The Issue is Community Control, Not Ownership.
Armando said it himself:
The problem is who gets to determine citizenship in the community. The problem is who gets to decide what's appropriate. The problem is control.
None of this has to do with ownership, per se. It has to do with management, i.e. control. If Dkos was a publicly-held company and Kos was CEO, it would not be dramatically different—unless the corporate charter and bylaws allowed it. Some public-held companies are nonetheless completely controlled by the CEO, who retains an outright majority of preferred stock and/or proxies. But the general form—whether for-profit or non-profit—allows for tremendous variation.
Corporations in their modern forms have been around for well over a century, so their ability to function cannot be seriously questioned. Furthermore, there is no sharp dividing line between the case where the CEO retains absolute control and the case in which there is extreme decentralization of power. Rather, there are a variety of gradations.
Communities can assert their control simply by issuing every trusted user a non-transferable share of preferred stock, and letting them democratically elect the board of directors. This structure can be intimately linked or significantly de-coupled from the governance of the site. Thus, the issue of community governance must be seen as one that can take many forms, and operate at different levels, time-scales and degrees of immediacy. There are a wide range of examples whose experience can be drawn upon.
Rather than lose ourselves in abstract discussions about what specific governance forms should be—I think there can be wide latitude—I prefer to move on and examine the problems raised by Armando. I hope the above discussion makes clear that I do not regard this as necessary for community control per se. Rather, it is about realizing some relatively optimal, immediate form of community control.
The Problems Armando Cites Are Not Dramatically Difficult In Themselves
These problems are:
(1) Citizenship All trusted users are citizens.
(2) Deciding What’s Appropriate This is why God invented bylaws. While interpretation and implementation are online responsibilities, the ultimate guideline-setting comes from the bylaws. Having an explicit set of rules to rely on in this manner can greatly simplify day-to-day issues.
(3) Libel and Liability. This is why God invented limited liability corporations. There is no reason why this presents any greater difficulties for a self-governing community.
(4) Consensus Is not necessary. We agree to disagree all the time. Armando says:
No single blog can hold the consensus Paul seems to believe it can.
But he misunderstands me. I don’t expect substantive consensus. I only expect procedural consensus, with built-in mechanisms for dealing with breakdowns when they occur. Hobbes argued that the only alternatives were monarchy and chaos. Armando seems to be arguing the same thing. History has proven Hobbes was wrong.
(5) Trolls and supertrolls Again, not a special problem for a self-regulating community. Can be handled in a wide variety of ways. Troll-rating handles most problems. The exceptions can be handled by monitors. A rapid response team may be necessary or desired. But some sort of mediation group is to be preferred. Time outs and cooling-off periods can be quite helpful, since this provides an explicit alternative to outright permanent banning.
We Have Models From Centuries of Democratic Struggle
If the previous section seemed overly short, there’s a reason for that: we have centuries of democratic struggle behind us. We have an enormous store of democratic models, values and traditions to draw upon. The online world is actually quite conducive to expanding on these models. While the challenges we face online are not new, the range of responses available is.
There’s An Underlying Issue of Liberal vs. Radical Vision—And Both Have Value
Armando and Media Girl both defend existing models of individual blog ownership. Armando says:
My response to Paul is yes daily kos is quite flawed, except when you compare it to all others. A huge community with weekday traffic of a million visits a day and with the range of vews as varied as it is with very very very few bannings of non-obvious GOP trolls is a track record unmatched.
Likewise, Britain in 1776 had a record that was unmatched. Its citizens had a tradition of rights superior to all others. They enjoyed expanding prospects of prosperity that were superior as well. And yet, it was felt that something much more was possible. And despite the bloody violence of the Revolutionary War, in the long run Britain has been America’s closest ally.
I’m considerably more friendly to Dkos than the Colonies were to Britain in 1776, but there is an underlying parallel: I’m talking about a fundamental difference that dwarfs what has gone before. So I don’t deny anything Armando says. I just think it’s beside the point that I am talking about.
For me, Dkos long ago passed the point of being too big for its structure to bear for the optimum development of fruitful discussions across a broad range of concerns. And this is a major concern of mine—creating a community structure that can grow ever more rich over time. This is not about looking at things from the POV of the individual owner, or individual blog. It’s about looking at things from the POV of evolving global consciousness, and how to create structures that support and further that evolution.
Aside:
This difference in POV has a history which goes back several centuries at least in British history, a difference that was extraordinarily significant throughout the 19th Century across Europe. It’s the difference between the liberal tradition, which focused on individual rights, and the radical tradition which focused on universality of rights. In general, liberals had recurring fears of the masses trampling on their rights. Radicals responded by saying that universalizing rights—particularly through such means as universal education and universal voting rights—was a means to make them precious to all. There were some significant problems with both views, but both were improved by arguing with each other, and this is what I wish to see continue.
(OTOH, when radicals are demonized and driven from the public sphere—as they long have been in America—the result is that the dominant dialogue comes to be between liberals and conservatives, and this dialogue tends to drag liberalism down. A topic for another diary.)
What I mean about evolving consciousness can be found among the findings from the World Values Survey. One paper providing insight into this is "Human Development as a Theory of Social Change: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (PDF) by Chris Welzel and Ronald Inglehart. Its abstract says:
This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social change—a syndrome not properly specified by classical modernization theory. We refer to this syndrome as Human Development, arguing that its three components have the common theme of broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development broadens peoples’ choice by providing them with individual resources; cultural change gives rise to greater emphasis on self-expression values that lead people to give higher priority to having autonomous choice in society; and democratization provides people with increasingly effective
rights, giving legal guarantees for human choice in politics.
Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates: (1) that the syndrome of individual resources, self-expression values and effective rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; (2) that this Human Development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect from individual resources and self expression values on effective rights; and (3) that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity, as the factor that makes given rights effective.
In general, liberals are more concerned with exercising self-expression values, while radicals are more concerned with expanding them. But both value these same values. In contrast, conservatives fear—or at minimum distrust them. (Not all who call themselves "conservative," of course, but those who define what conservatism is.)
My idea is that online communities can meet both liberal and radical concerns—giving liberals scope to exercise self-expression values, while giving radicals the means to expand them, and draw an ever-wider range of people into the community. As I will discuss below, empowering community control on a daily, hands-on basis is a way of expanding these values that can create an even richer environment for the exercise of these values.
The Significance of Heterarchical Structure And Phil Agre's Concept of "Issue Entrepreneurship"
I believe that Media Girl has some very important things to say about improving blogs within the liberal framework of concerns. But I think her approach is basically passive toward the radical concerns:
The real community is not on any single website -- it's the network, the matrices, the amalgamation of thousands of websites. And in that community, Daily Kos and My Left Wing and Booman Tribune and Media Girl and the joe bloggs blog you never heard of -- each is just one member.
While I agree that this is true, I do not believe that it precludes the value of creating blogs that more closely resemble fractal microcosms of the whole community. Indeed, I believe that the whole will become far richer if it has community blogs within it.
In an online article "The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship", UCLA Professor of Information Studies Philip E. Agre, an early beacon of enlightened self-reflection on the internet, writes about "three prominent political theories: social capital, deliberative democracy, and civic republicanism" and how each "suffers for lack of a theory of social skills -- the practical skills of political life broadly construed," and concludes "by sketching such a theory with particular reference to the United States." That theory is what he calls "issue entrepreneurship":
From the arguments above, it follows that a how-to for democratic republican citizenship would have several elements, including skills for building social capital and participating in the collective production and circulation of political arguments. I cannot provide such a how-to here, but I can sketch perhaps the central idea that is undreamt in the philosophies that I have been describing. That idea is as follows: it is central to the political process that individual citizens, in their public personae, are able to associate themselves with issues. Citizens, whether politicians or activists, make their political careers in entrepreneurial fashion by identifying issues that are coming to prominence, researching and analyzing them, staking out public positions on them, and building social networks of other citizens who have associated themselves with related issues, especially those whose positions are ideologically compatible [19]. Not only this kind of issue entrepreneurship central to the making of public policy, but it is also central to the "politics", in the broad sense, of nearly every institutional field, from industries to research fields, from bureaucracies to artistic circles, from professions to social movements. Ideologies, in their practical political aspect, are designed to rationalize and cement coalitions among issue entrepreneurs who have staked out a wide range of issues, and the social networks whose construction the ideologies facilitate then become the connective tissue of political movements.
What Agre is talking about here is a process that goes on in the larger community that Media Girl talks about, as well as beyond it—in graduate schools, think tanks, research institutes, non-profit organizations, etc. Indeed, there is generally too little connection between reactive activism—responding to crises—that currently dominates most political blogs and the sorts of long-term activities that Agre is talking about. And that is one thing that I think community-controlled blogs could help to begin changing.
With the capacity to create specific forums with their own "front page" we engender the formation of subcommunities who may have fairly stable cores and very fluid readership, with multiple forms of connections to other subcommunities. And the heterarchical structure within the community—one forum can be part of multiple overlapping hierarchies of geography, issue specificity, methodology, etc.—mirrors a more extensive lattice (and, in some sense, a quasi-fractal) structure civil society as a whole, as Agre envisions it:
This process is fractal: its logic is essentially the same on the global stage as on the national, and it is essentially the same on a regional stage as on a local. What is more, it is essentially the same within a wide variety of institutional contexts. Thus, individuals can stake out issues and build political networks within their professions, their churches, their unions, their industries, or their political organizations. The politics of the local PTA is, in this regard, largely isomorphic to the politics of a national political party. Issue entrepreneurship, in this sense, is a pervasive organizing logic of a democratic republican society, and not the preserve of the social movement leader-hero or the occasional prince. The key is that political personae, political networks, and political issues, on every scale, are all constructed in the same process. This network among individuals who have publicly associated themselves with particular political issues -- drawing on a mathematical metaphor (Birkhoff 1967), call it an issue lattice -- has four dimensions:
* in the vertical dimension, individuals who stake out a given issue on the national level will generally network with those who stake out the same issue on either the global or the regional level;
* in the geographic dimension, individuals who stake out issues in a given geographic jurisdiction will generally network with their counterparts in other jurisdictions;
* in the institutional dimension, individuals who stake out a given issue within one institutional context will generally network with those who stake out the same issue in other institutions; and
* in the ideological dimension, individuals who stake out ideologically related positions on different issues in similar institutional locations will generally network with one another.
This four-dimensional lattice structure is the essence of civil society [20].
The internal structure of the community blog as I envision it is not necessarily identical with the lattice as Agre describes it. People concerned more with electoral politics are going to have divisions such as congressional districts and state senate seats that will not concern most people dealing with organic local communities, as, for instance, scientists studying poverty in a given metropolitan area.
Yet, it is close enough for us to see that the ways in which a community blog might self-organize itself can produce a very good fit with ways in which people are already self-organizing themselves in the world at large—and this fit, occurring at many different junctures within the whole—surely carries with it a great potential for connecting people, ideas and ongoing activities in a manner that empowers solid cores and casual participants alike.
Community Control, Scaling And Mobilization
This is where I ought to get very detailed in my argument. But I want to get this posted today. And I'll be tied up at work this afternoon. So I'll just say that for me this is really the heart of the matter: the ability to structure the site into a lattice of concerns, with editing committees crafting front pages for them. It's probably best to defer a discussion of this anyway. Best to discuss the larger context first.
All I need to say for now is that this sort of organizing could take place already on a site like DKos, under private ownership is that's what Kos wanted. But it's a far more natural fit with a blog that is owned and controlled by the community of users.
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