Longing for Wikitopia: the study and politics of self-organization

Self-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation is central to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominant paradigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling the void that is opening up as both the state and market are increasingly perceived as undemocratic, unjust and inefficient. Drawing on observations from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, this paper argues that self-organisation indeed is an inspiring ideal but that it is often misunderstood and may produce adverse consequences when used as a policy guide. While self-organisation is too inspiring to abandon, its harsh realities need to be accounted for if we want to think and work with it

For a heterodox computational social science

The proliferation of digital data has been the impetus for the emergence of a new discipline for the study of social life: ‘computational social science’. Much research in this field is founded on the premise that society is a complex system with emergent structures that can be modeled or reconstructed through digital data. This paper suggests that computational social science serves practical and legitimizing functions for digital capitalism in much the same way that neoclassical economics does for neoliberalism. In recognition of this homology, this paper develops a critique of the complexity perspective of computational social science and argues for a heterodox computational social science founded on the meta-theory of critical realism that is critical, methodological pluralist, interpretative and explanative. This implies diverting computational social science’ computational methods and digital data so as to not be aimed at identifying invariant laws of social life, or optimizing state and corporate practices, but to instead be used as part of broader research strategies to identify contingent patterns, develop conjunctural explanations, and propose qualitatively different ways of organizing social life