Last week I gave two short talks as part of the IASC Knowledge Commons conference, one on our ability to contest rules in digital spaces, and another on how, more generally, we can engineer more responsive governance. Those links go to YouTube, where you can watch the talks. (Update: you can now also see the panel discussions for these talks: code as contestable law, engineering responsive governance.)
These talks builds off a previous issue of this newsletter, On Digital Disobedience. I wanted to share a bit of the talks here, especially the screen grabs of features I’ve build into Kybern.org as a way of concretizing and experimenting with these ideas.
For those who don’t know anything about Kybern.org, it’s a website which helps communities manage themselves and their resources in flexible, dynamic, non-hierarchical ways. Everything you do on Kybern is an action, and these actions can be governed (approved, voted on, consensed on, searched, discussed, analyzed, and so on).
Communities govern actions by setting permissions. Every time a user takes an action, it’s turned into an action object and checked against the existing permission system. Here’s a screen grab of a person taking an action, which also shows the permissions set in that group and the way that action is recorded in the action history:
But what about an action a user can’t take? Usually, those actions are completely hidden from them. This design makes it very difficult to know what actions are possible, and to contest your right to take those actions. So on Kybern.org, we show every user all possible actions, and give them the ability to propose any action:
This isn’t as far as we could go. We could also let anyone take an action, even if they don’t have permission.
This is really antithetical to how we think about digital platforms, but it’s not far off from how laws work in real life. You’re not allowed to drive drunk, for example, but you can still do it.
Now, if we could somehow magically flip a switch and stop everyone from driving drunk, we’d probably do it, but the fact remains that human societies mostly have laws that can be violated. So maybe there’s value in a digital platform that works similarly.
Another area where we might want to “rescue” some elements of the IRL experience is transition. Transition is the period when you’re changing from one governance system to another and it is often unstable. We don’t know if the change will stick or what its impacts will be.
This is hypervisible in national politics, when we worry about the transfer of power between leaders, or when we worry that a newly democratic country is going to backslide into autocracy, but it’s an issue at all levels of governance.
It might be tempting to say, “Software lets us encode and enforce - the transition will happen with the flip of a bit! Don’t worry about backsliding.” But that raises two questions for me.
First: what if the time it takes to transition is important? When governance changes it can have cognitive, relational, and emotional impacts - not to mention financial and logistical ones! In some cases, people likely benefit from having time to adjust. A slow transition also helps people spot unexpected problems with their new governance, and make the necessary adjustments.
Which leads to the second question: what if groups want to stop or revert a transition? All change is a guess at the future, so what if they guessed wrong? Mechanisms for reversability could help communities recover from experiments gone awry.
We haven’t built anything about transitions into Kybern, but it’s on the roadmap.
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Computers are delegation machines - if we can give them the right instructions, they’ll do our work for us, whether that’s adding up very large numbers, identifying images, or surveilling people’s behavior. But it is very hard to get the instructions right, especially when it comes to any human-centered activity.
We need space to disagree, to persuade, to change our minds. The bedrock of any democracy is disagreement (and the tolerance which keeps that disagreement from spiralling into violence). We can’t delegate that away to a computer. Or, rather: we can, we are, and we’re suffering for it.
There are so many more ways to do digital governance than the top-down, disempowering, over-simplifying models presented by the major social media platforms.
Let’s explore them.