Dissertation Research/Setting the Scene

Setting the scene

There is a transformation occurring in society, quietly and seemingly without the general population recognizing its profound impact. The internet now underpins nearly all action in society. Everyone realizes they use Google, and many especially in the younger generation hear from friends by mass email or instant message as much as (or more than) by phone. What people don't seem to fully appreciate is that these new modes of communication provide affordances and privilege new behaviors not only for individuals but also for loosely knit groups. They provide the possibility that collective behavior may change in ways that are only just beginning to be understood.

It is also possible that the magnitude of the change that I am hypothesizing isn't talked about as much as it might be because all the old institutions are still there. People have their old job titles, and where people lose their jobs it is easier to blame the already understood drivers of change – the state of the industrial economy, the existence of competitor firms, the nature of business cycles, etc. The change that is occurring doesn't require the removal of the existing ways of doing things before the new modes of cooperation can arise. The new processes have just provided additional paths to achieve results. Moreover, the collaborative nature of the change is just so different for those unwilling to adopt that they haven't noticed it. If it hasn't required new physical buildings, significant changes to the organization chart, or upfront changes to pay scales, it can't be that big a deal, can it? Furthermore, since the tools are just so ill suited to old behavior patterns - they don't explicitly help you compete - they are often sidelined as unimportant or worse. They may help people collaborate, but they are seen as not useful, but as time sinks. Non-users just don't participate or take advantage of those new alternative processes.

Critically, these transformations in communications permit open communication (creating content visible to those not directly part of the conversation at no cost to the participants), and this openness can build mutual trust and permit significant collaboration to occur independent of the traditional vectors of power within a bureaucratic organization, firm or market. This rise in the relative efficiency of cooperative behavior as a solution to both individual and societal choices is complex. Curiously, such seemingly unselfish cooperation premised on transparency in behavior appears to be not only increasingly resilient over time but might also crowd out untrustworthy or narrowly selfish market behaviors. Amoral production systems, constituted for the most part via joint stock companies in the late 20th century, be they located in free market or government directed economies, now have to compete with a method of production that is more closely tied to the multifarious motivations of those involved. Sharing behavior previously only located in small, geographically bounded communities where interactions are repeated - think of the village where one person clears the snow for another, as each knows that today’s recipient of assistance may well be asked to baby-sit over the summer school vacations - can now occur across the net, premised on multiple geographically distant and often asynchronous interactions that have generated high levels of reciprocal trust.

At a macro scale these communications changes are having several effects. More people are part of more processes, and systems are no longer buffered from each other and effectively independent. For example, the economy of rural Nigeria, for all of its geographic proximity to Lagos, before there was cell phone coverage and with only a few landlines was effectively independent. The people in the countryside weren't linked. Nowadays, few are off the grid, and capital generated anywhere can flow quickly into the global financial system. The level of complexity generated by the larger number of people involved has created a different order of both generative and dynamic complexity than in the past.

I got a phone in my bedroom and one in the barnA phone in my car and one in the yardA phone on my saddle for when I'm out on the rangeA phone in my pocket for when I'm down at the grangeNow with devaluation all over the landThe whole wide world has got more money in their handThey'll be calling me up from Peking and NomeI'm going to rip out my telephone


 * Arlo Guthrie “Telephone”

The system is also less manageable and stable than it was in the past. The old legal relationships and institutional levers are failing. When there are more people involved than you can possibly know personally, the old networks don't serve to provide a solution. The existing institutions are overpowered, and the existing law is found to be outdated in a digital net-enabled world. Old law designed for an earlier age is to some extent limiting the opportunity. Could the 2008-2010 financial crisis have occurred in anything the same manner had the net not been in existence and hosting the many interconnected traders and their misguided transactions?

New laws, institutions, and norms needed to address questions of privacy and surveillance aren’t in place. Individuals place information inside proprietary computer platforms after signing unread, complex terms of service that result in data that may or not be shared with the state. For the individual filtering the relevant from the irrelevant is the issue. No longer do individuals need to be trained to discover data hidden away but rather need to be taught to filter and prioritize where they should pay regard in an economy where the scarce factor is attention. Moreover, these problems can swirl together as laws permitting sharing of financial data of individuals are aggregated permitting large financial institutions to extract newly calculable measures and create financial transactions which when they occur on a massive scale overwhelm the financial system.

All this suggests we might be on a trajectory where open communication tools are adopted; open communication occurs; transparent processes, actors, trust is built, and (eventually) new types of institutions arise. Furthermore, old arguments about government provision vs. markets and the firm will be made more complex as social production, and social movements, become a more frequent alternative as a solution to societal choices, and generation of societal action. That said, the continuing level of change in the tools and the infrastructure suggests that no single path of development can be forecast. Those institutions with incumbent power may seek to maintain the power either by preventing future development or leveraging their privileged positions to exploit the future architecture for selfish gain and in parallel, a state or pseudo-state actor could also sustain an environment where surveillance by many actors is almost total.

All these futures may be equally unwelcome depending on one’s relationship to the processes, the incumbent or surveiller. Moreover, all of these futures rely on an unencumbered net where free flowing information is unconstrained. The cooperation requires the net to exist as a shared resource, and a repository for other commons resources (which were traditionally land or property owned by one person but open to usage by many other people.) Currently this is the case as the software that performs it truly is ownerless, since it increasingly relies on commons hosted ‘free software’ though it won’t necessarily be in the future.

Despite, the complexities outlined above the choice isn’t walking back in time and unplugging from the net (as certain social movements - the Taleban – advocate.) The crucial challenge is to understand the new organizational solutions that may emerge to address the problems created by this complexity. It is on this that I want my dissertation to focus. There are clearly many aspects of this opportunity that need to be understood at the micro and macro level; and I propose to concern myself only with contexts that reveal properties of new and emerging forms of institutions, and that can address the complexity and dynamic nature of contemporary public problems where old models have failed to date.

Narrowing the focus further

In order to identify the heart of my dissertation research it is useful to identify the body of literature I want to address, and also, especially because the technologies which I regard as so transformational obviously change traditional institutions and processes change much in society, it is necessary to demarcate the changes in which I am relatively uninterested.

In short, I do not want to understand the interplay between the new technologies and extensions of existing processes or traditional organizations. I wish to understand political, policy-making, governance-providing, and public good provisioning and focus on those elements which are novel in and of themselves. There are two characteristics which I regard as novel – the centrality of the ideas of the commons (and conceptions of effectively ownerless property), and new conceptions of voluntarism.

Much of what the internet has achieved to date with respect to political action it has done because it has enhanced existing processes. Take, for example, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The campaign used technology extensively and introduced some novel elements, but perhaps its key contribution was to lower the overhead involved in communicating with potential donors and inducing financial gifts. In many ways this was an extension of politics as usual. Move-On, the much vaunted internet-centric progressive organization, for the most part has operated as a streamlined congressional letter-writing vehicle. Again, it extended a traditional practice rather than inventing something new. Now, it is clear that there is substantial novelty left undescribed in the points above but it could be argued that most importantly (for his campaign) Obama took on-line the “Bush Pioneer” model of fundraising from friends, and Move-On the Amnesty letter writing approach of the 1960's.

Conversely the processes and institutional assemblages in which I am most interested are fundamentally different from firms and bureaucracies. They have at their core, a commons, and a new notion of voluntarism. These characteristics are antithetical to much modern political history where power was gained by small groups of professionals (an elite) gaining access to and maintaining power by continuing to exclude others and deploy resources in favor of their often narrow interests.

Moreover, I seek to research and reveal whether the commons-based approaches can operate in the sphere of political, and policy public goods. Given that political ideas are of a similar nature to software code – their distribution and raw copying is effectively cost free – I have at least a hunch that such research will support my hypothesis. A further criterion which I use to identify what I wish to study is whether my subject sheds light upon a significant public policy issue that is seemingly insoluble using currently understood organizational alternatives. Two such problems - global warming and global public health – fall into this category as insoluble because of their dynamic and generative complexity.

These policy issues are interesting as neither of these are seemingly resolvable using existing bureaucratic, private capital, or market means, as demonstrated by the many approaches that have been applied in the recent past. However much a market solution might be suggested to address such problems it can only work if information can be shared such that prices can be set and a market can clear. This isn’t going to happen since price-able products can’t be efficiently be generated and the positive and negative externalities can’t be estimated. Moreover, the scale of these issues are such that they extend beyond national borders and thus state centered bureaucracies become as much a hindrance as anything else and multinational structures fail to be as useful as they seemingly could be. Moreover, there is zero possibility that a traditional, formal, hierarchical functionally organized entity could be set up in a timescale that would address the issues in anything like a timely manner.

In particular, questions of global public health have to balance the needs of all citizens – those located inside democratic states as well as outside, those with significant financial resources and those without, those at daily risk of epidemics and those fearful of the results of epidemics elsewhere affecting their calm lives. Global warming has all of these challenges and more. To be solved the solution has to balance the policy preferences of citizens alive today with the policy preferences of those as yet unborn. Without an accounting of the likely policy preferences of the unborn it is hard to see a solution that will provide for an environment stable for all in the longer run.

In short, there is a clear case for a commons based solution in both these cases as sharing the benefits with those who didn't contribute to the solution helps those who did, and the need for people to volunteer and innovate in an indirectly coordinated fashion is probably the only alternative to an approach achieved through governmental coercion given the pace of implementation of the solution required.