The New Network Tribe

In times past leaderless organization was a theory, but in the Network Age, it is becoming dominant.
The fundamental element of Ancient Hebrew society was the extended family household. Without them, you were dead, often literally. No one else would take care of you because no one else had any duty to God to care much. Indeed, they had reason to be quite suspicious and keep you at arm’s length. Certain minimal life support issues were a duty, to give you a sporting chance, but general care and maintenance was a different matter. The only exemption was a covenant, which was more binding than simple shared DNA. This is how we are wired to live.
In the New Testament, the fundamental element was the church body, which was always organized like the ancient Hebrew tribal society. That is, your church was your covenant family. Again, this was more binding than blood ties, but the fundamental operation was as an extended family household in a tribal society. The whole point was the necessary support system for folks staying together in a single community. Chances were, if you followed Christ, your blood kin would likely kick you out as a threat to what they thought were God’s blessings. When churches were formed in Gentile communities, this might be less of an issue, but there were plenty of other problems which attacked the church and called for a tight, clannish community. This is how we are wired to live.
Hebraic families typically organized themselves by reflex. It included a measure of chaos from our Western point of view, but it was enough for them. It requires a book to discuss all the details, so we leave it there for now and point out: In the Network Age, physical proximity is often fleeting, if at all. It’s generally a non-factor in consideration of doing things together. Personalities may be an issue, but the fundamental nature of things does not require leadership at all. A common vision, yes, but not specific leadership. Rather, it requires only selected people taking up various functional roles, with the whole thing changing to meet the purpose, whatever that might be. In first century churches, a fundamental element was simply being together through thick and thin. Most important would be a shared vision of why we are still here on this earth. It had nothing to do with property or greatness as humans measure it; it didn’t matter what they accomplished. It was about the fundamental shift in what kind of people they were.
People in the Network Age are learning to get important things done with the most minimal structure. They seldom want things that require solid organizational structure. Too much of what matters most to them does not demand it. They have oriented on this life in ways older generations can’t comprehend.
Did the Occupy Movement produce results? Mostly they provoked even worse repression from the Establishment. The system geared up to destroy their influence. Does it occur to anyone that’s a good thing, if it becomes too publicly obvious so that no one can ignore it any more? Does it occur to anyone the failure itself brought a vast horde of people together over something that might be hard to define in terms of what is better, but not hard to define in terms of what is bad? The collected ideas pasted together in the early days of the Wall Street protests were often contradictory. The people who held these competing agendas didn’t agree and still don’t. But somehow they managed to get one job done: Making sure everyone knows the system is inherently broken and can’t be trusted. We now know it in ways we might have ignored before the protest.
Meanwhile, this vast horde of people got more practice at coming together, combining resources to build something we can’t easily detect with the normal awareness. If you are primed to think outside the collapsing structure of Western Civilization, you might see the Occupy protests as highly successful. They have organized with a unique identity and acted together for extended periods against a global foe, somehow managing to be cohesive in action despite the apparent disparity in terms of standard political agendas.
Yes, it did include a handful of organizers who tried to steer things, but those didn’t actually see what happened around them. The movement has built a tribal unity without the physical proximity. They have created a budding civilization that bypasses all the existing categories and structures. They are sucking the lifeblood out of the future for the current world order, while the current world order hardly notices.
Did anyone notice if you tried to deny them the standard infrastructure access, they simply routed around that denial? They manged to network through commodity devices and keep communications alive on a level sufficient to keep going. It was fundamental to their identity as a group. We can see the original movement is about dead, having moved into the stage of formalizing too much. It was perhaps inevitable because they were using new ways to do old politics. Already we are seeing political action without so much of the physical gatherings. Individuals with some shared vision are now acting individually in different places toward a common hope. The Network Age is slowly being born from the Net itself, directly, as whole segments of diverse populations from within many countries are embracing a whole new morality which is very different from the West.
They have become a virtual covenant tribe. They are a taste of the distant past and the future.