The Software Autocracy

I wrote about the Software Democracy -- which was a reference to a coder in SL claiming software engineering *isn't* a democracy, and my efforts (and others) to make it a democracy by resisting those sorts of controlling types. Is this a waste of time because "it's a game" or "not real" and "virtual"? Hardly. The setting of Second Life and its JIRA, the tools to report bugs and propose features, is a microcosm of what we all have to worry about in real life in the future, and that's why I bother.

I could be five years too early with this, or five months, but I feel strongly about trying to warn about these things. There are too many influential game gods like Richard Bartle or Edward Castronova who think real life should become like games. There are too many SL founders like Philip Rosedale or Cory Ondreija who believe that code is law and there should be no "no" vote. And there are now too many social-media gurus like Clay Shirky or Lawrence Lessig or Beth Noveck who think that "Here Comes Everybody" trumps individual expression, the group is all and we can all hive-mind our way to glory and ride the glory train to e-lectoral satori.

And they merely reflect the mindset of those they find around them in Silicon Valley, whether the literal geographic location or the global worldview, and with the money and power and influence of these people, and with them glomming on to the Obama campaign (globaming?), I really think you *do* have to worry. I think it's as bad a situation as any in history, and of course whenever you look back at the times when tyrants came to power, people always say later, but why didn't you strangle them in their cradle? Why didn't anybody do anything?

What are the features of this new-media world we have to worry about?

All of the same things we see as constraints on freedom of speech in Second Life or on Twitter or Facebook, where millions of people spend their time more and more, pertain to real-life issues like an election increasingly dominated by the Internet because people are watching TV or reading newspapers less and less Or they watch TV, but TV itself has been morphed into that sort of "Obama gives me a chilld down the leg" giddy stuff, like the opionated MSNBC bloggy TV discussed in the New Yorker this week.

What are these attitudes that increasingly prevail, increasingly restrict, increasingly create e-lites of people coding tools, using tools as early adapters and beta-testers, and prevailing with tools ncreasingly everywhere that matters?

1. The First Amendment has no more place to be, to exist in the round, as it were, because it is shut out by TOS speech codes or the arbitrary moderation of private corporations. Speech has to be restricted. Can't have flame wars and trolls now, can we! Mute, ban, delete, block. Censor, edit, filter and boot -- and hash-ban and IP ban and harass in RL if you have to! The Internet is for the People, not trolls and flamers! LOTS of concern about suppression of information and back-room decision making in the Bush camp or McCain camp, and rightly so, but a curious lack of curiosity about how a decision comes about like the flip-flop on campaign financing, in a "netrooted" campaign that is supposed to encourage more transparency and democratic participation.

2. People are encouraged to scorn representative democracy, deride it as "corrupt" and as "old white guys" and with this infantile and even racist mindset, and anti-democratic mob insolence, will be encouraged to mob, to "vote up," to camp, to click up to the top on whatever interfaces are given to us to express the people's will.

3. Yes, that means no more "no" vote. Direct democracy means you have to be positive! Can't have anyone gaming the system now, can we! Let's be constructive, now! Let positive proposals be crowdsourced and let the wisdom of the crowd decide whether they're good by voting them up -- or ignoring them in favour of other positive proposals! Remove negative posts -- they're "vitriolic" or "negative" or "trolling" -- can't have that now, can we!

4. It's ok to be anonymous; protect yourself from identity theft! Have no accountability. And/Or: It's not ok to be anonymous, go through hoops of verification of identity and let us mine it for marketing data and political control (often the same philosophies equally prevail, and are used interchangeable by even the same debaters).

5. Create or die; provide content or fail; patch or GTFO. You don't have your own Qik TV station streaming from your i-Phone. You are a loser. You don't even have a Blackberry? You don't blog or Twitter or Facebook? You need to get with the program.

6.Influence, influence, influence! Get LOTS of followers, and block anyone you don't like from following you to make them not even hear what you say such as to back-talk!

7. Friend, friend, friend! Create groups. Create peer pressure. Mob around together. Do things in sync. Hive mind! Individuals should be brought into line.

8. Why provide a full-length study with reasoned or researched examples when you can answer in half a screen or 140 characters?!

9. Copy and paste everything. There is no privacy. Let everybody see every chat, every draft, every deliberation, and put it on the blogs. Hey, we need transparency!

10. Don't let people into your private island/web page. Password protect. Create top-tier users with clearance. Delete those who talk back, boot them from the list, use the kill-file on their chat. Heck, don't even let them read your page, block their ability to view it. Or, conversely, unfollow, track-block, mute, grey out the view of someone else, creating an archipelago of egos.

11. Crowdsource, flashmob, sound-byte, Twitter, friend, connect, teleport -- but don't spend long hours in deliberation, thought, reflection, careful debate, reading (the old-fashioned way before we were made dumb by the Internet).

12. Make reputation systems, vote up (or negrate if you can), friend, reward, feature, showcase, put in the top of search! That way, people and ideas you don't like never have to be seen!

And so on. There's lots more I haven't even realized yet, I'm sure.

And I'm not kidding. Here's Scoble going to Washington, and his made concern is to find out whether the President is on Twitter, and reassure himself that he's too stupid to get Twitter. His main concern is to applaud various young 20-somethings as being savvy and placed to run the Obama Revolution, just as soon as they can get rid of any lingering Hilary Monster aggro, the damages can be repaired or the spells cast to heal...

Lately, I've been tackling these issues more head on, not only on Scoble's blog, but on Personal Democracy Forum, where I made the obvious point that "netroots are not grassroots" and where I comment on Matthew Burton, who is one of those new young tekkie darlings who is invading government on behalf of the e-lite.

Matthew worked for intelligence as a programmer, and now he thinks the solution to the problems of those vague bugabears like "government waste" is to move people like him into power, overriding democratic systems and appointments, of course, since they're all "corrupt" lol.

"What we need is a foundation that serves as the middle man between government needs and programmers’ abilities. Even better, we need a community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC, and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government."

Right, let's have a private foundation funded by Silicon Valley VC money like a "start-up," place tekkies into government office and override procedures! Sounds great! I guess all the think-tanks working in Washington already aren't good enough for Burton -- but one problem is that on the left as well as the right, there isn't a lot of awareness -- yet -- of just how much politics can be changed by new media -- and possibly not to make it more free and inclusive, but merely to put affluent tech-toy wielders in power. But...don't wait for them to get up to speed, get in on the ground floor now so you can influence the code...

Everything is always "broken" for these people -- which means they don't run it and code it their way. THOMAS is broken, this is broken, that is broken, but hey, time to "join the Man" and change from within (Trotsky used to call this "boring from within" lol).

"This philosophy goes against the grain of the reform community’s favorite mantra: “Change won’t come from the top down.” They say we have to focus on increasing public participation—registration, voting, Web-based fundraising, Web-based transparency, and so on—so that those in Washington understand whom they are beholden to. I believe in those causes, and all that bottom-up, power-to-the-people stuff is inspiring. But even if we do change our government from the outside, our success will be short-lived if we don’t have guardians on the inside who can enforce those changes."

There's a mixture of curious things going on with these techlib ideologies. On the one hand, the whole "personal democracy" mantra is supposedly all about "empowering" and "enabling" all these constituencies to get more involved from "the netroots" i.e. "The People". On the other hand, representative democracy is supposed to be discredited as corrupt, broken, old-media influenced, and run by rich people. So...uh...let's have DIFFERENT unaccountable rich people run it lol.

What it often boils down to, however, as I see it is merely an affluent elite that is unhappy about various issues, whether Iraq or global warming or gas prices, or feeling they have money and power but nowhere to go with it, and gradually bonding and finding new media tools to link to and reinforce each other in their viewpoints, which often start out informed, but become formed by really a handful of influencers who are just pasted and repasted all over the Internet. People rarely debate; they cheerlead. They fall into line -- or else. The are grateful to have a sense of belonging. They love Big Brother!

I began to notice this problem last year when I started trying to read various Dem blogs with all the funny names like Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, and began to see that they were all singing from the same hymn sheet. The script, the story selection, the party line rarely differed in any significant way. I would see the command and the memes flow out from moveon.org operatives and show up on every blog, linked and relinked a million times. Let's all rant on cue about Scooter Libby, etc. Later I would get the Obama campaign talking points every day, sometimes early, and then I'd see them all faithfully blogged up and memed everywhere on cue lol.

In the Obama campaign, I've seen the same really dubious and shallow meming techniques that we saw with Bill Clinton's campaign with that damn chicken guy going around everywhere. Let's all rant about Hillary claiming falsely she was sniped at in Sarajevo when the movies show her with little children -- what snipers? Although, of course, anyone going to Sarajevo at that time *could* face a sniper and snipers don't perform on camera, especially if the First Lady arrives and the area is pre-secured and pre-buzzed by secret service and security, duh.

Or let's all rant that Hillary seems to be implying that what this race needs is an assassination of her opponent, just because she was remembering that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in *June* i.e. our memories of that horrible day place it in the summer, in June, by which we know the campaign was extended. And so on -- with the other camp making much things like Obama's waffling waffle line on Hamas -- which in fact never got a good response and seemed like a far more serious gotcha than the Sarajevo shuffle.

Or Hillary being a monster. Hillary a monster? Suddenly, on HuffPost this "monster" business becomes about Samantha Power implying that Hillary's a monster because her husband did nothing about the Rwanda massacre -- Power's speciality as a historian has been studying and publishing books on mass atrocities. That would be great, except, at the time her comment was about the *campaign itself* and Hillary's statements, and just the visceral hate that some liberal and leftist women fetch up for Hillary, because of her husband's infidelity, or because of some other curious phenomenon that needs separate parsing. Samantha Power was on a contact high when she blurted that out -- it never occurred to her that it could sound "off" in a climate of such boosterism for Obama, and such ridicule of Hillary. I'm have no doubt that Power was NOT talking about Rwanda, but something more mundane, and yet, by the time the bloggers get their hands on it, Hillary was guilty of genocide.

In fact as I've explained, one of the reasons I was turned off by moveon.org very early on, back before it was forced to register as a lobbying PAC and so on, was the way in which a few rather invisible operatives would package the talking points and platform and theses, just like in the Young People's Socialist League or Spartacist League, and then disseminate them -- but without any kind of accountable movement discussion. It's impossible even to see the people who run this thing or figure out how they arrive at their memes. If you signed up as a journalist, you didn't get people to interview; you didn't get to participate in a discussion; you just became a passive recipient of the day's memes.

To this day, moveon.org, which is supposed to be all about the Internet empowering people blah-blah, is curiously shorn of all those new media features you would think it should have -- there are no comments enabled, no blogs, no forums, no people putting up Seismics on that site itself -- they're just supposed to come and drink deeply at the Koolaid well and then blog that elsewhere. That is, there's a "Virtual Town Hall," but it's controlled and pre-cooked, *some* members seem to get to put in their questions -- there's no comments enabled.

The success stories claimed are curious indeed -- moveon.org claims single-handed credit for blocking Bolton's nomination, without any awareness of the movement within the administration to "move on" Bolton or any awareness of more liberal constituencies than moveon.org playing a role through mainstream media and regular lobbying channels. Moveon.org curiously took up the Facebook privacy cause, apparently not getting the meme command from Scoble -- but that's because lots of lefties took it up because they hate advertising as a capitalist evil, and think social media shouldn't be making a buck from scraping its users and advertising back to them.

The public financing debate is actually a very good window into the inconsistencies of these "democrats'" arguments -- they complained bitterly about PACs and the corrupt election process in recent years, they got public financing into place, but now that they wish to avoid scrutiny and avoid caps on their fund-raising, and they're happy to escape the oversight and accountability of government public financing institutions in favour of non-regulated "netroots fund-raising bombs" that I don't see are accountable to anybody. I've taken on that debate on The Atlantic and The Moderate Voice.

I don't have a lot of ideas about how to mitigate the software autocracy that is coming to take over our discourse and crush dissent, except by the old methods of documenting, exposing, challenging. There's also the hope that more people will come to use these tools and roll back the constraints and controls instituted by the devs.

I instinctively felt when I came to Second Life in 2004 that I absolutely had to get engaged in the politics of virtuality because a lot of people were going to be coming to this world, and living in it, and it would not be free unless people fought for freedoms as they have to everywhere else in the world. It didn't occur to me even until recent months that the real problem wouldn't be so much inside the world, although it remains an engine for spawning memes and coercing people to adapt to the hacker mindset. The real problem would be that the hacker mindset would be in the world, that Second Life would only be one of the social-media engines for spreading the virus of groupism, hive-minding, meming, destroying representative democracy and the individual along the way.

Comments

[IYan Writer]

While I agree that online environments can all to easy turn into echo chambers, you're doing Castranova's "fun theory" a disservice. I've just read his book and it's a fascinating insight into possible ways of changing society mechanisms (like social security) guided by insights, offered to us by online environments.

[Kryss Wanweird]

Title could be:

The Software Democrapy

:D

[Prokofy Neva]

No, IYan, I've read and re-read Castronova, and it is truly scary stuff.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/troll-at-the-br.html

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Wow... This really _is_ like a Dr. Bronner soap label. "Dilute! Dilute! OK!"

(I hope you realize that Little Green Footballs is definitely NOT a blog with Democratic leanings.)

[c3]

in the 80s "revenge of the nerds" "appeared" to be a comedy..

in the 00s it's an apparent tragedy...

wheres Charles Atlas when you need him?...

[Ann Otoole]

Probably all about to change and go away. /me awaits the Mighty Message from the Mighty EFF Founder Mitch Kapor. (general consensus seems to be SL has been sold and the "lifestyle" aspects, that which made SL, will no longer be allowed and SL will fade into history as a total failure because it was run by all the wrong people. 9 days till we all find out if it is a catastrophe or another segway.

[IYan Writer]

I've been at that lecture and in no way support all his views - but his book "Exodus to the virtual world" is still fascinating and made me think about a lot of stuff we take for granted.

Is it really wrong for parts of real life to become like games? Why is grinding for EXP fun, while jumping through bureocratic hoops isn't? Re-evaluation of self is always useful.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's not realistic for parts of real life to "become like games". Putting this in a moral dimension of "wrong/right" obscures the fact that it doesn't work lol.

Grinding for XP fulfills certain basic instinctual routines in the human being like the need to hunt and gather, collect things, or persist to a goal, etc.

It's not like, oh, airport X-ray machine checking can be turned into "fun" by rewarding people if they find a gun -- they have to find the gun regardless.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, gosh, I knew that Melissa, but I'm glad you got your feeling of superiority fix for the day. My point is that I went around reading a lot of those blogs with the funny names. Most seemed to be Democratic. Yes, there are Republican ones too. You could make the case that the Republican ones contain copied memes, too. Since there are so many more Dems memes, it doesn't stand out.

[Cocoanut Koala]

" . . . but merely to put affluent tech-toy wielders in power."

The affluent tech-toy wielders want to be in power.

That's it in a nutshell. And they aren't real clear on such concepts as democracy in the first place.

And don't really care for it much, since the end always justifies the means, and the best end is obviously . . . for them to be in power.

Excellent piece, Prok.

coco