Intelligences
The Accountable Net had yet another road trip today, this time to Cardozo. It was a rich and interesting day that began last night with a somewhat raucous dinner.
At one point during the day I announced that we were not planning to revise the paper — that's not the point. We're trying to get people to think about affecting the course of online life, not to read another draft of the paper. (Phew.)
Here's the set of questions that the group today was grappling with:
1) what core values do we want to preserve as the net goes through a phase change that seems directed towards greater emphasis on authentication?
2) what are the technical developments that we can report on and describe that seem focused on requiring more authentication?
3) given 1) and 2), what are our worries (the word “willies” was used frequently throughout the day) about this phase change? (there are many)
4) could we describe individual choices to connect to others — and thus to both form groups based on peer recommendations and protect themselves from unwanted messages of various kinds — as a form of rule-selection (”governance” is a loaded term for many, but this is really governance) that could be deferred to by real-world governments worried about spam, spyware, and security issues?
After all, there is no particular reason online to privilege state actors as the only groups that get respect. There are other very meaningful groups that could (and do) set their own rules. The decision to communicate with others and choose those rulesets is both empowering for individuals and helpful to the development of a more complex online life.
I came away from the meeting with a renewed respect for in-person consultations. We couldn't have done this by just redlining a draft paper. We needed everyone in the room.
I also spent some time this evening thinking about the different kinds of minds in the room. There were experienced, old-net-hand minds, looking back bleakly at years of mostly failed efforts to influence policy. There were online company minds, dealing with daily pressures and reminding us all that users rarely if ever change the default settings they're handed. There were a couple of entrepreneurial, selling-products minds. There were thoughtful, propositional, logical (and strong-minded) minds. There were emotional, passionate minds. There were several musical minds in the crowd.
It was quite a gathering of different kinds of intelligences, and that made the day even more complex than I had expected. We had a lot of definitional difficulties and why-are-we-here difficulties. It's hard to talk about something being governed (or not governed) when there's nothing to point to and say “there it is.” And nothing “there” to push back. The words in the paper can be misused and misunderstood to suggest approval of online drivers' licenses. That's not what we had in mind, and we spent a lot of time defining terms and making clear that this wasn't a “proposal.” The different minds often stumbled over one another.
But this group, with all of its different kinds of minds, cared about these questions enough to spend the day talking about them. That was the collective intelligence in the room, and I appreciated very much being in its presence.