Digg and the guile of crowds

By now you've probably heard all you want to hear about the scandal uncovered by AlterNet of a group of militant US reactionaries using Digg's functionality to censor it by removing stories uncongenial to their extreme political views (or even in some cases apparently innocuous stories by people who hold uncongenial views - or even their friends). It's all over the web, having been picked up by Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Stephen Fry on Twitter among others, and has even made the mainstream press. So we won't rehash the story here.

The angle that interests us is accountability. Crowd-based tools like Digg are held up in some quarters as an answer to enabling democractic accountability online. We ourselves have been particularly impressed with Dell's IdeaStorm, for example, which applies a Digg-style promote/demote functionality to ideas for product improvements sourced from the crowd. But the Digg Patriots scandal points to the fact that censorship needn't be centrally managed by malign organisations or governments, and that the tools provided with good intentions by websites like Yahoo! and Digg can be used by determined individuals to self-organise and subvert them. How Digg responds to this is going to tell us a lot about the limits of democracy on the web and the power of technological solutions to filter the worse bits of human nature.

Who owns your soapbox?

A recent article in The Economist (sorry, no link - paywall) highlighted the slower growth of blogs as a platform worldwide in the last couple of years. It cited in part a shift towards social networks as responsible. A particularly eye-catching paragraph looked at the shift within the Iranian opposition movement towards Facebook as a tool. Mir Houssein Mousavi, who leads the "Green" movement and lost the disputed 2009 election, has over 129,000 Facebook followers. Hamid Tehrani, the Iran editor for the blog platform and aggregator Global Voices, is quoted as saying that Facebook is simply a more efficient way of reaching people.

I was struck by the contrast between such a pragmatic approach to platforms at the sharp end of politics (blogging gained its early popularity in Iran thanks to the closing down of media outlets by the state) and the arguments so prevalent in the digital media world about the ethics of privacy, ownership, openness and control around publishing platforms. Facebook has obviously been central to those arguments recently. I realised how perfectly irrelevant or alien such arguments would appear to journalists or campaigners struggling against the much more pointed and naked power of their own governments, who are simply happy that they have a tool - any tool - that enables them to communicate their message. Is it then a frivolous luxury for those of us living in relatively free or open societies to fret about such things?

My own view would be emphatically not. I couldn't hope to do a better job of explaining why than Michael Smethurst's recent perceptive and passionate post on derivadow. You really need to read the whole thing; but a couple of quotes will help illustrate the point here:

There's a lot of talk about digital inclusion, about taxes to fund broadband and about universal access to the web. But it all misses the point. It was never just about having access to other people’s information. It was always about everybody, everywhere having the ability to add their thoughts, the things they know, to the web...

...physical access is only the first hurdle. Once you're over that, the barrier to publishing is still too high. Owning your own publishing space means you have to start understanding domain names and DNS and server set ups and code installs and updates. Which for most people is just too difficult... Luckily "social media" sites arrived to fill the skills gap... The innovation of social media wasn’t really socialness. From Flickr to WordPress to Blogger to YouTube to Twitter the real innovation was the commoditisation of publishing technology. Now everyone could share what they knew. But at a price.

The most obvious price of commodity publishing is loss of control over your content. In almost all cases the hosting organisation will take a permissive licence on your content...

The second major problem is privacy... privacy issues aren't about how much information you share; they’re about the gap between your perception of the context of sharing and the reality. Extrapolating from that, once you trust your personal information to "the cloud" you lose control over the context of use. Your data can be meshed with other data in ways you didn't even begin to anticipate. And the rules around context can be nudged in whatever direction most benefits the cloud service...

Obviously there are worse fates than being the target of [a targeted mail drop]. Liberal democracies tend to assume they'll always be liberal democracies. History seems to suggest otherwise. If the worst were to happen do you really want all that personal data out there outside your control? You might end up with more to worry about than whether your prospective boss sees you drunk on Facebook.

Put another way, where many of the means of production are now digital, ownership of those means of production is prima facie a political question (and given the many layers, from hardware right through to ethics, that constitute the internet, not a simple one). But - bringing this back home and picking up on Michael's point about the concerns and complacency of those within liberal democracies - we are already collectively ignoring these important issues, and letting a new power structure emerge by default. Is simply opting out of Facebook an option? Certainly a lot of individuals, including our own Simon, have chosen that honourable route recently. But with the best will in the world, many of us (and our clients) will feel better advised to heed Clay Shirky's sorrowful and provocative aphorism:

It's not clear to me the anyone can abandon Facebook and still consider themselves a citizen of the 21st century.

In other words - we may have passed the point where collective grass-roots direct action has any realistic hope of changing the facts on the ground. So that leaves recourse to our political representatives. And that's where there is currently a pressure deficit. There's no doubt that people and organisations worry about digital technology in a whole variety of ways. But as the scandal of the Digital Economy Bill's passage through pre-election parliament like a hot knife through butter showed, it looks as though such issues will always be trumped by something more pressing. If you're in Iran and lacking basic freedom of expression, I'm not going to argue with that. But in a world where exaggerated fears about immigration and crime so often and so easily top the list of voters' concerns, how can we make a mainstream case for genuine digital freedom and empowerment to be given the airing they deserve?

Linkability Brown

The big political stories this week have been the sniff of corruption around ex-cabinet ministers, the prospective addition to the Cameron family and of course the budget. In amongst all that you could be forgiven for missing a fairly astonishing speech that Gordon Brown made on Monday on the subject of Building Digital Britain.

It's hard to know exactly where to start when looking at a bamboozling clutch of announcements covering everything from the efficiency gains to be had from bridging the digital divide to the launch of a Number 10 iPhone app (which will apparently reach "potentially millions of users" - well, yes, technically that's true...). The central themes revolved around a big idea about digital innovation simultaneously driving growth in the private sector, reduction of the public sector and curing society's ills. Here's one of the more arresting quotes:

This country has always been at its best when it has led the world in its pursuit of creativity and innovation and in the promotion of fairness and liberty. And in so many ways these issues have come together in the extraordinary development of the world wide web.

I didn't have the "son of the Manse" down as a techno-utopian - though it does make me a bit queasy to see the utopianism wrapped in a Union Jack.

Now, not being a close follower of political speeches, I don't know how unusual it is to launch both two new public bodies and two major web initiatives in such an under-reported speech, but that's exactly what Brown did, trailing both a £30 million new Institute of Web Sciences, to be run by Tim Berners Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, and a Digital Public Services Unit under Martha Lane Fox. The latter will be in charge of moving delivery of public services online via a new personalised service called MyGov. The former is meant to drive innovation to create jobs. So far so predictable, you might think. But the really surprising thing, despite January's launch of data.gov.uk, is Brown's wholehearted embrace of the semantic web. It's a concept which baffles some managers at the BBC - one of the world's foremost communication organisations - incuding web specialists. So reading the prime minister saying this kind of thing is just a bit surreal:

Underpinning the digital transformation that we are likely to see over the coming decade is the creation of the next generation of the web - what is called the semantic web, or the web of linked data.

This next generation web is a simple concept, but I believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary - just as disruptive to existing business and organisational models - as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information - and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information.

Not only that, but there's a slew of concrete announcements and proposals about datasets, right down to the level of detail that it is now a condition of new public transport franchises that timetable data will be made freely available. Brown certainly has a reputation as a details man, but this goes far beyond the parroting of slogans about web 2.0 which you're used to hearing from senior management.

The speech hasn't gone unnoticed on the web. The ever-intemperate Andrew Orlowski has described Brown's collaboration with Berners Lee over on The Register as "an alliance of the desperate" (and gone on to write a lot of contrarian nonsense about the pointlessness of the semantic web and the uselessness of data). You can get a much more nuanced take on it at ReadWriteWeb.