Democracy

Democracy

knowledge filters revisited

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The concept of filtering sources of knowledge has informed the personal knowledge mastery framework for many years, as explained here in knowledge filters (2011). Recently, a “CBC News investigation found that a YouTube channel devoted to putting misleading headlines on TV stories from other stations is getting recommended more often than many mainstream news outlets.” Given the current general election in Ontario, this could be a concern for our democratic processes. But the real culprit is that our society — especially elected officials, educators, and businesses — has done little to promote real media literacy. We need better information, knowledge, and opinion filters, and nobody will give them to us. We have to create them ourselves.

Let’s review the types of filters that Tim Kastelle so kindly shared in 2010.

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chaos and order

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chaordic [kay-ordʹ-ic], adj., fr. E. chaos and order. 1. The behavior of any self-organizing, self-governing, organ, organization, or system that harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2. Patterned by chaos and order in a way not dominated by either. 3. Blending of diversity, chaos, complexity and order characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature. —Dee Hock

Our institutions and markets are failing us. We need new structures and the return to tribalism currently manifested as populism will not save us. As the advent of the printing press helped usher in an age of inquiry, first in the Christian religion and later in the enlightenment and scientific revolution, so we have to engage in creating new organizational and governance structures for a global network era.

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self-determination ensures democracy

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Self-determination theory (SDT) is based on three innate human requirements: Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy.

Deci and Ryan [the researchers] claim that there are three essential elements of the theory:

1. Humans are inherently proactive with their potential and mastering their inner forces (such as drives and emotions)
2. Humans have an inherent tendency toward growth development and integrated functioning
3. Optimal development and actions are inherent in humans but they don’t happen automatically

If we change our operating models we can change the world. Models premised on SDT will serve the needs of everyone, not just management or the shareholders.

“Psychological self-determination is expressed in three different dimensions. In the first dimension people want to live their lives the way they choose to live it. This is the sense of sanctuary. The second way people express their psychological self-determination is in the widespread desire for voice: we want to be heard and we want our voices to matter. The third way we want our psychological self-determination to be expressed is in our desire to be connected: we want to be part of communities.” —The Support Economy

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retrieving gender balance

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This is a follow-up post from our future is networked & feminine.

Power & Media

The TIMN model, developed by David Ronfeldt describes how human societies have organized: first in Tribes, later with Institutions added (T+I), and in our current society where Markets dominate (T+I+M). As we enter an era where the Network form (T+I+M+N) gains dominance, most of the previous organizational forms will evolve to adapt to the new form. The Network form puts into question our current market-dominated forms, including our institutions and our families. Consider that the nuclear family is no longer the dominant Tribal form in many developed countries. Fewer people have faith in our existing institutions and our capitalist markets are seen as inadequate in distributing wealth. One example is the move to establish a universal basic income in many countries because our markets are unable to effectively distribute wealth.

The TIMN model aligns with changes in how we communicate: Tribes were mostly Oral, Institutions developed with the Written word, Markets were enabled by Print, and Networks communicate Electrically, fragmenting linear literacy. One potential aspect of the Network era is that it will retrieve a more Oral form of discourse, albeit in a new, electric manner. After thousands of years where Writing and Print have dominated, we may be retrieving some aspects of a Tribal society.

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architects of our future

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Stanford Prison Experiment

It has been generally thought in the popular press that the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that normal people act like sadistic guards when placed in a ‘prison-like’ environment. In this interview with Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Philip Zimbardo discusses his 1971 prison experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

“But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now ‘dangerous prisoners’. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.”

Our Structures Shape Us

Authority may drive us to do immoral things. German researchers have released horrendous stories of what went on with regular soldiers during the Second World War. As der Spiegel notes: “Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide”.  But the societal/organizational structure seems to have been a primary factor, as stated in the concluding paragraph of the der Spiegel article.

“The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible — even absolute evil.”

We may think we will do the right and proper thing, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves. In this report from Science News we learn that moral talk is cheap:

“When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew … But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash.”

The statement that ‘First we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us’, has been attributed to Winston Churchill. It shows that we become the product of our shaped environment. Father John Culkin, in A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, wrote that, “We become what we behold.
 We shape our tools 
and then our tools shape us.” This aligns with the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media. How we organize as a society is just another human-created technology, or as Harold Stolovitch wrote, “Technology is the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.” 

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perpetual beta 2017

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Blogging is one way I make sense of the world. This past year I wrote about 120 posts on various topics. What follows is a summary of some of my thoughts during 2017. My ways of seeing the world have changed over the years and blogging has helped to keep my thoughts in a state of perpetual beta: strong ideas, loosely held.

Relatedness

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies of our institutions and markets. Three aspects of this effect are: 1) access to almost unlimited information, 2) the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and 3) limitless opportunities for “ridiculously easy group-forming“.

The desire to relate is what drives people to support global social movements on one hand and to take shelter in tribal identity politics on the other. In politics, social media extend participation but also make information manipulation by small motivated groups much easier. Understanding this deep desire to relate to others should be foremost in mind in understanding human dynamics. We will not have organizational transformation, or political reformation, without people feeling like they belong. To counter Tribal populism, we also need to appeal to emotions and our feelings of relatedness. The same goes for education and learning.

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3000 half-baked ideas

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“The commons is the only genuine alternative today that allows us to build a truly participatory economic production system. The commons can cause a global cultural revolution.” —Yochai Benkler

Starting this blog in 2004 helped me connect with a global audience and share ideas with many people who over the years have become friends and colleagues. I was more optimistic at that time because we were not dealing with constant outrage on social media, fake news, surveillance capitalism, and the extinguishing of net neutrality. Given the online land grab by the platform monopolists it is becoming even more important for individuals to have a space they control on the web. It seems fewer of us are blogging because there are many more convenient options that require less time and thought. But we need thoughtful bloggers, unconstrained by platforms and publishers, now more than ever before. An aggressively engaged citizenry is essential to democracy.

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democracy, data, and intelligence

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Social media platforms may extend global participation and can be a force for better understanding but often emotions trump reason in an online world of constant outrage. The linear aspects of reasoning, a core part of a print-based society, are easily forgotten as is shown in the almost fatalistic acceptance that we live in a post-truth era. Identity politics have been retrieved so that one is loyal to one’s group, no matter what the facts. In addition, as these tribal forces are extended by the internet, we see a reversal of democracy into tyranny under populist demagogues.

Scientific American recently asked, ‘Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?’

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cities and the future of work

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Note: This post is based on several earlier ones. These have been edited and synthesized to a single composition in advance of my sessions in Helsinki on 3 November 2017 with The National Foresight Network and the Prime Minister’s Office where we will discuss the transformation of work and its consequences. This post looks at the roles of cities, and city regions, in a network society.

Tribes & Networks

“According to my review of history and theory, four forms of organization — and evidently only four — lie behind the governance and evolution of all societies across the ages:

  • The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging — the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs.
  • The institutional form was the second to emerge. Emphasizing hierarchy, it led to the development of the state and the military, as epitomized initially by the Roman Empire, not to mention the Catholic papacy and other corporate enterprises.
  • The market form, the third form of organization to take hold, enables people to excel at openly competitive, free, and fair economic exchanges. Although present in ancient times, it did not gain sway until the 19th century, at first mainly in England.
  • The network form, the fourth to mature, serves to connect dispersed groups and individuals so that they may coordinate and act conjointly. Enabled by the digital information-technology revolution, this form is only now coming into its own, so far strengthening civil society more than other realms.”
    —Overview of social evolution (past, present, and future) in TIMN terms, David Ronfeldt

There are strong indicators that society is heading toward a quadriform structuring (T+I+M+N) with network culture dominating in many fields: open source insurgencies, Blockchain financial transactions,  political manipulation through networks, crowdfunding, etc. This is also bringing tensions between the old Tribal, Institutional, and Market forms against the emerging Network form.

“The more entrenched an older form, the more difficult it will be for a newer form to emerge on its own merits: This mostly occurs where tribal or hierarchical actors rule in rigid, grasping, domineering ways; but it may also apply where pro-market ideologues hold sway … Examples may include governments rife with a clannish tribalism, militaries wallowing in lucrative business enterprises, and ostensibly capitalist market systems fraught with collusive, protectionist cronyism. The stronger are tribal/clan tendencies in a society, the more likely are corrupt hybrid designs. A society of myriad monstrous hybrids is likely to be a distorted society, even a mean-spirited one.”
—Explaining social evolution: standard cause-and-effect vs. TIMN’s system dynamics, David Ronfeldt

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The Copenhagen Letter

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I signed The Copenhagen Letter. Perhaps you should too, if you think that all people should control the technology that runs the world, not just the surveillance capitalists. Well, at least read it, please.

To everyone who shapes technology today.

We live in a world where technology is consuming society, ethics, and our core existence.

It is time to take responsibility for the world we are creating. Time to put humans before business. Time to replace the empty rhetoric of “building a better world” with a commitment to real action. It is time to organize, and to hold each other accountable … We who have signed this letter will hold ourselves and each other accountable for putting these ideas into practice. That is our commitment.

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