We kick the week off with an interview with Paul Hartzog about Panarchy theory which he is a primary developer of. He contributes to Smart Mobs and also blogs at Panarchy. We get his take on a few issues with respect to share and sharing alike.

MT: We seem to be awash with extremely powerful networking tools but our participation in our representative democratic systems seems limited to consultative excersizes (ie focus groups) that seem to be more placebo than participation. Do you agree with this assesment? And if so what needs to happen before this changes?

PH: Yes, I think there is a severe democratic deficit in much of the world. But it’s not just governmnent. We are moving towards a participatory civilization. But I also think that it is inappropriate for us to expect government or big business to “get it” when it comes to the success of openness. Both of those institutions are designed to capture and control the outcome of the process rather than open up the process itself. Netscape and Google’s recent attempts to pay people to contribute to group processes actually undermines the value of what is contributed by generating suspicion about the motives of the contributor.

So, what we need to do is look for open processes that are occurring in parallel to and independently of government and business. Open-source software is the archetypal example, of course, but more interesting are social and political movements that effectively resituate governance and commerce outside of the traditional spaces. For example, FreeCycle which matches givers to receivers nearly redefines what economy means. Howard Rheingold’s blog SmartMobs tracks much of this activity. So, what has to change is us. We have to stop looking at the old structures and look towards the new ones.

MT: The uptake of open processes sounds very promising but architectures of control (drm, biometrics, data mining, survaileance, spyware, limitations on user’s rights, etc.) are growing increasing pervasive and harder for more people to circumvent. How can we determine wether or not our society isn’t just building a high tech gilded cage for itself?

PH: Bearing in mind that this is my own take on things, I think that there is a war brewing. There are occasional conceptual wars in history such as the communism/capitalism war that resulted in the defining ideological divide of the 20th century. The current conceptual “war” is forming into two camps: sharers and proprietors.

Obviously, those who espouse ownership principles will want to use technology for those purposes, while those who prefer sharing will want to use technology for sharing purposes. The technology itself is value neutral.

The only way to “tell” if we will get a gilded cage is to try to assess the relative strengths of each side. Communism didn’t die because it is flawed; it died because the particular instance of it
was not sustainable. The same might be true of copyright v. copyleft. I would venture to suggest that neither DRM nor BitTorrent are conceptually more likely to win, but the particular instances of DRM or sharing that emerge will have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Since I’m on the side of the sharers, I work towards making sure we share in a way that is sustainable. I also happen to believe that the opposition is too selfish to outlast us.

Communications technology and its resulting networking sometimes facilitates things some people would rather not see more of (riots, terrorism, shrill self selecting media). Do you see any novel negative impacts from smart mobs developing or about to develop other than the aforementioned?

The novelty of Rheingold’s “smart mobs” is the way in which they react. Technology makes collective action 1) easier and 2) faster. Now there is nothing inherent in connectivity that makes easy rapid collective action “good” in a moral sense. I honestly don’t think we can have more “good” smart mobs without accepting that we’ll have more “bad” ones. Technology is as useful for us as it is for terrorists. Moses Naim’s book Illicit and Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s Networks and Netwars are excellent examples.

MT: In his essay titled Digital Maoism, Jaron Lanier presents an argument that collective decision making (what he calls Hive Minds) are limited in their scope and sometimes downright stupid. Do you agree with that assesment or is it to soon to judge the capabilities of collective decision making based on a few dodgy Wikipedia entries?

PH: LOL, I published a response to this here.

My first two paragraphs sum it up:
Lanier’s problem is all summed up in the last line of his article: “The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.”

The tension between the individual and the group is not something that can be permanently decided by an ad hoc moral decision that outputs a static rule to be applied in perpetuity. Rather, achieving a successful balance between individual and collective needs is an ongoing process (largely addressed by social and political theory).” but if I may comment on my comments (feel free to use both the original post and these additional comments)

In his work “Society Against the State” Pierre Clastres discussed the idea that certain social structures that work against the concentration of power actuall ward off the emergence of hierarchy. His argument resonates with what we see in wikipedia, open-source, and other technology-enabled forms of collective-action.

The emergence of technology-enabled peer-to-peer social organization is called “panarchy,” and is of course what I’ve dedicated myself to investigating in my academic career.

Although I agree with Rheingold that we should be careful not to confuse “collective action” for “collectivism,” I also agree with Lanier (and Gates) that collectivism is like communism. Where I disagree with them is in the idea that the new forms of collectivism bear any resemblance to their historical predecessors. The new forms are more like complex adaptive systems than old-fashioned collectivist hierarchies.

Nonetheless, just because cooperative culture is more effective at making decisions and performing collective cognition does NOT mean that they will make “good” or “right” decisions. A “smart mob” may not necessarily be a “good mob.”

Related

Smart Mobs
Paul’s Blog
Panarchy.com

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