“Organizational Ecology” as a protocol to build Political Power

Rodrigo Nunes, in his therapeutic book Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal (NVNH from now on), uses a combination of system theory, information theory, metaphysics, and political theory to identify what makes successful political ecosystems, such as the one that led to the Revolution in Russia in 1917 or the one behind the Civil Rights Act in the USA. To lead the Left out of their traumas, he analyzes victory scenarios and how they differed from the current condition of progressive spaces. Why did they get the impact they wanted, and why don't we?

According to Nunes, the answer lies in the material, cultural, and psychological aspects that in the past enabled healthy and synergetic political ecosystems to create conditions for strong political organizations to grow through mediation, aggregation, and accumulation of power. Not a struggle among sects to annihilate competitors, but a mutually beneficial dynamic of conflict and cooperation going beyond the traditional ideas of dialogue and agreement to build unity, which, according to Nunes, is ultimately a misleading notion when talking about political ecologies.

All good. The book is a banger. Everybody loves it and incorporates a lot of the content in their politics, including myself. Nonetheless, anybody trying to apply Nunes to their political praxis eventually encounters a problem. If the current way of doing politics is ineffective, detrimental, wasteful, and self-referential, it must be overcome to create a healthy ecosystem. How can you achieve such a transition without destructive infighting? How can you propagate this new way of doing politics without saying “My way is right and your way is wrong”, therefore reproducing on a higher level of abstraction the same dynamics you want to eliminate?

Nunes tries to address this point and anticipates criticism with a great argument: “This is not a new model to be adopted. It's a naturally emerging dynamic and I’m only pointing at it.” Smart guy. He knows what Leftists want to hear. He should write a book about it. This argument is great in the book, but not so easy to translate into practice.

Another way out is to participate in existing, healthy ecosystems and be content with that, leaving traditional political structures to rot. There are more people alienated and dissatisfied by the ineffectiveness of progressive politics than there are people willing to sacrifice their time and energy to delusional political practices, endless bureaucratic struggles within collapsing parties, boring assemblies, squabbling on social media, and planning carefully how to firebomb a Walmart without ever actually getting to firebomb a Walmart. The conditions, all in all, are ripe for healthy progressive political ecosystems to emerge.

Nonetheless, everything is connected and, as mushrooms flourishing on the stumps of rotting trees, we also have to deal with the remnants of the recent political past. There's no point of rupture, no disconnection. We cannot ignore that established organizations, practices, memes, narratives, and movements that share our values and goals keep attracting people, burning energy, impacting the narrative, and occupying physical and conceptual spaces despite their ineffectiveness.

We have to deal with it and while Nunes gives clear instructions on how to avoid frontal confrontation and conflict and gives tools to embed them in an ecosystemic view of your surroundings, no real guidance is given on how to overcome the barrier between who operates through an ecosystemic framework and who does not.

Some people who share your values are so ineffective that they become potestas even though they pose as progressives. They look like they should embody potentia, but they don’t. Nunes elaborates on how to think about these two different forms of power and develop a strategy conscious of the distinction but doesn’t address the possibility of turning the vast portion of the Left embodying potestas into something useful.

The book is missing a rather fundamental piece addressing how to incrementally transition from what we can call the “pre-ecological mindset” into the “ecology-aware mindset”. I mean, you can bash people with the book itself until they read it, but it's not a scalable strategy.

We need something more powerful: we need a protocol.

What is a protocol?

The word “protocol” has many meanings, but in this context, we are thinking about a very specific type of protocol: designers, system thinkers, software engineers, urbanists, and architects use the term “protocol” to identify a system of rules to coexist and cooperate on a given infrastructure. Cooperation here is intended in its strictest sense: the pursuit of different but synergetic goals by a group of people or organizations, using shared resources in a mutually beneficial engagement.

One well-known and easily understandable example of a protocol is street traffic. Suppose we want to use a car, or even walk in the streets of an urban environment. In that case, we need to participate in traffic. It is a mix of explicit rules enforced by law, implicit rules developed socially, and shared infrastructure, meaning the roads. Participation in traffic is necessary to get to your destination quickly without crashing into other cars. The goals of the participants are diverse: each one of them is going somewhere different, and yet they participate in the same system.

A protocol is not its infrastructure: you can drive your car on a road without respecting any rule of the traffic. You won't last long, but you can. Will Smith in I Am Legend doesn't need to respect traffic rules, even though he walks through the streets because other humans are gone and therefore there’s no need for protocols.

On top of that, a protocol does not embody specific values. It is agnostic in many regards. The success of a protocol is defined by its adoption and by the adherence to its internal logic. The value must come from without. For example, the traffic protocol is not responsible for minimizing CO2 emissions. It is left to whoever designs and enforces the protocol to alter the protocol itself from the outside, with actions that escape the logic of the protocol. In the example of traffic, this could be done through the legal system, restrictions to who can participate in the protocol (if you have an old car, you cannot participate), or actions that reflect only marginally on the reality of a protocol, such as banning the production of certain engines so that certain cars disappear from the protocol without the protocol ever being touched.

Note: Nunes does use the word “protocol” in his book several times but often with a different meaning. In his case, he seems to refer mostly to protocols concerning decision-making, for example the protocol of a congress, of an assembly, or the governance of an association. This is a very narrow, specific, and, in his view, a detrimental form of protocol, which hinders the flexibility of the ecology by crystalizing power structures rather than mediating conflict and enabling the growth of the ecology. Some people would call this form of protocol a “closed protocol”, and the ones we talk about in this article are “open protocols”.

A note of warning: protocols are a useful frame to think about systems, coordination, and scalability, but they are also a dangerous, addictive, and easy-to-abuse tool that will start hiding more about reality than it reveals. Use it with caution.

Why do we need a protocol?

What does this have to do with politics? Well, everything. Nunes suggests that successful political ecologies generate an aggregation of political power rather than internal strife. This is done, primarily, through a different culture of mediation between conflicting interests, which is virtuous rather than destructive. That sounds like the problem of not crashing into cars when trying to reach your destination.

Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal identifies and pathologizes the traumas of an excess of verticalism and an excess of horizontalism as dysfunctions filling the void left by the absence of a protocol.

If roads operated like the Left, getting out of the door we would see mega-buses cutting slowly through the city without stopping while the passengers looked at their destination pass by. We would see small madmaxesque vehicles, driven by people on amphetamines shouting: “MAKE WAAAAAAAY I'M TURNIIIIIIIIIING” at every junction. Armored pink tanks would be patrolling the street and shooting their cannons at any vehicle around them for fear of being hit first. Some cars would have wheels on the roof. Half of the drivers would be driving on the right side of the street, yelling at the other half who believe they should be driving on the left. Also, none of the vehicles would operate on fuel because it ran out long ago: everybody would be using their feet like in the Flintstones.

That's no way to coexist.

What does a political protocol look like?

Formalizing even a blunt draft of a protocol is far beyond the scope of this article. It would probably be a book otherwise. You’re welcome to finance me for a few years and I would be glad to work on it. For now, I must limit myself to hint at the parts of Nunes work that could be transposed into a protocol.

The second part of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal is more focused on a constructive proposal of how a political ecology looks like. Some traits he identifies could be turned into protocol rules to be adopted at the subjective, meaning individual of an organizational unity, level. Let’s look at a few of them, how I use them in my political practice, and how they could be turned into protocol rules.

We will provisionally call our protocol “PEER Protocol”: Progressive Ecology-Enabling Relational protocol.

We need to introduce first an important concept: protocols can always contain other protocols. The traffic protocol, for example, contains the protocol regulating how to interact with a traffic light. In the same way, the protocol we are talking about here is not a totalizing, hyper-detailed blueprint for the perfect ecology. This would be impossible to make explicit, rigid, and in total opposition to what Nunes presented as a compelling argument on how to build an ecology. The PEER protocol must be open for evolution in itself but also allow for sub-protocols to proliferate and allow the necessary flexibility that a strong ecology requires.

Nunes speaks of an important principle in every healthy ecosystem: functional differentiation.

We can also understand functional differentiation as denoting the different kinds of intervention that groups and individuals specialise in. Some will define themselves primarily by engaging in direct action; others will do community or labour organising among a certain group, in a certain area or industry; some will build cooperatives or mutual aid initiatives; others will collect information and analysis around a particular issue; some will have specificknowledges and skills, like computer programming or corporate research; others will focus on raising awareness among certain demographics, lobbying policymakers, producing and distributing news and commentary, and so on.

Some of those functions will be turned towards the environment, like the ones I have just listed, others towards the ecology itself (providing training, resources, legal support). Each group or organisation will no doubt do more than one of those, but none of them will do them all, or none of them will do them all.

Conscious of the importance of functional differentiation, good practice is to develop a strategy that is conscious of what is available in your ecosystem and fills what’s missing to achieve a certain form of change. Map your surroundings, understand the needs, incentives, and goals of other organizations in your ecology, then develop a complementary strategy accordingly.

In a protocol, participation in an ecology could render explicit the step of mapping and complementing. While not everybody might engage in the protocol, you will still be able to produce and share a formal map of how you understand your surroundings, ideally adopting a shared taxonomy with your peers. You could then state, publicly or privately with a subset of your peer organizations, your intents for the near future and what role you want to play in the ecology so that others can update their maps.

This is currently done informally and irregularly by organizations that have either read Nunes or are the “healthy” examples that Nunes used as inspiration. This process of exchanging maps and intents is done explicitly only in specific and densely populated niches, such as labor organizing or environmental movements. Most organizations, if they operate with this consciousness, deploy this process purely as an internal tool to reflect on their surroundings, but with little coordination with co-inhabitants of the same ecology.

What happens more commonly is that organizations first of all often lack internal direction and get pulled in different directions by factions. When they achieve a synthesis and a shared direction, they state it publicly every so often with old-fashioned and stale formats like manifestos, communiqués, strategy statements, or other lengthy and performative forms of communication. This creates a heavy burden on whoever wants to align and coordinate with you, establish relations, or discover you exist. Also, it is done irregularly, based exclusively on the internal needs of the organization, and through different channels. The current strategy of all the political organizations in my ecology should be one search and five minutes of reading away if it’s private, or one request form and one click on the “Allow” button if it’s private. Anything less than this means going slower than whatever we are trying to fight and therefore bound to lose.

Because no single agent has full control over any outcome in an ecology, the opportunities that agents create for one another are often ambivalent: they raise the probability of a desired result but potentially diminish the control one can have over it. This is the seventh point we can take from the anecdote above. If we view competitionas a conflict between forces instead of as an irreconcilable contradiction, that tension becomes a matter of relative strength rather than an absolute opposition. Any push in the direction of a common goal is in principle welcome, and we can support the process that leads to it even if we do not control it nor quite agree with its exact direction. If we want to make sure it is not led astray, we must ensure that we have the power to affect its course while taking the utmost care not to put it in danger.

A conscious participant in the PEER protocol should reasonably prioritize the political outcome of a given ecology over their control of such an outcome. Consistently failing to do so will mark you as a non-cooperative, hostile entity and the protocol should have the means to protect itself and exclude you.

Such a scenario is a main problem in digital network protocols, such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. These protocols mediate the coexistence of multiple emitters and antennas working at different frequencies, allowing the reliable and secure (well, Bluetooth not really) exchange of data in the proximity of multiple similar devices. While occasional interference is accounted for in the protocol, mechanisms to switch to different frequencies with little disruption are enabled in the case of non-cooperative emitters that pump indiscernible noise on certain frequencies.

What happens when you have a device emitting constant noise at all frequencies and disrupting any communication? That’s a jammer and soon a policeman will come and arrest you because the protocol cannot deal with that on its own. The violence of the state is how many protocols escape from conditions that they cannot manage. In our hypothetical political protocol, there should be a clear condition to discern between constructive competitors in the ecology, unaware disruptive participants, political enemies external to the ecology, and what we just described: actors intentionally disrupting the operation of the ecology in bad faith. The inability to perform this classification reliably, and act accordingly, is today one of the main sources of destructive conflict within the Left.

The third aspect we tackle is the idea of organization as mediation. For this one, I’m not going to quote Nunes directly because when he writes about metaphysics he likes to use complicated words and flex his philosophy expertise, so I couldn’t find fancy one-liners to extract.

Nunes understands the process of political organization as a mediation of forces. Agents who align these forces through the dissolution of conflict between such forces are on the good side. Who reinforces the conflicts and seeks to win them against their counterpart, which often shares most values and goals, is part of the problem. The whole argument is basically half of the second chapter of NVNH, so refer to that for more details.

For the sake of this article, we can focus on the idea that dissolving a conflict, a false opposition, or a false dichotomy, is always preferable to engaging and winning a conflict. In short, the dissolution of a false opposition creates alignment and synergy between agents that otherwise would have to waste resources to win the conflict. Let’s make a concrete example.

For decades, unions have opposed pro-environment measures because job losses would supposedly follow. Regardless of this being true, new environmental movements found an alliance with workers’ collectives and unions in the frame of a conversion of the industrial economy to a new, sustainable model. Rather than shutting down and relocating factories, convert them to produce new products that can find space in a sustainable economy. Regardless of what you think about green capitalism, transitionism, and other similar positions, this dissolution of a classical conflict between labor and environment means, in practice, that you now see young students with dreadlocks on the picket line, union flags at marches against climate change, concrete proposals of industrial conversion being put forward by workers collectives such as GKN in Italy.

For our PEER protocol, a rule of behavior that prescribes the dissolution of conflict over the engagement in conflict must be introduced. This is easier said than done: every conflict is different and some might not have a path to dissolution. Expectations in this regard must be kept low. Nonetheless, when an effective path to dissolution is put forward, proactive participation becomes the baseline expected behavior.

This reflection on conflict dissolution also opens up further challenges in conceiving such an ambitious protocol. Protocols are, intrinsically, machinery to resolve conflict at a minimal cost, but they work in this fashion only for expected scenarios. While several of the disputes on the left are unnecessary and repetitive, attempting to resolve, or even worse dissolve, political conflict through protocol(s) as the only tool is a technocratic delusion. Dialectical engagement is still fundamental, as long as it is conducted in the appropriate context and with aligned goals.

We could go on longer, but I hope these examples were useful to envision a space of translation from the philosophical foundations laid by Nunes into a usable, yet general and scalable bottom-up open and extensible protocol.

The research on protocols is not a new thing, but the interest from progressive politics in this topic struggles to grow outside of certain circles, in part due to the prerequisite knowledge, in part because it resembles the vocabulary and mindset of technical and reductionist discourses performed by ruling powers. The adoption of protocols in politics suffers from a certain disdain towards technology and system thinking that is unwarranted in general, and even more misattributed when dealing with protocols.

I would like to conclude this glorified set of messy notes disguised as an article with a list of resources that do deal with protocols and that I find interesting.