The Pandemic Reminds Us "Everything is Deeply Intertwingled" – We Need Better Logics for That

A bat catches a cold in Wuhan, and weeks later the whole world coughs. America and China battle a trade war, and then there is a shortage of PPE and ventilator parts from China.  Poor neighborhoods suffer high death rates because of poor health, but even celebrities and heads of state go into ICUs.  The economy craters, and we argue over relief to businesses versus workers based on which is more disposed to misuse what they might be given.  Health officials say flatten the curve, financiers say reopen, and corporations say they don’t dare reopen without testing.  The Federal government is too polarized to fix much of anything, and has forgotten their real job of governing by consensus.  

Modern technologies of global connection -- both physical and virtual -- make the pandemic emerge in weeks instead of years, and make all the butterfly effects far more complex.  That is our new curse, but also our new blessing.  We have global travel and supply chains, global communications and media networks -- a global village composed of local villages.  Techies moved fast and broke society, and now discourse seems too polarized to fix it.

All of these effects are driven by market forces -- however regulated.  Marketplaces of goods and services and marketplaces of ideas.  These marketplaces are driven by complex interplays of top-down structure and bottom-up emergence from billions of actors --and systems of actors.  

Technology has made these forces more dynamic and turbulent, but technology can enable smarter and better-regulated marketplaces -- if we re-focus.  We cannot undo this onrushing dynamic -- we need to get smarter about how we use technology to help us go forward.

The pandemic may be the kick in the ass we need to reform society over a wide range of domains and levels.  Seeing the commonalities can help us capture a new synergy.  If rise to that challenge, the future will be bright. If we fail it will be dark.  Many see that, but few focus on the root causes. 

Peter Drucker said “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Two new logics can help us correct the failures of our current logics.

Ever-growing intertwingularity

The problem we now face all too urgently is that our lives are all deeply intertwingled, but we fall back to simplistic “fast” thinking with rigid categories and institutions.  Some leaders rise to the challenge and others flail, and we argue over who does which.  The regulation of our marketplace of ideas that “mediates consent” about facts has broken down, as has our social/economic marketplace.  These problems are difficult and complex – but we can get smarter about solving them – the first order and second order effects.  (To get a sense of the range of these issues, see this briefing by Tony O’Driscoll [since adapted for publication] and this McKinsey report. To see how this has reopened old questions, and may provide an opening for new thinking, see this NY Times report on the shifting issues for the 2020 election.)

 

The symbolic circle of the Tao reminds us of that truth is never entirely black or white, but shades of gray that depend on the light we view it in and the perspective we view it from.  Just how much is subject to argument, discovery, and rediscovery, as reality emerges.  This is age-old, but it is more urgent than ever that we come to grips with it.  2020 will mark a turning point in human history.

For decades our world and our markets have been increasingly stressed, even as we seemed to be progressing.  Tensions of nationality, race, ideology, religion, economics, technology, and governance are raging.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold /…The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  It is now urgent that we re-center more wisely on our better convictions.

The Enlightenment has run aground because those who saw the light and had the benefits did not pay enough attention to sharing that.  Liberals turned away from “the deplorables” instead of caring for and raising them up.  Capitalists extracted short-term profits and enriched themselves with stock buybacks -- exploiting workers instead of empowering them.  Factions and political parties fought zero-sum struggles to control the existing pie instead of engaging in win-win cooperation to create and share a larger pie.

The Chinese ideograph for crisis is composed from the characters for danger plus opportunity.  Many retreat in fear of the danger and seek to throw blame and erect walls, but wiser heads look to the opportunity.  Most see opportunity in narrow domains, but some look to the big picture.  We now face an urgent and historic opportunity to refocus on a more enlightened and productive kind of cooperation across the full range of issues.

Those who see and work on these problems in particular domains of concern and expertise can unite in spirit and vision with those in other domains.  We can forge a new Age of Enlightenment – a Reformation of The Enlightenment.  An awakening of interconnection and cooperative spirit is emerging.  Our challenge is to synergize it.  Some elements:

• Economic and health insecurity for some leads to insecurity for all.  A safety net is needed.
• Market systems need slack to respond to black swan events.  “Just-in-time” and “lean” are efficient only when not overstressed.  Global supply chains need resilience and redundancy. Too much slack and safety drain our wealth and will, but too little lead to disaster.
• Moving fast and breaking things can break things that cannot be fixed.  Experience can blind us, but inexperience can kill.
• Power among local, state, national, and global government must be properly balanced and adaptable to stress.  Power and wealth must be shared fairly among people, factions, and nations, or those left wanting will throw rocks at the crystal palace.  The resurgence of nationalism, factionalism, and the crisis of disinformation are symptoms of perceived unfairness.  Government that is too small is just as bad as too big.

Our modern, high-tech world is far too complex for purely top-down or bottom-up management and governance -- we need a smart and adaptive blend. That requires openness, transparency, trust, and fairness, so even when there is disagreement, there is a common sense of reasonableness and good spirit.

New Logics for Intertwingularity

My recent work has focused on two new ways to deal better with this growing complexity.  These new logics that do not just exhort people to be better and wiser, but better align interests so that virtue is rewarded. 

One relates to failures of our marketplace of ideas – especially our social media and other collaborative systems.  Computer-augmented human collaboration first emerged in the 1960s, and was used for disaster preparedness (natural and nuclear).  It progressed slowly until the Web made it far more powerful and accessible to consumers, but we failed to direct those social media systems to serve us well.  Struggling to find a business model, they hit on advertising. We now recognize that to be “the original sin of the Internet” because it misdirects our platforms to serve advertisers and not users.  Algorithms can help augment human intelligence to make us smarter collectively -- instead of making us stupider, as social media now do.  Systems that elucidate nuance, context, and perspective can empower us to draw out and augment the wisdom of crowds (as explained in detail on this blog) to deal more smartly with our deeply intertwingled world.  That could drive a new Age of Enlightenment in which technology augments the marketplace of ideas in the ways that we have always relied on to mediate consent – an emergent mix of top-down guidance and bottom-up emergence that can lead to new, yet natural, forms of digital democracy.

The other relates to failures of our economic marketplace – how we can shift from the short-term. zero-sum logic of extractive mass-market capitalism to more long-term, win-win forms of market cooperation.  That can restore the emergent, distributed, and human logic of traditional markets that Adam Smith saw as socially beneficial -- before modern mass-marketing alienated producers from consumers and lost sight of broader human values.  Our digital economy now enables new ways to shift from fighting over a current pie to cooperating to co-create a larger pie -- and to share it fairly.  That logic can empower a reformation of market capitalism from within that could actually be more profitable, and thus self-motivating.  We can apply the power of computer-mediated marketplaces to let businesses and consumers negotiate at a human level -- about the values they care about, how to co-create that value, and how to share in the benefits.  We have begun to think in terms of customer journeys, but have been trying to fit customers into segments or personas. Instead, we need to design for segments of one that are custom-fit to each customer, to build relationships with each customer on human terms.

These two logics are interrelated: a flawed economic logic for consumer platform services has been built on advertising revenue (“the Internet’s original sin”). That has warped incentives to favor engagement with junk content that sells ads, rather then the value to users of quality content. An improved logic for value will create incentives for our platforms to facilitate a logic for a better marketplace of ideas.

The brief descriptions of these new logics may sound like just more exhortations, but the posts that they link to provide details of operational mechanisms -- and evidence that their elements have proven effective.  These new combinations of elements can quickly become second nature, because they draw on and re-channel natural behaviors that promise to make them highly self-reinforcing.

Many allied visions for better logics of emergence are finding new relevance in this era of crisis.  We have only to join together and rise to the occasion.  We say that “we are all in this together” – we need to open our minds to really think that way, and to work with new logics and “choice architectures” that make that natural.  With better logics, our instinctive behaviors can once again synergize to flow in increasingly enlightened ways.

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For more about the new logic for the marketplace of ideas (and intertwingularity in general), see this list of selected items on the SmartlyIntertwingled.com blog.

For more about the new logic for the economic marketplace, see this list of selected items on the FairPayZone.com blog.

2020 Vision -- The Restoration of the Customer

The Age of the Customer: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Nearly a decade has passed since Forrester said we were entering The Age of the Customer. That is apparent and has obvious implications. But as the decade of the 2020's dawns, I call out a deeper vision -- The Restoration of the Customer -- that could bring far more fundamental changes in the coming decade.

There are two surprising turns that may be taken in this decade to restore power to customers -- one that can fundamentally change how we conduct business, and one that can fundamentally change how we collaborate.

Those turns might just begin to undo many of the ills of the industrial revolution and of the computer revolution.  Both turns center on a return to enlightened human values:

• The customer is not just a persona with a bundle of attributes that a business can learn how to manipulate, but a unique human being that has been bred since pre-history to thrive on a cooperative effort to create value and share it.
• The user is not just a a source of attention that can be engaged to be sold to advertisers, but a customer to be served what they value -- again, a cooperative effort to create value and share it.

What those paying attention see

Forrester put the basic drivers nicely (emphasis added):

In this era, digitally-savvy customers would change the rules of business, creating extraordinary opportunity for companies that could adapt, and creating existential threat to those that could not. ...It requires leaders to think and act differently – in ways that feel foreign, unfamiliar, and counter-intuitive. And honestly, it is simply hard to do. ...These dynamics will endure as new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics emerge to challenge core notions of what it means to be a company, what it means to build human capital, and what it means to compete and win.

...And, a deeper vision

Here I point to some little recognized ideas on how re-centering on value can change not only the dynamic of commerce, but also a parallel dynamic of customer value that is equally important.

• First, the commercial dynamic that Forrester describes is just the foundation for reversing how the "progress" of technology cost us the human dimension in commerce -- a dimension that we had when commerce was just the way villagers did business with one another -- with human beings on both sides of an ongoing relationship. 
• Second, we humans, as "customers" of Web services, have lost control of our experience of the world.  Our central experience of human interaction has been hijacked by platforms who "engage" us in order to profit from bombarding us with advertising and paid propaganda.

First: Back to the future of commerce

Consumers are increasingly alienated from the companies they do business with. Instead of neighbors or shopkeepers, we deal with soulless institutions that we distrust and feel abused by. That has been, increasingly, the price of productivity and material riches. But now technology has advanced far enough to restore the dimension of human values -- if we applied to do so. That does not require that we abandon the miracle of capitalism, but only that we bring it back to the marketplace of human value. Technology now makes it possible for even large faceless institutions to build human interfaces that behave with human values. That will drive institutions to interact with human in ways that are more truly human.

FairPay is a framework for centering on why and how to do that. The key is to recenter on relationships and the creation and sharing of value in ways that are tailored to each individual. Specifics on how to do that are in my FairPayZone blog, some articles written with prominent marketing scholars, and my 2016 book. Some of the best places to begin to understand this are:

• The Ghost of Pricing Future -- A Thought Experiment -- a simple vision of human value.
• The Relationship Economy -- It's All About Valuing Customer Experiences -- how the restoration begins.
• The Elements of Next-Gen Relationships and Pricing -- A Unifying Framework -- deconstructing the elements of value.
• "Risk-Free" Subscriptions to The Celestial Jukebox? -- a simpler, 80/20 step toward value based subscriptions.
• FairPay Changes the "Game" of Commerce  -- a game theory method for seeking human value in business relationships.
• ...and for those with a more scholarly bent, A Novel Revenue Architecture to Monetize Digital Goods and Pricing in Consumer Digital Markets:  A Dynamic Framework.

Second: Who does it serve? - a course correction in how we experience the world

Social media and other online content services have changed how we experience the world, including how we interact with other people. Computer-mediation began with great hopes, but now it seems we have built a Frankenstein's monster.  As growing calls for change are beginning to focus on new levels of regulation, it is not enough to regulate against specific harms. Instead we must refocus on what we want to regulate for -- who these "services" serve, and what we want these platforms to facilitate. They were supposed to make us happy and smart -- instead they are making us angry and stupid. But technology can reverse that, if we incentivize that.

We can design new architectures for our interactive media that create value for us.  The key is to recognize that each of us is an individual, and we should be able to individualize our services, mixing and matching offerings to make just the service we want for what we are doing now. The most urgent part of that is to shape our media services to give each of us what we value. The Web stated out seeking to do that, and we can return to that vision. It won't be free, but it can be affordable. And we have seen that "free" is not really affordable (because it is not really free). If we do not change direction, our democracies and our civilization will collapse. Some starting points for seeing how:

• Our Digital Platforms -- What We Want to Regulate For (Not Just Against) -- a preliminary summary of my comments at an excellent event on this theme.
• The Augmented Wisdom of Crowds: Rate the Raters and Weight the Ratings -- a vision for how social media can make us smarter and happier.
• Reverse the Biz Model! -- Undo the Faustian Bargain for Ads and Data -- why the ad model was "the original sin of the Internet."
• The Tao of Fake News -- how truth emerges from what humans value as an informed consensus.
• Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm -- further suggestions on designing for human values.
• Free Speech, Not Free Targeting! (Using Our Own Data to Manipulate Us) -- how this clarifies the issues in the 2020 election crisis.

(Cross-posted with my other blog, FairPayZone.)

To Regulate Facebook and Google, Turn Users Into Customers

First published in Techonomy, 2/26/19 -- and more timely than ever...

There is a growing consensus that we need to regulate Facebook, Google, and other large internet platforms that harm the public in large part because they are driven by targeted advertising.  The seductive idea that we can enjoy free internet services — if we just view ads and turn over our data — has been recognized to be “the original sin” of the internet.  These companies favor the interests of the advertisers they profit from more than the interests of their billions of users.  They are powerful tools for mass-customized mind-control. Selling their capabilities to the highest bidder threatens not just consumer welfare, but society and democracy.

There is a robust debate emerging about how these companies should be regulated. Many argue for controls on data use and objectionable content on these platforms.  But poorly targeted regulation risks many adverse side-effects – for example abridging legitimate speech, and further entrenching these dominant platforms and impeding innovation by making it too costly for others to compete.

But I believe we need to treat the disease, not just play whack-a-mole with the symptoms. It’s the business model, stupid! It is widely recognized that the root cause of the problem is the extractive, ad-funded, business model that motivates manipulation and surveillance.  The answer is to require these companies to shift to revenue streams that come from their users.  Of course, shifting cold-turkey to a predominantly user-revenue-based model is hard.  But in reality, we have a simple, market-driven, regulatory method that has already proven its success in addressing a similarly challenging problem – forcing automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they make. Government has for years required staged multi-year increases in Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency. A similar strategy can be applied here.

This market-driven strategy does not mandate how to fix things. It instead mandates a measurable limit on the systems that have been shown to cause harm.  Each service provider can determine on their own how best to achieve that.  Require that X% of the revenue of any consumer data service come from its users rather than advertisers.  Government can monitor their progress, and create a timetable for steadily ratcheting up the percentage.  (This might apply only above some amount of revenues, to limit constraints on small, innovative competitors.)

It is often said of our internet platforms that “if you are not the customer, you are the product.”  This concept may oversimplify, but it is deeply powerful.  With or without detailed regulations on privacy and data use, we need to shift platform incentives by making the user become the customer, increasingly over time.

Realigning incentives for ads and data.  Advertising can provide value to users – if it is targeted and executed in a way that is non-intrusive, relevant, and useful.  The best way to make advertising less extractive of user value is by quantifying a “reverse meter” that gives users credit for their attention and data.  Some services already offer users the option to pay in order to avoid or reduce ads (Spotify is one example).  That makes the user the customer. Both advertisers and the platforms benefit by managing user attention to maximize, rather than optimize for exploitive “engagement.”

What if the mandated user revenue level is not met?  Government could tax away enough ad revenue to meet the target percentage.  That would provide a powerful incentive to address the problem.  In addition, that taxed excess ad revenue could fund mechanisms for oversight and transparency, for developing better solutions, and for remediating disinformation.

Can the platforms really shift to user revenue?  Zuckerberg has been a skeptic, but none of the big platforms has tried seriously.  When the platforms realize they must make this change, they will figure out how, even if it trims their exorbitant margins.

Users increasingly recognize that they must pay for digital services.  A system of reverse metering of ads and data use would be a powerful start.  Existing efforts that hint at the ultimate potential of better models include including crowdfunding, membership models, and cooperatives. Other emerging variations promise to be adaptive to large populations of users with diverse value perceptions and abilities to pay.

A growing focus on customer value would move us back towards leveraging a proven great strength of humanity — the deeply cooperative behavior of traditional markets.

A simple mandate requiring internet platforms to generate a growing percentage of revenue from users will not cure all ills. But it is the simplest way to drive a fundamental shift toward better corporate behavior.

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Coda, 7/24/19:

Since the original publication of this article, this issue has become even more timely, as the FTC and Justice Department begin deep investigation into the Internet giants. 

• There is growing consensus that there is a fundamental problem with the ad- and data-based business model. 
• There is also growing consensus that we must move beyond the narrow theory of antitrust that says there can be no "harm" in a free service that does not raise direct costs to consumers (but does raise indirect costs to them and limits competition). 
• But the targeted strategies for forcing a fundamental shift in business models outlined here are still not widely known or considered. 

For more information see my Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms. 

• It primarily focuses on these business model issues and regulatory strategies (including the auto emissions model described here), and how FairPay offers an innovative strategy that has gained recognition for how it can generate user revenue in equitable ways that do not prevent a service like Facebook or Google from being affordable by all, even those with limited ability to pay.
• It also links to a body of work "On the deeper issues of social media and digital democracy." That includes Google-like algorithms for getting smarter about the wisdom of crowds, and structural strategies for regulation based on the specific architecture of the platforms and how power should be modularized (much as smart modularization was applied to regulating the Bell System and enabling the decades of robust innovation we now enjoy.)

2019 New Year's Resolution: Let's Work Together to Invent a Better 2020!

My forecast for 2019: The best way to predict the future is to invent it -- let's work together on inventing a better 2020!

We face two over-arching and related challenges, one in the world of technology, and one in the larger world of enlightened democratic society.

At the broadest level, 2019 promises to be perhaps the worst and most traumatic year in recent American history. My point is not one of politics or policy (I bite my tongue), but of our basic processes of democratic society -- how we all work together to understand the world and make decisions. We now see all to well how much harm technology has done to that -- not by itself, but as an amplifier of the worst in us.

Within that world of technology, many have come to realize that we have taken a wrong turn in building vast and deeply influential infrastructures that are sustained by advertising. That perverts the profit incentive from creating value for we the people, to exploiting us to profit advertisers. That drive for engagement and targeting inherently conflicts with the creation of real value for users and society. We seem to not even be looking very hard for any solution beyond band-aids that barely alter 1) the perverse incentives of advertising, and 2) the failing zero-sum economics of artificial scarcity.

We seem to be at a loss for how to solve these problems at either level. I suggest that is simply a failure of will, imagination, and experimentation that we can all help rectify. Many prominent thought leaders have said much the same. I list some of them, and offer creative suggestions in An Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms. I hope you will read it, as well as the related material it links to.

My suggestions are more specific, actionable, and practical. That letter summarizes and links to ideas I have been developing for many years, but have taken on new urgency. They are well-supported, but as yet unproven in their full form. I can't be sure that my solutions will work, but there seems to be growing consensus that the problems are real, even if few have suggested any actionable path to solving them. (I have been a successful inventor and futurist for many decades. I have often been wrong about details of my answers, but have rarely have been far wrong about problems and issues. Very smart and well-informed people think I am on the right track here.)

But whether or not I am right about the solutions, we all have to make it a priority try to find, test, and refine the best solutions we can to confront these critical problems.

Still, few in technology, business, or government have turned from business as usual to rise to the urgent challenges we now face -- and even those who alert us to these problems seem to have few concrete strategies for effective action.

Please consider the urgency and importance of these issues at both levels, see if my suggestions or those of others resonate -- and add your voice in those directions -- or work to suggest better directions.

If we do not begin to make real progress in 2019, we may face a very dark 2020 and beyond.

If we do begin to turn this ship around, we can recharge the great promise of technology to augment our intellect and our society, and to create a new economics of abundance.

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This is cross posted from both of my blogs, FairPayZone.com and Reisman on User-Centered Media, which delve further into these issues.

"The Square and the Tower" — Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm (a Review and Beyond)

[Note: A newer post updates this one and removes much of the book review portion, to concentrate on the forward-looking platform issues: Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm.]

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Niall Ferguson's new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook is a sweeping historical review of the perennial power struggle between top-down hierarchies and more open forms of networks. It offers a thought-provoking perspective on a wide range of current global issues, as the beautiful techno-utopian theories of free and open networks increasingly face murder by two brutal gangs of facts: repressive hierarchies and anarchistic swarms.

Ferguson examines the ebb and flow of power, order, and revolution, with important parallels between the Gutenberg revolution (which led to 130 years of conflict) and our digital revolution, as well as much in between. There is valuable perspective on the interplay of social networks (old and new), the hierarchies of governments (liberal and illiberal), anarchists/terrorists, and businesses (disruptive and monopolistic). One can disagree with Ferguson's conservative politics yet find his analysis illuminating.

Drawing on a long career as a systems analyst/engineer/designer, manager, entrepreneur and inventor, I have recently come to share much of Ferguson's fear that we are going off the rails. He cites important examples like the 9/11 attacks, counterattacks, and ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, and most concerning to me, the 2016 election as swayed by social media and hacking. However -- discouraging as these are -- he seems to take an excessively binary view of network structure, and to discount the ability of open networks to better reorganize and balance excesses and abuse. He argues that traditional hierarchies should reestablish dominance.

In that regard, I think Ferguson fails to see the potential for better ways to design, manage, use, and govern our networks -- and to better balance the best of hierarchy and openness. To be fair, few technologists are yet focused on the opportunities that I see as reachable, and now urgently needed.

New levels of man-machine augmentation and new levels of decentralizing and modularizing intelligence can make these network smarter and more continuously adaptable to our wishes, while maintaining sensible and flexible levels of control.   We can build on distributed intelligence in our networks to find more nuanced ways to balance openness and stability (without relying on unchecked levels of machine intelligence). Think of it as a new kind of systems architecture for modular engineering of rules that blends top-down stability with bottom-up emergence that apply checks and balances that work much like our representative democracy. This is a still-formative exploration of some ideas that I have written about, and plan to expand on in the future. First some context.

The Square (networks), the Tower (hierarchies) and the Algorithms that make all the difference

Ferguson's title comes from his metaphor of the medieval city of Sienna, with a large public square that serves as a marketplace and meeting place, and a high tower of government (as well as a nearby cathedral) that displayed the power of those hierarchies. But as he elaborates, networks have complex architectures and governance rules that are far richer than the binary categories of either "network" ( a peer to peer network with informal and emergent rules) or "hierarchy" (a constrained network with more formal directional rankings and restrictions on connectivity).

The crucial differences among all kinds of networks are in the rules (algorithms, code, policies) that determine which nodes connect, and with what powers. While his analysis draws out the rich variety of such structures, in many interesting examples, with diagrams, what he seems to miss is any suggestion of a new synthesis. Modern computer-based networks enable our algorithms to be far more nuanced and dynamically variable. They become far more emergent in both structure and policy, while still subject to basic constraints needed for stability and fairness.

Traditional networks have rules that are either relatively open (but somewhat slow to change), or constrained by laws and customs (and thus resistant to change) -- and even our current social and information networks are constrained in important ways. For example,

• The US constitution defines the powers and the structures for the governing hierarchy, and processes for legislation and execution, made resilient by its provisions for self-amendable checks and balances. 
• Real-world social hierarchies have structures based on empowered people that tend to shift more or less slowly.
• Facebook has a social graph that is emergent, but the algorithms for filtering who sees what are strictly controlled by and private to Facebook. (They have just announced a major change --  unilaterally -- hopefully for the better for users and society, if not for content publishers.)
• Google has a page graph that is given dynamic weight by the PageRank algorithm, but the management of that algorithm is strictly controlled by Google. It has been continuously evolving in important respects, but the details are kept secret to make it harder to game.

As Ferguson points out, our vaunted high-tech networks are controlled by corporate hierarchies (he refers to FANG, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, and BAT, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) -- but subject to levels of government control that vary in the US, EU, and China. This corporate control is a source of tension and resistance to change -- and a barrier to more emergent adaptation to changing needs and stressors (such as the Russian interference in our elections). These new monopolistic hierarchies extract high rents from the network -- meaning us, the users -- mostly in the form of advertising and sales of personal data.

A fuller summary of Ferguson's message is in his WSJ preview article, "In Praise of Hierarchy." That headlines which side of fence he is on.

Smarter, more open and emergent algorithms -- APIs and a common carrier governance model

My view on this is more positive -- in that the answer to the question of governance is to make our network algorithms not only smarter, but more open to individual and multi-party control. Business monopolies or oligarchies (or governments) may own and control essential infrastructure, but we can place limits on what they control and what is open. In the antitrust efforts of the past century governments found need to regulate rail and telephone networks as common carriers, with limited corporate-owner power to control how they are used, giving marketplace players (competitors and consumers) a large share in that control. 

Initially this was rigid and regulated in great detail by the government (very hierarchical), but the Carterfone decision showed how to open the old AT&T Bell System network to allow connection of devices not tested and approved by AT&T. Many forget how only AT&T phones could be used (except for special cases of alternative devices like early faxes (Xerox "telecopiers") that went through cumbersome and often arbitrary AT&T approval processes). That changed when the FCC's decision opened the network up to any device that met defined electrical interface standards (using the still-familiar RJ11, a "Registered Jack"). Similarly only AT&T long-distance connections could be used, until the antitrust Consent Decree opened up competition among the "Baby Bells" and broke them off from Long Lines to compete on equal terms with carriers like MCI and Sprint.

In software systems, such plug-like interfaces are known as APIs (Application Program Interfaces), and are now widely accepted as the standard way to let systems inter-operate with one another -- just enough, but no more -- much like a hardware jack does. This creates a level of modularity in architecture that lets multiple systems, subsystems, and components  inter-operate as interchangeable parts -- the great advance of the first Industrial Revolution.

What I suggest as the next step in evolution of our networks is a new kind of common carrier model that recognizes networks like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as common utilities once they reach some level of market dominance. Then antitrust protections would mandate open APIs to allow substitution of key components by customers -- to enable them to choose from an open market of alternatives that offer different features and different algorithms. Some specific suggestions are below, but first, a bit more on the motivations.

Modularity, emergence, markets, transparency, and democracy

Systems architects have long recognized that modularity is essential to making complex systems feasible and manageable. Software developers saw from the early days that monolithic systems did not scale -- they were hard to build, maintain, or modify. Web 2.0 extended that modularity to our network services, using network APIs that could be opened to the marketplace. Now we see wonderful examples of rich applications in the cloud composed of elements of logic, data, and analytics from a vast array of companies (such as travel services that seamlessly combine air, car rental, hotel, local attractions, loyalty programs, and tracking services from many companies).

The beauty of this kind of modularity is that systems can be highly emergent, based on the transparency and stability of published APIs, to quickly adapt to meet needs that were not anticipated. Some of this can be at the consumer's discretion, and some is enabled by nimble entrepreneurs. The full dynamics of the market can be applied, yet basic levels of control can be retained by the various players to ensure resilience and minimize abuse or failures.

The challenge that Ferguson makes clear is how to apply hierarchical control in the form of regulation in a way that limits risks, while enabling emergence driven by market forces. What we need is new focus on how to modularize critical common core utility services and how to govern the policies and algorithms that are applied, at multiple levels in the design of these systems (another kind of hierarchy). That can be done through some combination of industry self-regulation (where a few major players have the capability to do that, probably faster and more effectively than government), but by government where necessary (and only to the extent and duration necessary).

That obviously will be difficult and contentious, but it is now essential, if we are not to endure a new age of disorder, revolution, and war much like the age that followed Gutenberg. Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech world need to take responsibility for the genie they have let out of the bottle, and mobilize to deal with it.

Once that progresses and is found to be effective, similar methods can be applied to make government itself more modular, emergent, transparent, and democratic -- moving carefully toward "Democracy 2.0." (The carefully part is important -- Ferguson rightfully notes the dangers we face, and we have done a poor job of teaching our citizens, and our technologists, the principles of history, civics, and governance that are prerequisite to a working democracy.)

Opening the FANG walled gardens (with emphasis on Facebook and Google, plus Twitter)

This section outlines some rough ideas. (Some were posted in comments on an article in The Information by Sam Lessin, titled, "The Tower of Babel: Five Challenges of the Modern Internet" -- another tower.)

The fundamental principle is that entrepreneurs should be free to innovate improvements to these "essential" platforms, to be selected by consumer market forces. Just as we moved beyond the restrictive walled gardens of AOL, and the early closed app stores (limited to apps created by Apple or Motorola or Verizon), we have unleashed a cornucopia of innovative Web services and apps that have made our services far more effective (and far more valuable to the platform owners as well, in spite of their fears). Why should first movers be allowed to block essential innovation? Why should they have sole control of the essential algorithms that are coming to govern major aspects of our lives? Why shouldn't our systems evolve toward fitness functions that we control, with just enough hierarchical structure to prevent excessive instability at any given time?

Filtering rules. Filters are central to the function of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. As Ferguson observes, there are issues of homophily, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news, and spoofing that are core to whether these networks make us smart or stupid, and whether we are easily manipulated to think in certain ways. Why not mandate that platforms be opened to user-selectable filtering algorithms (and/or human curators)? The major platforms can control their core services, but could allow for separate filters that inter-operate. Let users control their filters, whether just by setting key parameters, or by substituting pluggable alternative filters. This would be much like third party analytics in financial market data systems. Greater competition and transparency would allow users to compare alternative filters and decide what kinds of content they do or do not want. It would stimulate innovation to create new kinds of filters that might be far more useful.

For example, I have proposed strategies for filters that can help counter filter bubble effects by being much smarter about how people are exposed to views that may be outside of their bubble, doing it in ways that they welcome and think about. My post, Filtering for Serendipity -- Extremism, "Filter Bubbles" and "Surprising Validators" explains the need, and how that might be done. The key idea is to assign levels of authority to people based on the reputational authority that other people ascribe to them (think of it a RateRank, analogous to Google's PageRank algorithm). This approach also suggests ways to create smart serendipity, something that could be very valuable as well.

The "wisdom of the crowd" may be a misnomer when the crowd is an undifferentiated mob, but, what I propose seeking the wisdom of the smart crowd -- first using the crowd to evaluate who is smart, and then letting the wisdom of the smart sub-crowd emerge, in a cyclic, self-improving process (much as Google's algorithm improves with usage).

Social graphs and user agents: Why do Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others own separate, private forms of our social graph. Why not let other user agents interoperate with a given platform’s social graph? Does the platform own my social graph or do I? Does the platform control how that affects my filter or do I? Yes, we may have different flavors of social graph, such as personal for Facebook and professional for LinkedIn, but we could still have distinct sub-communities that we select when we use an integrated multi-graph, and those could offer greater nuance and flexibility with more direct user control.

Email systems were modularized long ago, so that we compose and read mail using user agents (Outlook, Apple mail, Gmail, and others) that connect with remote mail transfer agent servers (that we may barely be aware of) which interchange mail with any other mail transfer agent to reach anyone using any kind of user agent, thus enabling universal connectivity. Why not do the same to let any social media user agent inter-operate with any other, using a common social graph? We would then set our user agent to apply filters to let us see whichever communities we want to see at any given time.

Identity: A recurring problem with many social networks is abuse by anonymous users (often people with many aliases, or even just bots). Once again, this need not be a simple binary choice. It would not be hard to have multiple levels of participant, some anonymous and some with one or more levels of authentication as real human individuals (or legitimate organizations). These could then be clearly marked in feeds, and users could filter out anonymous or unverified users if desired.

Value transfers and extractions: Another important problem, and one that Ferguson cites is that the new platform businesses are driven by advertising and data sales, which means the consumer is not the customer but the product. Short of simply ending that practice (to end advertising and make the consumer the customer), those platforms could be driven to allow customer choice about such intrusions and extractions of value. Some users may be willing opt in to such practices, to continue to get "free" service, and some could opt out, by paying compensatory fees -- and thus becoming the customer. If significant numbers of users opted to become the customer, then the platforms would necessarily become far more customer-first -- for consumer customers, not the business customers who now pay the rent. (I have done extensive work on such alternative strategies, as described in my FairPayZone blog and my book.)

Analytics and metrics: we need access to relevant usage data and performance metrics to help test and assess alternatives, especially when independent components interact in our systems. Both developers and users will need guidance on alternatives. The Netflix Prize contests for improved recommender algorithms provided anonymized test data from Netflix to participant teams. Concerns about Facebook's algorithm, and the recent change that some testing suggests may do more harm than good, point to the need for independent review. Open alternatives will increase the need for transparency and validation by third parties. (Sensitive data could be restricted to qualified organizations.) [This paragraph added 1/14.]

If such richness sounds overly complex, remember that complexity can be hidden by well-designed user agents and default rules. Those who are happy with a platform's defaults need not be affected by the options that other users might enable (or swap in) to customize their experience. But we could have the choice, and innovations that are valuable can emerge for use by early adopters, and then spread into the mainstream if success fuels demand. That is the genius of our market economy -- a spontaneous, emergent process for adaptively finding what works and has value -- more effective than any hierarchy (as Ferguson extols, with reference to Smith, Hayek, and Levitt).

Augmentation of humans (and their networks)

Another very powerful aspect of networks and algorithms that Ferguson (and many others) neglect is  the augmentation of human intelligence. This idea dates back some 60 years (and more), when "artificial intelligence" went through its first hype cycle -- Licklider and Engelbart observed that the smarter strategy is not to seek totally artificial intelligence, but to seek hybrid strategies that draw on and augment human intelligence. Licklider called it "man-computer symbiosis, and used ARPA funding to support the work of Engelbart on "augmenting human intellect." In an age of mundane uses of computers, that proved eye-opening ("the mother of all demos") at a 1968 conference, and was one of the key inspirations for modern user interfaces, hypertext, and the Web.

The term augmentation is resurfacing in the artificial intelligence field, as we are once again realizing how limited machine intelligence still is, and that (especially where broad and flexible intelligence is needed) it is often far more effective to seek to apply augmented intelligence that works symbiotically with humans, retaining human visibility and guidance over how machine intelligence is used.

Why not apply this kind of emergent, reconfigurable augmented intelligence to drive a bottom up way to dynamically assign (and re-assign) authority in our networks, much like the way representative democracy assigns (and re-assigns) authority from the citizen up? Think of it as dynamically adaptive policy engineering (and consider that a strong bottom-up component will keep such "engineering" democratic and not authoritarian). Done well, this can keep our systems human-centered.

Not binary:  networks versus hierarchies -- "Everything is deeply intertwingled"

Ted Nelson (who coined the term "hypertext" and was also one of the foundational visionaries of the Web), wrote in 1974 that "everything is deeply intertwingled." Ferguson's exposition illuminates how true that is of history. Unfortunately, his artificially binary dichotomy of hierarchies versus networks tends to mask this, and seems to blind him to how much more intertwingled we can expect our networks to be in the future. As Nelson put it, "Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't."

It's a race:  augmented network hierarchies that are emergently smart, balanced, and dynamically adaptable -- or disaster

If we pull together to realize this potential, we can transcend the dichotomies and conflicts of the Square and the Tower that Ferguson reveals as so wickedly complex and dangerous. Just as Malthus failed to account for the emergent genius of civilization, and the non-linear improvements it produces, Ferguson seems to discount how non-linear the effect of smarter networks with more dynamically augmented and balanced structures can be. But he is right to be very fearful, and to raise the alarm -- we are racing along a very dangerous path, and are not being nearly smart or proactive enough about what we need to do to avert disaster. What we need now is not a top-down command and control Manhattan Project, but a multi-faceted, broadly-based movement.

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First published in Reisman on User-Centered Media, 1/13/18.

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See the Selected Items tab for more on this theme.

Universal Basic Income and a new Economics of Abundance -- "When looms weave by themselves, man's slavery will end"

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has become a hot topic, as noted in a recent NY Times article by Farhad Manjoo.  Confronting the rise of automation and robots, even libertarians and conservatives are warming to the idea of a universal income provided by the government, and some prominent technology VCs have become very interested. What we face is a new economics of abundance, and it will have many pervasive ramifications we can only dimly foresee -- some sooner than we may think.

The roots of this idea go back as far as Aristotle: “When looms weave by them­selves, man's slavery will end.” I read this quote in a 1964 NY Times article on automation, and it helped set the path of my "user-centered" career in technology. I wrote a high school essay taking off on it, extrapolating how it enabled utopias that blended Bellamy's "Looking Backward" and Wells' "Men Like Gods." Of course that was over 50 years ago, and my youthful utopian views were less seasoned with experience and pragmatism, but the core idea I expressed then still stands up:

...This raises the question whether the product of human labor is necessarily limited. The answer is that it most certainly is not. In this century a messiah has arisen -- perhaps Messiac* might be a better name for this role of automation. As Aristotle said, "when looms weave by themselves man' s slavery will end." The looms are now beginning to weave.

...One can easily conceive a giant automated complex, call it Messiac, that can produce nearly unlimited quantities of goods with only the labor of a few operators and repairmen. Similarly, farms can be improved greatly in efficiency by automation and eventually synthetic, mass-producable foods will be developed. Messiac could thus provide all with everything they needed or desired. It would not only eliminate poverty, but also remove all cause for stealing -- it is easier to push a few buttons for something than to steal it. Any individual who did not want to would not even need to work. The necessary labor would be of sufficient interest and lightness that volunteers could handle it. This remaining work would be of a professional nature and as such would have a high degree of interest... Messiac is thus an economic system that is far more utopian than that of the best traditional utopia.

It is timely that UBI is getting attention just as I have embarked on a much narrower and more immediate quest to develop a step toward that economics of abundance, based on some more sophisticated economics. While we undertake the long conversation about UBI, and the first baby steps on this road, there is a little-recognized opportunity for a related change in that direction.

Digital content and services already weave by themselves -- in the sense that they can be infinitely replicated at almost no cost. This has already caused great turmoil in the content industries -- journalism and music have been in crisis, and TV/video is not far behind. Content can be free, but who will work to create it, and how will they be compensated?

In my other blog, I suggest that the answer is in FairPay, a radically new strategy for pricing that adaptively seeks win-win compensation for creating products and services. Since there is no scarcity with digital, there is no invisible hand to allocate scarcity. Instead we need an invisible handshake, an agreement to set prices fairly to sustain creators, based on allocating "share of wallet" (whether hard-earned dollars, or UBI allowances).  FairPay suggests a simple, pragmatic mechanism for balancing power between consumers and creators/producers to agree on an equitable share of wallet.

Check it out. I suggest FairPay will shed light on how we will live soon, and even more so in a future world where all the looms weave by themselves.

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*That was the era where computers had names like UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), ENIAC, and EDSAC.

Cuba's Digital Future -- Market Incentives, Resource Allocation, and FairPay as a New Path

My recent one-week People-to-People tour in Cuba presented a fascinating contrast to our market economy and suggests an interesting path forward for Cuba. I was focused mostly on what I saw of the real economy (there is not yet much of a digital economy), but on reflection, realized that Cuba's digital future could be unusually interesting. 

I began to think that the new FairPay strategy for more efficient and more customer-friendly pricing (especially for digital content and services) might fit particularly nicely with Cuba's desire to modernize and privatize its economy without giving up on its strong social values. Maybe Cuba has an opportunity to find a unique path to creating a new kind of market for user-centered media services.

Cuba's evolving real economy

What I saw of the real economy presented a sharp lesson in how essential markets are to providing incentives for productivity and efficient resource allocation. My tour program contacts presented an impressive view of how Cubans have applied socialist ideas resourcefully to develop sustainable production of food and provide strong education and medical care, but the backdrop was one of inefficiency and wasted potential.

• Most striking was the story of the owner/driver of the beautifully maintained 1950's Ford convertible serving as tourist taxi that I had a short ride in. He had been an experienced medical doctor with a specialty, who was making $80 per month (actually 80 CUCs, but close enough -- a very good salary for Cuba). Now, as as a taxi driver who owns an attractive car, he makes $80 per day! -- 20-30 times as much as he made as a medical specialist!  What a waste of education and scarce skills!
• Similar surprises were apparent under the surface in farms and food markets, the low standard of living of most of the population, and the striking decay of pre-revolution buildings and other infrastructure.
• The food markets in particular showed the contrast of government ration books and subsidized prices for a very limited selection of basic food items, combined with gradually increased acceptance of a level of black market trade in more scarce and desirable items.
• Modest efforts at allowing private development of restaurants ("paladares"), some of which were very nice, also presented a striking (but still very limited) contrast in how market incentives fuel productive enterprise.

A Q&A session with Reuters economic correspondent Marc Frank (in Cuba for over 20 years) added an interesting perspective on Raul Castro's ongoing efforts to shift toward more private enterprise and prepare Cuba to more fully participate in the world market -- now likely to accelerate with the thaw in US relations and a probable end to our trade embargo.

(Of course my understanding of the Cuban economy is quite limited -- these are just my impressions from what I saw in my one week there.)

Cuba's future digital economy

While Internet use and literacy in Cuba is low and will take time to grow, this cultural/economic climate raises the interesting idea that the new FairPay strategy for digital services might be especially relevant to development of user-centered media services for Cuban consumers. 

• A core objective of the Cuban economy has been the socialist/communist ideal of "to each according to his need," The problem has been that the "from each according to his ability" does not work well (incentives are too weak), and the combination fails to provide efficient allocation of resources. That has led toward privatization -- but with conventional pricing practices, privatization does not deliver "to each according to his need."
• FairPay creates a market solution to this problem -- not by hoping that productivity will be achieved "from each according to his ability," but by providing direct profit incentives for producers to learn what each consumer wants and what they should pay, and to produce the digital services that are desired accordingly. More like payment from each according to the value received (and willingness to pay fairly for that, to the extent able), and profit to the producer as a fair share of the actual value created. 

Consider the contrast between FairPay and conventional pricing models for digital:

• Both conventional models and FairPay seek to enable businesses to price their services in the way that realistically maximizes profits.
• Conventional models for pricing digital services, like freemium (and soft paywalls), may provide limited free services to all who want them, but support themselves by charging set prices for more advanced "premium" services. That prices the premium services out of reach of many consumers who can't justify that set price, but who would happily pay less. That is a loss to the market because digital services can be replicated at almost no cost, to serve a very wide population of consumers who would gain value from such services. Thus the value these services could bring to the wider market is wasted, as explained in my post: Beyond the Deadweight Loss of "All You Can Eat" Subscriptions.
• FairPay seeks to maximize profit by finding the right price for each consumer who finds value in a service. It does this by using an adaptive process to set win-win prices tailored to each consumer's needs: based on usage, value obtained, and ability to pay. FairPay exploits the unlimited replication of digital -- a lack of scarcity that makes rationing unnecessary. FairPay seeks to approximate an individually fair (and affordable) price for each consumer -- adapting over the life of the relationship -- to ensure that production is sustainably supported and incentivized, 
• The FairPayZone blog explains in detail how that works in a market-driven, dynamically adaptive way. FairPay is aimed at broad use in the current market-based environment of the US and most of the world. But the wondrous new economics of abundance in digital markets now makes it possible to achieve many of the ideals of socialism out of a profit-driven market-based system, in ways that are not yet widely recognized. 

So perhaps, as Cuba expands its Internet infrastructure to enable wide use, FairPay will resonate as a way to achieve its ideals of fairness in a market-driven way. Businesses can seek profits, and do so in a way that adapts to the needs (and resources) of each individual consumer. 

• For most of the world, FairPay can be viewed as adding a kinder, gentler (and smarter, more efficient) touch to the invisible hand -- what I refer to as an invisible handshake. 
• For Cuba, FairPay may be seen as adding new market drivers to a social handshake, to make it more productive and economically efficient (at least in the digital realm, and perhaps more widely).

For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).  (While most of my posts on FairPay are on the FairPayZone blog, this one seemed better suited to this blog.)