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How Unexpected Connections Can Lead To Surprising New Breakthroughs
In 1998, Srdja Popović walked into a Belgrade cafe to meet some friends. A biologist by training, he also played bass in a goth rock band called BAAL. Lately though, his passion turned to politics. He’d become an organizer, eventually rising to lead the youth wing of Serbia’s Democratic Party. It was that passion that brought him to the café that day.
A few years earlier, and half a world away in Ithaca, NY, a young graduate student named Duncan Watts walked into the thick woods surrounding Cornell University to record the chirping of snowy tree crickets. He had recently entered the graduate program in theoretical and applied dynamics and was studying a strange, obscure phenomenon known as coupled oscillation.
Srdja’s meeting led he and his friends to start the activist group Otpor, spark the color revolutions and create a repeatable model for overthrowing dictatorships. Duncan’s nightly sojourns lay the groundwork for a new science of networks. Although they never met, their journeys would become intertwined with mine and reveal the hidden dynamics of change.
Early Antecedents
Srdja and his friends were hardly the first activists to dream of overthrowing a tyrant. But their efforts got a boost from a little-known academic named Gene Sharp…
