It’s that time of the year when I grab my tattered copy of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and start reading, nodding approvingly at every other page. In artsy internet circles D&G are best know for their theories on rhyzomatic organisation of networks, which, as it turns out, is exactly how the internet is structured: not as a hierarchical structure but as a lateral network of interconnections. One element of D&G’s theory is often overlooked and that is their theory of the nomadic warmachine. I believe the rise of social networks is not the rise of rhyzomatic networks, but spells the advent of the nomadic warmachine. One early theorist of such a warmachine was Lawrence of Arabia, who writes, in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

In character our operations of development for the final stroke should be like naval war, in mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed directions, of fixed points. ‘He who commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little of the was as he will.’ (…) Discrimination of what point of the enemy organism to disarrange would come to us with war practice. Our tactics should be to tip and run: not pushes, but strokes. We should never try to improve an advantage. We should use the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place. (SPoW, pp 337/338)

Off late, there has been much talk of “disruptive business models” on the internet. I’d argue that today’s online social networks, far from being the cosy hangout for the socially inclined, are in fact nomadic warmachines waiting to become manifest. It is in the nature of such machines to topple empires, to destroy the incumbents…Citizen journalism is one of the first arenas where the kind of oppositonal organization such as Lawrence describes is flourishing. And there are other, potentially disruptive business models that are flying under the radar – just. Mobile telephony is a case in point. There is a reason why Apple, once the nomadic warmachine of computers, has allowed AT&T to disable VOIP on the iPhone. If VOIP on mobiles becomes a viable thing, then there is nothing that can stop consumers of mobile services to by-pass their operators. And if these consumers were to band together, then that would certainly topple empires.