Just below the radar

Here is the first text from the large project of the Colta editors “Around the Horizontal” - about the phenomenon of self-organization: the idea and practice of horizontality in its stereoscopy and specific communities. We will look at horizontality from different angles: economic, political, practical and even philosophical.

We started preparing this project last year, then it went on pause (like Colta after it was blocked by Roskomnadzor in March 2022).

Nevertheless, we decided to revive it - today this topic has acquired such an urgency that no one expected. The old slogan “we will live without a state” is now even more necessary for everyone who continues to live and work within the country, but wants to do it as independently as possible, without merging with a system with which they do not agree. Practices of self-organization are also important for people who left Russia, but often exist separately.

And, of course, we are very grateful to syg.ma, which, in these difficult, or whatever, tragic times, gives this project refuge on its pages until Colta resumes work.

We begin with an interview with the famous sociologist Ella Paneyah with the broadest possible thematic scope: this is an introduction to the topic. When and why did the horizontal begin to strengthen in relation to state and economic power? What benefits does self-organization offer? What are the strengths and weaknesses of horizontal teams? Along what vectors did horizontal growth take place in Russia?

Polina Patimova wrote this text in February, before the war. It is clear that he could not remain the same. Therefore, it begins with a short introduction by Ella Paneyah and ends with her comments on her own interview, made from the perspective of today.

This interview was conducted with me in supposedly peacetime (in mid-February 2022). And when the editors of Colta decided to return to it, it seemed wrong to me to release it without comment from today. We had to look at a lot from a different perspective, many reservations that did not seem necessary then now have to be made. But on the whole, we tried to preserve this text as it was then - what we thought and talked about before the war.

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— Any horizontality is an alternative response to hierarchies and verticals. Let's start at the beginning: can we say that the desire for hierarchy is a cultural constant that is characteristic of all human societies?

Hierarchy is the most direct and primitive way to coordinate a large number of people. Where two or three people do something together, a hierarchy is not necessary - you can agree among yourself. But in order to coordinate a large number of people, at least a dozen, mechanisms are needed, and the simplest one is to choose a boss and subchiefs who will manage this small community. This is how the beginnings of hierarchy arise. It's not that hierarchy is a constant. The fact is that hierarchical ways of managing society are the first to arise if nothing else is done.

But this does not mean at all that they are the only or the best. They are simply the most obvious. But gradually people enriched their arsenal of ways to interact with large groups.

The very idea of ​​the need for hierarchy - that is, an institutional structure that governs the entire society - is as old as the world. But in a more or less modern form, that is, as a thesis about the need for a hierarchically structured state, it was formulated by Hobbes, a contemporary of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the English Revolution, the Fronde in France - in general, the general time of troubles (from the point of view of his contemporaries). Europeans), which led, in particular, to the fact that in 1649 King Charles I's head was cut off in the square.

Hobbes perceived what he saw as the basic - natural - state of people: solid authority disappears, order collapses, people are left to their own devices - and look what happens. And he made a logical conclusion: it is necessary to curb natural aggressiveness, namely, to create a Leviathan: to unite the people into one body and place the head of a sovereign on its top (this does not have to be a king, the head can also be parliament). Below the head, other organs work - institutions and classes, connected by laws-nerves. That is, the modern idea of ​​​​the value of centralization goes back to an idea created by a man who was scared to death. ( 1 )

The opposite idea, that all people are equal, appeared in the European tradition in the 18th century and belongs to Rousseau, although we now imagine the “natural state” of man differently, if we can talk about it at all.

The era of Rousseau is a period when modern science is just being formed and the hope is born in the minds of thinkers that with the help of reason and an objective description of natural laws it is possible to arrange everything in society in a more just manner, in accordance with nature.

The idea appears that Leviathan, without which the single body will necessarily disintegrate, is not the only scenario. You can connect people differently.

Rousseau creates a model of a natural man who lived in a world in which property had not yet begun to be divided. It is this division that, according to Rousseau, leads to the use of force: people want to take something away from each other and force them to do something. Rousseau is no longer afraid of shocks, he lives in a relatively prosperous time and wants to change the existing order to a more just one (unlike Hobbes, who was faced with disorder and only craves order). According to Rousseau, society needs to be returned to the “natural” state before the division of property, but without plunging it into savagery, but using all existing reasonable methods of management, production of goods and their distribution.

So both ideas directly reflect the realities of life of their authors. ( 2 )

— And how did centralization affect the development of states?

When we now talk about the conflict between hierarchy and horizontality, we are talking about overcoming the over-centralization that the modern state brought, first absolutist, and then the modern territorial states that succeeded it - more often republics than monarchies. Once upon a time, this over-centralization allowed the absolutist monarchy to be the most effective in wars and to maintain control over its territories. We don't know whether other types of communities were capable of more humane ways of coordinating large masses because they were eaten: the most successful predators were states.

Then the modern state of the modern era came to replace it, still territorially centralized, but now still dependent on the industrial structure in the economy, almost imitating this structure in the management of society. This is a system that, in the extreme, turns everything into a conveyor belt: education, medicine, assistance to the poor, taxes, law enforcement and even the court.

— How exactly does this type of hierarchical structure work?

There is such a constant - Dunbar's number: this is the maximum number of people with whom a person can not only be acquainted, but also constantly maintain relationships, it ranges from 50 to 150 people. With approximately this amount, you can live in a closed community in which everyone knows everyone. But it is extremely rare to agree on something - and with strangers too.

And the state unites a huge number of people - many orders of magnitude more. In rational-bureaucratic hierarchies, control signals are transmitted from floor to floor and classification of people and phenomena occurs. Each person, disease or, say, product (if we are talking about production) is simplified, divided into several cells, and systematized. In order to classify and fit into the cells of social nomenclature, people need to be rewritten - list the main characteristics, as in modern sociological surveys: man or woman, how old, what education, lives in a village or in a city. And then we will learn almost everything we need about a person. Or rather, it seems so to us - but for a long time this simplification, reducing a person to a set of simple characteristics, turned out to be very effective, too effective to be abandoned because of its inhumanity.

Methods of managing society, based on such simplification, sharpen a person to fit this mold. People are taught to connect with each other: to also classify others, to sort them, to have a certain number of languages ​​for communication between cells. Instead of fifty or a hundred individual acquaintances, people develop a set of communicative modes: they classify people and then communicate with them, that is, they are less afraid of strangers.

A person’s ability to build communication in general has greatly increased because this grid has been put on society: it occurs within the framework of rules and institutions that are made for everyone. They are not the same for everyone, but they are designed in such a way that they regulate the behavior of everyone, no matter who he is in this set of hierarchies.

States strive to make everyone more alike, so that everyone speaks more or less the same state language, receives at least some education, and knows how to read and write. And woe to those who do not fit into the given framework.

But state power, of course, needs history and ideology to explain why different people who do not know each other and, perhaps, speak different languages, still belong to the same community.

— How does the state continue to act with ready-made classifications?

Next, a rational decision is made about what to do now with this categorized society. It goes down, but at every step it undergoes distortions. Feedback should theoretically rise up the hierarchy. But there are big problems with this, because the feedback is also distorted. The larger the hierarchy, the more distortions; at each level there are not categories, but living people who not only make mistakes, but also care about their own interests. For example, when you tell your superiors something, you often think about how they will treat you, rather than about informing them in the best possible way.

But despite all the distortions, centralization created an institutional environment for interaction with strangers. Let's say the police and the court are impersonal institutional ways of protecting one citizen from the dishonest behavior of another. What in traditional society was provided by simple acquaintance and community, here the external institutional environment and various institutions are established. This is called "impersonal institutional trust."

In addition, centralization gave hierarchical institutions of coordination: everyone

they ordered, the plan was sent down, they were put on the assembly line - and everyone participates in the production of something complex. No one needs to negotiate with anyone, the boss will decide everything. ( 3 )

Bureaucratic hierarchy benefited from pre-modern methods of coordination. But it has very much begun to lose to modern post-industrial methods of human interaction, based on what was lost during the construction of effective modern machines: new methods take into account the exchange of not only economic resources, but also social capital, and this is often win-win communications, of which everyone comes out enriched not only economically, but also culturally, acquiring social capital - that is, connections that allow them to better build relationships with others and strengthen their reputation. These are just network, horizontal interactions. Interactions that are less afraid of diversity. ( 4 )

So, unification from above greatly increased people’s ability to horizontally self-organize, because it taught them the same things: skills, languages, similar ideas about the world. And precisely because people are so well coordinated, they often do not need an external network that has a monopoly of violence.

Look at the paradox: if you already know how to be the same, you can allow yourself to be different.

For example, if you have a common language with your interlocutor - say, English - it doesn’t matter that he is a foreigner, you will understand each other. You don’t need to look for a compatriot partner, say, in business. This is true with other, less obvious social skills. ( 5 )

Social hierarchy both terribly simplifies and terribly complicates the structure of society. It allows people to coordinate in a very complex way, but at the same time it becomes obsolete: we no longer need to turn to the state outside the framework for communication - we can interact directly with a stranger. If we have 50 mutual acquaintances with someone on social media, this is a better guarantee of their loyalty than a police force to turn to if that same someone behaves in a bad way. Now we connect with strangers via the Internet, which accumulates a reputation.

This does not mean that new networks do not have their own hierarchy. Some people have more social capital. Someone will have the resources, for example, to hire rather than be hired. Some have a tarnished reputation, while others occupy a central position in the network - they connect many different people and receive bonuses from this.

For example, bonuses such as the opportunity to tarnish a competitor’s reputation. The network is not necessarily more honest and kind than the hierarchy. But she is much smarter and, yes, more diverse.

And in general, a network is not the opposite of a hierarchy. This is an analytical division: hierarchy is also a network, just highly formalized and verticalized. Moreover, within any bureaucratic structure there is its own network of informal relationships, without which it simply does not work. It is informal connections that allow people to cope with all the hardships of being inside the bureaucratic system.

- But why do people even need decentralization?

I would say because the need for centralization is reduced. At the peak of the development of industrial society, she worked for economic development and increased prosperity. But at the same time, military power grew, and more and more terrible wars occurred.

— Are new institutions and new social norms developed at the intersection of a centralized structure with horizontal initiatives?

No, they are developed where horizontal structures manage to do something better - for example, create their own internal rules, which are preferable to resorting to centralized structures.

People come up with innovations that work as functional substitutes for existing institutions. Where did people used to look for fraud protection? Only at the police. Where do people find fraud protection now? Nowadays, you can Google the person or find their past employer and ask for a recommendation. From my point of view, new social norms are developed because something comes out that works better than the old ones.

On the one hand, centralization does not seem to leave much room for people to even dream about decentralization. And decentralized life exists somewhere in the gaps. But even in mature modernity there are many such gaps, and society also influences the state. This is not absolutely ideal totalitarianism: the further it goes, the more areas appear where people have more profitable or pleasant alternatives.

For example, there is centralized education, but now we have so many interests and there are so many things that we want to learn about - but for many it is stupid to go to a standardized school, you can learn this from educational videos or paid courses. And where new opportunities arise, people take them.

Moreover, those who have more resources take more and take it first. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has an idea that in modernity, that is, postmodernity - he has the term Liquid Modernity, “fluid modernity” - hierarchical, state-dependent structures become a refuge for those who simply cannot afford anything else. If you don’t have money, you will go to a public hospital for treatment; if you do, you will go to a private doctor. If you have the resources, you go to a private school. If not, you are in the public education system.

And this scheme works everywhere where people choose for themselves. And in the modern world they can afford more and more choices, and this creates a demand for decentralization. ( 6 )

True, people still partially continue to rely on external institutions. If they do something independent together and then some terrible fraud happens within the group, they still go to court. That is, the presence of the state on the periphery of a self-organized community continues to partially ensure its activities.

But the more society develops—more precisely, the specific segment of society we are looking at—the less satisfied it is with the justice and order that the state can offer.

People within more advanced communities have higher expectations for both the methods and results of law enforcement. And it turns out that it’s better to chip in, put a video camera and a combination lock on the entrance, than to rely on the police, who will be rude, yell and beat up an innocent person. Even if it’s a guilty person, we don’t even like that anymore. The Russian state specifically perceives such a refusal of its services, such a new autonomy, as a threat. And it classifies it as criminal intent.

On the other hand, trust in hierarchical centralized structures is falling in the world, and in Russia it is generally lower from the very beginning. It changes because of transparency: horizontal structures, among other things, make people much more transparent to each other. It's not always pleasant. From my personal point of view, that is, as a person who grew up in Soviet times, we now know a lot about each other. It's uncomfortable. I would prefer not to know much of what reaches me on social networks.

In modernity, a person is transparent to the state, but opaque to his neighbor. This is the private sphere. Now, in postmodernity, every person becomes more transparent: you can find out about him on social networks, he leaves a bunch of records in state and commercial registers, you can make inquiries about him in many more places. And at the same time, new ways of resolving conflicts are emerging, more humane and reasonable than the state in its current form can offer.

For example, the boom in philanthropy in Russia is quickly generating many scandals and discussions around how to ensure transparency and openness in the accountability of charities. It looks like people are accusing each other of something, exposing each other, taking conflicts out into the open - unpleasant. But in these discussions, institutions, rules of the game and the ability to avoid conflicts or resolve these conflicts are developed so that the organization survives and does not lose public trust, that is, it becomes better. As a result, a system is being developed to ensure transparency and trust within the organization, in this case, between the organization and the people who donate money to it. Sometimes something is borrowed from foreign samples, but a lot of things are invented anew depending on the situation.

But transparency increases not only for the average person, but also for people who participate in management - both public and private structures. It is, of course, easier for them to protect themselves from this, but more eyes are looking at them, so in total people see how both the private life of leaders and the internal life of the organizations they lead work. People see how wrong state leaders are and stop trusting them as something higher - as a sacred force personifying Hobbes's Leviathan. In addition, the gap in education and outlook between managers and managed is narrowing. Unlike pre-modern societies, people are no longer faced with such enormous social distance that they continue to believe that one person has the right to rule over millions of people like them.

— What new forms of self-organization in Russia seem to you to be the most widespread?

Now the fastest processes of self-organization are taking place in the not the most progressive strata - they have already largely shot themselves down.

I would put the boom in charity first in importance: it has become a mass phenomenon. In the Soviet Union there was no private charity at all. In the 1990s, there were individual projects run by 10 enthusiasts, collecting ridiculous amounts of money. Now this has very quickly become a mass process.

At the top of this process are people who are trying to change attitudes towards cancer patients, change legislation on painkillers, and introduce other practices for treating people in PNI. But the lower part are completely ordinary people who send 100 rubles to a sick child after reading about him on the Internet or hearing about him on TV. This is the most savage form of charity, but also the most widespread. I think this is a very positive process because people get used to participating in it. ( 7 )

The second most widespread and successful movement in recent years is the anti-vaxxer movement, although I myself hate to say it. It organized itself practically from scratch, although its agenda cannot be called constructive. But it’s impossible not to appreciate the massive scale. It is not at all stimulated from above - this is not a fake, but a natural grassroots movement that has become influential in just a few months, and this rarely happens. And the participants in this movement managed to really defend their point of view and work against the sluggishness of epidemic measures.

Another area that has directly blossomed in the mode of self-organization is much closer to me - educational projects and, more broadly, horizontal structures for disseminating knowledge and skills: free and paid training, educational videos. Now, if we don’t know how to do something, we Google it and always find some kind of tutorial.

I don’t want to name political projects, because it is very difficult to separate failure from too active opposition from the authorities. Although if we talk, for example, about political decentralization, then here too there is a request for diversity, less dependent on qualifying hierarchies. People want, for example, different orders in different parts of the country - if they don’t like it, say, in Krasnodar, they move to St. Petersburg. People with atypical cultural needs do not want to submit to the unifying force of the center, which intends to govern Volgograd, Makhachkala and Kaliningrad as if they were the same communities. Such things are cured by giving more self-government.

Although, we note that not all decentralization is necessarily self-government. If some functions are given, for example, to regional governors, then this no longer creates self-government, although this is decentralization. For example, at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic, governors were suddenly given a huge amount of authority to take measures on their territory. This is a typical decentralization step, but there is no more grassroots self-government; the right to make decisions has simply been demoted to a lower level.

But the truly successful ones are those who operate just below the radar on which the authorities determine political activity. Philanthropists manage to operate just below the radar, and so do anti-vaxxers. ( 8 )

— Do people inside Russia now exist in line with total centralization? Or are we somewhere in neutral?

It's hard for me to judge. Offhand I would like to immediately say: “Yes, of course, we are now at the peak of centralization.” We are in a situation of contradictory tendencies, of which, probably, the centralizing one is now stronger, but the grassroots decentralizing one is more promising.

At the same time, in the last two Covid years, the transparency that we talked about has dropped very significantly among society itself. And now I find it difficult to answer many questions that I would have answered with confidence two years ago.

For example, are more people moving into the informal sector? On the one hand, it seems yes: the general economic situation is not very good, incomes are falling, so they should leave. On the other hand, the tax administration of individuals is rapidly improving, so it is not a fact that many will be released into the shadow sector.

Although, of course, the pandemic has created a lot of blue-collar jobs with good pay. An obvious example is couriers. But this has nothing to do with decentralization - it is simply economic movement between the formal and informal sectors of the economy.

— They say that escaping the all-seeing eye of the state is quite typical for Russia. How constructive is this strategy now?

I don’t believe Kordonsky’s estimates when he believes that 30–40 percent of the population works in otkhodnicheskie and garage businesses—I think that’s too much. But I trust the empirical descriptions that the people on this team make.

Another thing is that I don’t see the process of escaping itself. People don't hide. They, after all, do something not underground, but in front of their neighbors. The local police officer or some local administration at the lowest level knows about this.

And at the same time, people build strategies for interacting with government agents. Sometimes on their own, sometimes through communities. For example, garage communities have informal leaders who negotiate with government officials. Communities pay, if not rent, then a tribute in kind - you can turn to them to fix something informally from, say, municipal equipment. They make transfers through the banking system. This is not an escape, this is an existence that includes such interactions.

The same can be said about ordinary business: it builds strategies for interacting with all agents of power that it can reach.

It seems to me that to completely escape you need to be completely invisible: earn little and live in the outback. Unless you're in something resembling a business, there aren't many agents of power that you interact with on a regular basis.

— Where do horizontal initiatives and structures work better, and where does a vertical hierarchy work better?

Horizontality is where the future is ( 9 ). Hierarchy is where the past is. Wherever there is something advanced, something new, something that did not exist in modernity, where new technologies are being developed, technical and social innovations are being introduced, horizontality wins.

Horizontally - where you want to do something together with your peers. Vertically - where you want to join the state.

For example, a vertical hierarchy works better where you are trying to build something for older people (although there are great grassroots initiatives for older people - but they reach only a few). Or if you want to do something for people who are not very educated, for those who have little knowledge of the Internet, or who have push-button phones. Where you need to create something necessary, but simple, with the participation of a large number of people, that is, where people still need to be the same. That is, where you want to build something more reminiscent of a factory or army, rather than a network university.

— What are the advantages and disadvantages of a self-organized community?

A self-organized community resolves a maximum of issues within itself, forms complex systems and maintains a level of diversity due to the fact that it has a large amount of social capital. This means that it is protected from non-violent invasion from the outside - from formal hierarchical structures that would try to regulate it. But this happens only until the hierarchical structures pick up a crowbar: until the state attacks a public organization, and a large corporation wants to crush a startup.

But if it does not come to the use of force, the network covers the hierarchy. The network is smarter, more flexible and faster, because all participants think in it: the network has as many brains as there are participants - plus synergy, because they communicate with each other. On the contrary, the hierarchy has as many brains as its boss has - minus the brains of all the subordinates who are thinking about how to deceive him. The hierarchy is stupider than its boss. The network is much smarter than each of its participants.

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1 . It was easy for me then to sneer at a man whose world had shaken and collapsed because of the war, however. Now I wouldn’t be so sarcastic.

2 . To be honest, neither ideology nor the other has led to good. Hobbes's ideas are still used to justify various tyrannies; Rousseau's followers, in their quest for unbridled good, led to a revolution even bloodier than the one that so impressed Hobbes.

3 . The problem with these wonderful, efficient mechanisms is—and much has been written about this—that they remarkably remove responsibility from the average performer. And even from the ordinary, from the middle of the hierarchy. Therefore, with the same effectiveness, you can use them to teach children to read and write, or you can train future soldiers. By the way, combining this is also not at all difficult. You can build an ice cream factory, or you can build a concentration camp.

4 . Conservatives are afraid of diversity for good reason. Diversity is a threat: it is much easier to quarrel with those who are different; The fear of losing the competition should not be discounted either. Diversity is a burden, emotional, mental, it requires constant adaptation. But diversity is full of resources. Therefore, it is important not to achieve diversity at any cost, but to build social environments that are resistant to it, that can withstand it.

5 . For example, it has now become simply impossible to exist on social networks. People, acquaintances and strangers, curse each other, shame, blame, everyone demands something from each other, old relationships are broken, every more or less loaded statement is guaranteed to attract haters. But you need to be aware that people now meet online who simply would not have met before in wartime, they had zero chance of hearing each other - at least in this way, in all these claims, curses and screaming. People sort things out through the natural front line. People in a variety of different - and often critical! - life situations. Or people who, from the same starting point, chose opposite strategies—those who left and those who stayed, for example. It would be very strange if these people were talking peacefully and calmly - but they are talking, mind you.

6 . Here I would like to attach a disclaimer to each paragraph: “until the state sees a danger in this and comes with a crowbar to destroy your beautiful horizontal structures.”

7 . In February, the charitable base in Russia shrank by about half overnight.

8 . Radars, unfortunately, have since dropped almost to ground level - you won’t get through unless you’re crawling, and then if you’re not very big and noticeable.

9 . But we now have problems with the future for a long time. We are waiting for the next round.