This page contains Chapter 7 of the podcast Designing the Revolution by Roger Hallam. We provide you with a summary and the full transcript (as well as downloadable subtitles).

Summary #

In this talk, Roger Hallam discusses how decisions are made in political and social movements, focusing on the concepts of attention and non-linearity. He argues that people often make decisions based on set rules or familiar patterns, which impacts how social change happens. He also explores nonlinear dynamics, where small changes can lead to dramatically different outcomes. Hallam uses examples to highlight the role of these forces in revolutions and points out that even those calling themselves revolutionaries can hinder progress if they focus too much on ideological purity rather than the movement's growth and diversification.

1. Attention and Non-linearity #

Host Roger Hallam explains two essential elements of political and social revolution: attention and non-linearity. Attention refers to the capacity to go beyond theories of free will vs. determinism and look at human actions within specific time and space. Non-linearity refers to how things frequently change over time in a sudden and unpredictable manner, rather than going in a straight line.

2. Decisions and Complexity #

Humans make thousands of decisions daily, based on rules of thumb and unconscious reasoning. This is linked to the concept of attention. When faced with many choices, we tend to follow others or use familiar criteria to make our decisions. This impacts our political, social, and ethical choices.

3. The Theory of Attention and Social Change #

Political activists need to perform disruptive actions to attract attention and create concentrated actions within a specific time and space. Proximity plays a key role in this. However, transition from minimal changes to dramatic changes is central in nonlinear dynamics.

4. Nonlinear Dynamics and Change #

Nonlinear dynamics refers to situations where things suddenly change after long periods of little change. Change can be triggered by small adjustments—the so-called butterfly effect. Revolutionaries need to maximise initial conditions to take advantage and bring about progressive, pro-social changes when the revolutionary episode occurs.

5. Revolutionaries' Common Challenges #

Revolutionaries often face two issues. First, their actions may seem to produce very little changes in the beginning, which can be discouraging. Second, once changes start happening exponentially, they may be unprepared to handle the sudden attention and power. These dynamics necessitate a good understanding of complexity and nonlinear systems by revolutionaries.

6. Case Study: Revolutionaries as Obstacles to Revolution #

Ironically, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, or people with radical ideologies, can often hinder the progress of a revolution. Their focus on ideological purity and internal conflicts tend to create barriers to the growth and diversification of the movement. Such tendencies must be understood and addressed for a revolution to succeed.

Full transcript #

The following transcript was generated using AI.

Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)

This is Roger Hallam and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. It's talk seven, Attention and Non-linearity. Hi. So we're trundling through here on various bits of theory and on the last session we were looking at the whole complexity situation. What I'm going to do in this talk is do two related issues. One is to do with attention and the other is to do with non-linearity. Okay, so attention is a really interesting topic because it enables us to get beyond the idea of free will and determinism. I wasn't actually going to start off saying that but I will because that sounds a bit complicated. But often when you look at human beings you have this problem of can people make decisions for themselves or are they determined by social forces? I think about attention as it bypasses that whole conundrum because it's actually looking at what human beings actually do in situ in time and space, which is really the big key to this sort of bunch of theory that I'm going to talk about. Okay, so as we did, yeah, we talked about complexity in the last session. What complexity refers to is there's loads of things going on and unsurprisingly there's loads of things going on for human beings in real time and space. For instance, you know, depending upon who you read human beings have to make something like 5,000 decisions a day. Obviously it depends upon what sort of decision you're going to make or how you define decision and you know what sort of day you've had and what have you. But let's say for the sake of argument there's about 5,000 things that you have to actually decide. So it's not surprising that you don't do the old-fashioned sort of rationalistic routine on every decision. You don't sit down in like a computer and weigh up the pros and cons. If you did you wouldn't get past, you know, more than 100. What you do of course is use rules of thumb or you're just not that conscious of the decisions you make, which is the same sort of thing. A rule of thumb in the literature is called a heuristic. What that means is you've, you know, walked down the stairs 10,000 times before. You don't have to make a decision about walking down the stairs. You're going to be thinking about something else and you do think about something else. So you're an automatic. But also heuristic means, you know, someone like a conservative minister comes on the TV. You don't have to decide whether he's okay or not. You've already made that decision as a rule of thumb. You know, conservative ministers on TV are going to, you know, say X, Y and Z, which you don't like. So you don't really have to make a decision about whether you agree or not. Another aspect of heuristics is you tend to follow what other people do, which is a bit of a bad thing of course, but that's what we do. So for instance, you're going out at night and you have to make a decision about, you know, a restaurant you're going to go and celebrate or something, and everyone else wants to go to restaurant X. You don't, you know, sit down for 15 minutes, or at least most normal people don't, to study restaurant X. You just go, I'm in for a quiet life, you know, everyone else wants to go to restaurant X, so will I. Okay. Now this has implications for making political and social and ethical decisions, as you probably are thinking. And one of the main academic discoveries, in inverted commas, is that poor people don't have that much attention broad width, as it's called. That's not because they're an intelligent, it's not because they're not interested, it's not because, you know, it has anything to do with them as an individual. It's because if you've ever been poor directly, you know what life is like, which is really hard. You have a whole lot of stress going on, and you simply don't have the time to sit down and think about Marx's Das Kapital, for instance, right? It's just not what you're going to do. You know, if you do a lot of manual work, I did manual work for about 10-15 years, you know what it's like, you get in at the end of the day, you just want to slump down in front of telly or something. If you've got enormous financial worries, like a lot of people do, you just spend an awful lot of time thinking about whether you've got money for this, whether you've got money for that, worrying, worrying, you know, staying up at night, getting tired, you have kids, you know, that puts another layer upon you. So it's not surprising that people do not, you know, enter into radical politics and all the rest of it, because of this attention-bought-with problem. Okay, so just to emphasise then, the great thing about this as an analysis is it's situated, situated in time and space, and that's what makes it a sort of an original and effective theory of how people operate. So as we'll come on to discuss, so I'm not going to go through much about this now, but it obviously lends itself to the idea that if you're going to get people to do radical things, enter into civil resistance, whatever it is, you need to get their attention, number one, sort of put that on your fridge, that's like super basic. And what that specifically means is you need to get their attention in a close, in a concentrated amount of time and space. So you don't want to just give them a leaflet, and then a week later give them another leaflet, you want to give them a leaflet, stop them, and then ask them to come to a meeting, which is happening not night, not a fortnight later, and such like. And obviously it needs to be something emotional, something that's going to attach, which is going to catch your attention, hence the whole advantage of using disruption. So that's broadly what's called the principle of proximity. I'm not going to go on about it a lot now because I'll be talking about it more, I think, in the next session. Okay, so the whole thing with the complexity thing and with the attention thing is you're situated, you're actually thinking about actuality, what's actually happening in time and space. And of course the thing about time and space is there's time, right? Time is an arrow, it goes in one direction, and things change over time, pretty obvious. But a lot of people fall into this sort of category error of assuming that things, categories, concepts, or events, it's like the situation is X, and of course that's a highly reductive way of looking at reality. The real situation is X happens over a certain amount of time, and during that time things change, particularly obviously if you're in a complex system. By definition, things are always mixing up and chopping and changing and being complex. So what does that mean? It means that you have this thing called non-linearity. So we've all been brought up to think that things happen in a linear way, in other words, things get a little bit better and then a little bit more better and then a little bit more better or a little bit more worse. In other words, things go in a straight line. It's rubbish. In actuality, things never, I think I'd be correct in saying that, things never go in a straight line. For starters, there's loads of noise in the systems that are bobbing around, but more fundamentally, there are what's called feedback systems. What a feedback system means is something impacts on itself over time and you get non-linearity. Non-linearity is where things are just trundling along and suddenly, wham, there's a massive change and then things trundle along and then there's another massive change. In other words, this is what's called an inflection point where things start to change a little bit for a while and then suddenly they go whoosh. I'm not saying this because I'm doing a series about revolutions, it's just the way the world works. An interesting example is often used in the literature is I think it's about rabbits and foxes who have horrible feelings about some other relationship with two mammals. Anyway, let's assume it's foxes and rabbits. What happens is the foxes eat the rabbits. There's lots of rabbits, so the foxes have a great time. Then almost all the rabbits and their population suddenly goes non-linear. There's loads of foxes because they're eating the rabbits and there's loads to eat. Then inevitably, you get low on rabbits. They almost disappear. As they're about to disappear, obviously, all the foxes start to starve to death or they just can't reproduce because there's not enough food supply for them. There's hardly any foxes. Suddenly, the rabbit's population massively increases because there's not so many foxes anymore. Then because there's loads of rabbits, suddenly the fox population expands. It might not be a dramatic thing, but you can see that just about everything has this sort of oscillatory pattern. There's these tipping points from where you go from one phase to another phase. This happens with just about everything in natural systems and human systems. A big example, as I'm sure you know, is the Arctic. The Arctic warms up, the ice melts, the ice disappears, the dark water attracts the sun's rays, it gets warmer, more ice melts, and you get this feedback system and this exponential function. Apparently, the exponential function is the one thing that's going to do the human race in according to some professor. It's the most difficult thing for human beings to understand. You're probably thinking, well, it's not that difficult to understand, but I guarantee you'll catch yourself making a linear-esque cognitive error, as it were, many times. You need someone to remind you, no, this is exponential. It's actually pretty difficult to get your head around, but for reasons that we'll come on to discuss, and it's pretty obvious, this is going to be a really important thing to understand when you're coming to looking at nonlinear dynamics in critical and social systems, which is what we're looking at. I want to look at something that expands on this nonlinearity theme, which is the sort of opposite, which is this idea of entropy. I hope I pronounced that right. What that means is, basically, you're getting inertia in a system as well. It's like the opposite. You get this massive inertia, things don't really change, and then suddenly you get a self-feedback system and suddenly things change. We've come across this sort of inertia tendency with the paradox of political identity. In other words, something massively increases, a social movement, fantastic, Extinction Rebellion comes along, 200,000 people join it, everyone's totally excited. They're totally excited because you've got all these people who are like them, and they're all doing something together. It's all wonderful. Then suddenly the growth stops and it just level pegs. One of the main reasons for that is the paradox of political identity, which I think we may have touched upon and we'll be touching upon it a lot during the series. One of the primary reasons everything just level pegs, of course, is because people have the same identity, they use the same language, they have the same culture, they have the same political orientations, and you basically use the population of those type of people. Because it's been so successful, it becomes unsuccessful for the same reason it's become successful, i.e. lots of other people don't want to join because they don't want to join that political identity, that social identity, that's not for them, etc., etc. A related dynamic is with elites. What elites do is usually they're super organized, super disciplined. The classic example is people from Central Asia like the Huns or the Mongols. They're tough, they're warriors, they go and conquer civilizations. Then they become their offsprings, their kids. They have these big empires, they've got lots of money, power, they live a comfortable life. Basically, they go soft, as you might say, and corrupt, and incompetent, and they only talk to themselves, and nothing dramatic happens for quite a while. Then suddenly, because they've become so corrupted and stupid, then someone else comes along and knocks them off their perch. This is called the circulation of elites. I think it's got another name, but you can see what I'm saying. So you have this inertia in the system, and dare I say, this is what happens on a regular basis, and it's happening now with the elites not being able to understand basic things like ice melting. I'll give you a third example. Again, we're going to be talking about this quite a bit, which is the situation with civil resistance episodes. So civil resistance episodes, that's where suddenly there's a big surge of social conflict. Millions of people come on the streets. You get a big alliance between different civil society organizations, and dramatic things happen. And the interesting thing is that historically, these episodes usually last no more than six months. Now, you know, this is not hard and fast rule, of course, but it's a general tendency. And the reason they only last around six months is, if they last longer than six months, they tend to bureaucratize, democratize in the sense of having big, unwieldy consultation processes, and they get clogged, and no one takes the initiative, and they generally get accommodated into the system. You know, people from the elites will join them and such like, and so forth. So again, dare I say, that was what happened to Extinction Rebellion after the April Rebellion of 2019. So it's not necessarily that people have been bad or useless or horrible. It's more just a structural phenomenon that happens when you get really big, really fast. Okay. So I'll just throw in two of the sort of phrases here, which you may have heard of once, phase transition. So the phase transition is this transition from inertia to non-linearity, or from a simple system to a complex system. In other words, there's a fundamental change in the operations of the system. So it's quite a useful phrase to remember. And it's sort of related to the concept of emergence. And that word became quite popular when people were talking about the internet in the early days, when people thought it was all going to change the world, and such like in around 2000s. So this again is, you know, things change and something new emerges, a fundamentally different system emerges. So all of this stuff is, you know, much of the much that it's all related, all these different ways of looking on social reality. What we're really looking at then, in summary, is this notion of breaking out, right, a tipping point where you go from nowhere to somewhere, something comes out of nowhere. This is the phenomenon we're looking at. And there's this notion of initial conditions. So initial conditions, a little bit complicated, but if there's going to be a massive change, it tends to get triggered by very small changes in the system. If you're familiar with this literature, you probably know about the flapping of the wings of a butterfly creating a storm halfway around the world. I won't go into the detail of why that is the case, but it does happen to be the case. But the point here is, is what we're doing in this series of podcasts is trying to maximise those initial conditions, so that as and when a revolutionary episode occurs, then we're most prepared for it. And we can most take advantage of the fluidity that that creates. To create this pro-social, progressive outcome. So before I finish on this, I want to just identify two problems which you will have once you go off and talk to other people about it, or if you're in a social movement or a political, you know, some sort of leadership role. So the first problem is things don't change. So if you look at an exponential curve, really, if you, you know, look at it in a certain sort of way, it looks like there's two linear lines. There's a more or less flat linear line, and then there's a more or less vertical linear line. As I said, there's this thing called the inflection point where things are just, you know, just changing a little bit. They're increasing, but it's nothing to shout about. And then there's this inflection point, and it goes whoosh, and it goes vertical almost immediately. So this creates two problems. The first problem is you're pushing along with your, you know, civil resistance project. And for the first six to nine months, let's say, nothing's really changing. You've got 10 people, you get 40 people, you get 50 people, then it goes down to 40, and maybe it trundles up to 100. And lots of people going, this is not changing. This is useless, nothing's gonna take off, you know, I'm going back to my day job and such like. What you have to explain to them is you're about to trigger a big explosion. And that's the way it goes. Things have to go through a whole bunch of iterations until you reach this trigger point, right? And then, so that's one problem. And in a way, that's the lesser of these two problems, because the second problem might not sound like a problem at all. But as we'll again come on to discuss, it's a massive problem, which is suddenly, everything takes off, you know, someone goes and throws some soup over a Van Gogh and 10 million people are watching you. And, you know, the press is the most nonlinear animal in the universe. You know, they're not interested at all. And then suddenly, your flavor of the month, and everyone wants to interview you. And, you know, you've got your 15 minutes of fame. And with a little bit of luck, you're gonna succeed in your campaign or, you know, something even bigger is going to take hold. And the problem with that, of course, is you're not prepared for it, because you haven't listened to his podcast, or something similar. And you don't understand why it's happened. And people get really ego-y and full of power, and patriarchal dynamics come in, and everyone wants to be your friend. And, you know, all these people that were just opportunists want to get involved in your organization, a whole bunch of things we're going to talk about. So you can see like, this is not, hopefully you can see anyway, that the whole nonlinearity thing is absolutely central to what we're going to be talking about. And it's a big problem, unless you've really got your head screwed on about what it's about. So obviously, at this moment in time, sitting here in my cell in January 2023, nothing, you know, a few things have half taken off, some things have happened, but no one around the world is, you know, about to transform the climate situation through some massive revolutionary episode. So obviously, the first problem is the problem, which is sometimes called jumping the chasm, which is a phrase that's used in entrepreneurial theory, it's used in systems theory. And what it means is, if you've got these first movers, you've got your 20, 30, 40 people, and nothing's happening, because you've got to jump to this inflection point when things take off. So again, that's something we're going to be talking about. All right, so I could finish this podcast here, but I'm going to be a little bit cheeky, dare I say it, and do a little case study, which I suspect may wind one or two people up. But I'm going to do it anyway. So my proposition is going to be, is revolutionaries make bad revolutionaries. Okay, revolutionaries make bad revolutionaries. So, you know, some people might listen to this podcast and think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a revolutionary. You know, well, this is what I need to say about it. And the fact of the matter is, in the initial stages of revolutionary processes, the people who self-understand themselves as revolutionaries tend to actually undermine the project. They may undermine it, you know, inadvertently or consciously, who knows. But it's not difficult to understand why this happens once you understand complexity and nonlinear dynamics. So I'll just, you know, there's a whole bunch of different dynamics here, but let's just pick a few out. So the thing about revolutionaries, you know, when they're sitting there in a cafe in Zurich, you know, 1910 or whatever it is, is there's not many of them. So by definition, they're first movers. So first movers by definition, and I don't mean any disrespect, but they tend to be weird people. They tend to necessarily be weird because they're first movers, like no one else is interested. Their only interest is that they tend to be nerdy. They tend to have quite peculiar or intense personalities. Sometimes they're quite egotistical. You know, you have to be quite full of yourself to decide you've got the truth and no one else has got the truth and such like. Okay, so this is a classic example of, you know, the paradox of political identity. And there's a bunch of things that prop me into their intercertainty. They usually have an ideology. It's a sort of cult-type tendency. We're totally clear everyone else is wrong. So they have quite a mechanistic view of reality, which is what we're trying to get away from. They tend to have a sort of macro, top-down view of the world. You know, they think about it in terms of big, deterministic forces of history and such like. And consciously or unconsciously, they tend to be gatekeepers. So someone comes into the group and they go, are you like us? No, you're not because you're not as pure as we are. And they, you know, tend to split into smaller groups over small matters, which are not actually small matters, but they're not what would concern most people, let's put it like that. Okay, so you've got the general picture and you're probably familiar with this sort of dynamic. Okay, so let me give you one or two examples. So over the last 10, 20 years, there's two examples which are quite interesting. So the first example is with Occupy in New York. So if you read one of the detailed books, and you should always read detailed books about revolutionary episodes or civil resistance episodes. So if you read one of the detailed books, you will know that when Occupy started off, it started despite the revolutionary groups in New York. So if you know New York, no disrespect to New York political culture, but it's the same in most big metropolitan, you know, global cities around the world. There's a whole bunch of purist revolutionary groups. Anyway, the upshot of it is, is it was set up despite them in the sense that as soon as they, you know, got going with the Occupy project, the anarchist establishment, as some people call it in New York, said it was bourgeois and, you know, reformist and all the rest of it. And, you know, it was rubbish, basically. And that made it difficult to organise, but they broke out. So you've got this inflection point, they broke out of that little bubble. And obviously, as I'm sure you know, it spread around the world and became a major phenomenon. Similarly, in the 2012 revolution in Egypt, again, if you read one of the detailed books, you'll know that it was like a bunch of people on the internet, you know, communicating with each other, young, middle class professional type people, and they fused in some dynamic, rapid series of social moves into occupying Tahrir Square. And all that time, the main revolutionary or at least radical organisation in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, who have been working to transform society for better or worse, for decades, they went, the hierarchy went, no, no, no, we don't want these people. You know, even after they occupied Tahrir Square, they were still opposed to what's going on, even though, of course, you know, thousands of people who belong to the Muslim Brotherhood joined in the activities in Tahrir Square. And I think, I might be wrong on this, but I think they finally came around to the idea, it was a good idea, you know, in the last two or three days, which is, you know, the classic move of these organisations, they're always late to the party. So something from my own experience is, and I don't think I've told you this story, but I was involved in organising the first web strike in London for about three decades. And I did a design for it, I organised the participatory structures, I worked with two or three other guys, they were sort of revolutionary orientated, but they had this pragmatism. In other words, they were following a lot of the ideas in these podcasts. And we practically designed it, we worked out how we're going to do the commerce thing, participatory meetings, as I said. And, you know, it was quite difficult, as all these things are in practice. But the fact of the matter is, it broke through, and 150 people stopped paying their rent, it rapidly spread, it went nonlinear, I think about 5,000 or 10,000 students stopped paying their rent, it came out of nowhere, the usual routine, and it was successful in a, you know, it was a massive success in forcing the landlords to, the landlord to reduce the rent. So myself and my mates, we wrote, fantastic, we're going to write this up. And we went into quite a lot of detail, we held a few workshops. And I thought, okay, that's great. You know, I'm doing research at King's College, I'll let those guys get on with it. So the following year, student year, there was another rent strike group, and a revolutionary group moved in to occupy it, as I might say, I think they were syndical anarchists, who cares, they were one of those types of groups which, you know, had this ideology. And quite long story short, they destroyed its pragmatism and its outward orientation. My poor mate was, I think, thrown out of the group. Anyway, if you're familiar with revolutionary politics, you're familiar with this sort of, you know, shoot yourself in the foot 20 times sort of routine. So, you know, you might think I'm just trying to be unpleasant here, but it is actually a structural problem. So there's no point, there's no point saying, well, those particular people are useless or something. It is a genuine, structural, systemic problem. And it needs a systemic response. In other words, we need to understand in some depth why this happens, how we can minimise it happening, right, because it always does happen, how we can minimise it, maximise the probability that we can break out of them, which is what these podcasts are about. So I'll leave you with the classic example on this, which is a, you know, it's a interpretation of the beginnings of the Russian Revolution. So apologies if there's anyone out there who, you know, has even more detailed knowledge than I do. But long story short, there were three or four guys in Switzerland who were the original first movers. And being first movers, they were impressively uninterested in mobilisation. What they were interested in doing is getting the theory right. And they spent, I think, literally two or three decades, you know, basically pissing on other people, other revolutionaries and such like, but they had this particular interpretation of Marxism. And they didn't get very far. So that was stage one. Stage two is Lenin came along with a few other guys and said, wow, this is great, we actually want to do something. And they went through this, what's called propaganda, propagandising, they have a mouthful, in other words, giving people propaganda. So in this stage, they go to, you know, the working class of St. Petersburg and say, look, we've got the truth. It's in this book, come to our reading group, and you'll understand the revolutionary way. And at best, it was really slow, because surprise, surprise, you know, workers don't have that much attention span, because they have to work 12, 14 hours a day. And secondly, it's like, it's just totally abstract. There's no emotion, there's no action. So it was, let's put it mildly, not successful. And then there was a sort of next stage was agitation. So agitation actually meant, hey, let's look at what the workers are actually concerned about, rather than a top down approach. And they, I think this happened in Lithuania, or one of the Baltic republics, which were under Russian rule at the time. So the idea on this scenario is these socialist Jewish revolutionaries, they went into the communities, found out the issues which were most important to the workers, and agitated, in other words, were activists for those particular issues. And surprise, surprise, the thing then took off. And you started getting thousands of workers being interested in revolutionary socialism. So you can see this, this pattern, this pattern happens again and again and again, because it's systemic, it's built into the way human societies are designed and human beings are designed and how social systems work. So that's the landscape. That's the theoretical landscape. And over the next few podcasts, we're going to get stuck in to actually the practicalities, how to change it. Thanks very much.