I’m having considerable trouble making sense of this; it seems to me that one or two people intent on disruption can do enormous damage in the real world as well.

For example, one or two disruptive students can completely derail a high-school classromm. The two DC shooters disrupted two states, for weeks. It doesn’t take even 1% of a population to disrupt the real world.

For specific vulnerable subpopulations online there ARE high exit costs, and sometimes high costs for not exiting too. Harassment/stalking, early-stage mugus (419 victims in progress), work-related groups. Mill in “On Liberty” diagnosed the problem of vulnerable groups and voting, but doesn’t solve the problem

No, I mean that I talk to all these online entities but really, there is no one there. I’ll grant you your narrow, professional example but for me and the places I go to I have no idea who it is I’m talking to. They don’t know me nor do I know them. It’s a kind of nightmare.

Slavoj Zizek:
The Freudian unconscious is very much like what one does in front of the computer screen. The Freudian unconscious is not all this body language or tonality, no. The Freudian unconscious is precisely this helplessness, where you are talking to someone, but at the same time you do not even know at whom it is addressed exactly. You are radically not sure, because basically this is a symptom. When you have some hysterical symptom it has precisely such a structure.

The discourse of the hysteric is perhaps the primary discourse on the net, certainly on blogs and forums. So a way to authenticate identities might help change things. If I could right click on a troll’s comment and get his/her name address and phone number I bet a lot of nonsense would end real fast.

The Economy of Discourses: a third order cybernetics?

The paper draws primarily on the writings of Lacan and Maturana to provide the epistemological presumptions upon which we generate a new characterisation of, and approach to, the business organisation. This new approach for the understanding of the business organisation is presented as an ‘Economy of Discourses’. This Economy is a description of the effects of a third-order in the second-order observer’s invention of himself as subject. We have formulated this approach as an aid for diagnosis, intervention and prognosis in our work with business organisations.

Although intended as a tool for business consulting, it might be similarly helpful in characterizing and understanding online discourse.

Alas, the findings of LCA happen not to correspond to reality: collective action of the kind Olson predicts cannot occur happens all the time! Maybe, just maybe, the assumptions are wrong.

The fact is that people aren’t wired to be the sort of “rational” actors that economists imagine them to be. We are moved by our socialization, by the frameworks and heuristics we rely upon to get through daily life without making a continuous series of calculations about he payoff from every move, and yes, by a behavioral reward that we get from altruism. The latter is hard wired in us by evolution because we are, by nature, social beings—not the radically individualistic atoms of the economists’ delusions.

Also, of course, people do get intrinsic rewards by joining collective action groups—there is a pleasure in membership, a chance to make friends, sometimes shorter term rewards that are delivered by group membership like discounts on purchases and free lunches and stuff. But far more important is that we get direct satisfaction from feeling that we’ve made a contribution to something, whether or not the cost-benefit analysis would seem to pay off; and a bit of guilt from being free riders. Else how does NPR raise any money?

Now, all this can be for better or for worse. It’s why people see war as football game—“We” have to win!—regardless of whether there is anything to be gained by “winning.” It’s why people respond to empty symbols of patriotism. But it’s also why we had a civil rights movement and a feminist movement and an anti-war movement.

Olson predicted that the Chinese revolution was impossible. Well, guess what: it wasn’t.

Given the enormity of collaborative and constructive effects (and I quite agree with you about ends vs. means), the cyberspace hypothesis—the net is an alternative to real life, rather than an aspect of it—is increasingly hard to support.

So you lose online every time you are in a group and your proposal is passed over—your code doesn’t become a patch, your edit is revised or reversed, your proposed rule change is ignored, your sense of what the group should do next is shot down by your colleagues.

You know, just like in the real world.

What Paul Peterson did to the study of American urban politics can now be done to the internet. Wow, it’s breathtaking to watch the frontiers of the social sciences expand…

rules for losing

How do you lose online? There’s nobody there.

I still quite like my Anti-Link proposal.

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals – prosperous community developing piecemeal by the cultivation of natural human sympathies and aversions into virtues.

It’s perhaps worth noting that neither Ward nor Hume are social contract theorists. Contract seems a bad metaphor for online community-formation, not least because of the point Clay mentions, that there are no barriers to entry to or exit from a given online community.

“Popularity Data-Mining Businesses Are Not A Model For Civil Society”

Conflating running an entire real society, with a game or a project, strikes me as an unholy alliance between hype-mongers who want intellectual respectability for their marketing, and academics who want hip material for papers.

Now, let me be clear I don’t maintain there’s no legitimate inquiry or study. But there seem to be many temptations to overreach into grandiosity (see Second Life’s PR).

This is true, and under girds the most common response one sees online to site members who criticize moderators. “Well, if you don’t like it, leave!”

I’m not sure how adequately this addresses concerns about the effects over-moderation, and the cult of personality that often accompanies it, have on the atmosphere of group blogs. Metafilter, especially, is an interesting case study in what happens to a previously laizzez faire community when moderators decide to assert themselves. My own sense is that it’s a lot less of interesting site than it used to be three or more years ago, and that changes in moderation style are largely responsible.

The problem of moderation in group blogs kind of reminds me of Shaftesbury’s “Letter Concerning Enthusiasm“: “It is in vain for the magistrate to meddle with [wit], since, if he be ever so virtuous or wise, he may be as soon mistaken as another man. I am sure the only way to save men’s sense or preserve wit at all in the world is to give liberty to wit. Now wit can never have its liberty where the freedom of Raillery is taken away, for against serious extravagances and splenetic humours, there is no other remedy than this.”