DISCLAIMER :
The nay sayers of decentralization/federation oriented towards grass roots emergence, and those who have misunderstood the Tragedy of Commons, will find this writing certainly repulsive and i even expect them to argue against the concepts described here :) These stuff are already available in internet, and i have kind of listed my udnerstandings about them, which is subject to change later.
@ /.\ ----+------------------+/ \ | Who has the time | | for auditing ? | +------------------+ +---------------------+-- ( me ) | Who has the time to | | exercise liberty ? | +---------------------+
WHY ?
The preluding post on commons communication infrastructure explains why communication infrastructure shall be driven by collaborative culture, owned by the grass roots network rather than a centralized control. One cannot deny that a centralized system has to follow a commonly agreed constitution, and transparent governance practice for the welfare of the people - atleast in principle. Even with initial deterministic neutral and progressive intentions, the system may emerge as a subjugative power, in order to preserve its designed structure. We have to observe, that atleast in a democratic society, even when the initial intentions are progressive, the reality indicate more authoritarian behavior of the governments functioning in the democracy.
Current Status !
With the raise in adaption of communication technology, complexity involved in building up, the necessary infrastructure has to be maintained and thus took a centralized approach initially to tackle the technical problems, supported by the policies formed for it. Gradually, when people started subscribing the services build on these centralized infrastructure, it has become the defacto method of running the business models which further reinforced the policies supporting the business structure. Innovation in alternative & diverse business models have been stalled to chase the stability in capital flow provided by the existing models. WHY ? because entrepreneurs mostly, nowadays device their business models based on models that makes success. It is no different than a emotional decision.
These centralized business models abstracted and obscured the underlying mechanism, technical problems, complexity, and advertised only the facilities they offer as service in exchange of capital. Moreover, they hide these complexities under the hood, with increasing loss of transparency in operation and function. People induced by this ignorance, thought that it is some sort of machine that can churn out the service seamlessly. This creates a dependency loop that perpetuates the transactions between the subscribers and service providers, always pushing humanity to rapidly, very rapidly develop technology just to reduce the complexities. Unfortunately, every new technology introduced will induce further problems. The current centralized business structures just use:
- Technology as temporary solution provider
- Gained social capital as resource supplier to make & maintain technology
Do We have a independent communication infrastructure ?
OK, now with the proof of participation in action works, how shall it be propagated to people all over the country ? Well, use the existing communication platforms & infrastructure. We shall share the information, explain the situation in detail & how it will affect directly & indirectly even when when it first does not seem to be related and connected. This method is nothing but, word of mouth communication in steroids.... :D.
We humans tend to use our reasoning, when we become confused. When a individual get confused from information overload by a number of threads a communication platform offers and usually pesters with their normative thought process, we seek for better explanation through the communication platform itself or in the real world possibly from whom we consider as socially aware and educated. Once a critical thought is hooked, then it becomes easy to compare the decisions reached by the reasoning ability with the influx of information and reject the false propaganda. When this happens, the individual goes on and shares the experience along with information and exaggeration through the friends and relation circles publicly.
When this happens for every second, from part of the population that are connected to a communication platform like internet, several innovative stuff like humours, memes emerge and creates pressure for the respective government, institution, establishment to take necessary action. This action in reality has a significant emotional psychology attached to it, and it is the very underpinning reason that motivates one to share rational and critical information about a issue. Thus one's emotional quotient serves as the carrier of information. However, nulling the emotional biases, will be based on the concentration and constant refreshment of rational information and critical thought expressed and propagated through the medium.
Think about it : What will happen if these centralized communication infrastructure in internet are shutdown by a subjugative authority either locally, globally ? We all will be suddenly disconnected even when we have hard lines connected with the ISP's which are themselves again connected to the backbones, and so on... For the past 2 years, Sarath from SFLC.in has contributed in observing internet shutdowns, which is a best illustration of what might be possible just in India. Imagine when we people go to streets relying on the online communication infrastructure hoping to see more participation, only to realize that our requests have not reached them, because of mass/communication communication failure.
NO GAURANTEE : With governments already tracking us through all possible means, and have setups to kill the internet, is it best to continue with the current infrastructure ? While the current centralized social networking platforms like facebook, twitter, google plus, whats app, telegram, etc.... do represent silos cannot provide transparency and accountability and cannot gaurantee intervention of government authorities to use the data, to track or to even kill the hardware lines.
Since the centralized social networking where most of the people hang around are based on centralized and non transparent business model, nobody can question the organizations policies over it. After all, most of us have compromised our freedom & liberty for meagre free of cost services & freebies. Partly because such nasty social taboo always present around us dictating ...
"... always buy or subscribe to something which provides something else for free of cost, u dumb fuck !, freedom or liberty does not going to provide for hunger, only money and freebies are going to...
I remember neighbors, parents, teachers, friends, cinema actors, local counsellors, preaching this shitty
advice to me. The epitome of marketing techniques and strategies are reached when we have mouth watering advertisements
promoting food pornography and lousy ones that despise peaceful protests itself.
The point is : Social Audit levels to ZERO (0) in such situation, which is the current scenario.
What does Social Audit has to do with Communication ?
Let us for now consider that the grassroots communication systems are emerging, where people are provided with open, self hosting, self reliable technologies, which are constantly peer reviewed and updated for better performance, personal security and so on.... Literally say, the technological problems are being addressed and soon might be solved.
Social Regulation :Even theoretically and with thought experiments one can easily deduce the problem of regulation. How would the network infrastructure be regulated and free from malicious and chronic attacks if there is no system of regulation in first place. It is necessary that the grass roots communication when emerged from the people has to prove its self regulating capability to the government, to prevent all of its subjugation oppressing the communication itself. Else even when we are self reliable and equipped with self hosting capabilities, in terms of technology the complete system becomes answerable to a central authority which requires a deliberation for its own.
Radio Regulation: With the development and usage of Radio based networking technologies, Electromagnetic spectrum management & unnecessary leakage of electromagnetic energy even in unlicensed bands have to be regulated. I believe, that current mobile phone networks are not transparent about the measurement of pollution caused by these radio driven networks, and what is their contribution in the whole pie specifically based on ground measurement are still lacking. In other words, nobody knows how much Radio Frequency (RF) energy is applied while transmitting and receiving information is unknown, and if possible is not transparent. There are no public mechanisms and policies to make it available atleast, if not in real time. Where as i personally believe, that such measurement based auditing mechanisms can be implemented along with the commons-oriented infrastructure networks technically.
It seems that grass-roots communication infrastructures like Grassroots Radio Hybrid/Mesh Communication Network architectures require significant human participation in the loop with enough technical understanding and extensive critical thought about the infrastructure behavior itself. Moreover, with increasing density and spread, it would ask for a commonly agreeable set of guidelines... much like a constitution ... Since this is much of an unexplored territory, one has to research and learn how internet itself has evolved without any such constitution during the initial periods. All that we know is, internet does not have a written constitution, and simultaneously we cannot reject that most of the internet users do care about its presence,whatever that reason might be. We can observe that the following properties, whether originally intended or not, have emerged and seems to be inspire most in one way or the other :
- Liberty
- Freedom of Expression
- Information Neutrality in the Network
- Anonymity enabling fearless participation
- Association through Collaboration
Who is going to regulate the infrastructure or what is in place to build a mechanism via technology that follows the regulation policies ? Since we now have adopted grass roots - direct to people - participative infrastructure, the policies seems to be deployable in similar manner. One can easily understand Social Auditing when they compare it with Safety guides & regulations. Basically, nobody enforces safety on you, but since we know that it is going to cost our lives, the fear drives us to follow those simple guidelines that ensures the safety. Here the safety guidelines are specific and varies according to the work, situation, place & time. Thus we have to use both of the following potential methods to implement the social audit guidelines, whatever that might be...
- EDUCATION :
Fear :
Losing communication liberty in exchange of few comfortness, have to be practically illustrated, by demonstrating the very effect of subjugative control over the ones communication channel. This could be practiced with story telling or cultural acts and skids in schools and colleges, to demonstrate the overwhelming result of power concentration.
Critical Interaction :
Engaging in active peer to peer discussion, in a local club, community, debating, emulating what if ? scenarios of centralized systems of communication, online web services, etc, will help the new comers understand the problem in a deeper manner, driving them to understand not only the problems of centralization and hierarchy, but also get a better clarity about it through reasoning, while caring about grass roots technology in terms of their limitation, advantages, policies involved, etc...
Comic-Art :
People can effectively use their artistic passion and skill to express an alternative thought, criticisms as it was expressed in history. Writing is one form, painting, drama, ... Since i like comics very much, that along with text which is the common form of expressing views, based on some story, one can make a comic story - which is actually better than a lecture video, and equivalent to a skid/drama on a performing stage.
Local Economy :
With any of the above methods, importance of local economy, can be emphasized, and how conventional internet based infrastructures are becoming draconian competetion that does not cares about the culture based economy, where the economy are based on operational & functional policies of the underlying financial structures & institutions. This chronic situation has to be educated from location based economy approach that understands the local needs instead of international business competitions and embargos.... :)
- TECHNOLOGY :
Depending upon the technology, protocols used shall be made intelligent and aware about the peer-reviewed social auditing policies. This will then enable the participating communication nodes, to automatically participate in sensing the malicious nodes, potentially blacklist them, while at the same time not compromising liberty of the respective users. With advancements in collaborative development methods, cryptography, & hardware, this seems to be promising. Inclusion of technology in terms of policy is much disturbing now, and can be potentially be not implemented in the current scenario.
So far it seems, declaring social audit schemes will be dumb even from my personal view points, and thus must be carried with a well experienced, educated, researched and criticial thinking council, that accepts participation. Probably a constitution might be required, which shall be distributed to all peers as digital documents in semantic way, that enables the communication appliance to cross verify its genuiness, act based on additional users intentions/suggestions. (I just imagined about them...)
Lot of stuff have to be deliberated around social auditing topic. like :
- properties of auditing
- peer-review
- who can audit
- how shall be audited
- effectiveness in self-regulation
- ...
Interested in digital constitution ? we shall discuss about that in another article possibly soon.