Web 3 and Continua of Dignity
Embedding dignified inclusivity in Web 3.0's aether
TL;DR This is a bit more of a critical, philosophically reflective essay on notions of dignity, so it’s best read in a calm, quiet place and a laid-back frame of mind.
“Web 3.0 is an inclusive set of protocols.”
Dialogues throughout 2018 and now into the new year in 2019 have continuously, if at times warily, touched on notions like welcoming doors and closed conversations, or openness and privacy, in distributed+decentralising development. And in fact, many such discussions are stemming from bigger, more age-old dilemmas of resolving psychological safety with and versus radical transparency. We must bear in mind that both come from completely different mindsets, and all in all from fundamentally diametric views of what constitutes toxicity.
Although solutions, or imagined scenarios, are going to have to necessarily confront and decide faced with tonalities of these paradoxical dilemmas, this is no longer about models like “Google” on the one hand “Bridgewater” on the other — we will have to dig much deeper, and reorient many conceptions altogether, to explore these questions adequately from within an evolved “distributed and decentralised” paradigm of dignity for building with blockchains in “Web3”.
“Dignity is different from respect. Dignity is a birthright.” – Dr. Donna Hicks, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs — Harvard University
We have to do this exploratory reorientation working from encounters and cultures of dignity — because, frankly, we all know that now it’s not simply organizational, but eco-systemic. And it’s also inseparable from the collective feeling that (re) decentralisation in general, or a community such as Ethereum, Zcash, ecc., offer both a technology and practical philosophy of hope.
Even given this, we have the really wonderful opportunity within the spaces of these conversations for creative and constructive conflict, rather than destructive or “open-ended” conflict. We should, though, be very weary of falling victim to zero-sum and isolationist narratives that sometimes legitimize exclusion. Our communities are heedfully striving to improve these kinds of dynamics — these “ingroup versus outgroup orientations” when dealing with social organization. This is something truly invaluable, because we should not act as if such core puzzles of humanity need not apply to us or our technology.
“Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases.”
Living out and committing to cultures of support and collaboration means the need to be able to fail publicly and gracefully. And it would be a mistake to dismiss such notions as “naiveté” about “cold, hard, harsh realities”, of “oh so dangerous and terribly risky perils” of being human in the world. The crux is that even in game-theoretical coordination our very value-functions need to necessarily involve dependencies on Others to engender the environments conducive to non-zero-sum, and which make abundance and cooperation possible.
Whether on-chain or off-chain, everything occurs on-life.
Because of this, corporal experience of encountering is very much key if we are going to understand how this could look and what it could be like. I hope I could also explain a bit more clearly. This does not refer solely to “in-person” meetings, but, an imagining of any “p2p relation” or person-to-person interaction, even a video call or forum chat, as “end-to-end embodied”. We make a lot of noise about decentralised technology, yet often neglect the underpinning phenomena of how to enable ‘decentralising’ coordination and cooperation to thrive when we’re looking at each other to experience connection, and trying to open space relationally for emergence. “End-to-end embodiment” means deepening understanding of future-analog computing and the dignity necessary to grant agency.
“There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane.” — George Dyson, “Childhood’s End”, The 2019 EDGE New Year’s Essay
Making these shifts is hard. It requires both cultural and behavioral changes that cannot happen without rethinking core themes like power, participation, and worth.
And here, Ubuntu as an example has this beautiful worldbuilding spirit, which can serve as a inceptive prism for coloring both present and future in our distributed, decentralising networks.
On a recent mission trip in South Africa, the potential of Ubuntu was even further fleshed out to better understand its role to share in the communities of Web 3 at their core.
“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”
This phrase (in Zulu languages) or motho ke motho ka batho (in Sotho languages), is often translated as “a person is a person through other people, though others include: a person is what they are because of other people; a person is a person because of others; we affirm our humanity when we acknowledge that of others; to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others in its infinite variety of content and form”…
Or, a lesser-known yet very beautiful rendering: “A human being is a human being through (the otherness of) other human beings”.
There is this inherent respect for the particularities of others’ views and modes, and the concept of Ubuntu gives “a distinctly African meaning to, and a reason or motivation for, a decolonizing attitude towards the other”, according to Louw.
A true Ubuntu embodies this attitude most notably as dialogue, i.e. it incorporates both relation and distance. It preserves the Other in their otherness, in their uniqueness, and without letting them slip too far into that distance.
Another core element is that an Ubuntu perception of the other is never fixed or rigidly closed. It is fluidly open-ended, and this allows the other both to be, and to become. It acknowledges an irreducibility of the other, i.e. never reducing them to any specific characteristic, or comportment, or function.
The grammar of the concept of Ubuntu affords this by denotation of both a state of being and one of becoming.
A key point here is not for romanticizing some idyllic notion of Ubuntu in society, but for a more critical, contemporary, and creative re-reading and rearticulation of the narrative…
True Ubuntu, says Louw, would take this particularity and plurality seriously, in that this interconnectedness of humanity in community does not subsume nor consume an other in their otherness. It preserves their right to their own dignity, and by extension a certain sphere of the roots of consent, because you cannot ask others to be vulnerable if you have not first created an environment of psychological safety.
We cannot ever force openness with regard to the transparency of interrelationships without firstly a fundamental right of privacy, because an Other has this dignity.
This has an entirely different ethos than many of our current approaches, specifically those we take to engendering inclusion and how we engineer. How we talk about inclusivity is paramount and needs to continue to be a major focus of discussion in 2019’s Web3 ecosphere.
“Interoperable inclusivity” is not a political stance. It is a modality for good, dignifying design.
An inclusive designing considers this full range of otherness, and of human diversity with respect to color, ability, language, culture, gender, age, sex, persuasion, neuro/cognitive, any and all other forms of human difference.
We need different models and modes through which to design, ones where cooperatives can sustainably produce commons, and are “statutorily oriented” towards the continuous creation of these common goods through an extension of our selves in becoming more Ubuntu conscious.
The commons produced by cooperative creation deeply involves this notional irreducibility and dignity of the Other.
Interoperable designing begs for thoroughly reworked paradigms of “Web 2’s oligopoly”, and we now need to open our considerations for designing for the potential beyond the simple network effect, beyond the Gaussian curves, beyond the falsely ‘externalizing’ metrics, beyond corners of dark UX, and beyond centralizing entropy.
Responsibility here, though, beckons as a core issue. As in, “should a group of people feel and act according to a responsibility within their power to affect a larger group or community of people?”. Or rather, under a notion of ‘public sphere’, “at what point does a group of private individuals become a “public institution”?
The public sphere, in a Habermasian sense, first of all here means a “realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed”. But the answers to these probes are unfortunately not so clear-cut, and this takes a lot of effort, coordination, power, and patience to both envision and see-through.
In fact, coming to understand the existence and futures of “multiple spheres” and “counterpublics” is quintessential, crucial framing for projects of decentralisation. This is all the more relevant in pushing towards deeper human ambitions beyond hierarchy for better decentralized cooperation.
And simply put, this is why dignity becomes such a crucial bedrock of understanding when designing + building in the entire Web 3.0 stack, via protocol on through to all other layers.
Accountability and the responsibility that accompanies running any “public good or service” both do come from this primordial yet contemporary relation of Ubuntu-like notions, of ‘being a person through and because of other people”, and holding ourselves to account to hold each other to account to hold power itself to account. And beyond from there.
Regarding openness and privacy — here a light might also be shone from a somewhat different perspective regarding marginality and power:
“I think the distinction between being seen and being watched is powerful because it articulates a nuanced, yet enormous dichotomy — one that ultimately boils down to who is granted permission to be perceived as human. We like to talk about the importance of visibility and representation for folks at the margins. I, myself, often write about feeling seen. There is an ongoing narrative that being visible might lead to being understood; that it will convince others that people are deserving of humanity. But for many, increased visibility does not lead to safety — only heightened surveillance and experiences of violence. We must interrogate how power shapes one’s gaze; how it can transform the act of seeing into the act of watching. (emphasis mine) — Lorraine Chuen
It’s easy for us to get lost in broad consequences and abstract concepts with largesse — affecting “everyone’s” data privacy, or openness for transparency’s sake as integral to freely open source and bedrock protocol culture. Such conversations are always important; still, they cannot be ahistorical.
Psychological safety and radical transparency are going to have to necessarily coexist here in some shape or form within decentralising human network constructs — and how we all co-design this, and why, means that even the ramifications of our choices which can bloom in future generations have this dignity embedded as a given.
This means we take stock. We breathe in. And we ask:
How can we engage in (world) building where even those at margins can feel at home, can be safe, can be understood as human, can be perceived inseparably from their dignity, and can be seen more as their full selves?
Dignity pragmatically means we can allow everyone the space to be reflective, to be uncertain, even to be confused. This is one of the most practical senses of “otherness”. And with all much due respect to many pioneering builders in this ecosystem, it also means taking this dignity into consideration and account when deciding on a path for sustainable economic models, value mechanics, and organizational designs.
The road will be long, yet invaluably full of worth and meaning, if we decide, though always facing dilemmas, in choosing to make inclusive dignity this core aether within decentralising bodies of communities.
“Without an understanding of dignity, there is no hope for such change. If you want peace, be sure everyone’s dignity is intact.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Some sources + further reading:
1 Letseka, Moeketsi. “In Defence of Ubuntu.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 47–60., doi:10.1007/s11217–011–9267–2.
2 van der Merwe, W. L. (1996). Philosophy and the Multi-Cultural Context of (Post)Apartheid South Africa. Ethical Perspectives 3 (2): 76–90.
3 Louw, Dirk J. (1998). Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other. Philosophy in Africa, The Paideia Project On-Line of Boston University. Paper delivered at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, August 10–15, 1998.
4 Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80. doi:10.2307/466240.
