The movie is Never Say Never, 1983; the scene, Monte Carlo casino.  A dinner-suited James Bond, (who else?) is locked into a prototype digital game to control the projected data-map of the world, gloriously spinning in 3-D on the giant screen separating the opponents.  Squeezed around the table housing the terminals and joystick, the casino crowd occupies the places of masses in awe of the two 'leaders' who hold the destiny of the world in balance.  Symbolically, James Bond wins.  It's a classic scenario of world domination played out between 'leaders' as a spectacle for the masses.

The world never tires of this spectacle.  It's still on every night in Bush's war on terror, the war on Sadam.  Leaders and their masses everywhere.  As political and cultural theorists, Deleuze and Guattari were quick to articulate, the difference between the protest of the masses and the psychology of the pack.  First, there's

the mass subject , with all the identifications of the individual of the group, the group with the leader, the leader with the group; be securely embedded in the mass, get close to the centre, never be at the edge except at the line of duty

then there's the pack, which even on its own turf, is consituted by a line of flight that is a component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, asign a negative sign... in a pack each member is alone even in the company of others (e.g. wolves on the hunt) each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band..  on the edge, in the centre..at the edge again...there are particularly refined examples: "high-society life". (A Thousand Plateaus, 33-4)  

Social elites form packs.  The lesson of this distinction is don't look for a leader in the pack.  Don't confound behaviours.  InThey Rule (http://theyrule.net), data-mapper, Josh On, tracks the behaviour of the  social elite of the coporate pack, the 1% who control a staggering 70% of the world's wealth (in dollar, not spiritual, terms), by mapping corporate lines of power.  There's no hierarchy, no boss.  Certainly it's not Bush, or Blair, whose leadership is a convenient public distraction.  They Rule is a data map of Fortune's top 100, or, at least those most influential, in terms of who is running the most powerful corporations in the world.  By contrast, politics is the side-show, the spectacle of the one and the many, leaders and masses, amped up by the media, rating fodder for tv.  Those who actually rule are found elsewhere, on corporate boards, and are mostly anonymous.

Click on the briefcases on these shadowy silhouettes and lines of convergence appear.  Data-mapping traces emergent behaviours and there are no firm lines of allegiance here.  Profit, loss, opportunity, dictates.  When you're dealing with a pack, there's no clear leader.  The pack splits, divides, disappears in corporate shuffles.  Instead of leaders there are intersections of lines of investment, contracts, points.  There's not necessarily loyalty in the pack, only disjunctive syntheses, profitable connections, following lines of flight. 

By contrast,  political protest has mostly been contained in another system, in the representative game of masses and leaders, and government agencies.  Docile populations protest the WTO, the IMF: no matter how noisy, or deadly the protest, thinkers Foucault and Massumi have identitfied the "docility"  of protest populations, socially structured along certain behaviourial lines.  Tell the government and they will fix it.  The vote of the people counts in democracy.  Meanwhile, the shadowy directors of global commerce and production go largely unnoticed; check the money flows to political parties, the arms length alliegances.  Boss/worker flashpoints take the protest heat, as do summits of government trade representatives. 

The those who rule of They Rule  are elsewherere.  The website issues an open invitation to keep on tracking the distributive networks of power.  Like the web, knock a part of it out and it continues to function.  Look at corporate America and the Dow Jones adjustments; its about not bringing the whole system down.  Disjunctive synthesis, distributed networks have no centres of power, only shifting concentrations, outlier opportunities, the potential for radical shifts.  Repeat, no-one is in charge.  Nothing is locked in, certainly not that most liquid of assests, of capital.  The point of the network is to keep the system flowing, to keep a certain proportion of investments in motion.  Unlike the more fixed tendency of government structures (invested in perceptions of stability etc), the relationships of the ruling classes are fluid: a distributive pack network open to redistributions, micro and macro shifts. 

From this point of view, They Rule could become hallucinatory and a game of distribution of abstract mass: pure data flow.  It's tempting to shift a corporate donation or two.  What would it take for a huge donation to swing California Green, for an energy corporation to invest in windfarms and flick the political switch with a generous energy concession?  The oil balance shifts.  What kind of microshifts would change the world?  After all, the pack is opportunity, imagination.  All it takes is a little shift; in data terms, for an outlier concentration to determine a paradigm shift (as we've seen with Gates and Microsoft, in Deleuzian terms a line of flight, a deterritorialization of capital from blue chip industries, a territorialization of the data-sphere).  The invitation is there.

Unfortunately, the web-site is for tracking only.  The players with their wealth and connections are fixed, according to the data of Fortune 500.  Visitors are invited to contribute to the building the data-base, to multiply the links, the densities and intensites in the data cloud; to data-mine.  To learn and to predict.

Other data-mappers, like Axis  (http://www.whitney.org/artport/commissions/codedoc/Levin/axis.html) tracked political alliances on the conventional government models:  segmented structure, segmented flows, molar thinking.  Axis threw up concentrations of shared data, creating parody axes of evil.   You were invited to click on any country in the world and an axis of shared data (plotted from other world data) emerged: sometimes linking Russian AKA machine guns to their distribution in Angola; at other times uncovering absurd shared links which became the immanent political critique of the data-mining method.  Logicaland  (http://logicaland.net/) was likewise molar in structure, tied to the concept of the nation-state and GDP (gross domestic product).  This contrast between They Rule and Axis/Logicaland threw up comparisions between strategies of thinking in the molar terms of nation-states as bounded entities (clumsy, absurd, outmoded), and the more furtive, sinister, and successful, becoming-animal of the ruling class' packs which know no borders, or, for whom, borders are temporary obstacles or useful investment dykes.  The success of The All-Star Data Mappers was that it provoked political thinking.

The All Star Data Mappers, curated by John Tonkin, event futurescreen O2: data terra, at Artspace, 28 Nov-7 Dec, 2002 as part of data terra , curated by Leah Grycewictz, for dLux Media, 2002.