(2023-01-13) Berjon The Internet Transition

Robin Berjon: The Internet Transition. Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution opens on the story of a “scientifically curious protozoan”

Arriving amongst us, it is shocked to discover that massive colonies of billions of eukaryotes not so unlike itself (about 10^13 of them for any human being) move around all stuck together and act as one big organism with a high degree of internal complexity

before it even gets a chance to notice that things here are even more complex than that: not only do those big bags of cells have stunning internal organisation, but they further assemble into all kinds of higher-level social collectives!

somewhere, somehow, through evolutionary iteration, a bunch of individual, independent, single-celled organisms stumbled upon governance principles that made them fitter together.

To look at this slightly differently, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs asked us to think about “the kind of problem a city is.” The answer, she convincingly argued, is that a city is a problem of organised complexity.

what kind of governance makes us fitter together?

Complex Is As Complex Does

is it really a good thing that we’re making our social organisation more complex?

TL;DR yes. We should systematically be fostering social complexity. Complexity in society is good.

Increased specialization and intensified cooperation allow us to solve harder problems. (Grand Challenge)

The ability of our institutional arrangements to deal with a given degree of difficulty or complexity can be referred to as our institutional capacity. And so the problem we have is that:
the Internet has made greater institutional capacity possible, but
it has also made our world more complex in ways that require an increase in institutional capacity to happen and
it has broken some of our established institutions, actually causing a decrease in institutional capacity, and
we are not yet using the new governance capabilities that the Internet made possible anyway.

there is evidence that the Internet has thrown us into a massive increase in societal complexity, happening at a time at which our institutional capacity was already overwhelmed by globalization (as well as under political attack)

the Internet transition, which notably includes a shift to post-geographic interactions

Even as trade networked distant places over the centuries, much of people’s lives until very recently remained locally anchored, and losing the friction of this local anchoring has a number of effects.

territory over which sovereignty and jurisdiction can be clearly defined

shared epistemic frameworks

My point is not that we need to return to locality, but that we need to build institutions that are adapted to this new reality

Institutional capacity is, in a very rough sense, a society’s computational power or collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence is a developing domain, see for instance the excellent first issue of new journal Collective Intelligence or the emerging Collective Intelligence Project.

For our purposes, institutional capacity, a society’s problem-solving ability, or collective intelligence are all enough of the same thing which we could define as “the difference in performance between what can be achieved by the group of individual agents, and what can be achieved by the individuals on their own, where performance accounts for trade-offs and tensions.”

we’re trying to run a planetary society that needs to solarpunk the fuck out of itself in a hurry on the collective intelligence of an 18th century principality that’s heard of the Enlightenment from some guy at the pub.

much of the infrastructure we have which sustained our collective intelligence has been thrown into disarray at a time when it was already barely coping.

some governance systems are simply less capable at dealing with harder problems, no matter what your preferences are

Any planetary governance worth its salt has to aim for a governance ecosystem that fosters the requisite collective intelligence. We need to develop a sense for what that looks like.

One of the most common future-Earth sci-fi tropes is that of a single unified world government, often simply depicted as a beefed up UN — something bureaucratic, ineffective, and in charge of pretty much everything

We need effective global cooperation and worldwide is the right scale at which to deal with many of our most pressing problems. The climate change crisis is the most obvious example, but is far from being the only one.

Where the digital sphere is concerned, our problems are similarly global, as are our insufficient governance bodies. Addressing problems of capture and stewardship of the digital infrastructure that permeates and engineers our societies needs to take place at the same scale at which these problems are being created.

Global, however, does not entail either centralised or unified under a single meta-institution like that sci-fi UN.

Centralisation has a bad reputation, but the fact is that it’s a trade-off. “A centralized approach to optimizing coordinating control is possible when a central unit has access to all measurements and can decide for, and direct, all the elements of the ensemble (…).

every single one of these conditions either doesn’t hold at societal scales or comes with severe side-effects

“As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge,” said Jane Jacobs. To which she added: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

If you’ve ever worked at an OKR-driven company, this description of Soviet tekhpromfinplan planning (from the excellent Red Plenty) will feel chillingly familiar.

Electoral democracy can, and often does, help manage the downsides of centralisation. But we should be very cautious about treating voting like a panacea.

Having dealt with centralisation, we should also examine the belief that governance should be somehow unified, clearly integrated, with specialised bodies all wrapping up neatly into bigger ones like matryoshka dolls. Even though this model requires an overarching top-level organisation, this idea is distinct from centralisation in the sense that smaller units could benefit from real devolved power (team agency) and strong subsidiarity.

It is the neatness of the hierarchical matryoshka that I think is wrong: the only way to delegate isn’t up. It is wrong, I believe, in the same way that our understanding of intelligence is wrong. (Hierarchal Structure vsEverything Is A Graph)

In a series of papers eventually collected in Cambrian Intelligence, roboticist Rodney Brooks developed a different approach. In his subsumption architecture, a set of layers or modules run asynchronously from one another and no layer can control another. A layer may only replace some of another’s inputs or inhibit some of its outputs. Crucially, there is no representation and in fact no shared global state — no legibility of the world at the top.

I’m not suggesting that we can simply paste the shape of a Brooksian subsumption architecture atop planetary governance, but it provides a good analogy for a better way to integrate subsystems.

Polycentric governance involves similarly overlapping and intersecting institutions that act independently from one another, typically with local knowledge

Essentially, we can think of this approach as a form of Cambrian Governance.

I find the “Cambrian” moniker to work well because this is an ecosystem approach to governance.

It also suggests the potential for a Cambrian explosion in planetary governance.

Cambrian Governance is worldwide governance that is neither centralised nor unified, and in which every institution provides governance

Governance for the Ungovernable

we can take steps to articulate (as I am doing here) what we should know about the world, what our north star(s) should be, and each of us can work on local reforms that drive us in that rough direction.

You may note that nonideal approaches work well in a Cambrian governance model as they are local, independent, and distributed. They also work well with local variations such that we don’t all have to pursue the same goals

there is a metric that could plausibly be deployed (with some additional research) to evaluate progress towards better global governance. We can call it Apolito Integrated Information

help answer the question of “what is a form of ‘collectivity’ that everywhere locally maximizes individual agency, while making collective emergent structures possible and interesting”

while many have justifiably expressed concerns over the anticompetitive behaviour of highly centralised Internet corporations, I am in fact more worried about their anticooperative effects: by taking over infrastructure and shaping it according to mechanisms designed to benefit themselves (or their unexamined ideologies), which prevents distributed agents from coordinating their behaviour usefully

anticooperative dynamics prevent collective intelligence.

We need new thinking. These new thinking tools are there or emerging: capabilities approach, retentive infrastructure (leading to local benefits), heterarchy, polycentricity, Cambrian, the study of collective behaviour as a crisis discipline, networked subsidiarity, analytical democratic theory, ideal/nonideal, self-certifying, Apolito Integrated Information… not to mention my darlings such as infrastructure commons or the application of institutional models of contextual norms to privacy.

We can assemble concrete, testable, implementable systems from these ideas.

It still feels like we have many separate communities and aren’t speaking the same language, yet, but a broad field of rich notions is emerging — and hope with it.

We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles

We don’t need a worldwide technical U.N. to figure this out. Rather, we need transnational topic-specific governance systems that interact with one another wherever they connect and overlap but that do not control one another

Networked technology that mediates so much of our lives is social engineering — which is to say that deciding how it works is politics. If we want any hope for these politics to result in a world worth wanting, we need to build our Internet according to sound institutional principles. The toolbox for that exists, figuring out how to integrate and use it is what’s next.