I once said that work on social software formed the experimental wing of political philosophy. I said it to a room full of geeks, not philosophers, by way of exhorting them to consider social ramifications of seemingly technological choices, such as “If you have a point system for good behavior, people will behave to optimize points, not to be good.” (cf. John Quiggans’ post on grades.)
Behind the basic point of this throwaway line, though, is something that has been puzzling me for some time. Like all groups with shared pursuit of shared goals, mediated groups need governance, which is to say rules for losing. It has to be the case that at least some participants in a group are willing to regard not getting their way as both legitimate and acceptable, or the groups would simply fork with every non-unanimous decision, and dividing groups with powers of two in the denominator would atomize even huge collectives after a handful of such decisions.
And so, several years ago, I began reading classics of social contract theory. After the initial excitement of seeing the similarities between Federalist Papers #10 and the Slashdot moderation system, though, I bumped into two key ways in which the arrangement of constitutions didn’t fit with the sort of rules for losing that are essential on the net.
The first is the concern, in recent centuries, about reining in majoritarian tyranny — preventing 50.1% of the polity from simply voting themselves into a permanent advantage over the other 49.9%.
This is something of a concern online, but its also clear that the really novel threat to group action in mediated fora is the tyranny of the individual. Even in systems not constructed around consensus, one or a small group of people determined to upset the proceedings can do enormous damage.
The second is the concern, at the center of the debate since Hobbes, about how leaders are to be legitimated, and under what circumstances, if any, they can be removed and replaced. This concern seems to stem in large part from physical and political facts — to a first approximation, each person is a citizen of one and only one country, and can’t readily switch citizenship should they object to the policies of that country. In the troika of exit, voice and loyalty, much political theory assumes that exiting is off the table for most people.
Online, though, inflexible one-to-one mappings of member to group are rare. One can contribute to Apache _and_ Linux, comment on MeFi _and_ BoingBoing, and so on. Indeed, the two most normal cases of governance on the net are the cabal (there is no cabal) and benevolent dictatorship, as with Linus and Linux or Guido of Python, whose acronymed title, BDFL, stands for “Benevolent Dictator For Life.” What keeps these dictators benevolent is precisely that membership in various groups is non-exclusive, and switching allegiances is under the user’s control, with no analog for rules of state.
So what I want to ask of the collected wisdom of CT readers is this: what one or two works would you pick, from any discipline, that best illuminate the group governance issues we see on the net, as different from political thought about the real world? (Mine would be Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and Logic of Collective Action.)
{ 15 comments }
Caleb D'Anvers 07.03.08 at 4:06 am
Online, though, inflexible one-to-one mappings of member to group are rare. One can contribute to Apache and Linux, comment on MeFi and BoingBoing, and so on.
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.”
Seth Finkelstein 07.03.08 at 5:54 am
As one of those geeks (metaphorically), I’ve been inveighing against some of that philosophizing from the opposite direction, with the summary
“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).
Sam C 07.03.08 at 8:43 am
Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action – spontaneous organization ‘like a seed beneath the snow’ under hierarchy and entrenched bureaucracy, showing itself in neighborhood gardening groups, school playgrounds, etc. (As Ward himself says, essentially a popularization of Kropotkin.)
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.
Alex 07.03.08 at 9:46 am
Of course, the problem with exit, especially in communities with very low costs to exit, is that it accentuates the “tyranny of the individual”; it’s an ideological cleanser’s charter.
I still quite like my Anti-Link proposal.
JP Stormcrow 07.03.08 at 9:58 am
Happynet!
John Quiggin 07.03.08 at 12:06 pm
Following up Alex, having, and displaying, high costs of exit can be a strategic advantage since you can commit to making things unpleasant enough for others to leave unless you get your own way.
Ciarán 07.03.08 at 12:22 pm
Perhaps Philip Pettit’s work on groups might be helpful. There’s a recent paper here (pdf).
noen 07.03.08 at 2:52 pm
I’ve seen little good come from those who treat the net as an end in itself. Those who treat it as a means, as a tool derive greater benefit.
rules for losing
How do you lose online? There’s nobody there.
Anonymous 07.03.08 at 3:04 pm
Tiebout! Virtual Tiebout!
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…
clay 07.03.08 at 3:07 pm
_Au contraire_, @noen. In the developed world, _most_ people are now here.
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.
cervantes 07.03.08 at 7:07 pm
The Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson) is typical of the process used by economists: make a bunch of assumptions, construct fancy mathematical theories based on the assumptions, and declare that you have discovered something.
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.
noen 07.03.08 at 9:21 pm
Au contraire, @noen. In the developed world, most people are now here.
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.
vivian 07.04.08 at 2:04 am
Clay, exit costs online are typically low because survival/safety/livelihood does not depend on one remaining in the group. So you want to look at the literature on truly voluntary associations for a parallel, not “Governance” more generally. I don’t buy into Bob Putnam’s conclusions, but it’s solid work and well-sourced (with dead-tree links), so you can find your own. But why do you assume remaining in the group is a better choice than leaving and starting over? There are not so many sunk costs online, and no scarcity.
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
SamChevre 07.04.08 at 1:55 pm
This is something of a concern online, but its also clear that the really novel threat to group action in mediated fora is the tyranny of the individual. Even in systems not constructed around consensus, one or a small group of people determined to upset the proceedings can do enormous damage.
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.
noen 07.05.08 at 4:34 am
But they suffer real consequences. They go to jail or are ejected from the class. Online disruptors do not.
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