Most people view money as a neutral store of value. They are wrong. There are flavours of money – inherent emergent value systems that are built into the design of the currency. Here we have Bernard Lietaer talking about the design of our current financial system in terms of Yin and Yang.
Lietaer is no light-weight. His CV includes a phD at MIT, and a stint at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium), where he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992. You can check his bio on WikiPedia or here.
Flavours of Money
It is our view that money and votes are just two examples of token exchange games, from a palette of an infinitely more diverse range of similar games. The design of these games, profoundly influences the behaviour of players – games can be individualistic or cooperative, thoughtful or aggressive. Democratic votes, differ from hard currency in only a few minor technical aspects, a fact that you can discover for yourself if you try and code computer systems for online voting or currency transactions – yet we treat them very differently. Liquid Democracy allows votes to flow more freely through the network, and can itself be broken down into different categories of votes or recommendations – reflecting different value systems. Ricardian Contracts can be used to assign entirely new forms of value to conventional currency systems.
This is not complex stuff, this is not 3D computer graphics, or rocket science – just simple game design. There are many different flavours of money, and we do not have to be stuck with the one we’ve got.
The Parliament of Things is a decision making space, in which various stakeholders to a decision, come together (that is interact), in order to reach a decision. This space is better if it is represented in physical space in some form or other, but this does not necessarily mean a “parliament” in the traditional sense, rather it may mean a network of smaller spaces, temporary spaces, public or intimate spaces, that are combined somehow into a single cohesive decision making sense through the medium of the network.
The medium of the network is deliberately vague here. Yes, an obvious way to conceive of such a network of spaces is to use technology, the internet, video conferencing, projection, and software platforms to connect these spaces, but this is not the only way, and indeed high-tech real-time conferencing rarely works well, and is for the present a technology that would exclude rather than include the vast majority of communities in the developed and the developing world. Better, is that we consider, other modes of connectivity, using story telling, recordings, asynchronous communication, SMS, and other low-tech solutions.
“Things” are spacial, decisions are usually multidimensional and can be restricted to specific domains. It is useful, to represent these processes spatially, if only as a metaphor that makes the way we debate issues more intuitive.
So what is the “interface” that best combines the ideas of live (as in alive), and space (both as in physical space and narrative space)? And what human activity is closest to the aspirations and practice of our original experience of democracy? Theatre!
It is surely no accident that the ancient and original sites of democratic debate were also those of theatre. Even today, should you chance on a live community debate on a matter of importance, you will experience first hand, the vitality of real human theatre. For my part this was what drew me first to the political sphere, having absolutely no interest in national party political politics.
Our second inspiration comes from the life long work of Augusto Boal, who sadly passed away in 2009. His work first in Forum Theatre and then finally with Legislative Theatre was always political (in it’s best sense), but never dull.
Brazilian theater director and writer Augusto Boal presenting his Theater of the Oppressed at Riverside Church in New York City.
Theatre in this physical space, political sense, is the ideal interface to Latour’s Parliament of things in the epistemological sense. Theatre is spatial, embedded . The set of a theatre can incorporate, projection, video, sound, lighting – it is an informational space. It provides context to the debate.
Interactive, or improvised theatre, is also a debate, but more than a debate in the political sense, it captures potent ideas around the notions of expertise, skill, emotive communication, authenticity participation and engagement. It is controversial and playful. It is serious and informative. In the sense of theatrical space, the performance interface is the legal framework of the parliament. It is the written, spoken and unspoken culture of interaction in the space.
The Pirate party in Germany won 7.8% of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the most populous state which includes cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Essen. That puts it near the Greens and ahead of both the ex-communist Left Party and the Free Democrats, who are part of Germany’s ruling coalition. If the party enters the Bundestag in next year’s federal election, it could affect the make-up of the government (NRW is seen as an important bellwether for national elections, which take place in late 2013).
Voting at a Pirate Party meeting - source the Economist.
Michael Lühmann of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, fears that without parties to mediate between citizens and the state, small, highly motivated groups can prosper at the expense of the many – sounds like political lobbying to me? Nor do I expect he as analysed the socratic effect of “communicative ascent” on political dialogue over time…
Yet Germany is often said to be suffering from a democratic malaise, with broad-based parties like the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats all losing members. As in other western economies, voter turnout is falling, with citizens tending to mobilise outside party structures. A poll in Der Spiegel says that 83% favour more direct participation.
Not just a flash in the pan
In Germany, the Pirates secured 7.4% of the vote in Saarland, Germany’s smallest state (excluding the city-states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg). “They have their strongholds among young people in cities with universities, with an academic environment,” says Lothar Probst, a political scientist at the University of Bremen. “One of the amazing points in Saarland is that it only has one or two universities. The Pirates were still pretty successful in the countryside.” Their ship came in yet again on May 6 when they earned 8% of the vote in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. Entering parliament in NRW makes them four for four.
Now if someone can translate this properly for me, as I’d like to figure out what they are saying about the use of Liquid Democracy by the Pirates….
I’ve been doing some thinking about books, and libraries, and slow rooms, and came across this video from Susan Cain about introverts:
In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert.
The thought here is that a decision-making space needs to be slow, quiet and introverted, and that there is a danger, or at least a perceived danger of everything becoming loud, glitzy, technical, instant and superficial.
Democracy and the Slow Room
It is a common concern that while the wisdom of crowds and using television or the internet to make it easier to vote, they also make it less considered. If (the thinking goes), all you have to do is send in an SMS, “like” or click +1 here, to “answer” some television poll – what chance is there for a more contemplative response? Surely this is a dreadful way to express a democratic opinion?
This is an unfortunate assumption, and certainly not what is being aimed for, when we discuss democracy and debate in the Parliament of Things. Indeed it is precisely the superficial forms of public debate encouraged by television, and current political systems that inspire the project to look for richer forms of deliberation.
In particular, for many decisions we need to be able to construct slow rooms, and long tables. A slow room is a place in parliament where thoughtful, and considered processes are required before the decision can be made, while a long room is a space which is designed to debate and decide on issues that only make sense to discuss when considering very long time scales (such as environmental impact).
How such a space is designed is an art that involves the design of physical and virtual space (what we call interface design), as well a social process of creating the right culture around the decisions backed up by the technical and legal structures that embody the decision-making framework.
Liquid Democracy and Thoughtfulness
It may well be the case that what most people currently experience on the internet, is a trivialization of debate, and a chaotic over-exposure to information and opinion, but it would be a mistake to judge the future of online decision support tools on this basis. Rather the current poor state of online deliberation, should be viewed in terms of a natural historical progression: from simple self publishing tools and mass platforms, to specialised and sophisticated spaces that are designed to support decision-making in specific niche fields and communities.
We now have had secure digital tools for online payments, and are beginning to see these on mobile platforms, and it is only when the low hanging fruit of mass engagement platforms have been fully ceded to platforms like FaceBook, Google Plus and Twitter, that we can see developers and investors taking the time and money required to create more sophisticated tools. At the same time, we as users of these systems will begin to become more demanding.
Voting is thought at the moment as a process of putting a cross on a piece of paper, or clicking a button on an online poll – but it need not be like this. There are many ways an individual can express their preference, using richer forms of democracy voters can:
express their support for individuals they trust, based on dialogue, long-term acquaintance, and extended conversation.
express their support for various positions, through learning and study, and in so doing gather the support of others
they can abstain on issues they are not interested in, and act directly on those that they are knowledgable about or passionate.
In a time where the collection of votes, and the distribution of rich documentation around a debate (let’s call this documentary), is effectively free and substantially more universal than ever before (via the internet and mobile phones), the problem can shift from the practical task of collecting trivial democratic input, to enabling individuals to express their democratic preference in richer and more engaging ways.
Doing this every 4 years used to make economic sense, but no longer: now it is just a forced distortion on the ability of individuals to express their knowledge and political preferences with regard to how society should develop. We’ll take a look at the sort of mechanisms that we could use, and how these enable and encourage a higher quality of debate, and not just a greater quantity of button pushing – in a later post.
“Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This post is about collective behaviour, and in particular the sorts of fields of study that are of interest when thinking about how to defend a networked organisation from attack. That is the problem of creating a defence force for an open, decentralised society.
In this post I want to look at a couple of outlying fields. It is clear that a core area of study is the study of how real people behave in small or medium size organisational structures. Here however, I want to concentrate on the study of a couple of biological behaviours, from a mathematical or computational point of view. Why? Because, by looking at these fields we might come across some novel techniques that we can use to augment the more traditional forms of organisational structure that human beings use.
There are two areas of scientific research that are of interest here:
Swarm behaviour is in some ways a danger, and in others an asset with regard to network organisations – either way the study of this subject is throwing up interesting technical results, with ethical implications (see below).
Artificial Immune Systems
A good metaphor for thinking about the design of a new network oriented politics, and it’s long-term viability, is the immune system. If we are able to learn from these biological systems techniques that we can use to prevent the inevitable attacks from both inside the organisation, and outside of the organisation (by this I mean any network of individuals), we may be able to avoid the all too common pitfalls that real groups face.
Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) at the University of York Department of Electronics
Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are adaptive systems, inspired by theoretical immunology and observed immune functions, principles and models, which are applied to problem solving.
It is a common experience that informal p2p or networked structures decay over time – and usually into more traditional hierarchical structures. We see this in a wide range of social movements, whether political revolutions, religious movements or smaller social collectives – over time the original ideals, and forms of informal social organisation are subsumed by the need for action, in particular defensive action.
It is for this reason that a study of techniques that might prove useful to literally immunize a p2p network organisation is useful – particularly if we can embed this in the legal and technical code of the networks structure.
An Immune Aesthetic
Visualisation of complex systems, can help to interpret complexity in ways that humans are better suited to process. If we truly want to keep hold of ethical, or deep human values – perhaps we need a way to experience the systemic properties in a way which would allow us to participate? This sort of abstraction has all sorts of potential consequences – not all of them benign.
Fugue (below), is an interactive art installation, based on the functioning of the human immune system.
At the heart of the piece is a complex piece of scientific software, an artificial immune system algorithm, accurately mimicking the changes and cascading responses of the human immune system. The artistic concept, inspired by the musical form of the Fugue, interprets, expresses and communicates these changes through independent channels of vision, using cell-like images, and sound. In the most recent version, a large-scale interactive installation, participants engage the system in a spontaneous non-verbal dialogue, influencing both the unfolding of the immune system drama and the nature of their own experience.
How altruism helps swarming robots fly better Swarm intelligence is also being used to study the emergence (that is evolution) of altruism. If a behaviour emerges based on an evolutionary stable strategy – it is a good sign that it is robust. Studies like these can therefore point to how we my seek to design systems that have robust p2p ethical properties.
“Testing the evolution of altruism using quantitative studies in live organisms has been largely impossible because experiments need to span hundreds of generations and there are too many variables,” EPFL notes in a press release. “However, Floreano’s robots evolve rapidly using simulated gene and genome functions and allow scientists to measure the costs and benefits associated with the trait.”
“If an individual family member shares food with the rest of the family, it reduces his or her personal likelihood of survival but increases the chances of family members passing on their genes, many of which are common to the entire family. Hamilton’s rule simply states that whether or not an organism shares its food with another depends on its genetic closeness (how many genes it shares) with the other organism.
‘We have shown that Hamilton’s kin selection theory always accurately predicts the relationship between the evolution of altruism and the relatedness of individuals in a species,’ explains Markus Waibel, lead author of the paper and former doctoral student of both Keller and Floreano.
Hamilton’s rule has long been a subject of much debate because its equation seems too simple to be true. ‘This study mirrors Hamilton’s rule remarkably well to ex-plain when an altruistic gene is passed on from one generation to the next, and when it is not,’ says Keller.”
The study will help biologists but it has already had an impact on other robots at EPFL, notably swarms of flying robots. “We have been able to take this experiment and extract an algorithm that we can use to evolve cooperation in any type of robot,” says Floreano. “We are using this altruism algorithm to improve the control system of our flying robots and we see that it allows them to effectively collaborate and fly in swarm formation more successfully.”
How robots become altruistic after 500 generations
Thanks to a link provided by Mark Roest, we have some further insite into the topology of the social media networks involved in the Arab Spring. Follow this link the full article over on Nature.
The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants (i.e. the leaders of the recruitment process) and of the users who acted as seeds of message cascades (i.e. the spreaders of information). We find that early participants cannot be characterized by a typical topological position but spreaders tend to be more central in the network. These findings shed light on the connection between online networks, social contagion, and collective dynamics, and offer an empirical test to the recruitment mechanisms theorized in formal models of collective action.
The network analysis shows that users at the core of the network are more likely to be the seeds of global chains of information diffusion.
The distribution of cascade sizes (Nc) suggests that only a few cascades percolate to affect most users, and that the vast majority die in the early stages of diffusion. (B) There is a positive correlation between network centrality, as measured by the classification of nodes in high k-cores, and cascade sizes, suggesting that users at the core of the network are more likely to be the seeds of global chains of information diffusion. (C) The nodes in the network arranged according to their k-core; node size accounts for degree centrality, and node color indicates the maximum size of the cascades generated by the user (users generating the largest cascades are depicted in orange). (D) Example of a global cascade affecting about 35,000 nodes. Nodes in blue are users who participated in the diffusion of protest messages; nodes in orange were exposed to the messages but did not send messages of their own. The darker the shade of blue, the earlier users joined the cascade as spreaders; the lighter the shade of yellow, the later users joined the cascade as listeners.
While this sort of analysis is useful, it would be great to correlate the form of these networks with the form or shape of the network (as I agued for in The ethics of network topology), and to examine the qualities of the conversational links - which I talk about in an earlier post (Equality, and the structure of democratic networks).
