stimulant

The idea that knowledge can be effectively broken down into categories is deeply rooted in our attitudes about the world. We taxonomize knowledge and skill very early on, and we see it everywhere. Driven by the increasing economic pressure for specialization and the fundamental role we let career play in defining our identity, “the field you work in” is a unit of knowledge that we take for granted. People find it hard to answer simple questions like, “What does it mean to be a scientist?” When you exclude someone’s career, the question, “Who are you?” gets much more uncomfortable for many, because we get so little practice thinking of ourselves as more than our career, much less more than what we do.

The illusion of a neat set of bins¹ into which you can place all knowledge and experience is reinforced and rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” and “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) and identity (who you are). People grow up being “good at math” or “a talented athlete.” For a decade, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and simultaneously told that we are “students,” further reinforcing the coupling between an artificial organization of knowledge and our identity. Then we head off to college, where that relationship deepens, giving us the language to discuss our intellectual curiosity and muddling that with what we do and who we are.

A lot of collateral psychological damage is incurred in this long narrative of assumptions about the nature of expertise. Unfortunately, simply being aware of these problems and articulating them is not enough to insulate you from their effects.² People have talked about the need for cross-disciplinary thinking in science for years. And with the arrival of “design thinking” on the education scene, more people are beginning to use that type of language. Nonetheless, the disempowering role of the idea of expertise is still well-entrenched across every domain in which an institution dominates that domain’s definition. Plenty of people identify as parents and can incorporate that into their identity. But for most, calling yourself an artist because you draw and paint is a much harder jump. In part, this is because people differentiate between activities defined by doing and activities defined by being. That difference does not exist. It is a myth entirely perpetuated by the very idea of expertise being something intrinsic to a person, and therefore inaccessible to some people.

I can work eight hours a day as a waiter and go home to play music with my friends and call myself a musician, or paint portraits in my spare time and call myself an artist. This is possible only because there exist infrastructures and narratives which I can comfortably integrate myself into that permit me to do this. The musician-trying-to-make-it-big is an archetype: they play gigs and long to become part of the mainstream media so that thier identity as a musician can be validated by an external definition of success. The “starving artist” has a bit easier of a time permitting themselves their identity, because the starving artist narrative has some amount of counterculture built in at the ground floor (i.e. that is, to some extent, some people feel like rejection and marginalization are a necessary part of being an artist. Not that they’d turn down a gallery showing.)

But what if I just paint? Or fiddle with a guitar every now and then? Why can’t wielding a paintbrush every now and then be enough to call myself a painter? Or even better, why do I need to call myself a painter? Why can’t I just be painting?

I’m ignoring plenty of complicating issues, not the least of which is the fact that activity is strongly correlated to identity, particularly when a community grows around an activity.³ The group of people who associate themselves with classical concert performance share not only an activity, but an entire culture and mindset. Unfortunately, people usually lack the language to differentiate between an activity as an indicator (something which is correlated to membership in a certain culture) and an activity as an identifier (something which is part of that culture’s definition).

How do we change this? The end goal is to empower a person to approach an activity without comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, and open to engagement at many levels.

The typical pop song involves an enormous amount of work to create. The fact that all that work is hidden from people means it is difficult to feel empowered to create music, because an entire industry is devoted to making it seem easy, effortless. The conflation of the artist and their art only exacerbates this problem. Even in a pop song, because it is seen as “accessible” [for listening, if not writing] suggests that classical music is even further removed.

Within a field, this raises an issue for everyone who’s not at the top of the artificially defined hierarchy of expertise. Musicians who haven’t “made it” wonder about the workflows of musicians who have [“made it”]. Even if they understand that it isn’t an issue of talent but of work, the mystery surrounding the workflow is disempowering.

Turning to science, we find the same problem: for motives different than the music industry’s, producing papers which hide all your mistakes and mis-steps is [mis-]incentivized.⁴ so strongly that we have given a name to scientists’ particular insecurities.

The situation is the same everywhere you turn: doctors, artists, athletes — everywhere an expertise is defined, the fact that “experts” in that field feel the need to maintain and extend the importance of their identifying skill means that there is a feedback loop encouraging the increasing commodification and obfuscation of indicators for that particular skill. The art industry is infamous for the disconnect between quality and credentials — when people are in a museum complaining that, “my toddler could paint that,” what they are revealing is a deep ignorance, disempowerment, and resultant bitterness about the artistic process. Experts cannot exist without defining amateurs, and that will always set up a disempowering dynamic if it is seen as a component of identity.

These problems are generalizations of the process of artificially defining poverty. In Deschooling Society, Illich wrote (emphasis mine),

Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friends. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.

Instead of technologies separating the rich from the poor, it is more abstract commodities like access to credentials or studio labels or museum galleries. And I think that this generalization highlights the first, concrete step in addressing these issues.

During the 2008 election, a plethora of musical and visual works were created by “everyday” citizens to support Barack Obama. From the polish of Yes, We Can to the parody of No, You Can’t to the antics of Obama Girl, dozens of music videos of all levels of skill were created to communicate a message and define a community. Graphic designers and artists and “simply” excited people with Adobe Illustrator came together in parallel and created hundreds of powerful designs advertising for Obama. At this point, despite the fact that there are thousands of academic, professional blogs and videobloggers, blogs and YouTube are generally regarded as fundamentally vulgar⁵. This access has meant that thousands of people feel empowered and secure enough to dip their toes into an activity and medium that was otherwise off-limits.

Taking this as a blueprint would suggest that for a given domain there are a few components to empowering people broadly:

• Recontextualize the activity :: Blogging doesn’t have to be about Writing, it’s about writing-about-what-I-ate-for-lunch-today. A video with music in it doesn’t have to be about Music, it can be about how much I like Barack Obama. Drawing doesn’t have to be about Art, it can be about my enthusiasm for anime.
• Expose the process :: When people realize that the distance between high quality video productions and films and your daily dose of YouTube is more about hard work and small details than anything else, it’s a big deal. People realize that trade secrets are powerful, but knowable.
• Take back — or relinquish — linguistic real estate :: Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” and “artist” and “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly — makers and hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years — or you can make the question irrelevant. Even if I’m a Writer because I blog, I don’t need to care about that identification, rendering the distinction powerless to make me insecure.

I still need to concretize what this means for individual domains in which I am interested (in particular, science and education — what’s the difference between a good teacher and a good communicator? Between a scientist and someone who explores their world in a rational, curious way?).

Comments and critiques welcome. Poke holes in these claims!

1. That is, a taxonomy [↩]
2. Or at least, it hasn’t been, for me [↩]
3. Consider the entire idea of a community of practice. [↩]
4. Think about the implications of plagiarism’s precedence in music and science. Setting aside the debatable issues of intellectual property, plagiarism’s ethical prominence highlights how starkly money and credit oppose the enhancement and refinement of fields they dominate. [↩]
5. In the sense of the the original Latin, vulgaris, meaning the “common folk”, not in the sense of obscenity or crudeness [↩]

I’m going to constrain the meanings of these words for this post. People bandy them about, but there are some essential differences that call for their distinction.

Opportunities are the chance to do something, the chance at something. Rights are guarantees that are (morally or ethically) inviolable. Privilege are opportunities accorded by virtue of your identity. Opportunities have nothing to do with power and everything to do with chance. Rights require power to enforce their guarantee, but they are guaranteed equally for everyone, so there is no disparity in power. Privileges are guaranteed precisely by the difference in the power held by the privileged (or their benefactors), and the unprivileged.¹

Obligations are external expectations that affect how bound to a course of action we feel. They are intrinsically normative (read: arbitrarily set by society). Responsibilities are obligations that accompany privileges or rights: they are the currency in which we pay for those guarantees. Frequently, we are not given a choice in assuming responsibilities. Duties are those things which our ethical or moral system suggest we do. The expectation of self-consistency then binds us to them.

Obligations, responsibilities, and duties tell us what we should and should not do. There is no guarantee intrinsic to any of them. If we want to behave consistently, if we want to try for Heaven, we can feel forced to do something. But those values are all external. That is, they require enforcement; they require power from somewhere else.

On the other hand, opportunities, rights, and privileges tell us what we can and can not² do. They require power to protect and guarantee, but not to provide. They extend the range of our free will, whereas obligations, responsibilities, and duties direct and constrain it.

Within this (admittedly narrow) framework, I would suggest that opportunities entail obligations, rights entail responsibilities, and privileges entail duties.

So, what does this have to do with education? These are all words that come around conversation about teachers and students and schools and parents. These are all words that are bandied about when people talk about education. And I’m frustrated by the ridiculous assumptions that get swept under the rug by our failure to distinguish between them.

“Education is a right,” some say. That may be, but that’s how we act. We act as though schooling were an obligation. Some say that education is an opportunity. While that’s certainly true in the vernacular use of the word, it’s not true here: education is not an option made available by chance. ³ Others say that education is a privilege. Does that mean that schooling is a duty? What are the duties of the educationally privileged?

At a talk by Noam Chomsky on the role of the universities in activism, he pointed that we (including him) were an exceptionally privileged group of people. And with that privilege, he said, came certain duties (namely, making the world better — or at least, not making it worse). In echoing the sentiment of noblesse oblige, Chomsky implied that our situation is one of privilege, distinct from the simple exercise of education. In part, it is exactly what and which schooling to which we have access that determines how privileged we are. The credential-laden culture of the industrial world guarantees that education cannot trump a lack of schooling; although, schooling can be enhanced by education. As such, I would not suggest that education is incapable of bestowing privilege. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what minimum level of schooling is necessary to provide for education’s pragmatic relevance. For instance, your undergraduate institution’s lackluster status can be counteracted and compensated for by a strong education: that is, by actually learning and doing something of substance. Despite this, a middle-school student educated to the level of a high-school student is still functionally stunted. They cannot partake of many of the advantages that a high-schooler enjoys, allegedly because of their education (e.g. easy college or job hunting). And while this continues to change, we are still at the point where a rush for credentials characterizes successful studenthood.

Peoople are generally comfortable couching education as an opportunity, right, or privilege, but not as an obligation, responsibility, or duty. But schooling is exactly the opposite, for most people! For most, school is something they are coerced to do. Keep in mind that this is separate from learning; while the option of homeschooling technically exists, for the overwhelming majority, it is a financial and logistical impossibility. If education is a right or a privilege or a responsibility, why is it so consistently and thoroughly forced upon us? Why are is there a police force — truant officers — to ensure our attendance? Why do we go out of our way to reinforce the power of college credentials, when this necessarily creates a class of have-nots? People have been convinced that a good education is an artificially scarce resource by being bullied into conflating learning with schooling, which is an arbitrarily scarce resource.

In the name of “providing” this opportunity/right/privilege to people, we even take from them other privileges, like the freedom of speech. The judicial standard for defining the constitutional rights of students was set in 1969 by the US Supreme Court Case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. As a result, we have the “Tinker test,” which tells us that:

free expression is guaranteed in the public schools where it (1) does not materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school, and (2) does not invade the rights of others.

Subsequent jurisprudence has not been kind to students. Even in 1969, Judge Abe Fortas commented that,

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Just to be clear, the US Supreme Court takes for granted that you must “shed [your] constitutional rights” at the schoolhouse gate. And this is to guarantee people the “right” to schooling — a right that is far more tenuously established than the right to free speech.

Not only are these assumptions about schooling and education implicit, but their consequences are never explicitly connected to these assumptions. Worse, the consequences (e.g. behavior problems in the classroom) are misinterpreted as causes of interference with people’s education as opposed to effects!

It’s essential to deconstruct this taxonomy of power in education to create not only the type of learning and creating environments we want, but the type of society we want. I don’t know if every activist feels this way, but to me, education seems like the prime mover in so many social ills.

And so I’m excited about fixing it. Start by speaking straightforwardly. Now, people use these words (i.e. opportunity, right, privilege; obligation, responsibility, duty) interchangeably. Try distinguishing between them when you talk and when you listen: I’ve been surprised by how radically different an impression of an argument can be had when you think carefully about which of these words people mean to use.

1. “Underprivileged” is such a shameful euphemism: it implies that everyone is entitled to same basic level of privilege. We conflate privilege and guarantee. [↩]
2. Note that I did not say “cannot!” This is essential. [↩]
3. Again, in the narrow framework I’ve constructed. I’m begging the question of whether the categories I’ve named guarantee collision-free categorization. That is, it is emphatically not clear at all that education or schooling (or anything else, for that matter) need fit well into this framework without requiring splitting or merging categories. [↩]

Why are my friends and acquaintances significant to me? Largely (and couched with deliberate callousness), I care about them because of what they do for me. They provide value. Whether this is because I inevitably have fun around them; because they know how to do the things I want to; or because they have access to ideas or people or equipment that I need; the underlying theme is the same: my friendships are determined by my interests (in the game theoretic sense) and how my friends (and those resources to which they have access) help me pursue my goals.

Despite the inflammatory wording, this is true of everyone. Maybe some people would suggest that friendship is unconditional, but nobody would recommend staying in a net negative relationship.¹ Everyone uses their friends for something:² sex, fun, emotional support, money, homework help, etc.

My social network is just the collection of people I have found useful enough to connect to.

social networking still hasn’t left the gate

So, this is what my real social network does for me. What about my online social network? Well, it can tell me who I know in the real world, where they live, what movies they like, what they’re interested in, whether they’re up for casual sex, … in short, it doesn’t tell me much. Sites like facebook provide for pretty terrible network searching and browsing if you don’t know who you’re looking for, and if you’re not searching within a small, particular, explicitly defined³ group. Honestly, I don’t care that much about what movies my friends watch. It’s good to have access to this information, and it’s certainly valuable. But, there could be much more potential.

People commonly cite the idea that “social networking is a feature, not a product” as one of the hallmarks of “Web 2.0.” But in this regard, social networking hasn’t even left the gate, having failed to realize that there are real, significant reasons we want to connect to other people that can and will exist outside of social network software. Furthermore, contexts exist other than those manufactured by sites like twitter or iLike or Last.fm; in fact, those are the least important reasons I care about knowing somebody. Right now, social network software focuses on who your friends are, rather than why you’re friends with them, despite the fact that it is the latter information that will allow social networks to enable really significant collaboration. This is why calls for portability, openness, and interoperability make so much sense. Despite these possibilities, we’re still connecting people together for, in many cases, no particularly good reason. The social networking “workflow” ends with your connecting to or finding the other person (or maybe peters off with your ability to message them or poke them or dedicate a song to them). But, it can and should begin when you “friend” a person: finding someone is only the seed, the first step of community building. Once we acknowledge this, we can envision some pretty neat possibilities.

identity

Consider the thorny problem of identity and anonymity online: right now, we manage our identities — that is, we disambiguate and distinguish ourselves — by creating and maintaining the privacy of secret information (most frequently, usernames and passwords). But, in the real world, this is not at all how we operate. More fundamentally, secretive, unique data are not what actually define our identity: they’re artifacts of our interactions with massive, top-down organizations like schools and government. Our real world identity is defined by whom we know, what we do, what we read, what we like, what we dislike, etc. Our identities arise from how we apportion our attention and to what resources — people, things, knowledge — we have (and conversely, want) access.

As more and more of our life goes online, we are looking for increasingly dynamic online environments and platforms that are responsive not only to our needs and our explicit requests, but our identity. Historically, browsing the internet has been a passive process wherein the user is a spectator moving among static pages. We’re moving toward a participatory society⁴ where our interactions are increasingly active: they no longer comprise simply receiving information. This active component of our online experience goes beyond content creation and extends to a fuller recognition of our identity. Commensurately, we’ve been giving up more and more of our anonymity. This is a natural consequence of moving from consumers of online information to producers of online content and actors in the online community. What does this mean for the management of our identity online?

Currently, identity is managed pretty shallowly. For most rich internet applications (RIAs) and communities, identity is managed with a user account. Depending on the information you give the application and the preferences you set, your user experience changes. Unfortunately, the process of giving applications information is still relatively labor-intensive. Although people have recognized⁵ that if you can convince users to give you loads of ostensibly useless, raw data (e.g. browsing history or bookmarked sites or book preferences) about their lives, you can almost always extract and monetize a useful application from it, we still conflate the application and the collection of raw data. This practice naturally fractures users’ online experiences, requiring them to set up redundant user profiles, and in turn handicaps developers who always want more data.

We are still stuck on the idea that we need a unique identity in all places. For example, when you log into Amazon, you need to see your recommendations. What if your results overlap 99% with twenty or thirty other people? You could gain increased privacy without trading functionality if you realize that your identity is not an all-or-nothing piece of information: you can reveal your book preferences without revealing your name and credit card number. In the real world, there are a variety of ways to control how much of your identity you reveal. Social networking could provide a robust sense of identity if we expand our sense of what a node can be on a social network.

What if it could be a movie, a place, a body of knowledge, or a person? Then, the information in your social network would become a deep but very flexible representation of the what that you find pertinent about yourself. Precisely the facets of your identity you’re interested in sharing with developers would be made available, and their availability would itself be flexible. Essentially, by allowing for the addition of markup or meta-information to the edges on your social network (i.e. your connections to other people), one could provide for levels of privacy, or for easy access to subsets of anonymous but useful information (e.g. what restaurants you like) which could then be made available without revealing the other elements of your identity that uniquely define you. Rather than solving the privacy problem with more security, we could make an end-run around it by more finely controlling what information we reveal. Note that this is a fundamentally flexible and dynamic decision: rather than a static user profile requiring updating, a user can simply choose to reveal more information. No one need engage in the painfully redundant process of writing up user profiles and accounts.

For this dream to come true, companies and services (both online and offline) need to collaborate to create an open, independent network. Frankly, I don’t know if facebook is up for it. I’m a little flabbergasted by the dearth of collaboration between companies, particularly online! Given how much of a service’s ability to provide deep user experiences depends on the information available about its users, openness is clearly in everyone’s best interest. The fact that an API and a set of closed data is the best we can do is concerning. Luckily, people are asking for more.

network of trust

Calling for such openness naturally raises questions of security. If we broaden how we think of a social network just a little bit, we can take care of that, too.

In May of 2007, Linus Torvalds gave a Google Tech Talk about source control management (SCM) and in particular, his SCM solution, git. Version control is a really, really powerful idea that confronts a lot of the problems central to collaboration. Those problems remain, for the most part, unsolved; despite the fact that there are many domains this solution could revolutionize — like Congress — it’s not quite what I want to focus on, today. I do want to take a look at an excerpt from Linus’s talk (emphasis mine):

In practice you will never see, oh, there will be a thousand or maybe twenty thousand different branches, but in practice you won’t ever see them because you won’t care. You will see like a few main branches, maybe you’ll see only one. in the case of the kernel, a lot of people, they only ever look at my branch. so even though there are lot of branches you can ignore them. What happens is that the way merging is done is the way real security is done. By a network of trust. If you have ever done any security work, and it did not involve the concept of network of trust, then it wasn’t a security work. I don’t know what you were doing but trust me, it’s the only way you can do security, and it’s the only way you can do development. The way I work, I don’t trust everybody. in fact I am a very cynical and untrusting person. I think most of you are completely incompetent. The whole point of being distributed is I do not have to trust you, I do not have to give you commit access. But I know that among the multitude of average people, there are some people that just stand out and I trust, because I’ve been working with them. I only need to trust 5, 10, 15 people, if I have a network of trust that covers those 5, 10, 15 people that are outstanding, and I know they are outstanding, I can pull from them. I do not have to spend a lot of brainpower on the question. […] And the nice thing about trust is that it does network. That’s where the network of trust comes in. I only need to trust a few people that much. They have other people, they have determined, hey, that guy is actually smarter than I am, that’s actually a really good measure of who you should pull from. If you have determined that somebody else is smarter than you, go for it. You can’t lose. Even if it turns out that you pulled crap and somebody else starts complaining, you know who you pulled from and you can just point to that other person and say “hey, I just pulled, go to him, he knows what he is doing”.

Linus is only talking about development, here. But, SCM is a powerful idea⁶ , and in particular, the idea of a “network of trust” seems underimplemented. Social networks provide an extremely natural way to generalize the idea of a network of trust and make the feature modular and portable.

Currently, social networks are very simple graphs whose nodes are people and whose edges represent acquaintance of some sort. Our real world connections between people are much subtler and much more multi-faceted than “acquaintance of some sort.” Unwittingly, as far as I can tell, people have been slowly straining to add more information to these edges: e.g. facebook allows you to note how you met someone, while the Top Friends and Enemybook/Snubster applications clumsily let you note what kind of relationship you have to a person. But this is really a joke compared to what we should be expecting of social network software. What if we could define attributes by which we classify our connections to people, defining subgraphs of our social network to which we can attribute privacy settings, levels of trust, etc. What if rather than being added to the developers’ permissions list for a version control application, you simply joined a developer’s group online? Rather than leaving the definition of groups up to the service, what if you could decide what groupings were important, and make these distinctions available on-the-fly to other applications and services? Again, the idea is that identity exists t many more scales than we acknowledge currently, and we not only need to recognize those scales, but give users finer control over what scales — i.e. what facets of their identity — they reveal.

needs

• We need to get over the newness of the idea of an online social network and reappropriate the knowledge and intuition we’ve already created for designing and capitalizing upon social networks.
• We need to broaden our definition of what constitutes a node on a social network so that we can start adding extrapersonal significance to the documentation of our relationships.
• We need to understand the long term benefits of openness: rather than trying to capitalize on incremental innovations in the short term, we need to work together to assemble a flexible infrastructure for the long term.
• We need to start identifying the themes behind people’s problems and desires (e.g. resource matching!) and make tools to address these; domain specific problem solving can lead to an unjustified lack of interoperability.

I’m excited!

1. In fact, it’s hard for me to reconcile the existence of an affective metric with the idea of unconditional emotions: the metric needs to be fully irrelevant! [↩]
2. I understand that I’m bastardizing the meaning of “exploit” and the connotation of “use,” but please bear with me. [↩]
3. By which I mean that users have set out an explicit group (e.g. a class) as opposed to an implicit group formed by facebook on the fly, given desired parameters [↩]
4. Some would say that we’ve arrived; however, I think we’ve a long way to go [↩]
5. I know I’m paraphrasing from a source elsewhere, but I can’t seem to find it again: any hints would be appreciated [↩]
6. If you skipped the link the first time, go now and read about Congress’ need for version control. [↩]