Democracy

The missing ideology of Creative Commons

In the continuing discussion on the governance of the iCommons (the international Creative Commons) we have seen warnings raised by some (for example Tomâ??s article) about the loss of the grassroots. Attempting to address these concerns writers are attempting to explain why the iCommons works and therefore criticism of it is unjustified. For example Golden Swamp writes that the iCommons is a network joining up the nodes. While the network is a nice metaphor vague enough to incorporate almost all fuzzy feelgood thoughts on the virtual organisation and loose alliances working towards common goals â?? what does the network really mean?

If the Commons was a network power would be evenly (more or less) spread over the network â?? this is not so. The power of the Commons emanates clearly from the central point of San Francisco. The closer you are to the epicentre the greater the power.

After experiencing the presence of Microsoft and the Soros Foundation at the iCommons summit Becky Hogge at Open Democracy writes a post with the title that says it all â??Who owns a movement?â??

The Creative Commons is a great idea. It is a set of licenses which people can use. It helps â??ordinaryâ?? people participate in the copyright discourse by visualising the fact that the binary situation of all or nothing copyright is not enough. But the Commons is not a movement in the sense of the Free Software Foundation whose basis is on ideology â?? the Copyleft ideology.

By being pragmatic the Commons has grown faster than many contemporary movements. However this pragmatism is also part of the problem. The emptiness of its ideology means that many of the participants in this movement fill it with what they think it represents. The shock (?) then of seeing Microsoft at â??theirâ?? summit shows the effects of pragmatism. Those who want to see the Commons as being based upon a Copyleft ideology quickly must realise that this is not going to happen.

Does ideology matter?

Yes! If the Commons is to be seen as a movement. Without a central ideology the movement (can it be a movement without an ideology?) cannot define its core values and eventually will splinter.

No! The licenses are simple, standard licenses and nothing else. Naturally even licenses reflect ideologies but they are not in themselves ideologies.

If the iCommons wants to become more than a set of licenses (which it seems to want) it must then discard its all to pragmatic position and be prepared to make some people unhappy. Without taking a stance, setting up a camp somewhere, attempting to please everyone â?? it cannot grow.

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Writing Disruptive Technology

Finally done. I handed in my edited thesis to my supervisor today. The work spans 268 pages split up into 1769 paragraphs, 9953 lines. Which became 101 956 words. It includes 7 tables and 2 figures, not including the cartoon in the acknowledgements.

Since I have already survived two seminars on the work with revisions after each now my supervisor will read the work again and I will be able to make minor changes after his comments.

From the brilliant Jorge Cham – PhdComics

Then its summer – not a lot happens then. With any luck I will avoid reading my thesis. Just let it be until the begining of August. Then the work is off to the printers and upon its return a copy of the work is nailed to the university notice board along with information about the public defence which will be in September (one of the days: 25th, 26th or 27th still undecided…). If I pass & survive my defence then I am well and truely finished with this project.

The title of my thesis is “Disruptive Technology” and it has the subtitle “Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” if you want to read the latest version download it here.

Posted on by mklang

Read this book

The blurb on the back of the book is important since it has to interest the reader and at the same time be a factual discription – without being too long, complex or explanatory… So after a period of thought and procrastination this is what I have:

This work is on the democratic effects of attempts to regulate disruptive technology. By looking at the phenomenon of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship this work shows the effects of regulation upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy.

Social interaction and organisation are, in part, shaped by the technology used. The social differences between the technology of snail-mail and the technology of e-mail are defined by features that the technology allows, and the limitations that constrain, the user modes of interaction. Therefore technological innovation and development over time affects the ways in which social interaction and communication are carried out. Certain forms of gradual technological innovation and development may be easily assimilated while other forms are more disruptive. This disruption can be seen in the way which new technologies affect the organisation of social interaction and are called, in this work: disruptive technology.

This work studies regulation as an attempt to come to terms with the disruptive effects of technology upon social interaction. This is done by focusing on the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy. In conclusion, this work will show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

Would you read this book? If so you can download it here.

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What is an ending?

I tend to avoid memes but one of them I came across recently has started me thinking. The idea is to blog the last sentence of your thesis. Actually doing this is not a problem â?? even though I am not sure how interesting it is to read.

Discarding the technology entails a limited, regulated use but will fail to recognise the full potential of disruptive technologies as an agent of change within the participatory democracy.

The problem is: what is an ending? How should a thesis end? What is the purpose of the end? The purpose of the conclusion is to bring the work to an end and to (hopefully) provide an answer to the question which was posed somewhere in the beginning. But what is the meaning of the last sentence and what should it include?

Obviously I realise that there always must be a last sentence. But now that I have begun to think about the role of the final sentence it has begun to bug me. Now I will have to try to figure out what the role of these last words areâ?¦

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Text editing blues

Like bad tasting medicine editing is an aweful process which is only done because of its obvious benefits. Its terrifying the amount of errors that can be spotted at this late stage. Today I even found an incomplete sentence… it simply tapered off like someone losing a chain of thought.

This is the begining up until the research question. Not sure about it though…

This work begins with the thesis that there is a strong relationship between the regulation of technology and the Internet based participatory democracy. In other words, the attempts to regulate technology have an impact upon the citizenâ??s participation in democracy. This work will show what this relationship is and its effect on democratic participation.
Taking its starting points from the recent theoretical developments in regulation, disruptive technology and role of ICT in participatory democracy, this work is the application of three theoretical discussions. These theoretical discussions are used in the empirical exploration of six areas: virus writing and dissemination, civil disobedience in online environments, privacy and the role of spyware, the re-interpretation of property in online environments, software as infrastructure and finally state censorship of online information. The purpose of these studies is to explore the effects of these socio-technical innovations upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. The overall research question for this thesis is therefore:
What are the effects of technology regulation on the Internet-based participatory democracy?

To connect to an earlier ongoing discussion about the text: The book is now 257 pages long and 99 479 words long. Do you think that word can handle going over 100 000 words or will it simply melt…

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Book Cover Design Competition

My phd thesis goes to the publisher in May and I need a book cover for the work. My own attempts have been less than exciting so here is a competition for all you creative people.

Design a cover for my thesis and I will use it. Your work will appear on the 200-300 copies printed, you will naturally recieve full credit for your work and a copy of the book.

The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology” the undertitle (which should not appear on the cover) is “The Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy”

All submissions need to be in by May 10.

Spread the word!

UPDATE (13 April)

Some questions about the competition & thesis.

Format: Not entirely fixed but approx: Height 23 cm, width 15 cm, length 260 pages.

Colours: No limitations other than the budget does not allow glossy photo-quality covers.
The basic argument of the thesis is: While governments talk about the advantages that technology may bring to the democratic process they are more concerned with streamlining administrative procedures rather than promoting true democratic interaction. When unconventional/innovative uses of technology appear the regulatory desire is to prohibit rather than promote. A draft version of the thesis is available here.

The thesis will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license

Posted on by mklang

War and Peace

In an article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, George Orwell wrote about the relationship between military technology and democratic development. National self-determination is, according to Orwell’s technologically deterministic argument, a product of the ability to develop efficient arms.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle…Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccansâ??even Tibetansâ??could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only threeâ??ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weaponâ??or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fightingâ??not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant. (full article here)

The concept of war and peace has changed since Orwell published this article in Tribune (19 October 1945). Those old enough to have experienced the world wars (either as participants or spectators) claim that we have had peace. This is strange to as I cannot remember a single period in my life when we were not at war with some nation (echoes of Orwell’s 1984?)

This peace is therefore an illusion, a consensual hallucination, if the interpretation of reality claims that we are at war then we are at war. If the claim is that we are at peace then we are at peace. Naturally this does not effect the fact that people are being killed, or that military forces are attacking each other. It just does not mean that we are not living in peacetime.

The atom bomb nicknamed Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki exploded at 11:02 A.M on August 9.
It left an estimated 70,000 dead by the end of 1945.

While living in this myth of peace the threat of all out war remains a threat but in reality war remains based in the use of the rifle or rifle-like weaponry. Since there is no real war in (or with) Afganistan, Iraq, India/Pakistan (Kashmir) or Indonesia (For lists of ongoing conflicts look here and here) but only ‘conflicts’ the struggle remains focused around the rifle.

This is not, as Orwell thought, the technical ability to mass-produce this relatively simple technology but rather the ability to obtain cash or credits to be able to buy small arms (estimated black market trade in small arms range from US$2-10 billion a year). In conflicts such as these it is not the posession of advanced technology that resolves the conflict but rather the money and determination to accept heavy losses.

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Silence of Dissent

As early as 2002 the Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) have been considered using biometrics to beef up security. SAS state in a press release dated 2002-05-06 that they are evaluating biometrics to improve check-in and embarkation procedures. In the press release (reported here in the Swedish newspaper DI) they refer to the 9/11 attacks (naturally â?? what else?).

On 30 March 2006 the Swedish Data Inspection has given SAS permission (Swedish Press Release) to use fingerprints on domestic flights to ensure that persons handing in luggage are also on the flight. The goal is to have 1.4 million passengers voluntarily leave their fingerprints to a local database. When the passenger begins her flight the information in the database is erased.

Naturally the scheme is a violation of personal integrity. The Data Inspection legitimises its decision by pointing out that the data is only stored for a brief time and that the system is voluntary.

By waving the flag of freedom of choice the Airline company, the Data Inspection and others are practicing the art of spin to a marvellous degree. Any and all complaints against a voluntary system can be easily ignored. The critic can be derided since the system is voluntary â?? if you donâ??t like it then donâ??t do it.

This is, I believe, to miss the whole point.

We have all been taught to defend our rights but the question is then why people do not react when things like this happen in front of their eyes? The reason is that we are prepared to fight the strong foe but we have no defence against the â??Salami Tacticâ??. The Salami Tactic is the opposite of brute force it is hardly even a fight. It entails taking over something slice by slice. Each step in itself so small that it is not worth retaliation â?? Any protest against a slice being taken can again be defended by the freedom of choice argument. The critic is over-reacting. If someone was to attempt to take the whole salami at once reactions would be legitimate. Not to react would be a sign of weakness. To react when someone takes a slice is a sign of a petty mind.

This is the weakness of a strong democracy.

The voluntary nature of this scheme, and indeed others like it, undermines the present rights argument since we cannot fight. The voluntary nature of the scheme is also problematic when this scheme gradually becomes the norm. Then the person wishing to maintain the voluntary status and not participate is seen by everyone as being difficult and relatively socially inept.

There will be no protests, there will be a rush to accept this scheme. Everyone will sing its praises: frequent fliers will sing about efficiency, police about security and the airline will sing about profit. Those who will not sing will sit in embarrassed silence while another slice of our rights is lost forever.

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Vietnam disagrees

Recently (17/11) the Reporters without Borders (RWB) published The 15 enemies of the Internet and other countries to watch. among the top (bottom?) 15 was Vietnam of which the article wrote:

The country closely follows the Chinese method of controlling the Internet, but though more ideologically rigid, the regime does not have the money and technology China has to do this. It has Internet police who filter out â??subversiveâ?? content and spy on cybercafés. Cyber-dissidents are thrown in prison and three have been in jail for more than three years for daring to speak out online in favour of democracy.

This article was not recieved happily by the countries on the list and now the Vietnamese news agency has written an article which argues against RWB putting Vietnamn on their list. The Vietnamese article is published by the VietNam News Agency (VNA) which is the official news service of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. The “VNA is directed by the Government and is authorized to make official statements reflecting the State’s points of view on important national and international issues” (more info about VNA). The article argues against the RWB list and claims that:

The RWB made groundless and ill-intended allegations against these nations for “violating the right to freedom of speech on Internet, censoring liberal sources of news, strictly controlling Internet services.” It accused these nations of “shutting the mouth of dissidents, making troubles, repressing and even imprisoning those who expressed on the Internet opinions running counter to the Government’s policies.”

the article then goes on to describe the development of Internet services in Vietnam. Which is naturally followed by the consequences of such development.

The country’s poor management capacity and infrastructure facilities have been blamed for the Government’s inability to control inflammatory, false and libelious information and pornographic images posted by several local Internet providers. The fact has caused concern among the people. Viet Nam has also failed to introduce effective measures to prevent hostile and reactionary forces and political opportunists at home and abroad from using the Internet and on-line forums to speak ill of achievements gained by the people.

The article then moves on to meeting the actual accusations which places them on the RWB list

Like other countries, Viet Nam discourages and restricts the dissemination of information calling for subversive attempts, and puts firewalls on websites that are not suitable to the morals and fine customs of oriental people in general, and the Vietnamese people in particular.

The main motivations for censorship are the twin threats of subjecting children to pornography and terrorism. Vietnams main defence, in his article, seems to be “everyone else is doing it”:

After the Sept. 11 incident, haunted by terror threats, many Western nations have tightened control over the Internet – a move considered by some citizens to violate individual privacy. The United Nations has been calling for the establishment of a UN Internet Surveillance Agency, which will map out and implement Internet administration policies, covering the most imperative areas of the global network, namely the distribution of domain names, Internet security and crimes, spam, and the protection of individual information on the net.

Naturally the fact that other countries are behaving badly is something which the RWB is aware of even countries that did not make the list (yet) are included in the study as countries which need to be watched. Among the more interesting statements in the article is a sentence at the end “Why did RWB try to politicise a technology that has brought vigorous changes to daily life worldwide?”…Nice try – but when was technology apolitical?

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Thesis abstract

Strange as it may seem I have never actually written an abstract for my thesis. The title is Regulating Disruptive Technologies…the rattling you hear is the dried up remnants of a brain which seem to shake inside my skull when I write.

Different groups claim to be superstitous. I think deep down inside all Phd students are superstitious (a bit like Pascal’s gambit – the odds are better on believing!). So I will say that the date is closing fast but I will not utter the actual calender date.

Abstract
The main point of this thesis is to show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy. To understand how the regulation of technology effects the regulation of democracy this thesis will study the regulatory activities of the regulator and the reactions of those being regulated. The driving force is the understanding of the effect of technological change upon social institutions. This work will examine the technological challenges to central social institutions and show that the technological change has far outpaced the evolution of the social concepts in these areas and as a result the technology can be viewed as being a disruptive force in society.

The understanding of the concept of disruption within this work is important. Disruption is as an agent of change in society. Change is a semi-autonomous driving force in society brought about by disruption. Therefore, disruption is the motor of change, change is what pushes, or pulls, society forward. Therefore the basis of this thesis is that disruption is good.

The locus of this work is the Internet. The study is on the regulation and over-regulation of Internet based activities. The measure of whether a technology has been regulated or over-regulated will depend upon the democratic effects of the regulation. If the implemented regulation tends to not only regulate unwanted/undesirable behaviour but regularly criminalises or frustrates many types of legitimate behaviour then the situation is one of over-regulation.

It is therefore the purpose of this thesis to look at the use of power through the regulatory structures. While the study of the creation and adaptation of regulation shows the movements and flows within structures, the reactions towards regulation shows the human actors desires to adapt and negotiate the new social orders being created. To better understand these processes it is necessary to look at the way in which technology can be seen as a disruptive force and the way in which technology and democracy are being linked together in rhetoric and practice. This thesis will exemplify, discuss and analyse the democratic effects of the disruptive effects being brought about by technology and the attempts to regulate information and communications technology (ICT).

The development of understanding of the way in which we regulate disruptive technology helps us to understand the regulation of that which is new and which threatens that which is established. The results of such a study can then be applied to all domains where regulation of disruptive technology may occur. This may be within an organisation, a family group, a multi-national corporation or a state.

Posted on by mklang