Imagining Data Communities
A curated comment thread from “Overgrowth of the Digital Economy…”
A question that’s been on the minds of many leading up to Holo’s launch today (whoa…) concerns what a data community and its governance might be like.
I call computing networks “data communities” for two reasons. One is to make visible the fact that networks constitute communities, even though it may not feel that way right now (thanks a lot, corporate web, and your divide and conquer strategy that masquerades as meaningful participation). The other is to generate awareness of the fact that, within these networks, there is always something of value being produced (data) — that both enhances coordination of flows of resources in the present and regeneration via simultaneous recording that makes this possible.
Today we take our first major step into the agent-centric world of Holochain. It’s an app that encourages users, through issuance of mutual credit crypto-currency, to band together to allow those not familiar with the benefits of user-centered computing to try out distributed apps through a web browser. Think platform-coop style cloud!
For the occasion I scraped some dialogue from a recent post to shine a little light on application governance…
Thanks to Linas Vepstas who responded to my initial post with the following:
OK, I’m just now starting to understand the meta-issue here. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s this:
Corporations are building psychological profiles of individuals, and then pushing them into bad behavior patterns (pushing adverts at shop-o-holics) or using that data to deny services (e.g. deny insurance to members of the motorcycles-without-a-helmet club) or deliver propaganda (e.g. posting “Hillary eats aborted babies for breakfast” ads to social conservatives)
So its not about social media, per-se, or apps, per se, or communities, or curating the big-data that they generate — its that the availability of such fine-grained data can be used for nefarious purposes, and we must protect against that.
Yes, that’s the meta-issue, precisely. The Internet, as it stands, is pushing us further into our bad habits rather than encouraging us to become more capable of collaborating, more open-minded, and more self-aware. Most people think about this as a problem of “filter bubbles”, saying that we can’t rely on the algorithms that we naively trust to deliver content to us. I take an infrastructural view on the problem instead because, to take Google as an example, even its top-level engineers can’t audit or re-work search algorithms in a way that is neutral to what it “knows” about the user. And why would they willingly relax their world domination, anyway?
To me it actually IS about communities and curating big data. Because I’m not at all saying that we shouldn’t be able to transmit detailed data about ourselves. My point is that we are not choosing the communities who curate big data, and if we don’t care about that, we are failing to exercise our freedom of association (one of my favorite freedoms ever! lol).
I think this happens because people are used to…well..just being born into a particular community. The digital world is finally becoming a teenager, realizing “hey! I can choose a clique or a sub-culture more aligned with me!” On blockchain, where data is held universally, it’s like a rebellious/depressed teen, choosing to be anonymous to avoid facing the question about what would be a community to meaningfully take part in.
So, to protect ourselves, we can “reboot” this trend by switching to distributed apps that are governed by its users and whose data is actually held by users, or perhaps by trusted community stewards (like the ecosystem my teammates and I are building with Holo).
Vis-a-vis curating data, my long term vision for distributed apps is that users would be able to opt their data in to support causes. To take one of your examples, motorcycles-without-helmets club would have its own cycling app and someone could decide one day “hey everyone! if you opt-in with your data, we could contribute our stats for research toward legislation to change helmet laws! or for collaborating on proposals to insurers for better-fit plans!”, etc.
Linas says:
To create these apps, someone has to write the code. One can imagine that volunteers will write open source, but there’s lots of experience with that — in short, for every successful open-source project, there are 9 that failed. Now, FB and google have thousands of brilliant engineers who are highly paid, highly motivated; how can you compete against that without moving around similar quantities of money?
Undeveloped in your article is how communities might actually work. Do the village-elders (curators) have the power to reveal parts of your profile that you’d normally keep private? Can they federate with other villages after a majority vote? A super-majority? Is there a do-not-track feature that a user can request, as they move from community to community? What prevents nefarious entities from tracking you anyway, and building up a psychological profile of you, against your wishes?
Can anyone be a curator, like wikipedia? Are there ranks of higher and lower authority (like wikipedia)? What motivates people to seek high rank? Money? Fame? Wikipedia is crawling with high-rank jerks, dishonest players, malicious actors with the power to ban, harass, abuse lowly users; as a community, they have not yet figured out how to prevent abuse by the high-ups. And a wikipedia user, once banned, has this badge of shame, forever, whether or not they were actually guilty of anything, whether or not the accusation was false or malignant. There’s no recourse.
So there are really three problems: (1) how do you fund the creation of these apps? (2) How does identity masking and revealing actually work? (3) How does the structure encourage good behavior in those ranks that have power?
You ask great questions. Let me take a stab, with full disclosure that I am answering not from a speculative position, but from within a group that is actively trying to build exactly what we’re describing.
The way we have set up the funding for the creation of these apps, in addition to incentivized hackathons to jump start a basic app suite, is through capitalizing a network of hosts that we set up in order to create a bridge from the centralized web to a decentralized/distributed alternative. The motivation here is that even distributed apps are only useful if they attract a decent amount of traffic, so it stands that there should be a way for people to test them out before adoption. And they’re not only more useful in the sense that I want to choose between more than the same 5 apartments if I’m using a distributed “FairBnB”. It’s also that more dedicated users means more infrastructure brought BY users themselves!
Finally, there’s a concern that without such a bridge, the benefits of decentralized alternatives largely stays only within the reach of the already tech-savvy. This, too, is a crucial facet of the project in that our aim to fairly distribute the power that inheres in networks simultaneously rewards what many already do for free (think seeding files using a torrent client), confers upon newbies a visitor, or tourist status, welcoming them to a taste of user-governed apps, and regenerates itself by leveraging algorithms that give a bird’s eye view of the network itself, to provide more compensation.
But this all requires hosting for those who are not running their own full nodes, to which we apply the 90s classic “bring your idle computing capacity” fix, with the addition of a mutual credit cryptocurrency that tracks available storage and processing power. We also have a crowdfund to sell full-node devices to future hosts and hosting credits to future devs. The network capitalization goes almost entirely toward funding app dev in some form or another (whether through our hirings, hackathons and on-boarding education, network-wide approved allocation of funds toward development).
Protocols for identity masking and revealing is context-dependent, and fit-for-purpose. You probably wouldn’t want to have the same validation and verification requirements for sending a tweet as for moving around millions of dollars. At root, though, the user would be in control of their digital identity and able to move through different communities, with only their source chain (record of previous transactions) in their backpack, so to speak, adhering to different social standards (like in real life). This is the point at which it makes sense to speak of applications themselves as communities with different norms, languages, thresholds for interpersonal familiarity, etc.
As above, it really depends on the app and the degree to which it’s necessary to have such power. Nevertheless, there could be currencies built into apps that require a significant degree of central control. Again taking as an example the distributed hosting app, centralized only in the sense that it implements an algorithm for aligning its mutual-credit currency with the demand for, and actual computing capacity of, the network: The structure encourages good behavior through auditing, first, and as with any network, the massive incentive of participation in order to increase value for all.
As the issuer of the currency, Holo is an “infrastructure provider”, a role for which it takes fees for providing DNS service that links the network back to the centralized web and maintenance. Standard stuff. But then it also puts transaction fees toward governance tools (like in-built voting mechanisms) for the ecosystem itself that will enable the crowd-direction of a major part of those funds, as I mentioned earlier. That’s how an app becomes a community — collectively broaching, distributing, and directing funds generated in common rather than failing to consider (or worse, obscuring) the “wealth of networks”.
Further, its allocation of transaction fees within the network are public entries signed to a distributed hash table (public validation structure that uses gossip), and is linked to its account, as would be the case for a public entry for any host on the network. The Holo organization is not even a representative in this case, able to take advantage of the gap constitutive of representation per se, but more of a network servant whose instigator advantage means that it technically enacts the maintenance that everyone agrees needs doing. Similar to a bunch of people that just had a pizza delivered. If, after a couple moments of staring at each other, someone gets up and sets the table…would you really consider that actor more or less powerful than the others?
Just one use case, but this is how the first large-scale app on Holochain does it.
