Posts Tagged ‘oni’

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.