Note: this essay doesn't necessarily make it 100% clear that "buying locally" would often be a "good thing" in the system that is described. I figured that was obvious, but then all my examples made it seem otherwise. Thinking about designing this system so that it works well in lots of diverse locations and for many different people with different tastes is something like 99% of the point. So, please keep these things in mind as you read. Also, if you're reading this and you get stuck on the first sentence with the question "what is a scholium system?" you might want to read first introduction to scholium systems before diving into the rest.
I've been thinking about using scholium system ideas in the political and business arenas. Here are a few of the thoughts about this.
First, let's imagine a store like WalMart or Amazon or Ebay or whatever. But let's imagine it as being run more like a co-op and less like a "corporation". Let's imagine that it is run as free software, with maintainers instead of "managers".
At some future point in time, like WalMart, it might have its own distribution network and even its own suppliers and producers. But we'll start small and think about how to get good food that you want at a good price. Say, some oats, because - as I heard the story - that's how co-ops got started: a bunch of hippies going in on a big bag of oats so that they all could get some more cheaply than they would if they each bought a canister of the Quaker variety.
(Of course, co-ops then and now also cater to people with "special" tastes - they usually like organic foods, social justice, etc. – but I'm going to ignore these things for now.)
How do you get the oats for cheap? Well, you could buy them at a local co-op. If there is no local co-op, you could see if there is some distributor that you could use to start a local co-op. Oh yeah, and you might need to find some friends to go in on the oats with you if you want it to be really cheap… there is some cost-benefit analysis to do, like, would it be better to buy the amount you personally want to use at the local co-op, or would it be better to go through a distributor yourself? Maybe the only way the distributor could make things cheaper would be if you bought 100 sacks, and you might not want to do that.
So, there are various things to coordinate, both understanding the supply side and understanding (and amassing) the demand side.
This is just working through the historical example of co-ops.
Now… let's say that you decided that the best way to get oats for cheap was to start your own co-op. But you say, this worked so well for oats, let's do it for soap, and oil, and cleaning products, and… all sorts of stuff. So now we're in the business of coordinating lots of different products, different people, different tastes; we'll probably need some space to store things locally or at least a good way to get the stuff delivered or picked up. Its complicated, but this is what co-ops do. So.
OK, how are we going to coordinate things? This is where the model diverges somewhat from the historical co-op model. Instead of having management who gets paid, we have some hackers who design a system that the whole co-op community can easily use to say what they want to buy – and to give feedback on products in general.
So, for example, someone says "Well, I want to buy Coca-Cola". So, Coca-Cola appears in the system. Poof. Someone else says, you know, there is supposed to be an international boycott on Coca-Cola for such-and-such reasons, I'd personally much rather not have this co-op carry Coca-Cola and I certainly won't buy any if it is carried, however, I can suggest a related product that is not too much more expensive that, people generally agree, is better. Then these folks hash things out. If there is sufficient demand for Coca-Cola, it probably gets stocked, otherwise, it doesn't. But the detractors get a chance (because we're using a scholia-based model) to make everyone who buys Coca-Cola aware of the implications. And they can do their best (as they feel motivated) to find and provide other alternatives.
And so on and so forth. If something is a health hazard, people can say "hey, don't buy this, it could kill you!", and after sufficient debate, maybe the thing won't be stocked any more. If something is great, people can say "hey, this is great, you should buy it!", and then, presumably, people will.
The important thing about this model is that it is knowledge-based. If you want to find out about where, say, your place-setting came from, you can do research and find out, and add this information to the system.
It has potential to be a very hyperreal thing - like the HDM, but for shopping, and, more generally, for world economics.
After a while, techniques for production can be explained, social justice issues can be hashed out by the people who care about them. And so on - this thing has the potential to be a very big deal.
Now, one question is, how can such a system actually change patterns in the real world? Well, one thing is by helping awareness about different products grow. E.g. you might be able to buy something that is a health hazard or the cause of some great social or environmental bruhaha elsewhere, but the product and its implications can still be discussed in "Co-opMart". So, it increases public awareness. Another way is simply by undercutting. If this store can provide things that people want more cheaply than the competition, they will buy things at this store. If these things are made in a way that people like for other reasons too (e.g. social justice) that comes as a hidden bonus.
It is also a very democratic system - if enough people want to buy, say, non-recycled paper, it will get bought, even though others may raise an outcry. "Social justice" is not to be determined by tyrannies of the minority, but by an algorithm that takes demand into account, and, indeed, is essentially just driven by demand. Now, for the person who lives down-wind from a papermill and hates this, they can do their damndest to make buying non-recycled paper seem like a bad thing. But other people are free to ignore them or to say "you don't like it? why don't you move?" or whatever.
And thus we recover all of the complexities of "real world" politics in this system. And these too should be worked out by a "democratic" system. Politicians may be people who care especially about some issues, but anyone should be able to get their voice heard by people who wish to hear it.
End of story.
I don't agree with everything, but this is remarkably close, so check it out: http://www.strangelove.com/
Compare free culture as a labor issue for another essay on a similar theme coming from a different perspective. --jcorneli Mon May 23 20:34:44 2005 UTC
A couple points, for an extremely brief (sorry) reading:
A tyranny of the minority is not the end of our worries in a democracy, indeed, if it is functioning optimally, the tyranny is of the majority. The fact that one is also usually in the majority should be little comfort when one takes into account the fact that the co-op system makes decisions along many dimensions, therefore the probability that one ends up in the minority of a minority of these dimensions is essentially guaranteed. And a tyranny is not any less so if the decision is made by an algorithm after factoring individual inputs.
Basically, I find no solace in democracy where it can be avoided. I consider it a necessary (which is debatable) evil in arenas where it seems there is no option other than universal standardization on some solution.
The second point is that I think for the most part, what you are saying is a very good idea. You are saying that scholia could be used to improve the information that fuels economic coordination. Yet, I would also point out that this is already happening. Thinking about this scholia stuff recently, I realized that the web itself is already a scholium system. Any part of the web can consist of superimposed information about any other part of it, through the mechanism of hyperlinks. True, there is no formal "marking" or "typing", but these things can usually be done informally.
I've noticed in the past few years that the web has exploded with scholia-like information which seems to have as its goal the provision of more perfect information in the marketplace (or you can generalize, to more perfect information about decision-making in life in general). The internet is overflowing with meta-services which rate, recommend, establish reputations (just look at eBay), review, aggregate, filter, and select. Most of these are commercial innovations, often because some third party can always profit by helping consumers to make more efficient decisions about other products and services.
Anyway, I've been glad to see this, and hoping for more scholia-like/superimposed-value-addition activity, especially on the part of consumers. In effect these things are better than unions or co-ops, because they provide all the information needed for individuals to make decisions that save money or protect themselves, but do not force them to do anything. I would certainly like to see more of these things that are truly independent from large corporate players (relative to various markets).
--akrowne Mon May 23 23:23:16 UTC 2005
Let me add also that I think the explosion of "more perfect market information" on the web is also improving and transforming markets, and dare I say capitalism, in general. I think there was a lot of pent-up potential for this kind of activity, because no low-cost, universal, scholium-like system existed for consumers to use previously. The web provided this, and I think this is being subconsciously recognized as one of the key values of the web, as opposed to the mere "digital relocation" of services that seemed to fuel the dot-com bubble. Why a company was going to get filthy rich because it was selling cat food online instead of off is beyond me, but why a third party company might profit from providing consumer's forum rating and reviewing cat foods is pretty obvious (and more importantly, that the consumers themselves will profit).
--akrowne Mon May 23 23:34:38 UTC 2005
The way I'd address your questions are as follows. The answer to questions 1 and 2 is really the same at its basic level, but the expansions can go in two different directions.
First though, nota bene - just like you don't much care for the word encyclopedia to describe PM's "encyclopedia", democracy in a traditional sense is only an approximation of what would be going on in the system I'm thinking about.
But the reason for deciding things democratically (bearing in mind that this is a somewhat different use of the term than you might initially think of) is to assemble some "bulk buying leverage" after discovering what it is that people want to buy.
The reason for not stocking something that most people consider harmful something that if used as directed kills you and (unlike cigarettes) has an otherwise-perfect substitute that doesn't have this effect – is that most people won't want to buy such stuff once they know that it will have this effect. Basically it comes down to bulk buying again.
That's the simple cop-out answer (but still, it packs a bit of a punch).
The other way I can think of to look at the question about "buying at a non-loss" is more complicated: it basically boils down to the question of regulation in general. For example, let's say we were considering the product adrenalchrome, which, as legend has it, can only be obtained by sacrificing a live, terrified, human being.
So, if I was in charge, I might say "fine" - you want it, it can be bought, its gonna cost you, but sure, no problem, if you want to pay, we'll find you some adrenalchrome. But there would very likely be a huge outcry, I would be hunted down by the police, and it would probably be good-bye Co-opMart.
Other than extreme cases like this, the basic point is that if you are the only person buying some good, there is really no added benefit of going through a middle-man (unless it was to arrange shipping or something like that). In general, if something comes at a "non loss" and isn't illegal, then, yes, it would probably be available in the system. But maybe not forever; you might look at this system as a way of shaping future laws – if people object to the presence of some product on social justice grounds, for example, it might drive demand for that product down to the point where the product is no longer available at a non-loss. In a way, the scholium system and its particular version of "democracy" act as a "certificate" that people can use to assure themselves that the thing they are buying is something they want to buy.
I'm confused about your comments on "tyranny" in general. I'd like to get a more clearly-spelled-out transcript of your thoughts on this and on "democracy" and/or alternatives - it seems like you have some alternatives in mind that you like better. Maybe you don't object so much to the version of democracy I'm talking about here? You certainly don't seem to be arguing against the main point of this scholium-system-for-business, which is that making more information available will help people make better buying choices. You seem to agree that this is a good thing. And this is the principle that is at the root of what I meant when I said "democracy" in the essay.
You are saying that "this sort of thing is already happening", and I think the Strangelove link I provided above says something similar. I'd agree that you can get more information now than before, and that much of it is scholia-like. But this is a bit like saying that "math is already a prototypical hyperreality" - sure, I agree, but I also think that the future has much more to offer. Whether you call this stuff "the web" or a "scholium system" or a "semantic web", it seems fairly inevitable that lots and lots more information of all sorts and all sorts of structures will be available to more people, more readily.
However, I don't think that the co-operative nature of the business that I'm talking about in this essay is inevitable, indeed, I think that it would be a lot of work to put something like this together. I'd personally like to advance the hypothesis that
This : WalMart :: GNU : Microsoft
but time (and maybe some more & deeper theoretical investigations!) will tell.
--jcorneli Tue May 24 02:49:30 2005 UTC
"Democracy" is a slippery word. I wasn't at first sure whether you were using it in a global context, e.g., what can a scholium environment do for government; or a micro context, as in how can scholium facilitate democratic organizations. I tend to think it matters because one of these contexts is voluntary and free, and the other isn't. A lot of my comments assumed the former, but it seems you were talking about the latter, voluntary one. So you can discard most of my comments.
I like the "this:WalMart::GNU:Microsoft" association. It does get across succinctly what you are saying. Its interesting what is going on here– it is almost like "DIY vs. having someone else do the work for you" (including the thinking. Perhaps especially the thinking.) If you are interested in taking on more work or thinking harder instead of paying more money, you go with the DIY method.
I also think that the role juxtaposition of WalMart? and Microsoft is apt in many ways. They're both huge. They both exploit economies of scale and have a lot of bargaining power. They both tend to crush smaller competitors in overlapping markets. However, there are a few crucial differences. One is how much the middle man actually makes. In businesses like WalMart?'s, profit margins are razor-slim; 3.65% to be exact. Theirs are toward the lower end for a consumer goods retailer, since their gimmick is being super-low-cost. On the other hand, Microsoft's margins are huge– 28.89%. It is intuitively obvious why this is so: Microsoft has one sunk cost for development, then every additional "unit" it sells costs them almost zero. They have no cost of goods sold! I'm not sure how they settled on a reasonable profit-margin; maybe they threw darts at a board. Maybe they had complex models to tell them how much they could make before grandma would opt not to have a computer at all, to say nothing of switching to GNU.
Immediately, this begs the question of what exactly the point would be to co-oping in place of shopping at WalMart? (replace here any other retail business with a similar profile). 3.65% doesn't exactly sound like an unreasonable price for the logistics and delivery WalMart? affords. Also built into that is their bulk bargaining power. I would be impressed if you could co-op on something WalMart? does and actually beat them overall, even leaving out your extra work expenditure.
The point is, I think, that the market is already very efficient, via price signals alone. In certain sectors, you may be able to optimize by using scholium systems to coordinate collective bargaining, but I think perhaps the real potential of these systems is reinforcing the same dynamics that start with price signals and are amplified via competition. But I haven't thought about this enough to clearly justify this claim.
There are more ways that WalMart? is nothing like Microsoft. For example, since Microsoft has no cost-of-goods-sold, obviously there is nothing producer-side on which to use its bargaining power (to lower costs). So instead they use their bargaining power on the consumer-side– to raise costs! They do this by choking OEMs ("The Microsoft Tax" you get when you buy a new computer), corporations, and governments (bulk buyers). This is all enabled by the extreme viral nature of their software (forced obsolescence and network effects), which is enabled by the digital nature of the space they thrive in (or shall I say, "infect"…)
As I see it, there are many more reasons to find alternatives to Microsoft than for WalMart?. Its actually quite sad that the anti-corporate corporate crowd cannot see how much worse one is than the other, and additionally sad given how much more important the digital world is becoming.
So what am I getting at? That I think there is less hope, and less impetus for, the application of scholium methods to the (partial or total) replacement of real-world markets with noncommercial cooperation, in a fashion similar to how free/open source replaces commercial software.
I do, however, think that they could really go to the core of government systems. Right now citizen participation in the deliberatory processes of government are a humongous joke. This could be changed radically. Consider the problem of corporations being in bed with government. I think that in large part this is because it is simply impossible to interact in a meaningful way with the huge regular-person populous. It is much easier to meet with representatives of the largest corporations, with the weak excuse that helping them also helps their consumers, whom are the citizens. Digital government could really start to change this.
--akrowne Tue May 24 03:13:26 UTC 2005
Actually, the book on strangelove.com looks really bad. It is so gleeful in its distain for capitalism that it blinds itself and misses some critical things that utterly undermine its claims and predictions. It takes grains of truth and makes a sandhill out of them. It takes new things and construes them as every thing. The book highlights discrete examples as "proof" of the deprecation of "the old system", repeating the classic fallacy of using anecdotes as a proof of some universal truth.
Comments on some excerpts:
To some extent. But all I think this often does is create commerical opportunities with lower start-up costs. There are still "territories" to be occupied by corporations, except their boundaries are now demarcated by interest, attention, and memes. There is still a place for capital in "scaling up" an effort to handle delivery with a high, professional quality of service, and cover that pesky minority set of service provision that you can't reach without a lot more in terms of human resources (hiring developers, hiring customer service staff, hiring systems support staff, hiring salespersons, promotional people, lawyers, ad nauseum).
I've directly encountered a lot of these issues on PlanetMath. If there were no need for capital, we wouldn't be desperately searching for funding right now.
The dynamics are different in cyberspace, but capitalism is still inherently necessary and useful because there still are costs. The goal has shifted from product sales to service provision. In service provision, the steepest costs are human resources. And they are steep indeed. The book completely misses the boat.
Yes, but only for intellectual property. eBay is still very useful and very capitalist and very commodified, and it ain't goin' away. In fact, its one of the killer apps of the internet.
Not really. While the internet enables some people to act more in this fashion, most don't seem interested in going beyond being passive consumers. I would argue that it is very important and socially-transformational that these motivated, creative people– the tail of the bell curve– have been empowered and enabled. These people make CBPP a success. But most people use the internet as a platform for cheap communication, playing games, and viewing virus-laden diversional email attachments, not being creative or subversive.
They create a strong alternative. There is a lot of truth here. Bloggers managed to chase Trent Lott out of politics and Dan Rather out of broadcasting. This is a good thing. People with different values and points of view are no longer excluded from broadcasting and having mass influence. But commercial media is free to respond, and it has, and it will. Emergent media, lets call it, is only a competitor. And it turns out there is a really easy way to be a crappy media outlet and still rake in the bucks: tell people what they want to hear. Politics suffers the same problem. Politicians are only half of the problem: the other problem is that most people want to be lied to.
What a funny thing to waste time on. I've never heard of any new meaning given by subversive internet people to Barbie and McDonald?'s, and I'm practically in the super-internet-user category. When something "makes it big" on the internet, I know about it. This comes back to what I said earlier: attention and interest are still limitations.
Correct, piracy won't be eliminated. This is the nature of the internet. Its not that people are distainful of IP, its that its impossible to force any digital IP on people which they aren't willing to voluntarily accept. But commerce has always operated largely /without being able to assume deadly force to meet its ends; the recent regime of coercive over-IP is just that– recent. I would like to see it rolled back, and the realities of the internet are challenging it.
But I don't see how any of this erodes brand value. Brands provide convenient cognitive affordance. They bind notions of quality to a product and provider. Cognitive affordance is a pillar of Human Computer Interaction, even, which I think says something about how branding is a result of psychological constants that the internet isn't eliminating.
Come again? Most people in "online communities" (who are also in offline communities) will still not want you to take their physical property from them. As for intellectual property, most would agree that a "no IP rights" situation is bad, with even the most rudimentary understanding of what IP is supposed to do (encourage creation).
The book does not even take a very "scholiumific" view of IP, where creations become permanent artifacts and change and commentary create new ones. In this model, a creator is a permanent attribute of an intellectual creation, and thus they have permanent and perpetual ownership of the "goodwill" benefits that flow forth from them, such as reputation, recognition, and fame.
--akrowne Tue May 24 04:39:58 UTC 2005
Since it is late I will confine myself to a few brief observations, thoughts, and anecdotes.
In a way, a scholium system for merchandise is a lot like what we already have. Pick up a random box of stuff in a store and you will see a lot more on it than simply a label of the contents and the name of the manufacturer. You will find things like nutrition listings, ingredients, suggested recipies, health risk warnings, disclaimers, OSHA data, seals of approval from organizations such as Good Housekeepinng and Underwriter's Laboratory, advertisements for other products, coupons, proofs of purchase, comments from buyers, etc. These constitute scholia. As I see it, what your proposal would do is to automate and hopefuly expedite the procedure of attaching such scholia to products and do away with selection by the manufacturer so that even negative comments will appear. Now, the only way that negative comments appear is when they are forced to appear by law.
As for "democracy", the term has been used by so many people in so many different ways that its meaning is about as fixed as the meaning of "a" in algebra. Unless one's aim is to bamboozle people by using one meaning while using another, it is a good idea to to specify which definition is being used.
From my personal experience in activism and observation, here is part of my perspective on coroprations, politicians, and citizen involvement. To stay in office, a politician needs two things — funds and votes. To obtain the fomer, politicians court businesses. The politician knows that it is imperative to meet at least some of the companies' demands or they will cut off funding. To obtain the latter, politicians court the people. However, in this case, if they do not meet the peoples' demands, it is not so certain that they will suffer. Too many people are apathetic, they won't vote, or they will forget about the issue in question which offended them, or they can easily be persuaded otherwise with ease. Therefore, there is typically little to be lost in ignoring the demands of the people.
As a counterexample, I will cite the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christians in American politics. As I see it, the reason for this is simply that it is clear that, if fundamentalists disapprove of a certain politician's policy, they will turn out to vote and cast their ballots against the politician in question. Hence, they have an influence disproportionate to their proportion of the population.
However, when it comes to other groups and interests, such as labor or civil rights, it is not so clear that ignoring their demands will have such an adverse effect. Remember that these groups also have leaders who routinely meet with officials. However, the politician doesn't fear them like the fundamentalists because crossing their agendas is not likely to have the same dire consequences in most cases. For instance, if a hypothetical politician decides to vote for business aganst labor, the reasoning might run as follows: "If I vote against labor, sure the union will not endorse me. But so what? Many of the union members don't come out to vote and, of the ones that do, it is not so clear that they will feel sufficiently motivated by the issue to vote against me. On the other hand, if I vote for labor, business will be offended, and they are rather likely to cut off their generous donations to my campaign."
On a related note, I find it alarming how few people take an interest in local politics. The election for the mayor a month ago and the school board a month before that here looked like non-events. There were no lines of people waiting outside the polling place. In this case, the "vague amorphous mass" is much less of an issue since the population involved is much smaller, yet the problem is worse.
Changing topic, I would say that a lot of the reason the likes of Micro$oft get away with what they do is the abyssymal ignorance of the general public when it comes to computers. For Joe Average, computer literacy means being being able to push the right buttons on the mouse to get an application to launch. Therefore, it is not so hard to fool the general public into thinking that charging an arm and a leg for operating systems and snooping on users to make sure that noone tries to look at the source code are normal and acceptable activities and believing that "You get what you pay for, so obviously free software has gotta be pretty lame. If you want the bleeding competitive edge, you'll have to pay us dearly for it.".
By contrast, the constituency for free software consists largely of elite hackers who know too much to be fooled by this rhetoric and to whom the shortcomings of Windoze and Word are painfully obvious. As I see it, a good part of the blame surely must go to the deplorable state of computer education. I mean, when I went to school in the age of the 16k personal computer, computing class consisted of writing programs in BASIC with DO loops in all their glory. A little later, I got my Timex Sinclair computer and graduated from BASIC to machine code. I learned the memory map of the system, wrote bytes to output ports, and slogged my way through a book on machine language which included such fun projects as writing a disassembler and using it to figure out the code in the ROM. The instruction manuals were written for cognoscenti, complete with schematics of the circuit board as opposed to the books with the silly cartoons aimed at the intellectual level of a 5-year old one gets nowadays. As a consequence, I was able to write a memory tester for circuit boards in a particle detector when I was a freshman in college. Now, however, computer class means learning which magic buttons to push to send the e-mail and print a copy of the document one is writing and computer literacy means being able to use one or more popular applications as opposed to knowing a computer language and being able to write a program. As long as this is how kids are taught in school, it is easy to see why M$ has such an edge. And it's a vicious cycle. Businesses use Word so clearly that's what the kids should be learning in school. GNU, by contrast, is squeezed out, because relatively few businesses use it, so why teach it to kids? And how many business owners will put GNU on their machines when they can't find a technician in the phone book who knows how to install GNU or hire a typist who is familiar with Emacs? As long as people don't care to even show up for local school board elections, let alone go to school board meetings and voice their opinions, this status quo is likely stay pretty static.
Another consequence is that people without much of a clue about computers are not going to appreciate the potential of computers to revolutionize whatever they are doing or react out of fear instead of knowledge. We have all seen some pretty reactionary attitudes towards computers, even among people who are rather knowledgable in technical fields. To the random user, a computer is simply a glorified television, typewriter, and fax machine, and game machine conveniently rollled into one package. Hence, it is not so surprising, although extremely distressing, to me that most people see it reasonable that electronic books should be licensed on terms that allow the luser the cyber-equivalent of what can be done with a normal book, that many people are thinking of the internet in terms of an irrelevant "centralized source" paradigm which was relevant to printing, radio, phonographs, movies, and television, and acting accordingly by being passive consumers, that such ideas as electronic voting will go over people's heads. Part of the theme of my bottlenecks essay (if I don't forget to write it :) ) is how these new uses (as opposed to simpy simulating old uses in electronic form) can run up into trouble with legal safeguards which might have been rather reasonable in the days of the older technology.
Finally, the anecdote. A few years ago, I tried to convince the local food co-op to switch to GNU/Linux. The appeal fell on deaf ears. While an appeal to switch to free trade coffee would have been preaching to the choir, its equivelant in the domain of software was considered irrelevant. I see this sad situation as a combination of the computer illiteracy cited above and the prevelance of specialized thought which frowns upon going outside one's specialty, whether it be groceries or computers. In particular, it means that we are easy to conquer since we are already divided.
--rspuzio 24 May 2005
Ray, I don't agree that education is to blame for the state of the situation with M$'s dominance. I appeal back to what I said about their using their bargaining power to keep the tax for their product high, as well as the viral effects. I don't think its reasonable to expect everyone to be able to debug circuit boards in particle accelerators. This is not a reasonable prereq to being a lay person in a market that contains general purpose computers. I think consumers have every right to expect computers to be basically appliances that "just work". Most people have jobs other than hacking at their computers.
I think everyone feels a tinge of pain every time they're forced to shell out to upgrade office, or they don't save any money by opting not to have their Dell shipped with windows. But the standard way to solve this problem – collective action – doesn't really work. The collective action would be towards free software, but free software is inherently DIY. It betrays the notion that a computer should be an appliance. Microsoft understands this notion well, on the other hand.
What I am saying is that there's no good alternative.
Also on education, I would point out that for most markets to operate, vast quantities of formal education are not required. People use folk theories, lay knowledge, and indirect knowledge. The judgements of those who are able to make expert distinctions spread quickly to those who cannot. Is this not happening with free software vs. MS? I would argue it is (I remember a few years ago when my friend's non-computer-geek dad was telling me about how he thought he needed to be running linux), but that the very nature of the alternative rules it out for most of the market.
Switching gears, I think you are right that the dynamics of local politics are different. There is much more potential there for individuals to get involved. I still think digitizing it would help immensely, as it puts politics in the "track" of things we do daily (using email, the web…). Of course, scholia would help foster actual discourse.
On the Fundamentalist Christians point, this is indeed a real phenomenon. But I am not sure of its real impact. I think fundamentalists are being duped; that they are being used as pawns for votes through the manipulation of so-called "important" issues in the political environment. Whether or not gays can marry is not a real issue. Whether or not Terry Shiavo is allowed to be a vegetable or die is not a real issue. Real political issues are of universal importance (they dont just effect a handful of people or 5% of people) and have to do with the general distribution and use of wealth and power in society. But these flimsy non-issues that politicians quite gratuitously elevate get the fundamentalists interested.
And all the while, in the background, politicians are continuing to play their old game of lining their own pockets and sealing their own power.
So, I don't think the fundamentalist phenomenon is an exception to the rule that citizens really do not have a voice or meaningful participation in government.
--akrowne Tue May 24 14:03:16 UTC 2005
Going way back, .0365 is not a big number, but if you multiply it by a very big number, you get a big number again. There's no question that WalMart is worth a lot – a lot – of money. But the point isn't to get rich off of this scheme: it is to introduce freedom and – yes definitely – DIY ideas, to a sector that currently swings very far the other way.
Even modern co-ops offer relatively little freedom – maybe a comment book, maybe you can place some special orders – but you can't do as much within the modern co-op to determine your own fate as a consumer as I'd like. You can choose what to buy from what they offer: that's a good thing! But you can't necessarily have much impact on the collection of goods that they offer without becoming highly involved, and even then, I'd argue, you can't ever be sure that you are getting things people want. Sure, you can keep track of inventories, you can read the suggestion book, you can get by. But there's little effort to make the consumer informed. Tons of metadata is dumped the instant the product hits the shelf.
There's a company (based in Austin, actually) called Whole Foods, that competes with co-ops. They offer natural foods, and try to do things like provide local produce at their stores around the nation, they pay their employees well, etc., and all-in-all they are a pretty nice place to shop. They have earned the nickname "Whole Paycheck", though, because they are somewhat expensive – but of course, so are co-ops. But they do everything in a "closed" model, so I can't be sure why such-and-such a product at WF is expensive, or why it is cheaper than the same thing at a co-op (because the co-ops are closed too -- everyone is).
If the question is "can this be done in a way that beats WalMart's profit margin", I suppose the answer is probably yes, but I'm not sure exactly what the concern is there.
I agree that "free software" can easily undercut Microsoft and cut into their market share. These are good things, but recall that the point is, free as in freedom, not as in beer. The fact that WalMart has a thin profit margin shouldn't somehow lead you to believe that they are a "good company" – personally, I have no idea, and accordingly I don't want to weigh in on it.
But one thing I know is that they are not "free as in freedom", and that's my concern. Like I said, no one is. I'm actually rather attracted to some things about the WalMart system – but Whole Foods, and the various Fair Trade alliances probably have many things to offer too (as do unions and co-ops themselves, etc.).
Accordingly, I would really say that the impetus for "application of scholium methods" in real-world markets is the same as the impetus for creating and using free software. After the crops leave the field and the widgets leave the factory, trade is just information processing and transportation; its not so different from software.
This is pretty far from being the first proposal saying that it would be good to hack and/or free this system (hack the planet is the name of a web log, and they have a manifesto to boot; the US was born with the idea of the right to self-determination). The motivation to be educated, informed, and to have agency in the particulars of your life seem to be pretty universal.
My other comments: about the Strangelove thing – basically, I think that there is a lot of revolutionary potential here on Earth. Some of it has to do with the internet, some of it has to do with other things. I like my own free culture as a labor issue, but someone near and dear to me has said that it smacks of bullshit, so go figure. My sense is that the current proposal, rather than smashing capitalism or commodification, transforms them to some extent - into something that even anti-capitalist, anti-commodificationist folks could get into.
On the topic of the far right in the US and its connection to fundamentalism, my step-mom was reading a book… I'd like to recommend it, but I can't remember the title. Apparently it has some interesting things to say that sort of show how the "machine" works. My step-mom found it to be quite unsettling.
On the topic of Microsoft, I think the main issue is "vendor lock in". I've posted a link on the wiki a couple of times that talks about how people who would otherwise actually like to change to free software can't do so, because it would disturb the whole system (a system -- government in this case – that is getting some "good deals" from Microsoft, and who doesn't want to irk them). The article is worth reading.
On the politics thing… I'm afraid that that theme is kind of getting swept away by the stream of conversations about business applications, but I'd like to reiterate that there is a heavy "political" or "self-governmental" side to the way I'm imagining the scholium system would work. On the other hand, there are lots of things where the "politics of the marketplace" aren't really enough – gay marriage, school board elections, the right to life, and the right to death are examples of things that may not have a whole heck of a lot to do with what people buy or sell! And yet, I don't think these things are non-issues. I don't know if the war in Iraq, for example, is actually a "real issue" either – but it does at least have some fairly overt connections to the economy (Halliburton etc.). I'm not sure what the real issues are, and when it comes to politics/government I feel like my agency in pretty much all of them (real or not) has been sapped. Even for school board stuff, where I suppose my vote might actually make a difference, and where I could go talk to the candidates, etc. The problem, for me, is information; how to establish relevance, how to know that people are actually doing the best they can, etc.
I think that the scholium system has the chance to (a) be applied to all of these "non-economic" issues in approximately the same way it is applied to the economic matters in the essay. "Gay marriage" can be a commodity; "so-and-so for school board" can be a commodity; "the right to life" and "the right to death" can be whole sub-economies. Like when I go shopping, I can pick the things that matter to me. If I care about schools, for example, I may be quickly led to school boards (or maybe to home-schooling associations or the university or who knows what). If I find social practices or patterns of governmental spending (or whatever) that seem repellent to me, I can more easily figure out what the "real issues" are, and add my insights back into the mix. The scholium system is there to help keep the issues in the fore, and help push noise into the background. Clearly there is a lot of design that would have to go into making a system where you could find out the relevant things about abortion, as opposed to a bunch of screaming and yelling. But I think it can be done. And one nice thing about the system as I hope it could be implemented is that it would de-couple issues. What does abortion have to do with the war in Iraq? What does a raven have to do with a writing desk!
Coherence and agency; a free and informed populace.
--jcorneli Tue May 24 16:03:54 2005 UTC
I generally like what you are saying, and where you are going with this.
On WalMart and profit margins of .0356, of course, multiplying this by a big number gives a big number again, but that may not be too relevant. A profit margin is relative to each unit of productive activity. So, I think the evidence is strong that WalMart, and the lion's share of the retail markets, operate with a high level of efficiency.
But you rightly point out that libre-style freedom is also important, not just gratis-style, and this is an interesting point. Potentially even WalMart could benefit from more perfect information about how consumers feel and what they think.
You say:
Just to disambiguate this, I think "doing the best they can" generally comes back to questions of efficiency, which I think more sorely needs attention in the public as opposed to the private sphere. However, establishing relevance is more of a issue of goals and purpose, which could probably be better addressed through digital feedback mechanisms in all arenas.
It would be useful to see scenarios or other illustrations of how the kind of system you are thinking about would help. I'd want to see how these would go beyond the existing informal "scholium" of the web in general, which are already multiplying rapidly.
--akrowne Thu May 26 17:03:23 UTC 2005
Of course, when we talk about "efficiency", we should always be saying "efficiency WRT what"; its sort of a "G_X" [group action] thing.
I'm not quite sure what a unit of Productive-Activity looks like. Never took any kind of macroeconomics. My sense is that a "low profit margin" means that the company isn't raking consumers over the coals. Also it probably implies that it is hard to find better prices on the things that that company sells elsewhere. But this is all kind of a mish-mash for me.
If we assume that efficiency means "the consumer gets the deliverables at the lowest cost possible", then the introduction of free-software-style interactions in the marketplace tends first and foremost to enhance the deliverables end of things. You have a better sense of what you're really buying when you buy a Coke for example :). (Some people might "prefer not to know" I suppose, but I think that's sort of pathological.) Eventually it may be able to impact the low cost side of things too - WalMart allegedly optimizes for low price, but there may still be more that can be done with more information.
As for relevance, I think I meant: how do I figure out whether such-and-such an action matters to me, or whether it will have a positive impact on humanity. In Austin politics, for example, there was a referendum on the introduction of light-rail transit. Austin has a terrible traffic problem (think Boston, but smaller) and the light-rail was supposed to solve the problem. But how do I know that that's a good way to spend money? It would involve a major research study to even begin to have a clue – and here the powers that be are asking me for my opinion. How is my uninformed opinion relevant to the matter? Perhaps they are hoping that the "hive mind" will be able to answer the question better than a study done by a group of "relevant" experts. I don't deny that there's something to this way of thinking, but it seems a little bit weird to base a decision on the "gut feelings" of a bunch of regular old Austinites. Maybe many of them knew things I didn't; perhaps I should have abstained to vote on the issue; and then again, maybe a bunch of parallelized guts have good computation properties, I don't know. In any event, my preference in this case would be to decide the matter in a more informed way, by discussion. If I had been able to log onto a website and read all the "relevant" pros and cons that people had thought of, and maybe add my own two cents, that would have been great. Much less mystery.
One might argue that I could find out all this information without a scholium system - but the costs of gathering such information would be prohibitive. The scholium system is supposed to serve the purpose of synthesizing a state-of-the-art "syncretic" view on the topics under consideration.
The main example that comes to mind for me is (of course) the HDM. Can the hyperreal stylings of the WWW setminus HDM do anything to compete with HDM itself? I doubt it - but they may be able to do a bunch of other really cool things before the HDM is ready to ship.
One thing to keep in mind with this proposal is that it isn't just about "superimposed information" (document + scholia), it is something that I think is considerably more powerful (document as scholia). Looking at the set of products as the base data, it is a little bit tempting to assume that the document+scholia model can provide enough information; and, it is easy to imagine a service like Amazon adding more and more information to each of its product pages (or to pages One Click (TM) away). But with the HDM, "there is no top and no bottom" - you might sign on to learn about one topic, and quickly find yourself swept down an underground river to some completely new topic area. (One challenge is to be able to have "controlled" experiences in a space with a hyperbolic metric!) One can "rotate" the HDM so that the topic "group" is temporarily on top, but it would be ridiculous to say that all mathematics is superimposed on the notion of "group".
The WWW shares these properties with the HDM. I'd tend to say that these things are fundamentally different from a document+scholium model like the one used by Amazon.
One reason that the scholia-based document model system doesn't jive 100% with the traditional "digital library" model is that it is a somewhat different sort of digital library than the one that people are used to – specifically, a lot of its organization is implicit to itself, i.e., it is weblike. Sure, one could extract all the metadata into a "catalog", but that'd be more like making a "map" of the deployed system more than like making an "index". And it would be possible to make an index too – but one would be missing out on a lot of "cheap" extra organizational info in doing so.
Anyway, I list several other potential (simple) applications in my draft of Part 2 of the paper, and I'll flesh this out more… but I have to finish Part 1 first. Part 3 (if I ever get a chance to write it) will be about other grand "social theory" things like we've been engaging with on this page.
--jcorneli Thu May 26 18:07:53 2005 UTC
Interesting. When I use the term "superimposed information", people always seem to be implicitly envisioning such information as "second-class". I had this discussion with the NSF ALT proposal PIs as well.
This is not how I mean to use it, or how I conceptualize it. Noosphere and the web are indeed examples of how scholia and superimposed information can also be primary information. What's more, information superimposed over one artifact can eventually, through one or more steps, create a "loop closing" whereby the original artifact changes.
So for example, in Noosphere, a correction object is superimposed. Some would consider it secondary. But if this artifact is searchable, browsable, has its own discussions, and will probably lead to transforming the object it is attached to, in what sense is it not "primary"? Indeed, part of my idea in keeping correction objects around is that they can be learning objects (or at least, knowledge objects) just as much as an entry can be.
What I really mean to highlight when I use the term "superimposed information" is a model whereby value-added artifacts can freely be created and linked to other artifacts by third parties. This linking, integrated with some sort of "viewing" mechanism (could just be hyperlinking, but it could also be displaying in some combined context) "superimposes" the later artifacts over the earlier ones.
It's the value-addition I'm trying to get people to recognize. I reject any notion of "secondaryness"; I don't even see any point to it.
The real power for digital libraries is in not relegating superimposed objects to some secondary status. By treating superimposed information or scholia as first-class objects, the digital library can be continually enhanced, and at a low cost to boot (and as in the case of PM, entirely constructed).
So in sum, document as scholia is what I mean.
--akrowne Fri May 27 00:05:25 UTC 2005
This relates to the issue of in situ modification we've been talking about now and again. And especially to the matter of implementing semantics of modifications in a way that makes sense to viewers & preserves rights of original author & subsequent critics/co-authors/correctors in a "sensible way".
This could be something as simple as putting a bold there is a correction pending on this article flag on pages that are under dispute.
One of the most challenging questions for scholia-based documents is how to expose this sort of information in the most useful and fair way possible. Ownership models (or lack thereof) are an attempt at making the "spirit" of multiple-authorship work well. We've talked about several possible ways to synthesize improvements to PM documents out of existing data, including the "dispute flag" idea mentioned above.
Some extant CBPP systems put more work into explicit semantics-handling than others.
Review: Usenet and WWW rely on users to decide what "on-topic" means and uses social control to keep things on topic or to go with the flow depending on people's mood; Slashdot has a 2+ tiered mechanism, aka posting+scoring; PlanetMath has several different types of objects with some explicit semantics encoded in metadata; most objects in Emacs have explicit semantics that go "all the way to the bottom", with "human-readable" views on these objects provided in comments and with a fairly simple metadata structure thrown over the whole collection.
Just to reiterate: a major technical challenge is synthesis. But another related issue is analysis (in the sense of breaking things up into component parts). As I was talking about above, it is good to distinguish loosely-connected issues from one another – yes, it is good to show the connections when they exist. ("Potatoes aren't necessarily a greasy food, though there any many popular ways to eat fried potatoes, and its a fact at some dining establishments you can't buy potatoes that aren't greasy.") But IMO democracy shouldn't be about plea bargains and package deals ("vote for Gore if you want to get rid of Bush"), it should be about actual issues.
I'm not totally sure what to think about things like "support the war and we will give you more money, but if you don't support the war, we will take away the money we already gave you and do our best to make you look bad". I suppose this is a reasonable bargaining tactic and isn't something that can be gotten rid of by analysis or synthesis. I'd feel more comfortable if I knew that statements like this were really coming from "we the people" – but on the other hand, I realize that I'm coming close to contradicting what I said about light-rail above, here. The point, however, is not that it comes from "we the people" blindly, but that the strategy really is acknowledged to be the best thing that our country can come up with. Sure, there's the possibility for spin-doctoring but that's why the synthesis has to go to somewhat deep levels, insofar as possible, people's stakes in the issues they are talking about should be made clear ("Oh you think so, do you? And just who are you to say so?").
Just as an example (going back to cereal boxes, because I had cereal for breakfast today). Suppose you measure the actual amount of cereal you eat, as opposed to the amount that is listed on the box. Then you get a new read-out on the dietary components of what you just ate. Then you get a listing of additional items you could eat throughout the rest of the day to keep a balanced diet. The program NUT does something like this, and I'm sure that there are other programs that do similar things, probably some no-cost web services, even. But do these things track the cost of the food you eat? Do they say "you know, you like this food, you might like to try this other one for XYZ reasons?" Maybe. Do they say everything there is to say about the food-substance in question? Probably not.
--jcorneli Fri May 27 16:44:01 2005 UTC
I've been getting a bunch of email from MoveOn.org and I had to unsubscribe again. This is what I said in the feedback that accompanied my unsubscription request:
--jcorneli Fri Jul 08 23:50:52 2005 UTC
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I thought I'd take a look at their "unique action forum". This is a sort of scholia-based document (of course it is: its CBPP). But it is currently rather weak. Although they claim to support textual feedback, for example, in the current implementation the only kind of feedback is a rating! How lame is that! Both slashdot and craigslist offer quite a few more dimensions for interaction (followups, namespaces, and in the case of slashdot, various kinds of ratings). The MoveOn.org forum seems to contain a bunch of people mouthing off in (dis)unison, all agreeing with each other. Talk about ditto-heads. Where's the debate? Where's the context? It is almost sickening that these pages have the phrase "democracy in action" on them.
--jcorneli Sat Jul 09 00:14:00 2005 UTC