The post Carole Cadwalladr on Facebook’s role in Brexit and its threat to democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Reposted from TED.com. Go to the original post for full transcript and more resources
The post Carole Cadwalladr on Facebook’s role in Brexit and its threat to democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Russian Cosmism and how it informs today’s religion of technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.
I tell the story in my new book, Team Human, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?
They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.
The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.
The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.
No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.
As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.
The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.
We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.
Image from Wikimedia Commons – New Planet, by Konstantin Yuon
The post Russian Cosmism and how it informs today’s religion of technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Book of the Day: Team Human appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>
In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth. Find the book here.
Endorsements and Reviews
“Original and uplifting. Just the book America needs right now. In his unique and engaging style, Rushkoff reminds us of our human essence: we are social creatures, and if we trust this truth about ourselves we can accomplish the seemingly impossible.” — Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and Daring Democracy
“Rushkoff is the gold standard. He always knows what tech is up to—and he’s usually prophetic. Now he’s here to tell us how our Silicon masters are attempting to pit us against one another for their own gain. Go Team Human.” — Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out and Up in the Air
“A vivid thinker, Rushkoff is an insightful and acerbic antidote to Facebook, cultural hegemony, and the corporatization of everything.” — Seth Godin, bestselling author of The Dip, Linchpin, and What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn)
“Can the revolution start already? This book will help us. Thank God for Douglas Rushkoff.” — Parker Posey
“Technology can be a force for good or amplify our self-destructive capacities. In Team Human, the always-brilliant Douglas Rushkoff reminds us that the tools we design design us in turn, and offers a vision to invert our tools and make them better.” — Jason Silva, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games
“An astonishing, paradigm-shifting must-read for all inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Precisely and cogently written. Rushkoff’s best work so far.” — Grant Morrison
“A searing critique…Visionary, original, and inspirational. If you’re not already a member of Team Human, you will be once you’ve finished reading it.” — Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct
“[A] catalyst for conversations on what it means to be human.” — Booklist
The post Book of the Day: Team Human appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Let’s train humans first…before we train machines appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Hazel Henderson: Billions are spent by governments, corporations and investors in training computer-based algorithms (i.e. computer programs) in today’s mindless rush to create so-called “artificial” intelligence, widely advertised as AI. Meanwhile, training our children and their brains (already superior to computer algorithms) is under-funded, schools are dilapidated, sited in run-down, often polluted areas while our teachers are poorly paid and need greater respect. How did our national priorities get so skewed?
In reality, there is nothing artificial about these algorithms or their intelligence, and the term “AI” is a mystification! The term that describes the reality is “Human-Trained Machine Learning”, in today’s mad scramble to train these algorithms to mimic human intelligence and brain functioning. In the techie magazine WIRED, October 2018, we meet a pioneering computer scientist, Fei-Fei LI, testifying at a Congressional hearing, who underlines this truth. She said, “Humans train these algorithms” and she talked about the horrendous mistakes these machines make in mis-identifying people, using the term “bias in—bias out” updating the old computer saying, “garbage in—garbage out”.
Professor LI described how we are ceding our authority to these algorithms to judge who gets hired, who goes to jail, who gets a loan, a mortgage or good insurance rates — and how these machines code our behavior, change our rules and our lives. She is now back at Stanford University after a time as an ethicist at Google and has started a foundation to promote the truth about AI, since she feels responsible for her role in inventing some of these algorithms herself. As a celebrated pioneer of this field, Professor LI says “There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, it’s created by people and more importantly, it impacts people”.
So how did Silicon Valley invade our culture and worldwide technology programs with its short-term, money -obsessed values: “move fast and break things”; disrupt the current systems while rushing to scale and cash out with an IPO? These values are discussed by two insiders in shocking detail, by Antonio G. Martinez in “Chaos Monkeys” (2016) and Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in “Brotopia” (2018). These authors explain a lot about how training these algorithms went so wrong: subconsciously mimicking their mostly male, misogynist, often white entrepreneurs and techies with their money-making monopolistic biases and often adolescent, libertarian fantasies.
I also explored all this in my article “The Future of Democracy Challenged in the Digital Age”, CADMUS, October 2018, describing all these issues of the takeover by AI of our economic sectors; from manufacturing, transport, education, retail, media, law, medicine, agriculture, to banking, insurance and finance. While many of these sectors have become more efficient and profitable for the shareholders, my conclusion in “The Idiocy of Things” critiqued the connecting of all appliances in so-called “smart homes” as quite hazardous and an invasion of privacy. I urged humans to take back control from the over-funded, over-invested, over-paid computer and information science sectors too often focused on corporate efficiency and cost-saving goals driven by the profit targets demanded by Wall Street.
I have called for an extension of the English law, settled in the year 1215: “habeas corpus” affirming that humans own their own bodies. This extension would cover ownership of our brains and all our information we generate in an updated “information habeas corpus”. Since May 2018, European law has ratified this with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that individuals using social media platforms, or any other social system do indeed retain ownership of all their personal data.
So, laws are beginning to catch up with the inhuman uses of human beings, with our hard-earned skills being used to train algorithms that then replace us! The computer algorithm trainers then employ out of-work people surviving in the gig economy on Mechanical Turk and Task Rabbit sites, in minimum, hourly- paid data entry tasks to train these algorithms!
Scientist Jaron Lanier in his “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now” (2018) shows how social media are manipulating us with algorithms to engineer changes in our behavior, by engaging our attention with clickbait and content that arouses our emotions, fears and rage, playing on some of the divisions in our society to keep us on their sites. This helps drive ad sales and their gargantuan profits and rapid global growth. Time to rethink all this, beyond the dire alarms raised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking that these algorithms we are teaching will soon take over and may harm or kill us as did HAL in the movie “2001”.
Why indeed are we spending all this money to train machines while short-changing our children, our teachers and schools? Training our children’s brains must take priority! Instead of training machines to hijack our attention and sell our personal data to marketers for profit — let’s steer funds into tripling efforts to train and pay our teachers, upgrade schools and curricula with courses on civic responsibility, justice, community values, freedoms under habeas corpus (women also own their own bodies!) and how ethics and trust are the basis of all market and societies.
Why all the expensive efforts to enhance machine learning to teach algorithms to recognize human faces, guide killer drones, falsify video images and further modify our behavior and capture our eyeballs with click bait, devising and spreading content that angers and outrages — further dividing us and disrupting democracies?
Let’s rein in the Big Brother ambitions of the new techno-oligopolists. As a wise NASA scientist, following Norbert Weiner’s Human Use of Human Beings (1950), reminded us in 1965 about the value of humans: “Man (SIC) is the lowest-cost, 150 pound, nonlinear all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by un-skilled labor”, quoted in Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2015, p. 11. Time for common sense!
Hazel Henderson© 2018
Hazel Henderson D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, is founder of Ethical Markets Media, LLC and producer of its TV series. She is a world renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, consultant on sustainable development, and author of The Axiom and Nautilus award-winning book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and eight other books.
Her editorials appear in 27 languages and 200 newspapers syndicated by Inter Press Service, and her book reviews appear on SeekingAlpha.com. Her articles have appeared in over 250 journals, including (in USA) Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor; and Challenge, Mainichi (Japan), El Diario (Venezuela), World Economic Herald (China), LeMonde Diplomatique (France) and Australian Financial Review.
Photo by Ferrari + caballos + fuerza = cerebro Humano 
The post Let’s train humans first…before we train machines appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post I Used to Argue for UBI. Then I gave a talk at Uber. appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>For authors of business how-to books, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want to brag that Google is taking their business advice? For me, it was a little different. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus was about the inequity embedded in the digital economy: how the growth of digital startups was draining the real economy and making it harder for people to participate in creating value, make any money, or keep up with rising rents.
I took the gig. I figured it was my chance to let my audience know, in no uncertain terms, that Uber was among the worst offenders, destroying the existing taxi market not through creative destruction but via destructive destruction. They were using the power of their capital to undercut everyone, extract everything, and establish a scorched-earth monopoly. I went on quite a tirade.
To my surprise, the audience seemed to share my concerns. They’re not idiots, and the negative effects of their operations were visible everywhere they looked. Then an employee piped up with a surprising question: “What about UBI?”
Wait a minute, I thought. That’s my line.
Up until that moment, I had been an ardent supporter of universal basic income (UBI), that is, government cash payments to people whose employment would no longer be required in a digital economy. Contrary to expectations, UBI doesn’t make people lazy. Study after study shows that the added security actually enables people to take greater risks, become more entrepreneurial, or dedicate more time and energy to improving their communities.
So what’s not to like?
Shouldn’t we applaud the developers at Uber — as well as other prominent Silicon Valley titans like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, bond investor Bill Gross, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman — for coming to their senses and proposing we provide money for the masses to spend? Maybe not. Because to them, UBI is really just a way for them to keep doing business as usual.
Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.
When it’s looked at the way a software developer would, it’s clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that’s fundamentally flawed.
The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you’re doing something wrong or “leaving money on the table.”
Back in the 1500s, residents of various colonized islands developed a good business making rope and selling it to visiting ships owned by the Dutch East India Company. Sensing an opportunity, the executives of what was then the most powerful corporation the world had ever seen obtained a charter from the king to be the exclusive manufacturer of rope on the islands. Then they hired the displaced workers to do the job they’d done before. The company still spent money on rope — paying wages now instead of purchasing the rope outright — but it also controlled the trade, the means of production, and the market itself.
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps.
Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely. Instead of merely rewriting the law like colonial corporations did or utilizing the power of capital like retail conglomerates do, digital companies are using code. Amazon’s control over the retail market and increasingly the production of the goods it sells, has created an automated wealth-extraction platform that the slave drivers who ran the Dutch East India Company couldn’t have even imagined.
Of course, it all comes at a price: Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.
To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.
Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.
Meanwhile, UBI also obviates the need for people to consider true alternatives to living lives as passive consumers. Solutions like platform cooperatives, alternative currencies, favor banks, or employee-owned businesses, which actually threaten the status quo under which extractive monopolies have thrived, will seem unnecessary. Why bother signing up for the revolution if our bellies are full? Or just full enough?
Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.
No, income is nothing but a booby prize. If we’re going to get a handout, we should demand not an allowance but assets. That’s right: an ownership stake.
The wealth gap in the United States has less to do with the difference between people’s salaries than their assets. For instance, African-American families earn a little more than half the salary, on average, that white American families do. But that doesn’t account for the massive wealth gap between whites and blacks. More important to this disparity is the fact that the median wealth of white households in America is 20 times that of African-American households. Even African-Americans with decent income tend to lack the assets required to participate in savings accounts, business investments, or the stock market.
So even if an African-American child who has grown up poor gets free admission to college, they will still likely lag behind due to a lack of assets. After all, those assets are what make it possible for a white classmate to take a “gap” year to gain experience before hitting the job market or take an unpaid internship or have access to a nice apartment in Williamsburg to live in while knocking out that first young adult novel on spec, touring with a band, opening a fair trade coffee bar, or running around to hackathons. No amount of short-term entitlements substitute for real assets because once the money is spent, it’s gone — straight to the very people who already enjoy an excessive asset advantage.
Had Andrew Johnson not overturned the original reconstruction proposal for freed slaves to be given 40 acres and a mule as reparation, instead of simply allowing them to earn wage labor on former slaveowners’ lands, we might be looking at a vastly less divided America today.
Likewise, if Silicon Valley’s UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future’s Marina Gorbis. As she points out, in Denmark — where people have public access to a great portion of the nation’s resources — a person born into a poor family is just as likely to end up as wealthy as peers born into a wealthier household.
To venture capitalists seeking to guarantee their fortunes for generations, such economic equality sounds like a nightmare and unending, unnerving disruption. Why create a monopoly just to give others the opportunity to break it or, worse, turn all these painstakingly privatized assets back into a public commons?
The answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is because all those assets are actually of diminishing value to the few ultra-wealthy capitalists who have accumulated them. Return on assets for American corporations has been steadily declining for the last 75 years. It’s like a form of corporate obesity.The rich have been great at taking all the assets off the table but really bad at deploying them. They’re so bad at investing or building or doing anything that puts money back into the system that they are asking governments to do this for them — even though the corporations are the ones holding all the real assets.
Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running. They don’t see the economic operating system beneath their programs, and so they are not in a position to challenge its embedded biases much less rewrite that code.
As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It’s the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they’ve sexually harassed. It’s hush money.
If the good folks of Uber or any other extractive digital enterprise really want to reprogram the economy to everyone’s advantage and guarantee a sustainable supply of wealthy customers for themselves, they should start by tweaking their own operating systems. Instead of asking the government to make up the difference for unlivable wages, what about making one’s workers the owners of the company? Instead of kicking over additional, say, 10% in tax for a government UBI fund, how about offering a 10% stake in the company to the people who supply the labor? Or another 10% to the towns and cities who supply the roads and traffic signals? Not just a kickback or tax but a stake.
Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.
The post I Used to Argue for UBI. Then I gave a talk at Uber. appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Res Publica ex Machina: On Neocybernetic Governance and the End of Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>By FELIX MASCHEWSKI & ANNA-VERENA NOSTHOFF: In 2017, Denmark sent the first digital ambassador, Casper Klynge, to Silicon Valley. The aim of this move of ‘techplomacy’ was, as Klynge explained, not simply to distribute greetings notes by the Danish queen. Rather, the intention was to ‘update diplomacy’ based on the recognition that a few tech companies have obviously become much ‘more influential than some nation states’. Klynge framed the new political course in the manner of a well-known old but still utterly contemporary mantra: ‘There is no alternative’. In a similar vein, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Anders Samuelson highlighted the importance of the step as follows: ‘Just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on. (…) The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.
Denmark and France are just two of many examples. One might also add the relationship between the ‘Facebook-President’ Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg; more practically, regarding the realm of healthcare, between Obama and Eric Schmidt; or, regarding the current realpolitik order, PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s advisory activities for Donald Trump; among others. They represent an (a-)political way of thinking which follows the tech-laws of solutionist efficiency in the first place. Its rationale was nicely summed up by a slogan promoted by the German Free Democratic Party (FDP) during the country’s 2017 election campaign: ‘Digital first, Bedenken [which is German for concern or reflection] second.’ Indeed, it seems that political leaders across the globe have come to realize that many tech entrepreneurs have arguably overrun a variety of states when it comes to power, money and – one might add – influence. The political reactions to this new awareness are homogenous, as is also exemplified by Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who, in October 2017, pitched his own country as a ‘Silicon Valley, plus everything else Canada is’. Against this background, he recently characterized the tech player Google as a welcoming ‘partner who is determined to find innovative solutions to make our communities even better places to call home’. Thus, Trudeau’s invitation to Alphabet Inc.’s Chairman Eric Schmidt and the subsequent plans of Toronto to ‘sell’ a part of its city (i.e. Waterfront, sidewalk labs) to Google for it to serve as its new playground for experimenting with proprietary AI-based products and services was not surprising. As Schmidt claimed after the deal was set in stone, the hope is to create something important and powerful that might give rise to new ideas that can be adapted and implemented in various other cities around the globe.
The idea to implement tech on new political test grounds is also mirrored by recent digital initiatives which focus more explicitly on the nation-state. The most poignant concepts in this realm include ideas such as ‘algorithmic regulation’, ‘government as a platform’ (Tim O’Reilly), ‘direct technocracy’ viz. ‘info-states’ (Parag Khanna), ‘smart states’ (Beth Noveck), or ‘social physics’ (Alex Pentland), to name a few. It is vital to explore some of these concepts in greater detail and on a more theoretical and philosophical level. What form of politics is implicitly being promoted in this context? As we argue, this question is best examined against the background of an understanding of these concepts as very idiosyncratic reformulations of cybernetic approaches to the political, which date back to the 1960s. We explore how the implicit visions and concepts rearticulate early concepts of cybernetic politics in their insistence on the vitality of feedback structures, in allegedly blending hierarchy with tenets of decentralization, in shifting the focus from the individual to the interrelations between humans, including the social fabric encompassing them and, most importantly, in how far this might raise problems. Subsequently, this rather theoretical perspective will allow us to examine the extent to which such neo-cybernetic concepts promote a rather reduced vision of the political, or politics as such. As we argue, current approaches to ‘smart’ states or cities and their corresponding models of governance mark no entire automation of politics but at least in certain respects, a pragmatic actualization of cybernetic visions of the state against the background of surveillance capitalism. As such, theoretical dispositifs that have emerged from early ideas of cybernetic politics are still marking certain effects.
More so, we are in a period in which smart technologies are becoming ever more ‘intelligent’, increasingly invisible and ever more difficult to comprehensibly grasp; therefore, it is all the more crucial to understand their cybernetic origins alongside their political connotations. To name a prominent and much-discussed example, Stafford Beer’s socialist cybernetic project to regulate Chile’s economy and politics through feedback systems at the beginning of the 1970s, was still based on the implementation of telex-machines, whereas current neo-cybernetic politics are able to instrumentalize sensor systems, algorithms, AI and, thus, an entire environment designed by digital techniques that are significantly more complex. Such ‘smart’ techniques are far more suitable to potentially implementing and actualizing what various political cyberneticists already envisioned a few decades ago, when the internet was still a centralized ‘Arpanet’, Wiener’s ‘Cybernetics’ had just become a revolutionary surprise bestseller and Silicon Valley was just about to become the melting pot of a new counterculture.
The Indian consultant and political scientist Parag Khanna has recently revitalised a new variant of technocratic governance that he terms “direct technocracy”.
Performance rather than Politics
Technocracy is a term first coined by the Californian engineer William Henry Smyth in 1919. In the 1920s and 1930s it gained popularity through the so-called “technocracy movement” in the US and Canada, which proposed to replace politicians with engineers.
Although Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication had no explicit political connotation, Karl Deutsch’s subsequent The Nerves of Government, which explicitly drew on Shannon’s information theory, was exclusively focused on the state. In what appears like an almost logical political conclusion drawn from Shannon’s reductive focus on information, Deutsch was convinced that the level of democratisation is directly related to the intensity of measured communication. For him it was equally irrelevant which contents run through the channels of communication, whether the information flow concerns the banality of consumption or a political movement, as long as autopoietic mechanisms of self-learning automatically lead to a new balance (homeostasis); a new controllable order. Nevertheless, for both classically cybernetic and neo-cybernetic politics, a certain level of anarchic contingency, even resistance and, thus, disorder, has always been vital. They keep the system in motion which, through additional information, offers the possibility of its optimization, expansion and regulation – to continually establish newly ordered wholes. Seen from the meta-perspective of cybernetic regulation, what is important is not what and how one communicates but rather that one communicates, that the information flow is continually kept alive and that it follows a foreseeable, anticipatable direction. The information flow must not be suppressed or restricted but, instead, reinforced and encouraged.
The problem of representation and the divergence between the rulers and the ruled, including the classic political-theoretical problem of how to overcome or mediate this divide, has – according to the cybernetic conception of government – become partially obsolete. In fact, it is thought to be resolved by a conception of politics that can continually establish orders through a real-time regulation of crowds, masses and affects. The political task par excellence becomes the (direct or indirect) creation of order(s) from noise, whereby the state’s goal is reduced to its mere systematic survival, what Habermas termed – in a more critical vein – equivalent to ‘the biological base of survival at any cost, that is, ultrastability.’ This term ‘ultrastability’, popularized by Ross W. Ashby in the early 1940s, is derived from the mechanisms of a classic homeostat, a device that reacts to external signals with the aim of self-regulating through constant feedback, thus reaching constant, stable states. More systemically, ultrastability can be defined as the capacity of a system to adapt smoothly to unpredicted changes by reducing noise. Early political cyberneticist Eberhard Lang went so far as to think of the general will as ultimately and solely concerned with the ‘absence of disturbances’ – a notion that seems reminiscent of Khanna’s aim to provide the greatest efficiency of a nation’s people at any cost.
Hermann Schmidt, the founder of cybernetics in Germany.
Then, the essential telos of a cybernetic state is precisely not a productive dissensus, let alone a form of democratic-agonistic pluralism, but the other’s integration into to the same, that is, the expansion of the whole via adaptation. Hermann Schmidt, the founder of cybernetics in Germany, affirmatively frames this logic as an imperative: ‘to control everything that is controllable, and to render controllable that which cannot yet be controlled’. The timely political conclusion to be drawn from this is nicely summed up by the authorial collective Tiqqun, who defines the task of cybernetic governance in the era of networks as follows: ‘governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the free – i.e., transparent and controllable – circulation of information that is generated in this manner.’
Smart Citizens, Smarter States?
‘(…) one attractive alternative [to conventional politics] (…) is that of networks (…). You’ve got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants. We might even call them citizens, because (…) [they] work together to serve each other in great ways. (…) social media do teach us something. Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform. It opens up the API [application programming interface] to allow (…) new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways. We need to think about how to open up the API of government, (…) the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of the institution (…) with the chaos and the excitement of networks, all of us working together (…), to engage in the practice of governance.’
Beth Noveck and Jay Rosen
In particular, Noveck’s last comment translates cybernetic management-pioneer Stafford Beer’s early vision of what he termed a ‘democratic machinery’ into the vocabulary of contemporary information technology. Sure, the idea of government as referred to by Noveck is far from that of an Opsroom with few steersmen acting on the basis of information, as Beer envisioned for the sake of cybernetically controlling Allende’s Chilean economy of the early 1970s. It seems closer to Beer’s never actualized project Cyberfolk, a form of a cybernetic nerve system established between the demos and the politicians, enabling the former to rate the latter via so-called ‘algedonic meters’ (pain-pleasure buttons on their TV) in real time and based on a vision of radical transparency. Noveck would arguably welcome such quantified direct-democratic mechanisms, as we will elaborate further on. In Noveck’s approach, the role of the government should be reduced to the role of a facilitator, its primary goal being to establish a ‘platform for coordinating citizen action’ based on the mechanisms of a dedicated feedback logic.
A pragmatic actualization of at least some aspects of early cybernetic visions of the state becomes evident, such as examined by Karl Deutsch, who, as mentioned, envisioned democratic politics as exclusively depending on its measurable level of information flows, ‘emancipated’ from deliberation, lengthy parliamentary discussions, arguments and what Habermas thought of as communicative action. Although Noveck provides a political approach that is far more participatory in its design than that of Parag Khanna or Karl Deutsch, her approach nevertheless reveals serious problems regarding issues of participation and equality. That is, Noveck addresses the problem of governance (which she, for the most part, uses as a substitute for politics in toto) as a coordination and logistics problem that urgently needs to be solved using better, or smarter, technology. According to her, the issue is to widen ‘the pool of potential problem solvers (…) with good solutions to a hard problem.’ A similar notion becomes evident in Khanna’s vision of what he considers a ‘smart’ state, in which progress should be measured according to so-called ‘KPIs’, or key performance indicators: much of the advantages that Khanna lists are concerned with smooth functioning, logistics and better service. One Singaporean example that he mentions affirmatively is the installation of touchscreen iPads for citizens to rate the state’s public toilet and passport check services.
Such a fundamental concern with the frictionless functioning of the whole and the rather limited focus on the handling of complexity through regulatable connectivity echoes Shannon’s concern with the intensity rather than the content of communication flows. Thus, it leaves little room for a discussion of more content-related and straightforward political matters such as various forms of inequality, issues of freedom, racist biases, algorithmic injustices and so on. Nor does it suggest how and why the sole focus on logistic efficiency might necessarily increase democratic deliberation. It should be evident that to participate in rating a service is clearly not similar to political participation in the sense of making one’s voice heard or articulating political demands. It is hardly surprising that Khanna at one point praises Swiss ‘technocratic’ workers who are ‘trained, competent and productive’ for ‘virtually never go[ing] on strike’: ‘Democracy,’ he concludes, ‘doesn’t deliver Switzerland’s perfectionist efficiencies; technocracy does.’ Again, this focus on maintaining stability at any cost is reminiscent of a classic cybernetic focus on ultrastability as the prior aim of politics, conceived as a ‘system’ in the first place. In fact, to Deutsch, the history of revolutions appeared ‘to a significant extent as the history of internal intelligence failures in the governments that were overthrown.’
The engineer Howard Scott, who was the leader and founder of the technocracy movement.
To return to Noveck and the problems that some of her arguments raise, while she criticizes the lack of integration of citizens into the process of governmental decision making and institutional design, she eventually rejects expert professionalism in governance and political thought only to propose an integration of a different body of experts that includes, above all, technicians. Criticism of political elitism eventually leads to promoting a new elite that is, first and foremost, in possession of smart, ‘practical know-how’.
At the same time, the role of the citizen is mostly reduced to providing information. In this context, Noveck refers to what she calls ‘an army of citizen scientists reporting data through an app’, which she mistakes for actual ‘participation in government’, or what Arendt would term political action [Handeln] as opposed to, and precisely not correlative with, fabrication [Herstellen]. Even though Noveck proposes a model far more inclusive than Khanna’s army of state-rating citizens, her state design has limitations of its own. It is quite telling that she explicitly criticizes Habermas’s discourse ethics for only stressing the necessity of mediated forms of public discourse, i.e. a discourse that depends on institutions (such as, traditionally, the print media). Habermas, she argues, undermines more direct participatory roles that citizens could play at the level of governmental decision making. She leaves out Habermas’s revitalization of autonomous judgment, argumentative participation in public discourse and the normative framework initiated through public debate, and only emphasizes immediate data delivered to the government. In her neo-cybernetic agenda she leaves little room for the formation of discursive political will and so implicitly repeats Khanna’s belief that political representatives spend ‘too much time arguing rather than doing something’.
In Noveck’s model, general participation is reduced to reporting systemic disruptions, whereas participation in decision making is open to only those obtaining the relevant knowledge or know-how that might contribute to solving a particular problem. Moreover, according to Noveck, such ‘citizen experts’ should be listed publicly and ranked according to their individual capacities, in close cooperation with private platforms, such as LinkedIn and Coursera, on which citizens can publicly inform others of their progress, newly awarded certificates and so on. It seems like she proposes highly competitive, market-driven forms of self-organisation, that is, self-governance that largely relies on 360° feedback models. Such forms of self-organisation implicitly propose decentralized governance through flexible markets that allocate individual capacities. Politics is limited to coordinating expert knowledge with the aim of finding relevant technical solutions in real time. Additionally, Noveck claims, such ‘expertise’ can be attained by ‘anyone’, since technical education is now available ‘freely’ through Coursera and other similar platforms. She thinks of expertise as being ‘democratized’ simply through internet access and access to (corporate) platforms without considering prior issues of equality. Such prior issues can include potentially unequal distributions of free time, potentially unequal access to resources, the ability to attain such knowledge and issues of privacy and transparency regarding the use of personal data, among others.
In this context, even more problematic is Noveck’s explicit reliance on nudging techniques, as elaborated on in Thaler’s and Sunstein’s much-discussed Nudge (according to a recent report, behavioral economics has already affected policy initiatives in more than 130 countries, whereas the frames of application usually remain rather non-transparent). Noveck affirms what Thaler and Sunstein call the implementation of a ‘libertarian paternalism’: the aim of influencing, subtly controlling and, above all, anticipating human behavior through changing choice architectures, whilst at the same time delegating responsibility to the level of the individual in a typically neoliberal fashion. Probably little surprising, such a limited understanding of freedom can indeed be traced back to the historical origins of cybernetics, particularly the aforementioned Stafford Beer. Although he, politically speaking, followed a diametrically opposed agenda, namely, a socialist model, he defines freedom as a ‘computable function of effectiveness’. This understanding hints at the intellectual mindset of another and particularly debatable pioneer of neo-cybernetic politics: Alex Pentland.
Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who directs MIT’s Media Lab, in 2017
The Problem with Social Physics
Not only Noveck and Khanna aim to disrupt conventional politics and allegedly antiquated notions of freedom. Even worse, certain Silicon Valley pioneers, and also the director of the MIT Media Lab Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, openly proclaim an agenda which leaves behind both negative and positive conceptions of freedom. Rather, we are dealing with an entirely transformed notion of freedom which is only realized through being potentially regulated when necessary. It is freedom as framed by Stafford Beer: ‘The freedom we embrace must yet be in control.’ Even more straightforward is the manner in which the management cyberneticist continues – the wording is indeed uncannily reminiscent of Parag Khanna’s and, as we will see, Pentland’s: ‘We have to become efficient in order to solve our problems; and we have to accept the threat to freedom that this entails – and handle it.’
Another problem with Pentland’s agenda to datafy the social can best be described by the media philosopher’s and mathematician’s Dieter Mersch’s recent diagnosis and critique of cybernetics. As Mersch argues, throughout the history of cybernetics the notion of participation has been reduced to merely equal access (this could also be said of Shannon’s mathematical understanding of communication). As Mersch reminds us, participation stems from the Latin ‘participatio’ and originally means ‘Teilhaftigmachung, Teilnahme, Mitwirkung [contribution]’. According to the media theorist, the concept itself however rests on a certain ambiguity, as it does not specify what participation relates to or how far it goes, or what it encompasses: ‘The ‘Mit-’ [with] in ‘Mitsein’ [being-with] remains as indeterminate as the forms of participation’. Mersch claims that particularly cybernetics rests on a reduced understanding of participation, thus implying a limited notion of both the social and the political, which are neither deducible from a sole technical infrastructure or logistical setting nor necessarily follow from it. As is particularly evident regarding current forms of the social – such as ‘social’ networks – the exclusive focus on technical infrastructure and coordination almost automatically reinforces the predominance of mathematics and a mathematical imaginary, thus producing what German sociologist Steffen Mau has recently termed a ‘metric We’.
This becomes especially evident with regard to Pentland’s neo-cybernetic vision of what he terms ‘social physics’: whereas his governance approach essentially rests on participation, it is not at all concerned with what Mersch (drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy) refers to as the ‘Mit-’ of ‘Mitsein’: a shared dimension of the social that cannot be (technically) constructed but is always precarious, a horizon at best which is still to come. As such, Pentland’s vision of governance illuminates the difference between sociopolitically rich and sociopolitically limited notions of participation. Seen from a political viewpoint that considers individual autonomous judgment as a necessary precondition for self-determined political participation, Pentland’s behavioristic focus on the homo imitans and on adaptable behavior is particularly alarming. Close to what Obama advisor Sunstein has popularized under the rubric of ‘nudging’, that is, a form of choice architecture that seeks to subconsciously influence or push human behavior in ‘more reasonable’ directions, Pentland seeks to influence the interrelations between humans. He distinguishes this ‘peer-to-peer behavior’ from ‘individual behavior’. The former largely rests on adaptation, a term that became extremely popular during the rise of cybernetics as a science (for instance, in the works of W. Ross Ashby and Norbert Wiener).
Pentland wants to shape the social fabric by implementing quantifiable incentives that modify interactions. Such a focus on the network is, according to him, twice as efficient as focusing on an isolated individual. One of Pentland’s experimental examples refers to the attempt to raise the overall activity level of a group during a lazy winter. Two groups existed: one in which people were rewarded with a specific amount of money according to their activity level and a second one in which people were assigned buddies. In the second group, a reward was given not when one had maximized one’s own activity level but if one’s buddy increased his or her activity. In other words, your buddy was rewarded for you being active and vice versa. Pentland’s experimental results showed that the second group was far more effective given the extent of interactions between people and the structures of mutual control and responsibility established between them.
What becomes evident here is a shift from depicting the human as capable of autonomous judgment to behavioristic models that have given up on the idea of the autonomous decider. Indeed, this holds not only for the shift from homo oeconomicus to what is now deemed behavioral economics in economic theory; the same occurs in political theory, which long rested on the idea of the individual as a rational decider or the picture of the enlightenable citizen, but is now considered a ‘system’ even by political theorists and sociologists (examples are the German sociologist Armin Nassehi, who recently argued for a smart steering of the social or political scientist Philip Howard in his Pax Technica). The individual is no longer conceived as an entity, but depicted as a ‘divisum’, as Günther Anders termed it very early on: dissociable, divisible and partly shapeable, whereby the distinction between activity and passivity becomes obsolete. To return to the issue of freedom, even though the implementation of choice architectures and the redesign of what Pentland terms ‘the social fabric’ are far from directly determining or immediately violating free choice – Sunstein and Thaler have repeatedly emphasized that they seek to preserve ‘freedom’, thus calling their approach ‘libertarian paternalism’ – they seem hardly compatible with either positive or negative freedom precisely because influence on individual behavior works primarily on the subconscious level.
Cyber Horse at Tel Aviv University – Creator: No, No, No, No, No, Yes – Ad Agency in Tel Aviv
The post Res Publica ex Machina: On Neocybernetic Governance and the End of Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Upstream Podcast: A People’s History of Silicon Valley appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>By this time many know about the hyper-exploitative business models of companies like Uber or TaskRabbit. Or about how AirBnB has heavily reduced housing stocks in cities worldwide. But in his new book, Keith A. Spencer goes further than just picking on a few high profile companies. He lays out an argument for why Silicon Valley, at its core, is a highly exploitative and problematic industry. With a look at the tech world from the vantage point of the marginalized and oppressed—those who have not benefited from the incredible wealth bubbling up in the valley—”A People’s History of Silicon Valley: how the tech industry exploits workers, erodes privacy, and undermines democracy” presents a damning thesis for why this new world of addictive gadgets and union-busting is increasingly undemocratic and dangerous.
The book is published by Eyewear Publishing.
Upstream producer Robert R. Raymond spoke with Keith A. Spencer at the offices of Salon in San Francisco, where Spencer is an editor.
Intermission music is by The California Honeydrops.
Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted.
The post Upstream Podcast: A People’s History of Silicon Valley appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Stop chasing unicorns: the power of zebras, herds and Platform Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Stop Chasing Unicorns
Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini: There is a fundamental flaw in the narrative of the startup culture: everyone is chasing Unicorns i.e. private companies valued at one billion dollars or more. Instead of aspiring to this elusive goal, should we not pause and wonder if it is really worth it? Rather, we should ask ourselves: is it really worth it? How much does society benefit from these companies when one does not merely consider their financial value? This focus on monetary valorization results in forgiving much of the negative impact they may have on their environment: the working conditions they provide, their general social impact and the redistribution of their value.
Collectively, we got lost in the rush for innovation. In the era of digitalization where solutions are only a few clicks away, we are looking for instant gratification. We subcontract daily tasks, decision-making and management to softwares that indicate the most efficient solutions. This process creates an ultra-competitive society where it is difficult to find space for human involvement nature, its diversity, its inherent complexities and our well-being. Instead, we trust simplistic binary solutions provided by digital platforms that often help us solve minor inconveniences, whilst creating ethical loopholes.
Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini
Platform Co-op: a Disruptive Narrative
Entrepreneurship within specific social territories is a complex matter. In order to create a company that truly makes a positive impact, there is a need for a complex balance between all stakeholders and their environment. Businesses driven by values rather than mere profit do exist. These social enterprises have proven to be sustainable, even if they do not always seek global dominance. Legally, they are often constituted under the cooperative entity or coops.
What if digital platforms were also structured as coops? What would happen if platforms allowed members to vote on the use of their personal data? Or how the value that the platform generates is redistributed? What if users had their say in the strategies implemented to ensure a sustainable development?
Luckily, these questions are not just hypothetical. Numerous companies are attempting ethical digital ventures. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider have developed an impressive corpus of publications over the past three years. Their work provides the framework for a strong narrative that highlights the existence of this sector under the label Platform Cooperativism.
The term gained rapid traction as existing companies recognize their values in this specific narrative. Ethical digital start ups flocked to this specific labeling because it embodies what they are trying to achieve.
. Zebras have two advantages: they are real and, since they strongly believe in cooperation, they move in herds.
The strength of the PlatformCoop Movement is that it creates an alternative narrative for digital entrepreneurship by highlighting existing initiatives as well as the challenges ahead. The diversity of the actors involved in the movement creates a slow but consistent progress in the growth of this sector of the digital economy.
The way our current business models are structured and financed is intimately linked to the dominant neoliberal narrative. It is structurally more difficult for a platform co-op to emerge as there still is too little formalized know-how available. Moreover, the existing financing models are not always adequate. While new Zebras are struggling to emerge, they are also fighting an unfair battle with wannabe Unicorns. These opponents are able to move faster due to suitable financing models, and the lack of regulation and ethics. A shift in this economic paradigm will require time and patience.
There is still a long way to go to make a structural change. If we want to succeed we will need to continue to organize the movement by strengthening our emerging networks and its narrative. Additionally, we will need to embrace patience and appreciate the complexity of what we are trying to achieve.
Nurturing the Narrative by Actions
Shifting the economic paradigm is not an easy task and sometimes it is good to take the time to appreciate the progress that has been made.
The Platform Co-op Movement is colliding with existing and emerging initiatives.
These include but are not limited to groups such as “Open Co-op”: an organization in the UK “building a world-wide community of individuals and organizations committed to the creation of a collaborative, sustainable economy”. The “Zebras Unite Movement” was started in Portland, and calls for a more ethical and inclusive movement to counter existing start-up and venture capital culture. In Paris, “Plateformes en Communs” is organizing recurrent meet-ups for Zebra startups. “Supermarkt” a platform for digital culture, collaborative economies and new forms of work in Berlin is also trying to structure the local PlatformCoop Movement. Another relevant?example relates to the sale of Twitter in 2016, Nathan Schneider suggested to transform it into a co-op. This idea got enough attention to be seriously discussed during the annual stakeholder meeting in May 2017.
Trebor Scholz got an important grant from the Google Foundation to support the economic development of cooperatives in the digital economy. Professor and author Jack Linchuan Qiu is strongly invested in gathering the existing PlatformCoop network in Hong Kong for their annual meet-up in an effort to get the asian coop sector and digital entrepreneurs on board.
The interest for the co-op model is also visible in the interest of academic institutions for the field. The VUB (Free University of Brussels) has started to study the benefits of the co-op model. The idea of platform cooperativism received enough traction to catch the attention of the Region of Brussels. The Region is currently funding a consortium of local experts in order to facilitate and encourage the emergence of platform co-ops. The consortium is composed of 3 organisations combining theoretical and practical skills; “Febecoop” is promoting and developing the cooperative model; “SAW B” a non profit enterprise is advocating for social entrepreneurship and “SMart” a shared enterprise of freelancers operating in 9 european countries that managed to scale its business model by developing a digital platform. The consortium is working hand in hand with “Coopcity” an incubator for social and cooperative entrepreneurship in an effort to create an appropriate environment to start a platform coop. Looking beyond the ambition of the Region of Brussels, the consortium will gather data on best practices from Berlin and Barcelona in an effort to strengthen and broaden existing networks.
The process initiated by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider will be slow but as long as we collectively continue to engage we will make change happen. It is important to encourage and nurture the existing mobilisation of policy makers, unions, entrepreneurs, academics, investors and consumers.
Embrace Patience and Appreciate Complexity
The challenges we are facing today are thrilling. We have at hand incredible technologies, brilliant thinkers and entrepreneurs which could enable us to shift our current world dynamic. This shift would contribute greatly to solving crucial global issues such as the urgent need to reverse the growth of social injustices. Collectively, we have an exceptional opportunity to work towards cultural change. We could move from an individualistic system that aims for personal profit, to a state of mind of solidarity.
To make these things happen, we hold an abounding ecosystem of social enterprises which can give insight on their know-how. Cooperatives have years of experience in managing distributed governance and social impact. We can also tremendously benefit from the unfortunate misconceptions of the current platform-economy as a handbook, which logs a full set of guidelines explaining what not to do and why.
Incorporating these positive and negative experiences can ensure that the tools we develop ensure the well-being of all the actors of the networks we create and bring about a positive impact on the environment in which they operate. In this way, we will be able to create the tools of tomorrow which central values will be social justice and genuine sharing.
The post Stop chasing unicorns: the power of zebras, herds and Platform Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post How nonprofits are organizing tech workers for social change appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Cross-posted from Shareable.
Nithin Coca: As tensions between tech companies and their surrounding communities in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin continue to escalate, there’s an effort underway to find meaningful, collaborative solutions. From driving up the costs of housing to increasing traffic congestion, employees of large-scale tech corporations have been blamed for intensifying socio-economic inequalities. But some workers are taking matters into their own hands. Recently, Google dropped its Project Maven collaboration with the Pentagon after employee pressure.
Coworker.org, a nonprofit based in the U.S. that enables workers to start campaigns to change their workplaces, received more inquiries from employees at tech firms about using the platform following the election in 2016. Yana Calou, the group’s engagement and training manager said: “They were really concerned about their jobs being used towards things that they were not really comfortable with.”
Another organization leading this effort in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to several of the world’s largest technology companies, is the TechEquity Collaborative, which is taking more of a grassroots approach.
“No one was looking at the rank and file tech worker as a constituent group to be organized in a political way,” says Catherine Bracy, executive director of the TechEquity Collaborative. “There is a critical mass of tech workers who feel a huge sense of shame and guilt about the role that the industry is playing in creating these inequitable conditions, and want to do something different about it. They are hungry for opportunities to learn and be out there and contributing to solutions.”
TechEquity’s model — as its names states — is a collaborative one. Instead of dictating solutions, the organization works on connecting tech workers with affected communities to foster a shared approach to reaching potential solutions.
“It’s not just a political strategy, it’s an end in of itself,” Bracy says. “We need to develop stronger relationships based on trust if we’re going to live in a world where tech can be a value-add for everybody, not just the people who are getting rich from it.”
This connects with the challenges facing another key group — gig workers. Many gig workers have seen their livelihoods directly impacted by the growth of platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Coworker.org is also helping gig and contract workers organize campaigns. One of those campaigns, started by the App-Based Drivers Association, a group for drivers working for various app-based companies, targeted Uber, which refused to make in-app tipping available to all of its drivers based in the U.S. Organizers believe this campaign played a role in the ride-hailing giant adding tipping in June 2017.
Coworker.org’s platform allows for a similar function — workers can build networks within the platform to stay connected after the completion of a campaign. For gig workers who work in isolation, this can be a powerful organizing tool. There are currently approximately 6,300 Uber drivers on Coworker.org. Calou sees potential for these networks to increase the power of gig or contract workers who are often at the periphery of the tech industry.
“One of things that we’re doing is thinking about is how can workers at these companies join employee networks where anyone has ever signed a petition on Uber then has a platform where they can connect with each other and have a more sustained, long-term view of things they want to get together and work on,” says Calou.
For Bracy, building worker power within the industry and partnerships with communities everywhere are key steps towards restoring the promise of the internet and digital technology to connect people.
“I still think the internet is the most powerful for democratizing communication in human history, and we’ve seen a lot of bad, but there is a lot of potential for good, but we have to do the work to pull the industry in that direction to make sure that promise of the internet is kept,” Bracy says.
Header image by Raquel Torres, courtesy of TechEquity Collaborative
The post How nonprofits are organizing tech workers for social change appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Essay of the Day: Disrupting Together: Challenges and opportunities for Platform Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Duncan McCann:
Platforms – like Uber, Deliveroo, or TaskRabbit – connect services and products with consumers. With both sides theoretically having control over the interaction, and investing in the platform to reap the rewards, the rapid spread of platforms has the potential to revolutionise capitalism. But increasing concerns over the past few years around tech monopolies and the potential erosion of workers’ rights through the gig economy have raised questions over who really holds control over the platforms, and what impact this has on workers and customers.
Platform co-operatives present a possible alternative to traditional platforms which tend towards monopoly, concentrate power and erode workers’ rights. Drawing on a cooperative lineage which spreads out ownership and control, platform co-operatives could present a brighter future. But there are barriers to the spread of platform co-ops, including challenges of raising capital, finding the right skills within the organisation, competing with Silicon Valley, and harnessing positive network effects.
This is the second of two reports exploring the potential for platform co-ops, drawing on work we undertook with support from NESTA’s ShareLab fund. The previous report, A Better Gig? focused on the concerns of both drivers and passengers engaging in the private hire gig economy in West Yorkshire, and suggested that platform co-ops could go some way to remedying these. This paper draws on these lessons to set out the main challenges to setting up platform co-ops, and suggest ways of overcoming them.
Click on the image to download
Through our own research, and in particular through observing the development of a new ride-hailing app started by drivers in South Yorkshire, we have identified five areas of challenge for platform co-operatives. Firstly, platform co-ops are not attractive to traditional venture capitalists and tech investors. Platform co-ops can utilise other sources of capital (crowdfunding, co-operative banks and credit unions, or blockchain and alternative currencies) but will still never be able to match the billions raised in Silicon Valley. Secondly, co-operatives must commit long-term operational and financial commitment to building and maintaining their technology. Thirdly, coops need technology which can enable it to recruit drivers and passengers in parallel, and to distribute the profits of the business. Fourth, platform co-ops must find a way of subsidising their early entry into the market in order to build a profile for themselves. And fifth, platform co-ops must find a way to harness the virtuous cycle of positive network effects.
These challenges are difficult for platform co-operatives to overcome. In the ridehailing sector, we posit that co-operatives can be most successful in either focusing on a large city-scale project, or creating a network of federated co-ops to overcome some of the challenges. In other sectors, like cleaning and social care, the less complex tech demands mean that platform co-ops can make more of an impact. As well as developing alternative market interventions, we need to tackle the dominance of existing platforms.
We are at a crossroads. Traditional platforms seemed invincible until very recently, but regulatory battles and consumer action are changing the platform landscape. Platform cooperatives can be part of building a more equitable vision of the future. But small businesses cannot do it alone.
- We provide a series of recommendations to make platform co-operatives viable.
- We need new funding structures that can provide alternatives to the venture capital funding model.
- New platform co-ops must collaborate with each other and, where appropriate, form federated structures.
- Workers should be provided with the necessary skills training and support to establish their own co-operatives.
- Locally-focused commissioning from the public sector could provide a vital revenue stream to platform co-operatives.
- Government must enforce existing regulation robustly to ensure a level playing field for new platform co-ops.
- Users and consumers need to understand the impact of spending their time and money on established platforms, and be given opportunities to spend their money on ethical alternatives.
The structural challenges outlined in this report offer some of the answers as to why we have not seen more platform co-ops emerge and flourish. Platform co-ops offer us hope that we can harness the benefits of digital platforms without the harms that many of the current ones create. But their creation will require both continued experimentation and the support of policy makers both to enforce existing regulations on platforms, and create new support structures. Only by working together can we hope to create a digital economy that truly works for everyone.
The post Essay of the Day: Disrupting Together: Challenges and opportunities for Platform Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>