On Groups

Steph links to this fascinating commentary that specifically addresses software design for online group interaction, but in reality is a much broader article about social dynamics of groups (and organizational pitfalls).

There’s just so much for a political theorist to love in this:

In the Seventies — this is a pattern that’s shown up on the network over and over again — in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn’t own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. “Communitree” — the name just says “California in the Seventies.” And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren’t before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

Anarchocapitalism at work?

It is simply assumed that members of the group share the same premises, and will always share the same premises. All members of the group hold equal political power. Obviously, if it turns out that some members of the group hold quite different premises than the ones originally assumed, they can wreck the group. There is no mechanism for dealing with that happenstance. And that happenstance (to take a Hobbesian view) is pretty much what one would expect from groups of humans.

And it’s not just Communitree, as the author points out later. I recall the same thing happening when the Neo-Tech nitwits pretty much took over the alt.philosophy.objectivism newsgroup, finally forcing the creation of humanities.philosophy.objectivism. This sort of thing happens all the time, even in groups that seemingly share important premises.

This is an interesting observation:

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need to have some rules.” It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.” And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

That bolded statement is fairly profound, if you think about it. It is broadly applicable well beyond the design of social software, because it suggests that a (potential?) corollary of human nature is constitutionalism (preferably written constitutionalism). Pages could be devoted to fleshing out that topic, of course (but that’s not going to happen here). We’ll just leave it at the conclusion drawn by this author (again, the topic here is software design, but I am suggesting this is broadly applicable politically):

All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. At the very least, the formal part is what’s substantiated in code — “the software works this way.”

The informal part is the sense of “how we do it around here.” And no matter how is substantiated in code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal part as well. You can’t separate the two.

Constitutionalism often works that way, because not everything CAN be spelled out in text. A framework can be constructed, and in some cases specific issues can be dealt with in the text (thereby removing them from contention). But not all specific issues can be anticipated and addressed in a constitution. And that’s part of the challenge of constitutional design.

There’s just so much of interest in this article that it could really be the subject of a coffeeshop discussion. Or an icehouse discussion, I suppose. Some of the notions the author has of groups being able to defend themselves from individuals who would hijack the groups are really a manifestation of the tension between direct and representative democracy, which leads back to human nature (and my skepticism of those fans of anarchocapitalism, who want me to believe that everything will be fine).

Fascinating stuff.