“Labor is a commodity like anything else used in manufacturing — Something to be bartered for as cheaply as possible, used to its upmost capacity, and replaced by as inexpensive a substitute as is available.”
- (Summary of) HC Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company“ How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? . . .
We’ll get you eventually.”
- Sean Parker, President of Facebook
150 years ago humanity witnessed the emergence of a new economic model. The combination of interchangeable parts, assembly line, the telegram, new kinds of financing created the ‘industrial Trust.’
Recently, we’ve lived through the emergence of another new economic model; social network. It might seem like of industrial trusts have nothing to teach us about managing the rise of social networks, but they share one striking similarity; they use humans the same way.
For Trusts, labor was indispensable, but any particular laborer was replaceable. This effectively commoditized labor. Previously, every local blacksmith was unique. They knew about their customers and local community. They were able to barter as equals with their customers. After the rise of trusts, they were forced in to a monopsony labor market, unable to capture the value of their labor. There were many responses to labor monopsony (government regulation, boycotts, the arts&crafts movement, etc). But the most effective response was the rise of labor unions. By creating a monopoly supplier of labor to negotiate on an even footing with a monopsony buyer, worker are able to capture more of the value of their labor (there by bringing the cost of labor closer to it’s theoretical free market value).
Unions were so effective because they combined the absolute power of regulation (union strikes can be as total as government regulation), and the pliability of negotiations (unions can work closely and creatively with management to make sure labor demands are met in a way the reflects changing market and business realities).
When thinking about the workers<->Trusts relationship, it’s striking how similar it is to the users<->platforms relationship. They are individual disposable, but collectively vital. The attention and data provided by users are as valuable to the platform companies as labor was to the Trusts. Every platform constitutes an “attention monopsony” in a slice of the attention economy. Users only partly want the same thing as their platforms. They want the platforms to succeed, but not at their expense. They may want to leave for another network, but the monopsonistic power of the platforms leave them with no options.
As with the Trusts, we’re seeing many responses to the rise of attention monopsonies. There are efforts to solve these problems through regulation, individual action, and cultural movements. I’m proposing that users solve this problem the same way labor did — By organizing for collective bargaining.
How to Organize a User Boycott
Supposing I’ve convinced you that collective bargaining is well suited to solve the problems we’re seeing with social platforms: How can we use technology available today to actually build a 1-Billion member union? Together that group can extract concisions that the individuals couldn’t. Modern labor union collective action is organized and enforced by contract law. But when unions were first getting started, strikes were enforced by violence. Unionized workers would harass, beat, and kill ‘strikebreakers.’ No one is going to use violence to enforce a social media strike, and the private nature of social media consumption make it very hard to monitor, let alone control.
There are four basic functions that a boycott union needs:
- Determine why there’s a boycott. There’s a thread in techno-utopianism that aspires to use technology to replace politics. BUCK isn’t that. Knowing that the discourse of preferences and power is inexorably human, we designed to work with human politics. In BUCK, it’s easy to create new mini-unions, each with their own stated priorities, initial leadership, and strike rules. Therefore, the political work of determining what users care about comes from the constant flux of creating/ splintering/ fusing/ promoting new unions. The melee to create a large stable membership will surface sets of priorities with broad support. We can speculate about what a users union might want, but the nice thing about BUCK is no one has to know what users want from the platform companies. BUCK discovers it.
- Determine when to start the boycott. The union will vote using a liquid democracy system for when to go on strike. The members with the most delegated authority will constitute a natural emergent leadership of the union.
- Enforce the boycott. From a technical standpoint, this is the only tricky thing we’ll be doing. In brief, you need a way to make a smartphone app practically unusable when a `state` in a Etherium smart contract reads, “STRIKE!”
In the ideal implementation, Apple and Google would build this functionality in to the core APIs of iOS and Android. But Since, at-least initially, we need to do this without their permission, I’ll be outlining 4 potential design patterns in my next article. - Determine when to end the boycott. The union breaks the strike the same way that it started it. With liquid democracy. The fact that most votes will be delegated, mean that the strike will break when the elected elite of the union have been convinced of a certain deal with the platform leadership.
Preventing a sybil attack
Using a ‘1-person = 1-vote’ system means that you need to be able to tell that a address is a unique person — ie you need to be able to prevent people from voting multiple times. Our solution: In order to prove who you are, you post a specified hash on your facebook wall. This both proves control of the account, and spreads the word about the union. We’ll lean on facebook system for real identities. Oracles are used to crawl facebook (for strikebreakers and claim hashes) and transmit the conclusions of votes.
A Small Step Toward a Big Idea
In game theory, there are two ways for one player to threaten another, ‘cheap talk’ and ‘strong pre-commitment.’ When a public figure threatens to “move to Canada if candidate [X] wins an election,” that’s cheap talk. Whatever happens, everyone knows that there’s always a way to weasel out latter. When Cortez burned his ships on the shores of the Aztec Empire, that’s strong pre-commitment. It’s clear to everyone that there is no going back. The blockchain is capable of an intersting magic trick. It can cheaply turn cheap talk in to strong pre-commitment.
That magic trick is going to transform politics. The most radical transformation will be in solving collective action problems. To the exasperation of both good faith actors and cynics, the public discourse around the most pressing collective action problems are dominated by cheap talk. Once people are able to put their pre-commitment where there mouth is, society will get a much better signal on what problems people really care about.
BUCK is starting with the collective action problem of users against technology platforms because (1) being digital by nature it’s technically easier to tackle than problems like environmental policy or elections and (2) how to manage user<->platform relationships is a novel $10 trillion dollar question of political economy where the solutions from the 20th century don’t really work.
Both the technical and human lessons learned building BUCK will be the ground work for a complete political reorganization of the world.
Note on terminology: It’s been pointed out that this post confuses the language of different collective action traditions:
When a group of [workers] organize to withhold [labor] from a [employer], we call that a [strike].
When a group of [consumers] organize to withhold [spending] from a [retailer/brand], we call that a [boycott].
When a group of [users] organize to withhold [attention/data] from a [platform], we call that a [. . . buck(?)].
Since we don’t have a vocabulary for collective user action yet, this post freely mixes terminology from both analogies.
