Michael Prorock (MP): Carl Popper - Open Societies - How easily
manipulatable large populations are?
How do you balance bad people exist who are good at manipulating people
NS - In other contexts we've been dealing with that problem forever, but
on the Internet we have been insulating ourselves by using this
"feudalism". Bitcoin align incentives with money
Reddit uses reputation
Online spaces look a little different than a neighbourhood, or a country
with notions of citizenship.
Really cool creative solutions can come from that
Jonathan Hoyland (JGH) - What does it mean to give Workers / users
responsibility for decisions, when the CEO is ultimately the one who has
legal liability? I wouldn't use Reddit if I had liability for what
others do?
NS - Don't use that structure. Find something appropriate for the
relevant community.
Mark Nottingham (mnot): How does this apply to what happens here? We're
not democratic, and maybe not even multi-stakeholder,
NS - Ethereum foundation - summer of protocols -
Protocols work differently from cooperative
Not a permissioned body
It's something people adopt or don't.
Look at orgs like the IETF and see whether there are lessons to be
learned about how to, and how not to do things.
Kaliya just shared a presentation earlier (it was in RASP-RG ARC
Regenerative Communities- Study of the IETF Protocols for Protocol
Development - Summer of Protocols 2024 Cohort)
Andrew Campling (AC): Was Mark Zuckerberg giving away power, or trying
to preempt legislative action (and by so doing preserve power)
NS - Fair
AC - Diffusion of power is complicated by legal absolutes and multiple
jurisdictions. Whilst you might be able to account for delegate
responsibilty but not liability.
NS - It's a thorny, but important, challenge. We've delegated the
accountability to the places where the companies happen to be in, and
that hasn't really worked. I think there is a need to, on the one hand,
enable commuinities to have the kind of power they need.
We've lived in contexts of overlapping gov regimes before and maybe this
world of networks is inviting us into a different way of mapping the
governance of our world.
Mallory Knodel (MK): Is exit overcorrected for? One of the challenges of
gov. at this lower level is that there aren't oa lot of humans talking
protocols and so limited opp. to get meaningful consent? Why does it
feel so hard to pracitse gov. by the people at the protocol layer in
this era of proliferating democracy.
NS - The idea of Exit and Vocie comes from Albert Hirschman
Effective voice vs. affective voice.
Affective voice - yell in a room and be heard
Effective voice - e.g. ballot box - being able to do something that the
powerful don't want to hear, but are forced to hear anyway.
Distinguish between constitutional governance vs IETF's protocol based
governance.
[...]?
Eliot Lear (EL): I run a 9600 person group on FB. Moderating is not
something I want to do, but FB doesn't really give me the tool to do
that.
Currentyl at the IETF we're going through a small crisis in how to deal
with misbehaviour. Our current approach is toxic / cruel. I'd invite you
ont the mod discuss list to share some points of view, but in this case
are we using our voices wrong?
NS - We have to learn from history, e.g. due process, processes that are
perceived as legitimate, balace cost with rigour, etc.
Excess of democracy is effective voice vs affective voice. Cancel
culture, etc.
Present case to someone with the power to act.
A group of friends are working on protocols for conflict resolution.
Specify due conduct and
Vittorio Bertola (VB): You can try to apply these concepts to small
niche communities of informed people like blockchain or the IETF, but
they don't work well when applied to mass contexts and average users.
This was tried across Europe 20 years ago, but the Italian experience of
online participatory democracy (Five Star Movement) ended up in disaster
when it became a mass thing.
NS - I learned a lot about the kind of tools you need to enable shared
ownership from Italy. You're right about mass participation. How would
you set it up to enable responsible stewardship. One thing I've been
thinking about is citizens assemblies. It produces different outcomes to
e.g. a reddit thread.
Dean Bogdanović (DB): This is a slippery slope topci. There is what's
technically possible. I compare the Internet to Hyde Park corner. Anyone
can go there and say whatever they want within UK freedom-of-speech, and
no-one has to listen to them. The UK and the US have different standards
of freedom-of-speech.
How can you be accountable for something in the UK but not in the US
with a global audience? How can you use technical means to enforce
varying standards?
NS - THis comes back to affective vs effective voice question. My goal
is to give teenagers a good experience of democracy.
Hyde Park corner is actually v. boring, because it's a bunch of people
with no power to do anything ranting unaccountably about things they
don't have to live with.
We've done the Hyde Park thing, we've done Twitter, etc.
Arnaud Taddei (AT): We have the same problem in the ITU. We tried this
in the T sector in Japan ? through society 5.0. It doesn't work at
scale.
We can't go too simple. Design means more than what's on the screen, you
are missing is the ethics part.
You're not learning from other fields e.g. medicine.
To treat Parkinson you have ethical issues with putting something in the
brain. We need to train an entire generation in this.
AR - We have limited ability to learn everything and I think we have to
work collaboratively.
Simone Onofri (SO): We running an experiment to understad the impart iof
a specific tech.
Kris Shrishak (KS): Should we be "upskilling" people on the corporate
side on human rights / ethical aspects. We should be able to decide
"don't develop this technology".
AR: If you can't mitigate the harms then don't do the thing. W.r.t.
upskilling it's better to work in teams than to assume you can learn
everything.