Rick Falkvinge - Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual to Changing the World

PART I

BUILDING

THE

S WA RM

CHAPTER ONE

Understanding the Swarm

Somewhere today, a loose-knit groupof activists who are having fun is dropkicking a rich, established organizationso hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organizations are usedto living by the golden rule those with the gold make the rules. New waysof organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shreddingthem leaving executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, ragtag,disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structuredorganization.

On June 7, 2009, theSwedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European elections, becoming thelargest party in the most coveted subthirty demographic. Our campaign budgetwas fifty thousand euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spentless than 1 percent of their budget and still beat them, giving us acost-efficiency advantage of over twoorders of magnitude . This was entirely due to working swarmwise , and the methods can translateto almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secretsauce.

A swarm organization is adecentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like ahierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a smallcore of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a largenumber of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people notpossible before the net was available.

Working with a swarmrequires you to do a lot of things completely opposite from what you learn atan archetypal business school. You need to release the control of your brandand its messages. You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody canmake almost any decision for the entire organization. You need to accept andembrace that people in the organization will do exactly as they please, and theonly way to lead is to inspire them to want to go where you want theorganization as a whole to go.

It is only as you releasethat control, the kind of control that organizations and managers have heldclose to heart for centuries, that you can reap the benefits of the swarm: thesame cost-efficiency advantage and execution-speed advantage against the competitionthat the Swedish Pirate Party enjoyed. This book will teach you those methods,from the initial forming of the swarm to its growth and ongoing maintenance anddelivery. It will not teach you the underlying theory of psychology andsociology merely share experiences and methods that have been proven to workin practice.

When I kick-started theswarm of the Swedish Pirate Party, I had posted a rough manifesto on a ratherugly website and mentioned the site just once in a chat channel of afile-sharing lobby. That was all the advertising that ever happened; the nextday, the party had hundreds of activists. Timing, social context, and messageare crucial but if you have those three, your initial swarm will form likebees to honey in hours. Growing it and maintaining it will also be crucial, butthose are the next challenges in line. We take one challenge at a time.

As we describe the swarmconcept, it is easy to think of pure decentralized amorphous clouds of people,like Anonymous or the Occupy Wall Street movement. However, while these swarmsshare values , they do not share direction or method . That meansthey are confined to succeeding on small projects that span a relatively smallnumber of people over a relatively short time span, even if each of those smallprojects builds gradual awareness of the Anonymous or Occupy brands.

The weak cohesion of theAnonymous and Occupy brands can partially be ascribed to their choice of beingleaderless. While this brings resilience, as no leader can be targeted byadversaries, it sacrifices direction and purpose. Ive found that the typicalInternet community methods of inclusion, when combined with strong leadership,work much better to achieve global change than working leaderlessly underlittle more than a common flag.

I learned some of thesetechniques while being trained for officers rank in the army, and even more ofthem by participating in many online communities. But the secret sauce recipeof swarm cost efficiency was hit only when I took an officers training inmaintaining strong group values, mixed in the nets strong participatory valuesand low-cost mass communication, and added a dash of management experience fromthe dot-com era at the turn of the century.

That dot-com era was quitespecial as a manager in the IT field. If your people didnt like what you saidat the morning meeting, they would merrily walk out of the building and have anew job before lunch. Your paycheck was far more replaceable to them than theyever were as employees to you. People didnt work for the money.

Therefore, this experiencecarries over directly to working with volunteers, where people dont work forthe money either (as they arent getting any). Leadership and positivereinforcement are key.

Perhaps most significantly,focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.

Focusin the swarm is always on what everybody can do.

This sets it completelyapart from a traditional corporation or democratic institution, which focuses sharplyon what people must do and whatbounds and limits they are confined to .This difference is part of why a swarm can be so effective: everybody can findsomething he or she likes to do, all the time, off a suggested palette thatfurthers the swarms goals and there is nobody there to tell people howthings must or may not be done.

Rather, people inspire oneanother. There are no report lines among activists. As everybody communicateswith everybody else all the time, successful projects quickly create ripples toother parts of the swarm. Less successful ones cause the swarm to learn andmove on, with no fingers pointed.