If service providers can close APIs at will, developers might hesitate when deciding whether to put in the necessary coding hours to built the latest mashup. But it is mashups that over the last years have really explored many of the directions left blank by “pure” applications. This creative force should be cherished and I wonder if there may be a need for something similar to creative commons for APIs – a legal construct that gives at least some basic rights to mashup developers…

1. Usefulness to constituents for watching over and communicating with their members of Congress
2. Potential impact of ethical standards on Congress

The design goal is accountability and that indeed is a perfect case for society oriented design. While people in Europa love to scold the US for their lack of data protection and privacy laws, just looking at the APIs the contest proposes to use makes me salivate for something similar in France. If you look at the Capitol Words API for example, just imagine the kind of discourse analysis one could build on that. Representations of what is said in Congress that make the data digestable and bring at least some of the debate potentially closer to citizens. The whole thing is just a really great idea…

Self-organization is used too often as a placeholder for an unspecified mechanism. The term becomes a euphemism for “I don’t really understand the mechanism that holds the system together.” That is the political equivalent of cosmological dark matter.

This seems really right on target: self-organization is really quite often just a means to negate organizing principles in the absence of an easily identifiable organizing institution. By speaking of self-organization we can skip closer examination and avoid the slow and difficult process of understanding complex phenomena. Webers second point is perhaps even more important in the current debate about Web 2.0:

Self-organization often evokes an optimistically tinged “state of nature” narrative, a story about the good way things would evolve if the “meddling” hands of corporations and lawyers and governments and bureaucracies would just stay away.

I would go even further and argue that especially the digerati philosophy pushed by Wired Magazine equates self-organization with freedom and democracy. Much of the current thinking about Web 2.0 seems to be quite strongly infused by this mindset. But I believe that there is a double fallacy:

1. Much of what is happening on the Social Web is not self-organization in the sense that governance is the result of pure micro-negotiations between agents; technological platforms lay the ground for and shape social and cultural processes that are most certainly less evident than the organizational structures of the classic firm but nonetheless mechanisms that can be described and explained.
2. Democracy as a form of governance is really quite dependent on strong organizational principles and the more participative a system becomes, the more complicated it gets. Organizational principles do not need to be institutional in the sense of the different bodies of government; they can be embedded in procedures, protocols or even tacit norms. A code repository like SourceForge.net is quite a complicated system and much of the organizational labor in Open Source is delegated to this and other platforms – coordinating the work effort between that many people would be impossible without it.

My guess is that the concept of self-organization as “state of nature” narrative (nature = good) is much too often used to justify modes of organization that would imply a shift power from traditional institutions of governance to the technological elite (the readers and editors of Wired Magazine). Researchers should therefore be weary of the term and whenever it comes up take an even closer look at the actual mechanisms at work. Self-organization is an explanandum (something that needs to be explainend) and not an explanans (an explanation). This is why I find network science really very interesting. Growth mecanism like preferential attachment allow us to give an analytical content to the placeholder that is “self-organization” and examine, albeit on a very abstract level, the ways in which dynamic systems organize (and distribute power) without central control.

1. There are actually very few thoughts and arguments in the whole “Web 2.0 literature” that have not already been phrased in Tim O’Reilly’s original essay. Granted, the piece was quite seminal but shouldn’t academia be able to come up with a stronger conceptual viewpoint?
2. The books in question are really lightweight when it comes to anchoring their thoughts in previous scholarly effort. A lot of room is given to metaphorical coupling with the natural sciences (some keywords: swarms, ecologies, auto-organization, percolation, critical thresholds, chaos, etc.) but although most of these books talk about the future of work (prosumers performing collective wisdom, in short), there is very little interaction with the sociology of labor or economic theory. Sure, a deeper examination of these topics would be difficult, but without some grounding in established work, the whole purpose of scholarship as a collective endeavor is meaningless – which is especially ironic given the celebration of cooperation one can find in Web 2.0 literature
3. As I’ve already written in another post, I find the idea that “participation” and “leveling of hierarchies” equates democracy deeply troubling. Richard Sennett’s argument that stable social organization and work relations are necessary prerequisites for true political discourse – politics that go beyond the flash mob activism often presented as prove for the new, more democratic age that is upon us – is ringing louder than ever.
4. Much of the Web 2.0 literature is basically antithetical to the purpose of this blog. Shirky’s idea that the new social tools allow for “organizing without organizations” is largely ignoring the political power that is transferred to the 21^st century tool maker and the companies that he or she works for. I’m not advocating paranoia here, but the fact that many of the tools that power mass sociability online are produced and controlled by firms that are accountable to their shareholders only (or the people that got them venture capital) is at least worth mentioning. But the problem really goes beyond that: the tools we currently have incite people to gather around common interests, creating and activating issue publics than can indeed take influence on political matters. But politics is much more than the totality of policy decisions. The rise of issue publics has coincided with the demise of popular parties and while this may look like a good thing to many people, parties have historically been the laboratories for the development of politics beyond policy. Europe’s social market economies are unthinkable without the various socialist parties that worked over decades to make societies more just. One does not have to be a left winger to recognize that the loss of the stable and accountable forum that is the political party would be at least ambiguous.
5. While Web 2.0 literature is light on politics and serious political theory it is not stingy with morals. The identification of “good” and “bad” effects that 2.0 ICT will have on society often seems really at the core of many of the texts published over the last few years. But as point 4 might have shown, the idea of “good” and “bad” is really meaningless outside of a particular political (or religious) ontology. What actually happens is the understatement of a vague political consensus that takes a position antithetical to the premises of critical sociology, i.e. that conflict is constitutive to society.
6. An essay stretched over 250 pages does not make a book. (I know, that’s a little mean – but also a little true, no?)

Don’t get me wrong, many of the books I’m referring to have actually been quite interesting to read. What worries me is the lack of more scholarly and conceptually demanding works but perhaps I’m just impatient. In a sense, “Digital Formations” by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen already shows how sophisticated Internet Research could be if we switch off that prophet gene.

But there is a more practical reason why I ask myself this very question. Pierre Lévy actually used to work at my department and my laboratory has recently stuck up a cooperation with his research unit in Ottawa. We’ve been organizing a little seminar here in Paris where Lévy will be giving a talk later this month. When Lévy wrote “L’intelligence collective” in 1994, many people saw his proposals as sheer blue-eyed utopia and dismissed it rather quickly. The American reading of that text has since then become something like the bible of research on participatory culture, user-generated content movements, and so on. Interestingly, Lévy himself has been pretty silent on all of this, leaving the exegesis of his thoughts to Henry Jenkins and others. Why? Because Lévy probably never imagined collective intelligence as photo-sharing on Flikr or Harry Potter fanfiction. What he envisioned is in fact exemplified by his work over the last couple of years, which was centered on the development of IEML – Information Economy Meta Language:

IEML (Information Economy Meta Language) is an artificial language designed to be simultaneously: a) optimally manipulable by computers; and b) capable of expressing the semantic and pragmatic nuances of natural languages. The design of IEML responds to three interdependent problems: the semantic addressing of cyberspace data; the coordination of research in the humanities and social sciences; and the distributed governance of collective intelligence in the service of human development.

IEML is not another syntax proposal for a semantic web like RDF or OWL. It is a philosopher’s creation of a new language that allows mainly two things: facilitate the processing of data tagged with IEML sentences and help cross-language and intercultural reasoning. This page gives a short overview. Against the usual understanding of collective intelligence, IEML is really a top-down endeavor. Lévy came up with the basic syntax and vocabulary and the proposal explicitly states the need for experts in helping with formalization and translation. I must admit that I have been very skeptical of the whole thing, but after reading Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody” (which I found interesting but also seriously lacking – I’ll get to that in another post though) there is a feeling creeping up on me that Lévy might yet again be five years ahead of everybody else. In my view, the mindset of large parts of research on participation has adopted the ontology and ethics of American-brand Protestantism which, among other things, identifies liberty and democracy with community rather than with the state and which imagines social process as a matter of developing collective morals and practices much more than the outcome of power struggles mediated by political institutions. This view idealizes the “common man” and shuns expert culture as “elitist”. Equality is phrased less in socio-economic terms, as “equal opportunity” (the continental tradition), but in mostly in cultural terms, as “equal recognition”. (Footnote: this is, in my view, why political struggle in the US has been, for many decades now, mostly about the recognition of minority groups while on the European continent – especially in catholic countries – “class struggle” still is a common political vector) In this mindset, meritocracy is therefore necessarily seen as ambiguous.

I believe that the most interesting projects in the whole “amateur” sector are the ones that organize around meritocratic principles and consequently built hierarchy; open source software is the best example but Wikipedia works in a similar fashion. The trick is to keep meritocracy from turning into hegemony. But I digress.

Lévy’s bet is that collective intelligence, if it wants to be more than pop culture, will need experts (and expert tools) for a series of semantic tasks ranging from cartography to translation. His vision is indeed much more ambitious than most of the things we have seen to this day. The idea is that with the proper (semantic) tools, we could tackle problems collectively that are currently very much out of reach; and this in a truly global fashion, without bringing everybody into the rather impoverished linguistic umbrella of globish. Also, in order to make search more pluralistic and less “all visibility to the mainstream” as it currently is, we will need to get closer to the semantic level. I don’t believe that IEML, in its current iteration at least, can really do all these things. But I believe that yet again, Lévy has the right intuition: if collective forms of “problem solving” are to go beyond what they currently do, they will have to find modes of organization that are more sophisticated than the platforms we currently have. These modes will also have to negociate a balance between “equal opportunity” and “equal representation” and make it’s peace with instituionalization.

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

Know as the “is-ought problem”, the change of register implied by going from a descriptive mode towards a prescriptive one, poses the question on what to found the latter. There is a necessary recourse to something non-descriptive, a system of values that cannot be stabilized by the scientific method and is therefore necessarily a terrain for permanent struggle. Value systems are, however, by no means random but deeply embedded in historic process and while the conflictual nature of the “ought” cannot be dissolved, the contents of ethical debate can be treated as just another “is”, i.e. a field of discourse that can be described and analyzed. While the specific answers we give to Kant’s question “what should we do?” may well be products of long and hard reasoning, they are nonetheless developed against the backdrop of long-standing “networks of significance” (Geertz), that is, culture.

Having grown up in a German-speaking country, living in France but also following and participating in the globalized English-language sphere of discourse, it is hard not to be amazed by the striking differences in how recent developments in technology and digital culture are framed and appreciated. I have recently attended the “Web 2.0 Politics” conference near London and in a sense the experience had the quality of an epiphany. From the perspective of a drifter like me, culture (defined in national or linguistic terms) can sometimes look like a vast assembly of automatisms and reflexes. Coming from the outside, we cannot help but see how little in culture is actually decided upon and how much seems to be simply received. This is especially true when it comes to intrinsically shifty areas like ethics and political reasoning. What struck me at this conference was how certain words seemed to pass through what one could call “automated moral preprocessing”, which would allow filing very complicated and ambiguous concepts very quickly into neatly labeled boxes, largely divided into “good” and “bad”. This is very effective because it speeds up the reasoning process and bridges the rift between “is” and “ought” without much effort. A concept like “participation” for example gets preprocessed into the “good” box and can then be used as a general-purpose moral qualifier for all kinds of technological and cultural phenomena. Online services that allow people to participate can suddenly be called “democratic” because “participation” and “democracy” are commonly filed together. This is the moment when my Germanic “me” comes to spoil the party and points to the fact that pogroms and lynch mobs are in fact quite participatory activities. The little Frenchman that has secretly taken up home somewhere in my wetware adds that “populisme” is a permanent danger to true democracy and that only strong institutions can guarantee freedom. Catholicism’s heritage is a profound mistrust in human nature. These are perhaps nothing more that worn clichés, but in my case the effect of multiculturalism is a permanent cacophony of competing automatisms that disables the “good” / “bad” preprocessing that so much of the current Web 2.0 discourse seems to fall victim to.

We seriously need to get back to understanding ethics – and as a consequence politics – as deeply troubling subjects. The usual suspects of French philosophy have become household names but their principal lesson has been washed away like the famous face in the sand: that critical thinking must look at the ground it is built on. That doesn’t mean that normative arguments should be excluded, quite on the contrary – a new Habermas is direly needed. It could mean though that Hume’s bafflement at how the “ought” suddenly seems to spring out of nowhere should trouble us, too.