Homo Co-operans
Karl Marx found the relation between capital and the means of production to be the key. The key, that is, to unlock a better world — or to keep a few in riches and millions in poverty and squalor.
Nowadays, data is the new gold. The richest companies on earth are those in the information technology industry. So some advocate to hold on to our data, claim it back as our personal property, sell it maybe. But I think that is a mistaken idea. It is not so much data that is key, but the means to co-operate.
Consider Uber. Its software allows small-scale co-operation. Someone wants to travel from A to B and finds himself a driver with a car. Uber matches prospective passenger to driver, and facilitates the contact and co-operation between both. Small scale, local — but repeated worldwide.
Think of AirBnB. Same story, now applying to holiday makers and property owners. Or Ebay: buyers and sellers. The list goes on.
Less conspicuous: Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook can all be considered to be means of communication, supporting co-operation.
But all these wonderful services are free. How can this be? Here is where data comes in. These service providers observe us closely when we deal with each other and learn tons of stuff about each of us, personally. They profit by selling these observations. Now, one may take issue with this business model, and I do. It unhinges our society. But focus too much on it and you lose sight of something at least as important.
What attracts us by the billions in the first place are the services themselves. It is the way this information structure supports us in conducting our daily life, in dealing with each other. It is not all serious stuff; a lot is just fun, but nevertheless.
Turn to big corporations outside the tech sector, and you’ll observe the same pattern. A large part of the the software made worldwide is to structure corporations. To support internal co-operation. To facilitate companies dealing with each other — which is really just people co-operating across corporation borders. Such software is not cheap, neither to acquire, nor in terms of required investment to actually use it. These are todays’ means of production in a very real sense. I am not saying that a steel plant is not important; but I claim that without enterprise software, companies like Tata could not exist in our current world.
Because of cost it is just wealthy organisations that can afford the necessary means to organise themselves, solidifying the trend that Marx observed: the concentration of money, means of production and thus power. It is this exploitation based economy that has brought us unimaginable riches and at the same time wrecked our world, as Rob Wijnberg concisely formulates it (1).
Interestingly, analysis of this class of software reveals the same patterns over and over again. The details are beyond the scope of this column, but suffices it to say that all of them can be captured in a vocabulary of just five terms, Context, Role and Perspective primary among them. Role especially, and despite the mathematical footing we’ve given it, it’s all what a layperson might think it to be. We are intimately familiar with the concept ‘role’, as we are socialised right from birth to recognise, play, respect and invent roles.
Building on this insight, Cor Baars and myself have created a language to express models of co-operation. Currently we make software that runs such models. Now here is a thing to take note of: ‘run a model’ does not mean something like ‘simulate a co-operation process’. Instead, it means that the computers that run the model together form an ad hoc infrastructure to support people when they co-operate. Note the plural: a model runs on multiple machines. We liken our program to an operating system, but given its federative nature we’ve coined the name co-operating system for it.
The software that Uber runs costs many millions. As does Airbnb’s, Ebay’s, etc. This is because each of these programs is built from the ground up. It is also because it is run centralised, requiring enormous resources (servers, networks) to service a worldwide public. Centralisation is required for their data-based business model. In contrast, with Perspectives (2) one creates a service by just providing the essential model. All the rest is achieved by the runtime system — coded once, fit for thousands of patterns of co-operation. Even more important, the software runs on computers we already have: our laptops, mobile phones, desktops.
Software like Perspectives has the potential to support us — ordinary people — in the way we co-operate daily with each other. It can empower us to form well-supported ad hoc ‘organisations’ for which currently no business case exists. Because of this potential, we’ve put it in the public domain. It is a key that should not be in the hands of the happy few.
(1) Wijnberg coined the phrase I took as the title of this column.
(2) Perspectives is the name of our program. It is work supported by NLnet.
This is the ninth column in a series. The previous one was: The Role Of Artificial Intelligences. Here is the series introduction.