The People You Know
The People You Know was extrapolated from the Six Degrees of Separation by the environmental activist, Carl Bailey. His argument was that the Six Degrees was actually little more than a mathematical exercise with no real-world significance.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain Bailey’s dismissal of the earlier theory is with a personal example. Within three or four degrees – a surprisingly small number of steps – I can find a person to person link between myself and the President of the USA, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Queen, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the presidents or prime ministers of at least three other G8 countries.
Does that mean I can contact any of these people? No, partly because of the nature of human relationships, because we adhere to surprisingly strict but unwritten rules as to what is and isn’t acceptable to ask of our acquaintances and friends. What’s more, given those rules, it only takes one of the three links to be less than a very close friend for the negotiations to become impossible.
But even if I could use my chain of three or four degrees to contact all those people, could I utilize that contact to any significant ends? No. I might use it to obtain a signed photograph, perhaps an invite to tour the White House or attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace, but the mere existence of a connection doesn’t confer any serious consideration.
Bailey’s point is that the Six Degrees does not represent a global old boy’s network. In fact, it represents nothing more than a sort of randomly generated exponential growth.
As a committed environmentalist, Bailey was interested in finding systems of cooperative action which could start at a very local level and expand to have a global impact.
The People You Know was the book that resulted, and although it enjoyed only modest sales at the time of publication (and in truth, it is a somewhat dense read), the theory itself gained increasing currency among environmental and local action groups.
The idea is simple, that with a realistic goal and a high enough level of collective commitment, the people you know will have the necessary skills, connections and resources between them to achieve their objective.
The first successful campaign attributed to the application of the theory was that against the building of the LVO Waste Processing Plant in Vermont in the US. In this case, a group of close friends mobilized and used small but vital spheres of influence to ensure that LVO eventually pulled out of the project.
The fact that LVO subsequently built the Waste Processing Plant in an impoverished area in Arkansas also points to one of the criticisms of this theory – people tend to be friends with like-minded people. The Vermont activists were university educated and included teachers, lawyers, a doctor and a local politician among their number.
No such group was available to oppose the plant in its new location, which opens the theory to the criticism that it’s merely glorifying an age-old middle class tendency to protect its own backyard at the expense of poorer or less educated communities.
But the concept of The People You Know still underpins a great deal of activism in the environmental movement and in other locally-based initiatives. And as Bailey is quoted as saying, ‘Anything that motivates people to join together to save what they value can never be said to have failed. It may not always succeed but the only failure is doing nothing.’
(coming next - the destruction window)
