Can there be tyrannical, non-centralized authority?
The digital logic upon which networked technology is erected wants to be universal, ever more rigorous, more tightly woven. Logic, that is, wants to be articulated with logic, until there is perfect, overall consistency. Such logical consistency–with all its coercive possibilities with respect to the evolution of human social structures–is quite compatible with a kind of fragmentation and centrifugal movement. This suggests that there are anti-human potentials of technology we haven’t yet learned to recognize–potentials that are neither centralizing nor decentralizing in the traditional sense–or are both at the same time. The beehive may give us a relevant picture. Its intricate (and subhuman) unity seems to arise from nowhere. “Even the queen bee cannot be regarded as the visible guardian and guarantor of the totality, for if she dies, the hive, instead of disintegrating, creates a new queen” (Herman Poppelbaum). There is no totalitarian center of the hive, and yet the logic of th
