The public sphere and its business models

1 Management of the discourse commons

A powerful idea that I want to return to.

Nadia Eghbal, An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons point to the failure of online discourse as an issue of management of the commons:

My big takeaway from the patterns Ostrom identified is that sustainably managing the commons requires a high degree of context among participants. Most failure outcomes can be traced back to context collapse. This is true whether you’re an open source project or someone with a large Twitter following.

Ostrom paints an eerily accurate picture of the problems we see today:

…no one communicates, everyone acts independently, no attention is paid to the effects of one’s actions, and the costs of trying to change the structure of the situation are high

Whereas in the sustainable, “smaller-scale” CPRs she looked at,

…individuals repeatedly communicate and interact with one another…[When individuals] have developed shared norms and patterns of reciprocity, they possess social capital with which they can build institutional arrangements for resolving CPR dilemmas.

Ostrom’s framework is more about managing physical resources like trees and water and stuff. But we can maybe imagine casting civil discourse as a metaphorical resource and then ask ourselves: are we doing any of the things that science suggests we need to do to manage it?

I like this because it slices up the debate in a more productive way. The least thoughtful of free speech proponents often seem to be arguing for a discourse commons that is everywhere ungoverned and tragic. But we know that this insane for normal commons resources. Sustainable commons management happens through institutions. They can be bottom-up or top down, they can be codified laws or they can be property lights or something informal and trust-driven. But when institutions are missing, commons management does not work, and if the only way I can read my news feed is by scrolling through troll flamewars then I can’t read the news.

In this sense arguing for “free” speech is ill-defined. Instead we might need to solve for a different criterion.

On what terms am I prepared to commit the constrained resource of my attention to a community discourse? How many “die in a fire faggot” attacks am I prepared to weather to comment on a news story? What credentials am I prepared to show to earn someone else’s attention?

As with other commons management institutions, we can imagine that this is a contextual thing. We can have different norms inside communities, inside schools, inside workplaces…

Crucially there is no connection between the state (say) declaring some speech illegal, and an individual community deciding that it is not appropriate inside this community.

I’m sure I can come back and make this point more compactly somehow. TBC.

2 Incoming

• Untangling Threads—Erin Kissane’s small internet website
• Ben Thompson, Portability and Interoperability
• Robin Hanson’s throwaway line about costing free speech.

I would like to have a link on the difficulties of coordinating on justice via mob rule, public shaming and petitions, wherein we look at the coordination problems, and separate the problem of identifying injustice/inefficiency/existential threat, and the problem of calibrating a political response. Sideline in altruistic punishment and feedback loops. TBD.

• The silence is deafening

  Good articulation off a point that we seem to find challenging to remember:

  Imagine you’re at a dinner party, and you’re getting into a heated argument. As you start yelling, the other people quickly hush their voices and start glaring at you. None of the onlookers have to take further action—it’s clear from their facial expressions that you’re being a jerk. In digital conversations, giving feedback requires more conscious effort. Silence is the default. Participants only get feedback from people who join the fray. They receive no signal about how the silent onlookers perceive their dialogue. In fact, they don’t receive much signal that onlookers observed the conversation at all. As a result, the feedback you do receive in digital conversations is more polarized, because the only people who will engage are those who are willing to take that extra step and bear that cost of wading into a messy conversation.

• Michele Coscia, Avoiding Conflicts on Social Media Might Make Things Worse

• Musk and Moderation

• Costs of free speech: billboards kill people [@HallCan2022]

• Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

  the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right.

• Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

• Trust & Safety Tycoon

• Big Tech’s guide to talking about AI ethics

• The internet is for 12-year-olds - by Max Read

• Why haven’t internet creators become superstars?

• Cat and Girl, You monetized your social contacts? Monster

• Taylor Lorenz, Julia Allison Was the First Online Influencer and Was Vilified for It