What do you think works, doesn’t work, or is missing?

I’ve had a few people ask why I’ve focused on the technical characteristics of the Internet at all. Basically I think the technical characteristics both provide some insight to the social characteristics, as well as provide some solid grounding to the argument that the social characteristics, no less than the technical characteristics, should not be tampered with lest we damage the opportunities provided to our society by the Internet.

Let’s extrapolate the technical characteristics discussed in the last post and see what each technical characteristic leads to in a social sense:

• Open standards - open technical standards for connection and data exchange is a core aspect of the Internet, ensuring the capacity to communicate across different systems and platforms.
• Common access - once a connection is made online, core aspects of the Internet are common to all (such as root name servers and communications protocols), and thus access provides a common experience, unless specifically tampered with or configured otherwise. This commonality is important as it creates the capacity for people to connect with information and each other across the globe.
• Peer to peer - the Internet isn’t a hierarchy, it is an enormous number of machines that talk to each other as peers, albeit usually configured to use a common addressing scheme. This feature of the Internet means people can connect, publish, share and collaborate with each other, without relying on a third party (apart from infrastructure).
• Routing around damage - the distributed nature of the Internet means there is the capacity to work around any failure in the system.  this is extremely important for continuity of the online experience. This feature of the Internet becomes particularly profound when “damage” includes censorship or any other form of tampering, but it also has led to an embedded social expectation that people should be able to access what and who they want online.
• Massively distributed network - the Internet is designed to have no single point of failure, with many redundancies built in. This approach of a massively distributed stable platform for communications has led to the establishment of massively distributed infrastructure, and as a result massively distributed online communities that traverse almost all traditional barriers to communication and has brought the world much closer together.
• Multi-source networks of trust - part of having a massively distributed network is the availability of multiple sources, especially when there are failures. How DNS works is an example of a technical multi-source network of trust. As a society we can actively seek out information and other people online and we have the ability to find multiple sources, or indeed first hand sources of information. As such as we can compare and contrast with “official” reports, and establish our own understanding of a situation. Over time we establish networks of trust for people, sources and platforms, which we use to prioritise and contextualise information.
• Platform independence - Internet communication protocols are necessarily independent of the hardware and software stacks involved in being online, which means communications online are independent of your choice of device, hardware or software.

Below is a further extrapolated list of potentially useful social characteristics or perhaps simply reasonable expectations of our experience online.

A draft declaration of online rights

Below is a set of online rights that we, as online citizens, should be able to expect. Extrapolated from various sources and the technical foundations above.

Please note, it is inevitable some of these will conflict, it is about balancing the best possible set of expectations.

UPDATE: I’ve numbered them so you can more easily refer to them for feedback in the comments Thanks crystalsinger for the suggestion

1. The right to anonymity, pseudonymity and the choice to divulge as much or little personal information as we choose.
2. The right to an uninterrupted connection online, free from any and all human threats of disconnection.
3. The right to freely express, publish, debate and distribute knowledge.
4. The fundamental right to observe and the share your observations.
5. The right to freedom from persecution, discrimination, intimidation, lock-in and being held to ransom.
6. The right to determine the use and access to personal content and information, including the right to export data to another platform or download for perpetuity.
7. The right to choose a clean feed, that is, a connection and software that is not filtered or otherwise manipulated to expressly change the online experience of an online citizen.
8. The right to free association without persecution.
9. The right to hold others to account for their actions or deeds, especially with respect to this charter.
10. The right to be free from unwarranted surveillance.
11. The right to be free from data retention.
12. The right to be free from retroactive data mining and data policing.
13. The right to symmetric data rates without discrimination (aka – no difference between upload and download speeds, especially given modern communications infrastructure like fibre where the arbitary limitation is unnecessary).
14. The right to reasonable affordable connectivity rates, especially when public funds are used in private infrastructure.
15. The right to tell mathematical truths without restrictions – (encryption related).
16. The right to use strong cryptography and to have sources of cryptographically strong randomness.
17. The right to assist others in resisting violations of any of these principles.
18. The right to have surveillance and censorship systems revealed to the public.
19. The right to be free from government and corporation actions that compromise or intercept your personal electronic and other computing devices.
20. The right to privacy of metadata (such as location, browsing history or email recipients) – metadata is content; metadata in aggregate is sensitive, private and powerful content and should be protected.
21. The right to participate in shaping the future of the Internet – democratising the running of core Internet infrastructure.

Some references and credits (chronological order)

• Many thanks to Jacob Appelbaum who contributed heavily to this list.
• Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996) [EFF]
• Universal Declaration of Digital Human Rights (2009) [MNEMOSINE]
• RFC1958 – Architectual Principles of the Internet (1996) [IETF]
• Declaration of Digital Rights (2011) [Pirate Party]
• The United Transnational Republics project and Manifesto (2011)

is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, it is said, are largely powerless in the face of global markets.

“The global financial crisis,” Rodrik answers, “has shattered this myth.” Over the last few years it has been nation-states – China, Germany, the United States, Australia – who have grabbled (however inadequately), with the problems running rampant through the global economy. No longer could anyone argue that the state was drifting to irrelevance. Only the state could provide the stimulus, regulation and safety-nets required.

Indeed, Rodrik continues, despite their unfashionable nature, nation-states continue to persist and indeed dominate the international political landscape. National policymakers have driven international thinking. Nations remain a persistent touchstone of individual identity. Geography continues to shape economic calculations. The Internet – as our more frequent use of local websites shows – is not borderless.

I wouldn’t argue against any of this. Nation-states remain critical actors on the world stage and in all of our lives. They will continue to do so for many years to come.

But there’s more to what is going on than to simply say ‘nation-states persist, there is nothing else’.

Global flows of information, capital and production are increasingly coming to dominate both who we are and how we live our lives. Nation-states no longer represent the principal containers for economies or ideas. Even the US, once half of the world economy, is now buffeted by flows of capital and production that it cannot easily manipulate or control. The world is bigger than that now.

In mapping out his argument in Nation Formation, Paul James drew an interesting argument from Jack Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind. “The written word,” Goody argued, “does not replace speech, any more than speech replaces gesture. But it adds an important dimension to much social action.”

This is a simple but crucial recognition. The development of new capabilities - or new technologies - does not mean the erasure of the old.

James echoed this in Nation Formation. The development of more abstract forms of social integration – such as that afforded by the development of writing five thousand years ago, or the Internet today – means not that the earlier forms are erased, but that they continue, only to be shaped by the new integrative landscape.

The nation-state does, as Rodrik asserts, persist. It will probably continue to persist beyond all of our lives. But it is not, as he concludes, “all we have.”

Throughout this project we want to raise a simple argument: that the changes in social organisation brought about by the Internet constitute a break with the recent past as dramatic as that seen during the Neolithic or industrial revolutions, and that we are in a unique place to be able to seize the democratic potential presented by this moment.

To make this argument we’re drawing (well, in this case really it’s Will drawing) from Paul James’ argument in Nation Formation that social formations can be understood via their dominant and subordinate forms of production, exchange, organisation, communication and enquiry.

But that’s an overly wordy way of phrasing it…

James’ argument – and our argument here – is that significant technological changes in production or communication have enabled radical shifts in social organisation.

Dramatic social changes of the order we’re interested in have previously been ushered in by the development of agriculture, by the invention of writing, and by the emergence of industrial modes of production. Each of these have brought about new forms of social organisation: agricultural societies born from their hunter gatherer forbears; literate from the agricultural; industrial from the literate.

The Internet has brought about the fifth.

In making this argument we recognise that this reductionism lumps together particular historical societies that in many ways are really quite different. There is much that divides the thinking, modes of production and modes of communication of Victorian England and Post-War America. Yet our classification lumps both together as societies of the industrial age. There is probably more separating Imperial Rome and Renaissance Italy. Yet again we lump these together as societies of the literate age.

This is clearly reductionist. Yet we do argue that the changes in communication and production being brought about by Internet constitute a radical break with the recent past. The integration afforded by the Internet is rapidly and radically becoming the form of integration that dominates social organisation. We’ll be providing evidence for this in many of our coming posts.

We also believe that though we can point to much that is shaping this emerging society, we are safer at this point resisting explicit names – whether the ‘networked society’, the ‘information society’ or the ‘Internet society’. Here Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” suggests to us that wisdom on this topic may be many years off yet. At this stage we’re better off being just that bit more cautious and open rather than declarative and closed.

In future posts we hope to flesh out more on the relationship between different forms of social organisation, particularly dwelling on Paul James’ argument (page 22) that “all societies are formed in the uneven intersection of various overlaying levels of integration”. Though new modes of production and communication may have brought about this Society 5, there is much that still connects us with the world of the past.

In several of Neal Stephensen’s books, he talks about a “Distributed Republic”, which according to Wikipedia is the concept of:

… a fluid republic consisting of land and citizens scattered across the globe, changing far more frequently than conventional nation-states.

In French President Sarkozy’s speech to the eG8 last year, he spoke about the need for governments to intervene in the Internet and the heart of his argument rested on the premise that:

Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies.

But this premise is debatable. The Internet gives us the capability to have our own voice, to be our own legitimate representative in a global dialogue.

This is not to say there is not a part for geographically defined governments to play. Personally I believe governments play an important role in creating a baseline equality and opportunity for people in the community.

Of course, I am coming from an Australian and democratic perspective, where free health care, education and cheap public transport (just to name a few) are all broadly accepted components of what keeps our local community relatively egalitarian, and I believe we will ever need to manage physical resources to create the best possible life for people.

But our online lives, an enormous component for many of the 2 billion people on the Internet, does not have any legitimate representation at this point in time. There are certainly voices, advocacy groups, lobbyists on all sides trying to frame and direct the agenda. But frankly, we have the technology to engage directly as a community. Hence the idea of establishing a virtual “government’, a distributed democracy for our online lives.

Would such an entity be useful? What could it do? Perhaps it could engage in international trade agreements or treaties on behalf of the Internet society. Perhaps it could define some essential technical and social characteristics of the Internet and then be the representative international watchdog for our community. How would it operate and be funded? Is it possible to build a functional, sustainable, effective and ultimately completely open model of government to represent and serve the citizens of the Internet?

Perhaps the treaty of Antarctica could provide an interesting premise. After all, there had been much debate and landgrabbing happening until the point where it was decided that Antarctica in it’s pristine state was ‘in the best public interest”, and as such a treaty was eventually negotiated to largely protect Antarctica as an international resource.

The Internet is certainly an international resource in the best public interest, so defining and protecting it’s essential characteristics seems to be a logical step if we are to learn from the Antarctica example.

Check out the “What makes the Internet – technical characteristics” blog post and contribute your thoughts on that topics there.

There are many questions and the discussions we’ve had with people to date demonstrate strongly that  there is a need for some debate and dialogue around the future of the Internet, and the needs of it’s citizens.

We will launch a wiki next week to kick off the collaborative community development of this model, and we’ll thrown in a few ideas and some structure to get it started. It may be that this is simply unnecessary or too far fetched, but it will certainly be an interesting thought experiment nonetheless, so we encourage you to get involved.

There will be individual pages on the wiki for the following topics. Please add any further topics to the comments which you think should be part of the wiki structure.

• Founding principles – the vision, essential technical characteristics of the Internet, definition of reasonable online rights/expectations.
• Roles and responsibilities – what could such an entity do in practice? How could it usefully represent the online community in international fora?
• Structure and voting – how could such an entity be the perfect model for open government, and representative of the diversity of its globally distributed citizenship?
• Citizenship – what would being a citizen mean? What rights and responsibilities would it entail?
• Economics – how could it be funded to get things done?
• References – existing projects, documentation and efforts in this space.

Below are some existing projects that also reflect parts of this idea. It’d be great if you could add your thoughts in the comments below and add any links to other communities, projects or documents that might be useful for the thought experiment.

Commentary on universal digital rights and representation

• Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996) [John Perry Barlow]
• Universal Declaration of Digital Human Rights (2009) [MNEMOSINE]
• Declaration of Digital Rights (2011) [Pirate Party]
• Manifesto of the First Transnational Republic (2011) [Transnational Republic]
• War on the Internet (2011) [Bernard Keane]
• President Sarkozy’s speech at the eG8, May 2011 (2011)
• Consent of the Networked (2012) [Rebecca MacKinnon]

Many people are debating Internet intervention from a perspective of open vs closed Internet, but rarely does the debate go into specifics of what should or should not be off limits for intervention, let alone the rationale for not tweaking certain key characteristics that make the Internet a social and economic powerhouse and community enabler.

The draft definition below draws from many sources as well as from some wonderful contributors already, and it might – with some community input and tweaking – provide a useful way to better inform and possibly frame the debate about open vs closed Internet access.

The Internet ubiquitously distributes the power to publish, collaborate, monitor and even enforce, so it is a good point in history to define what constitutes the Internet and indeed some reasonable expectations online.

Please add your thoughts in the comments below and feel free to respond to and discuss with others. Add any references you think are important for this discussion.

Essential technical characteristics of the Internet

• Open standards – open technical standards for connection and data exchange is a core aspect of the Internet, ensuring the capacity to communicate across different systems and platforms.
• Common access – once a connection is made online, core aspects of the Internet are common to all (such as root name servers and communications protocols), and thus access provides a common experience, unless specifically tampered with or configured otherwise.
• Peer to peer – the Internet isn’t a hierarchy, it is an enormous number of machines that talk to each other as peers, albeit usually configured to use a common addressing scheme.
• Routing around damage – the distributed nature of the Internet means there is the capacity to work around any failure in the system.  this is extremely important for continuity of the online experience.
• Massively distributed network – the Internet is designed to have no single point of failure, with many redundancies built in. This approach of a massively distributed stable platform for communications has led to the establishment of massively distributed infrastructure, controlled by no single entity.
• Multi-source networks of trust – part of having a massively distributed network is the availability of multiple sources, especially when there are failures. How DNS works is an example of a technical multi-source network of trust.
• Platform independence – Internet communication protocols are necessarily independent of the hardware and software stacks involved in being online, which means communications online are largely independent of the choice of device, hardware or software.

What are other technical characteristics of the Internet? Please note, we go into social characteristics in the next post in this section, so please keep it relatively technical.

As citizens of this online society, it’s time to figure out what we want and what we can do to achieve it.

Society 5 is a progressive project to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society. This is a collaborative discussion. We believe the future of our society should be discussed and decided upon democratically.

Everyday, more of us are living more of our lives online. Everyday more of us go online to work, play, socialise, shop and learn.

Our online lives – our email, social media, search, websites and communities – are no longer separate from our ‘real lives’, but an important extension of us.

Of course, many of us live lives barely touched by the world online. Many of us continue to struggle for the basics to survive. Yet the ubiquity of the Internet and its proliferation across the world has changed lives everywhere.

As French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in opening the 2011 ‘eG8’ Forum.

“This an important moment. We are at the cusp of the emergence of a new form of civilisation, a new society made possible by the emergence of the Internet”.

This is a moment of great potential – but potential for what?

In the same speech praising the social and economic benefits of the Internet, Sarkozy went on to make a case for government intervention.

“The States we represent need to make it known that the [online] world is not a parallel universe, free of legal and moral rules… Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s lives, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum. Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies.This is a moment of great potential, but we are also at a tipping point where the future of society as we know it is being determined.”

We are in the midst of a digital landgrab in which the technical and social foundations of the Internet are under threat and its transformative potential is being turned against us. Sarkozy is half right. A new form of society is being brought about by the Internet.

The Internet is a distributed model of publishing, communication, power and enforcement. As such, traditional hierarchical models of decision making, organisation and thinking should not define the sole vision for the future.

We have a slim window of opportunity for us as citizens of the Internet to establish the future we want, and hopefully the Society 5 project will provide a platform for that dialogue and action.

Our core goal here is to stimulate discussion and collaboratively figure out some possible paths forward. We plan to collaboratively define the technical and social characteristics that make the Internet the enabler we know today. We hope that this work will inform the debate around the future of the Internet, and move us away from the impractical dualistic debate of an open vs closed Internet. We plan to integrate the discussion and feedback from this site into a book later in the year, with full attribution of contributions.

This phase of the Society 5 project will run for four months and will include many ideas to explore, including the possibility of alternative models for online citizen representation. Please use the Table of Contents to click through to discussions of interest.

We look forward to designing the future with you,
Will & Pia