This is a reprint of an article published a couple years ago in BOP, which is no longer available on the web. I'm going to write some on the future over the next little while and want to start with this as background.

An older ABC story:

participants were asked to gather in advance in one of several bars and only then were handed a leaflet detailing the target - Macy's department store.

More than 100 people suddenly appeared on Macy's home furnishing floor and, as instructed by the leaflet, began discussing whether to purchase a 'love rug' for their fictitious commune. To the bewilderment of the sales staff, the crowd then melted away as quickly as it had formed.

Flash mobs provide an early example of a new way of organizing society.

Take a cell phone, add in an inertial guidance system and constant broadcast unless turned off, and you’ve got a constant snapshot of where everyone is all the time. Sounds like a privacy nightmare, doesn’t it? But like a lot of dangerous innovations there’s a side of it that is bright and shining and moreover, I’d argue that privacy in the sense of “no one knows where I am or what I’m doing” is soon going to be a thing of the past. The question is not “can we stop these technologies”, the question is “who is going to control them.” Right now, with your SSN someone who knows how can find out everything about you. Right now, if your cell phone is on, your exact position can be triangulated. Right now, your phone can be used as a listening device. Right now surveillance technology can listen to what you’re saying in a sealed room unless you take extreme steps. So the question is who’s going to control that info – if you’re going to know someone’s checking on you, and if you’re going to be able to control who’s checking on you, who’s monitoring you.

But the technology has a bright shining side to it as well – as with changes like the automobile and the fixed telegraph and telephone, it has the potential to alter how we live in very fundamental ways – to change the definition of family, to change who is in our social spheres and to change how we organize activities like defense, policing, social services and many more. In a sense it’s much simpler to give examples than try and explain so let’s start with policing.

You’re walking in a bad neighbourhood and you’re attacked. With a single word you activate your phone and it broadcasts an alarm. That alarm goes to everyone within a predetermined distance of you who is in the local flash-militia or your flash-tribe. It tells them who you are, provides them with a picture, gives your location, pulls up a map, tracks your vitals and shows any movement of you (or rather your phone). Those people immediately converge on your location and as they do, if they find it’s more than they can handle they can either call for specific help “need an ambulance” or “riot in progress, call up the riot police” or they can simply expand the initial alert. Perhaps there is a fight involving five or six people and more militia members are needed to subdue it – the call is widened until enough people have been alerted and agreed to come at a run (or drive). A private network is set up for the responders, they track each other and help each other (for example, someone in a car picking up someone on foot), arrive, and deal with the situation.

It’s not hard to expand that sort of situation to medical emergencies. Have the pda/phone tracking vitals and if they go beyond programmed criteria the cry goes out to people who are first responders. Those people head in and stabilize the situation. If you’ve set things up properly, and depending on who’s in the area, they may even simply act as an parameds and an ambulance – patching into the emergency medical network and getting instructions on where to take the patient.

A more extreme form of this is the flash-military. At its simplest military action is about concentrating and dispersing – something flash networks will excel at. A networked flash militia of citizens who trains together, supported by a massively redundant network and with caches of vehicles and weapons interspersed through their geographic mandate would be a very effective military force. More than that, it would put the military, basic defense, back in the hands of ordinary citizens.

In any circumstance where fast action is needed – where resources have to be grabbed and coordinated quickly and effectively, a flash network – a flash tribe, whether militia or social or fire, can provide. And since you disperse the skills over a wide population you wind up with a civil society; a society where anyone who wants to and can hack it, can be a part time fire fighter, can belong to the militia, can be part of a real neighbourhood watch. This is the beginning of re-creating a society where citizenship involves a duty to one’s fellow citizens; a society where you can feel like you matter and you belong – because when the shit hits the fan – you’re there helping.

Tribes
Modern Tribes is one of those ideas which people have been playing with for a long time – and which has never quite worked. But flash networks are the beginning of tribes. Because you can’t let just anyone into a flash network – the people have to be trustworthy and if there’s a goal that they’ve signed up for (medical support, military, policing) you have to be sure they can handle it – that they’re trained and competent and if it’s a task that requires working with others that they have easy facility with coordinating as part of a group with people they only know casually or whom they might never have met.

The step from those filtering mechanism, from that shared set of skills and training to expanding the network beyond defense is a simple one. Need a chartered accountant? Check your flash tribe for one you know you can trust – because in a social network like a flash tribe he wouldn’t dare do anything but a great job for you, because it will get around. The same goes for babysitting, mowing your lawn, or anything else you can think of. Set up your profile as being available, what your price is and your references, and when someone needs your service – get beeped.

But this really is reliant on that initial filtering mechanism. First the training, first the purpose of defense, or policing, or emergency response – then piggybacking on that system of social trust you build the rest – or the rest emerges.

And tribes can have relationships. Moving from New York to Boston – join either your tribes chapter there, or join an affiliated tribe. Just traveling, get linked in as you cross the border into the very basic level of emergency response – both as a recipient and a giver.

This is a world where people swim in a network of relationships explicitly, where who you are is who you know and what you do, in a very explicit way. It’s a world of social ties, where you are a part of society in an active way. It’s also a model of organization which allows people in as far as they’re able and willing to go.