Power Laws, Russian Czars, and Blogs

Not going to get into the mud anymore on the direction of blogs opposed to Bushevism, so I'll leave it to Demosthenes, a long-time observer with a foot in both camps of the dispute going on between the top tier bloggers on "our side" and the bottom feeders who thought they could count on top tier support. Instead, I would like to make a couple of points about how the dispute relates to similar historical (and predictable) outcomes.

First, the things I've read on complex adaptive systems in which agents interact freely in forms of competition and cooperation indicate that distributions of outcomes in those systems don't follow the familiar bell-shaped curve. They follow a "power law." I'm not well enough trained to explain the math, but the basic idea is that eventually things will shake out into tiers. On the top tier, for example, you'll have one agent. On the second tier, 2; third tier, 4; fourth tier, 8; and so on. You see it in book sales, academic study citations, economic firms, etc., and I believe we're seeing it with blogs (at least on the "progressive" side--the structure of our opposition doesn't seem all that conducive to free interaction and comp/coop). I'm not going to try to list who's on what tier, but most lists of estimates would include most of the same blogs in pretty much the same order. And yes, Good Nonsense is somewhere between tier 156 and 162 depending on if Avedon Carol has linked to us lately.

So, actually from this perspective, what has happened with our side of blogs was predictable from the start. We went from the free-ranging conversation of anybody who could find the time and stuff to say that the late, lamented Billmon threw himself on a sword for when complaining about the trend in blogging several years ago to the hierarchy and highly business-oriented system we have today which Billmon condemned and got himself banished from Atrios for.

But, as in almost everything he said, Billmon was right. If you value a marketplace of ideas and a network of like-minded folks in an egalitarian organization, you lament its decline and disappearance to just a few niche bloggers very much. If you value a marketplace of winner-take-all and a core group of gate-keepers who control the bulk of what is put out in our name, you just see it as a matter of course, of nature operating the way nature does, winners and whiners. I suspect that it was this inevitable triumph of the latter and his inability to stop it that played a major role in Billmon's decision to leave blogging, to the detriment of both groups of participants.

We are now very close to what Billmon foresaw, if not already there. It shouldn't be surprising for another reason that actually illustrates what has happened well. Some of the creators of the top tiers, Kos and Armstrong and their bodyguards, came directly from the Social Darwinian world of the dot-com boom, with its rules and ambitions. They've clearly applied the concepts to development of the blog world and succeeded in establishing something remarkable and impactful. But they didn't do it for the reasons Billmon, Digby, Avedon, or most of the rest of us got into this, the conversation, the chance to contribute and maybe even sway a debate once in a while. I would love to see the business plan they laid out when they launched and how closely they've been able to hit their timetables. They've also succeeded in building themselves as brands and developing branded consumers. Like folks who give away product free or cheaply to hook the customer, they spread themselves far and across a wide range of groups to establish market position from which they could then start controlling production and producers. They also made some bloggers dream of creating similar businesses, some of whom now are reacting as if betrayed when those dreams are being crippled by these business decisions of the top tiers to cut them off the gravy train. The "betrayed" felt they were part of a community that would support each other. They ignored Billmon and paid.

Second, the other historical, predictable part of all this is the inevitability of a split like this. It happens in every major communal undertaking starting in opposition against a common threat or enemy that finds success and then has to deal with contending perspectives originally hidden by the common cause. (Let the "prayer in school" people win and watch what happens to "prayer.") I used to teach Soviet history and always marveled at (not admired) the emergence of the Bolsheviks out of all the groups trying to topple the Czar at the end of the dynasty. It was like a power law, actually, the complex adaptive system generating at first a large number of potential challenger groups, all "in this together," but eventually whittling down and self-organizing into a power law distribution. Only in this case, unlike best-selling authors, or most of them anyway, the top tiers got to literally take out the lower ones. Actually, that's not that uncommon, neutering or eliminating the lower rungs, as students of US business history can attest. And, since the Kos/Armstrong/Atrios/Huntington model is based on being a business, not a whiskey bar, it's maybe lamentable but certainly not surprising that they are now in the process of whittling out and controlling the potential competitors.

I'm sure that some of the half dozen readers we get will protest that the top tier are really good people and we're egalitarian and not hierarchical (with all the authoritarian overtones of that) and that business principles don't really guide all this now. Well, to some extent I agree. There will be niches for folks who have independent sources of income and time that they can devote to a free Internet and its use, although that's a lot of potential speed bumps for the existing system. And the top tiers will continue to need to show "diversity" and "fellowship" so their group of favored bloggers on the immediate lower tiers will continue to be promoted. Especially when they know better than to challenge, as was demonstrated when the news of Armstrong's dot-com violations came out and Kos told the close tiers to deny the story oxygen. Whereupon those tiers all in disturbing lockstep scoffed at the notion that Kos could tell them what to do and denied the story oxygen. That's the kind of "freedom" (and self-deception) that has already raised its head in this emerging coagulated system and will be more and more prominent as the complex adaptive whittling continues. (Are the fourth and fifth tier courtiers really not paying attention to the possibility that they could be cut off the blogrolls of their higher-ups and what they could do to their readership and revenue? Do we really believe these whacks at the lower bloggers aren't a form of warning shot across the bow?)

Of course, until the top tier figure out a way to deny oxygen to anyone who can start a blog and have the time and independent resources to maintain it, there will be this lower tier, this "long tail" of bloggers with their small audiences who can keep the flames of the discourse that Billmon cherished alive. Who really knows how many of us that applies to? One indicator might be who doesn't run ads on their blogs, who is selective about the ads, and who will take any dollar available. (One of the best distinguishers of who has the Billmon view and who has the Kos/Atrios view is the extent of mental contortions the blogger has to jump through to justify accepting ads from people "I really don't support"--like politicians who say "my vote can't be bought." Whatever.) But it's a hard lesson to learn that, when one becomes a business, you become dependent on and linked your revenue producers, on folks who buy space on your blog or who direct customers to it. We've managed to see what happens to news media that carry the implications of this out to their logical conclusions, but somehow too many of us have missed that the same thing could happen to our happy little egalitarian camp of good guys.

We're fortunate at this blog not to have to rely on outside resources. We do it for the enjoyment of having a chance to blow steam and share ideas with a small but interesting group of people. We stopped reading the toppest tier folks long ago when it was clear where they were going, and only partake of a few of the higher tiers that established themselves on merit before the natural shakeout gained speed. You can see from our blog links the type of blogs that we value and the interesting perspectives the blogworld can still provide. (And, yes, Atrios is there to keep you linked to the top tier world. We're noble.)

But that world is morphing rapidly now, just as complex adaptive systems following power laws always do. It's kinda sad, just as it always is, to watch its victims have reality dawn on them. There will eventually be two arenas of blogging--those framed around the business model and those framed around the whiskey bar model. The former will be even more dominant, but, like the music industry, there will be the ferment and the potential for innovation and creativity in the latter that will force the former to coopt and tame the good outcomes and to try to control and eliminate real threats. Those who got into this mistakenly thinking they'd found a community and a home that would last? That they could make a dependable living from writing their thoughts? Well, would it be too insulting to ask that they at least appreciate what they had while they had it? If it's any consolation, they're not alone in what's happened to them on the broad scale, and their company actually has some pretty distinguished and honorable efforts in it throughout history. The top tiers may be the top but historically they rarely leave the stage admired.

I know. It's insulting, and I take it back. I just wish those banished from the top tiers now well and hope they survive. We need them. Soviet history, music/software/automobile history, basic human history show what happens too often when the top tiers totally get their way. Please hang in there. That's the best we can do. And we're sorry it's not enough.