Category Archives: Theory

Flavours of Money

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Most people view money as a neutral store of value. They are wrong. There are flavours of money – inherent emergent value systems that are built into the design of the currency. Here we have Bernard Lietaer talking about the design of our current financial system in terms of Yin and Yang.

Lietaer is no light-weight. His CV includes a phD at MIT, and a stint at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium), where he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992. You can check his bio on WikiPedia or here.

Flavours of Money
It is our view that money and votes are just two examples of token exchange games, from a palette of an infinitely more diverse range of similar games. The design of these games, profoundly influences the behaviour of players – games can be individualistic or cooperative, thoughtful or aggressive. Democratic votes, differ from hard currency in only a few minor technical aspects, a fact that you can discover for yourself if you try and code computer systems for online voting or currency transactions – yet we treat them very differently. Liquid Democracy allows votes to flow more freely through the network, and can itself be broken down into different categories of votes or recommendations – reflecting different value systems. Ricardian Contracts can be used to assign entirely new forms of value to conventional currency systems.

 

This is not complex stuff, this is not 3D computer graphics, or rocket science – just simple game design. There are many different flavours of money, and we do not have to be stuck with the one we’ve got.

Swarm intelligence, immunlogy and how altruism helps robots fly better

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This post is about collective behaviour, and in particular the sorts of fields of study that are of interest when thinking about how to defend a networked organisation from attack. That is the problem of creating a defence force for an open, decentralised society.

In this post I want to look at a couple of outlying fields. It is clear that a core area of study is the study of how real people behave in small or medium size organisational structures. Here however, I want to concentrate on the study of a couple of biological behaviours, from a mathematical or computational point of view. Why? Because, by looking at these fields we might come across some novel techniques that we can use to augment the more traditional forms of organisational structure that human beings use.

Swarm Intelligence

There are two areas of scientific research that are of interest here:

Swarm Intelligence
Swarm intelligence is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

Swarm behaviour is in some ways a danger, and in others an asset with regard to network organisations – either way the study of this subject is throwing up interesting technical results, with ethical implications (see below).

Artificial Immune Systems
A good metaphor for thinking about the design of a new network oriented politics, and it’s long-term viability, is the immune system. If we are able to learn from these biological systems techniques that we can use to prevent the inevitable attacks from both inside the organisation, and outside of the organisation (by this I mean any network of individuals), we may be able to avoid the all too common pitfalls that real groups face.

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) at the University of York Department of Electronics

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are adaptive systems, inspired by theoretical immunology and observed immune functions, principles and models, which are applied to problem solving.

It is a common experience that informal p2p or networked structures decay over time – and usually into more traditional hierarchical structures. We see this in a wide range of social movements, whether political revolutions, religious movements or smaller social collectives – over time the original ideals, and forms of informal social organisation are subsumed by the need for action, in particular defensive action.

It is for this reason that a study of techniques that might prove useful to literally immunize a p2p network organisation is useful – particularly if we can embed this in the legal and technical code of the networks structure.

The field of Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) is concerned with abstracting the structure and function of the immune system to computational systems, and investigating the application of these systems towards solving computational problems from mathematics, engineering, and information technology. AIS is a sub-field of Biologically-inspired computing, and Natural computation, with interests in Machine Learning and belonging to the broader field of Artificial Intelligence.

An Immune Aesthetic
Visualisation of complex systems, can help to interpret complexity in ways that humans are better suited to process. If we truly want to keep hold of ethical, or deep human values – perhaps we need a way to experience the systemic properties in a way which would allow us to participate? This sort of abstraction has all sorts of potential consequences – not all of them benign.

Fugue (below), is an interactive art installation, based on the functioning of the human immune system.

At the heart of the piece is a complex piece of scientific software, an artificial immune system algorithm, accurately mimicking the changes and cascading responses of the human immune system. The artistic concept, inspired by the musical form of the Fugue, interprets, expresses and communicates these changes through independent channels of vision, using cell-like images, and sound. In the most recent version, a large-scale interactive installation, participants engage the system in a spontaneous non-verbal dialogue, influencing both the unfolding of the immune system drama and the nature of their own experience.

How altruism helps swarming robots fly better
Swarm intelligence is also being used to study the emergence (that is evolution) of altruism. If a behaviour emerges based on an evolutionary stable strategy – it is a good sign that it is robust. Studies like these can therefore point to how we my seek to design systems that have robust p2p ethical properties.

The study described below on altruistic robots, was carried out by EPFL robotics Professor Dario Floreano and University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller.

“Testing the evolution of altruism using quantitative studies in live organisms has been largely impossible because experiments need to span hundreds of generations and there are too many variables,” EPFL notes in a press release. “However, Floreano’s robots evolve rapidly using simulated gene and genome functions and allow scientists to measure the costs and benefits associated with the trait.”

iCub, an EPFL robot (photo, ©2011 iCub / EPFL)

Their paper was published in the Journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology. It provides support for what is known as Hamilton’s rule of kin selection, developed in 1964 by WD Hamilton. He proposed a precise set of conditions under which altruistic behavior may evolve. EPFL describes it:

“If an individual family member shares food with the rest of the family, it reduces his or her personal likelihood of survival but increases the chances of family members passing on their genes, many of which are common to the entire family. Hamilton’s rule simply states that whether or not an organism shares its food with another depends on its genetic closeness (how many genes it shares) with the other organism.

‘We have shown that Hamilton’s kin selection theory always accurately predicts the relationship between the evolution of altruism and the relatedness of individuals in a species,’ explains Markus Waibel, lead author of the paper and former doctoral student of both Keller and Floreano.

Hamilton’s rule has long been a subject of much debate because its equation seems too simple to be true. ‘This study mirrors Hamilton’s rule remarkably well to ex-plain when an altruistic gene is passed on from one generation to the next, and when it is not,’ says Keller.”

The study will help biologists but it has already had an impact on other robots at EPFL, notably swarms of flying robots. “We have been able to take this experiment and extract an algorithm that we can use to evolve cooperation in any type of robot,” says Floreano. “We are using this altruism algorithm to improve the control system of our flying robots and we see that it allows them to effectively collaborate and fly in swarm formation more successfully.”

How robots become altruistic after 500 generations

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported by genevalunch.com

Network Dynamics of the Arab Spring

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Thanks to a link provided by Mark Roest, we have some further insite into the topology of the social media networks involved in the Arab Spring. Follow this link the full article over on Nature.

The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants (i.e. the leaders of the recruitment process) and of the users who acted as seeds of message cascades (i.e. the spreaders of information). We find that early participants cannot be characterized by a typical topological position but spreaders tend to be more central in the network. These findings shed light on the connection between online networks, social contagion, and collective dynamics, and offer an empirical test to the recruitment mechanisms theorized in formal models of collective action.

The network analysis shows that users at the core of the network are more likely to be the seeds of global chains of information diffusion.

The distribution of cascade sizes (Nc) suggests that only a few cascades percolate to affect most users, and that the vast majority die in the early stages of diffusion. (B) There is a positive correlation between network centrality, as measured by the classification of nodes in high k-cores, and cascade sizes, suggesting that users at the core of the network are more likely to be the seeds of global chains of information diffusion. (C) The nodes in the network arranged according to their k-core; node size accounts for degree centrality, and node color indicates the maximum size of the cascades generated by the user (users generating the largest cascades are depicted in orange). (D) Example of a global cascade affecting about 35,000 nodes. Nodes in blue are users who participated in the diffusion of protest messages; nodes in orange were exposed to the messages but did not send messages of their own. The darker the shade of blue, the earlier users joined the cascade as spreaders; the lighter the shade of yellow, the later users joined the cascade as listeners.

While this sort of analysis is useful, it would be great to correlate the form of these networks with the form or shape of the network (as I agued for in The ethics of network topology), and to examine the qualities of the conversational links  - which I talk about in an earlier post (Equality, and the structure of democratic networks).

The ethics of network topology

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In a previous post, I argued for why it is important to look at the quality of the transactions that lead to the forces of preferential attachment and hence scale free networks. In this post I want to look at the opposite, that is what you can say about the human quality of a social network, by considering it’s form. This should I believe be an entire research discipline, one I’m actively looking for, but not yet found.

Let’s call this discipline: social anatomy, or network aesthetics, or some such snappy title. Whatever we call it, it would be the study of emergent values, of network topologies. There would be a body of longitudinal studies, in which different topologies were compared, randomly allocated to different groups and the quality of the emergent behaviour at an individual and social level compared. Studies would take place within the same domain, comparing different topologies, and then compared across domains to see if general lessons could be learned regarding the role such topologies have on abstract qualities, such as creativity, or empathy, or aggression for instance.

This research would have a practical focus. It would help us design online communities, social media tools, social institutions and legal frameworks. But to keep things simple, let’s take a look at social media, and (for the purpose of illustration), the media reporting of the current Libyan protests. @techsoc relates:

  • Traditional media puts things in a sterile, manageable place. Here are dead children. A crush of people. Btw, don’t you want a bigger car?
  • Even when they tell you, they tell you in a way that distances you. The anchor & the correspondent are distant, so you remain distant.
  • On the other hand, there are billions of people & many tragedies. Not possible to live w/ it all, all the time. No answers, just reflecting.

Is this not an emergent property, of the topologies of the two network structures – television and twitter? What substance can we give to the observation that the professional behaviour encouraged by hierarchical institutions tends towards the well – bland, and the cold? What sort of structures could preserve a wider range of qualities within the diversity of reporting?

It is also surely the case that the potential of social networks does not stop with the direct reporting of individual incidents in all their emotive intensity. We have a network, and are beginning to see social editorial structures emerge, both technical, and cultural. It is certainly possible to imagine, and indeed occasionally experience mediated representations of events that combine the two – direct and emotionally intense on the ground accounts, with objective, impartial or statistical analysis.

Networks can serve to address some of the shortcomings of professional reporting, by giving a richer structure and typology to the objective representations, while retaining the immediate presence of direct visceral experience. This can be technically mediated by showing an image, or raw video footage, but is also socially mediated by the fact of knowing that the reporter is not professional, is not being paid, but is perhaps being motivated directly and simply by the need or impulse to tell a story.

Tweets are based on a format designed by engineers to exchange technical data over a cellphone network – their social and emotive impact comes not from the format, as much as from the topology of the communications network. Tweets are able to capture the emotional context of news stories, in a way in which a television news studio and network of reporters is unable to. A community and culture of reporting can then grow around this network. Is it not the case that we may be able to look at the topology of such networks and map classes of these topologies to a range of social qualities.

It would seem to me that there are a number of qualities;  authenticity, empathy, humour fairness to take a few, that appear to suffer in any conventional process of institutionalisation. It is no coincidence that the social sciences, lack good theoretical frameworks to understand these qualities, and that research in these areas is poorly funded. Nor is it a coincidence that these areas are of genuine human importance. The important things are hard, and we have not had ethically viable research tools to investigate these core qualities of human society.

Fairness may be related to an appropriate use of reputation in a network, but studies like this are only just scratching the surface. We need longitudinal studies, in order to move an academic discipline towards a real science of social institutions in a networked world, not one stuck in an analysis of historical structures, but an experimental science that enables us to look at appropriate designs for qualities that we seek, not simple side effects of historical happen-stance.

In medicine we have a range of instruments that allow us to look at the structure of the human body, and detect signs of structural disease, or signs of healing and good health. When will we have these for the social structures of our institutions?

Equality, and the structure of democratic networks

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In her essay Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks, Zeynep Tufekci describes why we should not take for granted that the “Leaderless Revolution” will be able to resist a natural process of transformation into “hierarchical and ossified networks”.

At first sight, there is little to disagree with here. It is clear that while we can be sceptical about the rhetoric of some of these claims, there is little dispute that flat, horizontal and structureless organisations in nature (including human social organisation) are exceedingly rare, and when they occur tend to be replaced quickly. The geek inside all of us can marvel at the structural similarity between emergent networks in systems as diverse as:

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy.

But our inner geek can lack a little emotional intelligence when it comes to translating these observations into something of value to the human sphere. To pick up on what is really important here, we need to consider more closely the quality of the transactions that lead to these similar emergent structures, and to compare these (and not simply the commonality of topographical structure), with our deeper political or ethical aspirations.

First lets take a step back, and take a closer look at the argument, put so eloquently by Zeynep (my emphasis):

Preferential attachment means that a network exhibiting this dynamic can quickly transform from a flat, relatively unhierarchical one to a very hierarchical one – unless strong counter-measures are quickly and firmly employed. It is not enough for the network to start out as relatively flat and it is not enough for the current high-influence people to wish it to remain flat, and it is certainly not enough to assume that widespread use of social media will somehow automatically support and sustain flat and diffuse networks.

The problem I have with all this analysis is not that it is wrong, but that is misses the point, and does so dangerously. Dangerous because it reinforces the worst possible aspects of both sides of the debate. It misses the point because the real aspiration here, is the desire to replace corrupt hierarchical processes with a richer fairer discursive democracy. It is my assertion here that a great deal of this aspiration is being catalysed by technology, and that scale-free network or not, we should be celebrating the quality (not the form) of this new form of dialogue.

It is clearly the case that technology is enabling people to have new and richer forms of two-way political communication, and for these political conversations to scale in ways, and at a speed, that were not possible before. It is also clear that this process has only just begun, but that technology will continue to drive these changes as communication technology (in particular mobile and smart phones) become more ubiquitous, and new social structures emerge that leverage these new capabilities.

Scaling these technology-enabled conversations, may well mean forming natural small world or scale-free networks, but who cares? Isn’t that what we want, should we seek to elect a representative or decide together on a policy? We may well for instance decide together on a policy, without there being any clear (or indeed known or knowable) individual leaders. What really counts is how we form such decisions (the qualities of the conversations), and not simply the abstract shape or form of the social or decision making structure.

There are more hidden dangers in this way of thinking. The first is to equate the hierarchical structures of classical social organisations, with the more-or-less stable structures we find in scale-free networks. It may be true that the social connections between individuals, or other entities, has a scale-free or small world network structure, but this surely does not equate directly to the perceived deficiencies in the legal organisational structure? It is the latter that is the real target for most of the criticisms, and not simply the rich structure of natural networks founded on real diversity and freedom of opinion. Referring obliquely to both with the term “hierarchical and ossified networks” is not helpful. There are surely stable network structures (that are a result of fluid and flexible transactions), that have almost nothing in common with rigid hierarchical structures?

It is also dangerous because the above arguments are a direct and very effective attack on the hopes of the protesters and the intellectuals supporting the idea of new and richer forms of democratic participation. They support a sceptical “best of all possible worlds” view of politics.

The stated assumption, is that “strong counter-measures” need to be “quickly and firmly employed”, but why should it be important to flatten this hierarchy, and is this really something that people want and are calling for?

There is certainly a general background demand of activists in this area, and that is the desire that all voices are treated equally, and that ideas are allowed to flourish without party or other power structures suppressing them for their own organisational imperatives. However, I think this demand needs looking at more closely than it has been, as it is not as easy to reconcile a naive interpretation of equality, with a true respect for the far more important values of respect for diversity. For now let’s leave this for another post.

Some History
Lets translate this argument into something more grounded. Around 2004 or thereabouts, I had the privilege of helping to establish the funding and democratic structure for a network or new media artists in Vienna. The aim was for this organisation to function as a (leaderless) but genuinely democratic network, in which the community itself could debate and decide which projects, or groups the city of Vienna should fund. Naturally there was a lot of fierce debate amongst the community, and this forced me to re-evaluate some of my ideals.

Vienna was very different from London with regard to arts funding. In the UK there are a wide range of quangos, charities and other intermediaries to which an aspiring artist can apply for funds. In Vienna it is much more likely that funding decisions are made over coffee, discussing the proposal with a city official (who is in turn directly responsible to a local politician).

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vienna, and marvelled at how easy it was to get real work done, simply by sitting in a good café and having meetings (arranged or otherwise), with key people. Beats the hell out of travelling 40 minutes on the tube to have a once in a month meeting with someone in London. However this system is clearly open to a great deal of corruption, and political influence. It was literally a small world, in which if you new the right person socially, you were much more able to attract funding for the projects you favoured. Hence the genuine enthusiasm, by both activists and officials in the city to look at new ways of allocating funding.

Phew! I hope I managed to say that without offending too many people :)

Now my background was working with social graphs and voting (transitive delegated voting or Liquid Democracy), and also secure digital currencies, and it was from this background that I had come across the mathematics of small works networks, pareto distributions and so forth. It was a clear and present fear of mine at the time, that the ideals of the network would inevitably be corrupted over time by the mathematical consequences of preferential attachment. Call me a geek, but this maths seriously dampened my revolutionary vigour. What would be the point, I asked myself, of replacing this wonderful (if not corrupt), network of cafe meetings, with an equally corrupt network of influence online?

The answer to this question is hugely important. It is the key to the vitality of our future organisations. My hope is to explore these issues on this web site – as there are several layers to a deep answer. However one thing stuck me at the time, and that was this. There is much more to the ethical, and effectiveness of the social editorial of an institution than the topology of the dialogue structure. Put more directly, protein networks,  sexual relations in Sweden, café conversations between political servants and arts funders, and online discussion fora, may all share a scale free network topology, but we learn little from this with regard to the human consequences for the system as a whole.

For one I’d prefer to be part of a network, in which I was free to express my opinion, without coercion, either by peer-pressure or force, based on the perceived quality of the person or idea I am supporting, than to live in a Mafia like society in which family ties, and preferential attachment is used to scale power. The topology of both systems may be equivalent, but not their quality, or the use to which the power of this network topology is used.