I agree, adversarial aspects of the new system's architecture have to be addressed & really haven't so far. What's needed is to bring those of us who really understand this sort of thing into the picture, namely hackers.

Which is where I come in. As a long-time member of that community who's become committed to the emergent democracy concept, I'm working on generating interest & getting hackers informed about what's going on, so we can contribute our expertise towards finding solutions to these problems. It's slow going, but I'm confident that in the end the hacker community will join in & do its part.

Tim

I'll make an offer. If anybody wants to work with me on a presentation, I can guarantee space for it at 2 or 3 of the top hacker cons. Any takers?

Tim

I think that these criticisms are very useful, except the label "Techno-Utopians". I don't think these people are insisting that their models are the first, last and only way. I don't think they are fantasizing that people can cooperate better by using technology, and I don't think they are fantasizing that their efforts will create a "utopia". At best, their efforts might create a sustainable way of solving some problems of human existence for some people.

It's true that everyone in the world doesn't have access to networked technology. And it's true that human nature is quite variable, and people are not automatically going to be civil and polite and cooperative just because they have access to empowering technologies.

I don't think that the people involved in the "extreme democracy" idea are so unrealistic as to see that their concepts they are exploring here are going to become some type of magic cure-all for global social ills.

What I do think is that they will give people in America and Europe and other places a new literacy for becomong more directly involoved in their own social processes. I believe that when people can cooperate on grassroots levels, they can help themselves and others better.

An example is a recent post by Howard Rheingold to smartmobs:

http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/01/20/smartmobbing_di.html

This post describes grassroots, online efforts to coordinate aid and information. This aid and information directly benefits thousands,a nd possibly millions of people who have no access to anyy networked technology, and is a great example of the concepts talked about by people here at "extreme democracy" in action.

I ask you, what is so wrong with people who DO have access to technology trying to figure out ways for them to use it to benefit everyone else? I see "extreme democracy" as an acknowledgement of a real phenomenon (the emerging "second superpower"). And I see it also as an invitation to participate in helping this "second superpower" become something that can effectively benefit everyone.

So, in my mind this means, instead of just complaining that "Joi Ito, et al only see political history to teh federalist papers", help map out political history the rest of the way as it applies to the "extreme democracy" concepts.

The "autonomous individual" is a very real socio-cultural construct in the United States and Europe, and other western culture-based cultures. It also happens that this is where most of the people who have cheap, ready access to networked technologies reside on earth right now. So it makes sense that a cooperation model aimed at them will work within this type of idea about what motivates people.

A cooperation conceptualization aimed at a different culture might have totally different themes. But, the idea is that, starting with the most local level possible, the individual, the system can be made more grassroots oriented, and allow people to solve more problems with less need for older strcutures like beurocratic governments and corporations. If this type of thing can work, then these same people can also help those who currently have no access to the technologies they use to cooperate. As Howard Rheingold pointed out in his post to smartmobs, it's really not all that fantastical or implausible. People are doing it now. Wikipedia is of course another huge example of a real actual grassroots type of effort that has made a tremendous, and free resource.

Sam Rose

It's true that everyone in the world doesn't have access to networked technology. And it's true that human nature is quite variable, and people are not automatically going to be civil and polite and cooperative just because they have access to empowering technologies.

I don't think that the people involved in the "extreme democracy" idea are so unrealistic as to see that their concepts they are exploring here are going to become some type of magic cure-all for global social ills.

But I do think many of them aren't thinking about how to design defensively. I'm all about harnessing the power of networks, but we need to start including people with a security mindset if we want the systems to be robust & fault tolerant.

I'm not just talking about the coding level here, but vulnerabilities at the level of the social networks being built using these tools & concepts. There's all kinds of effects & transforms that can be created if you understand the math behind networks. Information cascades, cascading failures, degenerate loops, attacks against the hubs, there's a whole new world of vulnerabilities for a new generation of hackers to play with. The sooner we start working on figuring out how to protect against them, the better off we'll be.

Tim

It's the thing to do, so I'll coin a phrase to capture the essense of what I'm talking about - "social network security". That's what we need to start thinking about.

Tim

Sam,
Maybe I should have used the expression
techno-optimists. But, I should add that
I don't think utopianism is a bad thing or
unrealistic or anything like that. Utopian doesn't
mean that someone thinks of their ideas as "first, last or only.' I think of utopian thought as an effort to imagine another way of being or another way of organizing the world. So that wasn't meant as a critical term, simply as a designator.

And, I don't think there is anything wrong with thinking about the ways that technoloy can be used for democratic purposes--that's actually why I'm interested in the essays here and why my own work takes up similar themes from the side of political theory. So, I don't think of my remarks as just complaining. Rather, I think of them as part of a discussion, one that thinks it is important to include insights into the critique of individualism and the notion of the autonomous rights bearing person, one that thinks that it is important to recognize the way that democracy designates primarily a kind of political form rather than provides itself a substantive approach to solutions or connections, and one that is still trying to figure out if there is yet a core concept or set of concepts behind the notion of 'extreme democracy.'

Jodi, you're right. Your criticisms are not just complaints. So, I apoligize for throwing that jab anf characterizing you in that way.

You're right, your remarks and criticisms are very important to this discussion. It's definitely worthwhile to think about how people who have no access to technology can be helped.

I think you are right on to look at the underlying "values" or fundamental-assumption themes here.

My impression is that at least some of the core concepts behind extreme democracy are: decentralization, and enhancing grassroots cooperation.

I think that the whole process of creating a collaborative grassroots system should be debated extensively, so I think your thoughtful criticisms are very worthwhile to this end.

My own interest in this is partially from my own work in foresight applications. A lot of people workign in the futures studies and foresight fields agree that there are quite a few "drivers" that are likely bound to collide withink the next thirty years. see http://2030spike.com for some examples.

I believe that these "drivers" will be the things that motivate people who have otherwise been apathetic to seek new alternatives as they realize that their way of life is not perpetually sustainable.

I think that you are right, that part of the equation will be the different world views, and teh different "scales", and limits to one system of bottom-up control. Indeed, I agree with the old systems theory rule that "all change begins on local levels". I personally think that much of the grunt work of extreme democracy will be on local levels. I know that efforts like MoveOn and wikipedia have been successful on a larger scale. But, I think that changing the way that people currently rely on governments and corporations to solve problems will happen in local communities. It will most likely be applying the decentralized concepts on a manageable local scale, to mostly local issues. The local participants can take into account the local nuances that make their situations and life conditions unique. These local groups can then be networked to help one another, etc.

This is an example, anyway. There are also ideas like those shaping up at http://solari.com and http://panarchy.com and http://telecommunities.org and http://www.greenblue.org/ and http://cooperation.smartmobs.com

I see "extreme democracy" fitting in with these other movements in a system that people can apply on local levels, and coodinate on larger scales.

I think that this "extreme democracy" idea is part of a larger toolbox of concepts that people will be able to turn to and employ.

Tim wrote:

.But I do think many of them aren't thinking about how to design defensively. I'm all about harnessing the power of networks, but we need to start including people with a security mindset if we want the systems to be robust & fault tolerant.

I'm not just talking about the coding level here, but vulnerabilities at the level of the social networks being built using these tools & concepts. There's all kinds of effects & transforms that can be created if you understand the math behind networks. Information cascades, cascading failures, degenerate loops, attacks against the hubs, there's a whole new world of vulnerabilities for a new generation of hackers to play with. The sooner we start working on figuring out how to protect against them, the better off we'll be.

Tim

Tim,

I totally agree with you. I think there is a wealth of material to explore in terms of making systems secure.

I think "social network security" is a great idea. If you have more material about this online somewhere, please let me know.

I may be crazy, or naive, but I do think that many of our systems can be made to be automatically or inherently secure by design. I think the opensource software movement has a lot of examples of how they handle these problems in online collaborative systems. There are, of course, new problems that arise with the types of things that we are talking about here.

I would be most interested in reading anything you've got to say on this subject, Tim. Perhaps if we continue discussing it here, we can draw some of the project participants into the discussion?

Also, Jodi, I agree with you that Shirkey's "Power laws" piece is great. I think that knowledge of dynamics like these can make a grassroots collaborative system plausible.

Sam,
I appreciate your thoughtful response. I'm going to look through the links you provided so that I have a bbetter sense of what you are talking about--much of what you mentioned is new to me and I need to be better informed. I share your interest in thinking about the local, decentralized efforts and how they might fit together--this to me is one of the most interesting aspects of the emergent democracy idea. It may be that the conceptual work is really lagging behind here--that new 'things' and ways of interacting are emerging that we don't have the right concepts for yet and that part of the newness is the way that what's going on exceeds concepts that emerged in very different contexts (as in radical difference in Greek sense of democracy, to versions of democracy in French revolution, Diggers in England, American conflicts over versions of democracy, socialist democracy, et etc all the way to the present.)

Sam,
I totally agree with you. I think there is a wealth of material to explore in terms of making systems secure.
I think "social network security" is a great idea. If you have more material about this online somewhere, please let me know.

I don't know of any resources that deal with the concept at a broad level. The closest I can think of is the SoftSecurity entry on Meatball Wiki. Although it's good stuff, it's not really what I'm talking about.

What I mean is, once you see social systems as algorithmic constructs, you have to think about algorithmic manipulation of them. Social networks can be mapped, attacked & defended, strengthened & weakened, made more or less efficient, just like any other network.

I've started tagging papers at CiteULike.org, to pave the way for others to study & make use of. Take a look & think about the possibilities of applying the methods in them to social systems.

Tim

It's been several days & my comment hasn't been posted. Somebody's asleep at the switch.

I don't know of anybody working on or any significant resources dedicated to social network security. The closest I can think of is Valdis Krebs & OrgNet, but he doesn't focus much on the security aspect.

My basic concept is, since social networks are algorithmic, they can be manipulated algorithmically. You can map them (we've seen a lot of that), attack their structural integrity, strengthen them, weaken them, make them more or less efficient, all through applying the right coordinated effort across the network as a whole or at specific points as dictated by the requirements of the effect/transform/program you wish to run. If it's a network, it'll behave like any other network.

We've seen the precursors of this with flash mobs & similar projects. Clay's powerlaw essay sketched out some territory for us. We've seen the concepts used in intelligence, when the Gray Fox unit tracked down Saddam in Iraq. But really, we've only just begun to realize the potential of seeing society as a network with predictable properties, not an unpredictable, stochastic system.

If you want to see some of what's possible, take a look at this collection of papers I've started building at CiteULike. Now imagine setting some of the best hacker minds loose on it, & see what they come up with. That's what I'm aiming for.

Tim

Sorry for the lag, Tim. We'll be more attentive. Of course, you also have the option to set up a typekey identity, and sign in to post.

Yeah I have one, I just forgot to sign in with it for the one comment. I'm just impatient to keep the discussion moving. Sorry if it came out snippy.

Tim

Tim,

I have been eating and digesting everything you've got at the CiteUlike site you've put together. Looking at what you have there opens up a whole new dimension for me. There definitely needs to be a literacy of security in decentralized networks. I think you are right on to tap into the knowledge base of the hacker communtity for this. Please keep me updated about what type of progress you make with this. Perhaps an online community, or wiki site, or message board or something could be created by one of us that focuses on this topic? Maybe we could use such a community to draw others into the conversation, and to aggregaet info and knowledge and let people collaborate on creating secure decentralized netoworks?

Sam, this is exactly what I'm after. I've been trying several ways to jumpstart such a community, but I haven't found the right setting for it yet. I've tried generating interest without a proper site to guide people to & that's just not happening. But I have this burning vision of what's possible, & that keeps me going.

I know what elements it needs to have; discussion areas & file galleries (with multiple categories or tags) are the 2 must-haves. It needs more than just a blog or wiki; I've tried to build it with various packages (Zope, Drupal, etc.), but site-building is just not my thing & it comes out like crap.

If there's anybody who would like to give me a hand in turning this into a reality, I'd be delighted & show my appreciation by doing my level best to make it the center of gravity for a new generation of hackers devoted to learning the ins & outs of social networks.

One way or another, this is something I'm determined to make happen.

Tim

Sam, this is exactly what I'm after. I've been trying several ways to jumpstart such a community, but I haven't found the right setting for it yet. I've tried generating interest without a proper site to guide people to & that's just not happening. But I have this burning vision of what's possible, & that keeps me going.

I know what elements it needs to have; discussion areas & file galleries (with multiple categories or tags) are the 2 must-haves. It needs more than just a blog or wiki; I've tried to build it with various packages (Zope, Drupal, etc.), but site-building is just not my thing & it comes out like crap.

If there's anybody who would like to give me a hand in turning this into a reality, I'd be delighted & show my appreciation by doing my level best to make it the center of gravity for a new generation of hackers devoted to learning the ins & outs of social networks.

I'll repeat my plug to CiteULike, to give people a taste of what I'm driving at. Just browse through some of the papers there & think about what groups like Shmoo, Ghetto Hackers or the L0pht could do with them. One way or another, this is something I'm determined to make happen.

Tim

I agree with Tim/scalefree 110%! The same thinking/analysis for 'network security' will help us minimize infrastructure attacks like the bad guys are practicing in Iraq... and getting damn good at.

See John Robb's excellent blog on Global Guerrillas...
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/10/guerrilla_entre.html

John writes good stuff. Along the same lines, here's some hefty but intriguing works I ran across the other day: Complexity & Infowar.

Tim