Today is October 10. On the tenth day of every month, my wife and I
kiss and wish each other well, grateful for our ongoing relationship
counting the months and years we've been together. 31 years and 7
months! Our love remains an incredible source of joy and amazement
in my life.
Last year I was exchanging emails with @Greta@fosstodon.org, author of Gretzuni, her wiki-like digital garden. There, she had written about the contributive economy in value for value:
Bernard Stiegler championed the notion of a “contributive economy” —
in which everyone can be a contributor, emitting their own symbols.
In his economy of contribution, people are so much more than consumers.
So we started talking about systems of exchange. Do you see contributions made in your free time as deserving of compensation? And if so, in what form?
I was surely influenced by my thoughts on staying unprofessional. In the context of role-playing games, I wrote:
Instead, consider how the act of playing our beloved games is
fundamentally anti-capitalistic: you don’t need to buy much of
anything to play. Pen, paper, dice, maybe a book or two. And then:
no money required for years and years. You can’t grow a global reach
by playing at a table. I guess you can grow a global audience with
YouTube and Twitch and all that, and maybe monetise it, but mostly
the providers of these services are going to monetise you. The
actual game needs no money. You talk and laugh, and scribble and
dabble, howl and haggle, and a good time is had. There is no
“growth.” There is no “increased productivity.” It’s about the basic
joys of being alive: talking to people, imagining things and telling
others about it.
So what about all the unpaid maintainers of software, the unpaid maintainers of small websites? I usually love doing the things I do. Sure, I hate bugs, and services failing, and migration hassles and system upgrades and many more things besides. But in general, I spend time at the laptop, programming, and time passes and I'm in a flow state that I enjoy very much. Inner peace!
At the time, Greta asked about small, everyday changes we can make to support different forms of exchange. I wonder why this makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s the word “exchange” – and having read a bit of “Debt” by Graeber – the suspicion is that exchange leads to debt and accounting and that, I suspect, leads to a world that does not run with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The word “exchange” conjures up a world of value-for-value exchanges in which those that are smarter generate more value, and also get back more value. And we already know from our current large scale experiment of hacker culture, that meritocracy does not lead to a better world. I mean, at least it’s not very corrupt, but there are side effects like being a good hacker gaining you a good position somewhere (meritocracy), and the good position gaining you visibility and clout in other areas. It’s a bit like asking pop stars for their opinions about a political topic: their abilities do not transfer, and yet our world demonstrates that humans imagine the transfer. Maybe something Kahn’s book on slow and fast thinking could illuminate this, but I’ve only read the first part of it.
So if small gains of reputation are susceptible to corruption in that meritocracy and fame leads to abuses of authority, what about gamification? When people used gamification on Stack Exchange, it sort of worked. I find many of my questions answered, there. But at the same time, people tell me that there are some who ask or answer inane and trivial questions in order to rack up points, gaming the system for side-effects. I’d say: every system of gamification will be gamed… 😆
To bring it back to the everyday changes, and how to structure environments – all I have is a bunch of hazy notions, nothing really ready to go, but perhaps a start:
It’s nice if you get recognition and praise, but this doesn’t have to scale. In the giving-away Facebook group my wife is in, people are offering so many things that your offers scroll off the bottom quickly, and when you then give something away to somebody else, your audience is small: the people that participated in the thread, usually. On social media, you can always get more followers, there is no sand in the machinery to slow you down. On the contrary, as more and more followers boost your messages, more people start following you. I unlisted myself from directories of accounts to follow because I don’t need more followers. The number of followers can be intimidating, or respect-inducing, and that’s not great, as far as I am concerned.
It’s nice if you can put your name to your work, but it’s also nice if it’s possible and the default expectation for that association to disappear over time. On a wiki, for example, your contributions can be reworked, paraphrased, removed, and perhaps, for licensing reasons, the name you provided is still going to be listed, but the exact contributions your made are going to be lost (in the “kept pages” sense that expire eventually). This is not about privacy, and the ability to repudiate your contributions – those would be additional benefits, which is why “forgetting in software” remains an interesting topic to me. Oddmuse implements many of the things I could think of, but more thought is required in the area, I think. In a way, IRC and other such chat networks afford this, too: even if all the interactions are logged forever (boo! hiss! bad for privacy and no repudiation of your contributions…) the structure works against the use of logs to build reputation and influence as the conversation happens within IRC clients that typically do not show log information. You cannot tell from a nick how many questions they asked, how many likes and thanks they received, and so on – you might only get the nick registration date, so: “age”.
I also like frameworks where I can quickly and easily contribute small things, like fixing typos in documentation. Sometimes this is made possible via GitHub’s web interface where I can edit a document source file, typically some Markdown file, and fix something, without having to check out the project to my laptop, and doing the full dance. Sadly, this is sometimes made impossible because documents don’t typically show where the sources are, or the sources are in a system where I don’t have an account, so I need to create an account, and if there’s no web interface, I need to be ready to check out sources and do the full dance. A wiki, in this respect, is great: the sources are right there, the edit interface is right there, and my choice of anonymity or pseudonymity is immediately available. A wiki could be even greater if you could just edit the page directly. Interestingly, while it is possible to setup Oddmuse such that it uses HTML only, with an HTML editor, and edit on a double click on the page, I’ve never actually used such a system myself. I guess I like the separation into source document (wiki text, Markdown, and so on) and result (HTML).
Now that I’ve switched from Oddmuse to Oddµ for my personal wiki, I haven’t handed out any accounts. And already Björn told me about a typo and pointed out that I had to fix it myself since he was no longer able to edit the page. The irony is not lost on me.
So this is where I am regarding small exchanges. I think the main takeaway is that reputation and likes and all that are nice to have in the short term because it tells you whom to pay attention to if you are new. It’s unfortunate that there is a network effect going on, however, so it would be great if this reputation were ephemeral, or at least backgrounded in the user interface so that it’s only there if you look for it and if it is upheld by sustained contribution. It would also be nice if such reputation were tied to topics such that they didn’t easily transfer. Being good in one area should not give you authority in another.
#Philosophy
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On fedi, @Greta@fosstodon.org answered:
Prompted again to ask: what are we daring to do, *together*, in our
world today? How can we recognize each other?
'Tokens of recognition' — as per ancient custom – enable a host to later
recognize the guest (and vice versa).
By having shared something once through the generosity of hospitality
given and received, further - more distantiated - recognition is made
possible in the future.
Contributive economy as mutual hospitality... if we dare
My first thought about *tokens of recognition* is reputation. We know each other by name – and by extension we have systems of authentication in place that ensure that somebody leaving is a person we can recognize in the future. Then again, that doesn’t necessarily mean usernames and passwords nor the tracking of IP numbers. I am reminded of my eight colours solution for IP numbers. Within a short timespan, four times eight colours (32-bits of information) might be enough to say: this change was made by the same person that made these other changes.
It does take me back to the world of wikis, of Oddmuse. And with Oddµ I wanted to lean into the personal, the memex. I hesitate to have a discussion about a thing I care about on the site somebody else controls. When it disappears, a part of my memory expansion (memex) disappears. When I want to search my memory expansion, I run into problems when I need to search external systems. For a while I thought that Near Search would solve this. Federate search and have each connected node run a similar search, report back, let me collate the results.
So much dependencies on external systems not under my control. So little trust left. Indeed, if we dared. If only we dared.
I no longer dare.
Instead, I think it would be fair to let participants copy my summary of the discussion into their own memex, into their own digital garden, their own Zettelkasten. Or they can write their own, of course.
Copies provide resilience.
This in turn reminds me of thoughts I read on Ward Cunningham’s wiki:
We disregard the industry tradition of normalizing data and
refactoring code in order to avoid duplication. We instead look to
life and culture for creative inspiration.
We embrace the Creative Commons in code where everything we do in
public is automatically with attribution and share alike.
– Profligate Copying
This naturally results in doubt.
How long should we hold onto thoughts before we expose them to
others? With who should we expose the incompleteness of our
thinking? Do we have property rights over our thoughts that should
be protected?
– Writing with Strangers
I don’t have a good answer. I guess I don’t fear the exposition of my inadequate thinking since most people have read my words more or less benevolently. (Thank you all, readers!) I also don’t fear other people taking my thoughts. They haven’t shown themselves to be all that valuable. I’d rather they’d lift others up instead of dying in obscurity. What I fear more these days is the fragmentation of my own life in text. To give other voices uncontrolled space in my collection; to open myself to intrusion and disruption.
The approach of Federated Wiki seems good to me: Allow copying. Provide attribution. Take my words into your space. Notify me – or don’t.
Instead of relying on the Federated Wiki software, however, I’m relying on email, I guess? Why build an automated system if we don’t need that, yet? Have conversations, post words, provide attributions, add more links.
You are responsible for the consequences of your speech (Yes, really).