The Tyranny of Group Chats
In some very exciting news, last month marked the inaugural meeting of our communist book club, the Berlin Cell, a sister organization of the Hamburg Cell. While, to me, it's more than just a book club—we are already re-arming ourselves and practicing military drills in my living room—it's given me a lot of time to reflect on group dynamics.
Currently, the European continent is gripped by a devastating and tyrannical new social phenomenon: the group chat. Right now, Dani and I are in 67 shared WhatsApp group chats, a number that has kept spiraling out of control even though I asked everybody to stop that. This doesn't include our separate group chats, work chats, Telegram, Signal, Instagram group chats, family chats, or event channels.
What makes group chats snowball is that the more successful a larger chat is, the more resistant members are to adding new people, and the more likely smaller subgroups will form off the main group. This can be harmless, like a group chat organizing a birthday present for one of its members will be n-1 the size of the original chat minus the birthday girl, or more troubling, where group chats stack inward like a set of Matroska dolls with smaller permutations of the same group that denote members' relative closeness to each other, finally ending with the smallest permutation: the dreaded three-person group chat—where one person texts a couple, who pretend they are not in the same room.
This lighthearted energy of emoji reacts, GIFs, and stickers masks a complicated social landscape. No one wants to think that they believe in authority until they are trying to throw a dinner party with ten of their closest friends and everyone is being annoying in the group chat. But, any group chat connoisseur knows that to get Tom, Dick, and Harry to come to your party, you need to make sure Jane's going to be there, and to get those plans off the ground, one person needs to take control and limit back-and-forth discussion to the bare minimum.
Don't fret; all friend groups naturally form patterns of behavior over time that, at their worst, just make the vibes weird. But groups of any kind operate similarly to your friend group. In fact, we should think of every organization as nothing more than small clusters of friends coming together. Political scientist Jo Freeman says we shouldn't think of "elites" as nefarious, shadowy figures but as groups of friends within larger groups that use more intimate, informal means of communication. Consequently, the natural values and orientations of those "elites" in any group will come to govern decisions that are made. Even if a group insists it has no leaders, they'll emerge anyway, and their vibes will rule.
Freeman refers to this in her 1972 essay as a tyranny of structurelessness. "Contrary to what we would like to believe," she writes, "there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may distribute tasks, power, and resources evenly or unevenly among the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved."
This is the part where I embarrass myself, because I have famously befriended many communists in recent weeks who might be reading this, from whom I have learned many delicious secrets about famous activists, like that Malala and her husband are in an open relationship, and she was seen doing cocaine with the gay Obama sister, and many more things that I won't tell you here, but you can ask me about in person. These communists, I believe, have a suspicion I am a meathead because I do things like use the word "bro" unironically (instead of the much more elegant "comrade"), and The Tyranny of Structurelessness is one of the most famous short essays in the communist milieu and something that almost every Lenin lover has already read, owing to the fact that it is only three pages long. This essay invariably always gets used to defend people's interpersonal crises, exactly like I am doing here (like, bro, just text her back). But that's because what Freeman says is just true, and you should listen to her, because you can apply it to anything you want.
For example, I post The Tyranny of Structurelessness in my work Discord chat at my flowchart job about once a week, just to remind everyone I'm a communist. Often, "flat structures" are markers of pride at new-age software companies, and I like to remind everyone that it's an incorrect opinion. I used to have a job with no project managers because, famously, everyone hates project managers. So software developers also set timelines, talked to clients, and reported to the big bosses. This gave engineers more autonomy and power over their work. I liked this idea in theory because once, a long time ago, I had a job at a four-person company where I had a boss, and my boss also had a boss I wasn't allowed to talk to. But at my last job, natural elitism crept into the "flat structure" in a thousand tiny ways. We were all asked to limit our communication to the public group channels instead of private chats (a great way to encourage the diffusion of information), but some employees had access to the boss's iMessage, were regular attendees of his house, or even blood relatives, while others, like me, were not. When layoffs eventually happened, it wasn't the cousins who were asked to leave first.
Millennials love to reference The Tyranny of Structurelessness when talking about Occupy Wall Street, which everyone agrees was a giant failure. Vincent Bevins makes a broader version of the same argument in his book If We Burn: that many of the mass mobilizations of the 2010s failed, in part, because they never developed the structures necessary to turn mass participation into something politically coherent. Bevins wrote the book after a small demonstration by the Movimento Passe Livre against rising bus fares in Brazil ballooned into internationally televised protests. The press glorified these eruptions, but several years later it became clear that they “preceded—if not necessarily caused—outcomes that were very different” from their goals; most dramatically, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro. Bevins argues movements are not destined to succeed simply because millions of people join them. Ideologically diverse movements without recognized leaders wield far less power than they appear, and the development of Facebook group chat technology bears much of the blame for these movements manifesting the way they did.
In The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Freeman writes: “The more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given enough media interest and appropriate social conditions, the ideas will still spread widely. But the diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are discussed. Insofar as they can be applied individually, they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be.” The distinction here is something that is hard to unsee.
In my day-to-day, where, in an effort to get in good with the group chat, I inexplicably and often go march in the street for things like the right to be a “dyke”—which, from its myriad definitions, I gather is largely the right to wear ugly pants—I often look around and see communists, liberals, greens and anarchists and more protesting alongside advocacy groups representing every imaginable position on every imaginable political issue. This makes the events I go to widely attended and fun, because you will always bump into people you know. It also makes them difficult to describe as doing anything in particular, and I, personally, always leave feeling sad. The one true thing my president has argued, is that the human body is like a battery with a finite amount of energy; it's best not to try to waste our life force unnecessarily.
If you're looking to participate in effective forms of mass protest, strikes and boycotts are more effective. The Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, for example, is highly participatory, with straightforward demands that make it simple to participate, while also keeping the airwaves free of confusing noise. Conversely, it's not true what they say, size isn't everything, it's what you do with it. Your friends may ruin everything, but the bonds of love that tie the group chat together also make something like a communist book club worthwhile, because everything good in this life is about hanging out with your friends.