Archive for July 13th, 2008

An old debate, made famous by Machiavelli, has been resurrected in recent weeks when discussing Barack Obama. Does the end justify the means? Do Obama’s recent political maneuverings on FISA and public financing justify his goal of becoming president? Is his place in the Oval Office so important that he should sway on important issues like telecom immunity or campaign finance? Lawrence Lessig, for whom I have great admiration, certainly thinks so. Others, though, are becoming disillusioned and realize that Obama is a politician like others, prone to changes and human error.

I, too, have been disappointed. I never thought Obama was perfect, but he was certainly brilliant and had the academic credentials and connections that I think are important for politicians to hold. However, it recently occurred to me that perhaps his ideal role is not in politics. The broad, genuine support that Obama has enjoyed certainly makes the highest office of the land look promising, even likely. But could his following exist outside politics?

Historically, those wanting to induce policy change needed to be where power was. They needed the attention that came from being Senator or President. However, the deep structural resiliency of Washington, D.C. allows for the persistence of corruption and stagnation. Many Mr. Smiths have gone to DC to see their hopes and plans crushed.

Now, many of the elements of power - attention, influence, etc. - have been distributed outside DC. Al Gore has been more effective outside of politics than as an insider. Bill Gates commands more flexibility and cash than many countries. Both men have the ability to gain media attention and amplify their power. The same could be true of Obama. Now, I don’t presume that any private citizen could maintain the influence of the President of the USA for four years, but as a private citizen Obama could stick to his principles. The resurrected question of ends and means wouldn’t mean much. The end and means would be aligned.

Imagine Barack Obama forming the “Coalition for Change” or the “Alliance for Hope.” His digital roledex of hundreds of thousands of supporters would quickly become one of the most important political forces - while existing in a distributed, assymetrical fashion.

So, it isn’t that I want Obama to drop out of the race (too much of McCain’s policies and approaches are less than ideal) but, instead, he should recognize that if, for some reason, he doesn’t win the Presidency, he may be better as something besides a politician, a private citizen.

David Brooks gave a recent talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival about the unconscious mind and its importance. According to new research, the mind can only consciously process 1% of the information it captures. While we have grown to believe that thought and reason shape decisions, the reality is that consciousness is only like a small boy riding an elephant - it is important, but much of the work is done in the unconscious/elephant. These non-cognitive skills are just starting to be understood through behavioral economics, neuroscience, sociology, psychology and other fields.

The processes that shape people’s minds are really hard to measure and do not resonate with our current framework of economic incentives. Brooks thinks we need a new vocabulary do discuss these topics because our explicit decision-making is understood in terms which do not reflect our growing understanding.

I really recommend you check out the brief speech, in two parts, here and here.

David Weinberger, in an early essay for Publius explained that “Rules are norms that have failed.” In his reasoning, the majority of human action is not governed by explicit rules; instead, tacit governance - norms, conventions and expectations - dictate the appropriate behavior in most cases. Where explicit governance is needed, the norm based approach has failed. Roads need explicit speed limits to avoid people’s tendency to cause accidents. “The overwhelming preponderance on the Net of tacit governance over explicit is a sign of the Net’s depth, importance, humanity, health and success.”

This tacit governance is connected to the civic technologies extolled by Zittrain. Those technologies, like Wikipedia or the Internet, which require constant care and effort to be successful, rely on mix of tacit and explicit governance. On the one hand, the Internet Engineering Task Force decides through “rough consensus,” often by humming. On the other, Wikipedia has an extensive list of rules and policies (of which one is to “ignore all rules”).

This mix of governance strategies hints at an effort to capture the civic ethic which allows these technologies to avoid formal, external institutional rule-making. Partly as a result of a technopanic over online porn, the Communications Decency Act was passed to regulate online speech. Because badware is so pervasive, McAfee and Symantec have a tidy business of combating it. Both of these are purely explicit governance which can have numerous complications.

How do we govern the Internet and technologies in either purely tacit manners or through a mix which minimizes explicit rules? I think it comes back to the civic ethic which can motivate heroes like Ghandi or just a simple Wikipedian who deletes a malicious edit. The question, then, is how to capture this civic ethic and expand it to new fields? This is more than a technological question, but by designing the tools and understanding the motivations of civic engagers, we can seek to expand this.

Last month, the Personal Democracy Forum brought together leading thinkers on the evolution of politics and technology. The list of speakers was really impressive and I’ve been watching the videos posted to Blip.tv. I really enjoyed Jonathan Zittrain’s discussion of “civic technologies” which he defines as those technologies which succeed as long as people are self-consciously willing to help it succeed. Non-civic technologies work pretty well regardless of people’s efforts. To JZ, radios are non-civic, but Wikipedia is civic. It, along with others like PCs and the Internet, require neighborliness to work and defend against threats that may befall them (in the form of the tragedy of the commons or short-term commercial exploitation).

The law is expensive to enforce and, as such, requires cooperation. Historically, volunteer groups used to help round-up criminals. More recently, the public has been used to “notice anything suspicious.” This nature of the law, which requires cooperation, is what makes civic disobedience so potent. When laws are unpopular enough that citizens choose to not assist in their enforcement, then the legal institutions are put under enough strain that they may break.

A civic engagement, though, can help to enforce certain ethics. Wikipedia is a civic technology because it has a core of users which defend against spam and other violations of the rules. Digg, JZ points out, does not have this civic nature and has spawned a site, Subvert and Profit, which aims to game the system.

The Internet and Wikipedia are able to succeed largely without formal governance because tacit norms of civic technology provide enough incentive to defend against violators; the users operate in a framework of empowerment and realization which motivates them to create and defend.

Much of Zittrain’s work has been an effort to understand and create civic ethics around technologies. PCs are under massive attack by adware, viruses, trojan horses and spam; StopBadware.org is a way to combat this. The the principle of free expression online is under massive attack by corporations and governments censoring the Internet; the OpenNet Initiative and the forthcoming Herdict are ways to combat this.

Although I’m not clear exactly the delineation between civic and generative technologies (they are intricately connected), it is obvious that the civic ethic is an important way to frame the debate over Internet governance.