Original en español: Lógica distribuida para la autoorganización ciudadana
Distributed Logic for citizen self-organization
The following is a brief review of the history of distributed logic, to understand how the internet has enhanced. It then analyzes the ability to remove dependencies that impose centralized systems to citizens as well as the differences in efficiency between centralized and distributed systems. Besides reviews some cases where distributed logic has jumped the barriers of the digital, and how it has changed the context in which it is applied. Finally, we describe the current trend that is occurring re-centralization online, what that means for citizenship, and how distributed logic is an indispensable tool to reverse this trend.
This article was first published in the book Ciberoptimismo, conectados a una actitud, edited by Cibervoluntarios Foundation.
Background: Before the internet, let’s talk about the Maya
The distributed logic is not new and was not born with the Internet, not even something exclusively Western. The decision process in Maya communities has take place for centuries in a distributed model. To agree the community members come together in pairs and talk, each member has to talk to everyone else, spend time exclusively to each person to tell his approach and listen to the other. Only then will be ready to reach a consensus. This way you make decisions equal to all parties, hindering individual appropriation of discourse. Even today, the Zapatistas continue to rule their communities well, actually doing its best “Here the people
command and the government obeys”. However, Maya distributed decision making has a scale limitation: only applies to a community, a group of people with the enough degree of trust in each other, where all members know each other and have a strong and uniform level of commitment.
Internet has saved this limitation and to apply distributed logic to a network of people outside a community, that do not even have to know each other. Internet function has allowed different values based on the engagement, such as recognition, generating regulating mechanism operating at the network scale.
As has been written repeatedly, internet has in its DNA the distributed logic. The U.S. government, through its Department of Defense created ARPANET in the late sixties. The network that gave rise to the Internet was launched with the idea that universities and other research centers communicate and share resources. ARPANET allowed the seamless exchange of knowledge and information among researchers around the country, and create a network in which the computing capacity of each computer could be used by others in an age in which the processors were not as powerful as now. The design of the network architecture was distributed from the beginning, without a machine centralizing communications.
Perhaps the first experience of distributed production globally was the development of communities of free software, real meritocratic systems that have laid the foundation for networking outside economic profitability. Hackers who participated in them invested hours of their free time in the development of software unpaid, so the currency was the time and not money. The reward money was not obtained, but a recognition of the community in accordance with their abilities and dedication. Thousands of programmers around the world, spending time and gaining recognition, were the ones who developed the core of the free Linux operating system in the early nineties, no cash involved. Thousands of hackers are still in use today in the same way.
From Internet business development in the late nineties this model of operation has been moving to many other contexts that have been radically transformed.
The tug of war between the central-it and distributed
In 2006 Google landed in China. After negotiations with the Chinese government agreed that certain results are censored in the Chinese version of the browser. In January 2010, after seriously damaged their public image (to the point of staggering first generally his, now forgotten slogan, Do not be evil), decided to put an end to censorship, the Chinese government began to run by itself. Inside the Great Firewall, Chinese companies began to cooperate with the government and foreign competition step removed. China’s case is paradigmatic. No party, no government or companies, foreign or domestic, considered the Chinese citizen for the decision making.
Even in scenarios such as Chinese, it is clear that the Internet has provided new opportunities for meeting and exchange of information, transforming the citizenship of each country in a transnational connected crowd with a capacity of cooperation and action for social transformation previously nonexistent. Since these spaces are the places in which, increasingly, cooperation dynamics are generated in the public network, it is necessary to analyze and understand what tools are used and what the governing logic is. Who has control of them depend on their autonomous existence according to the needs of citizens, not corporations or governments with remote interests to those of their customers or the governed, as was —and is-- the case of China.
According to network theory, in a distributed configuration “The removal of any of the nodes do not disconnect from the network to any other. Thus all nodes are connected to each other without having to necessarily pass through one or more local centers”. A distributed system is theoretically uncontrollable by one of its nodes, as opposed to centralized or decentralized systems. Therefore, the distributed operation is a critical feature, but not sufficient, for a digital space for citizen action remains outside the unilateral control of governments or companies.
People who have suffered damage to their laptop and have wanted to repair it by themselves, they may have tried to find the manual for their machine on the internet. Probably would not have met. Unless clients are one of the few brands that offer manuals on its website, is an arduous task. For most computer manufacturers do not publish the technical specifications of their products is an effective measure to shorten life. Not sharing this information difficult home repair, but it is also a way of making a living prevent small businesses repair, inconvenient obstacles for manufacturers to generate planned obsolescence in their products, in order to sell more.
Given this scenario, for years several networks of users and professional repair manuals compiled websites, bypassing intellectual property laws, are offered freely. The project iFixit goes a step further: the people involved in it dismantled the products of big brands, study them, understand how they work and make their own manuals, instead of play originals and exposed to demand. iFixit gets free general interest information and introduces a bad practice, but also change the rules of the game: for manufacturers no longer makes sense not to share the manuals. As shown by iFixit, when applying a distributed operating system, implicitly or explicitly, with intent sought or not, are removed dependencies party impose on the rest used for its own sake. Those who did not, regain control of decision and action, autonomy within the system.
Efficiency and effectiveness in distributed systems
Distributed systems are often more efficient than centralized ones. If not, how is it possible that after half an hour of airing your favorite series on any channel in the United States can see subtitles in your language on the Internet? Vocational translators distributed networks worldwide, connected through internet, share the footage of the chapter and then assemble the fragments, and not take more than half an hour to do that. And if you can wait a few hours, you will have the dubbed version in your native language. How is it possible that the same chapter take six months to reach television channels from your country?
The distributed logic, is perhaps the most powerful conceptual tool that internet and democratization of technology have provided. As recounted in Chris Anderson The Long Tail was distributed observation skills of thousands of visitors to the NASA website which allowed to identify more than 200,000 craters of Mars. The project Mars Clickworkers in 2001, when the Internet was still young, allowed this task in three months, when depended on the ability of concentrated observation scientists and students could take years.
Later projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which allows anyone to classify galaxies by their shape from photos, corroborating Mars Clickworkers intuition that for certain tasks such as observation or tracking images, the ability to spread out with large group without specific training or preparation is more
efficient than the most prepared of research teams that can never be as numerous. On the Internet, distributed networks facilitate the free movement of bits of information, and a way in many cases more efficient than under a centralized system. But distributed operation not only reduces the time required to perform a task or achieve a goal, in some cases provides a system efficiency.
Think of any traditional centralized tax system: an administration collects the money, decides where to invest and distributes it. The goal is a deal that meets the needs and desires of all taxpayers. It’s hard to find a tax system that all governed like, and always will be initiatives or areas that do not fit in the games that come out of the taxes, or do not have the ability to access the administration division. Distributed financing systems such as crowdfunding skip unilateral decisions of a State, a company or any other centralized source of funding, where to invest money. They also have the added advantage that they are social legitimation processes of projects. If the required number of people invest in something, if there are many small contributions, means that there is a sufficient number of people who consider of projects. If the required number of people invest in something, if there are many small contributions, means that there is a sufficient number of people who consider the project interesting, useful or relevant. Financial support is distributed as social acceptance, constituting a prefilter to avoid spending resources on projects that do not care enough or are not mature. I do not mean by this that the crowdfunding have to replace the tax, but it is interesting that the distributed logic has helped
finance initiatives that were not possible before.
In the offline world distributed logic does not only affect the bits
In the time that the distributed logic is understood, just need imagination to apply it to other systems where the information is not necessarily the subject, but objects, money, people or energy. When distributed logic crosses digital borders is when it purchases its full potential. Also here the idea is the same: to reduce economic dependency, social, cultural, or energy, provided by the distribution of services and resources.
Anyone who has walked through Berlin will see here and there robust red bicycles scattered throughout the city. The public bike system has no stations to park or go get a bike: Bike Berliners pick where they find and leave when they reach their destination, outside the theater or in the middle of the Tiergarten. This apparent chaos has two features that make it work: the system has a very high number of bikes, and the bikes are locked when parked, unblocked electronically via a mobile message or a payment card when you want to use them. This allows operation without stations and have a high probability of finding a bike when needed. This distributed system, which was launched without having anything to do with internet, could see that all you need to run a distributed system is critical mass, bikes in this case.
Couchsurfing and other hospitality networks are the distributed property . On the one hand reduce economic dependencies of a travel, but perhaps most interesting is that destroy our cultural and social agencies, our canonical or preconceived idea of travel: tourism, travel way predominantly before, is reduced to a choice of a much wider range. If we add to the
distributed accommodation the car sharing networks, such as Bla bla car, we have a real distributed system for the mobility of people.
Another interesting case is that of the Editorial Orsai that has introduced the distributed logic to the world of publishing distribution. Hernán Casciari, the responsible editor used to write for traditional publishing and
general media. Tired of seeing such a high percentage of their work reversed in them and not in himself, and how he was imposed exclusivity clauses that prevented him from publishing his writings freely, said goodbye to his former bosses and created Orsai. The publisher publishes a literary magazine bimonthly paper. His idea was to make a magazine accessible to as many readers as possible to what they created its own currency with a value relative to having the right price in all countries. The currency, PD$, gets its value from the price of the largest newspaper in the country on Saturday. The magazine always costs 15 PD$, but that in Spain is 9 € and in Finland 13 €, for example. On this basis the distribution was opened to anyone who wanted to perform the functions of local distributor, that would receive the copies to local price. At first, the publisher could decide what the profit would be, the overprice of the magazine related to what Orsai was paid. Although now the system is less flexible, and the publisher sets the dealers’ profit. Orsai distributed distribution has sold nearly 20,000 units in 2013 to 176 cities, thanks to its 210 distributors. Quite an achievement considering that this is a paper magazine that is offered for free in online PDF.
The Internet re-centralization
As explained by P2P production mode in cooperative group Las Indias, “under all communication architecture hides a power structure”. If internet, born with distributed architecture, has enhanced distributed ways of doing and relationship, what if it becomes a centralized or decentralized structure?We do not need to do a science fiction exercise to represent the scenario: today most of the digital spaces we use have neglected the distributed spirit of the net creating dependent users, captive in the worst case.
Apparently it is safe to use WhatsApp messaging instead of sending an SMS, and after a first glance, communicate through Facebook may seem equivalent to sending an email, but it is not. The Short Message System and e-mail enable distributed communication without dependence on a single server and therefore a single company, WhatsApp and Facebook on the other hand are centralized systems. If we want to send a message WhatsApp have to use the language created by the company WhatsApp, that only means the application WhatsApp. The SMS instead is a system that sends and receives messages using standard protocols for communication between machines. Similarly, when using Facebook, we are using Facebook servers without option.
In the case of search engines, with Google as a paradigm, the centrality becomes more important. Google orders internet, based hierarchy rules that he defines, an algorithm that is not public. A change in their criteria makes internet topology changes, Google’s decisions can make invisible certain content simply leaving it out from the results. Pages indexed by search engines make up what is called the surface web, but the truth is that there is an internet outside the borders of Google and other search engines, unknown territory called Deep Web representing 95% of the internet: what is out there of the search engines does not exist since it is difficult for someone to find. The existence of this invisible Internet is due to technical limitations of the search engines, but also is due to strategic and conscious choices of the companies that develop them.
The clearest and everyday case to understand the effects of the internet re-centralization is Megaupload, the file-sharing service that disappeared from the overnight struck by claims of infringement of intellectual property. Millions of users lost access to files that were hosted on their servers, whether they were illegal or not. Megaupload perfectly exemplifies the vulnerability of peripheral nodes of a centralized network, users in this case.
We can say that citizenship depends increasingly on the Internet to communicate, to find information, to store it so we can share it. The three previous cases, Facebook, Google and Megaupload exemplify centralized services that meet the three requirements above.
Faced with this scenario in which the citizens become more dependent centralized services users, we can imagine an alternative in which distributed control of our data, of the internet to which we have access and our communications back to our hands.
As an alternative to Google, the P2P search engine Yacy functions
staying the search results on the computers of users and not in data centers owned by a company. Their algorithm is public, modifiable and replicable. This means that there is no single search engine, there are so many as people are using it, and every Yacy installation can modify the algorithm for indexing pages that fit your needs, probably reducing the non-indexed, inaccessible to internet.
Alternative to Facebook, federated social network Diaspora allows to install their software on your own server to launch a “local” social network, preserving users control over their node and data contains. At the same
time, Diaspora has a connection system between nodes that allows being part of the “global” social network in the case you want to.
Alternatively to Megaupload, systems of P2P file sharing, such as those based on the torrent protocol, connect the machine directly to users without reliance on any central server. This allows files to be hosted on any computer on the connected network, even repeated, so that if one computer is turned off, you can always turn to someone else who has the same file.
Finally, the project Unhosted has been developed under the idea of separating the application code of personal data of users who use them, allowing them to choose where to host their information, recovering their control over it regardless of the service used.
The tools to retrieve the distributed nature of the Internet exist, for every service we use in centralized internet, we can find another alternative scenario that builds a distributed alternative scenario. Just need to use them, because as in the Berlin public bike system, all distributed internet distributed needs to run is critical mass.
