In difficult times like these, popular demands persist: in the last 3 and a half years the only positive developments for our country have come from referendums. To the ever greater surprise of politicians and scholars of social flows, political protest movements are organizing themselves and are preparing to be, thanks to the Internet, increasingly structured and 'intelligent'.
A typical and important phenomenon in the structure of the increasingly present popular movements (from the peaceful protest ones to the 'revolutionary' ones of North Africa) is the lack of a traditional leader: rather one can investigate a 'leader brand', a 'shield ' behind which many converging interests find common ground to organize themselves from below. Many groups even advocate the absence of a leader.
Why the Media's insistence in searching for a leader at all costs or in the 'total' demonization of any organized group of citizens? The reason is to be found in the desire of the 'analog society' to better understand the nature and organization of groups: in other words, there is a lack of understanding of a fundamental fact: the technology of networks and social networking is changing politics.
For many traditional political observers, the notion that a political movement can grow without leaders is inconceivable: who will they put on the cover without a leader? And who will they interview on TV? Above all, who will negotiate with them? After all, (including Grillo in Italy), each previous movement had a figure of reference: so how do you explain the movements of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt?
The underlying reason lies precisely in the interpretation of these movements: they are not without leaders, on the contrary. They are FULL of leaders. It is a type of distributed leadership and totally different from the one we think we know: it is not vertical but horizontal, and is based on the 'sharing' of a superstructural charisma: the technological mechanisms allow valid and effective group decisions (someone still remembers the Referendum on water and nuclear?).
Many of us come from generations that only know the old concept of leadership and we have difficulty thinking of 'command' as a decision-making factor that can come from an organized form of collective intelligence: everything from our education (schools, churches, governments, companies) leads us to think that leadership is a form of 'vertical' interaction, from top to bottom, made of order on one side and obedience on the other.
The old scheme is: answer the right questions, execute orders, make apprenticeships and advance in career.
Today, however, we live in a sea of 'lateral' social connections that allows everyone to connect and share needs and talents capable of satisfying them.
Traditional political institutions appear in disgrace, incapable of reforming themselves and paralyzed by the search for constant challenges and special interests: the result is an explosion of citizen movements demanding social change. The Indignados, to name one above all: lenticular organizations in which everyone is equidistant from an argumentative centre, there is not a pyramid but a sphere of interests: in such a system if a node 'falls' there are others ready to replace it and to take his place, and you can't stop him by hitting a 'boss'.
We lack money, but this situation could mark a marked increase in our sense of responsibility and (I hope) the abandonment of a delegating mentality in favor of an active and cooperative approach to problems. If the Internet succeeds in this aim (overcoming the enormous lobbying resistance present) the politics of the future will do without professional politicians.