The Utopic Collaborative society: a side note about transparency
Collective intelligence, transparent society, big data, cryptocurrency. Words that are buzzing, and with the release of the descent film adaptation of Dave Eggers ‘The Circle’, will be hotter than ever. A couple of days after having watched the movie I stumbled upon a book by Dutch philosopher Hans Achterhuis called ‘Koning van Utopia’. Where the movie adaptation lacks a bit of content by having a simple: ‘be aware of technological evolution, what seems good can become evil, but at the end it will still prevail.’ as the final conclusion, Achterhuis brings our attention towards the fact that total transparency was always sold as an utopian dream. From Thomas More classic till the The Circle: sharing is caring.
But let’s use both images of utopian, or should we say dystopian societies to create a side note of what total transparency would mean in an utopic collaborative society.
Towards a collaborative future: documentation is key
Since my first experience with truly cooperative movement like POC21 and later Enspiral, Edgeryders or Sensorica I’m fascinated by the methodology and injected much of those values into my projects and personal philosophy. How can we put ego aside and create collaborative structures on a large scale?
At the moment I’m observing two organizations in transition: Civic Innovation Network and OpenFab. The first is creating an ‘open wall’ to have discussions about societal problems while using all the knowledge and people contributing to create tailor made solutions. The latter is starting a gamification of their process towards a much more playful way to work in a fablab and make collaborations as easy as joining a guild in World of Warcraft. Both have something in common: the documentation plays a key role in building the structure.
This logic comes from the open source movement and is starting to be implemented in civic society. Github is therefore a great tool through his pull and push request, branches and repositories to create an almost organic process for progress inside an organization. Every interaction is noted and can be traced. Nothing is completely lost and there is enough room to experiment. It gives you the feeling to be building a termite mound: all having the same goal, but non has a blueprint to where to go, it just feels right.
Documentation, once you get hold on it (the protocol, the time of work spend on it), becomes your best friend and makes any new project easier to start, because you can build on what is been done. In an utopic collaborative society, everything would be documented and would be accessible. Rightfully putting creative common labels would become as easy as buttering a toast. As argumented by the CEO’s in ‘The Circle’ data would be used for medical progress, big technological leaps and for personal benefits. Because why would you deprave a child in a wheelchair of your awesome nightly bike ride, isn’t that a bit egoistic? So film and document everything! Once again: sharing is caring!
Where does the technology end and the humanity start?
I like using an anecdote written by Rutger Bregman’s in his book ‘Je hebt wel iets te verbergen’ about internet privacy and transparency: in a small village in the Netherlands, somewhere in the 70’s while doing renovation, a newlywed couple found a book with all the genealogy of the local Jewish community dating till 1942. After doing some research they found out that the local rabbi hided this book just a couple of hours before the German soldiers came in his house. Would this information have been exposed, hundreds of families would have been deported. While we all can agree the importance of documentation, we have to start thinking: what and why do we want to document.
Another dystopian specialist is the creator of Black Mirrors that showed us the downside of constant documentation through season three opener ‘Nosedive’ where everything you do is linked to a social media account and has repercussions towards your whole life. You are constantly noted on a scale of 5, and if you go under some level you get a lesser loan, facilities,… In a grotesque way it shows how a new hypocritical layer is created to suite societal demands through this system. People are nice to each other, only because they are afraid of losing stars. This rises the following question: Do we want documentation of the individual (sport bracelets, Instagram followers, places we were) where perverted side notes are easily created or do we want utilitarian documentation where the ‘I’ hasn’t a place to thrive?
As example of the latter I want to invite you to read this interesting piece about HOL: Human Operating Layer, a kind of Open Value Network with an humanistic central believe. Like Phoebe Tickell says at the end: ‘We may not have to rebuild the physical infrastructures, rely on technology to save the day (on its own) or start all new companies to realise the more beautiful world that many of us see as possible.’ This is where it get interesting, the moment when we are starting to understand that technology in itself will not save us, and that we need to invest much more time in researching a newly found humanistic approach of society.
Of course, on a short notice, there is a technological solution towards not perverting big data and it can be found inside cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. (For the neophytes, cryptocurrency are a way to create value without a central bank, so in a way completely distributed). This could be applied towards data too, having a distribution of data resources would make it difficult for big central organs to control the data. But it still raises the question: Is it in technology that we need to find narration of a new Utopia?
Humane Nature: still the most difficult code to crack
Maybe it is time to revisit David Hume major work ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’ that brought an enormous brick to the structure that was the enlightenment. He gave us a well argumented lecture about the comprehension, passions and morals of the human nature. But all these are now bamboozled by our urge to put it inside technology. We are aware that we became as a human a homo technologicus, but to what evolution do we want to bring technology at the table of the future collaborative utopia?
