The dialogue of social and information technologies
Many software developers have converged lately in favor of a complete ecosystem of freely available, interoperable social tools and technologies. Such an ecosystem could help humanity to organize more genuinely, building sustainable social energy in favor of freedom and accountable opportunity for all.
I’d like to outline some fundamental concepts I associate with this brilliantly hopeful movement, including one key creative tension. These views reflect discussion with many explorers at Enspiral, Collaborative Technology Alliance and elsewhere.
State of Emergence
Humanity is entering a new state of high energy and interactivity. The Internet has put ideas and information from diverse cultures into frequent direct contact with each other, greatly accelerating the evolution of our personal and collective potentials for creation and destruction.
In physics and chemistry, high energy levels often disintegrate structures which formed at lower levels. New structures emerge, more stable and lasting. Likewise, humanity is outgrowing historic social structures, and must find new ones which survive and thrive amidst high energy exchanges of ideas and information.
For many reasons, I’ve come to think that our high energy cultures will need to encourage personal autonomy and collective opportunity on all scales of social organization. We will need to marginalize coercive behaviors and rules, and at the same time, we will increasingly recognize the normal advantages of cooperation over competition.
Cooperative and competitive forms develop naturally, on all levels of the association of matter and energy. It’s cooperation, however, which creates all forms. Competition, which we so frequently glorify or villainize, is merely a special case of the many ways in which cooperative forms interact. Competition isn’t inherently bad, nor inherently avoidable. Competition drives the assimilation, differentiation or disintegration of structures and systems which depend excessively on one or more shared, limited resources. Competition may often seem inevitable, because some resources are critically limited within any specific frame of reference. Others, however, are not.
Ideas and information, including creative tools, aren’t limited in the ways that material resources are. The cost of copying and distributing them, for instance, approaches nothingness. On the other hand, the research, development and evolution of ideas and information still require significant resources, some of which are critically limited. This creates a key global challenge: how to practically maximize the value of existing ideas and information, while reliably incentivizing the research and development of new ideas and information.
This unprecedented challenge requires more powerful and versatile technologies for cooperative effort of all sorts — peer-to-peer, peer-to-network, project-to-project, and so on — on all scales of society, from personal relations to global community.
Technologies
I’ll use some rather precise descriptive terms here, just hoping to communicate clearly.
Technology includes tools, techniques, and systems (or technologies) of tools, techniques, and agents.
Technology can do at least a few basic things. It can perform processes upon resources, and it can regulate or automate processes. For instance, we can regulate and automate material processes with complex mechanisms and machines. We can regulate social processes by constructing strict rules, policies, and procedures; and we can practically automate those processes by assigning people to strict roles of administrative responsibility. However, since we’re not machines, we can also create informal, organic social processes, which are based more upon expectations and guidelines than coercively enforced rules.
I’ll describe some personal distinctions of social technology and of information technology, because I think their relationship is critically important to our future.
Social Technology
Social technology incorporates material technology and information technology. However, many common social tools, techniques and systems developed long ago in ‘low-tech’ cultures.
For millennia, we’ve had many types of social interactions: personal, cultural, economic and political. Across these overlapping domains, we share ideas, emotions, values, and goals through processes which I’ll describe as communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration.
Communication encompasses all acts of sharing ideas, information, emotion, values and objectives. Communication precedes coordination, cooperation and collaboration, and it’s crucially important for the regulation and evolution of those processes.
Coordination is the arrangement and/or modification of separate processes — regardless of who does them — in ways which seem mutually beneficial, or at least less harmful. For instance, the activities of two groups may be differentiated to reduce unnecessary competition.
Cooperation, in this ‘social technology’ context, is the parallel pursuit of a described/defined process by two or more social agents. For instance, crowdsourcing is (supposed to be) cooperative. Stigmergic ‘snowball effects’ can rise from lightly coordinated cooperative efforts.
Collaboration is the collective pursuit of one or more objectives, oriented towards creating a specific result.
All group projects, and organizations, involve collaboration on one or more processes. However, roles in project management, administration and (when applicable) ownership are typically limited and exclusive. Many projects rely deeply on contributions from their communities.
Communities, of any sort — people who share resources and interests — have many reasons to coordinate and, at times, cooperate. Collaborative efforts, however, aren’t often shared across an entire community. Projects often attempt to capture most if not all of the cooperative potential of a target group or community, with widely varying degrees of success.
I view the distinction between projects and communities to be of deep social importance, so I’ll revisit it frequently.
Information Technology
Now I’d like to distinguish information technology as simply as possible from social technology as I’ve described it above.
Information technology, in a deliberately generic sense, includes all technologies for transmitting, recording, storing, sorting, filtering, processing and displaying qualitative and quantitative data.
Information technology these days includes all kinds of hardware and software. However, written language is a fundamental information technology which has always reshaped cultures it’s entered.
Humanity
Compelling social and information technologies have been integral to the development, differentiation, and occasional fusion of cultures and subcultures. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” This should lend a cautionary, reflective note to our assessments of current and potential technologies.
With that in mind, I offer an earnest suggestion:
In the design of social and information technologies, always aim to advance personal autonomy and collective opportunity.
Humans needn’t be used as tools within machine-like social systems. Individual roles of any sort — from an open community’s guests, to an organization’s board of trustees — need not relegate us to automatic functions, nor prescribe our activities so strictly that we fear to explore, engage, and express our humanity. As information technologies evolve, this becomes ever more true. We have fewer and fewer excuses to fall back on Industrial Age, bureaucratic social systems, which some people saw beyond before they developed.
“Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.” — Immanuel Kant
Open hearts, open source
Having placed humanity at my center, I want to say some nice (and well-deserved) things about a special realm of information technologists today.
I believe that various qualities in open source software projects have helped to advance not only information technology, but social technology, as we move uncertainly towards a global peer-to-peer age.
What’s socially special about open source coding?
- Coders can easily cooperate and collaborate remotely.
- Open source creates a relatively open, democratic competition of ideas and value-provided.
- Coders can design complex virtual machines without using material resources. I.e., code work is radically ephemeralized.
- Code either works, or it doesn’t. Mistakes can be directly identified.
- Online code repositories automatically document everyone’s contributions — making it easy to tell who’s done what.
- Code has always benefited obviously from intentionally modular design.
- Distributed version control , at Github and elsewhere, can and IMO should change how we think of creative collaboration in general.
Convergence
Commons are all about community, on any scale. As Alina Siegfried writes:
“When you design for communities, you design for cooperation and abundance…
This makes commons-based economies hyper-productive, as people aren’t having to waste time and resources reinventing the wheel.”
Some emerging trends in transdisciplinary commons-related thinking:
- Decentralization
- Federated social structures
- Fractal organization
We can pursue these concepts in open networks and in tightly managed projects. I believe that by doing so, we may gradually dissolve artificial distinctions, and find true community.
The dialogue we need
As innovative thinkers have pursued big concepts like decentralization, federation and fractals — and faced big problems, such as consumerism and financialism — I’ve come to perceive the unstated difference between social technology and information technology as a source of some confusions and tensions.
Collaborative software serves as an interface of social technology and information technology. It inevitably straddles both worlds with a dialogue between the desired and the currently possible. That dialogue can improve, and extend, indefinitely.
Communities don’t need designers to tell them what kind of social technology they want, or should want. Likewise, designers don’t need to unconditionally limit themselves to the desires of current communities.
Key thinkers in software, and other disciplines, envision an open system of tools and apps to serve humanity in general. Not specific clients, investors or communities, but humanity. At such a broad level of ambition, I think that real communities and real designers must challenge each other to help evolve organizational models, information technology, and software together.
If we can do this, I believe we can turn my previous, ominous McLuhan quote on its head with an older saying:
