A world of offense or a world of compossibilities?: Molly Russell, Greta Thunberg and online safety - how can we do better?

Modern stories like those of Molly Russell and Taylor Swift collide in curious — and consequential — ways. Young women are finding their faces brushed into pornographic content or onto other bodies in ways they may not consent to or agree to being presented. But our internecine struggles, ‘call-outs’ and bickering are an inadequate response. This article asks: “how might we all do better?”

What Molly had been witnessing on social media should not have been there but drawing lines between bad taste and genuinely harmful content is still proving impossible — for reasons we’ve yet to come to grips with. Who decides and how?

Whilst Molly’s father is reasonably critical of both social media and mental health services, there is another group who are failing to act responsibly: namely, you and me — the public.

First though, let’s acknowledge Ian Russell’s point: According to research conducted by Antono Béjar on Instagram users, 8.4% of 13 to 15-year-olds had seen someone harm themselves or threaten to harm themselves in the previous week. The Independent also revealed just under 300,000 children across Britain were waiting for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) treatment with an average wait time of 107 days. So, there is a major problem…

What could, would, or should the public do about it then?

Well, one ‘solution’ might be personal responsibility. But that’s insufficient, for several reasons; not everyone is responsible, people get things wrong, people disagree on what is and isn’t appropriate or allowable, people are not generally qualified to do the work of public censors, but most of all, people are largely unable to assert any rights they might have over harmful content.

The ‘solution’ we have now is farcical: ”We’re just a lot of young [people], like a lot of [people who have] just finished their degree… sat there trying to figure out how to judge all this content with no legal background” says one anonymous ex Facebook content moderator.

So another, more realistic way, is to literally take some, perhaps partial, ownership of the offending (and non-offending) materials. I have been campaigning for this partial public ownership of online ‘user generated content’ for many years — so far, to little avail, presumably because people do not understand the proposition. Hence, I write occasional but repeated articles like this one, trying to explain…

The idea is based on the work of several scholars and on plain observation and experience. One such scholar is Hillel Steiner, whose theory of compossibility distinguishes classically liberal, ‘negative’ rights, which do not compete, from positive rights (things we desire) which do. A simple example of a competing right would be mine, to privacy, and yours, to freely speak about me. These rights are naturally problematic and become litigious. Property rights, including intellectual property rights, differ in that they are compossible — they don’t compete.

This compossibility also means they can be shared. If we all own a house, we can all have the same rights in it. So what might this mean for Molly Russell or Taylor Swift, whose interests lay/lie in having some protections from online bullying or harassment and misrepresentation?

Well, what is clear is that it is not possible for Ian Russell, the mental health services, Taylor Swift, Greta Thunberg (pictured) or any other injured or concerned party to exercise their (desired) online rights or responsibilities — to privacy or care duties — over what are, although we seldom notice it, the intellectual property rights of other individuals and corporations. But what we, the public, forget, is that we have enormous skin in the game. We supply all of that ‘user generated content’ which powers the attention economy business models of the tech giants. Not only do we have natural property rights (according to John Locke) over every word, sound and image we create but our rights can be singular, joint and several. In our compossible property rights, we have power.

All we are missing is an awareness and means to assert it.

Eventually, everyone asks (me): “Ok, that’s all very academic but how does it help me? — or Molly, or Taylor or Myanmar etc..?”. My answer is: “You’re asking the wrong question. Try asking how you expect any other member of the public, on their own, like Elon or Mark, Meta, or X or You Tube, to help you?”. They can’t. They’ve proved it — and there is a reason. While we all waste our time ‘calling each other out’ and pointing fingers at the greater and lesser offenders, we are simply ignoring the solution. With the same rights as one another — shared rights — we each have all of the power of the public at large.

But we need to attack the problem of online harms through the compossible system of property rights rather than the ever decreasing circularity of so called identity rights. This is the sea change we are trying to effect.

The question then becomes: “How do I (little old me) assert my rights ‘against’ (it’s actually with) these giant corporations?” Well, apart from the fact that the corporations are generally crying out to be properly regulated, the answer is that we’ve already made a success of doing this for most of the twentieth century — by paying our taxes for a public censor. We enabled elected representatives to hire non elected civil servants for us, to work in the public interests of safety and morals as, for example, film censors, thus developing the still in use film classification system.

Now we get to the meat and bones of the problem.

The means of transferring image, text and sound (the media) used to be centralised. It slowly became more distributed, until now, it is almost entirely peer to peer. I ‘Whatsapp’ you a ‘link’, you ‘open’ it on ‘You Tube’ and then ‘share’ it via ‘LinkedIn’. Someone sees it there, ‘remixes’ it with another proprietary ‘app’ and re-issues it with a new set of rights as, say, an exercise video for their company’s business, who re-circulate the whole thing via all the same channels under a different set of ‘rights’.

The film censor looks at this, runs away and hides her head down the nearest rabbit hole… she’s no use anymore — totally redundant — or is she?

There are several issues: ownership, rights (primary and secondary) and technology being the main 3.

What eventually becomes clear is that what matters is what we do with potentially public content at the moment new rights are created. That’s the moment we, whoever we are, apply sufficient human creativity to trigger new intellectual property rights. It is at this moment when we have real power and that includes the power to ‘do something’ for Molly Russell, Taylor Swift, the Myanmar people and all who will continue to suffer from the public’s ongoing inability to protect itself and each other online.

So, having established WHAT we could, would or should, do, the next question is HOW?

This is the question I’ve been trying to address for at least 10 years now. At first, I argued and discussed, then tried to build a business, then tried to build a movement and now I concentrate on developing tools. What I’ve realised is that we need two things: the first is an interface. As bills like the online safety bill and the ‘side hustle’ tax bill come into force, we are all going to be shoehorned into trusting platforms to ‘keep us safe’ or ‘report our accounts for us’. This makes very few of us responsible for everyone and only compounds the already demonstrated inability of these companies to carry out these ‘surveillance’ duties — now on behalf of a state and without elected accountability. So, what is needed for people are interfaces for vendor relations management — as opposed to vendors managing us as customers. If you sell your words on 3 different platforms and your goods on 7 more, your tax bill is still going to require some collating — and it’s still, ultimately, your responsibility. Likewise, if an image of your daughter in a sexually compromised scene has been faked and spread across multiple platforms, you want to be able to act immediately. The second thing we need then — and we’re trying to do this without any interface now which is causing mayhem — is new, workable, rules. So what will enable us to act effectively, in the public interest? How do we do it?

Well, to answer that, we need to go back to basics and be a bit (legally) technical: first you need the right to act and a right to act on. To create this right, we need to assume a “negative community,” in which all human beings have an equal right to appropriate unappropriated resources”. (as opposed to a positive community, in which one set of individuals may exclude another). In other words, we need executable rights over public goods. Well, here’s the kicker: we all have an imagination! The public domain is where our shared imaginations create common or public goods. By establishing some shared property right over publicly owned goods, we create that right to act as well as rights to act on.

Hillel Steiner took these ‘rights’ and: “endorsed what used to be known as the “single tax” idea of Henry George. Georgists alleged that one cannot legitimately own naturally occurring resources, but can only have rights to the value one adds through one’s work, Therefore, those who use such resources must pay a tax (it is rarely indicated to whom) reflecting its value”.

Arguments arise about the “slight difference between the “right to an equal share” and the “equal right to appropriate a share”. Many have not been persuaded about public rights to equal shares in, say, land, as the Georgists proposed, but my proposal is for a new ‘Digital Georgism’, in which we might all, quite correctly, assume a right to an equal share in the raw materials of our human imaginations. It remains true that we may have no rights in our imaginations, but can legitimately own them as a collective ‘good’ — as well as their positive ‘products’. The simple difference between land property rights and creative property rights is that land is not a part of our own physical bodies. We most definitely and demonstrably DO own (at least a part of) our creativity — but we also share creativity with every other human being. So, sharing, to some degree, the ‘fruits’ of that creativity is entirely possible — as is sharing the rights and responsibilities created.

So, to return to how you might act in the interests of someone experiencing online harms as a result of some of these intellectual products, the answer becomes quite straightforward — by asserting your natural intellectual property rights — and responsibilities.

“And how do I do THAT?”

That’s why we’re building the tools. We think (there’s more than just me working on this now thankfully) that the first thing you need is an interface. To be able to assert your rights, which exist in multiple places, you need to manage all those ‘vendors’ (Meta, X, etc) in one — local — place. The second thing you need is an ability to know which rights you create are for you alone, for you and a select few others and which rights you share with everyone — and what responsibilities they create in turn. In Digital Georgism, the part of every IP asset which is shared — you always got some of your creative ability (yes, imagination can also be taught) from elsewhere — becomes, in itself, a contribution to a publicly owned store of wealth — a tax fund. Not just ‘in the public domain’ (ie, free and openly available to all) but chargeable to the private domain. Once you have established this pooled pot of wealth, you can use it as a resource for the public good. We can resource public censors, courts, content review panels and moderation and do all of the things we are vainly requiring platforms to do for us. We might even, as Steiner proposed, use it for a universal basic income. (UBI) Likewise, requiring only governments to do it is not working because they do not, as yet, represent a publicly owned stake in this wealth of (over)shared goods.

So, finally, #CultureBanked invites everyone to engage in building new digital tools fit for the future, engage in making new property rules fit for digital taxation and digital moderation and safety requirements and to say “yes” to sharing responsibility. Right now, I have no more to offer than this #culturebanked hashtag and these words. I’ve been using the hash for a few years so you can read this and do some (messy, online) research around it. Alongside Kendraio though, we’re now working hard to develop better ways of addressing these problems, but we need more partners and use cases and funding. And that means we need you to help us to help each other.

So far, we’ve built some asset management tools and we’ve built a (demo) interface for the public to notify platforms that they want their material to be treated as taxable supply goods. The problem is that under the current thinking of the OECD, we still only plan to tax corporations on their profits. The problem here, for all who have been harmed and will be harmed by online business models is that they’ve already used your ‘stuff’. And they’ve used it under their terms and not yours. To give Ian Russell the power he must lie awake at night wishing he had possessed — to protect his daughter — we need to empower each and every one of us to assert the natural property rights we have over all the ‘content’ we supply, freely at present, to global media corps who then swallow it and process it, purely for their own profit making requirements. Initially, there is no need to argue over the rules. Let’s do that when we’ve got enough of a resource to make them and the tools we’ll need to enforce them. my suggestion, for now, is that we find a way to, literally, take back control of the content we currently give away and neglect asof habit, with just a ‘click’. Want to do different?

We do have the power and the ability to start now by simply pooling our very considerable resources — human imagination and the free content it supplies.

Own it!

Please get in touch if you are interested in partnering, funding or any other aspect of working with us…