Three motivating projects
I have three inter-related goals in mind, all stemming from my doctoral dissertation about the Internet Governance debates of the mid and late 1990s. Two are more or less academic, and the other is very practical:
- Publish the historical portion of the dissertation as a mass market book.
- Publish a series of scholarly articles that flesh out the dissertation's theoretical arguments.
- Create a "civic software" prototype that might help other groups overcome the consensus-building problems I observed.
1 Book Manuscript: Roots of Power: The Rise of Dot-Com and the Decline of the Nation-State
My dissertation research covered the events that led to the world's first global election and to the creation of the first body formally designated to govern the Internet's core resources. My goal is to rework the empirical sections of the dissertation and other material I've gathered into an accessible narrative history. The book will cover the invention of the Internet through the rise of the Web, drawing on dozens of insider interviews and treasure troves of email archives. The main focus is the behind-the-scenes power struggle over who would keep authority to set policy for the Internet's valuable Domain Name System. Who would be empowered to set any fees? Who would be the ultimate arbiter of any disputes? That fight became so bitter, the community which designed and built the Internet split apart, and then briefly split the Internet itself.
I had the opportunity to observe much of that infighting first-hand, culminating in the November 2000 meeting where the members of the Internet's new governing body reached their controversial decision to expand the system's set of Top Level Domains.
For more about the book, see this.
2 Theoretical Studies: Rules, Interests, Power, and Freedom
These investigations would lead to articles targeted to relatively small audiences of students and professional academics.
Beyond recounting the blow-by-blow history of the rise of Internet Governance, I want to deal with deeper questions about society in general, and what the future may hold. The Web's early growth inspired sweeping proclamations about concepts such as Internet-based global democracy, stakeholder-based self governance, and the opening of a new era that would free people from the obsolescing constraints of nation- states. The result, however, was far from Westphalia. It wasn't even Augsburg. What did occur was certainly important, but not nearly as pivotal as some had hoped or what may yet come. Still, there have been some interesting hints about what kinds of changes may be in store. The Post-Westphalian conjecture presents an enduring and useful thought problem.
We can count on the fact that our human future will display unmistakable resemblances to our past. Any serious speculation about the prospects for an expressly global form of organization would have to include a foundational account of how humans have been able to organize themselves into any sort of a society at all, whether families or clans, or religions or nation-states. We cannot fully understand globalization until we achieve a firm appreciation of our innate capacity to order ourselves. And that would require a careful explanation of how we humans use language to make rules and frame our interests.
Though my field is International Relations, my approach draws a great deal from evolutionary psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. This aspect of my work is an affirmative response to the constructivist framework laid out by Nicholas G. Onuf. It is intended in part to fortify his claims that: 1) Rules are ontologically prime to the study of human societies, and; 2) Interests equate to plausible demands and expections for status, security and wealth. I add further claims that Joseph Nye's famous distinction between "hard" and "soft" power is overly simplistic for analytical purposes, even if it remains useful as a popular metaphor. A more robust and strictly categorical understanding would cast power as the deployment of rules by agents who may act as either guides, gatekeepers, or peers. Furthermore, I argue that human agents justify their behaviors by resorting to one or more of six distinct conceptions of the proper source of rules. The essential incommenusrabilty of those conceptions has provided ground for deeply contested notions of freedom and moral action.
In brief, my take on the Post-Westphalian conjecture is that nation-states will not "go away," just as religious institutions did not disappear at the start of the Westphalian era. That historical cusp marked a separating out of human attitudes toward temporal and atemporal authority, refashioning those agencies. The inception of an an expressly global era would be likely to engrave more formal distinctions between coercive, border-mediating authority, and mercantile, property-credentialing authority. The purview of the state will not be overtaken by electronically-mediated activity, but bypassed by new loci of activity which states are poorly prepared to handle. The rules of personhood will grow more complex as agencies and structures continue to proliferate.
3 Indaba/ChoiceRanker: A Scalable Venue for Collaborative Expression of Converging and Diverging Opinion
The Internet's success as an open social platform reflects the engineering culture from which it emerged. Widely shared values -- especially connectivity, interoperability, and scalability -- helped community members frame common technical goals. The Internet's designers were especially successful at collaborating via remarkably open online processes. "It is a matter of pride and honor," said one community leader, "[that we] used the paradigm to develop the paradigm."
Given that the Internet standards-making process seemed to work so well for so long, it was intriguing that the Internet Governance process turned out so badly. One reason was that sudden interest in getting access to the Internet's core resources attracted so many newcomers so quickly. There was little time to build up the levels of trust, familiarity, and respect that would allow for congenial give and take. In addition, the challenge of managing this valuable new kind of property was vastly different from that of writing standards. New charter values and new grounds for collaboration needed to be established. The list-based working group approach used by the Internet engineering community failed to meet the needs of the governance debates, and no alternative mechanisms were up to the task. As a consequence, civil discourse broke down, outspoken members of dissenting factions went their separate ways, and major decisions were worked out behind the scenes by powerful actors who had lost patience with the hoi polloi.
As I evaluated that outcome, I was struck by the similarities I saw in the fractured culture of the contemporary political blogosphere. The Internet provides fertile ground for partisan echo chambers, but mature, reasoned, goal-oriented debate is all too scarce. Most bloggers are either preaching to the choir or adding to the cacaphony. It's easy enough to fix the blame on base-baiting polarization. The challenge is to fix the problem so well, that if anyone actually does post a blog that lives up to the claim of being "The Supremely Cogent Solution To All That Ails Us," the suggestion will be given a good chance to earn the attention and respect of the community as a whole. The fix I have in mind, therefore, involves creating a platform that is optimized to locate and fortify consensus across seemingly irreconcilable groups. The long term goal is a massively scalable venue through which people can set priorities and find grounds for compromise.
This is an ambitious project, so I had to break it into phases. The first is still underway.
Since traditional yay or nay feedback systems tend to polarize debate and block consenus formation, I decided that a ranked choice/instant runoff voting polling format would be best suited to accomplishing the first phase's main task: Rather than just showing the winner of a ballot, I wanted participants to be able to see the process of consensus formation and the impact of their votes on outcomes. To do this, I had to conjure up a new way of visualizing the round-by-round play of an instant runoff, and then build a system to display it. It's not quite the lightbulb, but it works well, and the experience of turning such a novel vision into reality turned out to be a thrill I'll never forget. To see current progress, try this.
There is one major outstanding task to complete in this phase. Panel Filtering is premised on the idea of attracting people from diverse groups to participate in the same election. Filtering is equivalent to structured subaggregation. It would allow members of one group to compare their own consensus-building process with that of other groups. The same feature lends itself to participation by appointed panels of experts.
For my initial ideas about the next two phases, see this.