Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real
In 2002, a Colombian political campaign manager named Clara Rojas was kidnapped in the jungle while attempting to earn votes in a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC. The rebels had been waging a bloody civil war with the government for decades, and planned to exchange the women for their imprisoned brethren.
It didn’t work, and Rojas was held for six years. During that time she became pregnant by one of her captors. While the relationship was consensual, the rebels did not appreciate a screaming infant in their encampment (he was injured during childbirth). They took the boy away from Rojas and gave him to a distant peasant farmer. She would not see baby Emmanuel until her release in 2008.
Soon after she was freed, Rojas’ story caused a sensation across the nation. Whatever side you took in the civil war, if you were Colombian you prized motherhood above all else. Kidnap, murder, gun running, corrupt politicians—all business as usual. Separate a baby from his mama, and there will be hell to pay.
A Million Voices
Shortly after the story broke, a young engineer named Oscar Morales opened a page on then-new Facebook, and called it, “A million voices against the FARC.” Word spread like wildfire. Colombian ex-pats connected with one another and amplified the message, funneling it back into the country, energizing tens of thousands.
In a matter of days, nearly 5 million people spontaneously marched in protest in streets across the country. “No more kidnappings! No more lies! No more deaths! No more FARC!” they cried. International protests were held in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the United States. The marches were organized and backed by no political party. They were sponsored by no one.
The FARC was shamed. In the months and years to follow, they receded. Ultimately, and with the encouragement of voices like Clara Rojas, they came to the negotiating table. In 2016, a final peace agreement was signed, ending a long, terrible chapter in that nation’s history.
Sufficient Energy
In terms of the Collective Journey, the 2008 Colombian peace march represents how pervasive communications technologies enabled groups of people to generate a spontaneous self-organized social system.
In the social sciences, self-organization happens “when some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous [happening suddenly and without centralized leadership] when sufficient energy is available.”
We’ve seen this before the advent of the internet, of course, but those events tended to be either small, local, or planned over far greater lengths of time. These marches involved millions worldwide. They happened at blinding speed, and they wound up altering the course of Colombia’s history, largely due to the exponential boost of social media.
What was imagined as a sentence on somebody’s Facebook page became real for an entire nation in a matter of days.
An Engine Powered by Story
What is important for our purposes is that sentence alluded to an extremely compelling story—the separation of an injured child from his captive mother.
So, if we follow the four major components of the Collective Journey engine, it went this way:
- Regenerative Listening. First, a story with great resonance was revealed to the Colombian people. One person posted about it on Facebook using authentic language and expressing heartfelt emotion.
- Superpositioning allowed for others to pick up on this resonance and share it with friends and colleagues across Facebook and other social media. Sometimes this was done under different accounts, sometimes anonymously. These sentiments radiated in fractal patterns, both within the country and around the world. They reinforced not just shock and anger, but boldness and defiance. The Colombians’ well-founded fear of reprisal was transcended by strength in numbers. Fuel for the engine.
- Social Self-organization. Self-determination followed. The Colombians had rapidly pushed themselves past a tipping point, and collectively took action. Yes, there were individuals responsible for some of the logistics, but they were not traditional leaders. They were not heroes. They were members of a beleaguered community who suddenly understood that no one was coming to save them. Instead of continuing to listen to the story, they chose all at once to become part of the story.
- Change-Making. In doing so, they would eventually activate this, the fourth component of the Collective Journey engine: lasting change.
Rise of the Starfish
While the No More FARC marches may have been one of the first, in the decade since, there have been a dizzying number of social media spurred self-organized movements: the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, ISIS, Me Too, Alt Right, and Hong Kong’s Yellow Umbrella to name a few.
As categorized by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom in their book The Starfish and the Spider, spiders are traditional top-down organizations. But what we are talking about here are starfish, leaderless collectives.
Cut the head off a spider and it dies. Cut a leg off a starfish and either another leg grows there, or you get two starfish.
Nonlinear, resonant, networked stories—the rivers and tributaries of communal narrative—are the life force of social self-organization. The starfish are rising.
Story Made Real
The reason the Collective Journey model is coming into prominence all around the world is because self-expression, self-organization, and mutual empowerment have become the most dynamic hallmarks in digital age.
The Hero’s Journey model has always reinforced the distinction between the real and the imaginary. You are the audience who exist in reality, this is the story which is demonstrably fictional. You can easily discern the artifice. The imaginary relates to our lives through theatrics and metaphor.
In the Collective Journey, there is a very different relationship between the imaginary and reality. With each share, there is added context from the sharer, which lends endorsement and authenticity to the story.
These affirmations by us, the people posting these stories, are an emotional payload that activates others. And each share brings added pressure and momentum to the narrative. Eventually, something gives, even if that something is unprecedented.
The act of sharing the story becomes the act of realizing it.
The results can range from the formation of a fandom around a new Netflix series, to a new trend in consumer behavior such as cutting the cord from long-entrenched cable companies; from the takedown of Hillary Clinton, to the placement of Donald Trump in the White House.
Flock of Birds & the Shotgun
We leave social self-organization with a final sobering simile. Much of what we’ve described here can be likened to the concept of murmuration.
At the start of murmuration, these flocks of starlings are “on the edge.” For any number of reasons, although they seem to be going about their business, they are also somehow ready to be completely transformed in an instant.
When that moment happens, and the birds fly up in unison, scientists believe it is like a phase transition—like the triggering of a stampede or the very instant that water turns into ice.
Regardless of the size of the murmuration, the birds all seem to be connected to the same network, perhaps sharing something we can’t quite yet identify. They become a spontaneous self-organized social system.
But what if you took a shotgun and fired it near the flock? What if you fired lots of shotgun blasts straight into the birds? What if you used canons? More than likely, the murmuration would deform. The whole flock might be sent in a different direction. Birds might even crash into one another and fall dead from the sky.
Well, some people have arrived with shotguns and canons, and they have commandeered the Collective Journey engine.
Next: Social self-organization does not always lead to lasting change. What are the factors that turn products into evergreen brands, popcorn movies into blockbuster franchises, and small men into world-threatening tyrants? The answers lay in the fourth and final component of the Collective Journey narrative engine: Change-Making.
Special thanks to Alan Berkson for helping me get this one done, to Steele Filipek and Caitlin Burns, and to Laura Adiwasito, Jorge Enrique Rojas Vanegas, Mauricio Bejarano, and the team at Out of the Blu in Bogota, Colombia for their assistance in preparing this installment.
The Collective Journey Series:
Intro: Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains it
Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age
Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It
The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling
Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television
Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey
Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer
In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field
Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses
The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives
Part 6: Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement
Part 7: Superpositioning
Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once
Part 8: Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real
