In May 2012, I gave a presentation on collective action and information epidemics at Re:Publica conference in Berlin.
In the year prior to that, Russia saw a rise in opposition movements that self-organized on the internet using various platforms. Using my background in network science, I studied these online communities to extract some of the principles for self-organization that are typical for an uprising.
To me, the most interesting part was how much correlation there is between the structure of the network and the collective choreography it can perform, both in the physical space during a demonstration and in the virtual space for self-organization and maintenance. It turned out that communities that are tightly knit are better mobilised but at the expense of a shorter lifespan. They are also more susceptible to infiltration as there are no backup centers of powers.
So there is a certain balance to be found when building a community that should be connected to be able to act as a unity and yet, also disconnected sufficiently to allow for the different centers of power to arise within to avoid a single point of failure. These ideas were resonating with the concept of Polysingularity that I was working on during this time and I presented their theoretical and practical implications at the conference.