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…the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertizing or in the high arts is towards participation in a process, rather than the apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt.McLuhan 1951 - Essential McLuhan(1995)
I’ve been making the case that industrial social-political
economies have required some form of ubiquitous anonymity. The comfort,
expectation and now right of anonymity has played a key role of a constraint
shaping the construction of personal identity. The other side of a society that
is at ease with ubiquitous anonymity (e.g. at ease in crowds, transact with
strangers, etc.) is a complementary need for a range of institutions that
provide certification of identity and accreditation of reputation and
background. For example, birth certificate, driver’s license, education and
professional credentials, credit history, country of origin and travel
experience, and so on. Without institutions that provide formal certifications
of identity comfort and trust with ubiquitous anonymity would not be possible.
Similarly, anonymous transactions could not be enabled
without the trust inherent in the institutions that provide for standards (e.g.
a pound of weight is a pound of weight, a dollar is a dollar, etc.); institutions
of recourse (e.g. police, courts, justice, due process, food inspections,
health and safety standards, medical and drug standards, etc.); and
professional institutions (e.g. credentials, ethical and conduct codes, etc.). These
institutions and the framework they provide, form a foundation for a widespread
trust that enables many forms of social interactions and economic transactions.
In effect these institutions reduce the friction of social exchange. Included
in the institutional framework are additional means of oversight to ensure the
institutions themselves are sustained as legitimate and trustworthy.
The overwhelming number of anonymous interactions and
exchanges are essentially ‘trustless’ because they are embedded in a context of
institutions that we can generally trust. For example, in buying an item in a
store we generally don’t have to trust the merchant, nor does the merchant have
to trust us – we both trust the currency (and supporting institutions). Nor do
we need a personalized network to support us (e.g. a clan to exact revenge in
the case of bad faith).
Thus, the constraints on our identity are two-fold. On one
hand the requirement of anonymity as a sort of stripping from social fabric that
enable ‘trustless’ transaction within market-based and other complex economies.
On the other hand a complex and market-based economy also requires new forms of
freezing the identity of people in different domains – such as
occupational/educational credentials, citizenship, residence, etc.
Perhaps we can engage in another way to reason through the
complexity of the shift from industrial scarcity-based economics inherently
dependent on some form of anonymity, toward an economics appropriate to the
digital environment. Consider that the price mechanism must carry 'good enough'
(nothing is ever perfect) information so that the market can allocate scarce
resources to where they will be of most value. This of course requires that
most people have the means to express what is valuable to them so the market
(via price) can allocate efficiently.
The means to express what is valuable, is some form of
currency (essentially a circulation of IOUs). However, when the playing field
is not equal enough, people don't have the means to express what is valuable and
the market can therefore no longer be efficient. The industrial market system
is based on scarcity which also entails that the institution of property rights
enables secure transactional exchange of rights to scarce goods – I give my
money then I get your good. My money becomes your property – your good becomes
my property.
Given these simple examples, it is clear that with the right
conditions a price mechanism and property rights can work extremely well to
enable self-organized allocation of scarce, rival, and excludable goods
(services are more complex). However, these same mechanisms also make it much
more difficult to grasp the ephemeral nature of currency as simply way to
enable the accounting and circulation of IOUs – credits and debits.
Two key questions: Is an economic system designed for
scarcity adequate to deal with the emerging economy of abundance or to
attractor of efficiency integral to the digital environment? Is the
institutional framework of an industrial economy adequate to a zero-marginal
cost economy – one that also entails exponential marginal value and
opportunity?
The concept of property rights is the embodiment of a
concept of individuals as isolated, atomistic, selfish (only self-interested) -
we all know intellectually that this is pathologically flawed but it was a
necessary narrative (illusion) that enabled us to break out of a tribal
constraint - it was necessary to enable individuals to develop and pursue an
individual path.
The reality however, is that to be human is to be social –
all value, language, culture arises in social conditions – all our individual
achievement depend on the achievement of others (not just the shoulders of
giants). As Graeber (2012) points out, the original Indo-European words for -
'Sin' 'Guilt' and 'Debt' are synonyms. That means we weren't born in original
sin (as Judeo-Christians define it) but we were all definitely born with
'Original Debt' – Debt to mother, family, society, the platform of our economy,
etc.
An institutional framework geared to abundance and seizing
opportunity must be different – first with abundance – property rights to
ensure excludability may be less important. When an economy is approaching a
condition of near-zero marginal costs (ZMC), property rights may seem
inefficient by having to institute transaction costs that encumber access and
allocation (usually by imposing a belief in an artificial scarcity is
equivalent to real scarcity).
We are not only in a ZMC economy (ZMCE), we are also in a
condition of accelerating change and innovation. In such condition the health
of the economy necessarily involves ensuring the development of better
capacities for the generation and seizing of opportunity. To do this requires a
foundation where more people that can take safe-fail risks enabling a faster
and more extensive social computing of the opportunity space can be explored (e.g.
an exploration of the problem-solution space).
In the conditions integral to the ZMCE, increasingly reliant
on innovation, the key to wealth is enabling the best productivity of people
(This is what Adam Smith defined as wealth - The productive capacity of people
that is the measure and embodiment of wealth).
As has been noted Graeber (2012) accounting is the original
form of sustaining social fabric and is more mechanisms of pricing. Price
presupposes a sort of negotiated discrete transaction in time and place that is
effective as a means for self-organized allocation of scarce resources. But
what is the price of stuff in a ZMCE? How can future opportunity be priced in
the present (without a speculative gamble) and without foreclosing on
unknowable adjacent possibles – or more positively stated – enabling the
unleashing and grasping of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.
order positive externalities, exaptations, affordances?
The important question – Is how do we enable the unleashing
of productive capacity of people in those domains of abundance - of ZMCE - of
the world of non-rival, and only artificially excludable 'stuff'? Graeber
(2012) suggested that value is only revealed in use. One can make an object
that is costly – but the determination of its value is not as simple as what is
spend in its making – because no matter how is spend to produce it – if no one
wants it, then it produces no value. And future use value – future additions,
modifications, combinations-with-other, cannot be pre-determined.
In the digital environment and the ZMCE, perhaps we can only
rely on tracking and accounting of use, of creative application, of new uses,
of experiences, of recombination, of links to whole lineages of use and
development of particulars (revealing 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. order arising of new
potentials and value). This would be the type of accounting that arises with the
co-evolution of 'spimes' (Sterling 2005) – physical and virtual objects that
are imbued with so much information that we can query their entire history. An
accounting that can enable us to reveal the social fabric upon (and within)
which we depend to develop ourselves and our potential. An accounting that can
also enable us to self-govern ourselves and our work around a dynamic adaptive range
of homeostatic values.
The primary economic problem of ZMCE is not the allocation
of scarce rival, excludable 'stuff'. The problem is more about how to ensure
the abundant flourishing of the productive capacity of people – enabling people
to aspire and pursue whatever they can excel at.
The digital environment suggest that anonymity is not the
best protection for our privacy – our right to not be interfered with. But the
digital environment is definitely disrupting our experience of anonymity. If
anonymity were an adequate protection for security of our identity – then we
would protect ourselves from prejudice by having every one wear a bag over
their body - so the fatness/thinness, beauty/plainness, race/color,
religious-observances, etc. couldn’t be used against us to cause us harm. The
bag over our body – would be the enabling of ubiquitous anonymity - the industrial
age sense of anonymity – that was inseparable from the incredible mass
displacement of people from their agricultural habitus into an ever expanding
urban habitus.
The dominant approach to protecting privacy seems to be an
emphasis ever more powerful means to ensure anonymity. For example, developing
ways to either own our personal data within encrypted data silos and/or creating
more powerful forms of cryptographic anonymity. Given the seriousness of both
government and commercial efforts at mass surveillance and Big Data analytics
this approach seems the most natural reaction to intrusive prying on personal
life and secret or veiled use of our information for unknown (and perhaps
malevolent aims). The assumption underlying the focus on encrypted anonymity
seems to be that a transparent society is not possible or desirable. David Brin
(1999) has written extensively of the development of either a surveilled
society or a society of mutual transparency.
Briefly Brin argues that by having all of our information
available for anyone to view – with the condition that if anyone does view our
information we would get an alert of who was viewing, when, what they were
viewing. By receiving a report we would have the power and capability to look
back. Furthermore we would be able to have a complete record of every view and
use of our information – and we would be able to view and use any other person’s
or entities information. Ultimately, like in any conversation held in a public
place we learn the consequence of watching others is that we ca be easily watched
in return.
However, by relying primarily on cryptographic forms of identity-protection,
we would be continuing to replicate the narrative of a society constituted by
isolated, atomistic individuals. We would be building a 'trustless' society
that would undermine the values necessary for a social fabric that fully
enables the emergence of a collaborative commons better able to generate and
seize opportunities. As much as we will continue to depend on all our digital
technologies, the more embedded social distrust is, the more it will impose a
kind of tax on all forms of economic activity -- a tax that high trust
societies do not have to pay.
By trying to protect the constraint of identity that worked
for the industrial society we are preparing to fight the last war.
The issue of protection is fundamental – but how do we do
that in a way that doesn't create side-effects that may be worse than the
problem we are trying to address?
Steve Fuller (2014a, 2014b) suggests an alternative that
could be a viable approach. He points out our institutions of retributive
justice – the eye for an eye – retrieved but also displaced inter-tribal forms
of identity. The emergence of the nation-state and corresponding institutions
enabled common laws, language, education, and infrastructure. These commons are
becoming global and producing new senses (and as McLuhan would have it
sensations) of the construction of what is ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’
(one consequence of the emergence(y) of climate change is the deepening of the
sensation the earth-commons as ours to solution).
Fuller proposes that we need a very fundament shift in the
foundation of rights – from property (fundamentally owning our information) to
liability (recourse when harm is perpetrated with our information). The aim is
to shift the focus from a concern about what others may or may not know about
us to a concern with the consequent behavior related to the use of our
knowledge of each other – to recourse when knowledge has been used to cause
harm. This approach enables a vision in which insurance & compensation
enables a foundation for the security of our personal identity. For Fuller –
this approach is the – de facto price for
potentially unlimited personal freedom.
Fuller calls this approach the ‘Proactionary Imperative’.
The aim is to unleash the capacity of the digital environments to enable
self-organizing group formation because of greater publicly available
information. Although Fuller’s proposal initially focuses on genetic
information (which Kevin Kelly has called our common wealth) it seems
fundamentally suited to many more applications where personal information may be
used with increasing ease to profit others or to harm us.
The price of greater freedom is that others are free to access you,
which means that you need to ensure that you benefit – or at least are not
harmed – by that new found freedom that others have over you. But in any case,
privacy in its classical sense is effectively dead.
The emerging digital environment is a new ground for
constructing our personal and collective identities. This new ground will
inevitably require us to understand, develop and construct new constraints
related to personal information and the construction of our identity in order
to do the work that will sustain our bourgeoning global society and economy.
New institutions will have to provide forms of mechanistic trust, which reliably
form new layers of governance that are suited to this age of complexity.
Our argument is that, one necessary constraint on our
identity, will be a new form of radical crypto-transparency presupposed on
trust, but made more secure with institutions enabling forms of insurance and
recourse along the lines of Fuller’s proactionary imperative. The constraint of
radical crypto-transparency protect and enables new forms of values and new
types of commons, based on Big Data markets, and new modes of production
enabled by responsible autonomy and networked individualism.
As the ground of the digital environment becomes visible to
awareness the monsters it presents may include visions of ‘The Borg’ or of ‘Big
Brother’. Perhaps the anti-ground response, could include Doctorow’s “Little
Brother”.
These problems, may be essentially impossible to solve,
because they are inherently incomplete (involve many actors/variables outside
the boundary of the organization), contradictory (many conflicting issues), and
face constantly changing conditions of interdependencies involving requirement
that are difficult to recognise. What this really means is that problems are
not ‘things that can be solved’ but are in fact a condition within which we all
live. These sorts of problems cannot be cured but they can be understood and we
can learn to create conditions enabling adaptive solutioning. This solutioning,
however, will require fundamentally different constraints on our identities.
Constraints for
Freedom or for Security?
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor
Safety. –
Benjamin Franklin
The degree of change and hyper-fluidity facing the
individual and society is daunting even overwhelming – if we depend on
yesterday’s industrial frameworks. New technologies promise unprecedented
opportunities and freedoms. However, the shadow of the pace of these changes –
is that we have all become refugees from our own childhood – not just living in
future shock but in present shock.
Our traditional forms of security are eroding – job
security, life-long marriage, nuclear family, multi-generational community
life, the traditional forms of privacy-as-anonymity. As the digital environment
offers more freedom of opportunity is simultaneously offers more risk and
transforms the necessary foundation of our stability.
A simple calculus of risk is inadequate. Sound risk
assessment is only possible when the full range of outcomes is known. The
situation is profoundly more difficult and severe. We are all faced with
fundamental uncertainty. An uncertainty that includes a complete inability to
know what will be enabled in the future by the ‘butterflies we unleash in the
world’. We don’t know how a negative action will produce positive results or
how positive intentions will eventuate in negative results.
Not only don’t we know what will happen, we don’t know what can happen.
There is also great risk in not engaging in change. As
unfortunate and scary as it is for all of us – the 21st Century is
the era of complexity. The uncertainty we face is also mirrored in the shift
from a Newtonian world view toward a relativity/quantum/complexity
understanding of reality.
To end this overlong blog I’d like to finish with another
quote from William Gibson:
“I’m not trying to predict the future. I’m trying to let us see the
present.”
Afterword
There can be no such thing as identity theft in a
pre-currency society.
Yes - the ground of our social experience is in a tectonic
shift - it's making the previously invisible ground of industrial society
visible. But most of us are focused on the figures the ground frames - we
mostly are not seeing the frame. What will be the experiences upon/from which
we create our sense of 'self'?
How can we own personal data when the overwhelming portion
of the data is created through interaction with close, loose, audience, and
unknowable network of others? Each participant in the collaborative experience
is a co-creator of that data, and thus irrevocably also owns that data since it
is also part of their-self-as-experienced? Who owns the image of me is
another’s eye? Who owns the sound of my words in another’s ears? Who owns the
feelings my hand creates on another’s skin? If I aim to hide myself in
crypto-anonymity as a means to own myself – I must inevitably own the other –
or enact a radical surgery of myself from my social environment.
The monopoly of insight may also include the demise of the
'sovereign individual'.
Concerns about privacy are certainly serious, and raise some
important questions:
1) Will privacy-as-anonymity provide the protection it did
in industrial conditions?
2) Will the constraint of anonymity on identity
provide the adequate support to a digital economy (based not on scarcity of
goods but on an abundance of increasing returns, network effects, and
exponential marginal value)?
3)Will a corresponding effort to enclose the
informational commons into personal data enclaves of private property enable
the economy of the digital environment to provide the value it can?
References:
Brin, David. 1999. The Transparent Society. Will Technology
Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom? Basic Books.
Doctorow, Cory. 2010. Little Brother. Tor Books.
Fairtlough, Gerard. 2007. The Three Ways of Getting Things
Done: Hierarchy, Heterarchy & Responsible Autonomy in Organizations.
Triarchy Press.
Fuller, Steve. 2014a. Justice Beyond Privacy: As the old
social bonds unravel, how can we balance free expression against security?
Fuller, Steve. 2014b. The Proactionary Imperative: A
Foundation for Transhumanism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Graeber, David. 2012. Debt:
The First 5000 Years. Melville House.
McLuhan, Marshall. Letter to Harold Adam Innis, March 14
1951. From Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone,
p. 73
Rifkin, Jeremy. The
Zero Marginal Cost Society – The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons
and The Eclipse of Capitalism.
Sterling, Bruce. 2005. Shaping Things. MIT Press.
Wellman, Barry; Rainie, Lee. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. MIT Press. http://networked.pewinternet.org/2012/05/24/networked-individualism-what-in-the-world-is-that-2/
William Gibson says the future is right here, right now. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11502715
William Gibson says reality has become sci-fi. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/07/us-books-authors-gibson-idUSN2535896520070807
