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PCNA 2006: IP is a social contract
Submitted by acohill on Sat, 02/25/2006 - 10:55.
Garth Graham is the visionary leader behind Telecommunities Canada; Graham has been thinking about communities and technology longer and with more clarity than most of us, and when Garth talks, I try to shut up and listen. In the hallway between PCNA sessions, I made a casual statement about how "technology is a tool." It's an innocuous phrase that has been uttered by millions of technocrats at one time or another.
But Graham looked me straight in the eyes and said, "Andrew, I have to disagree with you. IP is a social contract, not a tool."
The instant he said it, I knew it was true, and I realized I had missed an important piece of the puzzle. IP (Internet Protocol) is a relatively simple set of rules used by all the individual networks that comprise the "Internet." The IP rules work only because individual network operators have informally agreed to abide by them for the last twenty years or so--an informal social contract.
The alarming proposals for a multi-tiered Internet discard that social contract and replace it with business contracts between network access providers and content providers. Content users are left out completely.
As Garth said, "We can't let this happen." I agree.
PCNA 2006: IP is a social contract
Andrew, I promised some flesh to the bones of that idea. Here it is.
Garth
IP as a “protocol” about relational choices has Darwinian roots. But describing the way that IP does things is not a story about survival of the fittest. It is about how cooperation in non-zero sum games affects evolutionary or emergent outcomes in self-organizing systems.
In self-organizing networks, the rules about rules are inside the systems themselves. Choice to relate and thus learn from experience is not bound by external authority. Legitimacy in relationship is never conferred. It emerges. This takes the idea of social contract onto different ground and thereby changes our understanding of how individuals and societies relate.
Being online now allows us to see a key difference - that a “person” is a network in a society of networks. The scale of relationship is fractal, not linear. The identities we assume in relationship are particular to the situations that occur. They emerge from, or are grounded in, the choices we make. The “individual” in these “situated” relationships is not classically isolated person assuming a contract that is imposed by the society they inhabit. They are themselves an emergent composite of physical and social relationships that are networked.
In the distributed networks of an Information Society the social contract is self-determined and multidimensional. It is self-determined in that IP allows from anything to connect to anything – but with the emphasis in action or agency on connection, not, as in an Industrial Society, on separation. It is multidimensional in that we all inhabit many social networks, and the personas we use to operate effectively (or rather to acculturate rapidly depending on the context) proliferate multiple identities within a single individual.
In an integrated and responsible individual, I see that proliferation not as schizophrenic but as a good thing. Even within ourselves, distribution of learning among multiple but self-determined zones of social interaction alters the way that we learn … particularly the way that we learn to cooperate, to interact. I’d like to think that this difference in the operation of social contracts is a way around some of the feminist critique of the classic understanding of social contract.