In our last essay, we introduced the importance of ‘repeating interactions’ as a foundation for building political movements. To summarize, it is extremely difficult to transform one-off or intermittent interactions between individuals into sustainable mobilizations that lead to power. Re-occurring, regular engagement is needed to forge the aggregate interest of many individuals into coherent collective action. In this essay, we name and explain the underlying catalyst for this process: predictability.
Cooperation requires prediction. If you help me today, then I’ll help you tomorrow. But this reciprocal relationship is only possible if you believe there will be a next time. If future repeating interactions are predictable, you can choose strategies that maximize benefits across all interactions, instead of trying to maximize your benefit in each individual interaction.
As the cliché goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Some goals, like successfully contesting political power, cannot be achieved by a single individual nor in a single day. They require a structure which allows for coordination over time.
An example: imagine a scenario where your neighborhood is being contaminated by toxic waste produced by a nearby factory. Naturally, you worry about your health and would like to do something to counter the negative effects of the factory – but you’re a busy person with only limited time available on a few weekday evenings. You have two choices. Option A is to spend that free time jogging to try to counteract the negative health effects (i.e., the non-cooperative option). Option B is to launch an extensive campaign with your neighbors to shut down the toxic factory (i.e., the cooperative option). If the probability of the campaign succeeding is sufficiently high, then Option B is the better choice by a wide margin. But if measured only at the scale of a single evening, time allocated to Option B is less beneficial than time allocated to Option A. The returns to Option A, although minor, are guaranteed and actualized at every decision point. In contrast, Option B is only more profitable when measured across all the evenings; across the sum of all decision points.1
As the example above highlights, predictable future interactions allow people to invest in each other for greater returns over the long run. Of course, this option is only rational if it is sufficiently predictable that it will repeat. This means that the other individuals involved have to be predictable to you, and you to them. You have to be able to rely on them showing up and doing their part. If something about this predictability horizon is murky, then it is eminently reasonable for you to avoid cooperation and focus on small short-term goals as an individual. For organizers, predictability is what allows for strategies to even be imagined. Any and all coordination requires predictable components. Any resource, whether physical or social, is a resource insofar as it is predictable. To organize a group road trip, your car and your friends need to be predictable to you. To create a magazine you need a group that predictably writes, edits, and distributes, and an audience that predictably reads it. To host a meeting, you will fail if you cannot with any certainty predict if 0 or 1000 people will show up.
Essentially, organizing requires predictable materials (a place to meet, transportation, materials, etc.) and predictable people.
Up until now, our focus on predictability is likely not very contentious. Though a vocal minority in progressive political spaces are dead set on absolute spontaneity, we suspect even the sternest insurrectionists will assent to the points above. However, our vision is ultimately incompatible with the mainstream approach to political organizing among progressives. To understand why, it is important to discern what allows for predictability to exist.
Fundamentally, predictability means constraints, or the absence of freedom. By definition, something (or someone) can only be ‘predictable’ if there is some domain where the behavior or attributes of that something are constrained to a bounded range. These constraints allow us to determine with confidence what the future state of the thing will be, and therefore allow us to incorporate that future state into our planning. Without constraints, there is no predictability, and therefore no planning. To the extent that political mobilization requires planning, which we strongly believe is the case, it requires constraints.
Another example: imagine you want to rent a cabin in Maine with your best friends for a weekend. To do this, all of you have to constrain your freedom to an extensive degree. Of all the countries in the world, you must be in the US; of the 50 US states you must be in Maine; of all the thousands of cabins in Maine, you must be in that specific one. Of all the eight billion people on the planet, you must be with those specific individuals. Clearly, the value of freedom is not unidirectional – some of the things we most cherish require fairly extensive constraints on our freedom.
To zoom back out to the big picture, we believe that achieving significant political goals requires coordination across time and between many individuals. Meaningful power cannot be built through spontaneous one-off interactions between strangers. But not all repeating interactions are equal – it is predictable repeating interactions that foster cooperation. And the people you predictably interact with are constrained in the ways that make them predictable – and if you are predictable to them, then you are constrained along some domain.
To successfully build collective power, one has to coordinate with individuals that you are constrained to repeatedly interact with. These constraints are most effective when set in your broader material environment. For example, you are (usually) constrained to repeatedly interact with proximate relatives, coworkers, neighbors, etc. The individuals who are most predictable to you in their repeated interactions are the most productive terrain for organizing – not necessarily individuals who already share your beliefs, opinions, and interests.
What is currently referred to as ‘organizing’ in contemporary political life goes in the exact opposite direction. It has come to mean meeting with and attempting to coordinate with individuals with whom you share nothing beyond a common ideology. Our contention is that such efforts, even when participants recognize the importance of repeating interactions, are unlikely to succeed because of the absence of constraints. Your continued participation is purely voluntary; nothing is constraining you to continue these interactions. This is deeply infertile ground for building cooperation and coordination; if anything, it might be deceptive, because people might perceive these repeated interactions as implying the existence of a constraint, and therefore future predictability, where there are none. Failing to recognize which relationships are genuinely predictable is costly, as it can result in the investment of scarce time and resources into relationships which prove to be temporary.
If the claims of the above terrify you, then you are correctly understanding the implications. We strongly suspect that most readers of this essay (much like its authors) are deracinated, cosmopolitan, mobile, and generally remote from ‘constrained’ social interactions. To paraphrase Brecht, we change countries more often than our shoes. The examples previously listed likely fall flat if you move often, work remotely, work in a small workplace, switch jobs often, are generally unable to be deeply embedded in your neighborhood, and lack other bounded repeated interactions. But collective movements benefit from cooperating with individuals they would predictably interact with, whether at the party office, the union hall, the church, the local bar, the mine, the factory, the local park, and so on.2 It is difficult to imagine how we can win without creating the essence of such conditions in the modern landscape. It is insufficient to wave your hands and say that the nature of sociality has changed. It is great that we have cellphones, but that doesn’t negate the need to plan. Sociality becoming ephemeral and transient is not some politically neutral background change – it is a cause and consequence of us losing. We don’t want to just be free to leave, we want to be free to stay. Advocacy for free association and the ability to easily fly away from things we don’t like can make us overlook the necessary institutions and structures that make us free to grow roots.
Another Type of Predictability
Often, progressive groups do recognize the necessity of predictability, but pursue it in a dangerous way. Instead of building environmental constraints that generate predictability, progressives (and other political movements) seek predictability in interests and beliefs. These groups combine absolute unconstrained interactions (you are free to join or leave or participate as you wish) with maximally constrained interests, beliefs, and even language. While environmental constraints can actually be positive (think of the Maine road trip example), solely imposing narrow constraints on people’s beliefs and interests is inhuman and invasive, requiring homogeneity and harshness towards any dissent, without any of the corresponding benefits of a constrained community.3 Nonetheless, it is often true of progressive groups, as in-group status is defined by ideology and culture as opposed to material boundedness (or general participation constraints that members have opted into). Further, common ideological outlooks can develop naturally within groups that were not formed due to common ideology.4
Contemporary political groups often skip this stage and directly try to forge disparate and unrelated individuals, with little common ties and no constrained vectors for repeated interactions, into an organization. Technology, especially the internet, gives us the sugar high of making this matching process incredibly fast. But such groups are the junk food of political organizing – created quickly, conveniently, but with disastrous long-term consequences. Pure voluntary idealism eventually burns out, people’s interests change, and such groups are by their very nature unable to plan or grow.
Internet groups are the apotheosis of these interest groups. Nothing binds the individuals together other than their interests; anyone can leave without consequence. You won’t run into those individuals at the supermarket or local baseball game, or have to interact with them at work. Even in the most spontaneous in-person interactions, you are at least constrained by social etiquette to not leave a conversation mid-sentence. No such constraints exist online. Your presence and participation is completely unbounded and can be terminated at no cost without notice. Clearly, this is terribly unpredictable. Why would you invest in a costly long-term project with individuals who can defect with no consequence? Ultimately, our contention comes down to this: is it rational to invest in someone you are bound to see every week but has differing opinions – or someone who shares your opinions but can stop interacting with you at any point without cost?
Clearly, the costs of matching are not a major obstacle for organizing. It has never been easier to find and connect with like-minded progressives. And yet, our losses and defeats are compounding endlessly.5 The planet is surpassing 1.5 degrees of warming, economic power continues to be monopolized, democratic institutions are in peril (if not worse), and the horrors of the last year-and-a-half are a dark omen for what awaits surplus humanity in the rest of the century. While most progressive spaces remain conduits for matching, we suggest that the main obstacles lie elsewhere.
What is to be done?
Of course, we recognize that mere predictability can be insufficient. Ideological incompatibility can be of such a degree as to make cooperation towards collective goals unlikely. For example, many of us struggle to belong to the involuntary communities we grew up in. But instead of fighting back by contesting power, investing in others in those communities, pushing our own agendas, moving up those hierarchies, or changing people’s beliefs, we often fall to the sweet siren song of escaping to islands of interest where others already share our values and beliefs. Functionally, offering this subcultural escape has become the dominant mode of many progressive groups. But it should be clear that this is insufficient. Instead, the focus on predictability can help orient our efforts. We should prioritize building collective structures with those we are bound with instead of striving to escape those constraints in search of ideological homogeneity in transient communities. Most relevant for those of us living fairly unconstrained lives: we should strive to transform our relationships with like-minded friends and allies by creating modes of predictability which require agreed upon constraints. We can try to plan our lives so that we live, work, and socialize with those we seek to struggle with.
Undoubtedly, this is different from the status quo. Many of us would be unfazed by a political group that requires adherence to a specific ideology, but would likely consider it unusual if a group imposed constraints on participation (like requiring its members to live in the same neighborhood) and/or non-participation (losing access to voting power or community resources if attendance is infrequent). But as movements in the long and potentially abortive 21st century continue to burn out, we have to recognize that ideological constraints can only exist in combination with participation constraints.
Architects often seek to increase sociality and foster connections between people. To do so, they physically design the environment to force social interactions. Progressives have become like architects who’ve forgotten about the power of design and instead quixotically put up posters in the building encouraging sociality. Subjective and voluntary willpower is insufficient on its own – it must be used to build constraints which compel cooperation through predictability, even when we’re not feeling particularly willful.
Authors (in first-name alphabetical order):
-Alireza G. Tafreshi (Primary)
-Eviatar Bach (Primary)
-Jack Montana (Primary)
-Julia Coursey
-Linley Sherin
This is an extreme binary example, where the ‘profit’ from the campaign is a step function. That is, you get 0 profit on any given evening but win completely if the campaign succeeds. Most political organizing can be more incremental, in the sense that any amount of effort expended results in a certain amount of benefit. In future essays, we hope to explore this specific dynamic: why progressives should focus on building power through incremental strategies instead of focusing exclusively on binary outcomes like elections.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is the seminal empirical study on the decline of social participation and repeating interactions. Anton Jager’s brilliant 2022 essay sketches out how de-socialization has extended even further than Putnam imagined. However, both Putnam and Jager fall short of identifying the role of predictability and constraints in generating sociality.
In a previous essay, we explored how action-based groups require more severe constraints than value-based constraints.
The mass political parties of history did not necessarily require prior homogeneity. Often, they merely required the acceptance of the majority position by everyone. Why would people accept this? Because the returns of maintaining in-group status even while advancing a position you disagreed with outweighed the benefits of defecting. How could this be? Because individuals were likely bounded to those communities and could not easily leave, thereby making cooperation more profitable and non-cooperation more costly.
Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn reviews international case studies of progressives eventually losing despite their ability to organize some of the largest protest movements in history.