Tag Archives: politics

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Building the Big Society: can reward schemes encourage civic volunteering?

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While our American readers have their own political maelstrom to deal with at the moment, over here in the UK we’re starting to get our first stable glances at the Janus faces of our new coalition government. David Cameron’s “Big Society” idea aims to replace Big Government social schemes with localised and voluntary civic involvement… which on the surface sounds rather wonderful (in a utopian minarchist kind of way), until you realise that cutting costs in social welfare is primarily aimed at being able to avoid taxing the highest earners any harder (you don’t wanna upset that power-base, Dave). It’s all about how you sell it to the peons, after all.

Ignoring the politics for a moment, though,  it’s interesting to start thinking about how the kind of community self-support that the Big Society idea seeks to create can be encouraged. I’m always a little wary of anyone who starts harking on about The Good Old Days (you could leave your door unlocked all the time, apparently), The Blitz Spirit and so on, but I am fairly convinced that the much-lamented decline in our sense of community is a genuine phenomenon, encouraged by years of policies and law that effectively tell people that almost everything is someone else’s responsibility: take away that sense of ownership and communal responsibility, and you’ve disincentivized participation. (“It’s not my canal, so why should I fish shopping trolleys out of it? I pay taxes so someone else can be paid to do it; not my job, mate.”)

So the problem is: how do we encourage people to voluntarily contribute to the upkeep of their communities? One potential solution is being tried out in the Windsor and Maidenhead areas, and it’s already a familiar one from the world of commerce – a voucher reward scheme.

Officers are still working out the practicalities, but it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners.

The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity.

Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.

The points would be given free by the commercial partner in return for the publicity and marketing opportunities, with the local authority picking up the relatively small cost of administering the scheme. The scheme might be extended to reward improved behaviour in areas such as school attendance and healthy living…

As Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber points out, there’s an obvious flaw with the idea:

Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, Sam Bowles ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward.

Which is a good point, though I feel we may be a fair distance down that road already. Another valid criticism is that only the able-bodied will benefit from such a system, effectively recreating the social burden of welfare dependence and placing it on the shoulders of the not-quite-so-unfortunate members of the community, instead of on the shoulders of the government (who, it could be argued quite fairly, are the root cause of that hierarchical dependency in the first place). Think about it: anyone who’s getting by well enough to be meeting all their bills every month has no motivation to volunteer for food vouchers, so your volunteer pool is going to comprise those already closest to being welfare dependent themselves. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that such a system is going to enhance the stratification of society rather than help flatten it…. which may go some way to explaining its appeal to the conservative mind-set.

But as I said above, there’s a nugget of validity in the Big Society idea which, stripped of the politics and spin and hidden motives, might be well worth chasing after… because it implies that people are waking up to the idea that the old left-right polar politics is dead in the water. As Vinay Gupta puts it:

If the big society is not ever an alternative to the market, then it logically exists only in the space being relinquished by government through spending cuts and withdrawal of services. It exists purely to buffer public service cuts.

On the other hand, if the big society is sometimes an alternative to the market, then we are seeing government suggest that people turn away from market capitalism and the state for provision of some of their services.

In the first instance, Big Society would be an utter sham and a diabolical lie. The Tories would be suggesting that we simply work for free to do the things that government used to do for us rather than, say, taxing the rich to continue doing the jobs at hand. This accusation has become standard rhetoric already.

In the second instance, however, something more subtle is going on. The State is telling us to organize to take back territory from it and from the market. We can logically deduce that we must be in this second case, too, because the state has no power to compel the Big Society not to fill some needs which would otherwise go to the market.

Gupta is more optimistic than myself (and, it would appear, the British body politic), because everyone bar the Tories themselves seems pretty much convinced that the first interpretation is the accurate one. But Gupta’s second option has many of the hallmarks of an unpalatable and inconvenient truth, and is worth considering in more detail:

… this turn of the wheel is not privatization. Not even [the Conservatives] believe in the power of the market any more, and into this loss of faith rush new archetypes, which is to say old ideas reborn. No longer is the Market the panacea, the universal solvent for all of our social woes. They cannot sell it because they themselves no longer believe it. It has been tried, and failed.

[…]

The Big Society could turn out Victorian, Feudal, Democratic Socialist, Swiss, even Anarcho-Syndicalist. It could draw influences from anywhere. But it is unambiguously a move off the traditional left-right axis of politics and I believe this is why we are all so confused by it.

I’m inclined to agree, and I’d suggest that the confusion is born of suddenly finding that those who’ve always maintained their leadership over us by proclaiming that they had all the answers have pretty much called their own bluff. And as such, an opportunity arises for us to start taking back control of our communities from the apparatus of the state, an opportunity to start thinking – and working – for ourselves.

The council reward schemes mentioned above, whether by design or not, are a way of replacing the welfare state with a sort of feudal corporate patronage (one wonders what incentives participating corporations might be offered by the government in return for their freebies… perhaps Vodafone could answer that one for us?); they represent an abdication of responsibility for civic duties by both the government and ourselves, and I find myself thinking of remixed double-page spreads from the 2000AD comics wherein every tower-block is sponsored by a corporation, of which the government is simply one of many*. It might work, but it’ll be pretty grim if it does.

What would be better, I believe, would be to reinstate a sense of community which is its own reward, a sense of community where we look after ourselves without having to be bribed with junk food or consumer goods. I’m not claiming to know how to do it, either, but – given that it’s the option that reduces government power and our dependence on such – I think it’s a question well worth considering.

[ * Yeah, I’m a child of my generation, no mistake. 🙂 ]

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The end of geography

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Dovetailing neatly with discussions of Wikileaks and Anonymous, here’s a piece at Prospect Magazine that reads the last rights rites for geography as the dominant shaper of human history [via BigThink]. The West won’t be the best forever, y’know:

The west dominates the world not because its people are biologically superior, its culture better, or its leaders wiser, but simply because of geography. When the world warmed up at the end of the last ice age, making farming possible, it was towards the western end of Eurasia that plants and animals were first domesticated. Proto-westerners were no smarter or harder working than anyone else; they just lived in the region where geography had put the densest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals. Another 2,000 years would pass before domestication began in other parts of the world, where resources were less abundant. Holding onto their early lead, westerners went on to be the first to build cities, create states, and conquer empires. Non-westerners followed suit everywhere from Persia to Peru, but only after further time lags.

Yet the west’s head start in agriculture some 12,000 years ago does not tell us everything we need to know. While geography does explain history’s shape, it does not do so in a straightforward way. Geography determines how societies develop; but, simultaneously, how societies develop determines what geography means.

[…]

As can see from the past, while geography shapes the development of societies, development also shapes what geography means—and all the signs are that, in the 21st century, the meanings of geography are changing faster than ever. Geography is, we might even say, losing meaning. The world is shrinking, and the greatest challenges we face—nuclear weapons, climate change, mass migration, epidemics, food and water shortages—are all global problems. Perhaps the real lesson of history, then, is that by the time the west is no longer the best, the question may have ceased to matter very much.

Amen. It’d be nice if we could get past our current stage of global socialisation, which might be best compared to a group of people sat in a leaking boat arguing over who should do the most bailing.

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Wikileaks and Anonymous

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There are a few things worth noting about the latest Wikileaks document-dump, the first and most obvious being how utterly unsurprising (though still deeply saddening) the contents were; for me at least (and I suspect for many others) it’s more of a confirmation of long-held suspicions than anything else.

The second is the reaction from the US and UK governments, which have focussed on the supposed risk to military personnel that the leaks will create; we heard that warning last time, too, and it turned out to be hollow. But it’s proving a very effective distraction to career journalists and their readers, most of whom have overlooked one very telling fact – namely that the aforementioned governments have made no attempt to claim the leaked documents are false. “OK, so we lied… but we were doing it to protect you!” Oh. That has worked out well, hasn’t it?

Thirdly is an observation from Mike Masnick of TechDirt, who compares Wikileaks with everyone’s favourite internet-prankster boogiepersons, Anonymous. The common themes are that they’re both products of our newly-networked era, and that they’re both being underestimated by the very powers that they most threaten.

I’d argue that the time to take the concept of Anonymous seriously came quite some time ago, actually. Even as people dismiss the group as often immature and naive (at times, quite true), what’s impressive about it is that Anonymous is a perfect example of truly distributed, totally anonymous, ad hoc organizations. When the group puts out statements, they’re grandiose and silly, but there’s a real point buried deep within them. What the internet allows is for groups to form and do stuff in a totally anonymous and distributed manner, and there really isn’t any way to prevent that — whether you agree with the activity or not.

Some think that “a few arrests” of folks behind Anonymous would scare off others, but I doubt it. I would imagine that it would just embolden the temporary gathering of folks involved even more. Going back to the beginning of the post, if the US government really was effective in “stopping” Julian Assange, how long do you think it would take for an even more distributed group to pick up the slack? It could be Anonymous itself, who continues on the tradition of Wikileaks, or it could be some other random group of folks who believe in the importance of enabling whistleblowing.

And yes, there’s a smattering of self-aggrandisement on my part here, because I made a similar suggestion back in July:

It’ll never be a big-bucks business, I’d guess, but the accrued counter-authority power and kudos will appeal to a lot of people with axes to grind. But what if they manage to make it an open-source process, so that the same work could be done by anyone even if Wikileaks sank or blew up? An amorphous and perpetual revolving-door flashmob, like Anonymous without the LOLcats and V masks? It’s essentially just a protocol, albeit one that runs on human and electronic networks in parallel.

Nowadays I flinch from making bold statements about profound change, but I find it very hard not to look at distributed post-geographical movements like Wikileaks and Anonymous and not see something without historical precedent. Whether it will last (let alone succeed in toppling the old hierarchies) is an open question that I’d not want to gamble on just yet, but what’s pretty much undeniable is that the nation-state is under attack by a virus for which its immune system has no prepared response.

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What we know and what we assume: Schneier on Stuxnet

Bruce Schneier has a good round-up of the hard facts about the Stuxnet worm (as mentioned previously), as well as an examination of how those hard facts – combined with a few very speculative conspiracy-theory-grade interpretations of some of the more cryptic and tiny facts – have led to the current state of the story in mainstream (i.e. non-techie) media, namely “it was probably an Israeli job”.

Best I can tell, this rumor was started by Ralph Langner, a security researcher from Germany. He labeled his theory “highly speculative,” and based it primarily on the facts that Iran had an usually high number of infections (the rumor that it had the most infections of any country seems not to be true), that the Bushehr nuclear plant is a juicy target, and that some of the other countries with high infection rates–India, Indonesia, and Pakistan–are countries where the same Russian contractor involved in Bushehr is also involved. This rumor moved into the computer press and then into the mainstream press, where it became the accepted story, without any of the original caveats.

Once a theory takes hold, though, it’s easy to find more evidence. The word “myrtus” appears in the worm: an artifact that the compiler left, possibly by accident. That’s the myrtle plant. Of course, that doesn’t mean that druids wrote Stuxnet. According to the story, it refers to Queen Esther, also known as Hadassah; she saved the Persian Jews from genocide in the 4th century B.C. “Hadassah” means “myrtle” in Hebrew.

Stuxnet also sets a registry value of “19790509” to alert new copies of Stuxnet that the computer has already been infected. It’s rather obviously a date, but instead of looking at the gazillion things–large and small–that happened on that the date, the story insists it refers to the date Persian Jew Habib Elghanain was executed in Tehran for spying for Israel.

Sure, these markers could point to Israel as the author. On the other hand, Stuxnet’s authors were uncommonly thorough about not leaving clues in their code; the markers could have been deliberately planted by someone who wanted to frame Israel. Or they could have been deliberately planted by Israel, who wanted us to think they were planted by someone who wanted to frame Israel. Once you start walking down this road, it’s impossible to know when to stop.

Are those mysterious little comments in the code the flourished signatures of master cyberwar artistes? Or a frame-job packed with credible deniability? Or an elaborate double (or triple) bluff? Truth of the matter is, we’re all just guessing. They say that life sometimes imitates art; this is a case of life imitating The Illuminatus! Trilogy, only without so many puns or sex scenes. We all have a story we want to map on to the world, and it only takes a few pins to tack it down in a way that seems to explain everything…

[ * For the record, my instinct tells me – with admittedly very little professional knowledge to back it up – that Stuxnet stinks of nation-state vs. nation-state, and I get the impression Schneier thinks so too. His point is about how we treat speculative interpretations as givens when they match up with the way we already think things work… confirmation bias, in other words. ]

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Speculative direct democracy: the cybernetic tax-allocation feedback loop

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Here’s a really interesting thought-experiment from Adam Rothstein, riffing off the no-fee-no-fire-brigade story and the receipt-for-your-taxes idea. I’ll let him explain rather than attempt to paraphrase:

What if after seeing this receipt, taxpayers were allowed to shift where their taxes went? Say, less Pell grants, and more to the war in Afghanistan, if that was their priority. Or less war, and more highways. Of course this would affect their service. The service only gets what the individual public thinks it deserves from their contribution to the tax coffers. It would be easier to go all Henry Thoreau on a war a hemisphere away then it would on, say, your local fire service, because there are fewer people contributing to your local fire bureau than paying national taxes, and you’d see the effect of the latter right away, the former only later. But hey, open it up. Let people pay their share of what they think it important. Let’s think about what would happen, if people could actually control where the money was going.

Other than finally letting individuals control their tax dollars, what this would eventually create is a massive, cybernetic feedback loop. Let’s say you opened up a website with UI controls, so you could adjust your proportional tax payment anytime you wanted, adjustable down to hourly segments of your fiscal year total. (I am assuming you must still pay your full total, you can just allocate the percentages. Otherwise, everyone would obviously opt to pay nothing at all.) And this site updates. So after it first launches, we see (and I am just guessing here) payment for education and arts decrease, and military spending increases. After a few hours of people allocating their own taxes, education and arts are almost at zero. But then what happens as people see these changes? Maybe someone who originally allocated 75% military/25% education, on seeing education spending slide nationally to nothing, decides to allocate 100% education to make up for the difference. How many people do this? Enough to counter the childless militants? What sort of equilibrium is reached? Is an equilibrium reached?

Now imagine, after they open up the API of this system (naturally), third-party algorithms are introduced. Want to help the budget reach 25% for education nationally? Install this add-on, and it will auto-adjust you and everyone else using the add-on in a unified front to make this goal a reality (while protecting your personal data, of course). Or maybe you set it to automatically devote up to 100% of your individual taxes to education, unless highways dip below 5%, and then it re-figures your totals according to your preference. Or, download the Democratic Party algorithm, which will automatically adjust your percentages to match the national tax distribution platform of the party. Download the Support our Troops algorithm, which helps the Veterans and Military budgets maintain a certain consistent ratio to the overall budget depending on how many troops are currently on active duty. Pledge to Support the Dollar, by downloading the FOMC algorithm that will adjust internal infrastructure spending and national debt spending in such a way as to drive the strength of the dollar world-wide. How about an algorithm that scans the news for stories of political scandal, reducing the money allocated to congressional salaries every time there is another ethics violation? Too many fires in your district last month? The Google Map Fire Layer-aware algorithm will automatically up your fire services percentage by an appropriate amount.

Now what would be REALLY REALLY interesting: what sort of equilibrium is achieved, and how far off is it the current balance as it now, without this sci-fi direct democracy scheme? After all the algorithms are factored in, and all the feedback to the results of the algorithms are calculated and re-factored… are we actually any different than where we are now? Is our national desired budget, summed from all the diverse opinion about where we ought to be spending money, really any different from reality? If we let one person tweak the budget, they’d do all sorts of different things. But if everyone’s opinion and rate of pay were weighted together, I’d say it’s a fair bet that we’d end up exactly where we are.

[…]

Is it possible that as bankrupt and backwards as our democracy is, that it actually functions perfectly at doing what it is supposed to do? This function: to obfuscate and abstract our own lack of knowledge and ability, to direct our attention away from our responsibility for our own egos. And is it possible that the government, by echoing the non-sensical desires and demands of a populace that is as fickle as a television programming schedule, is already the representative compass of a society that is ready and willing to sprint directly towards oblivion? This society that would rather wage war across the globe than put out the fires in our neighbors homes, and fix the gas lines underneath our own feet.

Provocative stuff, and no mistake; much like Rothstein, I’d love to see the results of an experimental run of a system like this, though I’m perhaps a trifle more optimistic about the results we might see, especially if there were a good degree of local granularity involved.