About a half-mile from the White House, a presentation on online extremism is taking place at George Washington University (GW). The precise setting, however, is unusual: The event is in the physics building, rather than one of the political science halls across the street, and the discussion is being led by a fast-talking and personable British physicist.
Neil Johnson starts things off in unorthodox fashion, placing some props in the middle of a conference table: a snack-size Ziploc bag filled with multicolored paperclips and a cylindrical container holding 100 Chinese “fortune sticks.”
After a brief introduction, Johnson pulls open the bag and begins spreading the paperclips — different colors to represent different people, he says — randomly across the tabletop. He then assembles the clips into small linked clusters, which grow or shrink, sometimes splitting off and merging with other clusters. His hands move quickly, rearranging the clips as deftly as a three-card monte dealer manipulates his cards.
For Johnson, the changing affiliations of the paperclips mimic what happens when, say, 100 people arrive separately at a social gathering and gradually mingle. “One minute you’re in a group of three; then it’s four, five or nine until some people break off and join another group,” Johnson says. But while it may seem random which and how many clips — or socialites — become linked together, he’s become adept at spotting the underlying patterns. And when it’s people clustering up, those patterns could have dangerous consequences, depending on the shared interests that hold the assemblage together.
Over the past half-dozen years, Johnson’s unconventional research has taken him online, studying groups not of paperclips or partygoers but of hatemongers and would-be terrorists. His conclusions suggest that rather than monitoring the behavior of individuals, hoping to pick out a few “bad apples” before they resort to violence, law enforcement officers would reap greater rewards by concentrating on the groups to which these people belong.
