Jill Dupré raised the question of crypto as an orgregore. Exploring the question helped me think about what an orgregore (aka ogregore or materialist's egregore) is.
Deciding what “crypto” refers to is an important prior question. I’ll take it to denote the enthusiasm shown by various people about investing in cryptocurrency assets and related businesses, rather than to the assets and businesses themselves.
Orgregores are built out of people, so the next question is what kind of social group “crypto” is. Three points along a spectrum of decreasing coherence are incorporated groups, movements, and markets.
When a group is formally organized (e.g., companies, law courts, religious orders, political parties) then one knows roughly what the candidate orgregore consists of. Or at least, one knows what its core consists of: one can debate whether a corporation is the shareholders, board of directors, management, and/or employees. Whatever the case may be, such a group is, at least potentially, an orgregore if one takes group agency to be a property of the beast (but see below for qualifications).
A political or social movement is more amorphous. Examples include political movements like social justice or conservative atavism, or people acting under the banner of BLM or QAnon. It’s harder to ascribe group agency here, and thus harder to identify a movement as a potential orgregore. However, movements have a joint intent, and they can produce things like political outcomes or violence. Perhaps the classic example is the Nazi party which some theosophists identified as an egregore.
Markets are at the far end of this spectrum. They’re not incorporated, and there isn’t a joint intent. According to List & Pettit (2011), “markets are not group agents: participants act only for their own advantage, however significant their aggregate effects on pricing may be, and there is no further center of agency beyond the individual level.” I agree.
Market frenzies like crypto (and others like the Tulip Mania, South Sea Bubble, and the Dotcom Boom) fall somewhere between movements and markets. I’m inclined to say they aren’t orgregores since I can’t point to what they produce. Some people get rich, others get poor; I don’t count that as a product. (Perhaps I should, though, since economic bubbles have real effects on people’s lives.)
The exploration so far has identified three aspects of an orgregore: agency, joint intent, and an outcome. A political movement can have agency; a market doesn’t. I don’t think of market frenzies as having attributes of agency like identity, autonomy, goal orientation, and interactive behavior.
Harrison White’s category + network (catnets) approach
I recently learned about sociologist Harrison White’s idea of “catnets.” White distinguished a pair of elements when describing populations: a category and a network; from Tilly, 1984:28
- A population forms a category to the extent that its members share a characteristic distinguishing them from others (e.g., all Welsh people, all coal miners, all viola players)
- A population form a network to the extent that its members are connected by the same social tie (e.g., a gossip network, or people who’ve borrowed money from each other)
Nick Crossley (2011:196, quoted by Mark Carrigan) describes them as follows:
Catnets exist where a set of actors are both internally densely networked in a relevant and meaningful manner and also share a common ‘category’ or ‘collective identity’. Actors can belong to a common category and even adhere to a common identity without necessarily enjoying meaningful and dense network ties: hermits are an obvious example. Likewise actors can be densely networked in a meaningful fashion without necessarily belonging to a salient category or sharing a collective identity: socially heterogeneous friendship groups might be an example. Where both conditions come together, however, we have a catnet and catnets are important, according to White, because the combination of networks and identities is particularly conducive to collective action, including protest and social movement mobilization.
A population forms a catnet to the extent that both conditions hold: there are both common characteristics and linking ties. This concept could help draw boundaries around orgregores.
“Crypto” isn’t a catnet. While there is a common characteristic among the people concerned (such as investment in crypto assets), there are no social ties that link all of them together. The same is true of other market manias, and for markets in general: there’s a shared characteristic but people aren’t all connected by some social tie.
I think a catnet is a necessary condition for an orgregore. I’m not sure it’s sufficient; I’m inclined to require agency, outputs, and joint intention as well. (Arguably, joint intention is a category.) On that basis, crypto isn’t an orgregore since it isn’t a catnet.
Conditions for an orgregore
Boiling this down, perhaps the minimal conditions for an orgregore are
- Constituent people share a characteristic (“cat”)
- There are 2-way social ties between members (“net”)
- Agency (differentiated, autonomous, interactive, adaptive)
- There are discernible actions and outcomes
This list is tentative. Some attributes overlap or may include each other, like outcomes and agency. It may not be sufficient. I’m tempted to add requirements for group agency such as those in List & Pettit (2011:34), in which a group of individuals “each intend that they together act so as to form and enact a single system of belief and desire,” that each intends to do their part to achieve this and believe that others will do their part, and that “all of this is a matter of common awareness.” I’ve omitted it since I want to focus on the behavior of the emergent collective rather than on the constituent individuals as List & Pettit do.
Notes
- I require that each member is linked to at least one other by 2-way communication. Following someone on a social network is not sufficient; the relationship has to be bilateral.
- This description also doesn’t refer to, or provide ways to test, that the orgregore has a single, coherent system of belief and desire about its environment. I may need to add this, but I don’t know how to operationalize the requirement.
- Another weakness is that I don’t know whether I’m compiling criteria or attributes, that is, conditions that need to be met to be an orgregore versus characteristics that follow from these conditions.
- I’m also unsure about how to categorize the concepts I’m trying to capture. An orgregore is some kind of entity, whereas agency is a potentiality (cf. essence vs. accident). It’s something like: agency is to an orgregore as awakeness is to an animal.
- Wikipedia describes the approach White has contributed to as “using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals.” I suppose I’m saying I may need both: the catnet relational pattern (conditions #1, #2) as well as the attributes and attitudes, i.e., a single, coherent system of belief and desire.
On this basis, a company could certainly qualify as an orgregore, as could a standard-setting organization. An industry might also qualify, if there are sufficient 2-way connections between employees in different companies to form a single network.
Political movements do have a joint intention (some political change). I’m not sure they are necessarily catnets. (I need to read Harrison White and Nick Crossley.) Just like crypto, there are common characteristics but not necessarily 2-way social bonds. If social networks are based on broadcast (like YouTube) or weak engagement (like retweets) they don’t constitute social bonds. However, if people are using social media for 2-way connections and there are enough 2-way links to connect everyone, there could be a catnet.
Crypto and other market frenzies are not orgregores since members aren’t networked, there isn’t a joint intention, and there isn’t agency or a purposive outcome.
I learned of an amusing test case from Gabor Molnar: the power of football (aka soccer) fans. After years of protest by Manchester United fans since the Glazer family bought the club in 2005, the American owners announced in recently that they were looking to “explore strategic alternatives” (BBC). They all belong to the category of Man Utd fans. I don’t know how well they’re networked together; there may be sufficient 2-way social ties, especially for fans living in Manchester and going to the pub together, to qualify. There is certainly a formal organization, the Manchester United Supporters Trust, that aims to “bring the United fans community together” including through community forums.
To summarize the examples:
|
Example |
Orgregore |
Category |
Network |
Agency |
Outcome |
|
Corporation (at least some) |
Yes |
Yes (derive income from company) |
Yes (board, employees) |
Yes |
Yes (products, income, survival & flourishing) |
|
Standard-setting group |
Yes |
Yes (memb’ship of task group) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes (creating a standard) |
|
Political movement (at least some) |
Yes
(?) |
Yes (beliefs?) |
Yes (?) |
Yes |
Yes (political outcome) |
|
Crypto |
No |
Yes (investment in crypto assets) |
No |
No |
No |
|
Stock market |
No |
Yes (hold shares) |
No |
No |
No |
|
Man United football fans |
No
(?) |
Yes (fans) |
No (?) |
No (?) |
Yes (forced owners to sell) |
Coda: Tricksters
Jill also asked how the crypto/orgregore question related to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). He reminds me of mythological tricksters.
A WSJ story about SBF a couple of weeks ago had a wonderful line: “There is much that remains unknown about the meltdown, and one big question for the investigators figuring out what happened is whether it was folly or fraud . . . .” Folly or fraud is often in play with tricksters, with some leaning to folly (Coyote), others to fraud (Reynard the Fox), and yet others where it’s sometimes one and sometimes the other (Loki).
Another recent WSJ story on “Why the Investing Pros Were Such Suckers for FTX” also had some relevant passages:
- “SBF may be at the center of what went wrong, but he didn’t act alone. Behind him lies a vast ecosystem of fantasy and fakery. It’s called the investing business. If we’re going to point fingers, let’s be sure we aim at all the right targets.”
- “Every bull market creates a willing suspension of disbelief, but the massive fee incentives of the investing business have turned the supernatural into the normal.”
There’s certainly a frenzy around crypto; Dionysus, the god of intoxication and revels, is in the house. SBF was certainly an effective cheerleader, which strengthened the crypto category.
Acknowledgement
Even more than usual, I’m grateful to Susan Tonkin for her feedback and insights on a draft of this post.
References
Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Towards-Relational-Sociology/Crossley/p/book/9780415534277
List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/3619
Tilly, C. (1984). Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Russell Sage Foundation. https://www.russellsage.org/publications/big-structures-large-processes-huge-comparisons
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