engine Time

Charles Fort was an eccentric — some would say “crank” — American writer and journalist in the early 20th century. In his book Lo! he coined the phrase “Steam Engine Time”, a concept that captures the essence of distributed emergence:

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s steam engine time.