Chapter Eight — Fundamental Infrastructures: The Assurance Commons

[This is the thirteenth installment in my serialization of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled Desktop Regulatory State] , taken from Chapter Eight. Because I have split some chapters into multiple new ones since the previously posted excerpts, there is a loss of continuity in numbering. The current Table of Contents with active links can be found here.]

I. Introduction

This chapter examines how voluntary, networked associations would perform the function David Ronfeldt calls the “Assurance Commons.” The Assurance Commons—the provision of safety, quality and other assurances in the goods and services we buy, protections against fraud, etc.—is probably the single function of existing states raised most frequently by those skeptical of the feasibility of a society built around voluntary, self-organized associations.

For me, thinking in terms of an assurance criterion leads to supposing that people at large in advanced societies seek to include the following: Assurances not only of fresh air and water, but also that food, medicine, and other products are made safe, free of dangers. Assurances that basic health, education, and welfare services are provided in equitable ways. Assurances that one’s vote counts. Assurances, in America, that the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and law more generally, not to mention many codes and regulations, are upheld and apply to all people (including corporations in their capacity as “persons”). Assurances of access to . . . well, I’m not sure how much to keep adding to this listing. Hopefully you get my point. I’m not trying to come up with a comprehensive list, just a preliminary indicative exploration.

As I wonder about what else might be listed, it seems even clearer that the commons is no longer so much about resources. It is indeed increasingly about practices — including policies — that assure rights and responsibilities, as well as accountability; practices that assure open and abundant access and usage; practices that assure universal services and public utilities, broadly defined; practices that require strategic risk management and quality assurance for the benefit of people at large; practices that make a society more robust and resilient, on everyone’s behalf….

An assurance-commons approach would not make governance issues any easier to deal with, but it might help illuminate them. As Elinor Ostrom’s work has shown, people are learning to manage common-pool resources in polyarchic network-like ways, without having to turn to old hierarchy- and market-like ways. But assurance commons involve more than common-pool resources. They also involve some of the knottiest governance issues around — e.g., in the field of health — requiring extensive coordination among multiple public, private, and other actors.

II. Legibility: Vertical and Horizontal

The technical basis, in network technology and the tools of individual super-empowerment, already exists for supplanting regulatory state functions (on the assumption, of course, that the regulatory state really does perform its ostensible functions). And they’re becoming available at a time when the regulatory state is becoming hollowed out by fiscal crisis, and by the technological obsolescence of many of its enforcement mechanisms. This is a “perfect storm” of mutually reinforcing trends, all making for a phase transition in the way society organizes most of its functions.

But getting from here to there will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in how most people think, and the overcoming of centuries worth of ingrained habits of thought. This involves a shift from what James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, calls social organizations that are primarily “legible” to the state, to social organizations that are primary legible or transparent to the people of local communities organized horizontally and opaque to the state.

The latter kind of architecture, as described by Pyotr Kropotkin, was what prevailed in the networked free towns of late medieval Europe. The primary pattern of social organization was horizontal (guilds, etc.), with quality certification and reputational functions aimed mainly at making individuals’ reliability transparent to one another. To the state, such local formations were opaque.

[Material from C4SS paper on James Scott]

With the rise of the absolute state, the primary focus became making society transparent (in Scott’s terminology “legible”) from above. Things like the systematic adoption of family surnames that persisted from one generation to the next (and the 20th century follow-up of Social Security Numbers and other citizen ID numbers), the systematic mapping of urban addresses for postal or 911 service, etc., were all for the purpose of making society legible to the state. Like us, the state wants to keep track of where its stuff is—and guess what we are?

Before this transformation, for example, surnames existed mainly for the convenience of people in local communities, so they could tell each other apart. Surnames were adopted on an ad hoc basis for clarification, when there was some danger of confusion, and rarely continued from one generation to the next. If there were multiple Johns in a village, they might be distinguished at any particular time by trade (“John the Miller”), location (“John on the Hill”), patronymic (“John Richard’s Son”), etc. By contrast, everywhere there have been family surnames with cross-generational continuity, they have been imposed by centralized states as a way of cataloguing and tracking the population—making it legible to the state, in Scott’s terminology.

During the ascendancy of the modern state, the horizontal institutions of the free towns were at best barely tolerated—and usually not even that. Kropotkin wrote:

For the next three centuries the States, both on the Continent and in these islands, systematically weeded out all institutions in which the mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression. The village communities were bereft of their folkmotes, their courts and independent administration; their lands were confiscated. The guilds were spoliated of their possessions and liberties, and placed under the control, the fancy, and the bribery of the State’s official…. It was taught in the Universities and from the pulpit that the institutions in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organized State; that the State alone could represent the bonds of union between its subjects; that federalism and “particularism” were the enemies of progress, and the State was the only proper initiator of further development. By the end of the last century, the kings on the Continent, the Parliament in these isles, and the revolutionary Convention in France, although they were at war with each other, agreed in asserting that no separate unions between citizens must exist within the State…. “No state within the State!” The State alone… must take care of matters of general interest, while the subjects must represent loose aggregations of individuals, connected by no particular bonds, bound to appeal to the Government each time that they feel a common need….

The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In proportion as the obligations towards the state grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.

Likewise, the preemption and absorption—or suppression—of all regulatory functions by the state favored the development of a mindset by which providers of goods and services were relieved of their obligations to provide reliable certifications of the quality of their wares to consumers, and consumers were relieved of their obligations to scrutinize their quality and the reputations of the vendors. It was the state’s job to take care of that business for us, and we needn’t bother our heads about it.

But it’s usually a false confidence that relies on the imprimatur of the state for the quality of goods and services; the average citizen consumes endless amounts of things like genetically modified organisms, pesticide and herbicide residues, and parabens, on the assumption that “they couldn’t sell it if it was dangerous”—when the so-called regulatory standards are largely written by the regulated industries. And whatever minimal genuine quality and safety standards exist in the regulatory code become, in practice, a ceiling as much as a floor; often corporations have successfully pressured the courts, when their competitors advertise a product quality or safety standard higher than the regulatory state requires, to treat such advertising as “product disparagement” on the grounds that it suggests products which merely meet the ordinary standard (which of course is based on “sound science”) are inferior. For example, Monsanto frequently goes after grocers who label their milk rBGH free, and some federal district courts have argued that it’s an “unfair competitive practice” to test one’s beef cattle for Mad Cow Disease more frequently than the mandated industry standard.5 In short the regulatory state, by supplanting self-organized reputational and certifying mechanisms, has relieved the citizen of the burden of thinking for herself—and the corporation has rushed in to take advantage of the fact.

[Chartier on “safe harbors”]

[Kropotkin, from The State, on Roman law]

To accomplish a shift back to horizontal transparency, it will be necessary to overcome a powerful residual cultural habit, among the general public, of thinking of such things through the mind’s eye of the state: i.e, if “we” didn’t have some way of verifying compliance with this regulation or that, some business somewhere might be able to get away with something or other. We must overcome six hundred years or so of almost inbred habits of thought, in which the state is the all-seeing guardian of society protecting us from the possibility that someone, somewhere might do something wrong if “the authorities” don’t prevent it.

In place of this habit of thought, we must think instead of ourselves creating mechanisms on a networked basis, to make us as transparent as possible to each other as providers of goods and services, to prevent businesses from getting away with poor behavior by informing each other, to prevent each other from selling defective merchandise, to protect ourselves from fraud, etc. The state has attempted to coopt the rhetoric of horizontality (e.g. “We are the government.”). But in fact, the creation of such mechanisms—far from making us transparent to the regulatory state—may well require active measures to render us opaque to the state (e.g. encryption, darknets, etc.) for protection against attempts to suppress such local economic self-organization against the interests of corporate actors.

We need to lose the centuries-long habit of thinking of “society” as a hub-and-spoke mechanism and viewing the world vicariously from the imagined perspective of the hub, and instead think of it as a horizontal network and visualize things from the perspective of the individual nodes which we occupy. We need to lose the habit of thought by which transparency from above even became perceived as an issue in the first place. Because the people who are seeing things “from above,” in reality, do not represent us or have anything in common with us.

As Charles Johnson—aka “Rad Geek”—argued, “the market” is nothing more than a series of choices made by human beings as to how to interact with one another:

Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else?

A. We will….

…It’s convenient to talk about “market forces,” but you need to remember that remember that those “market forces” are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. “Market forces” are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from people’s economic choices. S if the question is, who will stop markets from running riot, the answer is: We will; by peacefully choosing what to buy and what not to buy, where to work and where not to work, what to accept and what not to accept, we inevitably shape and order the market that surrounds us. When we argue about whether or not government should intervene in the economy in order to regiment markets, the question is not whether markets should be made orderly and regular, but rather whether the process of ordering is in the hands of the people making the trade, or by unaccountable third parties; and whether the means of ordering are going to be consensual or coercive.

The one thing that I would want to add to Sheldon’s excellent point is that there are two ways in which we will do the regulating of our own economic affairs in a free society — because, as I have discussed here before, there are two different kinds of peaceful “spontaneous orders” in a self-regulating society. There is the sort of spontaneity that Sheldon focuses on — the unplanned but orderly coordination that emerges as a byproduct of ordinary people’s interactions. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal without a prior blueprint for the goal.) But a self-regulating people can also engage in another kind of spontaneity — that is, achieving harmony and order through a conscious process of voluntary organizing and activism. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal through means freely chosen, rather than through constraints imposed.) In a freed market, if someone in the market exploits workers or chisels costumers, if she produces things that are degrading or dangerous or uses methods that are environmentally destructive, it’s vital to remember that you do not have to just “let the market take its course” — because the market is not something outside of us; we are market forces. And so a freed market includes not only individual buyers and sellers, looking to increase a bottom line, but also our shared projects, when people choose to work together, by means of conscious but non-coercive activism, alongside, indeed as a part of, the undesigned forms of spontaneous self-organization that emerge. We are “market forces,” and the regulating in a self-regulating market is done not only by us equilibrating our prices and bids, but also by deliberately working to shift the equilibrium point, by means of conscious entrepreneurial action — and one thing that libertarian principles clearly imply, even though actually-existing libertarians may not stress it often enough, is that entrepreneurship includes social entrepreneurship, working to achieve non-monetary social goals.

So when self-regulating workers rely on themselves and not on the state, abusive or exploitative or irresponsible bosses can be checked or plain run out of the market, by the threat or the practice of strikes, of boycotts, of divestiture, and of competition — competition from humane and sustainable alternatives, promoted by means of Fair Trade certifications, social investing, or other positive “pro-cott” measures. As long as the means are voluntary, based on free association and dissociation, the right to organize, the right to quit, and the right to put your money where your mouth is, these are all part of a freed market, no less than apple-carts or corporations. When liberals or “Progressives” wonder who will check the power of the capitalists and the bureaucratic corporations, their answer is — a politically-appointed, even less accountable bureaucracy. The libertarian answer is — the power of the people, organized with our fellow workers into fighting unions, strikes and slow-downs, organized boycotts, and working to develop alternative institutions like union hiring halls, grassroots mutual aid associations, free clinics, or worker and consumer co-ops. In other words, if you want regulations that check destructive corporate power, that put a stop to abuse or exploitation or the trashing of the environment, don’t lobby—organize!

Where government regulators would take economic power out of the hands of the people, on the belief that social order only comes from social control, freed markets put economic power into the hands of the people, and they call on us to build a self-regulating order by means of free choice and grassroots organization. When I say that the libertarian Left is the real Left, I mean that, and it’s not because I’m revising the meaning of the term “Left” to suit my own predilections or some obsolete French seating chart. It’s because libertarianism, rightly understood, calls on the workers of the world to unite, and to solve the problems of social and economic regulation not by appealing to any external authority or privileged managerial planner, but rather by taking matters into their own hands and working together through grassroots community organizing to build the kind of world that we want to live in.

It’s not important that we can’t answer every question about “who will prevent this or that without a state?” “How will we do the other thing without the state?” We need, as David de Ugarte argues, to think of social problem solving as something that we will do, by responding to the situation and using our judgment as we go along.

And what happens if we don’t have an alternative to every “solution,” at every moment? Nothing. It’s like free software, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, we’ll improve it; it doesn’t matter if there’s support or not, we’ll organize it. Freedom is fundamental to what is truly alive and human. It’s the starting point for all ethical thinking, not a distant objective. It’s not with Toni Soprano — or what’s worse, with his bards, or, worse still, as the case may be, with the initiation chants of the children of his theoreticians and rentiers — that the starting point lies for thinking in communal and social terms.

Such a shift in perspective will require, in particular, overcoming the hostility of conventional liberals who are in the habit of reacting viscerally and negatively, and on principle, to anything not being done by “qualified professionals” or “the proper authorities.”

Arguably conventional liberals, with their thought system originating as it did as the ideology of the managers and engineers who ran the corporations, government agencies, and other giant organizations of the late 19th and early 20th century, have played the same role for the corporate-state nexus that the politiques did for the absolute states of the early modern period.

This is reflected in a common thread running through writers like Thomas Frank, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, and Chris Hedges, as well as documentary producers like Michael Moore. They share a nostalgia for the “consensus capitalism” of the early postwar period, in which the gatekeepers of the Big Three networks controlled what we were allowed to see and it was just fine for GM to own the whole damned economy—just so long as everyone had a lifetime employment guarantee and a UAW contract.

Paul Fussell, in Bad, ridicules the whole Do-it-Yourself ethos as an endless Sahara of the Squalid, with blue collar schmoes busily uglifying their homes by taking upon themselves projects that should be left to—all together now—the Properly Qualified Professionals.

On his old MSNBC program, Keith Olbermann routinely mocked exhortations to charity and self-help, reaching for shitkicking imagery of the nineteenth century barn-raiser for want of any other comparision sufficient to get across just how backward and ridiculous that kind of thing really was. In Olbermann’s world, of course, such ideas come only from conservatives. The only ideological choice is between plain, vanilla flavored managerialist liberalism and the Right. In Olbermann’s world, the decentralist Left of Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and Colin Ward—the recessive Left that emerges when the dominant strain of Lenin and Harold Wilson is occupied elsewhere, as one of the editors of Radical Technology put it—doesn’t even exist.

[cite]

Helping your neighbor out directly, or participating in a local self-organized friendly society or mutual, is all right in its own way, of course—if nothing else is available. But it carries the inescapable taint, not only of the quaint, but of the provincial and the picayune—very much like the stigmatization of homemade bread and home-grown veggies in corporate advertising in the early twentieth century, come to think of it. People who help each other out, or organize voluntarily to pool risks and costs, are to be praised—with just the slightest hint of condescension—for heroically doing the best they can in an era of relentlessly downscaled social services.

But that people are forced to resort to such expedients, rather than meeting all their social safety net needs through one-stop shopping at the Ministry of Central Services office in a giant monumental building with a statue of winged victory in the lobby, a la Brazil, is a damning indictment of any civilized society. The progressive society is one of comfortable and well-fed citizens, competently managed by properly credentialed authorities, contentedly milling about like ants in the shadows of miles-high buildings that look like they were designed by Albert Speer. And that kind of H.G. Wells utopia simply has no room for atavisms like the barn-raiser or the sick benefit society.

Aesthetic sensibilities aside, such critics are no doubt motivated to some extent by genuine concern that networked reputational and certifying mechanisms just won’t take up the slack left by the disappearance of the regulatory state. Things like Consumer Reports, Angie’s List and the Better Business Bureau are all well and good, for educated people like themselves who have the sense and know-how to check around. But Joe Sixpack, God love him, will just go out and buy magic beans from the first disreputable salesman he encounters—and then likely put them right up his nose.

Seriously, snark aside, such reputational systems really are underused, and most people really do take inadequate precautions in the marketplace on the assumption that the regulatory state guarantees some minimum acceptable level of quality. But liberal criticism based on this state of affairs reflects a remarkably static view of society. It ignores the whole idea of crowding out (consider the extent to which the state actively suppressed self-organized mechanisms for horizontal legibility, as recounted by Kropotkin), as well as the possibility that even the Great Unwashed may be capable of changing their habits quite rapidly in the face of necessity—and that given enough time they might even figure out how to wipe their own bottoms without supervision by state-licensed shit-removal professionals. Because people are not currently in the habit of automatically consulting such reputational networks to check up on people they’re considering doing business with, and are in the habit of unconsciously assuming the government will protect them, conventional liberals assume that people will not shift from one to the other in the face of changing incentives, and scoff at the idea of a society that relies primarily on networked rating systems.

But the simple fact of the matter—as we saw described by Kropotkin above—is that there was a society in which the certification of quality and enforcement of commercial standards was achieved by horizontal legibility: the society of the free towns in the late middle ages, where such functions were performed by local, self-managed institutions like the guilds. These local institutions had their origins in necessity, as the new towns filled up with runaway serfs who, in continuation of the village tradition, united in guilds for mutual protection and support—and as merchants of necessity worked out mechanisms for tracking their reliability as trading partners. And it’s also a simple fact—again, as recounted by Kropotkin—that this society of horizontally legible regulatory bodies was stamped out by the state.

In a society where people are aware that most licensing and safety/quality codes are no longer enforceable, and “caveat emptor” is no longer just a cliche, it would be remarkable if things like Angie’s list, reputational certification by local guilds, customer word of mouth, etc., didn’t rapidly grow in importance for most people. They were, after all, at one time the sort of thing people did rely on before the rise of the absolute state, and as ingrained a part of ordinary economic behavior as reliance on the regulatory state is today.

People’s habits change rapidly. Fifteen years ago, when even the most basic survey of a research topic began with an obligatory painful crawl through the card catalog, Reader’s Guide and Social Science Index—and when the average person’s investigations were limited to the contents of her $1000 set of Britannica—who could have foreseen how quickly Google and SSRN searches would become second nature?

In fact, if anything the assumption that “they couldn’t sell it if it wasn’t OK, because that would be illegal” leaves people especially vulnerable, because it creates an unjustified confidence and complacency regarding what they buy. In many cases, this all-seeing central authority we count on to protect us is like a shepherd that puts the wolves in charge of the flock.

Self-styled enemies of what Andrew Keen calls “the cult of the amateur” are fond of throwing the example of the amateur brain surgeon in our faces. Oddly enough, though, the analogy never seems to come up in a discussion of actual brain surgery. Rather, when virtually any kind of licensing or professional regime comes up for debate, in contexts ranging from homeschooling to unlicensed cab services, the hoary amateur brain surgeon is dragged out and dusted off. In the more extreme cases, like the aforementioned Mr. Keen, it’s applied to amateur restaurant critics and books published without the benefit of a publishing house gatekeeper. As Clay Shirky argues: “The stock figure of the amateur brain surgeon comes up only in conversations that aren’t about brain surgery. The real assertion is that every time amateurs and professionals differ, we should prefer the professionals, and brain surgery is just one illustrative example.”

More importantly, no one—not even free market anarchists—would choose someone to perform a high-risk procedure of any kind without some form of licensing or other certification to attest to their capability. The real question at issue is whether a licensing or certification regime need be provided by the state.

[Yglesias on practical issues]

Even when state licensing regimes exist as a barrier to entry—as they do almost everywhere—and traditionally served to limit the number of competing providers that shifted the balance of power between the priest (ahem, professional) and the layperson, the rise of network technology is having a revolutionary effect on that balance of power. If a licensing regime is intended to exert some quality control over professionals, it also has the tendency to create a closed priesthood with limited accountability to the customer.

The desktop regulatory state serves to control the authority granted to licensed professionals, and to hold them accountable.

Previously—to take medicine as an example—a patient usually felt pressured by time constraints not to ask a doctor all the things she really wanted to know, not to question the purpose or possible side-effects of medications, and to take terse answers as final rather than asking follow-up. Even when the doctor encouraged questions and the seeking of second opinions, the culture of professionalism resulted in an asymmetric power relationship in which many perceived a doctor’s advice as “doctor’s orders.” Of necessity, even with a doctor willing to answer questions, the doctor was the main chokepoint controlling information available to the patient—and wittingly or not, her professional culture and tacit background assumptions filtered the kinds of information she provided.

The rise of network communications—first the Internet and then social media—has, as Willow Brugh observes, simultaneously made us less legible to the state, and more legible to each other. In response to a Scientific American article claiming that social media makes crowds less predictable, she argued “social media makes crowds more predictable to themselves.”

Crowds are only less predictable to the outside. They are becoming more predictable to themselves. Not talking about ranking, not talking about decision, simply speaking to awareness and therefore paths to action. This, to me, is related to the core disconnection in disaster response between official response’s view on social media/The Crowd as a resource to be tapped for situational awareness, and the mutual aid of The Crowd as self-organization. Formal organizations tend to think of The Crowd as an input function to their workflows. Their concerns therefore revolve around verifiability, bad actors, and predictability. A manifestation of this are the self-mapped roads in remote places via Open Street Map being grumbled over for not fitting into the data hierarchies of official responders. That is not the point of the maps being built.

These are identity politics on the scale of a community. These are people using a tool to their own ends, to support themselves, to gain better understanding of their world, not as a resource to be tapped. It is a group of people talking to itself. If institutions exist to serve collective purpose, their role here is to provide institutional knowledge (with awareness and self-reflection of bias), guiding frameworks (possibly), and response at scale (upon request). In this way, we can benefit from history and iterative learnings while escaping paternalistic ends….

As a crowd comes to know itself better, the intelligence can becomes an embedded, rather than external, component. We start to see many eyes on the bugs of society.

Thanks to the Internet, however, there are websites—ranging from the most mainstream like WebMD to a variety of alternative medicine sites and even information-sharing sites like Erowid for recreational drug users—providing an embarrassment of information riches to the patient. There are large online communities of people suffering from an almost infinite variety of ailments (Shirky gives the example of PatientsLikeMe), in which it’s possible to ask questions and exchange information. The patient can arm herself with better questions for the doctor, and compare the doctor’s advice to a universe of independently accessible information. Even when state-mandated licensing regimes are still in effect, the balance of power between physician and patient is far less asymmetric than fifteen years ago. The layperson is empowered to question and evaluate the judgment of the professional from a more equal position.

And networked, p2p reputational systems are rapidly becoming more effective than corporate branding or mass advertising campaigns at securing consumer attention. In a world where our attention is increasingly scarce and expensive to acquire, our peers are much better at getting our attention than are corporate advertisers. The reason is that, unlike corporations, our peers can interact with us; they can reciprocate our attention.

Brands face a huge obstacle in the attention economy because corporations cannot reciprocate. A corporation is owned by and exists for the benefit shareholders. Shareholders generally expect a financial return, therefore monetization is a necessity.

The same is not true for individuals. Individuals can engage in a true attention economy without any pressure to ultimately convert that attention into a monetary form. Peers are free to value attention for its own intrinsic benefits. An effective attention currency would have to be designed very subtly…fungible enough to facilitate more efficient reciprocation but not so fungible that it becomes awkwardly thoughtless.

And as William Gillis argues, the more effective networked, p2p reputational systems become at providing the information we desire, the harder our attention will be for corporate advertisers to get hold of:

…Their whole empire [i.e. of corporations like Google and Facebook that attempt to monetize attention through advertising revenue] is predicated on the assumption that advertising dollars are even a thing.

But openness is antithetical to a core presupposition of advertising: people are susceptible to suggestion and anecdote because they don’t have enough information–or time to process that information–when it comes to purchasing choices. Forget everything you’ve learned about madison avenue manipulations. Those manipulations are only possible when people have any reason to pay attention. Build a box that delivers all the relevant information and perfectly sorts through it in an easily manageable way and any form of advertising starts to look like laughable shucksterism. Who are you trying to fool? Why aren’t you content to let your product speak for itself?

In this sense much of the fertile territory being seized by Google is detrimental in the long run to one of its core income sources. As search improves and our instincts adapt to it there’s simply no reason to click on the ‘featured product’ getting in the way of our actual results. The more intuitive, streamlined and efficient our product comparison the less need there is to pay any attention to anything else. And if the app providing our results is tampered with then we can swap to another app. Walk into any given store with its inventory already listed and analyzed on our phone. Of course advertising covers more than just price comparisons between laundry detergents, but there’s no end to what can be made immediately transparent. “How cool is this product with a certain subculture or circle of my friends?” “Give me a weighted aggregate of consumer reports highlighting the ups and downs.” “List common unforeseen complexities and consequences.” “How would I go about navigating the experience of changing checking accounts?” Et cetera. Every conceivable variable. With ease of interface and sufficient algorithmic rigor one can easily recognize a tipping point.

Algorithms trawling for greater targeting power on the part of advertisers are jumping at comparatively trivial increases in efficiency with serious diminishing returns. (And insofar as new understandings might inform actual development/policy wouldn’t that a good thing?) Further, taken in a broad view, the issues of complexity to such datatrawling and analysis leans to the favor of consumers because there’s simply far more of us than there are sellers. Relatively simple advances in consumer analysis of sellers would drastically turn the tables against advertisers and corporate bargaining advantage in general. In such light their current golden age of analysis is but one last rich gasp.

In no way do I mean to underplay the threat posed by governments themselves, who surely have a huge investment in the establishment of institutions like Facebook and or projects like that of Palantir. At the end of the day they will remain a threat and continue working on these kinds of projects. But the context they’re operating in makes a big difference. The NSA isn’t going to cut Facebook a check to keep it afloat. The government simply doesn’t have the kind of money that the private sector is putting in to distort the development of norms in social networking / communications in the first place. Those are slippery cultural / user-interface issues that are far too complex for the state to navigate with requisite nuance.

The sooner we take it upon ourselves to kill the advertising industry the less time it’ll have to build weapons for the state.

Sure, like our current struggle to kill the IP Industry, it’ll be a fight that’ll last a while and involve complex cultural/political campaigns alongside purely technical ones. But at core it’ll be a downhill battle for us. Easier to spread information–both technologically and culturally–than to contain it.