[governance] Digital citizenship; Internet Governance as governance

[Garth Graham]

DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP: INTERNET GOVERNANCE AS GOVERNANCE
 
Garth Graham
December 21, 2012, a good day to reset the counters and begin a new cycle of time.
 
Various calls have been made on the Internet Governance Caucus list for a visionary synthesis of civil society’s consensus on Internet Governance.  I believe the best starting point for a “vision” (i.e. future oriented) should be the digital citizen’s Internet-based perspective on Internet Governance. 
 
My impression is that IGC’s conversations show evidence of significant divergence.  Like the outcome of WCIT in Dubai, it seems to me that the attempt to synthesize positions should only aim for a catalogue of conflicting views on the critical drivers of change.  I would like to see consciousness of a shift in values and norms, with a corresponding shift in practices, to become a component of that conversation.  In the interests of exploring some unexamined assumptions and revealing just how deep the divergence could get, here’s one person’s alternative view of the context in which the issue of Internet Governance exists.
 
In several forums, Michael Gurstein, (for one example among many), has been raising questions about the “what?” and “who?” of Internet Government in terms of the utility of the Internet as a public good.  He has raised a call to arms for:
“ … a vision of a truly global and globally beneficial Internet based on values and not exclusively on interests — one where the Internet is dedicated to the global public interest and is recognized (and governed) as a global public good….” (1).
 
He also challenged us to find an “appropriate (globally acceptable) venue.”  In IGC on 2012-11-17, Michael Gurstein wrote:
> …… if we believe that there is a global public interest (in the Internet) who do we trust to best represent that public interest (IBM, Google, the USG?) and within what (global) framework will that representation best take place (the market place, the US State Department, Google, the IGF?). (Unfortunately, I don't see CS as sufficiently strong or as sufficiently independent to even mention it in this context.)
 
I too agree that a civil society perspective is not all that helpful, although not for the same reasons.  But, more importantly, I can’t response to challenges of “what? And “who?” framed in that way.  It should not be assumed that attaching the adjective “global” to the public interest, the public good, and the Internet automatically ensures that benefit will be the outcome.
 
The public interest is usually defined as activities that address the welfare or well being of the general public, with particular reference to representing vulnerable segments of society.  But, while a person or a people can have interests that require a public dimension for their resolution, the assumption that persons or self-determined peoples can scale to a general public at the level of the whole planet, no longer seems to be a useful generalization.
 
For some time, I have been musing on what might be the nature of an “Internet based on values.”  I do so in the context of our transformation into a digital culture, where the values and norms are different from the cultures subject to its transformations.  From that perspective, I believe that digital citizens will view a “globally beneficial Internet” based on a “global public interest” as an oxymoron.
 
 
DIGITAL CULTURE
 
We have a new culture, digital culture, which has nothing to do with hierarchy.  The tools that people living in that culture create, like the Internet, are expressions of the way they do things.  Here are some of my assumptions about that culture’s forms of social organization:
 
(a). The “culture” of the digital age sees governance in a significantly different way than the culture of the industrial age.  Most of us now, either consciously or unconsciously, view governance as a matter of self-organization in complex adaptive systems.  Somehow the system just makes itself.  In that sense, our worldview is relational rather than mechanistic.
 
(b). Previously, we’ve understood governance, the rules about making rules, as something that’s imposed on systems from “above” or outside those systems.  But, in complex adaptive systems or ecologies, order is inherent inside all of the elements or subsystems of the system and it emerges from their interdependencies.  There is no center or periphery, no “higher authority,” to self-organizing systems, and the functions of organization, the rules about making rules, are distributed.
 
(c). Technology does not cause change.  Technology is always a socio-cultural expression of a particular society’s way of seeing and doing things … so societies and their technologies co-evolve.  The Internet therefore did not cause digital culture but is, rather, an expression or symptom of it.  The Internet, and the organizational structures of Internet Governance are examples or expressions of a worldview that understands and applies the concepts of self-organization in complex adaptive systems.
 
This way of looking at the Internet matters because it avoids technological determinism.  Technological determinism distorts the content of public policy formulation by abstracting values out of the equation.  And I agree with Michael Gurstein that values questions are at the root of good governance and effective public policy formulation.  Values questions are also at the root of understanding how socio-technical systems self-organize.  We are not paying sufficient attention to the way in which the values questions have changed, and the acculturation pressures that result from those changes have grown.
 
In IGC on 2012-11-30, at 10:40 AM, McTim wrote (and Michael Gurstein subsequently agreed):
> I don't think that the Internet "belongs" to anyone.
 
That’s correct.  At every level, it’s a common pool resource and needs to be comprehended as such.  Common pool resources are complex adaptive systems.  CASs self-organize.  They cannot be “governed” in the sense of external oversight because you are either of the system, and an influence on its events, or you are not.  Your expectation that cause and effect will work isn’t useful, because there is no place to stand to gain an external point of view.  Functioning CASs treat all external interventions, say for example the triumphant advent of major players, as a threat to their resilience and therefore something to be routed around.
 
It’s McTim’s “anyone,” but with a critical difference.  In the industrial age, to state that the Internet does not belong to anyone would imply that, collectively, it belonged to everyone (i.e. to that general public).  If you espouse the values of command and control, you’ll retort, “but anyone means no one, so how fast can I exploit this resource?”  But, in digital culture, with its emphasis on the interdependencies of particulars, that assumption can’t be made.  I am anyone and, for my own well being, I all responsible to uphold the position that the Internet does not belong to me.  And, in an opening move to connect to you, I should trust that you would do the same. Extremely complex structures can emerge from the application of that very simple rule.  It’s only chaos when someone attempts to block its application
 
 
DIGITAL CULTURE’S VISION OF INTERNET GOVERNANCE
 
In IGC on 2012-11-30, John Curran wrote:
> …. making the final determinations of what is appropriate public policy is one of areas that has been considered the realm of governments, and yet we are collectively unsure if that model continues to work in our new highly connected world.
 
I’m not unsure about that.  I’m certain it does not.
 
WSIS defined Internet Governance as:
·      the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.
 
That definition misses our experience of the Internet as an artifact of a digital culture that expresses the relational structures of societies differently.  There is nothing that renders members of that triad as essential components of social structure in digital culture.  The social construction that grouped society into a triad of government, the private sector and civil society falls away in the face of socio-cultural change that surfaces relational questions the triad cannot answer.
 
In fact, belief in the construction’s utility is crumbling as people realize in their daily lives online just how much governments are not the governors of socio-economic and political relationship.  That erosion is accelerated by the Internet’s existence and digital culture’s creation and use if it.  The threat to the institutional basis for the stability of nation states as they now exist is very real, so they have very good reason for resisting its advance.  So I suppose it’s only natural that many governments would focus on an artifact that exemplifies the nature of digital culture instead of facing the underlying epistemological shift its existence conveys.
 
I think that nation states are beginning to see how Internet Governance as the expression of the underlying digital culture of a relational worldview is a precursor of the way in which most applied concepts of governance are evolving.  For example, since self-organizing systems have no center, the exercise of delegation of authority is completely without meaning.  But representative democracy now rests on the hierarchical notion of delegation of authority, at a time when the belief of the governed in the legitimacy of authoritative assertions has disappeared.
 
Nation states are now in the process of externally imposing order on a complex adaptive system, Internet Governance, which has nothing to do with its nature.  This is a mistake, and I would never assume that nation states are unaware that it’s a mistake.  I think they have become completely aware of the threat that an emerging alternative expectation about the nature of organization and governance represents to modes of control that are being superceded.  The tactic they are using to oppose is called – kill the messenger.
 
Why would we push to institutionalize an inter-governmental capacity to generate Internet policy when the problem is the political instinct of nation states to ensure their stability (i.e. their survival) by slowing down the speed of destabilizing acculturation?
 
I submit that there is a “citizenship” specific to digital culture, and that the presence of digital citizens makes for different norms, and those norms clash with the belief that all of society is divided into parts of three.  It’s a fundamental mistake to take a social theory constructed by the Industrial Age as a necessary aspect of life, rather than as a temporary solution and compromise made in a historical context. The operant worldview makes current social theory and it’s related social contracts open to re-negotiation.  To that end, I would re-define Internet governance by reference to its real stakeholders as:
	• the development and application by digital citizens, and the communities (cultures) of location, practice and interest they inhabit, of principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet in sustaining their existence and mediating their interdependences.
 
Above all else, the relational nature of digital culture is an attack on universality.  Practices based on self-organization represent structural principles that are completely other than what we’ve previously automatically assumed.   The best place to act in applying principles for governance as self-organization is neither national nor global.  It’s local.  It’s at the level of the interaction of individuals and the communities of interest and practice they inhabit.
 
If interdependent is the defining characteristic of digital society, then it’s wrong to believe that coordinated action to address complex systemic problems has to be “global.”  Systemic interdependence means that the most effective actions will be distributed across thousands of self-organizing local networks. Seeking to construct a “higher” level capacity for addressing the “global public interest” is a holdover from the way that the assumption of hierarchy in industrial society does things.  It’s the opposite of the practices that result from having a relational worldview.  Concentrating power in a global institution is the opposite of an Internet-centric solution.  The centralization of power is the antithesis of the distribution of functions that occurs in self-organizing systems.
 
Nation states assume that development objectives formed at the national level will always approximate the public good but development objectives framed at the local level will always lead to conflicts over the use of scarce resources.  Digital culture, assuming a fractal scale of values, does not make that assumption.
 
Because the Triad’s attentions are governed by competition for scarce resources, its members imagine the “sphere” of influence of any global system to be closed.  Because it is an expression of digital culture, the public interest that has framed or should frame Internet policy-making principles is not and should not be global in that sense.  I think this means that a citizen of digital culture, a digital citizen, must and will step away from the notion of the global public interest and the question of whether or not there is an effective way to pursue it.  Because the way in which open systems scale is utterly different from closed systems, this is not simply a matter of opening out closed systems.  It’s a matter of being “in” community, but with a difference that emerges from holding a relational worldview.
 
 
COMMUNITY AS THE “IN” OF BEING-IN-COMMON
 
Our norms related to the concepts of the “people” as a body of persons comprising a community, and “public” as a space that is open to all in the community, depend on a definition of community that is in the process of radical transformation.  In a relational worldview, actions are distributed among self-organizing networks or communities of interest.  But those actions are not collective. Action is experiential, and the demand to absorb the individual into a “common shared vision” does not exist.
 
I kind of like the question raised in Jean-Luc Nancy's "inoperative community:" (2). - how to create "being together" without a "being as one." "The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader...) ...necessarily loses the in of being-in-common.  Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it.  It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness.  The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being."  I also like the definition of the good society as a potluck dinner (3), a togetherness, a being-in-common, that is an emergent situational consequence of autonomous individual decisions and trust.
 
We all live in some place.  That makes all our politics local and all our knowledge indigenous.  A resilient community self-organizes around three, and only three, basic principles: “take care of yourself, take care of each other, take care of this place.” (4).  If we put our faith in improving the place where we live, then an interdependent fabric of resilient communities will scale fractally.  It will not scale towards the universality implied by that word “global.” “Authoritative” and legitimate responses to complex planetary level problems can never be commanded to sum from local solutions, but the web of relationships that emerges will optimize a balance that roughly works or can adapt rapidly when it does not.
 
To put that in different words, because the outcomes of inoperative communities as complex adaptive systems are inherently unpredictable, rational analysis as a prelude to command and control decisions before the fact will ALWAYS result in worse decisions than letting the governance of complex adaptive systems evolve.
 
 
NORMS AND PATTERNS OF DIGITAL CULTURE
 
We are beginning to become conscious of what happens to norms (and therefore interests in public) as digital citizens choose to ignore the historical social construction that all of society is necessarily divided into parts of three - government, business, and civil society.
 
“Octavio Paz says: ‘we need a new culture that has nothing to do with hierarchy … what cultures do you live in that have nothing to do with hierarchy?’ …..  When we change the practice of living with ourselves, we change the way everything lives with everything else.” (5).
 
 In the relational worldview:
·      The normative values that become socially reinforced include: learning through practice, relational interdependence, adaptive resilience, and rough consensus.
 
·      Trust becomes dynamically recursive and uncertain, rather than an absolute yes or no (i.e. as a relational opening move, cooperate until the other defects).
 
·      The latitude of “major players” in closed systems to “decide” what makes up the “bedrock of shared values” has disappeared.
 
·      The normative values of command and control – authority, hierarchy, ascribed status, and discipline - don’t apply.  Transcendence is gone.  The individual cannot dodge responsibility through recourse to a higher power because there is no higher power.  Unlike an industrial society, digital culture will not reinforce leadership’s atypical competitive behaviours. 
 
·      Other atypical roles and behaviours that digital culture will reinforce include: navigators, watchers, predictive analysts (analytic specialists), influencers (influence as a question of their emotional intelligence and thus relational reach), modifiers of the structure of the game, and people who unearth and link to great finds.  Then there are people who embrace the persistence of difference and seek to increase “generativity – a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (6).
 
In the relational worldview, equality no longer means systemic equality of opportunity before the fact.  Since the outcomes of complex adaptive systems are inherently unpredictable, it means equally positive real world outcomes after the fact.  That’s a significant shift in cultural expectations.  The measure of effect is scaled by what individuals in the system learn about what happens to individuals.  While any individual can speak to that experience, no individual can represent it …judged by history, not by prior intentions because there’s no expected link between cause and effect.  Anyone can ask (and does) is equality an attribute of this system now?  But, although people continue to ask, will equality be an attribute of this system, the question is without meaning. Politicians who continue to promise equality before the fact are ignoring the degree to which outcomes (the story so far) have become the only measure of reality.
 
In the relational worldview, the accretion of individual choices results in an emergent pattern of behavior that relates as a part of another whole, but at a scale of systemic iteration that’s different.  The network of emergent behaviours that stands in the world as Garth exists in a network of other emergent social beings who, in turn, exist in networks of communities.  If you take apart the networked elements that comprise Garth, they cannot be put back together again, and the social networks he inhabited before you decomposed him would be altered by his absence.  But the self-organizing social networks he inhabits are innately resilient and they’ll get along without him just fine.
 
In the relational worldview, I can see that there are relations in public.  And I can see that there are interests expressed by autonomous individuals who must, through making the choice to act in the world, take responsibility for that expression.  Without hierarchy, the essential process of digital culture is not leadership to ensure a predictable future.  It’s the way the relational component of communication occurs in the present moment.  If you lose control of the expression of yourself in that present moment, you give up your autonomy in a way that sidesteps your responsibility.
 
We now prepare a public face to meet the public faces that we meet in an added dimension.  There I am in public, and responsible for the construction and presentation of my own image and its consequences.  But major institutions attempting to appropriate or enclose the complex adaptive systems of digital culture hold the view that they own not only the means of simulating my relational behavior but the very expression of that behavior itself.  Relations in online public spaces alter the dynamic evolution of our social identities in ways that, as yet, are not fully understood.  This does not and will not change the necessity of ensuring that the person who speaks to your story is yourself.
 
Because I do not trust the notion that “major players” are the key to effectiveness, I cannot play the opening move of a non-zero sum game - cooperate.  Continuation of the notion of major players perpetuates cycles of competition, conflict and ill-intentioned behavour in the context of zero sum games.  If, under the cry for representativeness, that’s where the multistakeholder model must take us, I’m not on that road.  For the road I am on, I want to see increasing awareness of why this shift in norms and practice needs to inform public debate.
 
The culture shift I’m describing specifically excludes actions like universalization, mobilization, and globalization.  That makes it impossible for me to conclude with recommendations for anything that would look like a “plan.”  I can speak to what I see as desirable outcomes.  But I can’t tell you what you should do about it because, as a digital citizen, I shouldn’t.  I can only ask you what “we” should do about it … beginning with a discussion of what “it” might be, and recognizing that “it” will change because we had that discussion.
 
We now have the means to purposefully alter our environment (the “place” we inhabit) to shape our relational behaviours in ways we choose.  “When we change the practice of living with ourselves, we change the way everything lives with everything else.”  To what degree do we want to consciously apply the capacity we now have to change ourselves?
 
 
THE PRACTICES OF DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP
 
In digital culture, what’s an Internet-like solution to defining the public interest?  Where do we look for the capacity to consider a “public interest” that self-organizes?  Who speaks for the public interest when the “public” (I and thou) knows it cannot survive unless it speaks for itself.  Who speaks truth to power in systems that reward behavior in the context of the phase spaces of daily life online where acculturation to digital culture occurs?
 
In digital culture, control is not power. Here is where the power resides:
You grieve you learn
You choke you learn
You laugh you learn
You choose you learn
You pray you learn
You ask you learn
You live you learn (7).
 
In the relational worldview, deciding whose job it is to speak truth to power depends on your sense of where power now resides.  Since complex adaptive systems have no centre, and the functions that structure them are intrinsically distributed, looking for the emperor to tell him he’s naked has no meaning.  But looking into yourself to determine the degree of responsibility you are assuming for the consequences of your own choices about interdependencies has great meaning.  If the imperative for systemic interdependence is – only connect, then the critical question for the truth seeker to ask becomes personal and relational  – am I connecting or separating?
 
A digital citizen inhabiting a world of interdependent inoperative communities has a different world model from someone who does not see it that way.  They won’t be squeezed to fit into that mass-market phrase, “the user community.”  They don’t agree that individual voices are ever subordinate to a larger collective.  Because they are seeing relations and not parts, they do not believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  That belief is an expression of a mechanistic world model.  They see that the sum of individual experiences emerges at the systems level as changed behavior of the system.  Then the system as subsystem behaves differently in relation to other subsystems.  They understand how the concept of mobilizing the masses or forming a “global people’s army” is antithetical to self-organization.  They know that the world stands on the back of a network and from there it’s networks all the way down.
 
In digital culture, remembering that cultural transmission is encoded in language, the ability to write and apply code that modifies relationships in the public sphere is a radical practice for change.  Here are some radical practices that seem to me consistent with enhancing the quality of life in digital societies on their own terms (i.e. actions by people who are fully indigenous to digital culture and its inoperative communities and fully committed to sharing their indigenous knowledge).  I’m sure many in IGC could easily add to this list.  What these activities have in common is the intention to increase individual or local capacity to use ICTs effectively:
 
1.     First Mile Project: Canadian First Nations sharing best practices and lessons learned from building community-owned broadband systems. http://www.firstmile.ca
 
2.     Mozilla Foundation’s objective of moving tens of millions of people from using the web to making the web. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/2013plans
 
3.     Digital citizenship: Users immersed in technology are beginning to organize themselves into their own society of ‘digital citizens.’ http://www.digitalcitizenship.net         http://www.scribd.com/doc/13853600/Digital-Citizenship-the-Internetsociety-and-Participation-By-Karen-Mossberger-Caroline-J-Tolbert-and-Ramona-S-McNeal
 
4.     E-Democracy’s Digital Inclusion Network; exchanging knowledge on digital inclusion strategies to close the many digital divides. http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/inclusion
 
5.     ISOC’s Internet Ecosystem: mapping the organizations that share common values for the open development of the Internet. http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/internetmodel.pdf
 
6.     ICANN’s At-Large (ALAC/RALOs) policy process, if its relations with the ALAC/RALOs become more synergetic and the RALOs actually serve to act collaboratively in fostering digital citizenship. http://www.atlarge.icann.org
 
7.     Community Broadband Networks; building broadband networks that are directly accountable to the community they serve. http://muninetworks.org
 
8.     Hacks/Hackers: a network of journalists (“hacks”) and technologists (“hackers”) who rethink the future of news and information. http://hackshackers.com
 
9.     The Canadian Internet Forum – Online (CIF): sharing thoughts on the development, deployment and governance of the Internet in Canada. http://cif.cira.ca/en/
 
10.  Occupy Movement / The Occupy Network: provides software tools that align with the values of the #occupy movement. http://www.occupy.net http://howtocamp.takethesquare.net/files/2012/09/Quick-guide-for-a-revolution-multilanguage.pdf
 
11.  Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN): an international network of researchers, practitioners and policy makers concerned with enabling communities through the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs).  http://cirn.wikispaces.com
 
12.  Megacities replacing nation states as the locus of human endeavor: the governance of megacities, because of their local necessity and networked maturity, is more organically coherent and experimental than other forms of governance.  See: Networked Society – The three ages of megacities. http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2012/ns_megacities_report_4.pdf
 
The people engaged in these activities are acting directly to address inequality (i.e. the public interest as it is now) by applying the practices of self-organizing systems.
 
But I do remain puzzled by a question.  When does the quiet increase in the learning occurring through digital citizenship broadly inform discourse and action in contemporary culture?  Even though the industrial age has a mechanistic worldview and the digital age has a relational worldview, both cultures engage in rigorous boundary maintenance of the forms of social organization that those conflicting worldviews produce.  All of those digital culture practices in that list act interstitially or in isolated “temporary autonomous zones.”  Hardly anyone chooses to generalize their experiences of the structural implications that result from digitally mediated social connection into a horizontal broadening of the “ties that bind.”  When we all become conscious of our digital citizenship, as I still believe we must, will that be a gradual awakening or will we undergo an abrupt phase change?  Only through practice can we learn what we need to defend.
 
 
END NOTES:
 
(1). Michael Gurstein . Whose) Hand off (What) Internet? Some Reflections on WCIT 2012. December 9, 2012. http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/whose-hand-off-what-internet-some-reflections-on-wcit-2012/
 
(2). Jean-Luc Nancy. La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community), Preface, 1986, xxxix.
 
(3). Ursula Franklin
 
(4). Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers.  “The promise and paradox of community.” In: The community of the future. Drucker Foundation Future Series.  Jossey-Bass, 1998. 15).
 
(5). Andrew Culver. Anarchy and Economy 3: population, time, history, The Big Bang, a little silence.  http://www.anarchicharmony.org/AnarConomy/anarco3.html
 
(6). (Jonathan Zitain, The Future of the Internet, 2008)
 
(7). Alanis Morissette. “I recommend biting off more then you can chew to anyone.  I certainly do.”
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